An American in the Gulag

by Alexander Dolgun

  I tried it again a day later, in the daytime, and this time I was able to signal myself to wake up in a minute, smoothly, and say quietly, “No, I can’t remember,” in answer to his question.

  This time, as soon as I heard the door opening, I woke up and found I was sifting up straight, and when Sidorov looked at me my eyes were wide open. Sidorov went directly to his big desk opposite my little table and thumped his file folders down on it. He spread out the newspaper and stood over the desk peering at it and wiping something invisible from his trouser leg with the back of his hand. Then he sat down behind the desk and read for a while without looking at me, and pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one. I recognized the routine. He smoked for a while and then looked at me for quite a long while without speaking. I have talked to hundreds of prisoners who have undergone interrogation, so I know that this is part of an interrogator’s method. Keep you waiting and wondering. Sidorov carried it too far with me because he was not a very sensitive man and had no idea what kind of game I was playing. I have him wondering, I told myself.

  After a while he said, “Prisoner, come over here.” I went and stood in front of his big desk. He had very gray eyes. I noticed that he had missed shaving just under his nose. After a while he offered me a cigarette. “Here.”

  I took it and he lit it for me with a kind of courtesy. “Your own are all gone, aren’t they?”

  “I told you that. Two weeks ago. More. They only lasted two or three days.”

  “You like to smoke, don’t you?”

  “Sure I do, you know that.”

  “I know a lot about you, my friend.” I waited.

  “In the labor camp where I will send you when I’m through with you, there is always tobacco, you can have your own and you can smoke whenever you like.

  Wouldn’t that be better than what you’re getting here?”

  I just smiled my simple smile at him and shrugged. “Look, prisoner, I’m going to give you some advice. It won’t get any better here. You think you’re having a hard time, but it can only get harder if you don’t cooperate. Now listen, it’s all in here anyway”—he slapped the files—“and I’m going to get it out of you because that’s my job and I’m good at it and I’ve never failed yet. So instead of waiting for a month or two or however long you intend to be stubborn, why not get it over with now? Today. Tell me everything because we know it all anyway, all we need is a few details and a signed statement, and then you’ll be able to sleep at night and smoke cigarettes and get decent food and be with other people all day long, and you’ll probably get a very light sentence for cooperating.”

  I heard snatches of music running through my head. I laughed out loud and said in English, “Is this the Chattanooga Choo-Choo?”

  “What’s that?” Sidorov said sharply.

  I said, “Why don’t you give me a shine?”

  “Prisoner, you are forbidden to speak English!”

  I said in Russian, “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. But this is really marvelous! I don’t think you realize how marvelous it is.”

  He said, “What are you getting at?”

  I said, “Listen. You’re getting extra pay for night interrogations. If I tell you everything right now, you’ll lose all those bonuses. Why should I do that to you after all you’ve done for me? Besides, if you know everything already, what do you need me for anyway? Why not just send me quietly off to camp? You could spend the next six months writing up your reports at home. Then you could report you’ve got the confession you needed. You don’t need me if you know everything.”

  Being pretty lightheaded, that all sounded better to me than it really was. But it did succeed in confusing Sidorov for a moment. His face was very blank, and then a trace of anger came into it. But he simply turned away without answering and picked up the paper. “You won’t feel so witty later tonight,” he said tightly.

  I drew on the smoke. It went down deliciously and took the top of my windpipe with a satisfying catch. It was the first cigarette since the weekend and it went to my head which was already floating, and made me very relaxed and dying for sleep. I had to fight off an impulse to say to Sidorov, “Please let me go to sleep! If you let me go to sleep, I’ll do anything you want.”

  But there was no point in even trying that because he wanted details of my spying activities and there simply were no spying activities to give him details on. I couldn’t win and yet I felt I couldn’t lose either, as long as I refused to give in and show any weakness.

