The toilet was located at the far end of the cellblock. On opening the door, the smell was almost overpowering. The window was left open permanently in an attempt to air the room. It was not successful.
The toilets were of the Asian, that is, bombsight, type, consisting of open holes in the floor. Learning to squat over them took some getting used to.
There was only one washbasin, with Spartan cold water. Following my cellmate’s example, I stripped to the waist and washed myself thoroughly. After that I was wide awake.
When we returned to our cell, I sorted out my new impressions. There was only one door to the cellblock, located midway down our row. There was also, for the whole cellblock, only one guard, who didn’t wear a gun.
About seven o’clock he brought the chaenek, filled with hot water. We used part of it to shave. I was surprised to find Zigurd not only had a razor but also a small piece of broken mirror. With the rest of the water we made tea.
Between seven-thirty and eight, breakfast was served. We received the same food as the other prisoners, soup or porridge, ladled out of the huge kettle. There were two kinds of soup, one smelling strongly of fish and the other made primarily from dried peas. We received whichever kind was available that day. When porridge was served, it was one of several varieties—manna (similar to Cream of Wheat), boiled oats, barley, millet, or buckwheat. I liked the manna best. I couldn’t stomach the fish soup; even when I held my nose, it smelled bad. At breakfast we were also issued our bread ration for the day: a good-sized piece of black or rye bread, about five inches long and three inches thick. Occasionally a lighter whole wheat was served instead. Delicious, fairly fresh white bread could be purchased from the commissary, as could margarine and, on rare occasion, butter. These extra items were available to anyone with money to buy them. Fortunately, before leaving Moscow, Barbara had left twenty-six hundred rubles (about $260) on deposit in my name, to cover such purchasable items, postage, and duty on packages. I was not too fond of black bread and usually gave Zigurd my ration.
There was a labor camp connected to the prison, with about 150 prisoners. Their barracks—which also housed the cooks and other service personnel—was one of the buildings I’d passed on the way from the administration building, and from the window I could see its upper floors, as well as the tops of the buildings in the work area itself. At eight each morning I’d peek through the crack in the window to watch some sixty to eight of the prisoners as they were marched through the arched gateway, around our building, and—on the other side, out of sight—through another gate into the work camp. Most wore prison-issue clothing, gray coat and pants, but some wore combinations of prison issue and their own.
I knew nothing about their life, and only a little about their work—apparently they worked with lumber, possibly making boxes or something similar, as I could hear a sawmill and hammering—but I envied their being outside and having something to do. I had already counted my time. It would be fifteen months before I could apply for transfer to a work camp, and even then there was no assurance the request would be granted.
After washing our breakfast dishes with newspapers, not a very sanitary method but all we could manage, there was about an hour and a half before our walk. We usually spent the time reading. Zigurd was as happy as a child at Christmas when he saw all the American paperbacks I’d brought from Lubyanka. Otherwise, we’d study Russian. Finding it hard to concentrate, I was a slow pupil, but Zigurd was patient. In a remarkably short time, just from our conversations, his English improved greatly. He had a natural flair for languages and had given up the study of French only because, having no one to practice it with, he was afraid of developing bad pronunciation habits. It wasn’t long before he had thoroughly indoctrinated me in one of his beliefs: every child in every country should be taught Esperanto. With all people able to converse in a common tongue, he was convinced that many of the world’s problems would disappear.
About ten o’clock we were taken out for our walk. And I made some additional discoveries, negating those made earlier. Although our guard had keys to all the cells, he did not have a key to the door connecting our cellblock to the rest of the building. This had to be opened by a guard on the other side. So, even should we succeed in overpowering our guard, there still remained the problem of getting out of the cellblock.
The green, red, and white light arrangement wasn’t used at Vladimir. But chance encounters were prevented by taking out only the occupants of a single cell at one time. According to my cellmate, this was of greater concern in our building than in others, because it housed political prisoners, that is, conspiring types. Some of the political prisoners had cellmates; many didn’t. Those who did were carefully paired in order to prevent their spending their time plotting. In the work camp, there were five to seven men in each room.
Our cell faced east. The walk areas were on the opposite side of the building, at ground level. To reach them we were taken downstairs, then out and around the building. Set some distance away from the building, up against the wall, there were about seven of these courtyards. From his guardwalk, one man could watch them all.
Our courtyard measured twenty by twenty-five feet. It took ten seconds to make a complete circle. To break the monotony—we had two hours—we would sit in the sun and do pushups. Feeding the pigeons we enjoyed most of all. It wasn’t long before I had several favorites and would watch for them each day.
From our courtyard we could see the windows of some of the cells on the west side of our building. Prisoners were forbidden to stand on their beds and yell out at those in the courtyards below. Some ignored the injunction. Zigurd would translate. For the first several days the messages were all the same.
“Is that Powers?” they would ask.
“Yes,” Zigurd would yell back.
“Give him our best wishes.”
I had wondered how other prisoners would react to the presence of an American spy. They were friendly, and curious.
They weren’t the only curious ones. Cadets studying to be prison officials would visit Vladimir for practical experience. Often we could hear them outside the cell, whole classes lining up for their turn to look through the peephole at the American.
We could always tell when the building superintendent was making his rounds. The Little Major, as we dubbed him, was so fat that his belt buckle scraped against the door.
There was even less privacy than at Lubyanka. However, whenever we heard a sound outside—someone yelling, or, on one occasion, a gunshot—we devised a way to look out the top of the window without being observed. One of us would stand in front of the door, the back of his head covering the peephole, while the other looked out. It had to be quick, because if the guard looked in and saw the peephole blocked, he’d immediately open the door.
Lunch was the best meal of the day, consisting of an excellent soup and a plate of either cabbage, noodles, rice, manna, or mashed potatoes. We were also given two hundred grams, or about half a tin cup, of milk. This was a special privilege, Zigurd informed me; milk was usually reserved for convalescent patients in the hospital. Possibly it was due to the fact that I was still having some stomach trouble. On warm days the milk was usually spoiled, but by letting it stand until it turned to clabber and mixing in a little sugar, we made a passable yoghurt.
We were accorded still another special privilege, although several days passed before we were informed of it. I would be allowed to keep my hair, and since we were in the same cell, Zigurd would be allowed to grow his again. This pleased me as much as it did him, although for quite different reasons. The hair rule appeared to be arbitrary. Of those prisoners I could see from my window, most had their hair clipped short, but a number didn’t. Among the latter, however, were apparently those shortly due for release. It was a small thing, perhaps entirely meaningless, but letting me keep my hair seemed to indicate that there might be some possibility of an early release. Of such fragmentary hopes are a prisoner’s day made.