I tried returning the same pattern, as soon as I had it memorized. This set off a terrific rattle of taps. I realized that my neighbor thought I suddenly understood the code. I felt impotent and frustrated. I answered with a simple pair of taps. He must have understood. A simple double tap came back.
We found we could get away with tapping while the food was being distributed; that was the only time when the peephole was not opened every minute. In the evenings I began to realize that a new pattern was emerging. My neighbor would start with the familiar 2,4; 3,6; 3,2... 1,3; 5,2.
I would answer with a single tap. He must have taken that to mean I don’t understand. Then he would begin the following pattern: 1,1; 1,2; 1,3; 1,4; 1,5; 1,6.
Then a pause. Then 2,1; 2,2; 2,3; 2,4; 2,5; 2,6. Then a pause. Then 3,1; 3,2 and so on to 3,6. Then it would be 4,1 to 4,6. Then 5,1 to 5,6. I knew there was some kind of key in this. I got out my remaining match stubs. I set them out on the blanket in the number groupings I had heard. My brain was slow and numb from sleeplessness.
Something obvious as hell was there. I knew it. But I could not get it. I would answer back a single tap. I do not understand. And patiently he began again, 1,1; 1,2; right through the whole sequence. We had to be very careful not to get caught.
Sitting on the toilet I found I could tap very quietly on the drainpipe, which branched through the wall into the next cell, and get a response. The toilet was to the right o the door, looking in from outside. The guard could not see my right hand down beside the iron cone, tapping ever so lightly.
My friend kept up his attempts at instruction during every meal, but in the morning he would just tap simple taps that corresponded to the rhythms and routine of the day. No code; just an acknowledgment that we were sharing the same experience. Two taps:—good morning, as I came back from interrogation. (He was always there when I came back; he was not in interrogation then?) Two taps:—going for my walk now, when they came to take him to exercise. Two taps:—I’m back. Two little human bits of caring.
I continued to train the guards to believe I was awake under the shadow of the hat. I had to reach the point where they would not wait to see if I moved, where they would simply make a routine stop at the peephole and go on. Once that was established I could dare to try an extended sleep every day. By extended, I mean an hour or so.
Sidorov was trying to work up a satisfactory set of protocols on the information system within the United States Embassy. Sometimes he cuffed me pretty hard on the ears and made my head ring. But for a couple of weeks there was no more serious beating. I still often went out cold in the interrogation room, and then he would slap me awake and curse and yell. But for the time being he did not kick my slowly healing shins.
Almost every day now, I told myself the plot of a movie. A favorite was 13 Rue Madeleine, a story of commandos and the Gestapo and parachuting into occupied France.
I held my own private screening several times. I found that each time I “saw” this movie I remembered more detail, and after a while I could almost have written out the screenplay.
I started lectures in world geography, calling up everything I could remember about rainfall, population, industry, vegetation, rivers, towns, political structure, and all the rest.
And I trained and trained the guards to think I was wide awake under the hat. Before long I began to give them their mid-term tests and then their final exams. They all passed except that squat old bag and I just gave up on her, but soon, with the rest, I could always get sleep in half-hour chunks, and with the young Komsomol I could sleep for two hours, which was as long as my back held out.
At this point I can predict, I think, what a reader of this page will feel. Relief. “He’s got it made. It’s all right now.”
Part of this is what I felt. Relief, certainly, and a certainty that I was now going to survive. But there was a grimmer side to it. As soon as Sidorov started to beat me, I realized clearly that I was going to be in prison for a long time. I did not think in terms of specific periods and I certainly did not think it would be for the rest of my life. But I knew it was not going to be over soon. I knew there would be more beatings and that I would suffer a lot. I knew I would have to train myself to meet that menace, and the knowledge made me feel numb in the heart. The two or three hours of light sleep I was able to steal each day barely kept me from caving in. I was constantly hungry. My weight dropped steadily. When they gave me back my hat, the hell I was living in became a hell I could survive, but it was still hell. I believe it was at that time that my eyes and my mouth began to settle into a grim cast which is still my normal expression when I am not excited or laughing, and even then I am told it lingers around my eyes. My iron mask never came off, and I can see that it never will.
