An American in the Gulag

by Alexander Dolgun

  The words of songs were important, all the familiar, romantic, goofy hit songs that we played on the phonograph at the embassy and sang at parties were a lifeline for me. Sometime in the third week at Lefortovo a new torture was added to the cold and the black and the loneliness of cell 111. Early one morning a strange low rumble started somewhere outside my window and soon grew in pitch and volume until it was a gigantic roar. When I looked at my plate and spoon on the shaky little table they were visibly trembling. Their edges were blurred! I was enraged. I thought that the sound had been designed by a specialist in tortures, a fiendish man who wanted to destroy human will. I admired the genius of whoever invented the torture. Even when I covered my ears the sound drilled through my skull. There was no escaping it. I was relieved when they took me to Sidorov. I wryly complimented him on the inhuman ingenuity of the terrible noise. Irony was never Sidorov’s strong point, and he didn’t understand me. He said, “I know. It is terrible. They have an aeronautical research institute next door. That’s their wind tunnel. Good thing my office is not on that side, I’d never be able to get my reports written.”

  Poor Sidorov.

  So it was a wind tunnel and not a torture device. And yet it was going to get me down. I knew it. I decided I would have to fight that sound the way I fought everything else they tried to break me with. I decided I would learn how to go deaf.

  I read once that some people go deaf psychologically after a strong emotional shock. I thought I could train myself to be temporarily deaf, the same way I had trained myself to smile at Sidorov every night instead of showing him how frightened and angry I was. However, I never carried this out, because almost as soon as I thought of it I also realized that this wind tunnel noise was something I could use to help me survive. Instead of fighting it, I would make it an ally.

  The guard brought me back to the cell at a quarter past five the next morning. I knew it was earlier than usual because for the last couple of hours Sidorov had been yawning all the time and then when he finally said that was enough for tonight and pressed the button for the guard, the doors in the other interrogation rooms were still closed and the corridors were quiet. Usually there would be some doors open, and since prisoners were being escorted you could hear the keys clanking on the guards’ belts along the corridors—the familiar signal to other guards, so that two prisoners would never see each other. The guard would usually hold me back in the room and look up and down the corridor first. But this morning he just motioned me straight out. When I got to the cell I was sure it was still well before six, and I lay down on the cot and nobody bothered me and I think I had at least half an hour’s sleep. Maybe three-quarters.

  I always used to think there was nothing worse than waking up after a sleep that was too short. But by now I was keeping score because I knew that every minute of real sleep was going to help me from going crazy and keep my memory from blanking out and so keep me alive. My eyes were burning, and I felt real hate for the guy who banged on the door, “Podyom!” at six o’clock, not just irritation but real hate, and yet all the same I knew I had gotten a little sleep, and I scored it off mentally as an edge, a bit of an advantage over Sidorov. Sidorov counted on wearing me down, and at this stage I still thought I could wear him down.

  A person is made up of his memories, and if you lose that you stop being a person. So even if the body keeps on living, the person is gone. But that is not what I mean; I’m really talking about how memory is necessary for sheer physical survival.

  I got up when they banged on the door and shouted “Podyom!” There was still no sign of light through the little hooded window. It was January outside in Moscow. I washed my face carefully in the cold water and then I sat for a few minutes on the toilet and closed my eyes in the fifty seconds of safety I could count on between visits at the peephole. This way I actually caught another minute or two of sleep perched on the hard edge of that iron cone.

  Then I got up and started to walk back and forth in the cell because as long as you were in motion they left you alone unless you did something strange. And then I began to count the minutes until the wind tunnel would start up because I had decided how I would use it.

  It was against the rules to talk in the cell, or make any sound. If you talked to yourself the guard would throw open the food slot and hiss at you. “Shut up, you! No talking! Hard punishment cell for you if I catch you doing that again!” Just for talking! Or if it was a good guard and he caught you whispering or muttering absent-mindedly because you were half asleep all the time, he might just tap at the peephole and wave his finger or shake his head when you looked up. But most of the guards took the opportunity to break their own boring routine, I guess, and throw open the slot and threaten me with the hard punishment cells.

