The House of the Dead

disciplinary battalions in European Russia. That I cannot undertake to pronounce upon: I have not been in them. Moreover, many of the convicts were able to have food of their own. Beef cost a halfpenny a pound, in summer three farthings. But only those who always had money used to buy food for themselves; the majority of the convicts ate only what was provided. But when the convicts praised the prison fare they referred only to the bread and they blessed the fact that it was given us all together and was not served out in rations. The latter system horrified them; had the bread been served out by weight, a third of the people would have been hungry; but served in common there was plenty for everyone. Our bread was particularly nice and was celebrated throughout the town. It was ascribed to the successful construction of the prison oven. But the cabbage soup was very unattractive. It was cooked in a common cauldron, was slightly thickened with grain and, particularly on working days, was thin and watery. I was horrified at the immense number of cockroaches in it. The convicts took absolutely no notice of them.

The first three days I did not go to work; it was the custom with every prisoner on arrival to give him a rest after the journey. But I had to go out next day to have my fetters changed. My fetters were not the right pattern, they were made of rings, “tinklers,” as the convicts called them. They were worn outside the clothes. The regulation prison fetters that did not prevent the prisoner from working were not made of rings, but of four iron rods almost as thick as a finger, joined together by three rings. They had to be put on under the trousers. A strap was fastened to the middle ring and this strap was fastened to the prisoner’s belt which he wore next to his shirt.

I remember my first morning in the prison. In the guardhouse at the prison gates the drum beat for daybreak and ten minutes later the sergeant on duty began unlocking the prison wards. We began to wake up. By the dim light of a tallow candle the prisoners got up from their sleeping platform, shivering with cold. Most of them were silent and sleepily sullen. They yawned, stretched and wrinkled up their branded foreheads. Some were crossing themselves, others had already begun to quarrel. The stuffiness was awful. The fresh winter air rushed in at the door as soon as it was opened and floated in clouds of steam through the barracks. The prisoners crowded round the buckets of water; in turns they took the dipper, filled their mouths with water and washed their hands and faces from their mouths. Water was brought in overnight by the parashnik or slop-pail man. In every room there was by regulation a prisoner elected by the others to do the work of the room. He was called the parashnik and did not go out to work. His duty was to keep the room clean, to wash and scrub the platform beds and the floor, to bring in and remove the night pail and to bring in two buckets of fresh water⁠—in the morning for washing and in the daytime for drinking. They began quarrelling at once over the dipper; there was only one for all of us.

“Where are you shoving, you roach head!” grumbled a tall surly convict, lean and swarthy with strange protuberances on his shaven head, as he pushed another, a stout, squat fellow with a merry, ruddy face. “Stay there!”

“What are you shouting for? Folks pay for their stay, you know! You get along yourself! There he stands like a monument. There isn’t any fortikultiapnost about him, brothers!”

This invented word produced a certain sensation. Many of them laughed. That was all the cheery fat man wanted. He evidently played the part of a gratuitous jester in the room. The tall convict looked at him with the deepest contempt.

“You great sow!” he said as though to himself. “He’s grown fat on the prison bread. Glad he’ll give us a litter of twelve sucking pigs by Christmas.”

The fat man got angry at last.

“But what sort of queer bird are you?” he cried, suddenly turning crimson.

“Just so, a bird.”

“What sort?”

“That sort.”

“What sort’s that sort?”

“Why, that sort, that’s all.”

“But what sort?”

They fixed their eyes on each other. The fat man waited for an answer and clenched his fists as though he meant to fall to fighting at once. I really thought there would be a fight. All this was new to me and I looked on with curiosity. But afterwards I found out that such scenes were extremely harmless; that they were played by way of a farce for the general entertainment and hardly ever ended in fights. It was all a fairly typical specimen of prison manners.

The tall convict stood calm and majestic. He felt that they were looking at him and waiting to see whether he would discredit himself by his answer or not; that he must keep up his reputation and show that he really was a bird and what sort of bird he was. He looked with inexpressible contempt at his opponent, trying to insult him to the utmost by looking down upon him as it were over his shoulder, as though he were examining him like an insect, and slowly and distinctly he brought out:

“Cocky-locky!”

Meaning that that was the bird he was. A loud roar of laughter greeted the convict’s readiness.

“You are a rascal not a cocky-locky!” roared the fat man, feeling he had been done at every point and flying into a violent rage.

But as soon as the quarrel became serious the combatants were at once pulled up.

“What are you shouting about!” the whole room roared at them.

“You’d better fight than split your throats!” someone called from a corner.

“Likely they’d fight!” sounded in reply. “We are a