Notes from a Dead House

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  “Well, so a day passes, a second, a third. Not a glimpse of Luisa. And meanwhile I heard from one of her friends (an old woman, also a laundress, Luisa sometimes went to see her) that the German knew about our love, and that was why he decided to speed up his proposal. Otherwise he’d have waited another couple of years. He supposedly made Luisa swear that she’d have nothing to do with me; and meanwhile he supposedly kept a firm grip on Luisa and the aunt, meaning he could still change his mind, he was not entirely decided yet. She also told me that in two days, on Sunday, he had invited them both for coffee in the morning, and that there would be another relation, an old man, who used to be a merchant, but was now poor as could be and worked as a watchman in some basement. When I learned that they might settle the whole business on Sunday, I got so angry I couldn’t control myself. And all that day and the next I did nothing but think about it. I think I could have eaten that German up.

  “On Sunday morning I still didn’t know anything, but once the Sunday services were over, I jumped up, put on my overcoat, and went to the German. I thought I’d find them all there. Why I went to him and what I wanted to say, I didn’t know myself. But I put a pistol in my pocket just in case. I had this worthless little pistol with an old-fashioned lock; I used to shoot it when I was a boy. You couldn’t even shoot anything with it. But I put a bullet in it anyway; I thought: they’ll be rude, they’ll want to throw me out—I’ll draw the pistol and scare them. I arrive. There’s nobody in the shop, they’re all sitting in the back room. There’s not a soul besides them, no servants. All he had for servants was a German maid, who also did the cooking. I go through the shop; I see—the door there is shut, an old door held by a hook. My heart is pounding. I stopped to listen: they were talking in German. I shoved as hard as I could with my foot, and the door opened at once. I look: the table is set. On the table there’s a big coffee pot, and coffee is simmering on a spirit lamp. There are rusks; on another tray, a decanter of vodka, herring, sausage, and also a bottle of some sort of wine. Luisa and her aunt, both gussied up, are sitting on a sofa. Facing them on a chair sits the German fiancé himself, brushed up, in a tailcoat and a standing collar sticking out in front. On a chair to one side sits another German, an old man, fat, gray-haired, who says nothing. When I came in, Luisa went pale. The aunt started up, then sat down again, and the German frowned. He was angry; he rose to meet me.

  “ ‘What do you want?’ he says.

  “I was disconcerted, but anger took strong hold of me.

  “ ‘What do I want?’ I say. ‘Receive me as a guest, offer me vodka. I’ve come to you as a guest.’

  “The German thought a little and said:

  “ ‘Zit down.’

  “I sat down.

  “ ‘Give me some vodka,’ I say.

  “ ‘Here iss vodka,’ he says. ‘Trink, if you please.’

  “ ‘So you won’t give me good vodka?’ I say. It’s because I’m very angry.

  “ ‘That iss good vodka.’

  “I was offended that he took such small account of me. And the more so because Luisa was looking. I drank and then said:

  “ ‘What makes you so rude, German? You should be friends with me. I’ve come to you out of friendship.’

  “Well, here I flew into a rage.

  “ ‘Ah, you scarecrow,’ I say, ‘you sausage maker! Do you know that right now I can do whatever I want with you? Want me to shoot you with this pistol?’

  “I drew the pistol, stood in front of him, and put the barrel right to his head, point-blank. The rest of them sit there neither dead nor alive; afraid to make a peep; the old man is shaking like a leaf, says nothing, turns all pale.

  “The German was surprised, but he pulled himself together.

  “ ‘I’m not afraid of you,’ he says, ‘and I ask you as a noble man to abandon this joke at once, and I am not afraid of you at all.’

  “That’s a lie,’ I say. ‘You are afraid!’ And what else! He didn’t dare move his head from under the pistol; he just sat there.

  “ ‘No,’ he says, ‘ziss you do not dare to do.’

  “ ‘And why do I not dare to do ziss?’ I say.

  “ ‘Because,’ he says, ‘it is strictly forbitten, and you vill be severely punished for it.’

  “Devil knows about this fool of a German! If he hadn’t fired me up, he might still be alive; all it took was an argument.

  “ ‘So you think I don’t dare?’ I say.

  “ ‘No-o!’

  “ ‘I don’t dare?’

  “ ‘You appsolutely do not dare to do ziss to me …’

  “ ‘Take that, then, sausage!’ I fired, and he rolled off the chair. The others cried out.

  “I pocketed the pistol and took off, and when I got to the fortress, I threw the pistol into the nettles by the gate.

