An American in the Gulag Read online

  I missed the sound of human voices, friendly voices, and it was very difficult to keep from talking to myself. Walking up and down the cell, when my head was turned away from the door, I would whisper very softly bits of remembered conversations, little encouraging messages to myself, little commentaries on what I was reading.

  Late in the afternoon a strange guard took me to the shower room. He had a blank face. I tried to talk with him but each time he just shook his head wordlessly and put his finger to his lips. I asked about the weather outside. Shook his head.

  Asked how often I would get to have a shower. Shook his head, more vigorously. Then I got an idea and asked him if he liked his job. He shook his head just as hard as before, and even made a grimace when he put his finger to his lips, and almost managed to look fierce. But I don’t think he had really listened to the question.

  Wordlessly he pulled out an old pair of hand-operated barbers’ clippers and ran them through my soft, week-old beard, reducing it to a stiff stubble and tearing out a good many hairs in the process since the clippers were dull. Wordlessly he motioned and shoved me into the shower.

  Even though the soap was the same foul-smelling soft stuff I had used a week before in the Lubyanka, the bath was welcome for the heat and because despite my strict regime of morning washes in my cell, the cold water with no soap still left me a bit ripe. When I looked at my naked body under the shower, I thought I looked a bit slimmer. I determined to keep up the dynamic tension exercises so that my upper body would not go to flab, and began under the shower to press my hands against each other.

  The soap was about one-third the size of a small wooden matchbox and I used most of it. Then when the guard was not looking I pocketed the rest to take back to my cell. I did not really plan to wash with it in cold water; it hardly dissolved in hot water. But I was developing pack rat instincts, automatically.

  Long before the evening porridge came I was belching long, sour belches of hunger. Then, when it came, I ate it slowly. I chewed every mouthful even though it was watery and thin. I mopped up with the last bit of bread I had saved from the morning meal.

  While I ate I found myself thinking about the failure of the embassy to come to my rescue. I felt sad and puzzled about it. Then sadness yielded to anger. How could they leave me in here for a whole week almost without raising holy hell! The more I thought about it, the madder I got.

  Then I thought, this isn’t doing me any good. I turned my thoughts to Mary Catto, to help me calm down.

  I thought about Mary a good deal as the evening came on. I felt buoyed up by her promise to wait for me. In a way I was excited and strengthened by the thought of the strange coincidence of my having ex acted that promise from her. I was filled with longing for her. I wondered for a while whether I should suppress those thoughts for the same reason I suppressed the food fantasies, but in the end I decided not to. The memories of Mary and the other girls in my life were a vital part of my connection with the world outside. They made me feel better, not worse, even though there was a strong rush of sadness sometimes. So by the time ten o’clock came and I was once more allowed to put my somewhat less numb brain to sleep, I—felt composed but lonely. Much as I detested Sidorov now, I almost looked forward to the morning, just to have someone to talk to.

  Looking back, it is strange that I had the instinct and the will to establish for myself so many disciplines and activities so early, since I was still convinced the whole thing was a mistake and that it would soon be rectified. Sidorov knew very well I was thinking this and he lost no opportunity to cast it in my face and to remind me that “we never make mistakes.” He told me that everyone always claims it’s a mistake, and, of course, he told me not to worry. From time to time his words would get to me and I would begin to think he might be right; perhaps that is one reason I undertook so seriously to develop survival strategies. Perhaps I had some intuitive sense of the real mess I was in. In addition, of course, I was young and I had read a great many novels and seen a great many movies and I had a young man’s natural tendency to try to make life imitate fiction.

