by Victor Serge
The line of men turns around the courtyard like a string of sausages to a military beat. We walk in silence, Indian file, a yard apart, describing symmetrical arabesques around the dreary grass plots. The resulting pattern approximates the shape of a cross. At each branch of the cross a guard is stationed to keep the men in line, silent, and in step. Seen from the infirmary windows, there is no stranger spectacle than that of men strung out like beads on a rosary, in never ending circles, without ever advancing, in a senseless ritual. The guards call out the cadences in turn, aloud: “One, two—one, two …” When “Duck Feet,” a nice plump old fellow with a waddling gait and an old woman’s voice, drops the count, then “Spike Chin,” his képi crushed down over one ear, his jaws huge and snarling, explodes into hoarse shouts at the other end of the court: “A-one, a-twooo, a-one, a-twooo.” He harasses our wretched line, snapping at our heels. “In step, Dubeux!” Dubeux, aghast, is decidedly out of step. “In step, I tell you, goddamn it!” The strings holding up this green-faced puppet seem to snap all at once; if he doesn’t fall down right there, like a limp rag, it is because he is carried on by the line, one hundred men in front, one hundred men (the same) behind, inseparable. “Two—hep!—hep!” The cadence is picked up, farther on, by the guttural voice of “The lap,” not a bad fellow, who always seems to be making fun of our grotesque round.
Everybody has his own way of marching: brisk, straggling, listless, or heavy. There is an infinite variety of shapes under the uniform dress. Heads erect, caps smart, or shoulders rounded, elbows flapping; the awkward gait of city urchins, the rhythmic tread of old tramps, the haughty stiffness of Meslier, who seems to wear invisible epaulettes on his threadbare denim. March, men! March. One, two. One, two. There is no end to the round. There is no end to time. There is no end to crime. There is no end to misery. There is no end to the reign of the swine.
I have made my way at least two thousand four hundred times through that eternal round which has continued, starting and stopping, for something like a half century. Slowly, one by one, the beads of that endless human chain are replaced, through the process of life and death. Yet the infernal round is one of the things of this earth upon which time has the least effect. Perhaps Western man must give birth to an entirely new destiny before this absurd circle can be broken.
Gilles, who took liberties in jail, would sometimes wait for me as the line went around in order to whisper me the news. He appeared suddenly before me one morning at the corner of one of the branches of the moving cross formed by our steps: extremely tall, his face a gray mask, hard bitterness in his clenched teeth. He raised his arm, slowly, to his neck, and pressed the edge of his hand against it for a moment. The hammering of wooden clogs exploded suddenly in my ears. On the next turn around, Gilles had his one hand half-hidden in his tunic: Three fingers, sharply outlined, were sticking out. Three. Three fallen heads. I answered “yes” with a blink of the eyes—something heads have been observed to do in sinister experiments. On the third turn around, Gilles was able to say a word:
“Bravely.”
One year later; the same time of day; the round continued. Gilles reappeared at the same spot with the same ashy mask:
“Jaurès …”
The round carried me on. Those barred windows. A flash of sunlight crowned the poplars with faint gold. The Spider dragged himself, leaning on his two canes, toward the urinary. One hundred and twenty seconds. The path of the human rosary brought me back toward the man whose lips were still sealed over their terrible secret,
“… assassinated,” continued Gilles.
TWENTY-TWO
Night
EVENING COMES, FOR EVEN THE LONGEST AND HEAVIEST HOURS EVENTUALLY plunge into eternity. The sensation of falling softly, slowly, into the amorphous gray depths of the void. Even suffering loses its sharpness, becoming as insensible as decay eating through bone. The occasional cry of despair or madness fades away into the gloom. Our round turns within a void. We have been falling through the void for years, turning in circles. Vertigo. Here is the evening at last: nausea.
