An American in the Gulag

by Alexander Dolgun

  More biographical research this night, although he seemed a little less interested now, and repeated himself a lot and seemed to be waiting for something. From time to time he left the room. Then finally after one of these exits he came back and said that was all for now, that I was being transferred to the Lefortovo military prison.

  Now, all through this period, despite the tiredness and the suppressed anger, I still felt a kind of excitement at being inside. I still felt that the climax was coming, and I still guessed it would be an offer to work for them. I maintained a cheerful exterior, and I always smiled at Sidorov when he asked me a question. From time to time, in the middle of asking about life in New York, the name of the ship we came over on, and all kinds of trivia like that, he would smile and say, “Listen. You must have thought it over by now. Don’t you want to tell me about your espionage work? Don’t you understand why you are here now?”

  I would shake my head with a sort of mock-bewildered smile, and he would say, “Oh, all right. We’ll get to it. I have to get all this stuff down anyway,” and go on with the personal background.

  The guard took me back to my cell. I lay down, and I think I dozed off, because there was a sort of shock when the guard unlocked again quite soon and told me to get up and come with him. When I stepped into the corridor, there were two guards waiting. They took me down in the elevator and along some strange corridors. Then we were in a kind of lobby to what must have been the main exit of the prison, and I saw a clock—just after three. I was given a bundle and told that it was the jacket and tie and so on that had been taken from me. Including my fine broad-brimmed fedora, which, I thought glumly, must be crushed out of shape in this parcel! I still was able to care about such things. Then they gave me the light topcoat I had been wearing when I was arrested and opened a side door and we stepped out into the cold night air.

  It felt refreshing and cleansing. In the yard there was a van with its back door open and a sort of ladder of steps reaching down to the surface of the yard. There was a light on top of the wall and I could see that there was a colored advertisement on the side of the van that read DRINK SOVIET CHAMPAGNE, with a picture of the bottle and some fancy artwork. I had often seen vans just like it in Moscow. What I had not noticed before was the two rows of little ventilators on the roof, six in all.

  These guards were pretty curt. One of them motioned me to go up the steps into the van, and I saw he had a revolver in his hand. The other guard climbed in ahead of me. There were six small doors flanking a very narrow central passageway—no more than a slot, really. The guard who got in ahead of me held one open and motioned me in. It was a solid box the size of a rabbit hutch. You could not sit down or stand up, just sort of hunker, with your knees near your chin. I hardly thought I could get in it at all, but I was shoved in and the door locked and then I heard the first guard get out and the second one get in, and then the back door slammed and the motor started up and the van lurched off.

  I could hear those sliding steel doors groan on their rails, then we moved forward again and I knew we were once more out in the streets of Moscow.

  It took, I think now, fifteen minutes. It seemed longer then because I was aching from the cramped position. A lot of my native cockiness was knocked out of me by the way I was hustled into this hutch like so much freight. I had to talk to myself again, to keep from losing control. “Easy, Alex, the last thing you need now is to get mad and bust a gut.” By the time the van stopped I had stopped steaming, but my back and legs hurt like hell. I heard someone get out of the front of the van, and I heard the cab door slam. Then, after a short wait, I heard the sound of huge iron gates swinging on their hinges, and the van started up again, lurching over a curb or up a sharp ramp.

  All this time I was hunched up in absolute darkness, jostled back and forth by the motion of the van. There was one small compensation: after only a day and a half in prison the clean night air that came in through the ventilators smelled wonderful.

  The van stopped again. I heard the back door open. Then the guard unlocked my rabbit hutch. The guard who had stayed inside was out of sight when I crawled out. They never let an armed guard very near a prisoner. It was still almost too dark to see, though my eyes were very sensitive after all this time in absolute darkness. The van was backed up against a door and I was led through a dim corridor to a sort of office where there was a man behind a counter.

  “Name?”

  “My name is Alexander Dolgun. I am an American “Prisoner, be quiet!” Prisoner!

  He had a file and I guess my photograph was in it. He looked in the file and scrutinized my face for a moment. Do they ever get a mismatch? I wondered. Do they ever make mistakes? Or is Sidorov right?

