by Victor Serge
The woman who wrote them wandered up and down Boulevard Sebastopol every day from five o’clock on, provocative and on the lookout. She knew her lover was a lost man. And she knew the score.
I made the acquaintance of two other neighbors, more conveniently, and less intimately. The guards sometimes give in to the pleadings of a man in isolation who is too weary of solitude, and allow him a yard companion during exercise period. It happened to me two or three times a year. In this way I met a neighbor from across the hall who intrigued me, a little old man, all white, spic and span, a little shabby, who looked a lot like the portraits of President Combes … When he learned I was an anarchist, he shook my hand effusively. In the “bear cage” he minutely observed the rules of a childlike and untainted courtesy. His tiny eyes, blue as motionless pools, fixed me with a watery stare while he rubbed his hands together and repeated, as if he were in a salon:
“Delighted, Monsieur, truly delighted …”
This man, a dead ringer for “little papa Combes,” had been a lawyer and had known Prince Kropotkin and Pierre Martin at the time of the Lyons trial; their memory filled him with a respect which was, perhaps, under the circumstances, only politeness. Then, having gone into business, and after long years of financial speculations, he had brought down on himself a large number of suits for fraud, violations of corporation law, etc. The pretrial examination of his numerous cases had been going on for two years. He explained to me that, since he knew more about the legal Code, procedure, jurisprudence, the brief, petitions of appeal, and delaying tactics than anyone, he would be able to prolong it for at least a year longer.
“You understand, Monsieur, at my age you don’t like change. Here, at least, I’m left alone, I am respected. The Chief Warden is very nice. I get my food from a restaurant …”
He expected to be sentenced to five years—he only spoke of this guardedly—and he hoped to do at least half, of his time in the preventive-prison system and then to be let out on parole.
Years later, in another prison, I heard him mentioned as one of the cleverest men in France. I asked what had happened to him. They told me that he had died in prison before the end of his trial, but after having crowned his career with a last dazzling exploit. It seems this swindler was able to inspire such confidence in the Chief Warden that the latter, led on by the prospect of a “nice little investment,” entrusted him with his savings … The Chief Warden’s savings had naturally gone into buying white wine for the old charmer.
The other neighbor, whom I met the same way, was a rather tall gentleman with the bearing of an ex-officer. His chest was embellished by a broad, fan-shaped beard. But his face, pockmarked to the forehead, was dark, with sharp little black eyes. He was an ex-colonial official— he said—charged with embezzling and wearing unauthorized decorations, and he bore a historical name—a name admirably suited, in this century, to seduce the plebeian wealth of Yankee lard-and-leather heiresses. The occupant of Cell Number 24 (I believe), Tenth Division, was the last direct descendant of a crusader who had been King of Jerusalem and then Emperor of Constantinople; and of a Cardinal who had been Finance Minister under Louis XVI.
People generally don’t realize the place held by the old nobility in this world. On various lists of old offenders I have seen the name of the descendant of a Superintendent of Finance under Philip the Handsome.
Ah, the old families!
The pathological self-centeredness of men in confinement sometimes comes out in an almost unthinking manner. I remember one chance neighbor who called out to me in the exercise yard. That day I had entered my eighth month of confinement. “How long you been here?” his voice asked me.
“Eight months.”
The question, as it often happens, was asked only for propriety’s sake. You have to pretend to be interested in others before you can talk about yourself. But the essential thing is to talk about yourself. Me, me, me, do you understand, I’ve been here for …
On the other side of the wall the man gave out a sigh. A short pause; the guard was going by. Then feverish, with an inexpressible accent of suffering, the voice answered me:
“And me for eight days. Eight days already! It’s hard! … Eight days! Eight days! …”
“There are those,” I said, “who are doing eight years and who keep their mouths shut.”
Prisoners awaiting trial are not allowed to receive newspapers. Their correspondence is censored by the examining magistrate. It is forbidden to discuss anything but family matters. My communications with the outside world were extremely rare. But around me, even in jail, I could sometimes feel the active, although invisible and silent, presence of a sort of freemasonry. When an event which might interest me took place on the outside, I learned of it first, thanks to this clandestine comradeship.
