The regulation prison fetters, adapted to work, were made not of rings but of four iron rods almost as thick as a finger, connected by three rings. They were worn under the trousers. A strap was fastened to the middle ring, and was in turn attached to the belt at the waist, which was worn immediately over the shirt.

I remember my first morning in the barrack. The drum in the guardhouse by the gate sounded reveille, and some ten minutes later the sergeant on duty began to unlock the barracks. People began to wake up. By the dim light of a cheap tallow candle prisoners, shivering with cold, got up from their bunks. Most of them were silent and sullen with sleep. They yawned, stretched, and wrinkled their branded foreheads. Some crossed themselves, others were already starting to squabble. It was terribly stuffy. Fresh winter air burst through the door the moment it was opened, and billows of steam raced around the barrack. The prisoners crowded around the water buckets; they took the dipper by turns, filled their mouths with water, and washed their hands and faces with it. The water was prepared the evening before by the slop man. According to the rules, each barrack had a prisoner elected by the whole group to serve in the barrack. He was called the slop man, and he did not go out to work. He was charged with seeing to the cleanliness of the barrack, with washing and scrubbing the bunks and the floors, with bringing in and taking out the slop pail, and with providing fresh water in two buckets—for washing in the morning and drinking during the day. Over the dipper, of which there was only one, quarreling broke out immediately.

“Where’re you sticking yourself, brand-head!” growled a tall, sullen prisoner, lean and swarthy, with some strange bulges on his shaven skull, shoving another one, fat and squat, with a merry and ruddy face. “Stay put!”

“What’re you shouting about! If you stay, you pay! Get lost! Look at this elongated monument! Not a drop of hetiquettanity in the man, brothers!”

“Hetiquettanity” produced a certain effect: many laughed. That was all the merry fat man needed. He was obviously a sort of volunteer buffoon in the barrack. The tall prisoner looked at him with the profoundest contempt.

“Rollicky little cow,” he said, as if to himself. “Fattened up on our clean prison bread.* He’ll drop a dozen sucking pigs by Christmas, if we’re lucky.”

The fat man finally got angry.

“And what kind of bird are you!” he suddenly shouted, turning all red.

“The bird kind!”

“What kind?”

“That kind.”

“What’s that kind?”

“Like I said, that kind.”

“But what kind?”

The two fastened their eyes on each other. The fat man was waiting for an answer and clenched his fists as if he wanted to throw himself into a fight at once. I really thought there would be a fight. This was all new to me, and I watched with curiosity. Later on I learned that all such scenes were perfectly innocent and were played out, as in a comedy, for the general amusement. They almost never led to a fight. This was all quite characteristic and represented the custom of the prison.

The tall prisoner stood there calm and majestic. He felt they were looking at him and waiting to see whether or not he would shame himself with his reply; he had to hold up his end, to prove that he was indeed a bird, and to show precisely what kind of bird. With inexpressible contempt, he cast a sidelong glance at his adversary, trying, for greater offense, to look somehow over his shoulder, from above, as if he were examining him like a bug, and uttered slowly and distinctly:

“Kagan!…”

Meaning that he was the bird Kagan.3 A loud burst of laughter greeted the prisoner’s resourcefulness.

“You’re no Kagan, you’re a scoundrel!” bellowed the fat man, sensing that he had flunked on all points, and verging on a blind rage.

But once the quarrel turned serious, the fellows were immediately pulled up short.

“What’s this racket!” the whole barrack shouted at them.

“Better to fight it out than split your gullets,” someone hollered from the corner.

“Fight, yeah, just wait!” came the answer.