  Furthermore, there was something about the atmosphere I had been living in that nourished a kind of heady, slightly unreal, playful and daring style of life, particularly if you were a relatively well-paid foreigner to whom all kinds of sought-after consumer goods were easily available and who also had the sense of invulnerability that goes with diplomatic status. At least I had thought I was invulnerable up to that point. I would try to explain this atmosphere to Sidorov when he endlessly harped on such things as my way of tearing around Moscow in embassy cars whenever I felt like it, and joining in the social life of the big guns from other embassies and so on. I was not the only one. I may have been a little more adventurous than some, but not more so than others. We all sensed this relief at the end of the war. Even ordinary Muscovites breathed a fresher air and looked forward to better days just around the corner, and for me and some other guys my age there was an intoxicating sense of confidence and optimism that certainly supported a romantic outlook. A good deal of this carried forward into prison, and thank God it did, because it was armor against the weapons that were being ranged against me and deployed with more frequency and more ferocity as time went by. Sidorov never admitted my point about the postwar mood in Moscow. I think he simply did not understand it.

  Sidorov’s language at night was violent and nasty. In the daytime he was easygoing and even chatty. Often he took time to read a novel or to write a report that had nothing to do with my case. He had a habit of twirling his pen nervously between his fingers, and in the afternoons he would lean back in his chair and twirl his pen and talk about the only real enthusiasm I ever detected in him: soccer and the Moscow Dynamos. The Dynamos were a secret-police-sponsored team, and Sidorov never missed their games. He knew their team members’ characteristics and specialties the way an American kid knows batting averages, and sometimes he would spend most of an afternoon on that subject.

  But at night he was always hostile and aggressive.

  I was never anything as simple as “podsledstvenny” (interrogatee) but at the very least “stupid podsledstvenny” and often “prostitute” or “son of a bitch” and all kinds of combinations. He spewed them out in harsh grunts and piercing yells. He sprayed a lot of saliva around the room as well.

  The gun would come out a lot at night. He would brandish it in a wild way, and then sit at his desk and sight me calmly, aiming right between my eyes, and cock the hammer and twitch his finger in a way that looked as though he might accidentally fire it at any time. The Tokarev does not have a hair trigger. In fact, it has a pretty heavy trigger, but I knew enough about guns and about accidents with guns for this behavior of Sidorov’s to make me pretty nervous. I never let him see that I was nervous. I just kept smiling. Sometimes I would even wink at him over the gun barrel, and this made him furious.

  Once, during this second week, I found myself unconscious on the floor being yelled at by Sidorov. I had no memory of going off to sleep. I mean that it was a complete surprise to hear myself being yelled at to wake up when I was not even in bed. One minute I was staring at Sidorov trying to keep my eyes open; the next minute I was on the floor being roused.

  In the cell I had to fight with every bit of willpower I had to keep awake. I tried a few times letting myself doze off while sitting upright on the bunk. If there was a decent guard on duty I might be left like that for a few minutes, perhaps even half an hour from time to time. But decent guards were few and far between. There was one young man with a Komsomol button. (Komsomol is a communist party youth organization.) He was the only guard who would ever chat with me, and that was evidence that he was new at the job. Most guards, when I tried to make them talk to me, simply answered, “Nye polozhna”—not permitted. In fact, nye polozhna was the single most often heard phrase throughout my entire time in prison. Sleep was nye polozhna, speech was nye polozhna, laughing was nye polozhna, anything human and simple you might
want was nye polozhna. It was a phrase that could be applied to life. It might almost have been the title for this book. It came to the point where I would ask a guard for something I knew he would not give me, a cigarette or something outrageous like that, so that I could enjoy saying nye polozhna before he did. Not to any of the regular bad guys on my wing, though, or I could count on extra buckets of water dumped on my floor next morning; The young Komsomol was by nature a compassionate and enthusiastic young man. Later, when I developed the technique that saved my life by allowing me to steal a total of up to two or three hours’ sleep every day and which involved a process of what I called “conditioning” the guards, this guy was so easily conditioned, because he was temperamentally sympathetic to my intentions, that he never bothered me at all. And when he first appeared in the wing he would sometimes let me sleep sitting up for several minutes at a time.