  I was given a spoon, a plate, a rolled-up mattress (very thin), a sheet, a musty old blanket, and a coarse pillow. Then I was taken around another corner and into another box like the one in Lubyanka, except that the floor was asphalt, the room felt dank, there was a smell I came to know as the prison smell: ammonia, damp, urine, dirty bodies, a touch of the smell of death.

  And then, within a very short time, I was taken out of the box and led to the cell that would be my home for the next ten months. As soon as my guard led me into the main body of the Lefortovo prison I stopped for a moment in astonishment, looking up. “Come on,” the guard hissed, “keep moving” He clanked his key on his belt—no tongue-clucking here—and as we walked I gazed upward into an immense space and had the uncanny impression that I had stepped into the bowels of a great steel ship. On both sides the wall rose up past several stories, each lined with a narrow metal catwalk. In the space between the opposing catwalks, at every level, was a coarse wire mesh stretching across the entire space. Each catwalk, which was just over a meter in width, had a metal handrail on the outside, and if anyone jumped or fell over the handrail he would immediately land unharmed on the wire mesh.

  We went around a corner and along a wall. It was painted black but when I put my hand out to feel along it I found it was made of solid stone. Looking up I felt that the huge hall went up to a dizzy height, the successive stories fading so that I could never be sure how many there were or whether in fact I could see any roof, but just an indistinct impression of something vast receding upward. We came to a staircase going up into this cavernous space. The stairs themselves gave me a cold feeling in my arms and back, like a chill in the air, because they were worn down in little hollows, as if millions and millions of feet had passed over them, erasing the stone.

  Lefortovo is shaped like a capital letter K—one straight long section, and two wings radiating southeast and southwest from its middle point. The guards took me up these worn stone stairs to the third level, and then, from the midpoint, along to the end of one of the diagonals.

  Although the building had a morbid mass to it, a kind of weight that was nearly tangible in the air, I was not so much afraid as immensely curious, with a kind of giddy apprehension. My feelings were not altogether unpleasant. I was increasingly aware that this whole business was not going to be over and done with in the wink of an eye, but then I thought in terms of forty-eight hours, or seventy-two hours, or maybe a week at the most. Now that the initial shock and humiliation had worn off, I still looked on it as a bizarre adventure. It was something like going into a horror movie when you were a young kid, and you knew you might just get more scared than you could handle, but you were propelled by bravado and curiosity. So I stumbled along with my bundles, gawking upward at the vault above or down at the hollowed stone steps or out at the network stretching between the catwalks, a bit giddy from the height and the dark pit below me, thinking that this was a terrific movie and I was in it, until we came to the end of the wing, the end of the padded catwalk, and two heavy steel bars were pulled back on a cell door and I was motioned in. I noticed the number on the door as I stepped into the dark room. Cell 111. At first I welcomed the darkness. After the harsh light in the Lubyanka cell, this seemed restful. I thought it was nice that t
hey turned the lights down at night here. But then it was a bit mystifying to discover that the walls were painted black, and the floor was black, and the bed was a black iron cot, and the light in the screened recess over the door was a little twenty-five-watt bulb which did not look as if it would ever get much brighter.

  Unlike the Lubyanka cell, this one had a sink and faucet, with a drain going into a toilet that was just a cast-iron inverted cone with a lid. When I took the lid off, the stench was pretty bad and I put it back on immediately.

  Usually when you are dog-tired, and I was dog-tired, the physical touch of bedding makes you overpoweringly sleepy. But this thin, hard mattress and threadbare sheet and blanket smelled terrible. Tired as I was, I knew I was not going to sleep easily or soon. I recalled prisoner stories from the hundreds of novels I had read and movies I had seen. Zenda. The Man in the Iron Mask. Les Misérables. I thought, Well, better start a calendar. Better keep in touch with the passage of time. I took my spoon and made a single scratch on the hard black paint on the wall opposite the bed. First day in Lefortovo. As I stared at it something caught my eye: scratches in the paint that looked like words, heavily painted over. I ducked to the left so that the meager light from over the door would edge these scratches better and make them more readable. I rubbed away some dust. More words emerged. I picked out a somber message from the past: a poem, an ironic welcome. A sign.

