by Victor Serge
The four of us:
Morge—known as Cookie or The Cook—has the clap. An “anarchist.” Twenty-two years old, I think. And twenty years at hard labor. He was the lookout outside the country house where a “buddy” of his, discovered in the middle of a burglary, strangled an old housemaid with his prudently gloved hands, using wet dish towels; then, in epileptic rage, slowly stabbed a seventy-year-old man. The gloved murderer came very close to the guillotine; his precaution saved him. He is free. This pale kid is paying in his place. He will keep silent. He has hopes. His wife (a young, washed-out blonde with TB who, believing in “free love,” used to give herself docilely, with soft, immodest caresses, to every chum who came along) promised to meet him in Guiana. It is said the convicts there get plots of land to till if they behave themselves. Illusory hopes of life in a penal colony ferment in this young brain, devoured by rebellions gone astray. Love, too, is perhaps being born there. At a fork in the rails, M. will leave us for another drunken boxcar. (His wife never went to meet him: She died during the year.)
Horel is sixty years old and looks seventy. His “case” aged him suddenly. He has white hair, a red nose which is always dripping, and wet, bloodshot, spaniel eyes. Horel babbles on and on; from time to time he squeezes a pink tumor on the back of his neck with his old, work-worn hand.
“Squeeze it,” he says. “Can you feel? The bullet is still in there.”
Good luck or bad? He hardly knows himself. Things have gone beyond him. He didn’t intend to live; now he no longer wants to die. But six years in jail at his age—and even that through the court’s indulgence!—is too much. Horel committed a crime of passion: Jealous of his own son, a handsome lad of twenty, he killed his mistress, a forty-year-old, and attempted suicide. He was brought back to life, after great difficulty, in order to be sent to prison. The drunken boxcar is carrying him toward his fate. Later on, I was to meet him often, his knees and back more and more bent, wearing wooden shoes too big for him, limping, among the old men working in the rope-weaving shop. One hand stuffed into his belt, the other slipped between two jacket buttons to avoid the chill, nose dripping, dull-eyed, slack-jawed, shaking all over with each stiff step like a broken puppet, he tottered on, walled within himself in enforced silence, toward the little prison cemetery. It took several years.
The third one also committed a “crime of passion,” although the word seems ridiculous when applied to this fat, pink-skinned boy whose bright cheeks are like ripe apples. He murdered a lad from his village, in a brawl, for playing up to “his wife”—he says “his wife,” although she was only his fiancée (but with what triumphant laughter he must have thrown her on her back under the shadow of a haystack on hot afternoons when the pungent sweat of young flesh goes to the brain, headier than wine!). The vigor of his nineteen years will now be employed carrying the soup bucket to the mess hall twice a day. I think he died, too, of pneumonia; my memory may have confused him with another peasant (a hardy lad like him who committed murder under similar circumstances), and I can’t remember which of the two died in the infirmary.
We sit in silence, side by side, in the drunken boxcar, unable to communicate. We met only on arrival.
Other temporary fellow travelers got into our coach at a station. I don’t remember them at all, as they were headed toward a house of correction while we were being transferred to a penitentiary.
An express train coming onto the track covered our dark silence with the groaning of its couplings. There were jerks, the impact of a stop, the impact of voices, an uncoupling, a voice:
“The cars are there.”
Stiff from eight hours immobilized in irons, we stood unsurely, our limbs free, lined up alongside a track while the guards from the transfer service moved from wrist to wrist, putting new chains on us, so that we became a chain of eight men linked together; a caterpillar with eight heads and sixteen slow feet, jangling, balking, staggering, crossing the tracks of the freight depot with our eyes blinded by the signals and our numb feet stumbling against the rails.
A caterpillar crushed under an iron heel; we moved slowly through the thick darkness of the March night. And suddenly my eyes were dazzled, my brain flooded with joy:
The sky!
Above our heads a glittering winter sky, full of constellations, spread out its deep blacks and blues, its profusion of stars, the ripples of light in its shadowy gulfs. Had I ever understood the marvel of a simple starry sky before? For four hundred days I had been deprived of it: and it was a revelation.
