You might have still other rights, but the duty officer would keep quiet about them. And you wouldn’t be losing much, truth to tell, even if you didn’t find out about them.
The check-up came and went. And the day began. The interrogators were already arriving there somewhere. The turnkey would summon one of us with a great air of secrecy; he called out the first letter of the name only. Like this: “Whose name begins with ‘S’?” and: “Whose name begins with ‘F’?” Or perhaps: “Whose begins with ‘M’?—with ‘Am’?” And you yourself had to be quick-witted enough to recognize that it was you he wanted and offer yourself as a victim. This system was introduced to prevent mistakes on the jailer’s part. He might have called out a name in the wrong cell, and that way we might have found out who else was in prison. And yet, though cut off from the entire prison, we were not deprived of news from other cells. Because they tried to crowd in as many prisoners as possible, they shuffled them about from cell to cell, and every newcomer brought all his accumulated experience to his new cell. Thus it was that we, imprisoned on the fourth floor, knew all about the cellar cells, about the boxes on the first floor, about the darkness on the second floor, where the women were all kept, about the split-level arrangement of the fifth, and about the biggest cell of all on the fifth floor—No. 111. Before my time, the children’s writer Bondarin had been a prisoner in our cell, and before that he had been on the women’s floor with some Polish correspondent or other, who had previously been a cellmate of Field Marshal von Paulus—and that was how we learned all the details about von Paulus.
The period for being summoned to interrogation passed. And for those left in the cell a long, pleasant day stretched ahead, lightened by opportunities and not overly darkened by duties. Duties could include sterilizing the cots with a blow torch twice a month. (At the Lubyanka, matches were categorically forbidden to prisoners; to get a light for a cigarette we had to signal patiently with a finger when the peephole was opened, thus asking the jailer for a light. But blow torches were entrusted to us without hesitation.) And once a week we might be called into the corridor to have our faces clipped with a dull clipper—allegedly a right but strongly resembling a duty. And one might be assigned the duty of cleaning the parquet floor in the cell. (Z—v always avoided this work because it was beneath his dignity, like any other work, in fact.) We got out of breath quickly because we were underfed; otherwise we would have considered this duty a privilege. It was such gay, lively work—pushing the brush forward with one’s bare foot, torso pulled back, and then turn about; forward-back, forward-back, and forget all your grief! Shiny as a mirror! A Potemkin prison!
Besides, we didn’t have to go on being overcrowded in our old Cell 67 any longer. In the middle of March they added a sixth prisoner to our number, and since here in the Lubyanka they did not fill all the cells with board bunks, nor make you sleep on the floor, they transferred all of us into a beauty of a cell—No. 53. (I would advise anyone who has not yet been in it to pay it a visit.) This was not a cell. It was a palace chamber set aside as a sleeping apartment for distinguished travelers! The Rossiya Insurance Company, without a thought for economy, had raised the height of the ceiling in this wing to sixteen and a half feet.18 (Oh, what four-story bunks the chief of counterintelligence at the front would have slapped in here. And he could have gotten one hundred people in, results guaranteed.) And the window! It was such an enormous window that standing on its sill the jailer could hardly reach the “fortochka,” that hinged ventilation pane. One section of this window alone would have made a fine whole window in an ordinary house. Only the riveted steel sheets of the muzzle closing off four-fifths of it reminded us that we were not in a palace after all.
Nonetheless, on clear days, above this muzzle, from the wall of the Lubyanka courtyard, from some windowpane or other on the sixth or seventh floor, we now and then got a pale reflection of a ray of sunlight. To us it was a real ray of sunlight—a living, dear being! We followed with affection its climb up the wall. And every step it made was filled with meaning, presaging the time of our daily outing in the fresh air, counting off several half-hours before lunch. Then, just before lunch, it disappeared.
And our rights included being let out for a walk, reading books, telling one another about the past, listening and learning, arguing and being educated! And we would be rewarded by a lunch that included two courses! Too good to be true!
The walk was bad on the first three floors of the Lubyanka. The prisoners were let out into a damp, low-lying little courtyard—the bottom of a narrow well between the prison buildings. But the prisoners on the fourth and fifth floors, on the other hand, were taken to an eagle’s perch—on the roof of the fifth floor. It had a concrete floor; there were concrete walls three times the height of a man; we were accompanied by an unarmed jailer; on the watch tower was a sentinel with an automatic weapon. But the air was real and the sky was real! “Hands behind your back! Line up in pairs! No talking! No stopping!” Such were the commands, but they forgot to forbid us to throw back our heads. And, of course, we did just that. Here one could see not a reflected, not a secondhand Sun, but the real one! The real, eternally living Sun itself! Or its golden diffusion through the spring clouds.
Spring promises everyone happiness—and tenfold to the prisoner. Oh, April sky! It didn’t matter that I was in prison. Evidently, they were not going to shoot me. And in the end I would become wiser here. I would come to understand many things here, Heaven! I would correct my mistakes yet, O Heaven, not for them but for you, Heaven! I had come to understand those mistakes here, and I would correct them!
