For seven months now, ever since my arrest and trial, I have been living like a queen here in prison: doors are flung open before me wherever I go—into cells, interrogation rooms, the courtroom. . . . Other hands close these doors behind me, too. Not that I do much walking these days, just the odd stretch now and then along some corridor. Still, I maintain the correct regal bearing. Mostly I am driven from place to place. An impressive number of people are employed in “serving” me: just to get a pencil sharpened I summon a junior officer of the guard. Should the Queen desire to have a fresh pair of socks issued out of her personal effects, any number of minions must spring into action, including the prison governor (he has to sign all paperwork, and Her Majesty’s demand for socks must, of course, be duly recorded).
The prison in which I am being held is called the Isolation-Interrogation Prison of the KGB, but during World War II, when Kiev was under German occupation, it was used by the Gestapo. Here, for the very first time in my life, I have a room all to myself. It is even furnished with a steel cot, a small night table, and a slop bucket which serves as a lavatory. All the Queen’s papers, in view of their importance to the state, are regularly scrutinized by “competent persons.” For this very reason, my first collection of poems written in prison is not committed to paper, but has been memorized painstakingly, word for word. In principle, heads are also subject to scrutiny in this place, but the principle has not been enforced in my case because of my very decisive “veto.” This privilege was not easily won, and gives me the right to walk proudly. Make the best of it, gentlemen; such is my royal will.
Today I am leaving my Kiev residence for one in Mordovia. Today is the start of my journey to the labor camp; a van will deliver me to the station in an hour’s time. All my papers, I have been told, will be sent on separately, “so that you won’t have to cart them around yourself.” The papers in question are my sentence, my appeal against it, my statement at my trial, my notes concerning the official record of the trial, and poems by Tyutchev, Pushkin, Shevchenko, Lermontov, and Zhukovsky, copied out of books from the prison library. Oh, well, I would probably not get a chance to read them during transportation to the camp.
I feel a slightly feverish exhilaration, as always before a journey. Of course, I know full well that this will be no ordinary trip: guard dogs, yelling guards armed with machine guns, the stuffiness and oppression of Stolypin railway cars,1 the stench of transit prisons. . . . Nevertheless, my spirits are high; these first seven months have not passed too badly. They did not get so much as a word out of me under interrogation, I did not make a single plea to my captors; all they got out of me was the statement I made at my trial and a flat refusal to take part in any of the proceedings. Quite an acceptable beginning for a political prisoner. Now comes the next step—transportation to the camp. My services to the Motherland have received the highest accolade: seven years of strict-regime camps2 to be followed by five years of internal exile.
The sentence came as a twenty-ninth birthday present. But I got another present on that day: my husband Igor was summoned as a witness to my trial. From the doorway, he called out to me: “Hold steady, darling, I love you!” And then, turning to the judges, he told them exactly what he thought of them and their proceedings. Among other things, he threw at them that I am a member of International PEN (news to me!) and then, just before they managed to hustle him out, one last look at me. Tell me, dear comrade judges, has anyone ever looked at you like that? Or at you, my warder-escort? Or at you, Prison Governor Petrunya? No, of course they haven’t. And that is why you cannot understand how I can face the journey to the camp with a smile.
They issue me rations for the journey: half a loaf of black bread and some herring. From my former reading of samizdat, I know that this means twenty-four hours of travel before the first transit stop. Eating the herring is inadvisable, because it makes you terribly thirsty, and there will be nothing to drink. Thank you, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, for your priceless counsels! Who can say whether Igor and I would have had the presence of mind to burn all letters and addresses while the KGB hammered on our doors, had we not read your works? Or would I have been able to summon sufficient control not to bat an eyelash when they stripped me naked in prison? Without you, would I have grasped that cardinal principle for all prisoners of conscience: “Never believe them, never fear them, never ask them for anything”? Thanks to you, even such trivia as the business with the herring is known to me in advance. A zek‘s3 light body, a zek‘s light bundle. . . .
The carriage is waiting, a Black Maria. Oh, well. It’s April. The journey lies before me. The van is brought right up to the railway carriage, so you step straight from one into the other. A guard dog barks frenziedly somewhere below: yes, I have read about all this. Here they are, the crowded Stolypin compartments. A welter of female bodies and faces penned up in a wire enclosure measuring three cubic meters. How many prisoners can there be in here, crammed in on two tiers? About fifteen? The next such “cage” is full of men. A clamor goes up as they see me.
“Look, here’s a young one!”
“Hey, sweetheart, where are you headed for?”
“Girlie, look at me!”
