30

MASLOVA’S cell was a long room, some sixteen feet wide and twenty-one in length; it had two windows and a dilapidated stove which stuck out into the room. Two-thirds of the space was taken up by sleeping-benches made of warped planks. In the middle, opposite the door, hung a dark ikon with a wax candle stuck to it and a dusty bunch of everlasting flowers hanging underneath. To the left, on a blackened part of the floor behind the door, stood a vile-smelling tub. The roll had just been called and the women were locked in for the night.

In all fifteen people occupied this cell – twelve women and three children.

It was still quite light, and only two of the women were lying on their plank-beds: one, an imbecile arrested for having no identity papers, who spent most of the time asleep with her head wrapped in her prison cloak; and the other, a consumptive serving a sentence for theft. She was not asleep but lay with wide-open eyes, the prison-cloak folded under her head, trying to keep back the phlegm that filled and tickled her throat, so as not to cough. The other women, all of them bareheaded and with nothing on but coarse brown holland chemises, were either sitting on bunks sewing or standing at the window watching the convicts crossing the yard. Of the three who were sewing, one was the old woman who had seen Maslova off in the morning, Korablyova by name – a tall, powerful, sullen-looking woman with knitted brows, wrinkled skin hanging in a loose bag under her chin, a short plait of fair hair turning grey at the temples and a hairy wart on her cheek. She had been sentenced to penal servitude for killing her husband with an axe. She had murdered him because he had been badgering her daughter. She was the cell monitor and carried on a small trade in drink. She wore spectacles to sew, and held the needle in her large rough hands the way peasant women do, with three fingers and the point towards her. Next to her, also sewing bags of sail-cloth, sat a snub-nosed, dark-skinned little woman with small black eyes, good-hearted and talkative. She was a signal-woman on the railway, sentenced to three months’ imprisonment for not having come out of her hut with a flag to meet the train, so that an accident had occurred in consequence. Fedosya – Fenichka, her companions called her – the third of the trio who were sewing, was quite a young woman, very pretty with a white skin and rosy cheeks, clear blue eyes like a child’s and a couple of long fair plaits, which she wore twisted round her small head. She was in prison for an attempt to poison her husband. She had tried to poison him immediately after their marriage, which had taken place when she was barely sixteen years old. In the eight months during which she had been on bail awaiting her trial she not only made it up with her husband but became so fond of him that she was found to be living with him in the greatest harmony. Although her husband, her father-in-law and especially her mother-in-law, who had grown devoted to the girl, moved heaven and earth to get her acquitted she was sentenced to hard labour in Siberia. This good-natured, cheerful Fedosya, whose face was often wreathed in smiles, had her plank-bed next to Maslova’s, and not only liked her very much but regarded it as her responsibility to look after her and help her. Two other women were sitting on their plank-beds doing nothing; one, a woman of about forty with a pale thin face, had evidently once been very handsome but was now thin and pale. She had a child in her arms and was suckling it at her white long breast. This was her crime: one day a recruiting party arrived at her village to take away a lad who, so the peasants thought, was being wrongfully conscripted; the people stopped the police-officer and got the conscript from him; and this woman – an aunt of the lad who was being wrongfully conscripted – was the first to seize the bridle of the horse on which they were taking him away. The other woman who sat doing nothing was a short wrinkled kindly old thing with grey hair and a hump-back. She sat on a plank-bed by the stove, pretending to catch a pot-bellied little boy of four with hair cropped close to his head, who ran backwards and forwards in front of her, laughing gaily. The little lad had nothing on but a shirt, and every time he ran past her he cried out: ‘There, you didn’t catch me!’ This old woman, who with her son was accused of arson, bore her imprisonment with the utmost good temper, troubled only about her son, who was also in gaol, and still more about her old man: she was sure he was being eaten up by vermin, since her daughter-in-law had gone off and there was no one to keep him clean.

In addition to these seven women four others were standing at one of the open windows, holding on to the iron grating, and making signs and shouting to the convicts who were passing to and fro in the yard and whom Maslova had met at the entrance to the prison. One of these women was serving a sentence for theft, a large heavy creature with a flabby body, red hair and freckles all over her sallow face, her arms and her thick neck, which stuck out over an unbuttoned open collar. She kept calling through the window, shouting obscenities in a loud raucous voice. By her side stood a clumsy swarthy prisoner no bigger than a child of ten, with a long body and very short legs. Her face was red and blotchy, she had wide-set black eyes and short thick lips which failed to hide her protruding white teeth. By snatches she broke into screeching laughter at what was going on in the yard. Nicknamed Beauty for her love of finery, she was being tried for theft and arson. Behind them, in a very dirty grey chemise, stood a stringy, haggard, miserable-looking pregnant woman with a huge abdomen, who was accused of receiving stolen property. This woman stood there without speaking but all the time smiled with pleasure and approval at what was happening below. The fourth woman at the window – in for selling spirits without a licence – was a short thick-set peasant with very bulging eyes and an amiable face. She was the mother of the little boy who was playing with the old woman, and of a seven-year-old girl, who were with her in prison because she had no one to leave them with. Like the others she was looking out of the window, but she went on knitting a stocking, and frowned and closed her eyes disapprovingly at what the prisoners in the yard were saying. Her seven-year-old daughter, though, in nothing but her little chemise, her fair hair flowing loose, clutching the red-haired woman’s skirt with her thin little hand, eyes wide open stood drinking in the words of abuse the women and the convicts flung at each other, repeating them softly to herself as if she were learning them by heart. The twelfth prisoner was the daughter of a subdeacon who had drowned her baby in a well. She was a tall stately girl with dishevelled fair hair escaping from her short thick plait, and staring, protruding eyes. She took no notice of anything that was going on around her but, barefoot and wearing only a dirty chemise, paced up and down the free space in the cell, turning abruptly on reaching the wall.