I would have fallen, my eyes lost up there, while I stumbled among the rails, the ties, and the cables stretched across the ground, if the other links in the penitentiary caterpillar hadn’t pushed me, dragged me, half-carried me toward the lights of the station …
The bizarre caterpillar wavered for a moment on its sixteen shaking feet as the station came suddenly to life before it. All the lights seemed to be shining on it: a brutal reminder of a life that had been lost. A stand with newspapers, magazines, books! Tobacco! The people crowding out of a stopped train appeared so close, so real: a soldier, a lady leading two kids by the hand, a man opening his newspaper at his compartment window, a man kissing a young woman. How we stared at that ordinary traveler, a sixteen-eyed monster brooding over the joy of his farewell!
Then the caterpillar was sliced in two. A car jolted the four convicts through the lighted streets of the town. They stared out avidly, stupefied that life was still going on, “quiet and easy,” just as it was when they lost it.
6 “A crazy plank, escorted by black sea-horses …” The line is from Rimbaud’s “Bateau ivre” (Drunken Boat) from which Serge also took his chapter heading. (Tr.)
FOURTEEN
Arrival
WE PASSED THROUGH A SERIES OF THRESHOLDS IN THE NIGHT. THE BUILDings were huge squares against the glittering, deep-blue sky above. A wardroom; some sleepy-eyed s.o.b.’s who looked at us with insolent nonchalance; a man in a silver-braided képi—bovine, crimson-faced, massive; képi over one ear, breath winy, a ring of keys jangling against his pants leg.
“This way!”
Unchained at last, amazed at the freedom of our limbs, the sudden lightness of our bodies (droplets of joy mounting in our veins; how good to be able to move your wrists freely!), we are led through a poorly lit alleyway under the dazzling sky. We penetrate another ring of walls, then a gloomy hall where the air is bad. There we lose each other, surrounded by a single man armed with keys who comes and goes, stands us in front of numbered doors like wax figures, terrified, under the glimmer of his dark lantern shining on our faces …
“Enter!”
I enter. Where? I don’t know. Into absolute darkness. It might be into the void.
The door closes behind me; the guard’s steps fade away below, outside on the pavement. Total darkness. Standing still, I try to make out my hands, held up a few inches from my eyes. Impossible. I stretch them out, my fingers moving cautiously like tentacles. I move forward slowly, feeling my way through the shadows (and still that feeling of joy flowing through my veins in tiny droplets, vivid and warm; the joy of moving without hindrance). The absurd memory of that dazzlement sticks in my mind: It was beautiful, after all, that starry sky! Ah! here’s the wall; follow it. It is clean, without any inscriptions. Four walls, by Jove, those well-known four walls … They are practically old friends, those four murderous walls. Nothing else. I was hoping for a bench.
Let’s get comfortable. I make a pillow out of my rolled-up vest and my crushed hat artfully draped over my shoes (what use to me now are these castoffs from the civilized world?). Stretched out full-length on the waxed floor, I dream.
I have no idea of what will come. The lawyers whom I questioned about my sentence exasperated me to death with their evasive answers. They don’t give a damn, by God! Once a client ends up here, he is no longer a client.
I saw the dawn rise: A dull gray filled the cell imperceptibly, banishing the darkness; then a pale glow. Slowly, thi
s became light. No idea of the time. Having dressed, I waited for a long while, pacing along the walls as if from habit. Sixteen paces. Seventeen if you turn around without hurrying. Why hurry?
The day began well. The three of us—the passengers of the drunken boxcar—found ourselves together again in a magnificent triangular courtyard …
“Terrific,” said Horel.
And the little homicidal peasant smiled a broad, broad smile.
There were at least six yards of grass in those ten square yards; and even a little stunted tree, no bigger than a bush, whose buds were beginning to open. We were “free” there, close to the earth and plants, free to chat, three buddies, no?
“We’re not part of the system yet,” said the little peasant. “It’s not possible.”