As if from a pit, from the far-off lower reaches, from Dzerzhinsky Square, the hoarse earthly singing of the automobile horns rose to us in a constant refrain. To those who were dashing along to the tune of those honkings, they seemed the trumpets of creation, but from here their insignificance was very clear.
The walk in the fresh air lasted only twenty minutes, but how much there was about it to concern oneself with; how much one had to accomplish while it lasted.
In the first place, it was very interesting to try to figure out the layout of the entire prison while they were taking you there and back, and to calculate where those tiny hanging courtyards were, so that at some later date, out in freedom, one could walk along the square and spot their location. We made many turns on the way there, and I invented the following system: Starting from the cell itself, I would count every turn to the right as plus one, and every turn to the left as minus one. And, no matter how quickly they made us turn, the idea was not to try to picture it hastily to oneself, but to count up the total. If, in addition, through some staircase window, you could catch a glimpse of the backs of the Lubyanka water nymphs, half-reclining against the pillared turret which hovered over the square itself, and you could remember the exact point in your count when this happened, then back in the cell you could orient yourself and figure out what your own window looked out on.
And during that outdoor walk you concentrated on breathing as much fresh air as possible.
There, too, alone beneath that bright heaven, you had to imagine your bright future life, sinless and without error.
There, too, was the best place of all to talk about the most dangerous subjects. It didn’t matter that conversation during the walk was forbidden. One simply had to know how to manage it. The compensation was that in all likelihood you could not be overheard either by a stoolie or by a microphone.
During these walks I tried to get into a pair with Susi. We talked together in the cell, but we liked to try talking about the main things here. We hadn’t come together quickly. It took some time. But he had already managed to tell me a great deal. I acquired a new capability from him: to accept patiently and purposefully things that had never had any place in my own plans and had, it seemed, no connection at all with the clearly outlined direction of my life. From childhood on, I had somehow known that my objective was the history of the Russian Revolution and that no
thing else concerned me. To understand the Revolution I had long since required nothing beyond Marxism. I cut myself off from everything else that came up and turned my back on it. And now fate brought me together with Susi. He breathed a completely different sort of air. And he would tell me passionately about his own interests, and these were Estonia and democracy. And although I had never expected to become interested in Estonia, much less bourgeois democracy, I nevertheless kept listening and listening to his loving stories of twenty free years in that modest, work-loving, small nation of big men whose ways were slow and set. I listened to the principles of the Estonian constitution, which had been borrowed from the best of European experience, and to how their hundred-member, one-house parliament had worked. And, though the why of it wasn’t clear, I began to like it all and store it all away in my experience.19 I listened willingly to their fatal history: the tiny Estonian anvil had, from way, way back, been caught between two hammers, the Teutons and the Slavs. Blows showered on it from East and West in turn; there was no end to it, and there still isn’t. And there was the well-known (totally unknown) story of how we Russians wanted to take them over in one fell swoop in 1918, but they refused to yield. And how, later on, Yudenich spoke contemptuously of their Finnish heritage, and we ourselves christened them “White Guard Bandits.” Then the Estonian gymnasium students enrolled as volunteers. We struck at Estonia again in 1940, and again in 1941, and again in 1944. Some of their sons were conscripted by the Russian Army, and others by the German Army, and still others ran off into the woods. The elderly Tallinn intellectuals discussed how they might break out of that iron ring, break away somehow, and live for themselves and by themselves. Their Premier might, possibly, have been Tief, and their Minister of Education, say, Susi. But neither Churchill nor Roosevelt cared about them in the least; but “Uncle Joe” did. And during the very first nights after the Soviet armies entered Tallinn, all these dreamers were seized in their Tallinn apartments. Fifteen of them were imprisoned in various cells of the Moscow Lubyanka, one in each, and were charged under Article 58-2 with the criminal desire for national self-determination.
Each time we returned to the cell from our walk was like being arrested again. Even in our very special cell the air seemed stifling after the outdoors. And it would have been good to have a snack afterward too. But it was best not to think about it—not at all. It was bad if one of the prisoners who received food parcels tactlessly spread out his treasures at the wrong time and began to eat. All right, we’ll develop self-control! It was bad, too, to be betrayed by the author of the book you were reading—if he began to drool over food in the greatest detail. Get away from me, Gogol! Get away from me, Chekhov, too! They both had too much food in their books. “He didn’t really feel like eating, but nevertheless he ate a helping of veal and drank some beer.” The son-of-a-bitch! It was better to read spiritual things! Dostoyevsky was the right kind of author for prisoners to read! Yet even in Dostoyevsky you could find that passage “The children went hungry. For several days they had seen nothing but bread and sausage.”
