An American in the Gulag

by Alexander Dolgun

  And that is what he thought of me.

  At least I think so. There were times in those early days when I suspected that he would take any credible confession, whatever it might be, whatever relation it bore to the truth. At other times, in fact most of the time, I felt he thought he was on to a really tough customer who had some high-priced goods hidden somewhere and wasn’t about to give away the combination, in a hurry. So my trouble was, however clever I was, or however right in explaining my behavior and my contacts and all the other trivia he pieced together to make a case against me, he simply thought I was employing the most subtle kind of tactics.

  My tactic was to try not to go crazy from lack of sleep, and I found the more elaborate the game and the more I could summon the energy to make Sidorov work, to irritate him, provoke him, make him think he was getting somewhere and then let him drop, then the higher my morale and the more nearly tolerable this terrible lack of sleep. In fact, I was beginning to be frightened about what might happen to me. There would be periods when I suddenly knew that I had no recollection of what had happened in the last few minutes. Dropouts in my mind. Total erasures. Sidorov was showing very little strain. He was getting five or six hours sleep a night, I assumed, in two segments of two to three hours apiece between six in the evening and nine thirty or nine forty-five A. M. And, as I learned from overhearing some whispered remarks to his mistress on the phone, he got a substantial pay bonus for doing night interrogation.

  Even Sidorov would begin to sag in the small hours. Three o’clock was a particularly low time for both of us, but in a way it was a good time for me, because after a lot of yawning, which he tried to stifle, Sidorov would tilt back his chair and close his eyes and drift off. At first I would wait a minute to see whether he was really sleeping. Then I would put my head on my arms on the table in front of me and be asleep instantly. When Sidorov woke up he would yell at me. “You’re not allowed to sleep!”

  “You’re sleeping,” I’d retort. “Never mind about me!”

  Then of course, later on, I began to experiment with sleeping upright, to see if my body could learn to hold itself erect. I thought if that would work I might escape detection in the cells for a few minutes at a time, because the guard at the peephole would not think I was asleep if I was sitting upright.

  And so it would go, snatching ten minutes here, half an hour there, occasionally a little longer if Sidorov called it quits before six in the morning and the guards left me alone till the wake-up call. But it was too little. Too little. I could feel myself slipping, getting looser and less disciplined every day. I dreaded going crazy almost worse—no, really worse—than dying. Since the end of the routine Sunday Mass and catechism of my childhood, I have never been a churchgoing man, but I believe in God and I think there will be some kind of life after death. I was afraid of the pain of dying and terribly reluctant to leave the world behind because I liked life a lot, even if it had been pretty tough sometimes. And yet dying would be preferable by far to this terrible thing of going nuts, and that was what I fought against as much as simple physical decay.

  Try to go without water for a whole day. Then imagine that your thirst is a desire to sleep. Then you will have ten per cent of what I felt. Stop breathing as you read this page. See how long you can keep from taking a breath. See how desperate you begin to feel as your heart begins to pump hard and your forehead begins to feel strange. Now, still not breathing, imagine there is no air left in the room. The muscles around your chin and neck are straining. Your larynx begins to make involuntary sounds and the bottom of your rib cage hurts. If you are really disciplined and carry this quite far, your vision will begin to blur. That is how badly I wanted sleep. I thought of sleep all the time. I fantasized sleep as a lecher fantasizes the flesh of young girls or a shipwrecked sailor dreams about a steak and mashed potatoes. There was an unending band of pressure around my head just above my eyes. My footsteps were uncertain when I walked and my breath was noisy and short. I found I was licking my lips a lot.

  Often when they yelled “Podyom” at six o’clock and I had been on the cot only five minutes or ten I wanted to give up right then and beat on the door and yell and beg for them to bring Sidorov, that I would tell him anything, sign anything, accept any humiliation if only I could close my eyes and disappear from the world for a few hours of absolute peace.

