And even if some part of our dreams came true in the transit prison, something else would foul it all up anyway.
What awaits us in the bath? You can never be sure. They begin suddenly to shave all the women’s hair off. (In Krasnaya Presnya, in November, 1950.) Or a line of us naked men is clipped by women barbers only. In the Vologda steam room, portly Aunt Motya used to shout: “Stand up, men!” And she’d let the whole line have it from the steam pipe. And the Irkutsk Transit Prison argued differently: it’s more natural for the entire service staff in the bath to be male and for a man to smear on the medicinal tar ointment between the women’s legs. Or during the winter, in the cold soaping-up room of the Novosibirsk Transit Prison only cold water comes from the faucets; the prisoners make up their minds to ask higher-ups, and a captain comes, puts his own hand unfastidiously under a faucet: “I say this water is hot, get it?” I have already wearied of reporting that there are baths which have no water at all, that they scorch clothes in the roaster, that after the bath they compel people to run naked and barefoot through the snow to get their things (the counterintelligence of the Second Byelorussian Front in Brodnica in 1945).
From your very first steps in the transit prison you realize that here you are not in the hands of the jailers or the officers of the prison administration, who at least adhere some of the time to some kind of written law. Here you are in the hands of the trusties. That surly bath attendant who comes to meet your prisoner transport: “Well, go wash, gentlemen Fascists!” And that work-assignment clerk with a plywood writing board who looks over your formation searchingly and hurries you up. And that instructor, cleanshaven except for a prominent forelock, who slaps his leg with that rolled-up newspaper and at the same time gives your bags a once-over. And then other transit-prison trusties, whom you don’t recognize, penetrate your suitcases with X-ray eyes—oh, how alike they all are! And where in your brief prisoner-transport journey have you seen them all before? Not so clean-looking, not so well washed, but the same kind of ugly-mug swine with pitiless, bare-toothed grins?
Baaaah! These are the same blatnye, the thieves, again. Those same urki crooks, whom Leonid Utyosov glorifies in his songs. Here again are Zhenka Zhogol, Seryoga-Zver, and Dimka Kishkenya, but not behind bars this time; they have been cleaned up, dressed up as representatives of the state. And putting on airs of great importance, they see to it that discipline is observed—by us. And if one peers into those snouts, one can even, with imagination, picture that they sprang from the same Russian roots as the rest of us—that once upon a time they were village boys whose fathers bore such names as Klim, Prokhor, Guri, and that their general structure is even similar to our own: two nostrils, two irises in the eyes, a rosy tongue with which to swallow food and utter certain Russian sounds, which, however, shape totally new words.
Every chief of a transit prison has enough presence of mind to realize that he can send his relatives back home the wages for all staff positions or else he can divvy them up with the other prison officers. And all you have to do is whistle to get as many volunteers as you want from among the socially friendly prison elements to carry out all that work just in return for being allowed to cast anchor at the transit prison and not have to go on to a mine or to the taiga. All these work-assignment clerks, office clerks, bookkeepers, instructors, bath attendants, barbers, stockroom clerks, cooks, dishwashers, laundresses, tailors who repair underwear and linens—are permanent transit-prison residents. They receive prison rations and are registered in cells, and they swipe the rest of their soup and chow on their own out of the common food pot or out of the bundles of the transit zeks. All these transit-prison trusties regard it as certain that they will never be better off in any camp. We arrive in their hands still not completely plucked, and they bamboozle us to their hearts’ content. It is they and not the jailers who search us and our belongings here, and before the search they suggest we turn in our money for safekeeping, and they seriously write down a list—we never see the list or the money again. “We turned in our money.” “Who to?” the officer who has arrived on the scene asks in surprise. “Well, it was one of them.” “Who exactly?” The trusties hadn’t noticed which one. “Why did you turn it over to him?” “We thought. . .” “That’s what the turkey thought! Think less and you’ll be better off.” And that’s that. They suggest we leave our things in the vestibule to the bath: “No one’s going to take them. Who needs them?” We leave them, for after all we can’t take them into the bath with us anyway. We return and there are no sweaters left and no fur-lined mittens. “What kind of a sweater was it?” “Grayish.” “Well, that means it went to the laundry.” They also take things from us honestly: in return for taking a suitcase into the storage room for safekeeping; for putting us in a cell without the thieves; for sending us off on prisoner transports as soon as possible; for not sending us off as long as possible. The only thing they don’t do is rob us by main force out in the open.
