I have noticed that such persons exist not only among simple people, but in all companies, estates, parties, journals, and associations. So it was in every barrack, in every prison, and as soon as a maidan was set up, one of them immediately appeared with his services. In general, no maidan could do without a servant. He was usually hired by all the players together, at five silver kopecks for the whole night, and his main duty was to stand watch all night. Most of the time he froze for six or seven hours in the dark, in the entryway, at thirty degrees below zero, listening to every tap, every clank, every footstep outside. The major or the guards sometimes appeared in the prison quite late at night, came in quietly, and caught the gamblers, and the workers, and the extra candles, which could be seen from outside. In any case, when the lock suddenly began to rattle on the door to the yard, it was already too late to hide, put out the candles, and lie down on a bunk. But since the servant on watch caught it badly afterwards from the maidan, the cases of such mishaps were extremely rare. Five kopecks was, of course, absurdly insignificant pay, even for prison; but I was always struck, in this and all other cases, by the severity and mercilessness of the prison employers: “You took the money, so do the job!” This was an argument that brooked no objections. For the kopecks paid, the employer took all he could take, took, if possible, even something extra, and still considered that he had done the hired man a favor. A carouser, drinking, throwing money around right and left without counting, unfailingly cheated his servant, and that I noticed in more than one prison, in more than one maidan.

I have already said that almost everyone in the barrack settled down to some handiwork: besides the gamblers, there were no more than five totally idle men; they went to sleep at once. My place on the bunk was just by the door. On the other side of the bunk, head to head with me, was Akim Akimych. He worked till ten or eleven, gluing together some multicolored Chinese lantern commissioned from him in town for rather good pay. He was an expert at making lanterns, worked methodically, without getting distracted; when he finished work, he put everything away neatly, spread out his mattress, said his prayers, and lay down properly in bed. He extended this propriety and orderliness, evidently, to the most petty pedantry; he obviously must have considered himself an extremely intelligent man, as all dull and limited people generally do. I disliked him from the very first day, though, I remember, on that first day I mused about him a great deal and marveled most of all that such a person, instead of succeeding in life, had wound up in prison. Later on I shall have to speak more than once about Akim Akimych.

But I will briefly describe the composition of our whole barrack. I was to live in it for many years, and these were my future roommates and comrades. Understandably, I studied them with greedy curiosity. To the left of my place on the bunk was a little group of Caucasian mountaineers, sent up mostly for robberies and with varying terms. There were two Lezgins, one Chechen, and three Daghestan Tatars.2 The Chechen was a gloomy and sullen creature; he hardly ever spoke with anyone and always looked around him with hatred, furtively, and with a venomous, maliciously mocking smile. One of the Lezgins was already an old man with a long, fine, hooked nose—an inveterate brigand by the look of him. But the other, Nurra, made a most delightful, pleasing impression on me from the very first day. He was still a young man, not tall, of Herculean physique, perfectly blond, with pale blue eyes, a pug nose like a Finnish woman’s, and bowlegs from a life spent on horseback. His body had been cut and wounded all over by bayonets and bullets. In the Caucasus he had belonged to the allies, but he kept going on the quiet and joining the opposition mountaineers, and made raids with them on the Russians. Everyone in the prison liked him. He was always cheerful, friendly to everyone, worked without a murmur, was calm and serene, though he often looked indignantly at the vileness and filth of the prisoners’ life and was fiercely outraged by any sort of stealing, swindling, drunkenness, and dishonesty in general; yet he never quarreled, but only turned away in indignation. He himself, during all his time in prison, never stole anything or committed a single bad act.