Why else would they have sent him to the special section? Ordinary crimes are punished much more lightly. However, Sirotkin alone among all his comrades was such a good-looking boy. As for the others like him, of whom we had as many as fifteen, it was even strange to look at them; only two or three faces were more or less tolerable; the others were all lop-eared, ugly, slovenly; some were even going gray. If circumstances permit, I will tell about this group in more detail some day. Sirotkin was often friendly with Gazin, the same one apropos of whom I began this chapter, recalling how he had barged into the kitchen drunk and that this had confused my first notions of prison life.

This Gazin was a terrible creature. He made a ghastly, tormenting impression on everybody. It always seemed to me that nothing could be more ferocious, more monstrous, than he. In Tobolsk I saw the robber Kamenev, famous for his evildoings; later I saw Sokolov, a runaway soldier, in prison awaiting trial as a hideous murderer. But neither of them made such a repulsive impression on me as Gazin. I sometimes imagined that I saw before me an enormous, gigantic spider the size of a man. He was a Tatar; terribly strong, the strongest man in the prison; of above average height, of Herculean build, with an ugly, disproportionately huge head; he walked with a stoop and wore a perpetual scowl. Strange rumors about him circulated in the prison: it was known that he was from the military; but the talk among the prisoners, whether true or not I don’t know, was that he had escaped from Nerchinsk;6 that he had been sent to Siberia more than once, had escaped more than once, had changed his name, and had finally landed in our prison, in the special section. It was also told of him that he used to like putting the knife to little children just for the pleasure of it: he would take the child to some convenient place, frighten and torment him first, and then, having fully enjoyed the terror and trembling of the poor little victim, would put the knife to him, quietly, slowly, with enjoyment. All of that may have been invented, owing to the generally painful impression Gazin made on everybody; but these inventions somehow suited him, they went well with him. And yet, when he was not drunk, he usually behaved quite reasonably in prison. He was always quiet, did not quarrel with anybody and avoided quarrels, but as if out of contempt for the others, as if he considered himself above the rest; he spoke very little and was somehow deliberately uncommunicative. All his movements were slow, calm, self-confident. You could see by his eyes that he was far from stupid and extremely cunning; but there was always something haughtily mocking and cruel in his face and in his smile. He traded in vodka and was one of the most prosperous taverners in the prison. But a couple of times a year he would get drunk himself, and it was then that the whole bestiality of his nature would come out. Getting drunk gradually, he first started picking on people with little jibes, very vicious and calculated, and as if prepared long in advance; finally, getting completely drunk, he became horribly violent, grabbed a knife, and threw himself at people. The prisoners, knowing his terrible strength, scattered and hid; he threw himself at anyone he met. But they soon found a way to handle him. Some ten men from his barrack would suddenly throw themselves on him all at once and start beating him. It is impossible to imagine anything more cruel: they beat him in the chest, under the heart, in the pit of the stomach, in the belly; they beat him hard and long and stopped only when he lost all consciousness and became like a dead man. They would not have ventured to beat anyone else that way: it would have killed another man, but not Gazin. After beating him completely unconscious, they wrapped him in a sheepskin jacket and laid him on the bunk: “He’ll sleep it off.” And in fact he would get up the next morning almost well and go silently and sullenly to work. And each time Gazin got drunk, everybody in the prison knew that the day was bound to end for him with a beating. He knew it himself, and still he got drunk. Several years passed like that.