I was cold, hungry, exhausted. My feet were swollen from wandering for several hours in a frantic effort to find the right path. When at last I got to the other side it must have been about midnight. I saw the lights across the water and called with all my remaining strength for the ferry. But there was no response. Only the wind, shrieking through the woods behind me, echoed my cries. I kept calling all night, but in vain.
When it dawned I gathered my last energies, stood up and called out again. This time I was observed, and a canoe was sent after me. Unfortunately, it was in charge of a boy. I was too ill to move, and he could not carry me to it. I had to creep on all-fours to the boat. With the boy’s aid, I finally found myself in the canoe. It took him a long time to ferry me across, and I was in a state of collapse by the time we reached the other side. I was taken to the Kuznetzov Hospital in Irkutsk again, where I lay dangerously ill for nearly two months. During this time I lost all my hair and half my weight.
After my visit to Yasha he naturally told his prison mates of it, being proud of my loyalty to him, but when days and weeks passed by, and I did not return, his comrades began to tease him about me.
“A fine baba is yours. You may indeed be proud of her,” they would torment him. “She has found some other husband. A lot of use she has for you, a prisoner. They are all alike, yours and ours.” Yasha took such jesting very much to heart. He was in complete ignorance of my whereabouts and finally made up his mind that I had betrayed him.
As soon as I was released from the hospital, I went to the Governor-General, in whose office I was told that Yasha had been sentenced to four years’ exile. Obtaining a pass, I went to Alexandrovsk to see him. But Yasha would not see me. Believing his comrades’ taunts, confirmed by my two months’ absence, he resolved that he had done with me. I was naturally at a loss to account for this abrupt change, and wept bitterly. Some of his acquaintances, who had been brought downstairs, saw me crying and described to him my wasted appearance. Then he came down.
Visitors were not allowed to come in contact with the prisoners at Alexandrovsk. There were two steel gratings in the office, separated by a distance of a couple of feet. The prisoner was kept behind one grating, while the persons who came to see him were placed behind the other. They could not touch each other.
This was the manner in which I was permitted to meet Yasha. We both cried like children, he, at the sight of my thinness, realizing that he had wronged me in suspecting me of faithlessness. It was a pathetic scene, this meeting behind bars. Yasha told me that he would not be exiled before May. As I offered to accompany him into exile, it was necessary for me to spend the several intervening months at some work. I also had to get permission to join Yasha in exile.
I found work with the same asphalte firm, but now as a common labourer, earning only fifty kopeks (about 1s.) a day. At intervals I would go to Alexandrovsk to see Yasha. It happened once that I was working at a job in the Irkutsk prison, and it was not long before the prisoners knew that I had a husband in Alexandrovsk, for there was a complete secret system of communication between the two prisons. On the whole, I was well treated by the convicts.
One evening, however, while at work in the hall, a trusty, catching me in a corner, attacked me. I fought hard, but he knocked me down. My cries were heard by the labourers of my party and several prisoners. Soon we were surrounded by a crowd, and a quarrel ensued between those who defended me and the friends of the trusty. An assistant warden and some guards put an end to it, drawing up a protocol of my complaint to have the trusty tried in court for assault.
As the day of the trial drew near Yasha was urged by his fellow-prisoners to influence me to withdraw my charge. He told me that the law of prison communal life demanded that I should comply with the request to drop my complaint. I knew that my refusal might mean Yasha’s death, and when I was called in court to testify against the trusty, I declared that there had been no assault and that I had no complaints to make. The case was dismissed, and my act enhanced Yasha’s reputation among the inmates of both prisons.