by Victor Serge
The cannon moved closer. We stayed in our cells for three straight days; they were immensely serene days. No more rounds of beating the pavement. The Mill had stopped grinding. The Mill, resigned, was waiting for that shell, that great millstone which would grind it up in turn. The guards, terrified, left us alone. I had received an encouraging letter. I was reading the life of Luther. I was alone with my serenity.
During those days, in the neighboring woods, they arrested some spies who were perhaps nothing more than deserters. One of them, a gnarled old peasant caked with mud from head to toe, was brought into the penitentiary before being sent to the court-martial. The orderly, Ribotte, a stool pigeon, was ordered to clean him up. He drove him to the shower room with jabs in the ribs. For the first time in his life he had in his clutches a human being he could martyrize, to whom he was allowed to do anything he pleased. He doused him with near-boiling water. “I says to him: ‘Wait and see, this is nothing yet, you bastard! When they tie you to the stake, then you’ll really make faces … And don’t worry, those twelve bullets are waiting for you; you won’t miss out on them.’ When I gave his balls a good twist, he gave out such a yell that Ironsides came in to see what was happening. I had a big bristle brush in my hand and I was scraping the bastard’s belly.
“‘What’s going on?’ says Ironsides.
“‘Mister Spy thinks my brush isn’t soft enough,’ says I.
“‘Give him a shot in the mouth,’ says Ironsides.
“You can bet I didn’t miss the chance. These spies,” concludes Ribotte, “just send ‘em to me. I know how to take care of ‘em.”
The battle moved away, the endless round began to turn again. Our daily hunk of bread was cut in half, reduced to 300 grams of brown dough full of straw, beans, and worms (at least they were cooked). Hunger, already an old friend, moved in with us to stay. We were supposed to know nothing of the war. The system added total isolation to total silence: Nothing from the outside was to reach us. The mutilated country bled through countless wounds: Those of her children who were in prison were to know nothing. There were fathers whose sons were fighting, brothers of soldiers, poor devils whose villages were now only heaps of stone still being pounded by the cannon: No one was to know anything about it. We nonetheless had an idea of how monstrous this war was. It reached us even through the bars, the mists, over great distances. The Battle of the Falklands, the English surrender in Mesopotamia, the Russians in the Carpathians … Bits of news drifted in to us; all the maps of the world seemed bloodstained to me. Rollot, who had heard about the shelling of Reims Cathedral, told us. Beaugrand, the firebug, ratted on him. My comrade was summoned before the three silver-braided képis of the “disciplinary tribunal.” The Warden, angry, was drumming on his desk with nervous fingers:
“You seem well-informed, Rollot. Where do you get your information?”
Silence.
“You’d better learn to answer when you’re spoken to. Where do you get your information?”
“From the moon, Warden, Sir.”
“Oh, so it’s that way, eh! I’ll put you back in step, my friend. The black hole until further notice.”
We were supposed to be ignorant of everything, even the destruction of the most ancient, holy stones of France. We were the only men on earth forbidden to know about the war; but, though we read nothing and could only glimpse, through the double smokescreen of war and administrative stupidity, the general outline of events, some few of us were blessed with exceptional clear-sightedness. I knew enough about the inner decay of the Russian Empire to foresee, at a time when the Cossacks still incarnated the hope of several old Western countries, its inevitable fall. Long before Europe ever dreamt it, we were discussing, in whispers, the coming Russian Revolution. We knew in what part of the globe the long-awaited flame would be born. And in it we found a new reason for living.
Nothing changed. The cannon reigned over all of Europe. A million corpses piled up in the valley of bones at Verdun. France, bleeding through her gaping wounds, avidly absorbed the new strength of Canadians, New Zealanders, Hindus, Senegalese, Portuguese. In the Mill, six hundred men continued their senseless round, attesting to the permanence of order—stronger even than a social cataclysm. We formed an unbelievable island, cut off from the movement of history.
“Perhaps,” mocked Duclos, “we will be the last survivors of old Europe. Machine guns, famine, pestilence, and madness will finish out their dance of death, and we will still be marching around these courtyards with Spike Chin and Cauliflower beating out the eternal rhythm.”
