Life became an actual inferno. Day and night I prayed to God that I might fall ill and die. But God remained deaf. And still I felt that only illness could save me from the daily punishment. “I must get ill,” I said to myself. And so I lay on the oven at night to heat my body, and then went out and rolled in the snow. I did it several times, but without avail. I could not fall ill.
Amid these insufferable conditions, I met the new year of 1905. My married sister had invited me to take part in a masquerade. My father would not hear, at first, of my going out for an evening, but consented after repeated entreaties. I dressed as a boy, this being the first time I ever wore a man’s clothes. After the dancing we visited some friends of my sister’s, where I met a soldier, just returned from the front. He was a common moujik, of rough appearance and vulgar speech, and at least ten years older than myself. He immediately began to court me. His name was Afanasi Botchkarev.
It was not long afterwards that I met Botchkarev again in the house of a married sister of his. He invited me to go out for a walk, and then suddenly proposed that I should marry him. It came to me so unexpectedly that I had no time for consideration. Anything seemed preferable to the daily torments of home. If I had sought death to escape my father, why not marry this boorish moujik? And I consented without further thought.
My father objected to my marrying since I was not yet sixteen, but without avail. As Botchkarev was penniless, and I had no money, we decided to work together and save. Our marriage was a hasty affair. The only impression of it that remains with me is my feeling of relief at escaping from my father’s brutal hands. Alas! Little did I then suspect that I was exchanging one form of torture for another.
On the day following our marriage, which took place in the early spring, Afanasi and I went down to the river to hire ourselves as day labourers. We helped to load and unload lumber barges. Hard work never daunted me, and I would have been satisfied, had it only been possible for me to get along with Afanasi otherwise. But he also drank, while I did not, and intoxication invariably brutalized him. He knew of my affair with Lazov, and would use it as a pretext for punishing me.
“That officer is still in your head,” he would shout. “Wait, I’ll knock him out of it.” And he would proceed to do so.
Summer came. Afanasi and I found work with an asphalte business. We made floors at the prison, university and other public buildings. We paved some streets with asphalte. Our work with the firm lasted about two years. Both of us started at seventy kopeks (about 1s. 5¹⁄₂d.) a day, but I rose to the position of assistant foreman in a few months, receiving a rouble and fifty kopeks (about 3s. 2d.) a day. Afanasi continued as a common labourer. My duties required considerable knowledge in the mixing of the various elements in the making of concrete and asphalte.
Afanasi’s low intelligence was a sufficient trial. But his heavy drinking was a greater source of suffering to me. He made a habit of beating me, and grew to be unendurable. I was less than eighteen years old, and nothing but misery seemed to be in store for me. The thought of escape dug itself deeper and deeper into my mind. I finally resolved to run away from Afanasi.
My married sister had moved to Barnaul, where she and her husband worked as servants on a river steamer. I saved some twenty roubles, and determined to go to my sister, but I needed a passport. Without a passport one could not move in Russia, so I took my mother’s.
On the way, at a small railway station, I was held up by a police officer.