by Victor Serge
On the way out of the Maria, a city trooper, or ‘Cipal, snaps the cuffs on the new arrival and leads him to the Souricière.
The name Souricière, or “mousetrap,” is a fitting one. Two stories of stench-infested wire cages, just big enough to hold a man and a latrine. Two paces wide, five paces long at the most. At one end, the wire-mesh door; at the other, the filthy toilet seat of rusty iron, stopped up to prevent anyone from destroying anything in it. The stench of urine and defecation wafts up over the drawings on the walls. The accused is left to stew there for long hours, frequently five or six at a stretch. How to keep busy? Your defense is ready: Constantly thinking it over only weakens your mind and wears on your nerves. You observe the comings and goings. They bore you in the end: Their variety is a form of monotony. So then you look for the pencil stub which the previous occupants of the filthy stall have concealed in a crevice of the wall under the latrine; or you remove your own from the inside lining of your jacket and add your own page to the prodigious book of the wall.
This wall was once whitewashed. At first glance it appears a solid gray, made up of a tangled, confused, crosshatched network of inscriptions and drawings. Names, stories, rhymed couplets, appointments, confessions: an incredible swarm of writings and hieroglyphics weaves a mad arabesque around the four great human themes: struggle, sorrow, love, carnal lust. The primitive literature of the inhabitants of the social jungle, identical on the walls of every jail. One word of advice is found here again and again, sharp and clear, signed by countless hands:
Never confess!
Someone who didn’t sign has etched his experience in little block letters over the name Adèle written out in a fine round hand:
I was dumb, I confessed, I’m screwed, it’s all over for me.
There is also:
I confessed: 5 years.
Obscenity radiates from the ceiling down to the tiled floor, from the door over to the latrine, in drawings which sometimes attain the lewd perfection of Persian miniatures. In one of “my” cells in the Souricière, a life-size drawing of a naked woman took up the whole back wall: lower belly slit open, pointed breasts, mouth twisted, prostituted: The hallucinated artist had not been able to get the proportions right and had been careful and workmanlike only in finishing the sexual parts. The eyes, shoulders, arms might have been drawn by a clumsy ten-year-old child.
(It was only much later and in a very different place that I ever saw pornography comparable to this in imaginative frenzy and in the total absence of aesthetic pretensions. It was in the Winter Palace of Petrograd in the modest soldier’s apartment of Czar Nicholas I, one of the masters of post-Napoleonic Europe, one of the heads of the Holy Alliance. In an anteroom off his bedroom there was a cabinet concealing a shower bath and a clothes closet on one side, at the back of which an insignificant painting was hanging. A hidden mechanism, well known to the august hands, allowed the first canvas to be pushed, aside revealing a second one, which was peopled with a swarming mass of purplish, rosy, turgid flesh intertwined in the most complicated positions …)
On that same wall someone’s fingers had left fecal traces. Someone else had written in blood. The blood letters, having turned brown, looked like streams of excrement …
Someone had translated everyone’s advice into a single, lapidary phrase:
Shut up or croak.
A municipal guard (two of them for prisoners who are considered dangerous) comes to fetch the prisoner and leads him, handcuffed, to the prosecutor’s office. At a turn of the stairs, just beyond a little oak door, you come into a huge hall filled with black-robed lawyers, groups of defendants hedged in by uniforms, law clerks, bailiffs—a whole busy, bustling world where handshakes and dossiers, sudden confidences and premeditated betrayals, are exchanged. Prisoners carrying on surreptitious deliberations at the door of “their” examining magistrate’s office. A door too slowly shut reveals an anxious confrontation. A man is in that room, alone, his head in his hands (“… that’s her hair …”) and, knowingly, like a drowning man who does not want to go down alone, he betrays …
Number 12–20 has been dragged from his compartment in the mousetrap, his heart beating wildly (for his fate will be decided today within that curly head glimpsed through a half-open door). So complete is the indifference enclosing him that he might, by shutting his eyes, imagine he was alone. No one, among the people coming and going— too busy and too hardened—notices the anguish of this poor wretch who has been tossed aside on a bench with two other wretches just like him—three grand larcenies. Sometimes a lawyer, suddenly remembering, will touch a hand or shoulder. A hurried conference takes place between Number 12–20’s anxiety and the reassuring, distracted defense counsellor’s feigned attention.