  All day I sat in the chair, shifting my shrinking buttocks from side to side, trying to blink away the burning in my eyes. Sidorov scarcely spoke. Once or twice he picked up the phone and called his wife. Sometime in the middle of the day he got up and left to get something to eat. He told the guard to make sure I did not go to sleep. I tried sleeping in my chair without showing it, but as soon as the guard saw my eyes closed he came and shook me. The high morale I had built up for myself with songs in the morning was beginning to wear off. I wanted to get back in the cell and sing some more songs, but I knew they shut the wind tunnel down before six o’clock, and I would have to wait until morning. There was a kind of pressure building up inside my skull. Not a headache, just a strong, incessant pressure connected with my eyes. I knew it could only be cured by sleep. Before Sidorov came back I tottered again and fell off the chair with my eyes closed. Somebody picked me up and shook me vigorously.

  “Sleep,” I said.

  “Talk, and you’ll get to sleep,” Sidorov’s voice said. I opened my burning eyes and smiled at him.

  Back to the cell at 6 P.M. Sometime in the middle of the day they have brought the midday bowl of thin cabbage soup with a bit of fish in it. When they open the door of cell 111 and shove me in, the soup is sitting there on my plate, cold, and if I want the bit of protein and phosphorous and other essentials it contains, I will have to eat it right away, cold and insipid as it is, or else do without my hot porridge, which will come almost immediately, since I have only one plate.

  That night, or one night soon after, two things happened almost simultaneously. I noticed that my hair was falling out, and I found some information on the bottom of my plate.

  In fact, my hair had started coming out at the end of the second week. Years later I was told this could be a result of extreme nervous stress, along with everything else that was happening to me. I was losing a lot of weight, but 1 could afford a bit of that. But there was no fresh food of any kind. I was sure I would start to get scurvy if I stayed in prison very long. My gums were beginning to get sore. When I washed my face and ran some cold water through my hair with my fingers, a few hairs came away and I saw them in the sink. The next time I was taken out for a shower, when I was drying myself, I saw some more hair lying on my arm. This time there was a whole tuft of it. I had brushed my hand across my head to try to ease the pressure in my skull, and I could literally feel a mass of hair come loose as my fingers rubbed my scalp. I brought down a bunch of blond hair and stared at it. The sight of it made me feel quite uneasy. It was a sign of physical decay. I had been expecting something, but not this.

  I felt a surge of panic coming on. I said, “Easy, Alex, that’s what they want. To make you lose control.” I was enormously tempted to feel my head and see if any more hair would come away but I was terrified that it would, so I didn’t.

  I thought, I’ve got to get busy at something new, anything to keep my mind active. I tried drawing in deep breaths to see if that would relax me. My chest felt weighted down with hard straps running around my ribs. I got up and ran some more water in the sink and splashed my face with it, and then decided to wash my plate very meticulously and dry it with my little towel. And this is where the information came from.

  I remember a story one of the guys at the embassy used to tell, about some guy who went to jail and was criticized by the warden for keeping a pack of cards instead of a Bible in his cell. Then the guy explained to the warden how the cards had a symbolism
that reminded him of all the biblical characters and could also function as a calendar and so on. Well, that’s what it’s like in prison. You make use of the smallest scraps of information and get a lot of mileage from them. When I was drying this enameled metal plate, I noticed on the bottom the name of the Moscow factory where it was made, and the figures 10-22.

  I’ve always enjoyed number games, and I thought, Here’s one ready made.

  Figure out what this means, 10-22. Probably when I first saw those numbers I assumed they were the date of manufacture, October 1922. But the plate was pretty new, not worn enough to be a quarter of a century old. I wondered for a while if it referred to the prison in some kind of code. Then, just while I sat and looked at it in my hand, I found myself saying silently that the plate was about twenty-two centimeters across and the inner section about ten centimeters. If that was true, I could prove it by making some sort of tape measure and checking the two dimensions against each other.

  Of course, my belt and tie were gone.

