by Victor Serge
A few of us were talking about the bad ones one morning in the infirmary courtyard: some consumptives, a blind man, and a fellow recovering from typhus, huddling together in a patch of sunlight. Almost every one spoke up in judgment:
“There’s Madagascar, who steals our letters to get the stamps …”
“Dupart broke a prisoner’s arm after putting him in irons …”
“Aborton lied under oath and sent some poor bastard to forced labor …”
“Cauliflower, when he was a guard in the kitchen, used to steal so much that we nearly starved to death …”
“Begaud, you know, the one they call d’Artagnan, steals wine from the canteen and puts in water … I saw him …”
“And Half Pint got paid twenty francs for carrying a package over the wall and then turned it over to the Warden himself!”
“All of ‘em, go on, all of ‘em,” said someone in despair, “they’re all the same. They’re no better than us …
“They’re worse …”
“They have more power.”
“The ones with more power are the worst.”
They are neither more powerful nor worse. Men are without power in the Mill. And the system is worse than the men.
TWENTY-FOUR
The Years
WE SPEND SUNDAYS IN THE WORKSHOP. THE SILENCE OF THE MACHINES STIfles our voices. The lack of activity keeps us from moving. We are riveted in our places; the hours drag on slowly, a sluggish river heavy with the silt of memories. We don’t have enough books, especially good books, to use as a steady refuge. We pass from the idle immobility of the workshop to the rhythmic round of the exercise yard. The round goes on and on, sometimes in the heat (our old tunics, buttoned to the neck according to regulations, clinging to our damp flesh), sometimes in the cold (nipping our fingers with invisible pincers). Happy enough if the three trees in the prison yard, frosted with silver dust, remind us of the enchantment of a park in winter.
Twice a month, on Sunday, from ten o’clock until noon, the inmates write their families on stationery with a penitentiary letterhead. It is forbidden to discuss the prison or any subject not directly related to personal affairs … Nouzy, writing to his wife, gave her some advice on the education of their little boy: “… Make especially sure they don’t teach him to respect fetishes; teach him, as early as possible, to see through hypocrisy …” His Honor the Civilian Controller summoned prisoner number 6852 into the little workshop accounting office. His Honor the Civilian Controller Sibour had a sharp nose, a moldy complexion, narrow, square shoulders, and a beige overcoat which came straight down over his big flat feet. He pointed to these lines with a stubby, waxlike finger:
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
The stevedore from Rouen, a sly old anarchist, narrowed his lively little eyes:
“That? … fetishes? Why, they’re fetishes, Your Honor, Sir.”
“I’m not talking to you about fetishes. I’m asking you-what you’re writing here to your spouse.”
This official savored the word “spouse.” “His ‘spouse,’ Hell!” said a voice behind him.
“Well, Your Honor, Sir, they’re my ideas …”
“Understand, Nouzy, that you’re not in this place to expound your ideas. If I catch you at it again, I’ll prohibit you from writing. Write this letter over for me for next Sunday …”
“Without the ideas, Your Honor, Sir?”
“You’ve understood me. You may go.”
Happily, few men allowed themselves the privilege of expounding any ideas. Nonetheless, an order from the Warden was posted in the workshop, for the benefit of the half dozen of us who held out, enjoining the inmates to make sure to “write out your correspondence with brevity, dealing, without digressions of any sort, with your family affairs exclusively.” Those who had left loved ones behind in life—a child, a woman waited for, dreamed of for years now in the haunted nights of their cells, in the senseless rounds, in the painful hours of sharp despair—these men turned to the task of writing with an uneasiness mingled with anger and disgust. How could they resist writing what they felt, searching for the words to express the inexpressible? How could they forego the urge to vent that stifled, twisted cry, filling a page mulled over, night after night with words of reproach for the letters that never came, plunging their nights into despair, tormenting their souls with unbearable fear and jealousy? But how could they write on that sheet which bears, next to the letterhead, the inmate’s registration number, that sheet which will be read by Monsieur Roussot, the mail clerk (known as “Pinch Ass” because of his skinny behind), and perhaps by his Honor the Civilian Controller, Monsieur Sibour (known as “Verdigris”)?