“Legris!” calls out the examining magistrate’s clerk, opening the door a crack.
Legris, Number 12–20 rises, still handcuffed, crosses the office threshold like an automaton, and is dazzled by the light coming from the large window, the corpulent bulk of the gentlemen writing a letter, and the thought that this is the examining magistrate …
Another compartment in the mousetrap. Legris feels shattered, caught in the clutches of a cat.
Condemned prisoners returning from their sentencing pass in front of the Souricière. I remember the women best: one being led back in tears— hair undone, chest heaving with convulsive gasps—by a fatherly ‘Cipal:
“You’ll pull through your six months, my dear. Why, you’ll already be out in December … Maybe they’ll shorten your sentence on appeal …”
(It has been known to happen. But more often the sentence is increased.)
“Six months, six months …” The bedraggled woman moved out of sight, led off toward the paddy wagon, but her hysterical voice still echoed through the nauseating cages, where the men greeted it with a scornful smile.
“Six months! What a joke! If it were only that …”
Another, plump and blond, went by choking with laughter, walking so rapidly that she appeared to be leading her ‘Cipal—one hand on her hip, invective on her lips: savage, furious, unprintable invective pouring over her eighteen-year-old cherry lips like a broken sewer main pouring the pestilence of the city out into the sunlight …
A fine figure of a girl: The firm fruit of her breasts standing out under her white satin blouse, the gilded ivory of her teeth between her raging lips, the light golden shiver of her neck, the hot vengeance in her voice, were a fleeting feast for all the males whose locked cages she passed. They learned that someone had “finked” on her, and that she got a year on a “frame-up” for fleecing her clients …
I also remember an undergrown adolescent, a precocious lad of fourteen or a backward eighteen-year-old—frail, red-eyed from crying and conjunctivitis, with a weasel’s snout and the ragged, rain-washed, tattered, ill-smelling clothes of a shepherd boy … His dull eyes were glued to the white gloves of the ‘Cipal, a florid man bedecked with medals, glittering with shining buttons and polished leather …
The image of the “outlaw” and the trooper made me think of a title for a sad fable:
The squashed weasel and the cavalry horse.
The Conciergerie is the last in the series of traps which lead the prisoner from the threshold of preventive prison to the final oblivion of a dungeon. A few stays in the Souricière prepare a man for the plunge into this last trap—the most cramped, the most stifling—encased in thick, centuries-old walls, and buried in the oldest soil of Paris under heavy Gothic arches cemented with medieval blood, the blood of kings. After the massacres of September 1792, Marie-Antoinette stayed in this building while waiting to place her royal head—uncrowned—in the lunette de Sanson …
Literature! You fall into this pit only to be knocked senseless by a verdict that descends on your head like a bludgeon.
There are so many different levels in the huge old Palais de Justice, built over ground honeycombed with underground passages, that I am not really certain whether the ground-floo
r cells of the Conciergerie are actually on street level. You can never shake off the feeling of being held underground when you’re in there. The stone arches of its broad, somber, silent corridors are supported by massive columns. In the tiny cells, hardly any larger than those of the Souricière, the meager light filters through narrow, barred window slits cut into the thick walls from courtyards lined with tall, gray buildings outside. It is impossible to read except standing directly under the window, and then only at the brightest time of day. The table—at least in the cell I occupied— never gets enough light, except from the electric bulb which burns all night in the middle of the whitewashed ceiling. By day, semidarkness; by night, the irritating glare of the electric bulb. Once, I tried sleeping with a handkerchief as a blindfold to get away from it. The guards, intrigued, dragged me from my sleep. Why this suspicious appearance of a man before the firing squad? They hunt anxiously for suicidal tendencies in all of us.