  I started looking around the cell for something I could use. The towel caught my eye. It was woven pretty loosely of a fairly coarse cotton. It took just two seconds to unravel a thread from across the end, and I got a piece about forty centimeters long. I broke off a piece a little longer than the width of the plate. I laid it across the diameter of the plate and creased it at what I hoped would be the twenty-two centimeter mark. Then I measured and knotted lengths equal to six centimeters, from the edge to the inner rim; ten centimeters across the inner section; sixteen centimeters from the outer edge right across the inner section; and another of twenty, twice the diameter of the inner section.

  I became totally absorbed in this cumbersome arithmetic. From time to time I looked up at the peephole, but what I was doing apparently seemed innocent enough because there was no interruption. Now I measured a thread equal to the difference between the six and the ten, and then folded it in half and found to my delight it was exactly equal to the difference between the twenty and the twenty-two. A small matter, but I almost laughed out loud at my success. All the other comparisons worked. I painstakingly pulled out threads until I had a piece that looked like about a meter, and then divided it up by sharp creases with my teeth into ten ten-centimeter lengths and then divided up the last of these into ten one-centimeter divisions. I now had a ruler.

  I at first decided to measure my cell. I said to myself, “I wonder how far I actually walk every day, up and down between these walls?” It was 227 centimeters wide and 351 long. I wondered how many kilometers a day I might make, up and down, up and down, my hands behind my back. I walked from the door to the opposite wall and back. Ten steps, five each way, which meant about seventy centimeters each step. I thought working on a base of seventy might be too much for my mental arithmetic, but if I could shorten the step to 661/2, so that every three steps meant two meters, then a kilometer would take fifteen hundred steps.

  I thought, I’ll walk to the embassy.

  I did not know then precisely where the American Embassy was in relation to Lefortovo Prison, but I remembered that the drive across town in the middle of the night took about fifteen minutes at a pretty modest pace; so I guessed about eight kilometers. Southwest, I guessed. Let’s see how long it takes me to get there.

  The idea excited me strangely. In my dead black cell, isolated from everyone but the anonymous eye at the peephole every minute or so, the fantasy of a walk across Moscow to join friends was totally seductive. I had not seen the outside of the prison, but I had heard the gates swing open and could imagine their size. I made the gates my first target and got up and started to walk as fast as I could, estimating a slightly shortened pace, and just feeling my way downstairs to the gates. Up and down the cell. Now I am at the corridor of boxes, another thirty steps, lucky the door is open; and no one is looking and I’m out into the courtyard. It’s dark enough. There is a van coming in with a prisoner, I’ll just slip behind it, and the gates are still open, and out into the snowy streets and freedom!

  A nourishing fantasy. An energizing fantasy. I breathed in the clear, cold imaginary air and hugged my coat around me. (What coat? Oh, I had somehow kept the exercise coat; that would do.) I turned southwest and began to count my steps, up and down the cell. I walked past the skating rink, with the lights and music and the boys and girls whirling around, but I didn’t look right, r left. I just walked and counted, up and down the cell. Now six hundred paces—it will take twelve thousand tonight, Alex old buddy, and you’d better make it by dawn or they’ll pick you up.

  Keep at it.

  Now a funny thing happened. I began to recognize the streets of Moscow—streets I’d driven through with the boys from the embassy, out on the town with a borrowed embassy car. I thought, Easy, I can’t have come this far. What’s the count? Streets I’d driven along with Mary, with her head on my lap, talking about the future, about America, so far to the west.

  Now I’m going southwest, in Moscow.

  Then I thought, Jesus! Why not go west, not south-west! Why not walk right out of this God-forsaken country? Let’s say it’s only six kilometers from here to the outskirts of the city proper, then I can pick up a road west and hide in some farm building in the morning and just head right across Russia until I’m free! Only nine thousand paces to the edge of Moscow, kid. Pick it up now, pick it up!