“When I write my wife,” said Guillaumet, “and when I think that cuckold of a Pinch Ass and that eunuch of a Verdigris are going to pick over my letter with sly little smiles, I’d like to throw this iron crowbar into their faces! What a relief that would be!”
Duclos, my other neighbor, whose registration was Number 4552 (which meant that he had survived four generations of prisoners), said in an almost inaudible voice:
“The worst of it is that you can’t even bare your soul. They always manage to find it and grab it in their filthy hands. After eighteen years, that’s the one thing I haven’t been able to get used to.”
Duclos, the parricide; became my neighbor during my fourth year. For the preceding fifteen years, he had held an office job that kept him clear of the guards’ harassment, allowed him to read and write, and provided him with an incomparable view: ten yards of green grass, a rough stone fountain, and a little pond where goldfish swam about peacefully. The desk of the “general accountant” faced a single window, which looked out over the Warden’s little garden. Alone, his stupid task over for the day, his canteen receipts and supply sheets sent off, Duclos would open Spinoza or Creative Evolution and, riveted to his chair by heart disease, with his chilly hands hidden nearly all the year round in a muff of old wool batting, his beret pulled down almost to his ears, looking, with his great nose, his bony cheeks, and his fleshless neck, like Holbein’s portrait of old Erasmus, he would begin to dream. The years had deadened his sufferings, dulled his memories, worn out his body, drained the blood from his brain. “My intellect,” he used to tell me, “has not faltered; but it has grown dim. I have never resigned myself; but resignation has entered me, has bent me down to the ground and told me: ‘Rest.’ To tell the truth, I’m not sure it didn’t tell me: ‘Die, slowly.’” His mind, often slack, no longer followed his book with the patience and ardor of an earlier time: Through the bars of the window his eyes wandered over the little garden with its hardy grass, its rosebush and lilac tree, before settling on that calmest of invitations to daydreaming: traced lightly in the water, like our destiny, in a pond as narrow as human life itself, the evanescent arabesques of the goldfish gliding through the water. “There are so many prisons in the universe,” thought the old prisoner; “every prison is a universe, every universe a prison … Those fish inside their four-foot basin, these men enclosed in their destiny, ourselves in this jail; and all the people who were born and who will die in the airless, lightless rooms of this little town …” He could no longer imagine a sky that was not cut into rectangles by bars. And up there, the celestial spheres turned ceaselessly in their immense crystal prison. He wasn’t sure if he were acquiring greater wisdom or simply moving toward a kind of contemplative insanity. He was as calm as it is possible to be in the Mill. “I was really well off. Two or three times a month I used to get hold of a newspaper …” This sinecure aroused jealousies. While Duclos was meditating, Moure, a former attendant in a Jesuit establishment (sex crimes, eight years) lived in his shadow, collecting accounting errors, little favors done in violation of the regulations, oversights of hands numbed by eighteen years of captivity, dangerous secrets … Moure had as much patience in his soul as he had unctuousness in his movements, velvet in his voice, pallor in his face, and complacent servility in his eyes a
nd in his spine. His denunciation, ripened over a period of three years, was a masterpiece of irrefutability. They went easy on Duclos, who spent thirty days in the “hole,” from which he emerged stumbling, his limbs grown a little more sluggish, his hands a little more gnarled, to become my neighbor. I discovered that he was a man of absolute integrity and rare firmness of character. We were already in his debt for the gift of his books. His presence brought us yet another priceless acquisition.
