But the Poles formed a group apart. There were six of them and they kept together. The only other person they liked in our room was a Jew, and him they liked perhaps simply because he amused them. He was liked indeed by the other convicts too, though everyone without exception laughed at him. He was the only Jew among us, and I can’t think of him even now without laughing. Every time I looked at him I could not help recalling Gogol’s Jew Yankel in Taras Bulba, who when he undressed at night and prepared to get into the cupboard where he slept with his wife, looked exactly like a chicken. Isay Fomitch, our Jew, was the very image of a plucked chicken. He was a man about fifty, short and weakly built, cunning and at the same time decidedly stupid. He was impudent and conceited, and at the same time awfully cowardly. He was covered all over with wrinkles, and on his forehead and each cheek bore the marks of having been branded on the scaffold. I could never understand how he had survived sixty lashes. He had been sent here charged with murder. He had hidden away a receipt which his friends had procured from a doctor immediately after his punishment. It was the receipt for an ointment supposed to remove all traces of branding in a fortnight. He dare not make use of this ointment in the prison, and was awaiting the end of his twelve years’ term of imprisonment, after which he fully intended to take advantage of the receipt when he could live as a settler. “Else I shall never be able to get married,” he said to me once, “and I certainly want to be married.” We were great friends, he was always in excellent spirits; he had not a bad time in prison. He was a jeweller by trade, always had more than enough work from the town in which there was no jeweller, and so escaped hard labour. Of course he was a pawnbroker at the same time, and supplied the whole prison with money at a percentage and on security. He had come to the prison before me, and one of the Poles gave me a minute description of his arrival. It is a most amusing story which I will tell later on; I shall speak of Isay Fomitch more than once again.
Among the other prisoners in our room were four Old Believers, elderly men and great Bible readers, one of whom was the old fellow from the Starodubovsky settlement. Then there were two or three Little Russians, gloomy fellows; a young convict of three-and-twenty with a lean little face and a sharp little nose, who had already committed eight murders; a group of false coiners one of whom kept all the room amused; and finally several gloomy and sullen individuals, shaven and hideous, taciturn and envious, who looked with hatred about them and meant to look like that, to scowl, to be silent and full of hatred for long years to come, the whole term of their imprisonment. Of all this I had only a glimpse on that first desolate evening of my new life, a glimpse in the midst of smoke and filth, of oaths and indescribable obscenity, of foul air, of clanking fetters, of curses and shameless laughter. I lay down on the bare boards of the bed, and putting my clothes under my head (I had not a pillow yet), covered myself with my sheepskin; but for a long while I could not get to sleep, though I was utterly worn out and shattered by all the monstrous, unexpected impressions of that first day. But my new life was only just beginning. There was much awaiting me in the future of which I had never dreamed, of which I had no foreboding.
V
The First Month
Three days after my arrival in prison I was ordered to go out to work. That first day of work is very distinct in my memory, though nothing very unusual happened to me in the course of it, except in so far as my position was in itself unusual. But it was still one of my first impressions, and I still looked eagerly at everything. I had spent those three days in the greatest depression. “This is the end of my wanderings: I am in prison!” I was continually repeating to myself. “This is to be my haven for many long years, my niche which I enter with such a mistrustful, such a painful sensation. … And who knows? Maybe when I come to leave it many years hence I may regret it!” I added, not without an element of that malignant pleasure which at times is almost a craving to tear open one’s wound on purpose, as though one desired to revel in one’s pain, as though the consciousness
