Page:Dostoyevsky - The House of the Dead, Collected Edition, 1915.djvu/34

 begun to quarrel. The stuffiness was awful. The fresh winter air rushed in at the door as soon as it was opened and floated in clouds of steam through the barracks. The prisoners crowded round the buckets of water; in turns they took the dipper, filled their mouths with water and washed their hands and faces from their mouths. Water was brought in overnight by the parashnik or slop-pail man. In every room there was by regulation a prisoner elected by the others to do the work of the room. He was called the parashnik and did not go out to work. His duty was to keep the room clean, to wash and scrub the platform beds and the floor, to bring in and remove the night pail and to bring in two buckets of fresh water—in the morning for washing and in the daytime for drinking. They began quarrelling at once over the dipper; there was only one for all of us.

“Where are you shoving, you roach head!” grumbled a tall surly convict, lean and swarthy with strange protuberances on his shaven head, as he pushed another, a stout, squat fellow with a merry, ruddy face. “Stay there!”

“What are you shouting for? Folks pay for their stay, you know! You get along yourself! There he stands like a monument. There isn’t any fortikultiapnost about him, brothers!”

This invented word produced a certain sensation. Many of them laughed. That was all the cheery fat man wanted. He evidently played the part of a gratuitous jester in the room. The tall convict looked at him with the deepest contempt.

“You great sow!” he said as though to himself. “He’s grown fat on the prison bread. Glad he’ll give us a litter of twelve sucking pigs by Christmas.”

The fat man got angry at last.

“But what sort of queer bird are you?” he cried, suddenly turning crimson.

“Just so, a bird.”

“What sort?”

“That sort.”

“What sort’s that sort?”

“Why, that sort, that’s all.”

“But what sort?”

They fixed their eyes on each other. The fat man waited for an answer and clenched his fists as though he meant to fall to fighting at once. I really thought there would be a fight. All this was new to me and I looked on with curiosity. But