Men in Prison (6 page)

³⁵
Many of the U.S. soldiers accused of tormenting Iraqi prisoners were prison guards in civilian life.

ALL MEN WHO HAVE EXPERIENCED PRISON KNOW THAT ITS TERRIBLE GRASP
reaches out far beyond its physical walls. There is a moment when those whose lives it will crush suddenly grasp, with awful clarity, that all reality, all present time, all activity—everything real in their lives—is fading away, while before them opens a new road onto which they tread with the trembling step of fear. That icy moment is the moment of arrest.

The revolutionary living under the shadow of the prison wall or the gallows, who, suddenly, in a busy street, feels he is being watched; the underground agitator coming home at night, having finished his work as organizer or journalist, who is suddenly aware of a shadow clinging to his shadow, of firm footsteps dogging his own; the murderer, the thief, the deserter, the hunted man, whoever he may be— they all know that moment of panic. It is a moment as painful to anticipate as to live through, courage and will power notwithstanding. The only difference between cowards and other men is that the others, after living through this moment without revealing their emotion by the slightest gesture, recover full possession of themselves. The cowards remain broken.

I have experienced this moment several times. Once it came after I had actually been under arrest for five or six hours. A plainclothesman had picked me up at the office of the anarchist paper I was editing. He had said it was merely a question of signing receipts for the documents that had been seized during a search that morning at my home. I caught on, but was not really alarmed. For prison is also something we carry within us. I had allowed for this as an occupational hazard, not to be taken too seriously. At police headquarters a fat sergeant of the Sûreté, gross in gesture and speech, told me calmly:

“I’ve got you. You’ll do at least six months awaiting trial. Talk, or I’ll arrest you.”

Through the window over his shoulder, I could see some bricklayers working on a scaffold. I thought to myself, “Maybe this is one of your last views of life,” but without believing it, without any fear. The moment had not yet come. I answered with a shrug:

“Go ahead. Arrest me.”

And I was left in that large room, which was furnished with desks and filing cabinets and decorated with anthropometric diagrams (“Nose shapes, Ear shapes, How to read and draw up a description”), for several hours, calmly reading newspapers from one end to the other, ads included. That evening they took me into the comfortable office of the Assistant Chief of the Sûreté. Two leather armchairs before a broad desk, the soft light of a table lamp. Across from me in the shadows, the refined, slightly elongated, regular features of the urbane, well-mannered policeman whom I had guided that morning from our editorial office to the print shop. His behavior on that occasion had been courteous: the intelligent affability of a clever sleuth who knows the value of taking in his opponent, of seducing him a bit. He had told me:

“I sympathize with you. I am quite familiar with your ideas. In the old days I even used to go to meetings where F*** spoke; a marvelous speaker, a marvelous speaker … But you people are too advanced; you’re bound to be a minority …”

Then, with cold, almost negligent, but predatory, glance, he had scrutinized faces, papers, objects—and had arrested just about everybody.

Now he was again extremely polite, rather sad, and seemingly distressed at having to carry out his duty. And once more, ingratiating and persuasive, he invited me to talk. “We know everything; all you can tell us are a few corroborative details; none of your comrades will ever find out; you’ll spare yourself months, if not years, of prison; you have no moral obligation toward these miserable wretches; you have nothing in common with them … Come now!”

While he was talking to me, the moment came. All I could see in the shadowy room was the dull, wan oval of his face across from me. I felt a choking sensation in my throat. Like a drowning man, I saw a series of incoherent images pass, with extraordinary rapidity, before my eyes: a street corner, a subway car, the scaffolding I had glimpsed earlier. Things were fading away. I took a deep breath and forced myself to speak in a normal tone of voice:

“Lock me up. But I’m terribly hungry. I’d be much obliged if someone could bring me some supper.”

It was late; it would be a problem. But as soon as we started talking about it, I felt different, calm again, strangely
free,
and in control of myself. The moment had passed. I had crossed the invisible boundary. I was no longer a man, but a man in prison. An inmate.

I was to live one thousand eight hundred and twenty-five days in prison. Five years.