Moure got the coveted job. The lazy darting of the goldfish excited different dreams in a different brain. Alone with himself, Moure became transformed, like someone possessed. He had always lived burdened with unavowable mysteries, but never had his life been so filled with them as now. In the calm hours of the afternoon, pretending to make clean copies of the Statement of Supplies Delivered, Moure opened his secret envelopes. They contained strange little locks of stiff hair, rolled into tight curls; a strange, musty odor clung to them. They were of different shades; and some were attached by white ribbons to paper tags on which was written, in a careful, round hand: “Georgette, November 26”; or “Lucienne, my cute little c … my adored one, f … on the second day of Easter.” These girls’ names were always derived from boys’ names. In his handwritten inscriptions, Moure liked to link the most brutally obscene insults with love words and coquettish diminutives. Eyes half closed, nostrils flaring, he inhaled the nauseating odor of dried human sperm; lost in his private reveries, his gaze followed mechanically the goldfish swimming in the pool. The soft, sweet face of a corrupted adolescent, with wide eyes and greedy lips like soft strawberries, would form in the reflection of a cloud on the smooth water. A young man’s deliciously immodest hands would offer a hot flower of virility to his kneeling lover. Moure then slowly wrote in a date, followed by tender words of affection: “Antoinette, my sweet, my pretty little darling.” Then, his mouth slightly twisted, his lower lip trembling, he added some harsh words, obscene to the point of cruelty.
And so the days, the seasons, the years dissolved like thick fumes of smoke, slow to dissipate, but leaving behind no trace.
Spring was the bittersweet season. In April, with the first buds on our stunted trees, the first clear skies, the first warm days, such a powerful call seemed to come from the very heart of life that we all felt we were emerging, our nerves raw, from some great lethargy. April quickened our old, dormant sufferings; but even more, April quickened our failing energies. Three hundred wooden shoes beat more smartly against the pavement in our round; broken marionettes began to straighten up again; gray faces were uplifted … Sometimes I wrote poems while marching; I felt so victorious over the Mill …
“Only twenty more months!” whispered Gilles, his face radiant, as he passed by.
TWENTY-FIVE
The War
I REMEMBER THE IMPLACABLY BLUE SKY OF ONE SUNDAY. WE SPENT THE DAY on benches along the whitewashed walls of a wide, tree-planted courtyard. Our furtive glances kept watch over the guards, slumped in their chairs in the heavy heat. The sun scorched the grass; you could see the hot air vibrating. The immobility, the heat, the relentless, oppressive brightness were all focused on a new and astonishing thought: war. We had just found out about it, as we always learned about great historic events, through unknown channels. My mind was blank. I tried to imagine the monstrous reality of millions of men marching against each other all over Europe, with their rifles hanging in their fists like the stone axes of their ancestors. A few paces away from me was a German, an ordinary lad, simple, strong and straightforward. From time to time, everyone’s eyes would turn toward this man, our brother, like all the others, our pal who had suddenly become, without even knowing it, an enemy who in any other place would have been ripe for killing. (We soon learned to say “Boche,” but I don’t think that term was ever applied to him; he was too real to us, too much like us; hatred, especially the hatred of crowds, needs a certain distance in order to work its distortions.)
That evening Miguel, who seemed feverish, managed to get close enough to stuff a wad of paper into my hand.
“I want,” he wrote, “to be outside so I can be the first killed. I want to be in the first battle to throw myself between the French and the Germans shouting: You’re all mad, you’re all brothers! Everyone called up with me is going to be killed. I belong to a dead year. I already feel like a condemned man the world has accidentally overlooked …”
Events presented themselves to us with incomprehensible simplicity. The war burst suddenly out of the void. We knew nothing of its preliminaries. We were thus, through the cruelest of ironies, perhaps the only men in Europe in those mad days, to look at it with the detachment of inhabitants from another planet. We were quite certainly among the few Europeans who were not carried away by the terrible war fever of those first days …
At night, in our cells, we could hear strange rumblings coming from the nearby town: the “Marseillaise” clamored by delirious crowds in stations filled with departing soldiers, the sudden train whistles, the muffled playing of bands. We would listen, straining, taking in that vague, contagious enthusiasm, then terribly saddened to fall back into the silence, the emptiness, the useless anguish of our nights.
