The days were overcast, as often happens in Vladivostok during spring. Dense fog from large clouds trailed through the high mountains and settled in the valley, encircling the city's tall buildings. Everything was gray, gloomy, wet. On a mountain slope rising above a seaside suburb there appeared, through the fog, from moment to moment, the small white house of the same Transcaucasian hero from Sakhalin who, ten years earlier, had arrived with me aboard the Volunteer Fleet steamer to Aleksandrovsk Post. Now, I was dining with a small group at his table. With us sat the homeowner's wife, a lively woman who’d also experienced the art of Sakhalin katorga, and a guest from Khabarovsk who, long before I did, left Sakhalin, where he’d been a teacher. “Lord!” the host proposed, “we’ve all been on Sakhalin, so drink to the health of the sakhalintsy!”

“And to you!” added the Khabarovsk guest. “It's time to put an end to this shameful tone. I became a townsman long ago, but to this day, can't dissociate myself from the sakhalinets caste. No, no, yes, it demeans me. But have you”— he turned to me— “enrolled in the townsman estate?”

“No,” I answered, “I’m still a regular sakhalinets: my passport references Sakhalin. I’ve tried to sever my connection to it, but this hasn't proved easy. First, to get around this enormous region one quite often needs an official pass; and second, it's so little enlightened by laws and regulations here that nearly every day the question arises, if not for me then for others, of exploring America. All my efforts and the governor's personal explanations have yielded nothing: up to now, I’ve got just the ticket from Sakhalin, and so I still wear the skin of a former exile. Breaking away from the katorga island is hard! I supposed that as soon as I left it, I’d quickly bury my entire past. But no! It's impossible to forget a life of so many years, indeed, reminders of Sakhalin are always around me. Wherever you go, you bump into a sakhalinets. My landlady is the wife of a prison warden who's under arrest and is being tried for embezzlement here; also, I dine with sakhalintsy, work with sakhalintsy, and my servants are sakhalintsy. During chance meetings, you conceal your Sakhalin identity, but this isn't possible for long.