The strands of human beads twine rhythmically through the courtyards. If it is summer, the sky is still bright over our heads, vast and calm; if winter, the stars—or the shadows—ignore us. Two long parallel strands meet at the doors of the dormitory cell block, wind up the iron stairs, and line up, bead by bead, before the cell doors. A guard hurries through the galleries counting the motionless puppets standing at attention.
The bolts of the cell door have groaned. Here I am, alone, suddenly still. Or is it only an illusion? The round goes on. The hours fall; our lives fall in a spiraling gyre through the gray abyss: nausea. I am alone in a numbered sepulcher. Third floor, Number 171. Three yards deep by two yards wide. A tiny barred window, hardly more than a slit: but I can see the sky. Chalky whiteness. The cot is monastic. A thin mattress over iron, coarse sheets, gray wool blanket, bedding folded every morning in regulation manner. Being up after the bell is prohibited. About seven minutes for walking in this narrow sepulcher. The sky is fading slowly this evening. My poplars are humming. And now the pale, emerald-tinted azure turns beautifully limpid. If, after so many horrible days, there was only this instant of contemplation, standing before this rectangle of infinitude, hung on the border of day and night, wouldn’t life be worth living? I would like to answer: No. Be tough! You’re kidding yourself. This moment of vain exaltation redeems nothing. But my whole being cries out the contrary. I can understand that the leper wants to live, his face eaten away, his hands rotting. I can understand that Lamblin, bald at thirty, with his poor, red, albino rabbit’s eyes, Lamblin, condemned for life, marching through the round for the past fifteen years without the slightest hope, wants to live, even like this. I can understand that Fla-Fla, the idiot, who shakes with hysterical laughter every thirty seconds (“She is there, there, there,” he says, with an obscene gesture, when you ask him about his laughter), that even Fla-Fla, if he suddenly understood what death is, that everything will be over, would cry out in terror, because he wants to live, to live, even he. I can understand that they are right: From the depths of their misery, they justify me, as much as the incredible delicacy of the June sky. I am not a coward. One must live. Be tough! Brace up under your burden …
Every day at the same moment, waiting in front of my cell door for the end of evening roll call, the same thought draws me slightly forward toward the railing of the third-floor gallery. One leap, a few rapid movements—one second—a fall of perhaps a tenth of a second: about forty feet, a thud, a sharp red pain—skull smashing on the tile floor— perhaps a dull black pain—bones cracking—and the round would cease, time would be vanquished. Giddy temptation.
You can read for a few moments in your cell. You can stare at your secret portrait, copied in pencil by Fuller, hidden under your shirt for fear of the evening search. You can, between two rounds of the guards, ears straining, smoke a cigarette, slowly, the better to savor it and to make sure the odor is dispersed. You can, stretched out on your cot, unfold the shred of the Petit Parisien picked up by a man on the maintenance squad in the guard’s lavatory: “PEACE CONCLUDED BETWEEN TURKEY AND SERBIA.” So there was another war in the Balkans? You can open and read over a brifeton, a message scribbled by a comrade or friend, confidences, secrets …
Night falls. A lantern at the foot of the courtyard wall throws a pale patch of light, striated by the shadows of the bars, on the ceiling of my cell. Closer, an electric bulb hanging somewhere in the galleries makes a stranger, sharper pattern, superimposed on the first. The cool freshness of solitude; a fresh bath of calm; slowly, I am cleansed of the day’s dust, ashes, and mud. How vast the night is! The purity of space comes through the window in great waves and bathes my brow. Faraway train whistles. Gleaming fails, signal lights, stations, a peaceful provincial square in the evening, the lights of a café, a couple embracing on the doorstep of an old house. Man and woman … A cry ascending into the night, nearby: “Sentinel, how, goes the
watch?” The sudden denseness of a heavy drop of silence. The echo, farther off: “Sentinel, how goes the watch?” A drop of silence, an echo.
I think of power. I extend my free hands into the aerial night. Am I not unbelievably free? Everything has been taken from me. I am chained to the Mill. All that remains to me is to end my life, if I want, by a leap over the railing. I can do it if I wish. It is within my power. No one could stop me.
