In the middle of the guardroom stands a sloping bench with openings for securing the arms and legs. The executioner, Tolstykh9—a tall, fleshy man with the build of a circus weightlifter, wearing a shirt and an unbuttoned waistcoat— nods to Prokhorov, who silently lies down. Taking his time, Tolstykh silently pulls the prisoner's trousers down to his knees and slowly begins to secure his arms and legs to the bench. The warden stares out the window impassively, while the doctor paces back and forth. He is holding a vial of some sort of medicinal drops in his hands.
"Maybe you want a glass of water?" he asks.
"For the love of God, yes sir, your worship."
At last, Prokhorov is secured. The executioner picks up the lash with three leather tails and slowly unfurls it.
"Buckle up!" he says softly, and without even drawing back his arm, as though just taking aim, he brings the lash down on the prisoner's back.
"O.n.e!" says the warden in the voice of a deacon chanting prayers.
For the first instant Prokhorov is silent and the expression on his face does not change. Then a spasm of pain runs across his entire body, and is followed by something that is not a scream, but more like a shriek.
"Two!" shouts the warden.
The executioner stands to the side and strikes in such a way that the lash falls across the body. Every five strokes he slowly moves over to the opposite side and gives the prisoner a break of about half a minute. Prokhorov's hair is glued to his forehead, his neck is swollen; after the first five or ten strokes, his body, already full of scars from previous floggings, turns purple and blue; his skin splits under each stroke.
"Your worship!" The words break through the shrieks and the wails. "Your worship! Have mercy, your worship!"
After twenty or thirty strokes, Prokhorov begins to whine like someone in a drunken stupor or a delirium:
"I am a wretch, I am a broken man.. .why are you beating me?"
Then comes a strange sort of stretching of the neck, sounds of retching.. Prokhorov says nothing, but only bleats and wheezes; it seems as if an eternity has passed since the flogging has begun, but the warden keeps on shouting, " Forty-two! Forty-three!" Ninety is a long way off. I go outside. The street is silent and it seems to me that the heartrending sounds from within the guardhouse can be heard in every corner of Duй. A convict dressed in the clothes of a freeman walks by me, glances furtively at the guardhouse, and suddenly every feature of his face and even his gait register horror. I go back into the guardhouse, and then I leave again, and still the warden keeps on counting.
At last: ninety. Prokhorov is quickly untied from the bench and is helped up. The area of his body where the lash landed is livid with bruises and is bleeding. His teeth are chattering. His face is yellow and damp. His eyes are rolling in his head. When he is given the medicinal drops to drink, he convulsively bites down on the glass. . His head is wetted down and he is led off to the infirmary.
"That was for the murder. He'll get another one for escaping," I am told on our way home.
"I love to watch floggings!" the army medic exclaims joyfully, very pleased with himself for having gotten his fill of the abominable spectacle. "I love it! They are such scoundrels, such scum.. They should be strung up!"
Present Your Survey Findings
The significance of a survey consists in the impressions you collect in the process of conducting it. A good way to present your findings is to describe the way the survey evolved.
I went from hut to hut unaccompanied. On occasion, however, a convict or a settler who, out of sheer boredom, had taken it on himself to act as my guide joined me. Sometimes I was shadowed, quite close or from a distance, by an armed guard. He was assigned to follow me just in case I needed something explained. Whenever I turned to him with a question, his forehead would instantly break out in a sweat and he would answer, "How could I possibly know that, your worship?" Usually my companion, barefoot and bareheaded and carrying my inkpot, would run ahead, noisily throw open the doors, and hurry to whisper something to the master of the house—most likely his suppositions about the objectives of my survey..
The convict population took me for an official and viewed my census as just another one of those formalities that were so common in the area and only rarely amounted to anything. By the way, the fact that I was not a local—not a Sakhalin official—excited a certain degree of curiosity among the convicts. They would ask me,
"What are you taking all this information down for?"
They came up with all sorts of explanations. Some thought the higher-ups were researching ways to distribute aid to the convicts; others speculated that the decision had finally been made to move everyone to the mainland (according to a persistent and firm conviction circulating on the island, the authorities were always on the verge of moving the penal colony and the settlers to the mainland); yet another group, the self-styled skeptics, said they no longer expected anything good for themselves because God himself had turned His back on them, but they said this mainly to get me to contradict them. And then, from either the doorway or the top of the stove,10 as if mocking all these hopes and speculations, a voice would be raised, filled with fatigue, boredom, and irritation at being disturbed:
"They go on writing, and writing, and writing, Holy Mother of God!"
Report Stories from Life
Collect autobiographical narratives and select one to reproduce as an example of how such tales are told; give examples of the questions that were posed and describe the context in which the stories were shared and the conversations took place.
Sometimes, while reading or writing, I would suddenly hear a kind of rustling and wheezing sound, and I would feel something heavy moving under my desk by my feet. I would look up to see Yegor, in his bare feet, picking up scraps of paper under the desk or sweeping the floor. In his late thirties, he was an ungainly and awkward fellow—a clumsy oaf, in short—with a simple and, at first glance, stupid face and a mouth as wide as a burbot's. He had red hair, a wispy beard, and tiny eyes. He never answered questions without first giving you a sidelong glance and asking, "How's that?" or, "Who's that?" He addressed me as "your worship" but used the familiar "you." He was incapable of sitting for longer than a minute and was always working and finding something to do. He would be talking with you, but all the time his eyes would be looking around for something to clean or repair. At night, he never slept more than two or three hours because he had no time for sleeping. On holidays he usually stationed himself on a street corner, dressed in a red shirt and a jacket, and stuck out his belly and planted his feet wide apart. This was his version of "going out on the town."
Here, in penal servitude, he had built himself a hut, made buckets, tables, and crude trunks. He could make all kinds of furniture, but only "for himself," meaning, for his own use. He never got into fights and he was never beaten, except for that one time when he was a kid and his father whipped him for letting the rooster into the pea patch he was supposed to have been watching.
One day we had the following conversation:
"Why were you sent here?" I asked.
"What's that, your worship?"
"Why were you sent to Sakhalin?"
"For murder."
"Tell me the whole story, from the beginning."
Yegor leaned against the door, put his hands behind his back, and began his tale.
writing advice
Write as if You Were Painting
Imagine that you are painting a picture with all the details and colors.