Two men I had known had just been killed: two magnificent rebels gone to waste. As morning soup was being distributed, a somber stare fell on me. Twenty minutes later, as I was passing my mess tin back through the Judas, a newspaper rolled up into a ball fell at my feet.
I felt I was reading news from another planet. There was fighting in Albania. The Montenegrins at Scutari. Monsieur Poincaré. Lord Grey. Wars, epidemics, catastrophes, governmental crises went on without causing the slightest perturbation in the smooth running of that perfect machine: prison.
There are silent encounters. One morning I found myself in an exercise yard whose wire-meshed side was turned toward the high window of a cell. I could see a man’s silhouette rather clearly in it; he was tall, bearded, well on in years, and he walked around his cage with rapid steps. Every half-minute he passed in front of the window again, without seeing me. His head was then visible in direct sunlight, in profile: a high forehead, somewhat receding; an arched nose; thick lips; a powerful face, but with something incomplete in the expression, like an involuntary confession of some weakness. He walked, but looked at nothing. Head lowered, he went on.
“Don’t you recognize him?” asked the guard who came to get me to take me back to my cell. “That’s T***, you know, the murderer …”
The murderer? (Since then, I have met many men with bloodied hands, and have learned they are no different from the others.) An ordinary murderer. The kind who slowly tightens his sinewy hands around the neck of an old woman so he can snatch the wad of bills from under a pile of worn, rough linen. I scrutinized that face, by chance a little more ravaged than the ordinary face, with a somewhat higher forehead, its tense muscles and deep lines betraying more concentrated power. The bearded face of an old tycoon with irons in every fire, the kind you meet in banks and in factories, surrounded by the din of work. To complete the resemblance, T*** stopped in front of his window, put on his pince-nez, and read over a letter. Our glances crossed, doubtless without his seeing me. His brown eyes were bewildered and absent, rather gentle: the sickly air of a man suffering migraine headaches.
5 See translator’s introduction.
TEN
Alms and the Almoner
ONLY ONE VISITOR CROSSES THE THRESHOLD OF THE CELL: THE ALMONER, priest, minister, or rabbi. He brings the alms of his presence, the alms of his words and gestures. His faith matters no more than the belief or disbelief of the man in the cell. Guards and officials blend into the walls themselves, the Judases, bars and bolts. You feel in the marrow of your bones that they are no more than cogs in the prison machine. And this is reciprocal: Human beings no longer exist for them. Only such and such a number occupying such and such a cell. The cell counts, not the crowd of inmates, not man. This chaplain is a man. And not an enemy. He is interested only in man. His profession is oddly anachronistic. He is concerned with that undefinable je ne sais quoi, the soul.
“The soul?”—laughed an eighteen-year-old inmate, “Catholic” and totally agnostic—“I think it’s a dumping ground for the old blues.”
Those who declare themselves Catholics, Protestants, or Jews on arrival are visited by the chaplain of their faith. The cell door closes even more
tomblike over the “freethinkers”: They see no one.
My agnosticism neither shocked nor surprised the Protestant chaplain, an old man of solid bearing and the appearance of a wealthy Huguenot. This pastor, a man of great kindness, open and broadminded, had been carrying on his disconcerting mission as prisoners’ chaplain and a prison official for perhaps a quarter of a century.
I remember his low voice, the heavy shaking of his head, his deep sigh when he said to me one gray afternoon:
“Many are those I have accompanied to the scaffold to hide it from them a few more seconds before the end, so that the last voice they would hear would be mine, crying: ‘May God help you!’ Many …”
The whole ambiguous duplicity of the chaplain’s calling was apparent to me here, as was the whole revolting sham of his function. Even more revolting because the man was sincere and kind, resigned to his sacerdotal calling with that inner toughness that a social conscience gives to the intelligent bourgeois. The guillotine, doubtless, is not Christian. But the guillotine is necessary to the Christians. The death of Pierre Durand, at a predetermined hour, “by verdict of law,” on that seesaw plank, is a horrible thing. But the justice that commands that death is sacred. The pastor’s duty is to sympathize with Pierre Durand’s final anguish. His “social” duty is to make sure the guillotine functions properly. Christian compassion plays its part, as does the oiling of the blade.