Someone proffers a sweet through the wire mesh. The guard lashes out, the sweet falls to the floor, and the hand is hastily withdrawn—it lacks several fingers and is covered with tattoos. The sun sets behind the hills. We all look each other over, smiling.
“No talking!”
_____________
We continue to exchange smiles. They are zeks, and so am I. Later, when the train gets under way and the guard is replaced by a less obnoxious one, they get him to pass me another sweet, and I reciprocate with a pack of cigarettes (I knew these must be bought before the journey, whether one smokes or not). Soon, I learn my first word of “zek-speak”: a “warmer.” A “warmer” is the acquisition of something not officially permitted, such as our exchange of a sweet for cigarettes. The first, obvious interpretation of this word strikes me immediately—something to warm the heart. A further interpretation was to come six months later: when you eat, you feel the cold less than when you are hungry. So a “warmer” can, quite literally, be calories. . . .
I have an enclosure all to myself. According to the regulations, especially dangerous state criminals must not be able to mingle with the other prisoners and exercise a bad influence on them. Who knows, ordinary criminals might just take it into their heads to stop stealing and robbing, and take to writing poetry. Or, worse still, start coming out in support of that traitor, Sakharov. In reality, however, what price isolation, when every compartment consists of three walls and a wire-mesh front? It is relatively easy, with a bit of dexterity, to pass notes through the wire from one enclosure to another, up and down the length of the carriage. And every word can be clearly heard.
“Hey, Number One, why are you traveling alone?”
Number One—that’s me, because it is the number of my enclosure, right at one end of the carriage.
“I’m a ‘political.’”
“Go on! Was it you, then, who took a shot at Andropov?”
“Why, has someone taken a shot at him?”
This is news to me. I was allowed no newspapers in the KGB prison in Kiev and, anyway, this is not something that would have been mentioned in the press. I went into prison under Brezhnev, and only learned from the prosecutor’s speech at my trial that we were now ruled “by Comrade Andropov himself.”
“You bet they did, but they missed, worse luck.”
“No they didn’t, he was hit in the knee.” This is another enclosure joining in.
“No, I’m here because of my poems.”
“How’s that? Your poems were against the government, were they?”
“No, independent of the government, so they took offense.”
“About God, eh?”
“About God, too.”
“Yeah, they wouldn’t like that. Say, how about reciting some of them? Remember them, don’t you?”
How could I forget? I recite the poem I dedicated to Sakharov:
Don’t attempt to coerce,
If a boy flies the nest and bereaves you—
Write it off as a loss, you exemplary homeland
and nurse!
You are quick to forget how to bless your own
son as he leaves you,
And instead you have learned the cruel art of
pronouncing a curse!What you put in your bread—
So that no one looks elsewhere to savor,
How you loose on the trail your swift dogs and
their practical art,
And poverty, jail, and the nightmare asylum
forever—Cease to harp on those strings.
We have studied and learned them by heart.Those with wide-spreading wings,
Who from birth have been stubborn and
awkward—
Don’t attempt to coerce, using bribes or the
menacing word—
We’re not reached by such things.
We leave and go onward and onward . . .
People say that a shot in the back simply cannot
be heard.
They are all quiet, listening. Heavens, what do they make of it? These are common criminals, half of them would not have so much as read a book in their lives. On the other hand, maybe they are not all like that: how varied are the people who have passed through our prisons! These listen avidly.
“No talking!”
I fall silent without demur; it is wiser to wait until the early vigilance of our guards loses its edge. This won’t take long. Some ten minutes later, a voice calls out: “Number One, you write it out and pass it along to us in Number Six, okay?” What’s your name?”
“Ira.”
“Start writing, Irinka!”
_____________
Generally speaking, writing is a bit risky. Under Soviet law it qualifies as “dissemination of slanderous documentation in poetic form.” Discovery can lead to the institution of new criminal proceedings. On the other hand, I have no intention of spending the next seven years in camp cowering in silence like a frightened mouse. That would be playing right into the hands of the KGB, whose aim is to make me fear giving my poems to anyone. As for my traveling companions—well, they are human, too, criminals or not, and I am not the Almighty to sit in judgment on them. For better or worse, they are my people, just as the young guard in his military uniform is, too. No, I shall not stoop to self-censorship.
Writing is difficult, though, because the train jerks and words jump on the paper. Better wait until the train stops. What should I write, so that they will all understand? I know—the one about the prison gnome. And something lighthearted—say, the poem about the flying cat. And the one about the old lady who waits for the return of her son. The next halt is a long one, and I cover a double sheet of paper ripped out of an exercise book.
“Girls, pass this on to Number Six, will you.”
“How about something for us?”
