all of them began to be more cordial to me. They had evidently begun to think of me as no longer one of themselves; they were already taking leave of me. K-tchinksky, one of the educated Poles, a quiet and gentle young man, was like me fond of walking about the yard in his leisure time. He hoped by exercise and fresh air to preserve his health and to counteract the evil effect of the stifling nights in the prison ward.
“I am impatiently looking forward to your release,” he said with a smile, meeting me one day as we walked. “When you leave the prison, I shall know that I have exactly a year before I leave.”
I may mention here parenthetically that our dreams and our long divorce from the reality made us think of freedom as somehow freer than real freedom, that is, than it actually is. The convicts had an exaggerated idea of real freedom and that is so natural, so characteristic of every convict. Any officer’s servant was looked on by us almost as in his way a king, almost as the ideal of a free man compared with the convicts, simply because he was not shaven and went about unfettered and unguarded.
On the evening before the last day I walked in the dusk for the last time all round our prison by the fence. How many thousands of times I had walked along that fence during those years! Here behind the barracks during my first year in prison I used to pace up and down, alone, forlorn and dejected. I remember how I used to reckon then how many thousand days were before me. Good God, how long ago it was! Here in this corner our eagle had lived in captivity; here Petrov often used to meet me. Even now he was constantly at my side. He would run up and, as though guessing my thoughts, would walk in silence beside me, seeming as though he were secretly wondering. Mentally, I took leave of the blackened rough timbered walls of our prison. How unfriendly they had seemed to me then, in those first days! They, too, must have grown older by now, but I saw no difference in them. And how much youth lay uselessly buried within those walls, what mighty powers I were wasted here in vain! After all, one must tell the whole truth; those men were exceptional men. Perhaps they were the most gifted, the strongest of our people. But their mighty energies were vainly wasted, wasted abnormally, unjustly, hopelessly. And who was to blame, whose fault was it?
That’s just it, who was to blame?