Once a week, the chaplain comes over to the prison. His stomach lined with a good lunch, his hands in the pockets of a well-tailored overcoat, appropriate to the season, his mind occupied by the ordinary things of life, our chaplain crosses the city. On the way over, he is perhaps distracted by the display in a bookstore window, an elegant silhouette, the morning’s headlines, the stock-market quotations. In his mind he maps out his day:
Three to five o’clock, prison. Be at the editorial office of Church Life at 5:30 … 6:30 promised to call on such and such a lady …
He thinks, as he approaches the prison, that eighty men are waiting for him in their cells. Including: one condemned man who will not be pardoned; two or three who will probably be condemned; a dozen “lifers”; that little D*** who is so ill; B*** who is always lying and begging for favors; H*** who prays and scoffs; Z*** who is becoming more and more unhinged. The thought of all these sufferings which he sees and cannot relieve saddens the chaplain. Eighty! And the prison is so big. Five minutes to get from the Fifth Division to the Fourteenth. The chaplain is out of breath.
At the gatehouse, the chaplain shakes some jailers’ hands …
Whenever he hears the sudden clang of the doors being unlocked, the stoop-shouldered boy with the jaundiced face of a sick fox who occupies Cell Number 8–6 feels his heart beating anxiously. The chaplain has just read his card in the file: “nineteen years old, theft. Breaking and entering.” The name is unfamiliar. Sad. Let’s go in. The hunted man, in his cage, gives an embarrassed greeting. Then he asserts that he is innocent. Innocent. That he is hungry: dying of hunger, the soup is nothing but water. That his father and mother no longer recognize him as their son. That he is without news of his wife, who has had a miscarriage. He is gentle. “I can’t go on,” he says, smiling, “it’s too much all at once.” It’s true, all too true. Between the two men hangs an invisible balance, and with each little phrase the weights of suffering fall on the guilty man’s side, keep on falling. The chaplain can do nothing. Theft with breaking and entering, he thinks: five years’ confinement; with extenuating circumstances, two years of prison. And the disciplinary battalions in Africa, in all probability.
“Would you like a Bible, my son?”
Oh! Yes! the nineteen-year-old-theft-with-breaking-and-entering wants a Bible, a book, a fat book.
“Read the Book of Job. He, too, thought he was abandoned even by God …”
The nineteen-year-old-theft-with-breaking-and-entering will read the Book of Job. But the chaplain, knows very well, deep down, that if the Almighty led Job out of captivity and blessed him until “he had fourteen thousand sheep, and six thousand camels, and a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand she asses,” and “he had also seven sons and three daughters,”
“… and after this lived Job a hundred and forty years,”
“… and died, being old and full of days,” as is written in Chapter XLII, Verses 12, 13, 16, and 17 of the Holy Writ—this poor bastard here is poorer than Job, and no one will shorten his suffering by a day …
The next cell smells bad. The man who coughs in it never opens the window. Very clean, nonetheless, ageless, impassive, as if withdrawn from his own life. An undeniable murderer on his way to the scaffold. The matter is closed. His deepest concern is for his soul. Before this door had closed on him, he never even suspected he had a soul. He hardly ever thought. Gambling, the races, women, Mitzi (whose throat he neatly cut one night with a razor). Now he prays a great deal. His eyes have grown larger, round, shadowy, glassy.
“I go up in two weeks,” he says this time.
The chaplain understands the allusion to the next session of the criminal court. With his long experience, he is able to calculate fairly accurately the number of days this man has left to live: there are the three days allowed for filing an appeal, the examination of the appeal, the appeal for clemency to the President of the Republic, the time necessary to prepare the execution. It’s now April; all of that will bring us up to July … This calculation is rapidly traced in the chaplain’s brain. He rests his firm, ruddy hand on the shoulder of the man-who-will-be-guillotined:
“Would you like it if we prayed together for you, my friend?”