We heard bells ringing, lines of men marching: the cadenced beat of long lines of wooden shoes against the pavement. The cadences of the penitentiary. It was clear to us that we had not yet begun our period of punishment. Besides, our “civilian” clothes were more than enough to remind us of that …
We lost them an hour later in the little “first-aid room” of the infirmary, where two prisoner aides in white smocks, a guard, and Sergeant Zizi got us into our permanent outfits. Our old clothes, thrown down one by one onto the floor, searched, pockets turned out, immediately took on the aspect of rags. Zizi, an old bemedaled veteran of the colonial service, seedy and servile, a huge hooked nose hanging over a white mustache piss-colored around the lips from tobacco—Zizi, silver braid running up to his shoulder, dictates his estimate of the value of our effects to an inmate-bookkeeper. Bellowing as if on a parade ground, he calls out:
“One black felt hat: twenty-five centimes … Suspenders: ten centimes. One gray tweed suit: one hundred sous! … One striped shirt: fifty centimes …”
Zizi is having a ball.
His appraisal is recorded in an account book, which we sign. The administration takes charge of our effects: They will be returned to us— whatever is left of them after the moths get through with them—when we are released. In case they are accidentally destroyed, the administration, in its honesty, promises to make good their value to the amount recorded here and countersigned by us. We start out by being robbed.
Then, standing naked in front of our little bundles of rags, we wait for our uniforms to be issued: shirts and underdrawers of gray canvas (probably originally white), jacket, trousers, and cap of brown denim. The ones they give us are so worn-out you can see the blue thread of the warp: but they are clean. Wooden shoes.
“Sew this on your right sleeve.”
It’s a square of white canvas bearing four numbers: 6731. Number 6731, that’s me. The wooden shoes make it hard to walk. They go click clack with every step, and they always feel as if they’re about to slip off.
They shaved my head. My hair has just been swept away along with the last of Horel’s white mane. By now I have been sufficiently depersonalized to appear before the administrative authorities. There is nothing left to distinguish me from the others, my peers, our prisoners’ rabble. We all have the same stubbly chins, the same shaved skulls— and doubtless the same look of the hunted man.
We appear before a sort of administrative tribunal: the Warden (képi covered all over with silver braid), the Controller (képi half-covered with silver braid), the Chief Guard (képi partly covered with silver braid). Képi, képi, képi. Stripes. A fat old man with a mustache who looks like a white wine drinker. A flabby pugnose. A faceless military man who has left no trace in my mind except that of his képi. The three of them on a dais behind a long table. Behind them, the Republic: a hunk of yellowed plaster specked with fly shit. Zizi, on their right, is acting as court clerk.
The new man appears flanked by guards, exactly five feet from the dais, in the regulation posture of a soldier at attention. The Warden leafs through a dossier and, depending on the case or his mood:
“Ah, there you are. They say you’re a tough nut. Well, you better watch out. We know how to take care of tough nuts here.”
A silence. A wave of the hand holding a blotting roller. Bushy eyebrows contracting into a frown under the silvered képi. The point has been made, doubtless.
“Dismiss!”
The new man is shoved smartly by the shoulders and thrown out.
“Next.”
“You’re supposed to have character too. Well, in this place, my lad, we know how to round off the corners of character. Understand?”
Shoulders drooping, neck pulled in, a voice which is nothing more than a respectful whisper, the questioned prisoner murmurs:
“Yes, Warden, sir.”
The third in today’s line-up is a little provincial solicitor who absconded with all the money in his village. The Warden’s eye softens as it falls on this sad, pudgy face. This one is neither an underworld character nor an ex-con: a respectable man who went bad, that’s all. The Warden suddenly remembers the theory of prisoner rehabilitation.
“Try to behave yourself, Boulin, and we’ll see what we can do for you.”
To the fourth, an anarchist, the Warden says simply:
“One warning: no propaganda here, or you’ll regret it.”
