Once they were grown up, they kept coming, but now without kalachi; that is how it almost always happened. There were some who were no longer girls. A kalach cost half a kopeck, and almost all the prisoners bought them.

I noticed one prisoner, a joiner, already gray-haired, but ruddy-faced and smilingly flirtatious with the kalach girls. Before they came, he wrapped a red calico scarf around his neck. One fat and completely pockmarked wench set her tray down on his workbench. A conversation began.

“Why didn’t you come there yesterday?” the prisoner began with a smug little smile.

“That’s a good one! I did come, and it was you that played hooky,” the pert wench replied.

“We were called for, otherwise I’d have showed up without fail … And two days ago all your friends came to me.”

“Who’s that, then?”

“Maryashka, and Khavroshka, and Chekunda, and Two-penny …”

“What is this?” I asked Akim Akimych. “Can it be?…”

“It happens, sir,” he replied, modestly lowering his eyes, because he was an extremely chaste man.

It did happen, of course, but very rarely and with the greatest difficulty. Generally, there were more lovers of drink, for instance, than of that sort of thing, despite all the natural burden of this forced life. It was hard to get hold of a woman. You had to choose the time, the place, make arrangements, set up a meeting, hunt for seclusion, which was especially difficult, win over the guards, which was still more difficult, and generally spend a heap of money, relatively speaking. But all the same I did manage, later on, to be a witness to occasional love scenes. I remember once in the summer there were three of us in some shed on the bank of the Irtysh, firing up a brick-baking oven. The guards were nice fellows. Finally, two “prompters,” as the prisoners call them, showed up.

“Well, where were you sitting so long? At the Zverkovs’, I bet,” the prisoner they had come to see greeted them, having waited a good while already.

“Sat for a long time, did I? That magpie just sat longer on the post than I did at their place,” the girl replied merrily.

She was the dirtiest girl in the world. This was Chekunda. Two-penny came with her. She was beyond all description.

“And it’s a long time since I’ve seen you,” the philanderer went on, turning to Two-penny. “Seems you’ve lost weight.”

“Maybe so. I used to be real fat, but now—it’s like I swallowed a needle.”

“So you keep company with soldiers, eh?”

“No, it’s wicked people fed you that about us—but anyhow, what of it? Though I go without a rib, I love the soldiers, that’s no fib.”

“Drop them and love us; we’ve got money …”

To complete the picture, imagine this philanderer, head shaved, fettered, in stripes, and under guard.

I said good-bye to Akim Akimych and, learning that I could go back to the prison, took my guard and went home. People were already gathering. The first to come back were those who worked at set tasks. The only way to make a prisoner work diligently was to give him a set task. Sometimes these tasks were enormous, but even so they got done twice sooner than if a man was made to work until the dinner drum. Once the task was done, the prisoner went home without hindrance, and no one could stop him.

We did not eat together, but haphazardly, whoever came first; besides, the kitchen had no room for everybody at once. I tried the shchi, but, being unaccustomed, was unable to swallow it, so I made myself some tea. We sat down at the end of the table. I had a comrade with me, a nobleman like myself.

Prisoners came and went. However, there was room enough, not everyone had gathered yet. A group of five men seated themselves separately at a big table. The cook poured them two bowls of shchi and set a whole skillet of fried fish on the table.