  Who enters here do not lose hope. Who leaves do not rejoice. Who has not been will be here yet. Who has been here will not forget.

  Well, I hadn’t lost hope yet, I thought. The poor bastard had a sense of humor, anyway. Probably did a long stretch, poor son of a bitch. Thank God I haven’t done anything. I’d sure hate to spend a long time in this dump!

  I put the bedding on the bed without unwrapping it. I looked carefully around the whole cell. It was about seven feet wide, I guessed, and twelve feet long, maybe not quite. Beside the door was the conical cast-iron toilet with the wooden lid. It could be flushed, more or less, by running water in the little sink which stood beside the toilet and drained into it. At the far end, if you stood on the bed you could reach up to the frame of a small window with heavy, wire-mesh-reinforced opaque glass. A tiny corner of light from outside showed on one side, but there seemed to be a metal hood on the exterior wall. Below the window was a small, fragile table. I was still standing on the bed when the slot clanged open and the guard hissed in a loud whisper, “Prisoner, if you do that just once more you will be taken to the hard punishment cells! Get down on your bed. And if you cover yourself, keep your hands outside the blanket where I can see them. Do not stand on the bed and do not go near the window!”

  I was boiling with resentment. I tried to protest that I was only going to be here for a few more hours anyway, and I didn’t know what the hard punishment cells were so that didn’t mean anything to me, and anything else I could think of, but he just told me to be quiet if I didn’t want real trouble and then clanged the slot shut again. I thought he must be a real son of a bitch after all the polite guards I had had in Lubyanka and the polite manners of Sidorov. Sidorov did not seem such a bad guy, I thought, in the wake of this ugly bastard. Maybe in the morning we can have another talk about contacting the embassy. Maybe he’ll realize I had one last cigarette in my pocket. And I had about a dozen useful matches left. Something had made me hold onto the burned stubs of the others.

  I took out my cigarette and smelled it for a while and lit up. The peephole opened. I wondered if this petty-minded slob would complain about the smoking. The peephole closed. Then, about a minute later, it opened again. Then closed. I soon realized it was a rhythm, a quick peek once a minute. The smoke was relaxing me. I thought, Let the bastard look. I went to the toilet and took off the lid and had a satisfying leak. I looked forward to the morning, to getting something done. I thought, Someday I’m going to write about that fantastic ship-like structure out there. What a movie it would make, if only I had a story to put in it.

  I felt sleep stealing over me and was very grateful for it. The cell was cool compared to Lubyanka. I pulled the blanket up to my neck, and remembered what the guard said about my hands, and then I drifted off.

  “PODYOM!” There was a terrific bang on the steel door. “Podyom!” Get up! It felt as though I had been asleep ten seconds. The first sleep in over forty hours. In reality it had been, I suppose, an hour and a half. They wake you at six in Lefortovo. I could hardly believe it. I pulled the blanket up over my face and mentally said to hell with it. The next thing I knew the door had burst open with an awful clang and a hard-eyed man had ripped off the blanket.

  “The prisoner will rise when he is told to rise. Hard punishment cells if you do not rise immediately. Now, this is your first day here so I will let it go this time, but I will not let it go next time. Podyom!”

  Curiously, he did not touch me. I rose.

  I was quite vague in the head and blurry-eyed and heavy-chested. I went to the sink and splashed water on my face. Suddenly for the first time since they took me, I felt hungry. I remembered the smell of the small, one-pound loaf in Lubyanka and actually found myself looking forward to its arrival. Up and down the corridor I could hear doors clanging and bars and bolts being slid and shot home again. Soon the door opened and the hard-eyed man handed in a bucket half-full of cold water and a small gray rag.

  “Wash the floor,” was all he said.

  “Jesus,” I muttered to myself, “one goddamn humiliation after another. I better get to Sidorov pretty fast.” I was beginning to think of Sidorov as a friend. “He’ll stop this kind of bullshit,” I said out loud.

