Gulag Voices (4 page)

I drank the hot colored water with the sugar in it and I drank a lot of cold water and urinated a lot. I felt my shins. They were exquisitely tender. When I washed and ran my fingers through my hair some more hair came out, a little tuft. Now, running my fingers over my scalp, I thought I could feel three tiny bald spots. That seemed a sign of serious physical deterioration and made my heart beat pretty fast, so I forced myself to sit on the bunk and stare at the peephole and lecture myself silently on calming down. I took long, measured breaths. Somehow, by a quarter to ten, when I signed in at the iron book,
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the pain in my head had gone down a good deal, but when I closed my eyes I could still see lights pulsing.

Sidorov came in late. He said “Good morning,” as if nothing had happened. “Are you ready to confess everything now?”

“I have nothing to confess.” I forced a smile at that hated face. “You may as well realize that I have nothing to confess and I never will. Then we could talk about something else or you could let me get some sleep!”

“We’ll see.”

A totally inconsequential day. Sidorov yawned a lot. That was hard on me. I yawned all the time and rubbed my eyes over and over. Almost routinely I fell on the floor, in a dead sleep. Sometimes I think Sidorov left me there long enough to get deep into my sleep before he called a guard to pour cold water on my neck. The shock of the water made my heart beat so hard I thought that I could hear it.

We got through the day. I was helped back to the cell because I stumbled so much. My vision was quite blurred. Strangely, I wanted to read. Words, for human contact. I looked for my books. They were gone. I knocked on the cell door. The woman had gone off duty and a reasonably decent guy opened the slot. “My books!” I mumbled in a piteous kind of voice. He must have thought I was crazy. He just shook his head and closed the slot. The books were never returned, and I never got another issue.

When I ate the cold soup, I immediately vomited. I drank some water and then carefully tried a few mouthfuls of bread saved from the morning. They stayed down. When porridge came I ate it with the greatest care, slowly. It stayed down.

I wanted to continue walking to America but I was too weak. I washed my face several times. I willed myself to sleep sitting up straight and probably caught a few minutes, but then I heard the slot open and the guard said firmly, “Ne polozheno.” Somehow I thought that was funny so I laughed a weak laugh at him and said, “I know, I know,” and waved him away. I fumbled with my calendar and tried to remember whether I had changed the date that morning. I remembered that I had not made the scratch for the day on the cumulative record, so I did that. Then I tried to add the days up and determine what day this was, to make sure the numbers were right on the bread calendar. But I kept forgetting the totals and gave it up.

Rubbing my head, I got another idea. It came out of nowhere. I felt the bare patches and looked at the hairs on my fingers and suddenly got some energy from a discovery that might save my mind. I knocked on the door again, and the moderately easygoing guard came back and looked in. I steadied my voice as well as I could and told him that I had a serious scalp condition and that if I did not see a doctor soon it could become really bad. I bent over and let him look at my patchwork scalp. He did not answer, but he went away and came back with the block supervisor, who also looked at my scalp. I could hear them confer outside. I remember being cheered, as I always was by the arrival of a new idea for surviving, all the way back to the interrogation room at ten o’clock that night. But the cheer did not last ten seconds inside the room.

Sidorov did not even wait for a denial. He waded into me with both fists, yelling at me that if I did not tell him everything he would kill me with his bare hands.

He sent me flailing across the room trying to hold my balance, which was not very good to begin with. I hit the wall hard and went down on my knees. I thought, I must protect my shins! I must protect my shins! Sidorov picked me up by the shoulders and dragged me to my chair, screaming obscenities. He dumped me in the chair and slapped my cheeks hard, yelling at me to sit up straight. I held my eyes closed against the shattering pain of the lights in the room. He slapped me again and yelled at me to open my eyes. I tried to force a smile, but my lips felt numb where his fist had caught me. I wiped my mouth, and there was a trail of blood on the back of my hand. Sidorov stood over me with his face close to mine.

“Are you going to identify the man?” he said, with a sudden quiet in his voice.

I did not trust my voice. I just shook my head and mouthed the words, “I can’t.”

