Page:The Russian Review Volume 1.djvu/251

Rh the charge was forty copecks. As soon as he had eaten the fish, he felt his stomach becoming very heavy, as though loaded with something; the sensation brought on nausea, thirst, acute pain.

Later, when he was listening to the foreman of the jury as he was enumerating the points at issue, everything in his abdomen seemed to be turning upside down, his body became covered with cold sweat, and his left leg became limp again. He did not hear anything, did not understand anything, and he dully resented the fact that they compelled him to stand while the foreman spoke, though he wished to sit or lie down. Finally, he and his fellow-defendants were permitted to sit down, and then the prosecuting attorney arose and said something which was entirely unintelligible to him. Then, suddenly, several gendarmes appeared from somewhere, holding their sabres in their hands. They surrounded Avdeyev and the others, and ordered them to go somewhere.

Now he realized that he had been declared guilty and placed under arrest, but this neither frightened nor astonished him. The state of affairs within his abdomen was not of the sort to permit him to pay the slightest attention to anything else.

"So now they won't let us go to the hotel, eh?" asked he of one of his fellow-prisoners. "And I left three roubles and a quarter pound of tea there."

All night he kept thinking with disgust of the fish he had eaten, and his mind constantly reverted to the three roubles and the quarter pound of tea that he had left at the hotel. In the morning, when the dawn was just beginning, he was awakened and ordered to dress himself. Then two soldiers, with bayonets in their rifles, led him through the city to the prison. Never, at any other time, did the streets of the city seem so interminably long. They made him walk, not on the sidewalk, but right in the middle of the street, through dirty, melting snow. His entrails were still engaged in a mortal combat with the fish, and his left leg was numb. He had lost his overshoes somewhere, and his feet were wet and cold.

Five days later, the prisoners were again brought to court to hear the sentence. Avdeyev was sentenced to exile to the government of Tobolsk. Even this did not frighten or astonish him. Somehow or other it still seemed to him that the trial was not over yet, that the case was still dragging along, and that the real "decision" was not yet reached. And he lived in prison, awaiting this decision from day to day.