Unless someone else dressed him nicely, sometimes even in a red shirt, and Sirotkin would obviously be glad of the new clothes: he would go about the barracks, showing himself off. He did not drink, did not play cards, hardly ever quarreled with anyone. He used to stroll behind the barracks—hands in his pockets, quiet, pensive. What he could have been thinking about was hard to imagine. You would sometimes call to him out of curiosity and ask him about something, and he would answer at once and even somehow deferentially, not prisoner-fashion, but always briefly, tersely; and he would look at you like a ten-year-old boy. When he happened to have money, he did not buy something necessary, did not have his jacket mended or get himself new boots, but would buy a kalach or a gingerbread and eat it up—just as if he were seven years old. “Hey, Sirotkin,” the prisoners used to say, “you orphan from Kazan!”4 During off-hours he usually hangs around the other barracks; almost everybody is busy doing something, he alone does nothing. They would say something to him, almost always in mockery (he and his comrades were often made fun of)—he says nothing, turns, and goes to another barrack; but sometimes, if they teased him badly, he would blush. I often thought: what has this quiet, simple-hearted being done to wind up in prison? Once I was lying in the hospital, in the prisoners’ ward. Sirotkin was also sick and lay next to me. One evening he and I got to talking; he became unexpectedly animated and, incidentally, told me how he had been sent for a soldier, how his mother had wept over him, seeing him off, and how hard it had been for him as a recruit. He added that he had been unable to endure life as a recruit, because everyone was so angry there, so stern, and the commanders were almost always displeased with him …

“How did it end?” I asked him. “What did you do to land here? And in the special section at that … Ah, Sirotkin, Sirotkin!”

“I spent only a year in the battalion, Alexander Petrovich; and I came here because I killed Grigory Petrovich, my company commander.”

“So I heard, Sirotkin, but I don’t believe it. How could you kill anybody?”

“That’s what happened, Alexander Petrovich. It was so-o hard for me.”

“But how do other recruits live through it? Of course, it’s hard at first, but then they get used to it, and, lo and behold, out comes a fine soldier. Your mother must have pampered you, fed you on milk and gingerbread till you were eighteen?”

“It’s true my dear mother loved me very much, sir. When I went as a reecruit, she took to her bed, and I’ve heard she never got up again … Life as a reecruit got very bitter for me towards the end. The commander didn’t like me and kept punishing me—and what for? I’m obedient in everything, live properly, don’t drink, don’t borrow money; and that’s a bad business, Alexander Petrovich, if a man borrows money. Everybody around is so hardhearted—there’s no place to go and weep. I used to slip around a corner somewhere and cry there. So once I was standing guard. It was nighttime; they put me on watch at the guardhouse by the gun racks. Wind: it was autumn, dark as could be. And I felt so heartsick, so heartsick! I set my gun by my foot, unfixed the bayonet and laid it aside, kicked off my right boot, aimed the muzzle at my chest, leaned against it, and pulled the trigger with my toe. Misfire! I examined the gun, cleaned the touchhole, poured in new primer, rubbed the flint a little, and put the gun to my chest again. What then, sir? The powder flashed, but again no shot! What’s this? I think. I put my boot on, fixed the bayonet, and paced about silently. It was then that I decided to do this thing: anywhere at all, so long as it’s out of the reecruits! Half an hour later the commander arrives; he was making the main round. He comes straight at me: ‘Is that any way to stand guard?’ I grabbed my gun and stuck the bayonet into him up to the muzzle. Got four thousand,5 and then came here, to the special section …”

He was not lying.