The cramped monastic cells are separated by walls half a yard thick, which smother noises and hamper communication; they are nonetheless not heavy enough to encase everyone buried here in total silence. For several days on end I listened (listening in spite of myself, distractedly, unable to read, write, or walk in the damp semidarkness of my cell) to the rhythmic sobbing of a stranger, my neighbor, crushed under an unknown sorrow. He cried for three or four days on end, without any shame or pride. I learned the rhythm of his breathing and his despair. He had outbursts of sobbing in which you could sense the outrage of a hurt child, the desolate incomprehension (“No, it’s impossible, it’s impossible!”) of grieved voices at a deathbed. Then there was only a forlorn murmur, dying away, the trailing off of a worn-out sorrow, purged of its substance, extinguished by the exhaustion of both flesh and spirit.
For a few hours you are “removed” from this parallelogram of semi-darkness and stone; you wind your way through the underground passageways, climb the steps of a narrow spiral staircase cut into a tower, and emerge into “the bright light of the courtroom” in front of the twelve jurymen and the judges—old sourpuss bureaucrats whose robes serve to amplify their oratorical gestures. Sham and ceremony. Defend yourself, Legris, show you’re a man like the others, neither better nor worse in spite of your crime—your crime of a starveling who turns one day and bites … or smashes and pillages a shop window! Deny, confess, repent, beg for mercy from these gentlemen; the rules of the game still allow it, one last time. Nothing you may say or do will have much place in the ritual. You are about to disappear entirely, worn down by the screws, the bolts, the peepholes, the successive traps of the great mousetrap, buried under the three hundred pages of the accusation, the seventeen questions (four aggravating circumstances), the twenty-four grounds and points of the indictment. During one hundred and twenty minutes of argumentation, the eloquence of two thin, contradictory voices waved two false specters before your dismal face: those of a scoundrel and those of an unlucky honest man which, counterfeiter, you never were. Yes, the game is over: You will understand later. On the way. By and by you will scratch these words, simply, into the chalk of a wall:
Eight years for forty-five francs in hundred-sous pieces.
Within these walls I bid farewell (with a nod of the head; both of us were handcuffed to troopers) to a strong, calm bandit who had never killed. He walked away with his springy athlete’s gait, a distracted smile on his lips. The redness of his muscular face and the wrinkling of the puffy eyelids over his gray (perhaps metallic, perhaps colorless) eyes were the only things that betrayed the shock he had undergone. “He’s taking it well,” someone had just told me. He was on his way back to his cell, a convict for the next twenty years. I myself was up for five years’ confinement. Seven in the morning.
In the evening an old drunken guard, who had predicted and hoped for my acquittal, came to chat at the Judas of my cell. His lower lip was twitching. He said very rapidly, in a whisper that smelled of absinthe:
“C*** just passed. He died like a man. The poison was hidden in the heel of his shoe. He kept his teeth clenched, writhing in death, to keep them from giving him anything or treating him.”
The moist, uneasy eye of the old turnkey—twenty-two years of service—betrayed incomprehension and pity …
“Why kill yourself? Twenty years? He could have escaped. Been granted a pardon. Anyway, think! With his character, his health, he would have come out of prison at the end of his time healthier than I am, after twenty-two years of service … No, it’s no good, it’s not sensible …”
And he went away with a little shuffling step, his shoulders rounded under his greasy tunic with its faded trimmings, continuing his rounds and his quarter century of service, a well-domesticated prison rat with a gray soul like the shadows under these arches, gray and soft like the rag mops which had just wiped up the suicide’s vomit.
THIRTEEN
Drunken Boat
IT IS LIKE STEPPING OUT INTO THE NIGHT ON A VOYAGE TOWARD THE UNKNOWN. The march will be long, so long that there is nothing by which to measure its duration, through a relentless night strewn with pitfalls. Falling along the way would be like sinking into a dark lake on a moonless night under a leaden sky in total solitude: No cry would ever be heard. So be silent, then, whatever happens. The fleeting circles would barely break the surface of the still water, which would soon close without a ripple over the drowned man.
A voyage not into space, but into time: forty-six months of darkness to traverse. Fourteen months’ claustration have already been covered. That was only a prelude. What will the sentence be like?