  I turned right at the next street in my mind. I did not recognize the street. But the moon hung low in the west and I headed straight for that. No one in the nearly empty streets paid any attention to me. Why should they? I just tucked my head down against the wind and walked and walked.

  The door of the cell opened. “Prepare for interrogation.” I thought, Hell! I’m only at 4,150 paces. I’d been walking for an hour. Then I thought, Why stop? I nodded at the guard, still counting, and determined that I wouldn’t lose the count because every step would matter just as every minute of stolen sleep would matter. I fell into step behind him with my hands behind my back, my eyes straight ahead, and walked and counted, down the corridor, up the steps to the room of the iron book, signed my name with my feet still moving up and down, and counting, counting, might as well add in every step we can, kiddo, because we’re walking home, and on to the interrogation room and into it and down in the chair at last, my legs really tired and glad of the rest now, and I’ve got 4,450 paces and Sidorov isn’t here yet. Now if I can snatch another fifty paces before he gets here, I’m halfway to the edge of the city and then I can finish the trip in the morning before it gets light and I’ll have wiped my feet on Moscow!

  I got up and, started to walk. Sidorov came in on the second trip across the room. “Sit down, prisoner” he barked. Forty-four-seventy-two and three steps across the room to my chair, 4,475, so I have an extra twenty-five to make up in the morning, now let me see exactly where I am and how many kilometers does 4,475 paces make? Could I do that in my head, I wondered? It’s twenty-five paces short of halfway, and I said halfway was, what, three kilometers? Or could I cheat?—because I really started counting after I left the street the prison is on and couldn’t hear the music from the skating rink anymore. Or did I? Twenty-five paces is about sixteen meters. Sixteen meters short of three kilometers. Work that out in decimal places and see if we can get some kind of efficiency norm worked out for this on an hourly basis, Alex old buddy, good old American efficiency. And so on. And after a while Sidorov started shouting at me that he had put the same question to me three times without an answer, what was wrong with me anyway.

  “I don’t get much sleep, you know,” I remember saying to him.

  It was not a very pleasant night, and it lasted the full time. I fell off the chair at least twice, and the second time they woke me with cold water. I was shivering when they led me back to cell 111 at 6 A.M. and my legs were aching from the evening’s crazy enthusiasm, and yet the minute the door opened and the guard beckoned me out of the interrogation room I began to count for sanity, and by the time my breakfast came, althou
gh my legs were screaming for mercy, the buildings of Moscow had begun to thin out for me and I was within one kilometer of the edge of the city.

  Although it is formally true to say that I was in interrogation sixteen to eighteen hours a day, of course one man could not really interrogate for such extended periods and neither could the prisoner react in any sustained way. In the daytime Sidorov would begin with a pro forma suggestion that it was time to confess, which he would repeat several times during the day without putting much steam behind it. The rest of the time he talked about all those other things. Even at night, when he was earning his extra pay, he did not usually keep at me nonstop. Some nights he went through without a break. Maybe he thought he was getting somewhere and maybe it was part of the pattern of wearing me down, wearing me down. Other nights, most nights, he would go out for a good supper around midnight or one o’clock (I guessed; the only clock I ever saw was in the room of the iron book) and come back wiping his chin and read awhile or work on his files. One night I enraged him by making fun of his needle-and-thread work with the files. They were laced into a soft-backed cover with holes down the side, and when he wanted to enter a sheaf of finished protocols he had to get out a sort of long needle and some coarse yarn and, after unlacing the existing binding, sew it up again. When I suggested that in a well-run military organization an important man like a lieutenant colonel would never be required to do such menial work he flew at me so hard I thought he was going to slug me. He yelled at me nonstop for half an hour. He called me the vilest things he could think of. He said that such a statement proved what an anti-Soviet prostitute I really was, threatened to jam the needle into me in a lot of original ways, and sprayed a lot of saliva around the room. He hated the job of lacing those files and I guess it was unbearably humiliating to be teased about it by his prisoner.