  Of course he had strict orders not to let me lie down except between ten at night and six in the morning, when I was not usually in the cell anyway, but even this rule he enforced in a manner that could be called kindly. He would open the slot quietly, not yelling or hissing in the sharp, harsh whisper many of the guards favored, but speaking in a quiet, gentle voice: “Prisoner, remember, I am not allowed to let you sleep. Sit up now.”

  Although I instinctively liked this guy, a man about my own age, I still had to kid him. It was part of my program of keeping a sense of being on top. Kid anyone who was susceptible. I said, “How do you like being in the Komsomol?”

  “Oh,” he said enthusiastically, “I like it a great deal. It’s fine.”

  “Are you an old Komsomol member?”

  “Well, as you can see, I am still very young but” (with evident pride) “I have already been in the Komsomol quite a few years!”

  “Well,” I said knowingly, “you’re in for it, then!” He stared at me, quite puzzled.

  “No, I mean it,” I said. “You’re in trouble.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Don’t worry!” I said, trying to sound very mysterious. “You’ll find out!”

  Actually I believed that he would be bitterly disillusioned, through his work as a guard, about the idealistic picture of the Soviet Union and its system that all those Komsomol kids were fed with. He was not around long enough for me to see if this happened to him. Maybe he did not stick out the job, I don’t know. He may well have been arrested for some anti-Soviet activity such as allowing a prisoner like me to sleep for a few minutes. It was not purely a joke when I told him he was in trouble.

  There was no room for compassion in the life of a guard.

  I had made it through the second week. I was muddle-headed and anxious by Saturday night, but I also experienced a sense of satisfaction at having resisted every attempt by Sidorov to get me to admit to the fiction that I was a spy, and a lot of satisfaction at keeping up my smile and refusing to let him see any crack in my armor.

  I sat on the edge of my bunk and steeled myself to keep awake until bedtime and the weekend respite at last. I read the poem, as I did most nights when I checked the calendar.

  Who enters here do not lose hope.

  “Don’t worry,” I whispered at the wall. “I won’t.” Then I checked the calendar, and added up the dates. Twelve days since my arrest. It was...

  It was Christmas Day.

  In my confusion and exhaustion I had missed Christmas Eve. It had gone right by me.

  And in my anger and my urgent work of keeping sane and surviving, I had scarcely given a thought to my mother, whose worried face now swam into my vision and engulfed me in sadness. She would have been expecting me for dinner. She would be pacing up and down wringing her hands, worried sick. My father would be saying, “It’s all right, dear. It’s all right. He probably had to go on a trip somewhere. We’ll hear from him tomorrow. I’ll give him a piece of my mind for not letting us know.”

  And then what would they do when tomorrow came and the tomorrow after that and still no word. I found the thought maddening. It made me tremble with fury at what seemed just then a worse affront to humanity than what was happening to me. I mean leaving those two innocent people frantic with worry. I had to get hold of myself. I had to tell myself firmly to cut out this fruitless worry. There was nothing I could do about it. Anyway, I still told myself, though by now I believed it a lot less, I’ll see them soon and tell them all about it.

  But I think when I finally settled into sleep my eyes were pretty damp.

  For the rest of the week I worked at shutting out the images of Christmas and New Year celebrations when they crept up on me. It was too painfully lonely. I found that I could manage pretty well, and the following week I sailed through New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day as if they did not exist as anything but marks on the wall.

  In the daytime periods in the cell I continued with my bread calendar, which went very well, and the attempt to make a needle, which eluded me for some time. When the calendar base-block I had made got good and hard, it was a bit gray and rough on the surface. So I took off my shoe and rubbed it with the sole until it began to look fairly smooth, and then polished it on my, blanket. I polished it every day.

  After a while it took on a gloss like polished wood. In the meantime I began to form the numbers. I fixed a short piece of match in the bottom of each one for a peg. I made two 1’s, two 2’s, and one of everything else, so there were twelve of these little figures to mold. I took my time and made a very careful and elegant job of each one. Any that did not turn out just right I ate.