  The slot banged open. The hard-eyed man said, “Prisoners you are not allowed to speak in the cell. Wash the floor and make sure you dry it well!” He gave me a brief stare to see that I had got the message.

  I poured a little water on the asphalt and worked away at it and got it pretty well mopped up. Then I stood up in front of the peephole and when it opened I held up the pail and rag so that he could see I was finished. The door opened. He looked at the floor, grunted, took the pail, and closed the door again.

  And then, when breakfast came, I stopped being hungry, because the bread was a damp, coarse lump, sour-smelling and dirty brown. The sugar was sprinkled on top of the bread. The bread was not a complete little loaf, as in Lubyanka, but a chunk cut from. a larger loaf. The end grain on the cut looked indescribably murky. But, I thought, I may be here for a while and I’ll need some strength to last me for a day or two, so I better eat some. I took a bite of the dank stuff, and then tore off another piece and put some of the sugar on before putting it in my mouth. The steaming cup on the shelf at the food slot looked like tea but had no flavor at all. Still, the warmth was welcome, because out from under the blanket the cell now seemed pretty cool.

  My head hurt a bit, and the piece of bread I ate made me feel sleepy again. I finished my tea and sat on the bunk and closed my eyes.

  The slot banged open.

  The guard said, “Prisoner, you are not allowed to sleep in the daytime. You are not allowed to close your eyes. You may sit on the bed if you want, but you must keep your eyes toward the door and keep them open. Please try to learn these things quickly or you will have a very hard time here in Lefortovo. You may walk in the cell or you may stand facing the door. But you must not lie down or sit anywhere but on the bunk facing the door. You understand?”

  I nodded wearily. I was losing enthusiasm for this game. Let’s get to Sidorov and get this stuff over with, I thought.

  When it was time to move my bowels I realized there was no toilet paper in the cell; so I knocked on the door and when the guard came I asked for some. He just shook his head. I repeated my request, making it clear I needed some now, but he just shook his head and closed the slot. So I learned how to wash myself after the toilet, in the Muslim fashion, with the left hand.

  In Lefortovo, when a prisoner is taken to interrogation, he is. led through a small anteroom to the building where
the interrogation rooms line the corridor. Here there is a large book like a ledger. Covering the ledger is a sheet of fairly heavy iron, smoothed with years of wear by hands and sleeves. It has a slit in it that is placed so that only the name of the prisoner signing in or out, and the interrogator’s name, can be seen; any other names are masked from view. There were two things I came to look forward to in the room of the iron book. One was to see the clock. I always knew exactly what time I was taken to interrogation and this gave me a sort of time-fix on the day. That little anchor would become more and more important as the days went heavily by and my sanity became more and more tenuous.

  The other thing to look forward to was signing my name. When I signed the protocols for Sidorov, using English script, I felt a little mischievous. I knew perfectly well how to sign in the Russian script, I had done it for various official documents often enough. But I conceived the idea, as one way to keep things a bit off balance, of signing my name differently each day, thinking up a new style of handwriting, either in the Roman or the Cyrillic alphabet, and never giving them the same signature twice. Then, I thought, if this ever does get serious and they make me sign some goofy thing that incriminates me, I’ll demand that they compare it with my real signature and then I can claim it wasn’t me. However juvenile this was as an idea, it was one of the first of many small techniques I devised for keeping a sort of sense of having the upper hand, and each of these things was important as part of my whole posture, even though in itself it might seem insignificant.

  I got satisfaction out of anything that did not fit their needs and expectations.

  Smiling at the interrogator all the time, being excessively polite, the changing signatures: these helped me retain a sense of being in charge of myself and human and not just a piece of meat these guys were shoving around.

  So, hands behind the back, look straight ahead, parade along the catwalk sneaking glances up and down through the steel mesh. Downstairs to the first level, treading the cupped hollows in the stone. Across the main wing (the straight line of the K) and out through a wooden corridor to another building, which you entered through the room of the iron book. Sign a flamboyant signature, feeling good. There will be news from the embassy this morning, I know it.