The shock when his boot hit my shin on top of the first bruise made me gasp. The next kick made me yell out loud. “Please! Please! How can I tell you names I don’t know! Please! I’ll tell you any name! Boris, Andrei, I don’t know. Anything, only please don’t kick again!”

The fist lashed out again and my consciousness just swam away. I have a vague memory of someone fumbling with a stethoscope at my chest, and fingers peeling back my burning eyelids. Then I know I was dragged down the hall and across to the cell block by two guards holding me under the arms. I would come to and pass out as they dragged me up the stairs. They dumped me on the floor of my cell. I smelled vomit and then realized it was on the front of my shirt. I felt parched and nauseated at the same time. I managed to get to my knees, although the blinding blows inside my skull had sent my balance all off and the movement made me dizzy. I turned on the tap and let some water run down my cheeks and swallowed a little of it. My stomach heaved and it came back up.

My soaked shirt chilled my upper body. I began to shiver terribly. The asphalt floor was terribly cold, but every time I tried to crawl to the bed I felt dizzy and sick.

For a long time I lay shivering on that floor. Then a strange thing happened. The pain receded. I was perfectly conscious. I was standing in the corner of the cell looking down at a shivering, vomit-covered wreck in the corner by the reeking toilet. There was blood on his face and his lip was swollen. There were bare pink patches on his scalp. He moaned with every breath, and from time to time his body arched and his stomach heaved a dry heave. And I thought, “That poor son of a bitch! Look how he suffers! But he doesn’t cry. He won’t give them
that
satisfaction.”

I quite clearly stood outside myself and my suffering. It is my clearest recollection of that pulsing and blinding and confused and agony-filled night. For a while I had clarity and peace. I watched my own body suffer. And when the suffering subsided a little and the moans stopped and the eyes opened and seemed to focus, I got back in the body and dragged myself to the bed and climbed in and blessed the warmth of the blanket, and left my hands outside, and slept without moving.

When “
Podyom
”
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was shouted, I went to sit up, but my head was pounding again and I had to go very slowly. When they saw that I could scarcely walk, they let the exercise period go by. I found I could eat my bread, through a mixture of burning hunger and twinges of nausea. The hot tea seemed to help my head. I wanted to look at my shins. One had red and purple bruises. The other was cemented to my underpants with blood, and I left it alone.

When the wind tunnel began to wind up, it startled me, and I was afraid that the noise would hurt my head. When it hit full volume, I felt a sudden sense of release and I had a terrible urge to cry, but I was damned if they would see me cry. I thought, Quick! What’s the most rousing song I know? And then I limped up and down the cell, feeling stronger as I worked some of the stiffness out of my lower legs, and I sang,

Roll! Out! The barr-elll!

We’ll have a barrel of fun!

I roared:

Roll out the barrel!

We’ve got the blues on the run.

A great song! A song I came to trust. I could feel the need for tears pushing hard from somewhere inside, but I pushed back with the song.

Zing! Boom! Tararrel!

We’ll have a barrel of cheer!

Stomping up the cell like a drum major, I brought my hand up and down with an invisible baton. To hell with them if they were watching. Let them watch. I stared hard at the peephole until it opened and forced a huge smile on my face as the astonished eyes peered.

Now’s the time to roll the barrel

Because the gang’s! All! He-e-e-ere!

I fully expected the guard to come in. He didn’t. That was the first time I realized that the chief reason for the prohibition against talking and singing must be to keep other prisoners from hearing me. From then on I sang openly toward the peephole as long as the wind tunnel was roaring.

Suddenly the door opened and a doctor came in. “What’s all this about your hair?” he shouted over the wind tunnel. I shouted back. He motioned a guard and they took me out on the catwalk, where the light was better, and shut the door against the noise.