  Saturday afternoon came. Sidorov packed his stuff in his briefcase and phoned his wife before it got dark and told her he was on his way home for the weekend. Can you imagine what hearing that meant for me? I almost wanted to stand up and bow to him in gratitude as he went out the door. When I got back to the cell I ate the cold soup right away, all of it, as a celebration. Then when the porridge and tea came at six thirty or so I ate it all, taking time with each mouthful, talking silently to myself in a measured way to fill the time until ten o’clock, when I would be allowed, I was certain of it, Sidorov was gone for the weekend, to crawl under the blanket (keeping my hands outside, of course) and sleep. And sleep.

  I began to hear music playing. Pleasant, waltz-time music. It came from the window. I was sufficiently. confused in my mind to wonder seriously if I was imagining the music. But I went to the end of the gloomy black cell and stood by the table and listened carefully and was sure the music came from the window. It was quite clear. I could hear voices, indistinctly, calling out and laughing, and then an unmistakable rhythmic, whispering, scraping sound that I knew so well from years of making it happen under my feet: the sound of skate blades on ice! Somewhere close by was a public skating rink, with music. Right outside the prison somewhere. I could see it in my mind. In fact, years later, telling someone about it, the vision was so clear that I told my friend in all sincerity that I had seen it, that I had leaped up to grasp the window frame and pulled myself up until I could peek out through a slit miraculously left for me by an incompetent designer of window hoods, and had seen the skaters whirling about.

  In reality what happened was that I counted seconds between peephole openings, stood still staring at the peephole until it was opened, began to count silently as soon as it closed (one-a-thousand, two-a-thousand), and still counting under my breath clambered up on the bed, crouched (I was pretty weak from the small rations and no rest), jumped as high as I could, grabbed the window frame, pulled up (twelve-a-thousand, thirteen-a-thousand, fourteen-a-thousand), kicked against the wall to help me, careful not to put any weight on the flimsy table, wriggled, pulled, got what I thought was a vision of some light from outside, ducked my head, sucked in breath for a bigger effort (thirty-one thousand, thirty-two thousand), pulled like hell as high as I could, realized there was no possible angle from which I could see past the baffles and out to the rink, hung listening a moment to the delicious music (I loved music anyway and at that moment I loved it like God, like Mary Catto, like a great dinner of roast chicken and green peas, like sleep), and listened as long as I dared (forty-five thousand, forty-six thousand) and then dropped to the floor and held my breath so the guard wouldn’t see my chest heaving as the peephole opened at fifty-one thousand and I was still staring, immobile, at the door, with my heart beating like the big bass drum.

  I remember that I waltzed up and down the cell until bedtime. Although I was so tired my breath was short and my eyes were burning, my morale was as high as it had been since I came to Lefortovo, because I knew I would soon get to sleep, provided Sidorov was not playing games and intending to come back for the usual nine-thirty nighttime start, so I danced or skated to the music. My floppy soles slithered up and down the asphalt. I held Mary in my arms and we spun around and around the ballroom at the Metropole Hotel. The peephole opened rhythmically, every minute. I kept on dancing. When I whirled away from the door I closed my eyes to keep them from burning and tried to guess how close we were coming to ten o’clock. There was a time when I guessed it must be close to nine and I had a terrible apprehension that Sidorov was coming back after all, and my sleep would be stolen from me again. I
closed my eyes, fiercely, and danced and danced, bumping against walls occasionally, and humming under my breath. I held Mary very close and whispered that I loved her. In a while I knew that nine o’clock had come and gone, and nine thirty. I knew, too, that it was an easygoing guard on duty that night. I sensed a settling down in the prison. I thought I would chance it. I sat on the bunk and leaned against the end wall, which was against the rules. The peephole opened but the slot stayed shut. If he was going to yell and harass me he would bang open the slot. I stretched out on top of the blanket and kept my eyes wide open. The peephole opened but the slot stayed shut. I pulled the blanket over me and kept my hands outside and my eyes wide open. The peephole opened and the slot stayed shut. I closed my eyes and listened for the peephole to come open again, but I never heard it. I never dreamed. I never heard the music. I dropped a thousand, a million miles into the most profound, world-banishing sleep I had ever known. Not gratitude, not relief, not peace. Nothing approaching consciousness. Nothing I could remember. Oblivion.