  “I came home, lay on the cot, and thought: they’ll take me right now. An hour went by, then another—nothing happened. And before dark such anguish came over me; I went out; I simply had to see Luisa. I walked past the watchmaker’s. I look: there are people there, police. I rushed to her old friend: call Luisa out! I wait a little, I see: Luisa comes running, throws herself on my neck, weeps. ‘It’s all my fault,’ she says. ‘I was wrong to listen to my aunt.’ She also told me that the aunt went home right afterwards and was so scared she got sick and—kept mum. ‘She didn’t tell anybody herself and told me not to; she was afraid; let them do as they like. “Nobody saw us then, Luisa,” she said. ‘He sent his maid away, because he was afraid. She’d have scratched his eyes out, if she’d learned he wanted to get married. None of his shop assistants were there either; he sent them all away. He made the coffee and prepared the snacks himself. And his relative has been silent all his life, he’s never said a word, and after what just happened, he grabbed his hat and was the first to leave. He’ll probably also keep quiet,’ said Luisa. And so it was. For two weeks nobody arrested me and I wasn’t under any suspicion. Believe it or not, Alexander Petrovich, in those two weeks I experienced all my happiness. Luisa and I met every day. She became so attached to me! She wept: ‘I’ll follow you wherever they send you,’ she said. ‘I’ll give up everything for you!’ I thought it would be the life of me, she moved me so much. Well, but after two weeks they arrested me. The old man and the aunt got together and testified against me …”

  “But wait,” I interrupted Baklushin, “the most they could give you is ten years, maybe twelve, a full term in the civilian category, but you’re in the special section. How can that be?”

  “Well, that was for something else again,” said Baklushin. “When they brought me to court, the captain used foul language against me in front of the judges. I couldn’t stand it and said to him: ‘What are you swearing for, you scoundrel! Don’t you see you’re sitting in front of the zertsalo?’3 Well, things took a different turn then; they started the trial over and tried me for all of it together: four thousand rods, and then here to the special section. When I was taken out to be punished, the captain was also taken out: for me it was down the green street, and him they stripped of his rank and sent to the Caucasus as a common soldier. Good-bye, Alexander Petrovich. Come and see our performance.”

  X

  Christmas

  The holidays finally came. On Christmas Eve hardly any of the prisoners went to work. A few went to the tailor’s shop or the workshop; the rest only came for the assignments; then, though they were sent here and there, almost all of them, alone or in groups, returned at once to the prison, and after dinner nobody left it. In the morning, too, the greater part went on their own business, not the prison’s: some to see about smuggling vodka and ordering more; others to see some chums, or to collect some debts before the feast for work done earlier; Baklushin and other participants in the theater to visit acquaintances, mostly officers’ servants, and get the necessary costumes. Some went about with a preoccupied and bustling air solely because others were bustling and preoccupied, and, though they had no money coming to them
from anywhere, looked as if they, too, would be getting money from somebody. In short, it was as if they were all expecting some change the next day, something extraordinary. Towards evening the invalids whom the prisoners had sent to the market came back bringing all sorts of eatables: beef, pork, even geese. Many prisoners, even the most modest and thrifty, who had been saving up their kopecks all year, felt obliged to open their purses on such a day and celebrate the breaking of the fast in a proper way.1 The next day the prisoners held a genuine feast, inalienable and formally recognized by law. On that day a prisoner could not be sent to work, and there were only three such days in the year.

  And, finally, who knows how many memories must have been stirred in the souls of these outcasts at the coming of such a day! The days of major feasts are sharply imprinted in a simple man’s memory from childhood. These are days of rest from their heavy labors, days of family gatherings. In prison they were bound to be remembered with pain and longing. For the prisoners, respect for the solemn day even turned into a sort of formal ritual; few caroused; everyone was serious and as if busy with something, though many had almost nothing to do. But both the idle ones and the carousers tried to maintain a certain gravity … It was as if laughter were forbidden. The general mood reached a sort of punctiliousness and irritated intolerance, and if anyone disrupted the general tone, even accidentally, they reined him in with shouts and curses, and were angry with him as if he had shown disrespect for the feast itself. This mood among the prisoners was remarkable, even touching. Besides innate reverence for the great day, the prisoner unconsciously felt that by observing the holiday he was as if in contact with the whole world, that he was therefore not entirely an outcast, a lost man, a cut-off slice, that things in prison were the same as among other people. They felt it; it was obvious and understandable.