Rumors of victory were circulating. Rollot got a letter which began, like a poem, with these words: “Tonight is a night of victory; I am a happy woman …” He read it, blushing, with a twisted smile. He wrote an answer in the margin, for himself. “You are mad. There are only disasters, disasters.” The names of conquered cities were whispered about: Mulhouse, Thann, the Cossacks on the outskirts of Berlin. Later we spoke of cities lost and destroyed: Liege, Mauberge, Charleroi, Lille. Defeat passed over the prison like the shadow of a sulphurous cloud. No one knew any details. The guards, questioned at every opportunity, kept quiet. The proofreaders used to listen at the door of the civilian manager’s office. They reported this comment on a victory communiqué in which it became clear that Compiègne had been occupied by the Germans: “One more victory like this one, and they’ll be in Paris!” Rumors of treason ran rife. People talked about generals turned traitor being shot down in the middle of General Staff meetings. What intrigued our little group of revolutionaries the most was the fate of our comrades. Had they tried to resist? Had they been shot? We imagined them trampled by angry mobs, the war passing over their dead bodies. One of us received a visitor. We primed him with questions to ask. He returned from the visitors’ room dumbfounded, understanding nothing:
“Nothing happened … nothing … Seems that Hervé has enlisted. Almereyda too … Anatole France too.9 All the comrades have joined up. Some of them have already been decorated …”
Men whose homes were in the North stopped getting letters.
Then the military prisoners began to arrive. A strange joy glittered in their eyes. “Stop complaining!” they said. “You can’t imagine how well off we are here!” “I’d rather do five years than go back to living that life at the front, with death at the end of it, and what a death!” The horrors of war were fresh in their minds, and they brought them home to us graphically. Deguy, a police inspector’s son with a tiny albino head at the end of a long neck, made a lunge in pantomime: “My bayonet got stuck in this guy’s guts and I had to use my feet to get it out …” Minot, a deserter arrested in the Pyrenees, his fake pass covered with numbers (“the more there are the better it looks”), told us what happened when he was sent with some buddies to bring back the chow and walked into the Company kitchen. “The whole room was red, yellow, and black; there were no more men; there was nothing left but flesh and scraps of cloth swimming around in the soup and blood on the floor … A piece of 155 fell right into their chow cannon; you can guess what it was like …” These refugees from the front found our slow torture a soft life. “No; really, you’re a lucky bunch of bastards!” Our whole notion of life was thrown into disorder.
The battle moved closer to us. At night a rumbling as of distant thunder came from the horizon: artillery. At noon, when the machines wer
e silent, we could hear the thud of faraway batteries firing across plains and hills where rows of helmeted ants were moving forward in parade-ground order … The town fell silent. Anybody who could run away, ran. Our civilian foreman, Monsieur Fouquier, a nasty, plump little rentier, moved among us haunted by a phantom; his only son had just been killed at the age of twenty. “Now he’s really going to be a bastard,” said Guillaumet. “He’ll hate us just for being alive.” This prediction did not come true. Heavy wrinkles lined Monsieur Fouquier’s flabby triple chin. A new pity appeared in his eyes. In a dark corner of the storeroom he showed one of us a snapshot of a beardless young soldier.
An order from the Ministry, so it seemed, forbade the evacuation of all prisons. The guards’ faces were damp with fear. “The Germans will be here by Sunday.”
Would there be a battle on the river? It made a natural line of defense for the retreating army. Our church steeple seemed to us a perfect landmark for artillery. Poule, terrified, asked me: “Do you really think they’ll shell us?” “Naturally,” I replied. I lived alone, feeling the fear spread from one man to the next. I felt a sort of exaltation which gave birth to a great serenity. The old world was being smashed by the cannon. The Mill would be crushed by the cannon. The law of kill-and-be-killed was reaffirmed for my generation. I would have preferred to take my part in the action, the common suffering, to fall like the others, friends and enemies (for me they were only men bent under the same law); but any end is a good one for the man who takes it standing up, who accepts; each man must fulfill his destiny. Marcus Aurelius taught me acquiescence: “Several grains of incense are on the same altar: one falls sooner, the other, later: no difference … Whatever suits you, O world, suits me!” There was profound joy in thinking about this resurrection of the world through the cannon, which had at last interrupted our round.