Demidova did not even bother to take off her cap and unbuttoned only the collar of her sheepskin coat. She smoked hurriedly, one cigarette after another, tossing the butts into a wooden ashtray filled with wood shavings. As she paced about the reception-room from the narrow barred windows to the doors, her guards followed her, imitating her movements.
When the doctor on duty returned with a third doctor, the northern darkness had already fallen, and the lights had to be turned on.
‘They won’t take me?’ Demidova asked the guard.
‘No, they won’t,’ the guard answered gloomily.
‘I knew they wouldn’t. It’s all Kroshka’s fault. She knifed that woman doctor, and they’re taking it out on me.’
‘No one’s taking anything out on you,’ the doctor said.
‘I know better.’
Demidova left ahead of the guards, the outside door slammed, and the truck engine roared.
Immediately a door opened from the corridor, and the head of the hospital entered with a whole retinue of security officers.
‘Where is she? Where is Demidova?’
‘They’ve already taken her away, sir.’
‘That’s a shame, a real shame. I wanted to get a look at her. It’s all your fault, Peter Ivanovich – you and your jokes.’ And the director and his companions left the reception room.
The director wanted at least to get a glance at the famous Demidova, a thief with a truly unusual story.
Aglaya Demidova had been sentenced to ten years for killing a woman whose responsibility it was to make job assignments. Demidova strangled her victim with a towel for being too pushy. Six months ago Demidova was being taken from court to the mine. There was a single guard, since it was only a few hours by car from the local court where they tried her to the mine where she worked. Space and time are analogous in the Far North. Space is generally measured in units of time; such is the practice of the Yakut tribesmen, who calculate the distance from one mountain to another as, for example, six days. Those who lived near the main artery – the highway – measured distances by the length of time it took to get there by motor vehicle.
Demidova’s guard was a young ‘old man’ who had stayed on for a second hitch and who was used to the liberties and peculiarities of life as a guard, the total master of the prisoners’ fates. It was not the first time that he had ‘accompanied’ a woman, and this sort of trip promised a form of amusement that most soldiers in the North enjoyed only rarely.
The three of them – the guard, the driver, and Demidova – ate at a roadside cafeteria. The guard drank some grain alcohol to get up his courage (in the North only higher-ups drink vodka) and took Demidova into the bushes. Rose willow, aspen saplings, and willow thickets grow luxuriously around any taiga settlement.
When they entered the bushes, the guard laid his automatic rifle on the ground and approached Demidova. Demidova tore herself free, grabbed the rifle, and in two criss-crossing bursts riddled the body of the amorous guard with nine bullets. She then threw the rifle into the bushes, returned to the cafeteria, and hitched a ride on a passing truck. The driver sounded the alarm, and the body of the guard along with the rifle was soon found. Demidova herself was arrested a couple of days later only a few hundred miles from where her tryst with the guard had taken place. She was again brought to trial and this time sentenced to twenty-five years. Even before she had shown no willingness to work and had occupied herself with robbing her neighbors in the barracks, so the head of the mine decided to get rid of her at any price. The hope was that she would not be returned to the mine after the hospital but would be sent somewhere else.
Demidova specialized in robbing stores and apartments – a ‘city girl’ in the terminology of the criminal world. This world acknowledges only two types of women: thieves, whose profession, like the men’s, is stealing, and prostitutes, the men’s sweethearts.
The first group is considerably smaller than the second but enjoys a certain respect among criminals, who consider women to be creatures of a lower order. Their professional abilities and services, however, demand recognition. The female companion of a thief will, not infrequently, participate in working out the plans for a robbery and even in the robbery itself, but she does not take part in the male ‘trials of honor’, where criminals actually try and sentence each other for violating their own peculiar code of ethics. These special male and female roles have been dictated in part by a life where men are imprisoned apart from women – a circumstance that has influenced the lifestyles, habits, and rules of both sexes. Women are not as hard as men, and their ‘trials’ are neither as bloody nor as cruel. In a thieves’ den, the women commit murder less frequently than their male comrades.
Prostitutes constitute the second and larger group of women connected with the world of crime. They are the thieves’ companions, and they are the breadwinners. Naturally, they participate, when necessary, in break-ins, casing a building and staking it out, concealing the stolen merchandise, and eventually fencing it, but they by no means enjoy equal rights with the men of the criminal world. Any celebration is unthinkable without their presence, but they can never even dream of participating in ‘courts of honor’.
A third- or fourth-generation criminal learns contempt for women from childhood. ‘Theoretical’ and ‘pedagogical’ sessions alternate with the personal example of his elders. Woman, an inferior being, has been created only to satisfy the criminal’s animal craving, to be the butt of his crude jokes and the victim of public beatings when her thug decides to ‘whoop it up’. She is a living object, used by the criminal on a temporary basis.
When a criminal needs to ‘get to’ a camp official, it is considered quite normal and proper for him to send his prostitute-companion to the man’s bed. She herself shares this view. Conversations on this topic are always extremely cynical, laconic in the extreme, and descriptive. Time is precious.
The criminal code of ethics renders jealousy and courtship meaningless. Time-honored tradition permits the leader of a gang to select the best prostitute as his temporary wife. And if only yesterday this prostitute had been considered the property of a different thug, property that he could loan to his comrades in crime, today all his rights transfer to the new owner. If he is arrested tomorrow, the prostitute will return to her former companion. And if the latter, in turn, is arrested, she will be told who her new owner is to be – the master of her life and her death, her fate, her money, her actions, her body.
What place can there be for such a feeling as jealousy? It simply does not exist in the thug’s ethical system.
A criminal, they say, is human, and no human feeling is alien to him. It may be that he regrets having to give up his woman, but the law is the law, and those responsible for observing ‘ideological’ purity, the purity of criminal ethics (without any quotation marks), will immediately point out the jealous criminal’s error to him. And he will yield to the law.
There are instances when hot tempers and the hysteria characteristic of all criminals will make him defend ‘his woman’. On such occasions the question is taken up in a criminal court, and criminal prosecutors will cite age-old traditions, demanding that the guilty man be punished.
Usually the parties concerned do not come to blows, and the prostitute submits to sleeping with her new master. There are no ménages à trois in the criminal world, with two men sharing one woman. Nor is it possible for a female thief to live with a non-criminal.