Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/256

244 correspondence. The mastering of this code enabled me to understand and study a number of dramas and love affairs of the prison and, when Mironoff was no longer my servant, to pick up his signals and talk with him.

I also learned from Mironoff the lingua franca of the prisons and came to know the keeper as the "ment," the prison as "kiecha," a knife as a "pen," a lodging as a "haza," a revolver as a "shpayer," a poison as "milk," a murder as "wet," to kill as "to sew," to escape as "to fly," a false passport as "the face" and many more like these, which I treasured in my mind and in my notebook.

I liked one expression which came to the prisons from the Volga, at the time when numerous bands of river pirates dominated this great highway to the whole country. These men used to rob and kill the merchants who were bringing their precious Eastern wares from Persia and the Caucasus, and they even mustered strength enough to fight the detachments of the regular army that were sent against them from Moscow. The national literature idealized the leader of these brigands, one Stenka (the diminutive of Stephen) Razin, making of him a hero, who was struggling for the release of the peasants from the slavery to their landlords.

The expression used by Stenka Razin, when he was on the point of undertaking some risky expedition, was:

"Saryn da na kiechku!" The influence of both the Tartar and Kalmuck language is phonetically perceptible in the phrase and, as a matter of fact, both have contributed to it. This sentence has two different meanings: for the robbers, "Kill and go to prison"; for prisoners, "Break the bars and flee from prison." After my instruction by Mironoff, I knew, whenever I heard this phrase, that an attempt to escape was in preparation.

Singing holds an important place in prison life. Many