Chapter 41 Part One - Thirty Eight

The next day, Sunday, at five o'clock in the morning, the whistle sounded as usual in the women's prison, and Kolabreva was already up, so Maslova was woken. "I am a convict," Maslova thought horribly.She rubbed her eyes and involuntarily inhaled the foul-smelling air in the room until the morning. She wanted to sleep for a while and return to the vast sleep, but the drowsiness was driven away by the habit of trembling.She got up quickly, sat cross-legged, and looked around.The women are all up, only the children are still asleep.The bootleg woman, with bulging eyes, carefully pulled out the prison robes from under the children, lest they wake them up.The women who resisted the conscripts left the rags they had wrapped their children in to dry by the fire.Her baby was crying desperately in the arms of the blue-eyed Fedosya.Fedosya rocked him and sang him a lullaby softly.The consumptive woman clutched her chest, flushed, and coughed desperately; between coughs, she gasped loudly, almost like a yell.The red-haired woman woke up, lying on her back on the bed, with her fat legs bent, talking loudly about her dream with relish.The old woman guilty of arson stood before the icon again, repeating the same prayers, crossing herself, and bowing.The chanter's daughter sat motionless on the bunk, her sleepy eyes staring blankly ahead.The Pretty Woman wrapped her oiled coarse black hair around one finger and tried to curl it.

There was the clattering sound of big cotton shoes walking in the corridor, and then the iron lock clanged, and two male prisoners came in to empty the toilet.Wearing short jackets and gray trousers with hems well above the ankles, they scowled and angrily picked up the stinking commode on poles and carried it outside the cell.The women went to the taps in the corridor to wash their faces.The red-haired woman got into an argument at the water tap with a woman in the next cell.Another insult, yelling, complaining... "Do you want to stay in a single cell!" The male guard shouted loudly, and he slapped the red-haired woman's fat, bare back with a loud sound that could be heard throughout the corridor. "Be careful not to let me hear your voice again!"

"Look, the old man's on fire again," said the red-haired woman, taking the gesture as a petting. "Hey, come on! Pack up and go to church." Before Maslova had finished combing her hair, the warden arrived with his guards. "Roll roll!" shouted the warden. Another group of female prisoners came out from another cell.All the female prisoners stood in two rows in the corridor, and the women in the back row had to put their hands on the shoulders of the women in the front row according to the rules.All roll call completed. After roll call, the female guard came and led the female prisoner into the church.More than a hundred female prisoners came out of each cell, and they lined up in a single file.Maslova and Fedosya were in the middle of the procession.They were all wearing prisoners' white turbans and white dresses, and only a few of them wore their own flowered clothes.These women, with their children, followed their husbands into exile.The entire staircase was packed to the brim with this procession.Only the sound of walking in big cotton shoes, talking, and occasional laughter can be heard.At the corner, Maslova saw her friend Bochkova walking ahead with a fierce face, and she pointed it out to Fedosya.The women descended the stairs without saying a word, crossed themselves, bowed, and began to enter the still empty and resplendent church.The assigned position for them is on the right.They crowded each other and stopped.Immediately after the woman came in were male prisoners in gray prison robes, including released prisoners, prisoners, and exiles sentenced by the village community.Coughing loudly, they crowded tightly to the left and center of the church.In the portico above the church stood many male prisoners who came in first, on one side were convicts with shaved heads and rattling fetters, and on the other were detainees without shaved heads and fetters.

This prison church was rebuilt by a wealthy businessman who spent tens of thousands of rubles, and it looks bright and resplendent. The church was silent, except for the sneezing, coughing, crying of babies, and occasionally the clang of chains.Then the male prisoners standing in the center of the church moved suddenly, squeezed each other tightly, and made way in the middle.From this road the warden went to the front of all the prisoners in the middle of the church.