  Chapter 5

  In the morning I was drugged with sleep. When “podyom” was shouted through the food slot, I knew I had to move, and I moved, but like a man under water, in slow motion. By now I realized the importance of disciplined routine; so I turned on the water and washed my face very carefully. Then I took off my shirt and square inch by square inch washed my upper body, cupping a little water in my hand and spreading it on, letting it dry a little, spreading some more on, and doing my whole trunk until I began to shiver with the cold. Then my lower body, taking off the baggy long prison underpants they had given me, with drawstrings around the ankles, folding them carefully until I had washed, using the little towel only on the hard-to-dry parts. By the time I had finished all that, I felt cheerful and hungry, almost painfully hungry.

  The daily ration scarcely varied. Always, at breakfast, it was the 400 grams of sour bread, a piece of which I usually forced myself to gave for later in the day, although I was so ravenous I felt I could eat my own flesh. Then the sugar and the tasteless imitation tea. Since my cell was at the end of the wing, near an elevator, I could hear the mechanism working when it started up in the morning with the tubs of tea and the trays of bread, and by now, even though only four days had gone by, I had begun to salivate uncontrollably at the sound of that elevator.

  For a very brief time I fell into the trap of imagining marvelous meals. I would spread out a table with nice dishes and fill them with roast beef and baked potatoes and fried fish and bowls of gravy and white bread and green peas and ice cream and mugs of fresh coffee. As I looked over all this stuff in my mind’s eye my stomach began to cry out with hunger. It hurt as it I had been hit. I salivated copiously and swallowed my saliva and began to belch deep, sour belches. Then I realized that this was no good. I was afraid it would break down my mind. I made a pact with myself, under my breath. I promised myself that if images of food like that crept into my mind, I would force myself to think of something else, like hikes in the woods with Mary, or poker games at the embassy, or the streets of New York’s East Side. At first it did not work very well because as soon as I went hiking in the woods with Mary she would spread out a cloth and arrange cold sausages and a bottle of wine and cheese and butter and my mouth would fill with saliva again. Or if I walked down a street in Manhattan I would pass a bakery. So then I had to try arithmetic or the names of all the ships in the major naval battles of World Wars I and II. It was difficult to do silently. But I was absolutely determined that every task I agreed upon with myself had to be carried through or else. Failure would be giving in to Sidorov, to them. And by constantly giving myself little pep talks I was able to do it.

  Easy, Alex. Take it easy. You can do it. You went with no sleep for a week and you can do anything you want. You’re all right, boy. You’ve got guts. You’re young and you’re strong. These Russian bastards are trying to break you but you’re on to them, aren’t you. So as long as you’re on to them they can’t get you.

  And this is the way I kept myself going.

  I would think, Look. You just have to get through this day. Tomorrow there will be more interrogation. Sidorov is getting madder every day. He may get really tough. Maybe the guards will catch you doing something and throw you into the hard punishment cells. Maybe they’ll even take you out and shoot you. But just get through this day. That’s all you have to do.

  In the middle of the morning, that first Sunday, the slot opened and a guard I hadn’t seen before dumped three books on the shelf.

  I said, “What’s this?” But he just closed the slot without speaking. They never spoke to you if they could help it. I rushed to pick up the books. They were tattered and dirty but they were treasures to me. Even though my eyes were sore and my head not very clear, I began to read immediately. I read every word with the greatest interest. I think I read those books four or five times during the next three weeks.