Chapter 9
I had to have a strategy for protesting against the beatings, and I decided to go on a hunger strike. I had no intention of starving to death. I just wanted to make the strongest gesture I could, and I guess I hoped that they, whoever they were, would do something about it and make Sidorov stop beating me. I had told Sidorov that I would tell him anything I knew, and apart from classified information at the embassy, I was perfectly prepared to do that. If he indicated any knowledge of the Kiev trip, I would even tell him about that. Nothing I had done, in my own view, had any harm in it. I did not know at that time that there were millions in prison camps all over the Soviet Union who had done nothing harmful. I still assumed that, however long it took, I would some day be vindicated and that they would admit they were wrong about me. But I was wrong about them.
Although I was suffering continual discomfort from the emptiness in my belly and getting weaker and weaker, I remembered how Mahatma Gandhi’s prolonged public fast had created a sensation around the world, and he had started as an incredibly skinny little man, so I just started leaving the bread in the food slot when it came in the morning and refusing to offer my plate for the soup or the porridge. I drank the tea for its warmth because the cell was so terribly cold and the hot drink would help me stop shivering for a while and help me sleep. But I ate nothing for three days.
It did no good at all. Sidorov still slapped me around and told me I was a damn fool to try such a useless trick, and at the end of the three days I was dragged, because I could not walk very well, into a clinical-looking room and strapped into a chair and my mouth was forced open first with a knife between my clenched teeth and then held open by a sort of oral speculum while they put a gastric tube down my throat and poured sweet tea and egg yolk and cod-liver oil into me. I realized that there was no point going on with the hunger strike then, and gave it up. The beatings came and went in waves, and I often had that experience of looking at myself shivering on the floor, doubled up with pain, bruised and nauseated, while I watched from outside.
But my mind stayed reasonably clear and my morale was, now that I look back on it, incredibly good. I came to love the invisible nameless being next door who greeted me and said farewells. He tried every evening to teach me the key: 1,1; 1,2; 1,3, and so on. I still could not get it. He persevered. I felt his teaching to be a form of deliberate moral support. Even in his simple double taps in the morning, I heard him telling me to keep my courage up, that I was doing fine, that I would get through, and that he cared for me. That did as much to keep me alive and sane as the sleep I had won myself under the hat. Either one without the other would have left me seriously deprived.
In the periods between beatings, when I was not too much in pain to do anything but escape from myself and watch from outside, I kept my clothes in repair by pulling threads from my towel and mending with my fishbone needles. From time to time the needles would disappear from my cell, but it took only three days for a new one to dry, and I still had my supply of dead matches to use as counters and needle-eye punchers and reminders of days when I could light up a cigarette for Mary and casually flip the match away.
I sang “Don’t Sit under the Apple Tree with Anyone Else but Me,” and “I�
�ve Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle Jingle,” and “Anchors Aweigh,” and “The Caissons Go Rolling Along.”
“Roll Out the Barrel” I saved for particularly tough times, and it always made me feel a lot better.
I often wanted to cry for relief but I knew that if they saw me crying through the peephole then they would know I was beginning to crack.
Sometimes I thought, I’m only twenty-two years old, and all this is happening to me! And I often thought, and got a kick out of thinking it, What a story I’ll have to tell when I get out! Over and over, when something new and bizarre turned up, even when it was disgusting or painful, I would find some small satisfaction in the anticipation of telling the boys about it.
There came a time when I was afraid for a while that Sidorov knew about my Kiev trip to visit Michael Kovko after all. He said one day, “We have definite proof that in 1946 you were being trained in terrorist activities.”
I said, “That’s interesting. Why do you suppose I never knew about that?”