  Anyway, they really believed I was an enemy of the people. I found that out later.

  Breakfast would come about six thirty. I had figured this out by counting the number of times the peephole opened between “Podyom” and breakfast. Once every minute, nearly. I don’t claim I was precise about it.

  Four hundred grams of hard, damp, sour black bread, with one and a half lumps of sugar and a mug of “tea.” Then around seven sometime the door opens again and a guard hands in an old greatcoat from the days of the Revolution, must be thirty years old at least, quite threadbare, and motions you into the corridor and clicks the key on his belt and takes you down some steps and out into the yard for the exercise period.

  The yard is divided up by wooden walls. The spaces aren’t that much bigger than my cell. I can’t see anyone, except a guard looking down from the tower above the exercise slots. I have fifteen minutes for fresh air. If I look straight up I can see the sky and this morning, I remember, it was still dark and clear and I could see a star. I guess lonely people all over the world have looked at stars like that. Is Mary looking at that star? I thought.

  There would be indistinct shuffling sounds from behind the boards somewhere across the egg-crate yard. Somebody else having his morning walk. I guessed there were other men looking up at the star and asking themselves if their wives or children or girlfriends could see, that same star.

  Then the guard came to take me back to the cell, but that was all right because I was waiting for the wind tunnel to start up so I could try my experiment in making it work for me. I counted the times the peephole opened. When I guessed it was getting close to eight o’clock, I thought, All right, now. Maybe after this peephole but before the next one. Then, you know, you don’t want to disappoint yourself. So I would say, No, I’ve probably counted wrong and it’s really a few minutes too early. I’ll give it three more peepholes.

  So finally it started up. Some blurred low noises at first, then a sort of winding noise, and then it would build up to a full roar. The building did not really shake but I could feel it reverberate in my chest. I turned away from the peephole in the cell door and the moment I strode away toward the window I opened my mouth as wide as I could and I filled my lungs and I sang out loud.

  I sang

  Mairzy doats and dozy doats

  And liddle lamzy divey

  Loud. I mean really full blast, everything I had. Fortissimo. Boy it felt great!

  At the end of the cell I turned and looked back at the peephole. I thought, On the way back where he can see my face, I won’t move my lips so much and I won’t sing so loud, so even if he looks carefully he won’t know what’s going on. So now, a little more carefully, Alex, sotto voce, is that the word? or piano?

  A kiddley divey too, wouldn’t you?

  The effect was fantastic! I mean the effect on me. I was grinning to myself. I had discovered another instrument for my survival. It sounds crazy talking about this childish song as an instrument of survival. But this was a song from America. It was a song they were singing in New York somewhere. Back at the American Embassy on Mokhovaya Street, there was a phonograph with that record on it. Maybe not right now, at eight o’clock in the morning, but the record was ther
e all right and sometime today probably, maybe tonight after work, someone would play it.

  If the words sound queer

  And funny to your ear

  A little bit jumbled and jivey

  Sing mares eat oats

  And does eat oats

  And little lambs eat ivy

  I immediately felt less tired. In about an hour I knew I had to go back to the interrogation room. Sidorov would have slept three, three and a half, maybe this morning almost four hours because he had quit early. Slept in a real bed with a pillow and sheets. He would have shaved in hot water. Probably he’d have had an egg or something good to eat and real tea with milk in it. He would know I hadn’t slept. He would count on me to be a little crazy, a little lightheaded so he could confuse me. My arms and legs and back would be sore from the hard bed. I wouldn’t have much endurance when he began to get at me.

  He’s had me three weeks now and pretty soon I’ll break down and tell him whatever he wants, he’s sure of that, I can tell from his face. Although when I just keep smiling politely at him I sense a kind of violence building up.