“But those aren’t thieves!” the connoisseurs among us explain. “These are the bitches—the ones who work for the prison. They are enemies of the honest thieves. And the honest thieves are the ones imprisoned in cells.” But somehow this is hard for our rabbity brains to grasp. Their ways are the same; they have the same kind of tattoos. Maybe they really are enemies of those others, but after all they are not our friends either, that’s how it is. . . .
And by this time they have forced us to sit down in the yard right underneath the cell windows. The windows all have “muzzles” on them and you can’t look in, but from inside, hoarse, friendly voices advise: “Hey, fellows! You know what they do here? When they search you, they take away everything loose like tea and tobacco. If you have any, toss it in here, through our window. We’ll give it back later.” So what do you know? We are suckers and rabbits. Maybe they do take tea and tobacco away. We have read about universal prisoner solidarity in all our great literature, that one prisoner won’t deceive another. The way they spoke to us was friendly. “Hey, fellows!” And so we toss them our tobacco pouches. And the genuine pure-bred thieves on the other side catch them and guffaw: “You Fascist stupes.”
And here are the slogans with which the whole transit prison welcomes us even though they don’t actually hang them on the walls: “Don’t look for justice here!” “You’re going to have to hand over everything you’ve got to us.” “You’ll have to give it all up.” This is repeated to you by the jailers, the convoy, and the thieves. You are overwhelmed by your unbearable prison term, and you are trying to figure out how to catch your breath, while everyone around you is figuring out how to plunder you. Everything works out so as to oppress the political prisoner, who is already depressed and abandoned without all that. “You will have to give it all up.” The jailer at the Gorky Transit Prison shakes his head hopelessly; and with a sense of relief, Ans Bernshtein gives him his officer’s greatcoat—not free, but in exchange for two onions. And why should you complain about the thieves if you see all the jailers at Krasnaya Presnya wearing chrome-leather boots they were never issued? They were all lifted by the thieves in the cells and then pushed to the jailers. Why complain about the thieves if the instructor of the Cultural and Educational Department of the camp administration is a blatnoi, a thief, himself and writes reports on the politicals? (The Kem Transit Prison.) And how are you ever going to get justice against the thieves in the Rostov Transit Prison when this is their ancient native tribal den?
They say that in 1942 at the Gorky Transit Prison some officer prisoners (including Gavrilov, the military engineer Shchebetin, and others) nonetheless rebelled, beat up the thieves, and forced them to stay in line. But this is always regarded as a legend; did the thieves capitulate in just one of the cells? For long? And how was it that the bluecaps allowed the socially hostile elements to beat up the socially friendly ones? And when they say that at the Kotlas Transit Prison in 1940 the thieves started to grab money right out of the hands of the politicals lined up at the commissary, and the pol
iticals began to beat them up so badly that they couldn’t be stopped, and the perimeter guards entered the compound with machine guns to defend the thieves—now there’s something that rings true. That’s the way it really was.
