An American in the Gulag

by Alexander Dolgun

  One morning Michael shot two birds with the shotgun. We rowed across the Dnieper River and climbed the far bank and threw the birds into the stream and took turns trying to hit them with the pistol. I could manage it, but Kovko couldn’t. He was envious of my skill, but not in a heavy way. He was always joking and always very easygoing. Suddenly, as we were popping away at those poor birds, I heard a noise in the woods behind us. I turned around and got a shock. There were four plainclothes cops with pistols pointing at us, more or less surrounding us. The one who approached us talked in a low, intense voice with a tone of authority.

  “Why are you shooting here? Don’t you know this is a forbidden zone? Who are you, anyway?” Then he noticed Michael’s breeches and the insignia on his shirt. “Excuse me, Comrade Major, would you be good enough to explain? You see, you are on the property of Secretary Khrushchev’s dacha, and no one is allowed here.”

  Michael produced his documents, always jovial, always easygoing. “Sure, sure, boys. Sorry. Didn’t realize where we were. Just having a little fun with my friend Alexander here, my wife’s brother. You boys are doing a good job, I’m sure,” and so on. Very impressive the way he handled them. They became quite friendly and put away their guns and we got out of there in a hurry, but not an undignified hurry.

  Kovko thought it was funny, but it took me a day or so to see the humor. After all, I had no authorization to be in the Ukraine and if they had ever asked for my papers it would have been pretty dramatic for a while.

  I had written myself some letters on embassy stationery introducing myself as a member of the embassy staff traveling on official matters, and would the Kiev stationmaster be good enough to issue Mr. Dolgun a ticket, etc., etc. I had no idea whether they would work. They would certainly not have worked in Moscow, but the farther you got from Moscow, I assumed, the sloppier and more lax things got. I explained my intentions to Michael when it came time to head back. He said I was not to worry at all, that he would fix everything up when we got to the station, and by that time I had relaxed enough to be sure that he would be as good as his word. In fact, he got us on a first-class coach reserved for officials only, with tablecloths and flowers on the table in the diner, excellent meals, and comfortable beds, so the trip back was a lot easier than the trip down, though not as exciting or dramatic. We had left Moscow on the tenth of July and on the sixteenth the travel restrictions were lifted, so we had nothing to worry about on the way back.

  We had had a marvelous time. The walks in the woods, the exciting brush with the guards at Khrushchev’s dacha, exploring love with Dina, lots of laughter and relaxed talk with Michael and Valentina. I remember that Michael admired my heavy silver I. D. bracelet with its thick chain and the engraving, Alexander M. Dolgun, American Embassy, Moscow. He had never seen an ornament like that anywhere and for some reason thought it was very special. I decided to have one made up for him and send it to him in Kiev. Sometimes he would get a bit drunk and tell me gloomy stories about transporting prisoners, which was, after all, a principal part of his responsibility. One time he had had to take charge of a line of barges moving prisoners down that same Dnieper River where we had been shooting birds and rowing boats. Eight or ten prisoners decided to escape and jumped into the river. The guards made no attempt to recapture the escapees, Michael said. They just machine-gunned them in the river and let the bodies float away. Two got to shore and were recaptured and shot.

  Sometimes Dina had gotten up early to go shooting with us, and she got to like the pistol. So when we got back to Moscow I borrowed a .38 with a long barrel and filed down the trigger so it was not too hard for her, and went into the woods on weekends and did some more shooting, trying to shoot the bottom Out of a wine bottle, for example, by firing through the mouth of it without touching the sides. Not that we ever achieved that kind of accuracy, even though I was a very good shot.

  Some nights I would go back and stay with Dina, and we continued to have a lot of fun together and it might have gone on for quite a long time, even though it was not deeply serious, at least for me.