“You can have this when they finish reading it. I can’t write it all out ten times.”
“Is it all right if we copy it out for ourselves?”
“Of course. But you could get into trouble if the guards find it.”
“Zero is what they’ll find.”
“Another word out of any of you, and nobody will be allowed out to the toilet until tomorrow.”
This last remark is from the guard. The threat is a weighty one. What are you supposed to do if they don’t let you out of the pen to use the toilet? Moreover, trips to the toilet are regarded by the guards as a nuisance: one of them stands watch outside the lavatory, one plays sentry in the passageway, and a third must open every enclosure in turn and escort the prisoners to the toilet and back, one by one. So from the point of view of the guards, the fewer trips there are to the toilet the better, and toilet detail is kept to a minimum, driving the prisoners to desperation. The men occasionally cannot hold out and urinate into plastic bags, if there are any around, or into their boots. The women weep and wail, but hang on. However, this fair-haired youngster is clearly not one of the nasty ones, and has issued his threat simply to restore order. The women in Number Three sense this immediately: “Hey, there, my fair little soldier-boy. Why are you so cross, eh? Come here and I’ll give you a kiss!”
“Behave, will you!”
“But I’m not misbehaving, am I? I’ll just give you one kiss, and it will make your whiskers grow like anything. Do you want fair whiskers, or ginger ones?”
“That’s enough of your chattering, you hear?”
“Oh well, if you don’t want us to talk, we’ll sing you a song. Come on, girls, all together now:
Valentina Tereshkova
Stupid bloody fool
Went to suck milk from a cow
But got under a bull. . . .”
“Watch it, girls, don’t try my patience too far.”
“We’ll try you, all right, and get a bun in the oven. All the better, it means we’ll get out come the next amnesty.”
“Yes, we’ll have nice little fair-haired girls out of you.”
“Shut up, will you! The convoy commander will be coming through any minute now.”
This appeal works, for the prisoners know that the young guard could get into trouble for talking to them. Everyone quiets down. In any case, it must be time to bed down now; they loaded us onto the train in the evening, and how much has happened since then! It would be interesting to know what time it is. This interest is purely academic: prisoners are not allowed to have watches or clocks. You are wakened when necessary and taken where necessary. How strangely reality narrows in prison. I know nothing: not where I will be tomorrow, not the direction in which I am traveling, nor what is going on there, in the outside world. I don’t even know anything about Igor, whether he has been arrested or not. A month has passed since my trial, and we have not been allowed to exchange letters or see each other in that time. Where is he now? Probably getting ready to sleep, too—but where? On our folding couch at home, or on a plank bed in prison? Sleep, my dear one. May the Lord give you strength.
_____________
Morning. The train has been stationary for several hours now. I have learned that we are being taken to Moscow, and shall arrive there only in the evening, at best. It is twelve hours by ordinary passenger train from Kiev to Moscow, but carriages with prisoners are attached to freight trains, so our journey will take at least double that time. I half-doze most of the time; this way, the hours do not drag so heavily, nor do the surroundings impinge so much on one’s consciousness. There is a swell of noise in the carriage, though, which cannot be ignored: “Hey, chief! Take us to the toilet.”
“Toilets aren’t supposed to be used during stops.”
“Well, when are we going to move, then?”
“When the time comes, that’s when.”
An outburst of helpless swearing among the prisoners. Who can say when the train will move again? After a while, the train finally jerks into motion.
“Hey, chief!”
The “chief” does not deign to reply. This is not yesterday’s young lad; the guards have changed. This new one must be an “overtimer,” one of those who remains in this job of his own free will. Though what could motivate someone to take up this kind of work for a living voluntarily is beyond me. We cannot see his eyes as he stands with his back to us. His fat cheeks, however, protrude from both sides of his head, which looks red and robust, even from the back. Does he hear the pleas of the zeks, or has he learned to switch off? A woman in the third enclosure is weeping, she has just about reached the end of her endurance.
“Chief! At least let the pregnant one go.”
The chief doesn’t give a damn about pregnant women; you can tell by that expressive back of his head.
How much time has passed? Half an hour? An hour?
“Hey, fellas! Start ‘er rocking!”
Our seemingly deaf and mute tormentor reacts as if stung: “Who said that?”
But in the general uproar, it is quite impossible to determine the culprit. It was a young male voice, but there must be about seventy men in the carriage. In the next moment, I find out what that seditious call to “rock” means: the prisoners bodily start to rock our carriage. All together, in unison, throwing themselves first against one wall of their enclosures, then against the opposite one. The carriage is so packed that the results can be felt almost immediately. In this manner, the carriage can be tipped off the tracks, derailing the whole train.