I explained as convincingly as I could that this was an old ailment that ran in my family and was brought on by cold. I made up a story. I said that I did not know if it was true, but that two of my cousins were said to have died of brain inflammations after all their hair had fallen out and that was why the whole family always wore hats all the time in cold weather. I said I had been wearing a hat when I was arrested but that it had been taken away. I must have been very convincing. Perhaps my shattered-looking state helped. In any case, the miracle took place. When I came back to the cell in the late afternoon (after a completely routine day with Sidorov, in which he announced that for the time being he would change the line of interrogation and that for the next several sessions we would discuss my work as a file clerk and the nature of the information I had access to), my hat was on my bunk! My beautiful, wide-brimmed, American-made fedora! I savored the word.
Fedora!
The hat was a bit crushed from being bundled up, but the brim snapped out, and I soon had it worked into something like its original shape. I parked it jauntily on my aching head and sat on the bunk facing the door. The brim eclipsed the little bulb over the door, and I knew that my eyes were in shadow. The light was so weak I was sure that my eyes would be invisible to the guard at the peephole. When the peephole opened, I sat absolutely immobile. The guard seemed to wait a bit longer than usual, but then closed it and moved off. I thought, he’s waiting to see if I’ve moved when he comes back. I did not move. He was back in a minute. I concentrated hard and sat motionless, trying to guess how long he would watch before he assumed I was trying to sleep. Just before I thought he was going to open the slot and yell, after he watched me for twice as long as usual, I raised my hand and wiped the back of it across my nose. The peephole closed. I spent the rest of the evening before going to Sidorov conditioning the guard that way. Every time he looked in he watched a little longer than usual, and every time I gave a sign of movement at the last moment. I was terribly tempted just to go off to sleep, now that I was confident I could do it without falling over, but I talked myself out of it.
Easy, kid. You had several hours under the blanket last night, even if you were beaten up. Don’t rush it. One false move and they’ll take that hat. This is going to save your life if it works. So you can go a little longer, just a little longer, keep it up, a few more days, that’s all.

I began to feel a hard knot in my stomach as the time came closer to go back to interrogation. I gingerly felt my shins and I knew I would scream if Sidorov kicked me again, as I fully expected he would. I did not know how I could possibly stand more of that, but maybe I would pass out again. Or maybe with a new topic I would be able to tell him things he wanted to know without compromising myself, and put off the beatings for a while. As it turned out, the next two nights were not so bad. He tried to get me to admit that as chief file clerk of the consular section I had access to coded information, and I kept insisting that the code room was separate, which he no doubt knew, and that I never saw anything classified, which was not true.

First thing in the morning I put on the hat and went on with the process of conditioning the guards. The nice young Komsomol
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was on, and he just left me alone. He probably knew what I was up to, I don’t know. But he never even lingered at the peephole, and I took the chance and got an hour’s sleep sitting up. My back ached when I forced myself awake, but my head felt a little clearer. Then came a hell of a day with the woman, who, I understood, would never be conditioned, and then it was Saturday night again.

Sidorov, as he often did, stopped the interrogation early on Saturday, and when I got back to the cell, even though the ugly squat one harassed me for the rest of her duty period, I had the consolation of the wind tunnel, which ran full blast that day until after six in the afternoon. I had another inspiration. I imagined Sidorov striding off down the street outside Lefortovo to his wife or his mistress, and I saluted his retreating back in my mind and shouted out loud, “Sidorov, you bastard, this song is dedicated to you!”

Then I sang all I could remember of

Saturday night is the loneliest night of the week,

’Cause that’s the night that my baby and I

Used to dance cheek to cheek.

I sang it ironically, not in the spirit of the original. It was my celebration of Sidorov’s departure for the weekend, and for the rest of my time under his care I sang it every Saturday night and looked forward to singing it. It was another one of the little things that seem almost infantile by themselves but provided a growing mass of tiny, essential props for my morale.

My Saturday-night sleep was long, dreamless, and a total escape. Stiff muscles on Sunday, but a vigorous walk in the yard and through my mental landscape and road map, and lots more accumulated kilometers. And then came another immense lift to my morale.

I had become aware that I had a neighbor in the next cell. I could hear whispered remarks from the guard at mealtime and the sound of a slot moved back and forth. That was the first indication of anyone in the adjacent cell, and I believe he must have just been moved in there. Then, on Sunday afternoon, while I sat on the toilet and worked away at [a] fishbone, I heard a sound that gave my spirit a huge jolt of excitement. The simplest of sounds. A series of taps on the wall, clearly coming from the next cell.