Supper the first night consisted of one item—boiled potatoes.
You could hear the serving woman moving the food cart from cell to cell. Later I counted them. There were ten on our side of the cellblock, twelve on the opposite side.
Of the four floors in our building, Zigurd told me, there were cells on the first and second, the third vacant, the doctors’ and dentists’ offices and the hospital on the fourth. Until a few days prior to my arrival, Zigurd had occupied a cell on the first floor. Building number 2 housed the worst political prisoners—those who had committed serious crimes against the state: for example, writers and intellectuals who had dared criticize the Soviet regime publicly, and people who had attempted to overthrow it.
Zigurd belonged in the latter category. Convicted of treason, he had received the maximum prison sentence, fifteen years. Of this, he had already served more than five, the first three in solitary confinement.
He was not reluctant to tell me his story. Rather, he seemed excited at the prospect of having someone to talk to.
What did I know about Latvia?
Very little, I admitted.
He described it—its forests and trees, its little villages, its people, their fierce nationalism—with an eloquence that could arise only out of deep love for one’s homeland.
In 1940 Latvia had been overrun by the Russians, who had incorporated it as the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic. Only thirteen at the time—he was now thirty-three, two years older than I—Zigurd had, like many of his countrymen, nurtured a hatred for the Russians stretching back through centuries of invasion and annexations. In 1941 Germany had invaded Latvia, driving the Russians out. To many of the Latvians, to whom German was a second language, this seemed less a conquest than a liberation. In 1944, when Russia again attempted to reclaim Latvia, Zigurd had joined the German Army, over the opposition of his parents, in order to fight the Russians. What followed was one continuous retreat, while the Red Army pushed their unit back into Poland, then all the way into Germany. By this time it was apparent even to the troops that Germany had lost the war. Many conscripts from Latvia, Poland, and other occupied countries were willing to battle the Russians, but they felt no animosity toward France, Britain, or the United States. Ordered to fight the Allies, they deserted in great numbers, Zigurd among them. Knowing that if he was caught by the Russians he would be shot as a traitor, he headed west, trying to make his way to the American lines. Before reaching them, however, he was captured by the British and placed in a POW camp. There, and later, in a displaced persons’ camp, he had learned English, which enabled him to get a job as guard at one of the British bases. While working there, he had been recruited by British intelligence, who flew him to England and put him through a special agents’ school. Trained to operate and repair radio transmitters, he was eventually returned secretly to Latvia by boat, where he went to work in the underground, transmitting messages, helping to smuggle people in and out of the country, and working to overthrow the Soviet puppet regime in Latvia.
The group did not engage in sabotage. Its primary functions, apparently, were to provide intelligence from behind the Iron Curtain and to form a nucleus of partisans that could be of assistance in the event of war.
Though in the Latvian underground for over a year and a half, he did not attempt to contact his parents. Erroneously, he had been reported killed in Germany. Not wanting to endanger them because of his activities, he had allowed them to believe that he was dead.
In summer his group had camped in the forests. Winters were so severe, however, that they had to have shelter. The underground hid them on a farm. One night they received warning that the secret police were closing in on the transmitter. A guide arrived, to take them to safety. After walking some distance, he left them by the side of a road while he went for a transport.
Since he had the radio strapped to his back and didn’t want it to be seen, Zigurd had left the others, retreating into the woods about one hundred feet, out of sight of the road, where he sat down on a log.
That was the last thing he remembered. On opening his eyes, he found he was staring at the checkerboard pattern in a wooden floor. He had been nearly frozen; now he was warm. Only then did he discover that he was bound to a chair in an interrogation room.
Though he had thought about it often, he was not sure how many hours or days had passed since his capture, nor exactly how it had occurred. He was sure he had been betrayed, however, and suspected the guide had been an informer. That he had been picked up so far back from the road, moments after arriving at the spot, indicated the secret police had been lying in wait.
After what he described as a “farce of a trial”—he was allowed no defense, the judge simply listened to the charges, then gave him the maximum prison sentence—he had been held in solitary confinement for almost three years, while they attempted to break him and make him identify others in the underground. Failing in this, they had transferred him to Vladimir.
When he arrived, his jailers had suggested that he write to his parents, giving them his new address. He had refused to do so. Rather than have them live under the stigma of a son in prison, he preferred that they believe him dead. But the Russians had written for him. His parents had come all the way from Latvia for a visit. And now they sent him letters and packages regularly.
That was Zigurd’s story, as he first told it. Not until much later would I learn how much he had left out.
He apologized for his rough English. There had been more than five years since he had had an opportunity to use it.
We made a deaclass="underline" I’d help him with his English if he would teach me Russian.
Several times during our talk I had heard tapping from the adjoining walls. Was it a code? I whispered. He nodded. What were they saying? “They’re asking, ‘Is Powers there?’”
Zigurd hadn’t replied to the tapping. Not sure whether the cell was bugged, I didn’t question him further. I guessed that having spent three years in solitary he was not willing to risk being returned there for a minor infraction of the rules.
Only on going to bed did he remove his beret.
There was another difference between Lubyanka and Vladimir. Here, after ten P.M., when the lights changed and the radio went off, you weren’t allowed to remain up or to read.
Zigurd fell asleep almost immediately. I lay awake for several hours, thinking about my new world, wondering when, or if, I would ever adjust to it.
Insofar as first impressions went, I liked my cellmate. As he told it, his story sounded believable. But I knew I couldn’t risk trusting him. There was always the possibility he was a Soviet “plant.”
At first everything was strange. Within a few days it became routine, then, all too soon, monotonous.
At six A.M. the squawk box blared the musical call sign of Radio Moscow. I started to get up, but my cellmate told me to remain in bed. He had to do his exercises and needed the floor space. These completed, he swept the cell. I offered to do it; he insisted it was part of his exercises. In prison, I soon learned, work of any kind is coveted. Though it required less than two minutes, Zigurd retained the right to sweep the floor, and no matter how many times I protested, he refused to let me do it.
Once dressed, we were escorted to the toilet, taking along the bucket, which Zigurd emptied and then rinsed with a strong disinfectant. Only two trips to the toilet were allowed each day; in the interim there was the bucket. Zigurd insisted on carrying and washing it; this too was part of his exercise, he said. On this I stood firm. We reached a compromise, he taking it one trip, I the next.