Eighty! The chaplain won’t be able to see more than thirty today. In two hours, subtracting the time needed to get around the prison, that leaves three minutes and thirty seconds for each visit. At five o’clock the chaplain goes away. At five o’clock, Pirard, Marcel, who is “going crazy” from being alone, suddenly feels crushed, overwhelmed by the idea that the chaplain will not come to see him today, that no one will come for another week. Why—yes, why—did they refuse this evening to give Pirard, Marcel, this last sacrament: three minutes and thirty seconds of human presence?
Twice a month, on Sunday morning, the minister conducts a service. The prison has a rudimentary church, Protestant chapel, and synagogue: everything that is necessary to render unto God what is God’s. The Protestant chapel is cellular in construction, and this invention simultaneously brings the science of prisons and the practice of religion to a remarkable degree of perfection.
There is a semicircle composed-of several successive rows of cells. A man is placed in each of these compartments, divided from one another by oak partitions. They make you think of vertical coffins. All you can see in front of you are the pastor’s pulpit and the two back windows. In one of these windows you can make out the corner of a window ledge. Birds come and perch there. Life! At the foot of the pulpit, looking bored, stands the guard on duty.
The pastor speaks of the Holy Writ and of terrestrial matters to his strange flock of pale men, each motionless in his cell. He sometimes quotes Saint Paul’s words, quite appropriate in front of these starving sometime criminals (“Sloth is the mother of all the vices”): He who does not work shall not eat! His bass voice is deep; and what he says about the divine legend strikes deeply into these minds unhinged by a hellish existence; what he says about bourgeois morality touches the minds of these unlucky, defeated men to the very quick. Others go to chapel in order to pass a “telegram” from hand to hand: “to Number Seven in the row, look out—, and don’t get nabbed!” The latter keep their faces silent in respectful hypocrisy. Their hands joined, they bow their heads during the prayer.
“Our Father who art in heaven! Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven …”
On the way out, someone murmurs:
“Go on, you windbag! You get plenty to eat!”
Back from the chapel.
My neighbor, the sad-faced clow
n, finds a blackish bucket in front of his door. A filthy rag, provided for washing the floor, is floating in it. This hygienic ritual is a dominical affair in our corner of the prison. The bucket gets slimier and slimier as it passes from cell to cell. You drag the nauseating rag across the floor with both hands, while it shreds apart and blackens any water. For long hours afterwards, the dampness seeps through your clothes, making shivers run up your spine.
Obedient ciphers, we wait in front of our doors for the “screw” to come along and lock us up. My, neighbor bends over the bucket, looks up at me and says, mocking:
“‘Our Father who art in heaven …’ He’s a nice guy, the Father! Bastard!”
ELEVEN
Capital Punishment
DEATH’S MULTIPLE PRESENCE. TOTAL HELPLESSNESS BEFORE A FATE AS IMPLACable as the end. Sharpened perception of time’s flight; consciousness of death. The will to live weakens. Depression tortures the tired brain. The huge weight of a life sentence; the near-certain premonition of dying here. Finally, the ultimate torture of those condemned to die.
Whenever a man is guillotined the knife descends slowly, grazing thousands of bent, expectant necks. The prostrate multitude feel a shiver of terror tinged with defiance and perverse attraction.
I have seen a Paris crowd gather around an intoxicating and revolting execution. The hum of the night streets had grown more and more quiet, more and more uneasy in the dismal boulevards surrounding the prison, till, in the darkness, it collided, like a front consisting of thousands of livid faces, with the lines of troops. Bizarre revelers arrived by automobile. Under the street lamps, urchins with queer, mocking grins traced the gesture of decapitation in the air. Bewildered crowds of workers and young intellectuals were jostled, divided, dispersed, forced back in disorder by the black wedges of cavalry or police charges as they nursed their impotent anger in bitter idleness. Many couples exchanged vague caresses. You could see them getting out of limousines parked at the edge of deserted streets, where the expectation of the execution was no more than a rhythmic humming, rising and falling like the tide at the foot of a cliff. What cliff of implacable cold stone did the tide of this crowd beat against: death or prison? You could see them arriving in groups and bunches from the poor working-class suburbs and from the depths of the slums—la Bastille, la Chapelle, Charonne, Montmartre and Montparnasse—pimps and hookers, a world of victims liberated only by the knowledge that sometimes victims take revenge.