Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - The GULag Archipelago Volume 1 - An Experiment in Literary Investigation

On the other hand, was he a one hundred percent loyal Communist? Was he that same socially-conscious proletarian who had been brought up to replace Palchinsky and von Meek and their ilk? This was what was really surprising—he was most certainly not! We once discussed the whole course of the war with him, and I said that from the very first moment I had never had any doubts about our victory over the Germans. He looked at me sharply; he did not believe me. “Come on, what are you saying?” And then he took his head in his hands. “Oh, Sasha, Sasha, and I was convinced the Germans would win! That’s what did me in!” There you are! He was one of the “organizers of victory,” but each day he believed in the Germans’ success and awaited their inevitable arrival. Not because he loved them, but simply because he had so sober an insight into our economy (which I, of course, knew nothing about and therefore believed in).

All of us in the cell were deeply depressed, but none of us was so crushed as Z-v, none took his arrest as so profound a tragedy. He learned from us that he would get no more than a tenner, that during his years in camp he would, of course, be a work superintendent, and that he would not have to experience real suffering, as indeed he never did. But this did not comfort him in the least. He was too stricken by the collapse of such a glorious life. After all, it was his one and only life on earth, and no one else’s, which had interested him all his thirty-six years. And more than once, sitting on his cot in front of the table, propping his pudgy head on his short, pudgy arm, he would start to sing quietly, in a singsong voice and with lost, befogged eyes:

He could never get any further than that. At that point, he would break into explosive sobs. All that bursting strength which could not break through the walls that enclosed him he turned inward, toward self-pity.

And toward pity for his wife. Every tenth day (since oftener was not allowed) his wife, long since unloved, brought him rich and bountiful food parcels—the whitest of white bread, butter, red caviar, veal, sturgeon. He would give each of us a sandwich and a twist of tobacco and then bend down to the provisions he had set before himself, delighting in odors and colors that contrasted vividly with the bluish potatoes of the old underground revolutionary Fastenko. Then his tears would start to pour again, redoubled. He recalled out loud his wife’s tears, whole years of tears: some due to love notes she had found in his trousers, some to some woman’s underpants in his overcoat pocket, stuffed there hurriedly in his automobile and forgotten. And when he was thus torn by burning self-pity, his armor of evil energy fell away, and before us was a ruined and clearly a good person. I was astonished that he could sob so. The Estonian Arnold Susi, our cellmate with the gray bristles in his hair, explained it to me: “Cruelty is invariably accompanied by sentimentality. It is the law of complementaries. For example, in the case of the Germans, the combination is a national trait.”

Fastenko, on the other hand, was the most cheerful person in the cell, even though, in view of his age, he was the only one who could not count on surviving and returning to freedom. Flinging an arm around my shoulders, he would say:

Or else he taught me to sing this song from Tsarist hard-labor days:

And I believe this! May these pages help his faith come true!

The sixteen-hour days in our cell were short on outward events, but they were so interesting that I, for example, now find a mere sixteen minutes’ wait for a trolley bus much more boring. There were no events worthy of attention, and yet by evening I would sigh because once more there had not been enough time, once more the day had flown. The events were trivial, but for the first time in my life I learned to look at them through a magnifying glass.

The most difficult hours in the day were the first two. At the rattle of the key in the lock (for at the Lubyanka there were no “swill troughs,” [114] 13. Special large openings in the cell doors of many Russian prisons [known to the prisoners as “kormushki,” meaning “swill troughs” or “fodder bins”]. Their lids dropped down to make tiny tables. Conversations with the jailers were carried on through these openings, food was handed through, and prison papers were shoved through for the prisoners to sign. and it was necessary to unlock the door even to shout: “Time to get up!”), we jumped up without lingering, made our beds, and sat down on them feeling empty and helpless, with the electric light still burning. This enforced wakefulness from 6 a.m. on—at a time when the brain was still lazy from sleep, the whole world seemed repulsive and all of life wrecked, and there was not a gulp of air in the cell—was particularly ludicrous for those who had been under interrogation all night and had only just been able to get to sleep. But don’t try to steal extra sleep! If you should try to doze off, leaning slightly against the wall, or propped over the table as if studying the chessboard, or relaxing over a book lying conspicuously open on your knees, the key would sound a warning knock on the door, or, worse yet, the door with that rattling lock would suddenly open silently, since the Lubyanka jailers were specially trained to do just that, and like a spirit passing through a wall, the swift and silent shadow of the junior sergeant would take three steps into the cell, hook onto you as you slept, and maybe take you off to the punishment cell; or maybe they would take book privileges away from the whole cell or deprive everyone of their daily walk—a cruel, unjust punishment for all, and there were other punishments, too, in the black lines of the prison regulations. Read them! They hang in every cell. If, incidentally, you needed glasses to read, then you wouldn’t be reading books or the sacred regulations either during those two starving hours. Eyeglasses were taken away every night, and it was evidently still “dangerous” for you to have them during those two hours when no one brought anything to the cell, and no one came to it. No one asked about anything, and no one was summoned—the interrogators were still sleeping sweetly. And the prison administration was just opening its eyes, coming to. Only the vertukhai, the turnkeys, were active and energetic, opening the peephole cover once a minute for inspection. [115] 14. During my time this word “vertukhai” had already come into wide currency for the jailers. It was said to have originated with Ukrainian guards who were always ordering: “Stoi, ta ne vertukhais!” And yet it is also worth recalling the English word for jailer, “turnkey,” is “verti klyuch” in Russian. Perhaps a “vertukhai” here in Russia is also “one who turns the key.”

But one procedure was carried out during those two hours: the morning trip to the toilet. When the guard roused us, he made an important announcement. He designated the person from our cell who was to be entrusted with the responsibility of carrying out the latrine bucket. (In more isolated, ordinary prisons the prisoners had enough freedom of speech and self-government to decide this question themselves. But in the Chief Political Prison such an important event could not be left to chance.) So then you formed up in single file, hands behind your backs, and, at the head of the line, the responsible latrine-bucket-bearer carried chest high the two-gallon tin pail with a lid on it. When you reached your goal, you were locked in again, each having first been handed a small piece of paper, the size of two railway tickets. (At the Lubyanka this was not particularly interesting. The paper was blank and white. But there were enticing prisons where they gave you pages of books—and what reading that was! You could try to guess whence it came, read it over on both sides, digest the contents, evaluate the style—and when words had been cut in half that was particularly essential! You could trade with your comrades. In some places they handed out pages from the once progressive Granat Encyclopedia, and sometimes, it’s awful to say it, from the classics, and I don’t mean belles-lettres either. Visits to the toilet thus became a means of acquiring knowledge.) But there’s not that much to laugh at. We are dealing with that crude necessity which it is considered unsuitable to refer to in literature (although there, too, it has been said, with immortal adroitness: “Blessed is he who early in the morning…”). This allegedly natural start of the prison day set a trap for the prisoner that would grip him all day, a trap for his spirit—which was what hurt. Given the lack of physical activity in prison, and the meager food, and the muscular relaxation of sleep, a person was just not able to square accounts with nature immediately after rising. Then they quickly returned you to the cell and locked you up—until 6 p.m., or, in some prisons, until morning. At that point, you would start to get worried and worked up by the approach of the daytime interrogation period and the events of the day itself, and you would be loading yourself up with your bread ration and water and gruel, but no one was going to let you visit that glorious accommodation again, easy access to which free people are incapable of appreciating. This debilitating, banal need could make itself felt day after day shortly after the morning toilet trip and would then torment you the whole day long, oppress you, rob you of the inclination to talk, read, think, and even of any desire to eat the meager food.