The bell gave the signal for lights out. Squadrons of airplanes flew over the prison on their way to Paris. The sky turned gold.
9 Gustave Hervé (1871–1944), a leading French revolutionary antimilitarist and editor of La Guerre Sociale, suddenly turned patriotic in 1914 and changed the name of his journal to La Victoire. Miguel Almereyda (Bonaventure Vigo) (1888–1917), revolutionary publicist, was founder of Le Bonnet Rouge, which led the “defeatist” campaign in 1916–17 until it was suppressed. A self-styled pacifist, Almereyda was arrested and accused of taking German money. He was killed in prison before being brought to trial, under mysterious circumstances. His son, Jean Vigo, became a well-known film director. (Tr.)
TWENTY-SIX
Discipline
FIRST VIOLATION OF THE RULE OF SILENCE: REPRIMAND. SECOND AND THIRD: loss of canteen privileges. Fourth: bread and water. Fifth: Disciplinary Room or solitary. Prison discipline is based on hunger. The disparity between the severity of the punishment and the triviality of the offense is often extraordinary.
Discipline based on arbitrary caprice. The rule of silence is observed by no one. The guards, in their reports, simply mark down the names of men whose faces they don’t like, plus a few more, chosen at random, to appear impartial. In each workshop there are a few men who are constantly noted for “bad behavior” and are punished one day out of every two. They are usually tall, skinny kids, with insolent glances— wise guys. “Young hoodlums,” think the guards, secretly envious, deep down in their rancid existence, of the youthful vigor of these tough young hooligans. I have always thought there was an element of instinctive envy behind the daily persecution of certain young prisoners by guards past middle age. These men, slowed down by the weight of forty years, themselves bound to our chain, with no future ahead of them, must feel a kind of physical aversion for lives that are still intact, that the Mill can’t crush entirely, that will sooner or later take flight toward new adventures, while they themselves will go on and on, guiltless, nonetheless, like the Pharisees, turning in our round until they are sixty …
Seated under the yellowed bust of the Republic, the Warden hands out disciplinary justice every morning at the “tribunal.” Violations of silence, correspondence among inmates, slackness at work, illicit trafficking in tobacco, brawling—such is the usual gamut of offenses he punishes before going off to lunch. Attempted suicide is punished by thirty days in solitary, as are homosexuality and petty theft. Stool pigeons are treated with a certain indulgence.
The worst privation, after celibacy, is tobacco.
Hautereau, of the print shop, was summoned before the braided képis, for having been caught red-handed using tobacco. During the evening search the guard, La Tuile, sniffed something suspicious on his breath and suddenly prodded his left cheek with a yellow, tobacco-stained, finger:
“What you got there?”
“Nothin’.”
“Then open your maw and let me see.”
Hautereau didn’t dare resist the man in uniform, who grabbed his face in both hands, opened his mouth like a box, stuffed two dirty fingers inside his cheek, and pulled out a foul chaw of tobacco (which he had probably spit out himself the day before) from between his rotten molars.
Hautereau—a wizened little redhead, forty-five years old, sinewy, with the flat head of a dried fish—now stands at attention like a soldier before his superiors:
“This is the second
time I’ve caught you at it, Hautereau. Where did you get your tobacco?”
“I found it, Warden, Sir.”
“You’d better find a better answer than that. I’ll give you thirty seconds. You know the consequences.”
The Warden bends his long white mustaches and his ornately braided képi over his handsome silver watch. A feeling of well-being, derived from a hearty appetite thirty minutes before lunchtime, gives him great firmness of character at this instant.
Hautereau, his brows wrinkled, is thinking about his pal, the spittoon man, a lucky old devil who lives dangerously. He has enough to pay for the favors of the “prettiest boys”; he lacks nothing. He earns his prisoner’s fortune from globs of spit. Since smoking is forbidden within the walls of the penitentiary, most of the guards chew; a few smoke when they are alone; their butts and used chaws end up in spittoons placed around the corridors and the courtyards. The man who cleans these receptacles and refills them with carbolic acid every two days, removes the remnants of tobacco mingled with tubercular sputum. He washes them, rinses them, dries them, and resells them. The butts are resmoked and the chaws are rechewed. Hautereau suppresses an urge to betray.
