Page:Dostoyevsky - The House of the Dead, Collected Edition, 1915.djvu/103

 and seemed to have grown used to things which I should have thought I could never in my life have grown used to.

Regularly once a week I went to have half my head shaved. Every Saturday in our free time we were called out in turn from the prison to the guard-house (if we did not go we had to get shaved on our own account) and there the barbers of the battalion rubbed our heads with cold lather and mercilessly scraped them with blunt razors; it makes me shiver even now when I recall that torture. But the remedy was soon found: Akim Akimitch pointed out to me a convict in the military division who for a kopeck would shave with his own razor anyone who liked. That was his trade. Many of the convicts went to him to escape the prison barbers, though they were by no means a sensitive lot. Our convict barber was called the major, why I don’t know, and in what way he suggested the major I can’t say. As I write I recall this major, a tall, lean, taciturn fellow, rather stupid, always absorbed in his occupation, never without a strop on which he was day and night sharpening his incredibly worn out razor. He was apparently concentrated on this pursuit, which he evidently looked upon as his vocation in life. He was really extremely happy when the razor was in good condition and some one came to be shaved; his lather was warm, his hand was light, the shaving was like velvet. He evidently enjoyed his art and was proud of it, and he carelessly took the kopeck he had earned as though he did the work for art’s sake and not for profit.

A. caught it on one occasion from our major when telling him tales about the prisoners he incautiously spoke of our barber as the major. The real major flew into a rage and was extremely offended. “Do you know, you rascal, what is meant by a major?” he shouted, foaming at the mouth, and falling upon A. in his usual fashion. “Do you understand what is meant by a major? And here you dare to call a scoundrelly convict major before me, in my presence!” No one but A. could have got on with such a man.

From the very first day of my life in prison, I began to dream of freedom. To calculate in a thousand different ways when my days in prison would be over became my favourite occupation. It was always in my mind, and I am sure that it is the same with every one who is deprived of freedom for a fixed period. I don’t know whether the other convicts thought and calculated as I did, but the amazing audacity of their hopes