That kind of answer always threw Sidorov because he had no detectable trace of a sense of humor and sarcasm was pretty well lost on him. So he would shake his head as if I had not understood and say, “No, no! I am telling you that we knew about it. Now I want you to admit that you were given terrorist training. Otherwise you will be in a lot of trouble.”
I said, “What kind of training?”
He said, almost triumphantly, “In 1946 you were unmistakably observed practicing sharpshooting with a high-powered pistol.”
If he had sprung that on me a few weeks earlier, before my face hardened, my expression would have given something away, because I could feel my heart begin to beat again and wondered just how much of the Kovko/Kiev story he was on to. Then he said a strange thing which made me feel a little easier again, but more perplexed. He said, “You see, our operatives have been watching you very carefully. Even when you might think you were perfectly safe to carry out your anti-Soviet activities, wherever you went in Moscow we knew what you were doing and had you under observation.”
In Moscow! Then it was not about Kiev. So what was it?
Again, as in the case of the photographs of military men, I sensed he had some kind of actual event in mind, but I could not imagine what it was. Whenever we had gone to the countryside to shoot, I had made sure to give any tails the slip—unless Dina was an agent after all. And if it was Dina, why would she have given me away about shooting bottles in the woods when she had a much better story in the Khrushchev dacha?
Again, Sidorov became violent. I would reel out of a night’s session with half a dozen cuts on my face and both shins screaming with pain. I was not always as sick and confused after the beatings now, because I was less debilitated by sleeplessness than I had been in the first few days of beatings. But I would start to shake with fear if I felt another bout of kicking coining on when my shins had not healed from the last one.
If I could have confessed to something at this point, I think 1 might have. I had no idea what he was talking about with his sharpshooter training. I finally admitted that I used to take a handgun into the woods and shoot bottles, but he was not the least bit interested in that. It was maddening how evasive he was when I asked him to supply the details I was sure he had, or thought he had. He wanted it all to come from me. I could tell that even if I said to him, “All right, I admit I was training to be an anti-Soviet sharpshooter,” he would not be satisfied until I told him where I was trained and who my instructor was, and there was no such detail to be supplied.
Once when I was dizzy with pain from the blows on the head and the kicks in the shins, I shouted at him that I would confess whatever he wanted. I felt kind of crazy. “Put down I’m a Japanese spy!” I said. “I’ll sign that! Put down I was born to be a spy. Put down I’m a Roman Catholic pope or a Chinese emperor, I’ll sign that!
Anything you want!”
He was furious, striding up and down and spraying. “Prostitute! Prostitute! Prostitute! Stupid son of a bitch! I want the details of your training in terrorism and sharpshooting, and I want them now!”
“I don’t know what you are talking about!” I shouted back.
Crack! I could hear the boot hit my shin and I thought it must have broken the bone. I doubled up with the pain and hit my head on the table. I lay on the floor roaring in pain and rage, and he came and smacked me on the back of the head with his fist.
And the next day he’s all hockey news and soccer and the novel he’s reading and maybe another attempt to get me to sign those checks.
To my grief I could not resist any opportunity to tease him or humiliate him.
Once, when the interrogation rooms were all in use, I was led downstairs to the courtyard instead of the interrogation wing. A van was waiting with the DRINK SOVIET CHAMPAGNE sign on the side and the six small vents in the roof. I was driven back to Lubyanka and taken to an office that Sidorov shared with three or four other officers. I had been there several times before, usually in the DRINK SOVIET CHAMPAGNE van, and once or twice in a bread van equipped with the same kind of crouching cells. But this time I was feeling cocky because it was an anniversary.
