When Yakov and Dashutka were returning, they were stopped by the lowered bar at the railroad crossing. Breathing heavily and letting shafts of crimson fire out of its ash pits, a long freight train was passing by, dragged by two engines. At the crossing, in sight of the station, the first engine let out a piercing whistle.
“Whistling …” said Dashutka.
The train had finally passed, and the watchman took his time lifting the bar.
“Is that you, Yakov Ivanych?” said he. “You know that old saying, if I didn’t recognize you, you’ll be rich. Ha, ha, ha!”
It was very late by the time they made it back home. Aglaya and Dashutka made themselves a bed on the floor in the tea-room and lay down side by side. Yakov went to sleep on the counter. Before going to bed none of them prayed to God, or lit the icon-lamps. None of them slept a wink that night, nor spoke a single word. The entire night, they all felt like someone was walking in the bedroom above them.
Two days later, a police officer and an investigator came from town to conduct a search, first in Matthew’s room and then throughout the whole inn. They questioned Yakov first of all, and he told them that on Monday evening Matthew went to Vedenyapino to fast, and that he must have been attacked and killed by the woodcutters working on the train track.
The investigator asked him how Matthew was found on the road, while his cap was found in his room at home—could he have gone to Vedenyapino without his cap?—Why not a single drop of blood was found on the road near Matthew, although his head was fractured, and his face and chest were black with blood. Yakov was confused and taken aback, and answered: “I don’t know how.”
And everything happened just as Yakov had feared: the policeman came, the investigator smoked in the prayer room, Aglaya swore and was rude to the officers; and while Yakov and Aglaya were led in handcuffs from their yard, the peasants happily crowded at the gates and said, “They are taking away those religious nuts.”
During the investigation, the policeman testified without hesitation that Yakov and Aglaya killed Matthew to avoid sharing their inheritance with him, and since Matthew had apparently had money of his own, none of which could be found in the police’s search of his property, that Yakov and Aglaya must have stolen it.
Dashutka was interrogated as well. She said that Uncle Matthew and Aunt Aglaya quarreled and nearly beat each other up every day over money, and that Uncle Matthew was rich, because he had given his “sweetheart” nine hundred rubles.
Dashutka was left alone at the inn. No one came now to drink tea or vodka, leaving her to either clean up the rooms or eat pastries with honey. A few days later, they interviewed the watchman from the railroad crossing, who said that late Monday evening he had seen Yakov and Dashutka return from Limarovo. As a result, Dashutka, too, was arrested, taken to town and put in prison.
Soon word spread that Sergey Nikanorych had been present at the murder. A search was conducted at his place, where money was found in an unusual place, in his boot under the stove. The money was all in small bills, three hundred one-ruble notes. He swore he had earned this money at work and that he hadn’t been to the inn for over a year, but witnesses testified that he was poor and had lately been short of cash, and how he used to go to the inn every day to borrow money from Matthew. The policeman described how on the day of the murder he himself had been at the inn twice accompanying the barman to help him borrow some money. It was also noted that Monday evening Sergey Nikanorych did not meet the freight and passenger train as he usually did, and his whereabouts were unknown. He, too, was arrested and sent to the town.
Eleven months later the trial occurred.
Yakov Ivanych looked much older and thinner, and spoke in a sickly, quiet voice. He felt weak, miserable, and smaller than anyone else. His soul, tortured by his conscience and dreams, his constant companions in prison, had grown old and thin like his body. When it came to the point that he was not attending church, the chief justice asked him: “Are you a dissenter?”
“Not that I know of,” he answered.
He had no faith at all now. He knew and understood nothing. His former faith was disgusting to him, it seemed unreasonable and dark. Aglaya had no peace, and continued to blame Matthew for all their misfortunes. Sergey Nikanorych now had a beard instead of stubble. At the trial he blushed and perspired, obviously ashamed of his gray prison robe and sitting on the same bench with common peasants. He justified himself awkwardly, and when he kept trying to prove he had not been at the inn for a year, he was continually proved to be there by every witness, to the amusement of the audience. While in prison, Dashutka had put on weight. At the trial she did not understand what she was being asked. All she could say was that when Uncle Matthew was killed, she was very scared, and then it felt better.
All four were found guilty of murder and given lengthy sentences. Yakov Ivanych was sentenced to penal servitude for twenty years; Aglaya for thirteen and a half; Sergey Nikanorych for ten; Dashutka for six.
Late in the evening, a foreign steamer stopped in Sakhalin and requested coal. The captain was asked to wait till morning, but did not want to wait even one hour, saying that if the weather got worse throughout the night he would have run the risk of leaving without coal. In the Strait of Tartary the weather can change dramatically within half an hour, becoming dangerous for those near Sakhalin’s shores. The water was growing colder and the waves were gaining height.
A group of prisoners was driven to the mine from Voevodskaya prison, the gloomiest and most severe of all the prisons on the island. They had to load barges with coal and then to tow them using a small steamboat to the waiting steamer anchored more than a quarter of a mile from the coast. There, the coal had to be reloaded, a most exhausting task. The barge kept bumping into the steamer, and the workers, weak with sea sickness, could hardly stand on their feet. The convicts, still sleepy and not quite awake, stumbled along the shore in the dark, clanking their shackles.
A steep and extremely gloomy bank was barely visible on the left, while on the right there was a thick, impenetrable mist; the sea was monotonously repeating, “Ah! … Ah! … Ah!”
Only when the overseer lit his pipe were the faces of the gun-carrying guard and two or three of the closest coarse-faced convicts lit for an instant, and the white crests of the foremost waves could be discerned.
Yakov Ivanych—nicknamed Broom by the convicts for his long beard—was a part of this group of convicts. He was now called simply Yashka. He had a bad reputation. Three months after coming to Siberia, feeling incredibly homesick, he had escaped. He had quickly been caught, given a life sentence and forty lashes. He was later punished by caning twice more for losing his prison clothes, although each time they had been stolen from him. His homesickness had begun the very moment he had been brought to Odessa, and the prison train had stopped at Progonnaya station. Yakov, pressing against the window, could see nothing, especially not his home, in the darkness.
He had no one to talk to about home. His sister Aglaya had been sent to the other side of Siberia, and nobody knew where she was now. Dashutka was in Sakhalin, too, but she lived in a faraway settlement with a former convict. The only gossip he had heard from another transferred prisoner was that Dashutka had three children. Sergey Nikanorych was serving as footman to an officer who lived not far from the prison, in Dui, but there was no hope of seeing him due to his revulsion at peasant convicts.