A few months later, while searching the empty apartment of an anarchist storekeeper, that same policeman came to a dark, tightly shuttered back room. Bravely, and at any rate unaware of any immediate danger, he entered; an instant later, he was locked in a violent hand-to-hand struggle with the man he had been tracking—a desperate anarchist bandit. In the wild embrace of the two bodies thrashing about on the floor, three bullets—fired point-blank—put an end to his career.

Another time, the moment came in a golden Mediterranean city on a brilliantly sunlit day, heavy with heat, a day of rebellion. We had lived for weeks waiting for the battle. That evening, feverish crowds seethed in dark, quiet waves against the foot of the rock where the citadel stood. In the streets, patrols of comrades filed silently past the patrols of gendarmes. Four o’clock in the afternoon: the hot, orange-tinted hour. The stucco façades of the squat, workers’ homes, usually ocher, glowed red; the trampled earth underfoot, orange or pomegranate red. A muffled din could be heard coming from a nearby boulevard, blocked off by troops, where the police were charging into running crowds. Walking rapidly, I left a house, surrounded by police, from which one of the leaders of the growing insurrection had just slipped away. My heart was still pounding with the joy of his escape. What light! As I emerged abruptly into the street, two plainclothesmen looked me up and down, hesitated … Then their steps fell in with mine—rapid, more rapidly; close, closer … Better not turn around. If only I could get to the street corner just ahead! My mind was absurdly fixed on that corner, as if it offered me some unhoped-for chance of safety. A voice hailed me:

“Señor! Hey, Señor!”

The man was already beside me; his dark eyes looked me over coolly. He pronounced the formula:

“In the name of His Honor the Civil Governor …”

Another ran up. The street suddenly seemed to darken. It closed in on me. The moment! In my mind, I started immediately to prepare a vigorous protest.

That time it was nothing serious. The police of that city knew they were living on the edge of a storm of revolt. And they were afraid. The workers’ power could be felt hanging in the air. An old police sergeant who was very correct, very polite, talked to me about Esperanto—one of his hobbies—and set me free after an hour.

Paris, the war, waiting to be mobilized. Camp Mailly? The front in Champagne? Stages to be passed through, luck providing: It would really be a shame to fall along the way. In the distance, the goal: the revolution unfolding its red flags in the streets of Petrograd. A day of high tension, anxious apprehension. Kornilov goes down in defeat. The Revolution lives! Over here, old Clemenceau carries out his slogan: “Make war!” Almereyda is dead, strangled in Fresnes prison. People are spied upon, arrested. Suspects and informers everywhere. The end of a workday, working clothes, the contented weariness of evening. Coming out of a friend’s house—chancy—I run into a slovenly, badly dressed, pallid little man with shifty eyes. I’ve noticed those shifty eyes several times during the past few days. Just to clear the suspicion from my mind, I turn around and walk right toward him. He slips away. This place is one of the most attractive spots in Old Paris: a modest little street between tall buildings, a little-known byway they say Balzac used to haunt. The street is not deserted this time. A gentleman waits at the end, idle. Another walks slowly away. Behind me, in a hallway, a third.

I have a record: anarchist “bandit.” There is an expulsion order out against me. I am “Russian.” Under suspicion. The day before yesterday—after meeting those shifty eyes—I put my papers in order and left detailed instructions with a comrade “in case of arrest.” Now this placid old street in the heart of Paris, whose silence I love so much, has become a vise tightening around me. I stop. I raise my head toward familiar windows. One of them is edged with flowers.

Le ciel est par-dessus le toit

Si bleu, si calme!
¹

The shifty-eyed man sidles shiftily up to me. I can feel his fear. My God! It’s all so stupid and tiresome! Let’s get it over with quickly. The moment has passed. I start walking again, I can hear the other man’s footsteps; I know he is afraid and that there is nothing to be afraid of.

“Your name?”

He expects a false one. His face is pale. The others are still far off— ten paces away. But they are walking faster. I give my name.

“That’s a lie! Your papers!”

He expected a false name so much that he automatically contradicts my answer, barely moving his bloodless lips! I put my hand into my pocket to take out my letter of transit, but my movement is checked. Violent hands grab both my wrists from behind. Hot breath blows into my ear: “Don’t try anything!” Three men, three bodies, brutal and heavy, bear down and crush me. Our faces almost touch. At last they realize that I am not struggling—I have no weapon, I am weak. They take a deep breath. So do I. We walk through the pale-blue street like any other passers-by … Those three men around me already constitute a prison, unseen by everyone but me.