Sidorov had told me, right at the beginning probably, saying “Don’t worry” when he said it, that no one ever lasted six months under this kind of treatment. By “this kind of treatment” he meant only the solitary cell and the black walls and the sleeplessness, because the beatings had not yet started. Now the reason I felt cocky this particular day was that it was June 15. The weather was warm and I no longer shivered on the floor of my cell when they threw me in it after a hard night with Sidorov. We had passed a few days of relatively easygoing interrogation because Sidorov was preoccupied with something else, and besides I think this bussing back and forth from Lefortovo to Lubyanka put him in a better mood, or distracted him or something. He was always less intense when we were moving around like that. But the biggest reason of all for feeling cocky on June 15 was that I had passed the six months and I was still holding out. Thin and weak and a bit crazy sometimes, but still absolutely determined they would not get me and still able to smile at the bastard who was trying to beat me into the ground.
When I arrived in the Lubyanka office this June 1st, two of Sidorov’s colleagues were doing paperwork at their desks. As Sidorov was opening his files, another lieutenant colonel walked in and gave some papers to one of the colleagues. He said good morning to Sidorov.
Sidorov said, “Say, by the way, has she confessed yet?”
The other lieutenant colonel said dryly, “You know these old revolutionaries, how stubborn they are. Nothing yet.”
“Well,” Sidorov said. Then he said, “Did you tell her her husband was shot?”
“Of course not!” the man said. “I have to use the threat of shooting him to try to get her broken down.”
They talked as if I wasn’t even there.
The man went on, “I showed her some of his protocols, you know. She admitted it was his signature. She said he would never have signed such preposterous stuff so it must be a forgery, and all that same old stuff. I’ll get her soon enough.
Don’t worry.” He pulled out a bunch of keys and dangled them in front of Sidorov. “The chief gave me possession of their dacha, you know. You should see the furniture. And a great library. Come and see me when you finish your case.” He gave a wave and walked out.
I could see we were not in for a very hard day and I started thinking about some way to make Sidorov look a fool in front of his colleagues.
“Going to talk today?” he asked. I shook my head.
“All right, all right,” h said easily. “We’ll see if you change your mind later.”
Then he got out his long needle and his twine and his scratchy fountain pen and began to work on his files. He cursed the pen a lot. “This goddamn lousy thing. It puts ink on me, it scratches like a cat, and it won’t write, goddamn it!”
One of the interrogators started to laugh at him. “Well, you’re
a durak, Sidorov, a fool. You can get a decent pen if you try. Look here. I got this American Parker pen three years ago. It writes like a charm. Here, try it.” Sidorov took the pen and tried it and admired its smoothness.
I said out loud, “Fifty-eight point ten!”
Sidorov looked up. He had a little wrinkle of bewilderment on his forehead. I had come to relish being able to produce that wrinkle “What’s that?”
“Fifty-eight point ten,” I repeated. “Fifty-eight point ten!”
The Soviet criminal code was famous for its section fifty-eight, the section under which political prisoners were charged with everything from having an anti-Soviet dream to trying to overthrow the government by force of arms. The subsection 58.10, anti-Soviet propaganda, includes a charge based upon badmouthing Soviet-manufactured goods, even by implication through praising goods of foreign manufacture.
“Arrest him!” I said, nodding from Sidorov to the other interrogator. “He’s committed anti-Soviet propaganda. Praising foreign goods. That’s one of my charges. Ten years if you can prove it, and I’ll be your witness. Arrest him!”
I underestimated Sidorov. Or overestimated his reticence in front of his fellow practitioners. He just walked quickly across the office, knocked me off the chair with a hard swing of his open palm, and left me on the floor.
After a while he said in a tired voice, “Get up, you son of a bitch.” I got up on the chair. I stared at him and he stared back. I wondered what he was thinking. Once again I thought there might have been a hint of admiration for the way I was holding out. But he was angry, too, and tired. Six months, I thought, and this guy is working me over sixteen, eighteen hours a day, and—I’m tiring him out! My ear was ringing from the smack, but I still felt cocky, though not cocky enough to risk another smack with some smart remark. I became aware, studying him that day, that he had lost a lot of weight too. Not, of course, anything like me. I must have gone from 186 down to
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