He was extremely devout. He said his prayers piously; during the fasts before the Muslim holy days he fasted fanatically and stood for whole nights in prayer. Everyone liked him and believed in his honesty. “Nurra’s a lion,” the prisoners used to say; and the nickname of “lion” stuck to him. He was absolutely convinced that, once he had finished his appointed term in prison, he would be sent home to the Caucasus, and he lived only in that hope. I think he would have died if he had been deprived of it. I noticed him distinctly on my first day in prison. It was impossible not to notice his kind, sympathizing face among the angry, sullen, and jeering faces of the other prisoners. Within the first half hour of my arrival in prison, he patted me on the shoulder as he walked past me and laughed good-naturedly in my face. At first I could not understand what this meant. He spoke Russian very poorly. Soon after that he came up to me again, and again smiled and gave me a friendly pat on the shoulder. Then again and again, and so it went on for three days. On his part, as I guessed and later learned, this meant that he was sorry for me, that he felt how hard this first acquaintance with prison was for me, that he wanted to show me his friendship, cheer me up, and assure me of his protection. Kind and naïve Nurra!

The Daghestan Tartars were three in number, and they were all brothers. Two of them were middle-aged, but the third, Alei, was no more than twenty-two and looked younger still. His place on the bunk was next to mine. His beautiful, open, intelligent, and at the same time good-naturedly naïve face won my heart at first sight, and I was very glad that fate had sent me him and not some other man as a neighbor. His whole soul was expressed in his handsome—one might even say beautiful—face. His smile was so trustful, so childishly simple-hearted; his big, dark eyes were so gentle, so tender, that I always felt a special pleasure, even a relief from anguish and sadness, in looking at him. I say it without exaggeration. At home one day his older brother (he had five older brothers; two others ended up in some sort of mill) told him to take his saber and get on his horse to go on an expedition with him. In mountaineer families respect for one’s elders is so great that the boy not only did not dare, but did not even think of asking where they were going. The brothers did not find it necessary to tell him. They were all setting out on a robbery, to waylay a rich Armenian merchant and hold him up. And so it went: they killed the convoy, put a knife into the Armenian, and stole his goods. The affair was discovered: all six were seized, tried, found guilty, flogged, and sent to hard labor in Siberia. The only mercy granted Alei by the court was the shortening of his term; he was sent up for four years. The brothers loved him very much, and more with a sort of fatherly than brotherly love. He was their comfort in exile, and they, who were usually gloomy and sullen, always smiled looking at him, and when they talked to him (though they talked to him very little, as if they considered him still a boy with whom there was no point in talking about anything serious), their stern faces softened, and I guessed they were saying something jocular, almost childish—at least they always exchanged glances and chuckled good-naturedly when they heard his reply.