Foolish relatives! They dash about in freedom, borrow money (because they never have that kind of money at home), and send you foodstuffs and things—the widow’s last mite, but also a poisoned gift, because it transforms you from a free though hungry person into one who is anxious and cowardly, and it deprives you of that newly dawning enlightenment, that toughening resolve, which are all you need for your descent into the abyss. Oh, wise Gospel saying about the camel and the eye of the needle! These material things will keep you from entering the heavenly kingdom of the liberated spirit. And you see that others in the police van have the same kind of bags as you. “Ragbag bastards!” the thieves have already snarled at you in the Black Maria—but there were only two of them and there were fifty of you and so far they haven’t touched you. And now they were holding us for the second day at the Krasnaya Presnya station with our legs tucked beneath us on the dirty floor because we were so crowded. However, none of us was observing the life going on around us, because we were all too concerned with how to turn in our suitcases for safekeeping. Even though we were supposed to have the right to turn in our things for safekeeping, nonetheless the only reason the work-assignment clerks permitted us to do it was because the prison was a Moscow prison and we ourselves hadn’t yet lost our Moscow look.
What a relief—our things had been checked. (And that meant we would have to give them up not at this transit prison but later on.) The only things left dangling from our hands were our bundles with our ill-fated foodstuffs. Too many of us beavers had been assembled in one place. They began to distribute us among different cells. I was shoved into a cell with that same Valentin whom I had been with the day I signed for my OSO sentence, and who had proposed with touching sentiment that we begin a new life in camp. It was not yet packed full. The aisle was free. There was plenty of space under the bunks. According to the traditional arrangement, the thieves occupied the second tier of bunks: their senior members were beside the windows, their juniors farther back. A neutral gray mass was on the lower bunks. No one attacked us. Without looking around and without thinking ahead, inexperienced as we were, we sat down on the asphalt floor and crawled under the bunks. We would even be cozy there. The bunks were low for big men to get under, and we had to slide in on our bellies, inching along the asphalt floor. We did. And we were going to lie there quietly and talk quietly. Not a chance! In the semidarkness, with a wordless rustling, from all sides juveniles crept up on us on all fours, like big rats. They were still boys, some twelve-year-olds even, but the Criminal Code accepted them too. They had already been processed through a thieves’ trial, and they were continuing their apprenticeship with the thieves here. They had been unleashed on us. They jumped us from all sides and six pairs of hands stripped from us and wrenched from under us all our wealth. And all this took place in total silence, with only the sound of sinister sniffing. And we were trapped: we couldn’t get up, we couldn’t move. It took no more than a minute for them to seize the bundles with the fat bacon, sugar, and bread. They were gone. We lay there feeling stupid. We had given up our food without a fight. And we could go on lying there now, but that was utterly impossible. Creeping out awkwardly, rear ends first, we got up from under the bunks.
Am I a coward? I had thought I wasn’t one. I had pushed my way into the heat of a bombing in the open steppe, I hadn’t been afraid to drive over a trail obviously mined with antitank mines. I had remained coolheaded when I led my battery out of encirclement and went back in for a damaged command car. Why, then, at that moment didn’t I grab one of those human rats and grate his rosy face on the black asphalt? Was he too small? Well then, go for their leaders. But no. At the front we are strengthened by some kind of supplementary awareness (and quite false, too, perhaps): is it a sense of our military unity? The sense of being in the right place at the right time? Of duty? But in this new situation nothing is clear, there are no rules, and everything has to be learned by feel.
Getting to my feet, I turned to their senior, the pakhan, the ringleader of the thieves. All the stolen victuals were there in front of him beside the window on the second tier of bunks: the juvenile rats hadn’t eaten a thing themselves. They were disciplined. Nature had sculpted the front part of the ringleader’s head, in bipeds usually called a face, with nausea and hate. Or perhaps it had come to be what it was from living the life of a beast of prey. It sagged crookedly and loosely, with a low forehead, a savage scar, and modern steel crowns on the front teeth. His little eyes were exactly large enough to see all familiar objects and yet not take delight in the beauties of the world. He looked at me as a boar looks at a deer, knowing he could always knock me off my feet.
He was waiting. And what did I do? Leap forward to smash my fist in that ugly mug at least once and then go down in the aisle? Alas, I did not.