  But this morning I’ve got the bastard because I can sing and that means I’m still in touch with the outside and I’ve had half an hour’s sleep, maybe forty minutes, and when he sees me he just won’t understand why I’m so goddamn cocky and I’m going. to be goddamn cocky this morning because I know that bastard is just not going to get what he wants from me and one of these days he’s going to have to let me go!

  I remember that I walked faster and faster up and down the cell that morning, pivoting on the ball of my foot at the end of the cell, filling my lungs up and singing nonstop. I’m the Lefortovo jukebox, I said to myself.

  Pardon me boy

  Is this the Chattanooga Choo-Choo

  On track twenty-nine

  Why don’t you give me a shine?

  It would be very easy to give in, which is the purpose of everything they are trying to do to me in cell 111 and in the endless interrogation room. I am accused of terrorism, of anti-Soviet propaganda, of espionage. If I confess to these charges, presumably they will stop keeping me awake at night, give me something decent to eat and a bed to sleep in. Well, even if I had something to confess I would never do it. But I have nothing and I’m still completely mystified every time Sidorov says, so confidently, “Look, we know it all, why don’t you admit it!” He picks up the thick folders and slaps them with one hand.

  “It’s all in here. The sledstvie (investigative bodies) have made a full report. We know that at a certain period in 1946 you were planning terrorist activities and we know you were recruiting others to work with you. Now tell me about it.”

  After a while that morning my legs got too tired to walk up and down anymore so I sat on the bunk. This was allowed as long as you kept your hands on your knees and faced the peephole. But I felt good. My optimism was back up again, after slipping pretty low the last few days. I thought I should run a little check list on myself and see how it was going.

  Name: Alexander M. Dolgun

  Age: Twenty-two

  Date of birth: September 29, 1926

  Address: American House, American Embassy, Moscow

  All of this out loud in a firm voice, but when the peephole opens I stop moving my lips, just stare straight ahead.

  Hands steady? I hold them in front of me. They tremble a little but that’s normal enough because I haven’t been allowed to sleep all night since ... I had trouble recalling since when, so I thought I had better work on that. I looked at my wall calendar, a series of scratches in the black paint on the wall of my cell. I was arrested on December 13, 1948. Monday. Moved here, to Lefortovo from Lubyanka, on the fifteenth, and put straight into this all-black cell with one twenty-five-watt bulb in a steel-meshed recess over the door, so it was hard to see my scratches. But they showed the first week truncated, only five days, and then another full week, and another, and then three scratches so it was Wednesday January 5 and that meant I had been two days and two nights without a full sleep. Saturday and Sunday nights they let me sleep while Sidorov went home or wherever he went.

  The door of my cell opened and the guard handed in my bucket of icy water and a rag and went out again without speaking. That meant about half an hour left before I would be taken upstairs. I poured some water on the black asphalt floor and got down on my knees and started to scrub. If you did it badly, whatever that meant, they might make you start all over again. There was a woman guard, a truly cruel person, who liked to find fault with the way I scrubbed the floor. Once she came back with a second bucket and spilled the whole thing out on the floor, and then yelled at me to hurry and get it mopped up with the rag because it was time to go to interrogation.

  She was the one who used to open the door when,, I was sitting on the iron cone, not grabbing sleep but really using it, with my pants down, completely vulnerable, and yell, “Hurry up, you sterva! Why does it take you so long!” Sterva is a very unpleasant Russian word meaning “carrion.” This squatty, mean woman was the only guard who used filthy language. Others would shout at you but she really was vile, almost as bad as Sidorov, and a lot meaner. Every time I used the toilet she would open the slot and yell at me.

  But this morning the guard was a quiet one, and when I finished the floor and stood in front of the peephole with my rag and bucket he opened the door without a word and took it away and locked me in again.

