Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 2

The warden was expecting Stepan to get violent, to hatch schemes with other prisoners, and to try and make a break for it. But there was nothing of that kind. Whenever the guard or the warden himself looked through the peephole in his cell door, Stepan would be sitting there on a sack stuffed with straw, his head propped up in his hands, whispering something to himself. When being questioned by the investigator he also behaved quite differently from the other prisoners: he seemed absent-minded, as if he did not hear the questions, and when he did grasp them he was so truthful in his answers that the investigator, accustomed as he was to contending with the ingenuity and cunning of accused prisoners, felt rather like a man climbing a staircase in the dark, who lifts his foot to find the next step, which turns out not to be there. Stepan gave a full account of all the murders he had committed, screwing up his brow and staring at a fixed point in space, and speaking in the simplest, most businesslike manner as he tried to recall all the details: ‘He came out barefoot,’ said Stepan, talking about the first murder, ‘and he stood there in the doorway, and so I slashed him just the once and he started to wheeze, and I got straight on with it and dealt with his old woman.’ And so he went on. When the public prosecutor made his round of the cells Stepan was asked if he had any complaints or if he needed anything. He answered that there was nothing he needed and that he wasn’t being mistreated. The prosecutor walked a few steps down the stinking corridor, then stopped and asked the warden, who was accompanying him, how this prisoner was behaving.

‘It’s a most extraordinary thing,’ replied the warden, gratified that Stepan had praised the way he was being treated. ‘He’s been with us for over a month now, and his behaviour is exemplary. I am just concerned that he may be thinking up something. He’s a fearless fellow, and he’s exceptionally strong.’

II

During his first month in prison Stepan was constantly tormented by the same thing: he could see the grey walls of his cell and hear the prison noises – the hum of voices on the common cell in the floor below him, the guard’s footsteps in the corridor, the clangs that marked the passing of the hours – but at the same time he could see her, and that meek expression of hers which had already got the better of him when he had met her in the street, and the scraggy, wrinkled throat which he had slashed; and he could hear her touching, pitiful, lisping voice saying: ‘You think you’re destroying others, but it’s your own soul you’re destroying. You can’t do this.’ Then the voice would fall silent, and those three would appear – the black devils. And they kept on appearing just the same, whether his eyes were open or shut. When his eyes were shut they looked more distinct. When Stepan opened his eyes the devils would blend into the doorways and the walls and vanish for a while, but then they came at him again, from in front of him and from both sides, making dreadful faces and repeating: ‘Do away with yourself, do away with yourself. You could make a noose, you could start a fire.’ And then Stepan would start to shake, and to repeat all the prayers he could remember – the Hail Mary and the Our Father – and at first that seemed to help him. As he recited the prayers he would start to recall his past life: his father and mother, his village, the dog Wolfcub, his grandad asleep on top of the stove, the upturned benches on which he had gone sledging with the other lads; and then he would recall the girls and their songs, and the horses, how they had been stolen and how they had managed to catch the horse-thief, and how he had finished the thief off with a stone. And he would recall his first term in prison and his release, and he would recall the fat innkeeper and the drayman’s wife and the children, and then once again he would recall her. And he would feel hot all over, and throw off his prison robe, leap up from his plank-bed and start pacing rapidly up and down his cramped cell like a wild animal in a cage, making a rapid turn each time he came up against the damp, oozing walls. And again he would start to recite his prayers, but the prayers were beginning to lose their effect.