Am I a scoundrel? Until that moment I had always thought that I wasn’t. But now, plundered and humiliated, I found it offensive to get down flat on my stomach again and crawl back beneath the bunks. And so I addressed the ringleader of the thieves indignantly and told him that since he had taken our food away from us he might at least give us a place on the bunks. (Now just tell me, wasn’t that a natural complaint for a city dweller and an officer?)
And what happened then? The ringleader of the thieves agreed. After all, I was thereby surrendering any claim to the fat bacon; and I was thereby recognizing his superior authority; and I was revealing a point of view in common with his—he, too, would have driven off the weakest. And he gave orders for two of the gray neutrals to get off the lower bunks beside the window and free a space for us. They obeyed submissively. And we lay down in the best places. For a while we still grieved over our loss. (The thieves paid no attention to my military breeches. They weren’t their kind of uniform. But one of the thieves was already fingering Valentin’s woolen trousers. He liked them.) And it was only at night that the reproachful whisper of our neighbors reached us: how could we ask the thieves to help us by driving two of our own people under the bunks in our place? And only then did awareness of my own meanness prick my conscience and make me blush. (And for many years thereafter I blushed every time I remembered it.) The gray prisoners on the lower bunks were my own brothers, 58-1b, the POW’s. Had I not just a short while ago sworn to assume the burden of their fate? And then I had shunted them off under the bunks. True, they hadn’t done anything to defend us against the thieves. But why should they have fought for our fat bacon if we ourselves didn’t? They had had enough cruel fights back in POW camps to destroy their faith in decency. But they hadn’t done me any harm, and I had them.
And thus it is that we have to keep getting banged on flank and snout again and again so as to become, in time at least, human beings, yes, human beings. . . .
* * *
But even for the newcomer whom the transit prison cracks open and shucks, it is very, very necessary. It gives him some gradual preparation for camp life. Such a change all in one step would be more than the heart could bear. His consciousness would be unable to orient itself in that murk all at once. It has to happen gradually.
Then, too, the transit prison gave the prisoner the semblance of communicating with home. It was there he wrote the first letter he was permitted to: reporting that he hadn’t been shot and, sometimes, the direction of his prisoner transport, and these were always the first unfamiliar words home of a man who had been plowed over by interrogation. At home they continued to remember him as he had been, but he would never be that person again. And that could suddenly, like a stroke of lightning, become apparent in one or another clumsily written line. Clumsily written because, even though letters could be sent from transit prisons, and there was a mailbox in the yard, it was impossible to get either paper or pencils—or anything to sharpen a pencil with. However, a ma
khorka wrapper or one from a sugar packet could turn up and be smoothed out, and someone in the cell would have a pencil—and so lines would be written in an undecipherable scrawl which would determine the family’s future peace or discord.
Women driven out of their minds by receiving such a letter would sometimes precipitately rush off and try to get to their husbands at the transit prison—even though visits were never allowed and they would have succeeded only in burdening him with things. One such woman provided, in my opinion, the theme for a monument to all wives—and even indicated the place for it.
This was in the Kuibyshev Transit Prison in 1950. The prison was situated in a low-lying area (from which, however, the Zhiguli Gates of the Volga River could be seen). And right above the prison, bordering it on the east, rose a high, long, grassy hill. It was outside the camp compound and above it; and from the inside and down below we couldn’t see the approach to it. Very rarely did anyone ever appear up there, although sometimes goats were pastured there or children played. And one cloudy summer day a city woman appeared on its ridge. Shading her eyes with her hand and barely moving, she began to scan our compound from above. At the time, three heavily populated cells were taking their outdoor walk in three separate exercise yards—and there in the abyss among those three hundred depersonalized ants she hoped to catch sight of her man! Did she hope that her heart would tell her which one he was? In all probability they had refused to allow her a visit with him and so she had climbed that hill. Everyone noticed her from the courtyards and everyone stared at her. Down below in the hollow there was no wind, but it was blowing hard up above. It made her long dress, her jacket, and her long hair stream out and billow, expressing all that love and anxiety which possessed her.
The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1 Page 62