  Now it would be five or ten minutes before they would take me upstairs. I was on to Sidorov’s daytime! nighttime pattern now. It had become perfectly regular. I decided it was a deliberate trick, to curse and abuse me at night and play a waiting game in the daytime, giving me a chance to let my guard down. The day before he had been carrying on about the Moscow Dynamos again.

  Did I ever go to soccer games? Wouldn’t I admit that it was a better game than baseball? And so on.

  And then that same night he had been at times morose and silent, staring at me angrily to try to unnerve me, and then at other times he’d paced up and down slapping his dossiers and shouting abuse at me. He would say things like, “You are an illegitimate son of a bitch and I fuck your mother. If you don’t cooperate with me I will have your balls and then I’ll take you out and shoot you personally.”

  Later on he would build it up to real crescendos, but even at this stage, when he would shout, “The state fucks you, you stupid son of a bitch!” I could sense that his fists were clenching and that worse was to come than just hard language.

  At night he would finger his gun a lot, the Tokarev seven-shot revolver. He would take it out and lay it on the table with the barrel pointing at me. That’s when he’d talk about taking me out to shoot me.

  But in the daytime he was never like this. He’d begin with, “Well, haven’t you decided to tell me everything and save yourself a lot of trouble?” Then I would say, “Well, I have told you everything I know, I have nothing more to add. What else do you want?”

  Then he would say, “I’ve got time. We know everything anyway.” And he’d hum a bit, and go through his fries and read the newspaper, and ask me what I knew about Marxism and Leninism, all in an easygoing, almost amiable way. In detective stories there is a well-known police technique of interrogation, in which a bad guy and a good guy team up. The bad guy terrorizes the prisoner while the “good guy” pretends to look pained and embarrassed at the threats of violence. Then the bad guy leaves the room for a drink of water or something and the good guy puts on a confidential tone and says, “Listen, don’t worry, I think I can keep him from losing his temper, just watch out, trust me, he really is a tough customer,” and so on, to confuse the prisoner and either weaken his resistance to the tough technique or win him over to the apparent “friend.” I suppose the MGB technique was to combine bad guy and good guy, in one interrogator. That’s what it seemed like.

  Well, today I was going to confuse Sidorov some more. I felt up to it. I was a bit lightheaded. I would have to go three more nights wit
h no sleep before it was Saturday. But somehow I knew I would get through it, and somehow I was sure I was going to find a way to sleep during the week.

  I stood up again and began to walk. The wind tunnel was still roaring. I grinned at it through, the stone walls. “Thank you, friend,” I said. And then shouted out loud, “Thank you, friend!” And then I put my head back and filled the time I had left with one more song I could really put my heart into.

  Oh, give me land lots of land under starry skies above,

  Don’t fence me in!

  Let me ride through the wide open country that I love,

  Don’t fence me in!

  I want to ride to the ridge where the West commences,

  Gaze at the moon till I lose my senses,

  Can’t look at hobbles and I can’t stand fences,

  Don’t fence me in!

  The door rattled and swung open. “Prepare for interrogation,” the guard said. He looked up and down the corridor and then motioned me out. He was a relatively easygoing guy, I remember. When he looked at me to motion me out of the cell his eyebrows went up quite a lot because I was grinning quite happily. But he didn’t say a word.

  Chapter 6

  Sidorov was not in the interrogation room when I got there. I sat on the chair and immediately went to sleep. It probably lasted two minutes, but this time I did not fall off the chair. I was beginning to learn how to sleep in a hard wooden chair without falling off, and to be ready to wake up again at the smallest sound. I had tried it two or three times on Sidorov already but I think he was getting wise to me. He would ask a question and I would say, “Listen, I have to think about that for a minute.” Then I would put my hand to my head and close my eyes and doze off, just go to sleep. The first time I came to with a lurch and he knew I had been sleeping. I said, “I can’t help it. I’m trying to remember but I’m too sleepy.” Sidorov said brusquely, “Keep your eyes open, then.” I said, “It helps me to remember. Don’t worry, I’ll try to stay awake.”