The world I carry within me has a crystal sphere as its symbol: fullness, perfection. I am free because nothing more can be done to me. Chained to the wall by a circle of iron, I will know how to close my eyes, without a whimper. Let necessity run its course; I am all assent. I have divided the world into two parts: chains, things—and my very flesh, which is a thing—are in your power. The crystal sphere, my will, my lucidity, my freedom are irrevocably mine.
I think of the mystery of time’s passage. There are minutes and hours which have no end: the eternity of the instant. There are many empty hours: the vacuity of time. There are endless days; and weeks which pass without leaving the least memory behind them, as if they had never been. I cannot distinguish the years that are behind me. Time passes within us. Our actions fill it. It is a river: steep banks, a straight path, colorless waves. The void is its source, and it flows into the void. We, who build our cities on its banks, are the ones who raise dikes against it, who color its waves with the beacons upraised in our hands, or with our blood. Time could not exist outside of my thought. It is whatever I make it. The instant which I fill with light is priceless, like a ray of light from a star which shines for eternity through the space it illuminates. The empty hours and days which I yield to dead things have no more existence than shadows … My very dream is the surest reality.
Stretched out on my cot, like a dead man in his shroud (I even like to cross my hands over my chest, like a dead man), eyes open under the pale flickers of the ceiling, I rediscover, I invent, under the crushing weight of the gray stones of the jail, the beliefs which were the refuge and the greatness of enslaved peoples for thousands of years.
The night grows deeper: My thought begins to falter. Notice how the inner flame flickers. Here, on the edge of sleep, comes the poisoned moment. A familiar obsession begins to filter through your veins. You can feel it in all your limbs. Memory again becomes a torture. Is it the city, with all its intersections brightly lit at this hour? Your home bathed in the golden circle of a lamp? the sharp scent of the earth after rain? an innocent, smiling child threatened by the unknown? a woman you desire uncontrollably? Those who have love driven into their hearts pay dearly for it, writhing on their mattresses as on a bed of thorns, ravaged by obsessive jealousy, devastated by the fear of death (for the lives of loved ones seem more fragile than a miracle in this place). Anguish. Lucidity. Madness. The flesh of six hundred males screams in the silence …
A sudden glow of light strikes me in the face. The guard passes, stealthy as a thief, a dark lantern in his hand. Then a wild scream tears through the night. The silence, like thick mire, engulfs it.
“Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!”
A strong voice now shouts this appeal; a feverish head beats rhythmically against the wall. Rapid steps clatter up the iron stairs. A door opens. Murmurs.
“Jesus!” repeats the desperate voice; “Jesus!”
Other voices, low-pitched, try to snuff out that voice.
Three giant shadows, three guards, surround Dillot, the seminarist, in his cell. He is in his nightshirt, his joined hands tremble, his forehead is burning.
“‘E’s loony,” says Cauliflower.
“Throw a blanket over his head,” whispers Ironsides. “Come on!”
The shadows grow larger around the man in the nightshirt, who finally notices them in his fever, and collapses, sobered by his fear, rolling in the dark blanket thrown over him like a sack. He struggles against it for a few seconds with the fury of a drowning man. His arm finds an opening and his voice, now strident, comes through, no longer calling the Son of Man, but men:
“Help! Murder! Help!”
“Will you shut up,” growls Ironsides.
A huge hand crashes down over the lunatic’s mouth, choking off his cries with a gag. The silence, like muddy water, swallows up this madman as they toss him, gagged, into a sack.
… I slept like a stone. Another day is dawning. I am ready. I shall wear down the Mill.