“Have you thought it over?”
“Yes, Warden, Sir. I found it—that’s all I can tell you.”
“Forty days in the Room.”
The Disciplinary Room is about as big as an average workshop and dark on account of its narrow, barred windows with painted-over panes, and its walls, which are painted black to the level of three feet, and dirty yellow above. A sort of big square wire cage is stuck into the entrance: That’s where the guard stands. It makes you think of the tamer’s shelter in a bear pit. As in certain bear pits, there are low cement benches placed around the middle of the room about five feet apart.
“Change your clogs!”
Hautereau obeys. He is not allowed to wear his usual clogs: That would be a mitigation of the punishment.
“Go in!”
The ringing echo of wooden clogs beating the pavement in rhythm, the semidarkness, the cage—all terrify him as he enters. He sees a line of frenzied marionettes dancing along the walls, turning round and round with dogged steps, seeing nothing but those walls, the cage, their own backs, hearing nothing but the guard’s nagging voice calling out the cadences: “Left! left! left!,” aware of nothing but the pain in their feet bruised by unfamiliar clogs, the cramps climbing up their calves, the hunger gnawing at their bowels, and the days that never seem to end. It’s another endless round within the larger round. Hautereau enters. Reduced to dry bread and morning soup, the men undergoing punishment march for twenty minutes with their arms folded across their chests, then twenty minutes with their arms folded behind their backs. Every twenty minutes they get ten minutes’ rest on the cement benches, legs together, elbows pressed to their sides. Every day they do thirty miles within these walls. Toward the tenth day a man begins to stumble at every turn, carried along by the rhythm, his feet covered with cuts and bruises. If he refuses to walk, they throw him into the “hole.” If he collapses, they isolate him in the infirmary for a week; once his feet have been bandaged and his body revived by a few bowls of broth, he resumes his place in the madmen’s dance.
“Forty days,” thinks Hautereau. “It’ll take me at least two trips to the infirmary to do forty days.”
What he doesn’t know is that he is going mad. But we know it. We call him “the nut.” While he turns, prey to his obsessions like all these unhinged marionettes, the worm that is boring into his enfeebled brain will complete its ruin. Turn, old man, turn!
Hautereau’s obsession is the most common one, after sex: He is obsessed by his “case.” He has been mulling over his case for six years now, more and more convinced each day that he is innocent (which is false), that he has been victimized (which is true), and that there is no justice (which is also true). He broods for months on end over statements he intends to send to the Minister of Justice, to the Court of Appeals, to the President of the Republic. Whenever he is allowed to write; he blackens page after page with close-written paragraphs full of memorized quotations from the Penal Code, precedents in long-forgotten decisions, specious arguments about the testimony of witnesses now dead or vanished, themselves long forgotten. The significant passages are underlined two or three times. Gamekeeper in a woodland, Hautereau used to exercise his male prerogative on the girls who came to gather dead wood on his land. At first a magistrate’s court slapped a six months’ sentence on him. Six months for lifting the skirts of a girl in the woods, a little thief who was sleeping with all the carters in the next village and who “ran after me herself so’s I’d keep my eyes closed”—six months without roaming the woods he used to haunt all year round, from dawn to dusk—this seemed an incredible injustice and an intolerable torture to him. A provincial lawyer advised him to raise the question of jurisdiction and to demand a new trial in a higher court, where an acquittal seemed possible. The Criminal Court slapped a sentence of seven years at hard labor on the poor devil, soon commuted to seven years in the penitentiary at the request of the jury. So many different penalties for so natural an act unhinged his reason.