The future? Time? Is there a future? The weak and the feckless will fall by the wayside, closing their tired eyes in a prison infirmary. I know that time has two subjective dimensions: The bitter minute drags on eternally; the empty months fly, leaving no more than a bit of dust in the soul. Not even an ash!
En route! The main thing is to have courage at the start and keep it along the way. From now on, the universe has but two spheres: mine and the enemy’s. The gears of the machine will grind me from every side, at every instant, for years. In vain will I raise my chained arms in revolt against it. Then let them bear their chains—inescapable burdens— with neither weakness nor vain resistance. I still have the other sphere: The machine cannot rob me of that. We face each other as equals, the huge Prison-Machine and I; our strengths and weaknesses limit each other, locked forever in a stalemate. Until the day of my release, I will be Number 6731, a prisoner, a robot programmed to obey the prison rules. I can do nothing about it. Until the day of my release, I will be myself—a free man, strong, inflexible, without fear—under the chains, the numbered jacket, the harsh, absurd regulations. The machine can do nothing about it. En route!
I will walk down that dark road as long as I have to. Until madness or death? No. I have faith in myself: If one or the other brings me down, it will be by violence, in spite of myself, without stooping to fear them. I will conquer prison.
En route.
These resolutions are not particularly praiseworthy in my case. I’m a short-termer. The long terms, the hard ones, begin at eight years. (When I first got in, an old prisoner told me: “Five years? Lucky bastard! That’s soon over. I’m doing twenty: fourteen done already. It’s a bitch.”)
There are only three ways of facing prison. Accepting it as a duel, which many convicts—especially among the true outlaws—do more or less consciously. I have encountered splendid moral strength among them. Giving in to it, head bowed, no inner resistance; letting the prison enter your soul and mold it; sinking into its dank folds, vegetating there—complaining, or passive, or happy to find a good spot. This is how the majority of prisoners act; they are drawn from a variety of social groups where crime is the exception rather than the rule: peasants, middle-class people, lecherous priests, shady lawyers, crooked accountants, corrupt administrators, and those who commit “crimes of passion.” Or not resisting at all, and not giving in either; with the will to live broken by the bludgeon of
the verdict, you drift along peacefully from one day to the next—for three months or three years—toward the haven of the infirmary where, one morning, you die quietly, having lived, in silence, only the time necessary to die. Real criminals are never found in this category of prisoners. The prison-weathered can always spot these “sad cases” when they arrive; doubly condemned, they carry their fates within themselves …
Departure for an unknown destination. I put on my “civilian” clothes, which I had shed the day after my conviction. So many memories of the street are hidden in their folds! Wrists in irons. A boxcar of the train fitted out with cells. In the cramped steel compartment there is no room to stand or to stretch out; my knees are jammed between the wall and the seat, the irons on my ankles further restricting my movement. This transfer coach is dark, dirty, stifling, full of shouting voices. Our deathly silence has a counterpart in the noise made by two guards, ex-noncoms with wine-flushed faces, who are stuffing themselves, drinking, playing cards, talking about promotions, shady deals, good wine, and lifted skirts in a language profuse with scatological exclamations. The foulness of these warm male voices fills our cloistral cells. The coach rolls on, a drunken coach, sinister, as the bateau ivre was at times,
Planche folle, escorté de hippocampes noirs6
carrying along these two men in uniform, full of animal joy at wallowing in a comfortable dungheap; carrying along too, in the shadow of these living men, four prisoners, excluded from life, chained, motionless, isolated, tortured by thirst, stiff and bruised all over from lack of movement. Coupled to freight trains carrying foodstuffs, uncoupled at a fork, forgotten for hours on a siding in an out-of-the-way station, hooked up again, shunted and jolted amid shouted curses, then returning to the deep silence of a deserted station, our wandering prison rolls and pitches us along its incomprehensible itinerary through time and space. We left in the morning; we hear—where?—the bells chiming at six in the evening. What do we care? But how we would love to stretch our cramped, tingling legs, to straighten our backs, to drink a tall glass of water. That would be good.