The convoy supervisor comes running: “Who started this?”
Up yours, mate; the whole carriage keeps rocking. I’m doing my bit, too, in my solitary enclosure. We’ll die and take you with us, you fat-faced swine! Obviously, this prospect does not appeal to him—two guards with keys appear on the double. One of them opens the enclosure in which the pregnant woman is locked. I see her as she passes my cage: a small, tearstained face, a shock of hair peeping out from under a washed-out kerchief.
The tension dies down. Keys rattle, enclosure doors bang, and my traveling companions all pass by me, half a step away, to the toilet and back.
My God, how many of them are there? I ought to keep count, for did I not promise myself, as I stepped across the threshold of my first prison cell, that I would miss nothing? That I would watch and remember everything, down to the tiniest detail? For the day would come when all this information would prove vital, and not just the emotional aspect, but facts and figures. But right now I simply cannot force myself to keep a tally: gray faces, gray clothing. . . . Only their eyes are different. They all look at me with unconcealed curiosity: a “political” is no mean title.
“How’s it going, Irinka?”
I smile. Eyes looking into eyes. And another look on the way back. I stand right up against the wire. What terms stretch before you, lads? How many of you will survive the camps, how many will emerge crippled or deranged? Whom have you left behind, and will they live to see you? And how many of you actually have a place to call home? What will be the fate of the child the woman in the third enclosure will bear? What will his first words be, learned in the camp? It was only later that I found out that the average mortality rate for babies in the camps is one in eight. How much I still have to learn, despite all that I have read about prisons and camps. So this is what you are like, zeks of my time. Let us exchange a forbidden smile; that, too, is a “warmer.”
_____________
With amazing sleight-of-hand, someone slips something into my pocket through the wire mesh. So adroitly is this done that I scarcely notice it, and the guard misses it altogether. And again. And again. A small square of paper, folded several times, falls to the floor. A note! Quickly, I cover it with my boot: like all the other zeks, I wear tarpaulin soldiers’ boots. Only mine are smaller than the regulation issue; Igor somehow managed to get a pair in my size and passed them to me in prison. Whew! Looks like nobody saw the note. I drop my handkerchief, then scoop up the note as I bend to retrieve it. I have not yet acquired the dexterity of a zek. Never mind, I will learn.
When everything quiets down and the guard turns his back on us again, I start to examine my booty.
“Hello there, Irisha! My name is Volodya. My term expires in three years’ time. I am very fond of poetry. My favorite poet is Omar Khayyßm. Here are some of his verses that I remember by heart, I hope you like them too.”
And, on a separate bit of paper, verses out of the Rubáiyát, closely written in tiny script (he must have written them when the train was stationary). Almost no grammatical errors. How about that! Much can be expected during transportation to the camps, but hardly something like this. Later, these verses were to be confiscated when I was searched upon arrival at Lefortovo prison, as were the Tyutchev and Pushkin poems which I had copied out and which were “traveling separately.” Instead of having them returned to me, I was given a document listing them as confiscated; the document stated that these poems were found to be slanderous, ideologically dangerous, and for this reason had been destroyed by burning.
The reason for this bizarre act was not hard to guess: the Kiev KGB staff cannot be expected to know anything about literature, and they had simply decided that these poems had all been written by me. It had not occurred to me to note that this poem was written by Pushkin, or that one by Tyutchev, as I had known them from childhood. So, by courtesy of the ignorance of the Kiev KGB, I was arbitrarily elevated to genius rank: writing about the mountains of Georgia, the depths of the Siberian mines, about thunderstorms in early May. . . . Naturally, this “creativity” only served to increase the vigilance of the KGB. That’s right, my bright sparks: keep your eyes peeled and your ears open; what will be, will be. In the meantime, on to the next note.
“Irinka, our names are Vera and Lyuba. We’re on our way from a juvenile-offenders’ zone to an adult one. We both have a year left to serve, though it’s not likely we’ll end up in the same zone. Write how long you’ve got to serve; we didn’t hear when you told the others. Vera thinks you said seven years, but that can’t be right, can it? Is it true that our political prisoners get sent to America in exchange for our spies that the Americans have caught? Write about your politics and pass it along to the fifth cage. All the others in here want to know, too.”
“Ira, you said that there is a political camp. Is that the one where they kept Solzhenitsyn? I read his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich when I was still free. Some of our boys say that Solzhenitsyn is a Jew, and that he has been imprisoned again. Is that true? Send your answer to the seventh, and mark it for ‘The Lip’—that’s what they call me.”