When I finally recovered my freedom—after nearly dying in the meantime—I was fifteen months and twelve hundred and fifty miles from there, during a night barren of stars but velvet with snow, on the Finnish border.

There, keeping the watch, stood an emaciated soldier. The red star on his cap seemed almost black in the darkness. The trenches of the Revolution were behind him.

¹
The sky above the roof So blue, so calm! —Verlaine (Tr.)

MAN IMPRISONED DIFFERS FROM MAN IN GENERAL EVEN IN HIS OUTWARD
appearance. Prison marks him from the very first hour. Incarceration begins with the search. Necktie, collar, belt; suspenders, shoelaces, pocketknife, anything that might be used in secret to free a desperate man from the power of the law by stabbing or strangulation; papers, notebook, letters, snapshots, everything that characterizes a man, the little objects that accumulate around his private life—all this is taken from him. He feels as if he has been stripped of part of himself, reduced to an impotence inconceivable an hour before. His clothes hang loose, with nothing to fasten them, constantly in the way. His shoes yawn open. He is disheveled from head to foot. Personal effects and toilet accessories are gathered up in my handkerchief by a jailer’s hands—fat, hairy, soiled, accustomed to handling these cast-off objects. From now on, they are only Number 30’s “bundle.”

This first night’s cell is apparently nothing more than a lockup set aside for prisoners in transit. A windowless hole, ten feet deep and eight feet wide, somewhere down a corridor. During the day a pale light filters in through the dirty panes of the wire-mesh door. At night an electric bulb screwed into the ceiling gives off a dirty yellow light just strong enough to weary the eyes and aggravate insomnia. Along the wall, an old wooden bench, worn smooth by countless sleeping bodies. In the corner, a fairly clean toilet. Every quarter hour, the toilet flushes automatically, making a great racket. Every time I manage, despite the wearisome glow of the electric light which seeps through my closed eyelids, to doze off stretched out on the bench, my neck flat on the wood, my head thrown back—like a dead man, the racket of the toilet flushing drags me out of my torpor.

On the bench, etched in with pinpricks, I find inscriptions. There are more on the walls; they are everywhere, barely visible. You have to
examine the walls very closely to make out these graffiti; but they are always the same, in every prison cell: only four or five themes, sex predominating. It is as if the throngs of men thrown together by prison needed only thirty words and a phallic symbol to express the essence of their suffering and their lives. At first glance, the cell is empty, silent, sepulchral. But after the first five minutes, every square inch of wall or floor has its tale of woe to tell. A thousand hushed voices fill it with their changeless, unremitting murmurs. You soon grow tired of listening, tired of the constant repetition of the same miseries.

Night. Even the city’s rumble seems to have stopped. Nothing. Nothing. Sleep is impossible. Yet this wakeful state has something in common with sleep and dreams, perhaps with hallucination as well. I am already in a sort of tomb. I can do nothing. I am nothing. I see, hear, and feel nothing. I only know that the next hour will be exactly like this one. The contrast between this vacant, empty prison time and the intense rhythm of normal life is so violent that it will take a long and painful period of adaptation to slow down the pulse of life, to deaden the will, to stifle, blot out, obliterate every unsettling image from my mind. The first days’ total disorientation. My inner life pursues its feverish course in a silence void of time.

Nerves strain with curiosity about tomorrow, with the feeling of being at the mercy of an anonymous, fearsome, many-faced enemy who must be resisted, deceived, defied, shown no weakness.

We climb a long spiral staircase. We are in one of the medieval towers of the
Conciergerie,
I discover. We: a bizarre company that has just been formed in the gray murk of a corridor. I catch a glimpse of a dozen terrified faces. Their clothes, unfastened and disheveled, hang loose. Wrists handcuffed. We climb ponderously, with guards preceding us, separating us, following us. The stairs are narrow. Clumsy feet stumble over the steps. A muffled “Goddamn.” I am led by a single plainclothesman, a nondescript blond fellow who doesn’t even seem to notice me. In earlier times they used to put their victims “to the question” on the rack in the cellars of this very tower. Today they apply Bertillon’s scientific system upstairs. This is the stairway of progress.