The Lubyanka library was the prison’s principal ornament. True, the librarian was repulsive—a blond spinster with a horsy build, who did everything possible to make herself ugly. Her face was so whitened that it looked like a doll’s immobile mask; her lips were purple; and her plucked eyebrows were black. (You might say that was her own business, but we would have enjoyed it more if she had been a charmer. However, perhaps the chief of the Lubyanka had already taken that into consideration?) But here was a wonder: once every ten days, when she came to take away our books, she listened to our requests for new ones! She heard us out in that same machinelike, inhuman Lubyanka manner, and it was impossible to judge whether she had heard the authors’ names or the titles, whether, indeed, she had heard our words at all. She would leave, and we would experience several hours of nervous but happy expectation. During those hours all the books we had returned were leafed through and checked. They were examined in case we had left pinpricks or dots underneath certain letters—for there was such a method of clandestine intramural communication—or we had underlined passages we liked with a fingernail. We were worried even though we were totally innocent. They might come to us and say that they had discovered pinpricks. They were always right, of course; and, as always, no proof was required. And on that basis we could be deprived of books for three months—if, indeed, they didn’t put the whole cell on a punishment-cell regime. It would be very sad to have to do without books during the best and brightest of our prison months, before we were tossed into the pit of camp. Indeed, we were not only afraid; we actually trembled, just as we had in youth after sending a love letter, while we waited for an answer. Will it come or not? And what will it say?
Then at last the books arrived and determined the pattern of the next ten days. They would decide whether we would chiefly concentrate on reading or, if they had brought us trash, be spending more time in conversation. They brought exactly as many books as there were people in the cell, this being the sort of calculation appropriate to a bread cutter and not a librarian: one book for one person, six books for six persons. The cells with the largest number of prisoners were the best off.
Sometimes the spinster would fill our orders miraculously. But even when she was careless about them, things could turn out interestingly. Because the library of the Big Lubyanka was unique. In all probability it had been assembled out of confiscated private libraries. The bibliophiles who had collected those books had already rendered up their souls to God. But the main thing was that while State Security had been busy censoring and emasculating all the libraries of the nation for decades, it forgot to dig in its own bosom. Here, in its very den, one could read Zamyatin, Pilnyak, Panteleimon Romanov, and any volume at all of the complete works of Merezhkovsky. (Some people wisecracked that they allowed us to read forbidden books because they already regarded us as dead. But I myself think that the Lubyanka librarians hadn’t the faintest concept of what they were giving us—they were simply lazy and ignorant.)
We used to read intensively during the hours before lunch. But it sometimes happened that a single phrase would get you going and drive you to pace from window to door, from door to window. And you would want to show somebody what you had read and explain what it implied, and then an argument would get started. It was a time for sharp arguments, as well!
I often argued with Yuri Y.
* * *
On that March morning when they led the five of us into palatial Cell 53, they had just added a sixth prisoner to our group.
He entered, it seemed, like a spirit, and his shoes made no noise against the floor. He entered and, not sure that he could stay on his feet, leaned against the door frame. The bulb had been turned off in the cell and the morning light was dim. However, the newcomer did not have his eyes wide open. He squinted, and he kept silent.
The cloth of his military field jacket and trousers did not identify him as coming from the Soviet, or the German, or the Polish, or the English Army. The structure of his face was elongated. There was very little Russian in it. And he was painfully thin. And not only very thin but very tall.
We spoke to him in Russian—and he kept silent. Susi addressed him in German—he still kept silent. Fastenko tried French and English—with the same result. Only gradually did a smile appear on his emaciated, yellow, half-dead face—the only such smile I had ever seen in my life.
“Pee-eeple,” he uttered weakly, as if he were coming out of a faint, or as if he had been waiting all night long to be executed. And he reached out his weak, emaciated hand. It held a small bundle tied up in a rag. Our stoolie understood instantly what was in it, threw himself on it, grabbed it, and opened it up on the table. There was half a pound of light tobacco. He had instantly managed to roll himself a cigarette four times the size of an ordinary one.
Thus, after three weeks’ confinement in a cellar box, Yuri Nikolayevich Y. made his appearance in our cell.
From the time of the 1929 incidents on the Chinese Eastern Railroad, the song had been sung throughout the land:
Its steel breast brushing aside our enemies,
The 27th stands on guard!
The chief of artillery of this 27th Infantry Division, formed back in the Civil War, was the Tsarist officer Nikolai Y. (I remembered the name because it was the name of one of the authors of our artillery textbook.) In a heated freight car that had been converted into living quarters, and always accompanied by his wife, this artillery officer had crossed and recrossed the Volga and the Urals, sometimes moving east and sometimes west. It was in this heated freight car that his son, Yuri, born in 1917, and twin brother, therefore, of the Revolution itself, spent his first years.
That was a long time ago. Since then his father had settled in Leningrad, in the Academy, and lived well and frequented high circles, and the son graduated from the officer candidate school. During the Finnish War, Yuri wanted desperately to fight for the Motherland, and friends of his father got him an appointment as an aide on an army staff. Yuri did not have to crawl on his stomach to destroy the Finns’ concrete artillery emplacements, nor get trapped and encircled on a scouting mission, nor freeze in the snow under sniper bullets—but his service was nevertheless rewarded, not with some ordinary decoration, but with the Order of the Red Banner, which fitted neatly on his field shirt. Thus he completed the Finnish War in full consciousness of its justice and his own part in it.
The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1 Page 25