Among the notes, I discover a caramel in my pocket. The aniline colors of its wrapper have imprinted themselves on the sweet itself in bright red and violet diamond shapes. We used to joke about these caramels in Odessa, saying that they were made of pure acetone. It melts slowly, slowly in my mouth. I will never know whose gift this is. Maybe it was slipped to me by that young, blue-eyed man with ringworm on his shaven head, or that elderly, homely-looking woman with smiling wrinkles, or that swarthy “stripey” (a term applied to those who are on special regime,4 and therefore are almost certainly doomed). Whoever it was—my heartfelt thanks. This caramel is the best I have had in my life. I reply to the notes as clearly as possible. The notes themselves I destroy, for we will soon be in Moscow and that means I will be searched. I keep only verses of the Rubáiyát: if they find them, let them search for a zek called Omar Khayyám.
_____________
I am transported through Moscow alone, in a large truck with a canvas hood. My guards are two young men, cradling submachine guns. Naturally, they are curious to know who it is they are guarding. I tell them my story. They are incredulous: “Surely not seven years plus five?”
I open a shutter in the door to catch a glimpse of Moscow. The night wind blows my hair back from my forehead. Lights. The area is unfamiliar. After a little awkward hemming and hawing, my custodians come up with an amazing offer: I’m young, so are they. Maybe I would like to have “a quickie” with whichever one of them I fancy most? There is still some way to go, and the other one will turn his back. Moreover, if I chance to become pregnant, I’ll almost certainly get out of camp early, because pregnant women or women with children are usually included in the amnesties proclaimed from time to time. In fact, two amnesties are expected quite soon in connection with the forthcoming revolutionary anniversary dates.
Luckily, I have enough sense to take no offense at their generosity. When all is said and done, in their own way they honestly want to do me a good turn. As tactfully as I can, I explain that while I think they are both fine specimens of manhood, I am a married woman, and faithful to my husband.
“Religious, are you?”
“Yes, I am.”
To them, this is a perfectly acceptable explanation, and the subject is closed. If no—then no. They are, in fact, immeasurably more sensitive than KGB men, whose response certainly would have been: “Where’s the husband who will wait for you for seven years!” How many times I heard such remarks during the seven months I spent under investigation!
My poor investigator, Lukyanenko, was at his wits’ end to come up with something that would shake my composure. He never did, and finally gave up trying. After every question, without even expecting an answer, he would note down “no reply” in the protocol. But these lads—their questions I do answer, whatever they want to know. I recite poems, explain who Sakharov is. In this way we pass the journey to Lefortovo prison. They give me a pack of cigarettes and I take it, even though I do not smoke myself; they will be a welcome gift for others. After all, I am not alone any more. With whom will it fall to me to share skilly?5
At Lefortovo, after being searched, I get what is a treat for any zek—a shower. This is one good thing about being in transport: the prisoners have to be able to wash once a week, and I still had five days to go before my next scheduled wash. This unexpected bonus is because all incoming prisoners in Lefortovo have to be given a wash. How long will they keep me here? No use asking, of course. I have a cell to myself, thank God. Faces, shaven heads swim before my eyes. . . . I have become unaccustomed to people during seven months of solitude. KGB men do not qualify as human beings, after all! But my erstwhile traveling companions are people, even though some of them may be killers and thieves.
Our nation has always referred to those sentenced to hard labor as “unfortunates.” And unfortunates they are, and I pity them, as, no doubt, they pity me. Certainly I know about the vicious camp “laws” by which criminals live, about merciless revenge, about the exploitation of the weak among them. . . . Yet there is something else to them as well—and that I will never forget. I shall try to appeal to that “something else” which exists in even the most hardened criminals, and the guards, and maybe even in that one, who has just peered in through the Judas-hole in the door to check whether I am asleep or not.
Oh, Lord, save my unfortunate people and have mercy upon them!
_____________
1 Carriages for transportation of prisoners, introduced by Pyotr Stolypin, Russia's Minister of Internal Affairs, 1906-11. Each carriage is divided into compartments of nine cubic meters which were shared by an average of four prisoners in czarist times and twelve in Soviet times. Records exist of compartments holding twenty-nine people.—Translator's Note.
2 There are four types of regime regulating conditions of imprisonment: ordinary, intensified, strict, and special. Each entails progressive reduction in prisoners' rights to visits, correspondence, supplementary food purchases, etc.—T.N.
3 Zek is derived from the abbreviation z/k, zaklyuchenny, prisoner.—T.N.
4 Prisoners on special regime are held in cells. Theirs is the harshest of the four categories regulating conditions of imprisonment.—T.N.
5 A thin swill, the staple food in the camps.—T.N.