  But one day I was walking in her street, Bolshaya Polyanka. I don’t remember why I was there. Anyway, I saw Dina ahead of me and decided for fun not to call out but just to walk up quietly behind her and take her arm and say “Be Quiet! MGB!” in a stem voice, to tease her. I figured I would do that just as she was entering her building, and I paced myself not to get too close until she had her head down fooling with the key. But she suddenly turned in the yard before her house and went into a school building. I followed her up the steps of the school building, and as I went in I saw Dina ahead of me, going into a room down the hall.

  There was an attendant by the door of the building and he asked me what I wanted. I said I was waiting for a friend, and I asked him what that office was down the hall. Oh, he said, that’s an MGB spetsotdel, one of the special briefing rooms where they hold informal meetings with their agents.

  I was furious. My first instinct was to wait outside and confront her when she came out. But I realized that I was mad enough to smash her and that would be no good. So I just turned on my heel and walked out of that yard and never went to see her again. She called the embassy quite often for a few days, but I never called her back.

  So of course I was pretty sure that this was the episode that Sidorov had in mind when he tried to link me with a particular military man. There were some inconsistencies though. He had never mentioned MGB, and he had never given the slightest indication that whatever he was after had taken place in the Ukraine. On the other hand, while he had mentioned several of my girls by name, he had never mentioned Dina.

  I sat in my cell and puzzled it over and it made me feel pretty uneasy because I felt I was going to lose, either way. That trip would be very hard to explain. The coincidence of turning up inside the boundaries of Secretary Khrushchev’s preserve just would not be believed. Michael Kovko would be in terrific trouble, if he was not already; unless, of course, he and Dina were in cahoots and they had both given me away. I decided that if I had to tell the story I would leave out the encounter with Khrushchev’s bodyguards, hoping that Sidorov did not know that part. Then I decided I would not tell the story at all unless I became convinced that he already knew it. I would have to undertake some fishing myself.

  I said, “Look, you know, I am really trying to remember. You think I’m trying to put you off, but I’m trying to remember if there was anything that happened with military officers that could give you this idea I was trying to recruit.” I said it in a way that left the question a bit open. Sidorov looked very interested. I felt he was taking the bait and that he sensed I might be about to give something away. I said, feeling pretty risky about it, “Can you tell me where it is these meetings are supposed to have taken place?” No bite. He said, “I think you’d better tell me that. I know, of course, but if you want to save, yourself trouble you will tell me everything very freely.”

  I tried to wait that out and see if he would tell me anything—anything at all—anything that would let me know if he had words like Kiev or Kovko running around in his mind. No luck.

  So then I thought I would try another gambit and try to fix the time. If there was any way of identifying the year and the month, I might be further ahead. I took a deep breath and said, “Now, I think you said we were talking about the summer of 1945,” just to throw him off the Kiev trail, if there was any such trail. He was completely casual about it, although he had not in fact mentioned any dates at all. But he must have thought he had, for he simply nodded agreement and waited. I waited. After a while Sidorov repeated, “Nineteen forty-five. That’s right.”

  We both waited. “Well?” Sidorov said.

  “Well,” I said, slowly, teasing him, because now I was perfectly relaxed: I would not have to tell him about going to Kiev in 1946. Maybe I had been unfair to Dina after all. Maybe she just went in to use the toilet, maybe the attendant who told me it was a spetsotdel was kidding, maybe...

>   “Well! Well????” Sidorov was getting impatient.

  Fine. I just shook my head slowly and said, in complete truth, “No. I am sorry. I am trying but I cannot recall anything from 1945. You know, I think you really have made a mistake this time.”

  It was midafternoon. Sidorov just slumped in his chair and looked disgusted. Then he got up and pressed a button on the panel behind him. When the door opened Sidorov said to the guard, “Watch this scummy prisoner closely. Don’t let him get up and don’t let him go to sleep. I am going out to have some tea.”

  Later that night he took it out on me, with rages and gun-waving and a renewed attack on my alleged relations with high-ranking military people. Clearly he was not going to give it up. I might be off the hook in connection with Michael Kovko, but there was something definite that he was aiming for. The more emphatically I denied his accusations and told him, honestly, that I was completely mystified by his line of questioning, the madder he got. I could feel the tension rising and rising. I figured it would be only a matter of days before it spilled over somehow, and I was not looking forward to that.