TWENTY-THREE
The Guards
THREE KINDS OF MEN INHABIT THE PRISON, MORE DISTANT THAN IF THEY LIVED on opposite sides of the ocean. There are the soldiers, sent over from the army post, who take care of outer security. They stand guard in the towers on the outside wall. The guards live inside with us. Many of them have homes and families. They go out to cafés. They wear a uniform with yellow trim which is only slightly different from that of a customs man or traffic cop. But they spend two thirds of their lives inside these walls. The irrevocable condemnation which weighs down the poor oppresses them more heavily than it does most of us. Inmates serve out their sentences, then they leave these walls. Guards don’t leave until they are ready to retire, at sixty, only to finish out their days in dismal, provincial wine stoops. On the back streets of little towns you find those empty cafés, still lighted by oil lamps, whose drab furnishings seem to reek of sordid resentments and stale quarrels. That is where Cauliflower, with his bovine brow, Spike Chin, with his copper complexion, Ironsides, with his strangler’s grip, and Latruffe; pale and flabby, jangling his cupboard keys in his pudgy hands as he now jangles those of the cell block, will finish out their days; playing pinochle. Seeing these old men holding their greasy cards, a chance observer would feel strangely chilled, as if a shadow, ready to snatch him, had suddenly come between him and life; for the old hands of the “screws” continue to play out the same absurd round on the patch of green felt, under the sign of the queen of spades.
Guards fresh out of the barracks start in at eight hundred francs a year. For thirty-five years, from the ages of twenty-five to sixty, they spend twelve hours a day in jail, under the strictest discipline, forbidden to smoke, to talk to the inmates, to talk unnecessarily among themselves, to sit down or to read on duty, while they themselves are kept under watch by the sergeants and are ready, in any case, to denounce each other for the slightest infraction of the rules.
The uniformed man guards his flock of inmates. The same silence weighs down on him; but we are a crowd, our glances are full of understanding, and the guard is alone, surrounded by false or elusive glances, watched by the whole workshop. Are his hours any less heavy than ours? We suffer for years; he suffers by the day; and in the evening he goes out under the poplars toward his supper, his wine, his newspaper, his wife. Several have the bloated faces of alcoholics. Others, yellow-skinned, have liver and intestinal diseases brought back from the colonies. Some are potbellied: peasants living in idleness on potatoes and sour wine; doubtless they find their life a soft one because their hands, destined for rough work on the soil, are idle.
The guards are no better and no worse than the men they guard. We know them all. We know that Tartarin’s sad gaze is sincere; he’s a nice old fellow who doesn’t bother anybody. We know that the elegant Marseillais has syphilis and that he nearly turned bad, having been in trouble as a kid; that’s why he is still a “regular guy.” We know that Reseda, also known as Flowerpot, a big awkward fellow with a red nose, has a good heart and drinks because his wife puts horns on him. But the man who called him “cuckold” was put in his place by Richardeau: “Don’t be a jerk! Can’t you see that man isn’t happy? And I’ll bet you’re more of a cuckold than he is!” We know that Duck Feet, who wears the medal of the Senegalese campaign, is a bit of a nut, friendly but sometimes nasty, and has trouble making ends meet because of his large family. We like Old Gramps, rickety and all white, whose wizened face reminds us of the dead-end kid he used to be. We like him because he once told us:
“Go on, stop complaining. You’ll get out of here. Me, I’
ve spent my whole life in this joint: thirty-four years. Twelve more months to retirement. I wouldn’t give two pins for the life I’ve led, you know. And what am I worth now, tell me?”
Not much, it’s true. Gramps doesn’t care about his job and lets us talk; we watch out so he doesn’t get caught. “No point getting him chewed out just at the end!”
There are probably more bad “screws” (“gaffs” in French, from the obsolete slang verb “gaffer”: to see) than good ones. Always on their toes, they have the hunter’s instinct. In the workshop, they unexpectedly turn on their heels, throwing the prisoners off their guard, to pounce on a whispered conversation behind the type cases. They notice the thin, white edge of a scribbled note stuffed into an open book, sniff out the vaguest trace of tobacco in the clothes of a man being searched. Every morning they send a whole stack of reports to the Warden. The other guards, if only to avoid being cited for negligence or incompetence, are thus forced to write up a certain number of infractions. They simply pick out a few unfamiliar faces for punishment.