  This simple structure gave me enormous pleasure. I never stopped working at it. Often, after several days, I would decide that the 6 or the 8—that was, the hardest one to make—had a certain imperfection, so I would eat it and start on a replacement.

  All this time the need for sleep was becoming more and more intense and the fear that I might crack for want of it was a threat in itself. The busywork with the calendar and my still fumbling and unsuccessful attempts at a needle became desperate attempts to stay awake and to stay sane. Sidorov, at my request, had explained that the hard punishment cells were below ground, unheated even in the depths of winter, had no windows and no bed, and that the whole day’s food ration was what I was now getting for breakfast and nothing more. So I was determined not to do anything that would land me in conditions that I certainly could not stand up under. That is why I fought sleep so determinedly, and largely successfully, through a second week: fear of that remote, hideous, destroying box in the cellars of this monstrous K-shaped prison for political prisoners—a dungeon worse than anything out of my novels and movies.

  Not that my own cell was in any way comfortable. In recounting what happened to me in Lefortovo, because I had a certain measure of success in outwitting Sidorov and outwitting the guards and even outwitting insanity and death, I am often afraid that people will forget what a hell I was living. I see them smiling and nodding cheerfully when I tell about making the calendar, for instance. That was, I guess, a reasonably ingenious thing to do and it gave me pleasure. So I recall it readily enough and tell about it with relish. But this was something that was done in a cell purposely designed to create a waking nightmare for its occupant. It was even called a “psychic cell” and Sidorov made no bones about the fact that it was intended to wear down my morale, because that was his purpose. “You won’t last six months at the outside,” he often said. “Nobody does, so you might as well start confessing now.”

  “I have nothing to confess.” Etc.

  Cell 111. The psychic cell. The black paint was neither flat, which might have had a velvety warmth to it, nor glossy, which might have had a few highlights in it, but just a hard black. The bed was black. The floor was black. The bulb over the door, which when I was allowed to sleep I had to face, was not bright enough to illuminate this black space but bright enough to be an annoyance when I faced it. I considered it one of the components of hell—never off to give you a rest, never bright enough to cheer you.<
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  The cell was cold. There was no source of heat in it. When the outside temperature dropped below zero, frost would form on the floor of the cell. I was warm only when they took me to Sidorov. The cell was airless. It stank of all those prison smells. But most of all it was an environment of almost unrelieved gloom and there is no question that I found it terribly oppressive—so oppressive that for the first couple of weeks it was a relief to leave it, even for interrogation. And then—part of the hell—I would look forward to getting away from Sidorov’s taunting and badgering and lies and anger and saliva and into a quiet place, my cell, which almost as soon as I was back in it began to intimidate me all over again with its blackness and its chill.

  The peephole was a rhythmic torture at first; later I think I came to terms with it, like breathing. If they had learned to be irregular about it, spring it on me at odd times, let a whole day go by without it, then slam it open, go for an hour without it, then open it every thirty seconds, and so on, it might have driven me quite mad in a short time. But it was very reliable. It could be counted on, even if I did not like it much.

  Memory keeps you alive. I firmly believe this. It’s obvious you need food and water and air and shelter, of course. But lonely men have gone mad or killed themselves even when they were warm enough and had enough to eat. A man in my position—left in a dark room, not really enough food to keep his furnace going, cold, insulted and abused by the few people he does encounter, so that he doesn’t see them as people anymore—needs a good memory to keep in touch with human beings who are somewhere else.

  If I had not been able to remember faces, names, the plots of movies, words people had spoken to me, books I had read, restaurants I had eaten in, maps, the face of Europe, rooftops in Manhattan, I could never have survived the Moscow prisons, Labor camps, maybe. There you are with people. In Lefortovo prison, even though I spent nearly eighteen hours a day, six days a week, in interrogation with Colonel Sidorov, I was alone and, next to the desperate need for sleep, aloneness was the strongest sensation and the most feared enemy.