Few men in modern society wield such absolute power over their fellow men as a prison warden. The Civilian Controller, who in reality acts as an assistant warden, doesn’t control anything. The Warden has, in effect, the power of life and death over the prisoner. All it takes from him is a suggestion to the Chief Guard (“keep an eye on him …”) and the prisoner, whose number is thus pointed out for the guards’ zealous attention, is constantly harassed with petty discipline and loaded down with penalties. The Warden can inflict penalties up to ninety days in the hole: more than enough to send the man thus punished to the infirmary, eyes ruined, lungs ravaged by tuberculosis, throat swollen, and ears dripping pus. Some die. Each year, the man in the silvered képi thus pronounces, in effect, several sentences of slow death, generally for trifling reasons.
FIFTEEN
The Mill
THE PERFECTION OF MODERN PRISON INCORPORATES THE PERFECTION OF THE self-sufficient feudal castle which, despite its economic dependency on the surrounding countryside, was able with its artisans, its men-at-arms, its church, its hospital, its jail, its gallows, its banquet halls, its arsenals, its storehouses, to sustain a long siege. The penitentiary perpetuates the economic and social organization of a medieval burg within the modern city. Designed to allow hundreds of men to live and die sequestered within its walls—not by freely accepted discipline as in monasteries, but under brutal constraint—it is a dreary city at once besieged and dominated by the enemy within.
Its outer walls surround vast buildings scattered among gardened, tree-planted courtyards. The single entrance, not far from the guardroom, under the Registrar’s offices (for the jail books must be near the rifles), opens onto a courtyard lined by the administration buildings, and closed off at one end by the edifices of the prison proper. The low roofs of the visitors’ room and the chapel-cum-tribunal stretch out from the administrative offices to the cell blocks. Passing through another gate, the prisoner finds himself in the land of punishment. It resembles an empty back street in a dull little town, lined with white walls and stern buildings with barred windows. The bakery, the kitchens, the laundry, and the various workshops form a quadrangle around a dingy little courtyard. The old prison, a massive parallelogram of white masonry dating back a century, encloses the shoemaking and metalworks shops; on the ground floor, the mess hall. The pointed arches of the gray stone church rise up from a paved courtyard overshadowed on one side by a high wall, and on the other by the four successive rows of the dormitory’s barred windows. This dormitory, of relatively recent construction, was designed for the application of the Auburn system—the last word in prison economy: collective work by day, isolation by night. It is built along the classical lines of the star-shaped cell block. Three wings, a central hub; four stories of galleries looking down over a wide hall
lighted from the ends by tall ogive windows. The only places where they still use those splendid windows, invented by the cathedral builders, are prisons. The hall is wide; the narrowness of the cells has been carefully calculated: There has to be room for a cot eighteen inches wide and for a man to be able to stand next to it. All the cells are whitewashed, and each has its window, a wide slit which you are forbidden to climb up to … A tree-planted court separates the dormitory from an infirmary composed of two rectangular buildings facing each other across a closed courtyard and connected by a glassed-in walkway … From the windows of the infirmary (which is painted a suitable white) you can see a grim cube of gray stone dotted with oblong, barred windows—a complete little prison set within the big one, with its own outer wall on which the guards make their rounds, its triangular exercise yards sectioned like a fan—the stockade. Three stories of punishment cells—light, half-dark, dark; in the basement, a double row of “holes.” Just as the keep, where the lord of the castle made his last stand, was the soul of the burgs of older times, so the soul of the prison—a soul made of implacable rules and of irons— is found within these walls. In the last analysis, discipline is maintained among the prisoners only through fear of the hole … Beyond, on either side of a glassed-in corridor, there are workshops: print shop, tailor shop, gold and silver chains, bookbinding, plaited ropes, metalworks. There is also a large yard planted with potatoes. And, somewhere below the prison walls (I don’t know where), there is a cemetery …
The topography of the penitentiary where I lived for nearly four years remains incomplete and inexact in my mind. The individual prisoner can piece it together only after a long while; through the synthesis of a large number of minute observations. He can see only what falls within a horizon of twenty yards. His movements are regulated by an anonymous power, foreign to his own will. The perfect jail is so compartmentalized that you can live there for years without knowing more than your own narrow sector.