  Chapter 8

  Toward the end of the first month in Lefortovo things began [o get very bad. Except on the weekends, I was never able to steal more than at the most an hour of sleep every day, and looking back it seems that an hour is too much, it may have been no more than a few minutes some nights. Effectively it was the same as no sleep at all, and my mind began to go blank fairly frequently. The effort to keep counting my steps and converting them to kilometers and remember where I had stopped walking the day before was almost more than I could summon up. My eyes pained constantly, both burning and aching. Sudden bright light was an agony. In the singing periods, I would find myself drifting off into incoherent mutterings and then I would have to lecture myself very sharply to get back on the road. One day I became acutely terrified sitting or, my bunk staring at the wall. The wall had been painted and repainted to try to obliterate the scratches of earlier residents of the psychic cell. The traces of half-obscured scratchings combined with cracks running through the masonry made patterns that my mind naturally reshaped into concrete images, the way the interlaced lines in the patterned wallpaper used to turn into ships and animals and cars when I lay in bed as a child. One pattern had begun to fascinate me. If I stared long enough at a certain section of the wall I would begin to see the face of an old man emerge from the random scars and etchings. At first it was agreeable to look for this pattern and relax and wait for the old face to take shape in the half light. Later it began to look like an evil face, but I still looked for it sometimes out of a vague curiosity. What frightened me that day suddenly was that the face, as I stared at it, narrowed its eyes and curled back its lips in a fierce and menacing silent snarl. The hallucination was quite real. The intentions of this evil old creature were clear. He intended to hurt me somehow. But the fear that started my heart beating fast and sent me walking up and down the cell and counting like mad was not the same fear as in a nightmare, when you believe in the terrible things you dream and are in a real way pursued by them. My fear was that I was going out of my mind. I was enormously, morbidly afraid of going crazy.

  Sidorov had increased the intensity of his questioning at night. He had begun to suggest that I was particularly interested in certain Soviet naval officers. He told me that my association with a navy lieutenant at our own embassy, Bob Dreyer, a guy I often went out with, drinking and dancing and so on, was suspect because they had long had him marked as an intelligence agent. Not long before I was kidnapped, Dreyer had gotten into trouble over our stores warehouse. The MGB accused him, falsely, of peddling embassy stores on the black market. He was declared persona non grata and the embassy had been forced to ship him back to the United States.

  Sidorov would say, “We have indisputable evidence that you were engaged in espionage activities with Bob Dreyer. Why do you deny it?”

  My answer: “I deny it, that’s all.”

  All this futile dialogue was dutifully recorded on protocols, day after day, and brought across the room for me to read and sign. Sidorov was angry all the time at night. He was angry at each denial, angry at the changing signature, angry at my silences while I tried desperately to shut out my hunger and my confusion and my searing need for sleep by concentration on my arithmetic and my line across the map of western Russia.

  One morning when I stumbled into the cell, it was so cold I could see my breath. Now I had to increase the pace of my walking to keep warm, and since I was losing weight on the miserable rations, I had little fuel m my body to burn for warmth.

  But even with all these growing threats to my stamina and my mind, I still believed I would find some way to get some sleep and that, once found, it would keep me going in spite of everything they could hit me with.

  Sidorov had produced a collection of photographs, mostly of army and navy officers, Soviets, in uniform, and began to show them to me one after another during interrogation, demanding that I identify these unknown men and cursing me when I said I did not recognize any of them.

  Over and over again, the same photographs, street photographs taken surreptitiously, formal photographs in a studio, face after face of strangers. Over and over again, with the sense of violence coming nearer and nearer to the surface. “I’m giving you another chance. We know you know some of these men. Point out the ones you know! Those were taken in 1945. Why do you deny that you know some of these men!”