  I have no idea whether the books were selected with a purpose in mind. One was called Political Prisoners in Tsarist Russia. It was supposed to be an account of the terrible indignities committed against the human person under the inhuman regime of the tsars. The first thing I noticed was that none of the prisoners I read about was ever prevented from sleeping. I thought that was pretty interesting. I was also fascinated to read references to a code used by prisoners for tapping messages to each other through the cell walls. It was called the prison Morse, but that meant nothing to me. Still, I was beginning to feel lonely enough that it would have been comforting to have someone other than Sidorov to communicate with, even by tapping through the walls.

  Another book was Dostoevski’s The House of the Dead. This was fascinating, in a horrible way. Ninety-nine years before me, this poor guy had been carted off to Siberia for discussing the theories of radical economists. He spent four hideous years there, “like a man buried alive, nailed down in his coffin,” he wrote. Reading of his long-past but very real troubles made me feel maybe mine were not so bad after all.

  On this Sunday morning I read for an hour, then walked up and down in the cell for a while, then read some more, spacing it out so as not to finish the books too fast. Also, I knew I should have some constructive physical activity to do in a regular way so that I would not get too dependent upon fantasy and keep a good grip on reality. There was a tear in my navy surplus shirt, and I decided that I would figure out some way to repair it. Again from reading old adventure books, I knew that if you were a prisoner you made needles out of fish bones. There were usually fish bones in the noon meal and even occasionally a couple of grams of fish. If I could somehow make a slit or, a hole in the thick end of the bone and then dry it out, I might be able to unravel some threads from the prison towel and do some mending.

  When the thin soup came in the middle of the day I saved three or four long fish bones from it and attempted, with no success, to bore a hole in the flat part of the wide end with my teeth and then with my spoon. The bone, which was soft from being boiled m the soup, would either split or be crushed completely. Then I tried to sharpen my aluminum spoon by scraping it on the floor, thinking that if I could get it to a point, I could punch the needle eye in tomorrow’s fish bones. And then, while I was sharpening the spoon, I realized that it could be made into a crude weapon, if the edges were made sharp, and that led to thoughts of escape, killing a guard and taking his clothes and making my way through the prison anyhow—all the kinds of things I had seen in so many Hollywood movies and read in novels.

  One problem about killing a guard or any other aspect of escape was that I was getting too weak from poor food and lack of rest. The weakness was not serious at this point, but I knew that if I stayed in this situation very long it would become a very severe problem.

  Anyway, a guard saw me sharpening the spoon and took it away, threatening hard punishment. I had been careless about the peephole timing. But even if I had not, I suppose they would have looked at it when 1 was out of the cell for interrogation.


  I got the idea, out of nowhere, for making a more elegant calendar than my scratches on the wall .1 would keep the scratches going, for a cumulative record, but I thought I could mold some numbers and a base to mount them on out of this soggy bread they brought me every day, which went very hard when it eventually dried out. I began to work on the calendar that first Sunday, starting with the base. I had enough bread saved for supper to steal a bit of my ration, and I kneaded it and rolled it and pressed it against the floor until I had a small, solid rectangle about eight centimeters long and two wide and one thick. Then I took one of my carefully hoarded matches and used the thin end to bore two holes about halfway through the flat side. These would be the receptacles for pegs which I would make out of the matches and fit into the bottom of the numbers that I would also make out of bread.

  With the point of a match, I pressed the year, 1948, into the end of this base. Then I set the little bread block on the window ledge to harden, and wondered if the guards would bother with it. I thought that once it was good and dry I could smooth the surface by rubbing it on my shoes or on the floor, and I began to look forward to starting on the numbers as soon as I could stand to set aside some more bread to make them with.

  So, with reading and bread molding and the abortive first attempt at needle making, I passed away most of Sunday afternoon. I was hungry but not too uncomfortable. Once the guard caught me humming quietly to myself and shook his head menacingly through the food slot, but I stopped immediately and he did not come in. It was terribly hard to keep awake, but I guessed that I would get a good night’s sleep that night and wondered whether I could make it through the following weekend, or whether I would have to. Maybe the whole charade would be over by then.