He had been a well-to-do tradesman; he left a wife and children behind; but he went into exile firmly, because in his blindness he regarded it as “suffering for the faith.” After living with him for some time, you would involuntarily wonder: how could this man, humble, meek as a child, be a rebel? I spoke with him several times “about faith.” He never yielded anything in his convictions; but there was never any anger or any hatred in his objections. And yet he had destroyed the church and did not deny it. It seemed that, with his convictions, he must regard his act and the “suffering” he endured for it as a glorious deed. But however attentively I looked, however I studied him, I never noticed any sign of vanity or pride in him. We had other Old Believers with us in prison, most of them Siberians. They were highly developed folk, cunning muzhiks, great Bible readers and dogmatists, and, in their own way, strong dialecticians; haughty, arrogant folk, devious and intolerant in the highest degree. The old man was a completely different sort of person. Though maybe a greater Bible reader than all of them, he avoided arguments. In character he was highly gregarious. He was mirthful, laughed frequently—not with the coarse, cynical laughter of the convicts, but with a serene, gentle laughter that had much childlike artlessness in it and that somehow especially suited his gray hair. I may be mistaken, but it seems to me that you can know a man by his laughter, and if from the first encounter you like the laughter of some completely unknown person, you may boldly say that he is a good man. The old man gained universal respect throughout the prison, which did not make him vainglorious in the least. The prisoners called him “grandpa” and never offended him. I partly understood how he was able to influence his fellow believers. But despite the apparent firmness with which he endured his hard labor, a deep, incurable sadness lay hidden in him, which he tried to conceal from everybody. I lived in the same barrack with him. Once during the night, past two o’clock, I woke up and heard a quiet, restrained weeping. The old man was sitting on the stove (the same one on which the Bible-reading prisoner used to pray at night, the one who had wanted to kill the major) and praying from his handwritten book. He was weeping, and I heard him say from time to time: “Lord, do not abandon me! Lord, give me strength! Children, my little ones, my dears, I’ll never see you again!” I cannot tell you how sad I felt. So it was to this old man that almost all the prisoners gradually began to give their money for safekeeping. Almost all the men in the prison were thieves, but for some reason everybody suddenly became convinced that the old man simply could not steal. They knew that he hid the money entrusted to him somewhere, but it was in such a secret place that nobody was able to find it. Later he explained his secret to me and to some of the Poles. There was a knot in one of the posts that looked as if it was firmly embedded in the tree. But it could be taken out, and there was a deep hollow behind it. Grandpa hid the money in it and put the knot back in place, so that nobody could ever find anything.

But I have digressed from my story. I stopped at why money never stayed long in a prisoner’s pocket. But, apart from the difficulty of safeguarding it, there is so much anguish in prison, and a prisoner is by nature a being who yearns so much for freedom, and, finally, by his social position, is so light-minded and disorderly, that he is naturally inclined to suddenly “go all out,” to carouse away all his capital, with noise and music, so as to forget his anguish if only for a moment. It was even strange to watch some of them work without letup, sometimes for several months, solely in order to squander all their earnings in one day, clean themselves out, and then drudge away for several more months until the next binge. Many of them liked buying new clothes, which were unfailingly of the civilian sort: non-uniform black trousers, vests, Siberian kaftans.