The dry clack of the clogs echoes endlessly against the walls of the Room. The immobile silence of the pauses cuts like a golden stripe across the gray warp of time. Seven men turning there in endless circles. Asparagus, an Italian bigamist, guilty of illegal correspondence with his wife: two weeks. Two young punks, Floc and Taupin, both pimps, one from the Porte de Clichy district, the other from the Place Blanche. Floc has legs of steel and a way of looking at people out of the corner of his eyes which is nastier than any insult. Every twenty-four seconds, Spike Chin, whose wire cage doesn’t protect him from the evil eye, is struck by that disturbing glance, but since Floc has been keeping in step without flinching for twenty days, the “screw” has nothing to say. He catches up on Taupin, who is by now nothing more than a limp rag, twitching wildly along, his feet bloody. Taupin is so dizzy at times, he thinks he is falling; and that awful burning in his heels, his ankles, the joints of his toes cramped in wooden clogs for twenty-nine days. “Ah, let me die,” he thinks. But the screw’s voice whips him on: “Faster, Taupin! Hup!” And Taupin, stirred up by that voice like a rag in a gust of wind, lurches forward. Hautereau sees the three other dancing forms less clearly, for they tend to follow him in the rounds and it’s only at the turns that he has a clear view of a broad face frozen into a grimace of anger and disgust, another expressionless face wearing glasses, and the last, so blank that it doesn’t count. All the figures are dancing. All the masks are grimacing and sneering. The Room is gray with yellow stripes. Nothing else is real anymore.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Latruffe
THE CELL BLOCK IS ANOTHER PRISON WITHIN THE PRISON, TOTALLY ISOLATED by its surrounding wall. Three floors of cells: dark, half-dark, and light. Two rows of dungeons. Triangular exercise yards forming a cement semicircle in a separate courtyard. In a ground-floor cell there is a small, almost comfortable office—cool in summer, warmed in winter by a radiator—belonging to the master of the place, Latruffe, a mountain of pale, swollen flesh, with bluish cheeks. His képi seems too small for his pear-shaped head, which widens at the bottom. His sausagelike fingers play continuously with a ring of keys, as inseparable as a Muslim’s beads. He greets his victims with a broad, moon-faced smile which exposes his rotten teeth, while he slyly whacks their ribs with his keys. “Pretend you don’t notice,” explain those in the know. “That’s what he likes.” Then he goes away laughing to himself and leaves you in peace. But if you make a fuss, he’ll never let you go, he’ll make you piss blood. He’s full of tricks. For instance, in winter he makes you wash your head at the faucet but won’t give you the time to get dry; so your teeth chatter till noon. In summer he gives you water you can’t drink; I don’t know what it is: funny and stale, as if somebody had been spitting into it. I wouldn’t put it past him. And at night when you bend over to pick up your mattress
, he always manages to give you a poke in the back with his keys on the sly. Don’t bellyache! He’ll throw you in irons with a report where he says you tried to kill him …
“If you’re a man, a real one, there’s still one good way of talking to him. All you have to do is say to him nicely, like this:
“Listen, Latruffe, old boy. If you want my ass, you’ll have it. But me, I’ll try to get yours first. Now you can start. Be my guest.
“Only if you talk to him like that, you’d better be serious. That bastard has a sixth sense about whether you’ve got guts, and he makes bluffers pay double.”
Every two or three hours, when the mood strikes him, Latruffe carefully folds his Petit Parisien, puts it down on the table, takes his lantern, and goes down to the dungeons.
A dank, foggy blackness, so thick you can almost touch it, reigns in these half-buried cement cells. Each contains a woven mat and a basin. The darkness is so thick inside that your arms seem to hug it, and your eyes absorb it; in a few hours it gets inside you, penetrating every pore. The sense of time no longer exists; the passing days, marked by a hunk of bread each morning, are lost, blurred in the darkness. Reason falters: That inner light succumbs to the darkness. You leave this place a sick man, eyes blinking, soul blinded, like a night bird turned loose in the bright sunlight. Leaving this place, you leave madness, or you take it with you. Four obsessions haunt these dungeons: the horror of injustice (the obsession of the case: “I’m innocent” or “I’ve been punished too hard, it’s unfair”); carnal desire (sometimes jealousy); the horror of death (the death of loved ones, transformed by the darkness into a certainty); the fear of dying. You don’t get to choose your obsession.