  Akim Akimych was also preparing very much for the feast day. He had no family memories, because he had grown up as an orphan in a strange house and had been doing hard work almost from the age of fifteen; nor had he had any special joys in his life, because his whole life had been regular, monotonous, for fear of stepping even a hair’s breadth outside his prescribed duties. Nor was he especially religious, because propriety seemed to have swallowed up in him all his other human gifts and particularities, all passions and desires, bad and good. As a result of all that, he was preparing to meet the solemn day not fussing, not worrying, not confused by melancholy and totally useless memories, but with a quiet, methodical propriety, exactly enough to fulfill the duties of the ritual established once and for all. In general he did not like to think much. The meaning of a fact seemed never to enter his head, but the rules once pointed out to him he fulfilled with sacred precision. If he had been ordered the next day to do exactly the opposite, he would have done it with the same obedience and thoroughness as he had done the opposite the day before. Once, once only in his life, had he attempted to follow his own mind—and he had landed in prison. The lesson had not been wasted on him. And though he was destined never to understand exactly what he was guilty of, he had deduced a salutary rule from his adventure—never to reason in any circumstances, because “he had no head for it,” as the prisoners used to say among themselves. Blindly devoted to ritual, he looked with a sort of anticipatory reverence even at his festive suckling pig, which he stuffed with kasha and roasted (with his own hands, because he also knew how to roast), as if it were not an ordinary suckling pig, which one could always buy and roast, but some sort of special, festive one. Maybe he had been accustomed since childhood to seeing a suckling pig on the table on that day, and deduced that a suckling pig was necessary for that day, and I’m certain that if even once he went without eating suckling pig on that day, he would be left all his life with a certain remorse over an unfulfilled duty. Before the feast, he went about in his old jacket and trousers, decently mended, but completely worn-out despite that. It now turned out that he had kept the new suit issued to him four months earlier carefully tucked away in his chest and had not touched it, with the smiling thought of solemnly putting it on for the first time at Christmas. And so he did. In the evening he took out his new suit, unfolded it, examined it, brushed it, blew on it, and, having done all that, tried it on beforehand. It turned out that the suit was a perfect fit; everything was as it should be, it buttoned tightly all the way up, the stiff, braid-trimmed collar held the chin high; at the waist it even had something of a uniform’s trimness, and Akim Akimych grinned with pleasure and turned jauntily before his tiny mirror, to which he had long ago glued gold borders with his own hands in his spare time. Only one little hook on the jacket collar seemed to be slightly out of place. Having realized it, Akim Akimych decided to move the hook; he moved it, tried it again, and it turned out to be just right. Then he folded it as before and, with his mind at peace, put it back in the chest until the next day. His head was shaved satisfactorily; but, looking himself over attentively in the little mirror, he noticed that his head did not seem perfectly smooth; barely visible sprouts of hair showed, and he immediately went to “the major” to have himself shaved decently and according to form. And though nobody was going to inspect Akim Akimych the next day, he had himself shaved solely for the peace of his conscience, so as to fulfill all his duties for the sake of such a day. Reverence for a little button, for an epaulette, for a bit of braid, had been indelibly imprinted in his mind since childhood as an unquestionable duty, and in his heart as the image of the height of beauty a decent man can attain. Having put everything right, he, as the senior prisoner in the barrack, ordered hay brought in and watched attentively as it was spread on the floor. The same thing was done in the other barracks. I don’t know why, but they always spread hay in our barracks for Christmas.2 Then, having finished all his labors, Akim Akimych said his prayers, lay down on his cot, and fell at once into a child’s untroubled sleep, so as to wake up as early as possible the next morning. All the prisoners acted the same way, however. They went to bed much earlier than usual in all the barracks. The usual evening work was stopped; there was no mention of maidans. Everyone waited for the next morning.

  It finally came. Early, before dawn, just after the morning drums, the barracks were opened and the sergeant, who came to count the prisoners, wished us all a Merry Christmas. We responded with the same, responded affably and kindly. After quickly saying their prayers, Akim Akimych and many others, who had their geese and suckling pigs in the kitchen, hastened to go and see what was being done with them, how they were being roasted, where things stood, and so on. From the small windows of our barracks, plastered with snow and ice, you could see through the darkness that bright fires, started before dawn, were blazing in both kitchens, in all six ovens. Prisoners were already darting about the yard, in the dark, with their sheepskin jackets on or just thrown over their shoulders; they were all rushing to the kitchen. But some, though very few, had already managed to visit the taverners. These were the most impatient ones. Generally, they all behaved themselves decorously, peaceably, and with unusual ceremony. You did not hear the usual cursing and quarreling. Everybody understood that it was a big day and a great feast. There were some who went to other barracks to wish certain people a Merry Christmas. There was a show of something like friendliness. I will note in passing that there was almost no friendship to be observed among the prisoners, I don’t mean in general—that goes without saying—but in particular, when some one prisoner became friends with another. There was almost none of that among us, and it is a remarkable feature: it is not that way in freedom. Among us, with very rare exceptions, we generally treated each other callously, drily, and this sort of formal tone was established and accepted once and for all. I also left the barrack; dawn was just breaking; the stars were fading; a thin, frosty steam was rising. Columns of smoke poured from the kitchen chimneys. Some of the prisoners I came across readily and affably wished me a Merry Christmas. I thanked them and responded in kind. Certain of them had not said a word to me before then for that whole month.
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  Just by the kitchen a prisoner from the military barrack caught up with me, a sheepskin coat thrown over his shoulders. He had noticed me when I was halfway across the yard and started shouting: “Alexander Petrovich! Alexander Petrovich!” He was running to the kitchen and in a great hurry. I stopped to wait for him. He was a young fellow, with a round face, a gentle expression in his eyes, very taciturn with everybody, and he had not yet said a single word to me and up to then had not paid any attention to me since my arrival in prison; I didn’t even know his name. He came running up to me and stood, breathless, right in front of me, looking at me with a sort of dumb but at the same time blissful smile.