  My answer: “I deny it.” Sign the protocol.

  Sidorov would tell me, correctly, that I was very knowledgeable about Soviet ships and planes. He would quiz me about this: tonnages, armaments, and so on. I don’t know now whether it was foolish to answer him accurately, but I did. If agents in the embassy, and it became clear that in one case a charwoman, as well as many others, had reported on my reading and my conversations, then there was no point claiming I was ignorant in military and especially naval matters. They were a hobby with me and anyone who had been around the embassy would know about it. Sidorov claimed that the books I had taken from the embassy library—like Jane’s Fighting Ships and Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft and so on—marked me as a spy for sure and he would not believe me when I told him that in a free country you could buy such books in any bookstore. I told him that thousands of young kids in the States memorized the details of planes and ships just as others memorized batting averages and other baseball details, but he just accused me of lying to cover up my “demonstrated anti-Soviet activities.”

  And then, around three in the morning, he put photographs on my little table and yelled at me from across the room to keep turning them over until I was prepared to admit that there was someone in the collection I recognized. I sighed and put my head down and began to turn them over. I said, “It’s no use; we’ve done this over and over. I don’t recognize anyone. Not one!” I kept turning the photographs over dumbly, placing them face down after I had scanned them. I did not see him come at me until it was too late to throw up my hands or duck. His fist came in hard and caught me on the side of the face with enough force to spin me right out of my chair and onto the floor. I was dizzy with the shock of the blow. I lay as still as I could on the floor with my hands over my eyes and my head pounding. The blow was still reverberating inside my skull. Sidorov barked, “Liar! Liar! Liar!” He came and stood over me where I huddled in the corner. “Get up!” he screamed. “Get up and go through them again and again until you come to your senses and confess you know him!”

  “Who? Who?” I yelled back at him, still on the floor. “I never saw any of these men! None of them!”

  Suddenly I felt as if my right shin had been cracked open. I sat up and grabbed for it, almost screaming myself, when the toe of his hard high boot landed on the other shin. I felt sick and my stomach began to heave but there was nothing in it to bring up. I got to my hands and knees somehow. My eyes were blurred and red and I could vaguely see his feet scuffing. the floor beside me. I w
as afraid he was going to kick again. I knew I could never stand another blow on top of the first. I pushed myself up as hard as I could, breathing hard and fast to keep the tears back and to keep from yelling. “The photographs!” he screamed. And hardly able to see them at all, I bent over them again. I had begun to believe that there was someone here I should recognize. I knew, too, that his continual insistence that I knew someone in these pictures could lead me to believe it even if it was not so. I was determined not to be trapped like that. My hands were shaking with anger and pain, but I started going through the photographs as quickly as I could, identifying the few streets or buildings I recognized, and muttering, “I’ll try, I’ll try as hard as I can.” Sidorov paced the room. I bent my head hard over the pictures so he could not see my face. I worked at composing myself. Gradually I got my heartbeat slowed down and my breathing a good deal easier. I really peered closely at those pictures. I waited until Sidorov got tired of walking and sat down, and then I looked right in his eyes and smiled a big smile. I said, “Maybe you’ve got some better pictures?” His eyes went very narrow. I was taking the risk of another fist or a boot, but I knew that this was the precise moment when I had to show him he was not winning. He did not get up out of his chair. He did not yell. He just stared. I think there might have been a faint hint of admiration in that stare.

  Back in the frigid cell I rolled up my pants and looked at my shins. The left was angry-red and bruised. The right was cut open, and when I pulled up the long prison underwear, a bit of clotted blood was pulled off and a thin trickle of blood began to ooze. I washed it in cold water. It seemed a little before six. My head was pounding terribly. I was shivering and nauseated. I climbed under the blanket and willed that there should be time for sleep. For a while my pounding head kept me awake with a sensation of lights pulsing. Then I dropped off and slept for perhaps ten or twenty minutes before the slot opened and that squat, ugly hag yelled at me.