A pretty conspiracy indeed—for providing prisoners with old clothes! I shall hereafter always allude to this case as the “old clothes affair,” and hope to show by it some of the little peculiarities of “administrative methods” in Russia. These “administrative methods” are sometimes extremely unpleasant for those treated by them. The gendarmerie can imprison people, and exile them to Siberia or the outlying provinces without trial, all by “administrative methods.”
Besides those implicated in the “old clothes affair,” there were at this time in the gaol many prisoners involved in other cases, among them several well-known literary men—Protopòpov, Krivènko, Stanyukòvitch, and Erthel. The first-named was my neighbour, and we were soon knocking to one another, though not without some misunderstanding at the outset. Directly I told him my name he left off replying to my taps, I could not imagine why. Several days passed. I could hear him going up and down in his cell, could catch his voice when he spoke to the warder, but he left all my signals unanswered; so concluding that he was afraid of being caught (though the officials of this prison did not seem to make much fuss over the knocking), I left off in despair. After a little, however, he began again. “Why do you hide your name from me?” he asked. I replied that I had told him my name at the very beginning, and repeated it; upon which he hastened to apologise: “I took you for a spy; for I could not make out what you said, and thought you seemed to be knocking confusedly on purpose, so that I might not decipher the name.”
We now conversed together freely. Our names were well known to each other, and we had many common friends. Of course, we were very anxious to know one another by sight, and we accomplished this in the following manner. From the windows of our cells, which were on the fifth floor, we could see into the “cattle-pens”; and though we were all supposed to take our exercise at the same time, we arranged together that each should manage to get out of it on different days, and that he who remained in his cell should recognise the other by a preconcerted signal. The next thing was to know one another’s voice, and this also we succeeded in effecting. We knew that in this prison, “politicals,” in the “Case of the 193,” not only spoke together, but even conveyed small objects to one another, by means of the water-closet pipes. The sanitary system here was so arranged that on all the six storeys each pair of cells was in communication, not only with one another, but also with those immediately above and below. Thus twelve prisoners could arrange together that they should simultaneously let the water run, so making a space in the pipes that acted as a speaking-tube; and if one spoke into the opening the voice could be heard perfectly in the connected cells, while the running water prevented any inconvenient odour. In this fashion we instituted a club of twelve members.
CHAPTER VIII
FRESH FEARS—THE COLONEL OF GENDARMERIE—INQUIRY INTO THE CASE OF GENERAL MEZENTZEV’S MURDER—MEETING WITH BOGDANOVITCH—DEPARTURE
During my imprisonment in the Petersburg House of Detention my spirits were altogether more cheerful than they had been since my first arrest. At Freiburg I had been in a chronic state of excitement and unrest, longing for the freedom that seemed so near. In the Fortress of Peter and Paul I had been downcast and despairing. Now I had reached a condition of equanimity and indifference.
“Hard labour in the Siberian mines,” I thought to myself. “What does it matter whether it be for ten years or fifteen? It is much the same to me.” My future was done for, my life gone. It is hard for a man to reconcile himself to such a thought, particularly when he feels physically sound and healthy, but one does somehow get accustomed to it. At times there will arise sudden hopes, dreams of unexpected luck, of happiness in a distant future; and then wild visions chase one another in dazzling pictures through one’s brain. But I had lived through too many bitter self-deceptions of the kind when I was at Freiburg; and I was only annoyed with myself when I found my fancy dallying with them, and tried to extinguish them at once. “Nonsense!” I cried to myself; “if anything, the only unexpected turn Fate will do you will be some bad trick.” And I steadfastly made up my mind to the worst.
Weeks had gone by since my change of prisons, and during that time I had not been once up for examination. I did not know in the least how my affair was going. “Perhaps in ‘high circles’ they’ve taken a new departure, and invented some other means of treating me as a political criminal. Why am I not brought before the court? Why do they not send me to Odessa? Something must be happening.” I had begun to fidget in this way occasionally, when one July morning, as I came back from my walk feeling rather cheerful, the warder said to me, “Make yourself ready; they have come to fetch you!” A hired droschky awaited me at the door, and I and a gendarme got into it. From him I could learn nothing as to our destination, and although this uncertainty did not last long, it made me feel uncomfortably nervous. After about half an hour the carriage stopped in the courtyard of a large building. I was taken into a small cell with a tiny window, whose panes were of thick ribbed glass. As I was pacing up and down here I noticed an officer at the peephole in the door observing me closely.
“May I come in?” he asked, hesitatingly opening the peephole window.
“A strange question! I am at your disposal, not you at mine,” said I. The door opened, and smiling apologetically, a young man in the uniform of a colonel of gendarmerie stepped in.
“Allow me to introduce myself”—he bowed and clicked his spurs together—“Colonel Ivànov.”