The National Geographic episode and the chess game were two bright spots. There weren’t many during that month of February.
My disappointment was gradual, but cumulative. As each day passed with no word, I became increasingly despondent. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had been let down, abandoned; that had Ambassador Thompson brought up my case with Khrushchev at the same time as he has the RB-47 pilots, I would have been released. My captors had given every indication they were prepared to let me go. I was happy for the RB-47 boys, yet in my darker moments I couldn’t help thinking that if they hadn’t been here, I might have been released.
Time passed slowly. Movies were now about a month apart, occasionally less often. We had stopped making envelopes because paper was unavailable. I had started another carpet, having mailed the first one to Barbara, but ran out of wool and was waiting to see if Zigurd’s mother was able to find the right colors in Latvia. I knew I should take up my Russian again, but didn’t. Perhaps unconsciously I felt that to do so would be to admit I would be staying. Nor was reading any longer an escape. One evening I discovered I was staring at a blank page: the words were no longer there. My peripheral vision was normal, but my central vision was gone. My eyes were just tired, I decided, putting the book aside. When I picked it up later, everything was fine. But the following day there was the blank spot again. And it kept returning, with increasing frequency. Two things frighten a pilot more than any others: heart and eye trouble. The heart palpitations remained—they had never completely left me since May 1, 1960—and now this. I discussed it with Zigurd, and we decided it might be a vitamin deficiency due to our poor diet. Vitamins were not available through the prison commissary, but Zigurd wrote to his parents asking them to send some. They had done this for him on a previous occasion. However, there would be at least a month before they arrived. Meantime, the problem remained.
That, however, was not my major worry. One thing now concerned me almost to the exclusion of all else.
Barbara had again stopped writing. Her last letter, written January 9, had arrived on the twenty-sixth of that month. After that, nothing.
I was annoyed at myself for letting this business with Barbara’s letters upset me so. I knew she was undependable. But emotionally, I needed to hear from her about the world I knew. Contact with Barbara was contact with home, contact with life.
On February 22 the KGB colonel made his regular visit. Through Zigurd I tried to engage him in conversation, to determine if he had heard anything, but he was very brisk and businesslike. His manner seemed to indicate that something had changed. However, it was not until two days later that I received confirmation. As I wrote in the journal on the twenty-fifth, “The major came yesterday and said the relations between the two countries had not gotten any worse, but they also were not better, and they couldn’t see them getting better in the near future. This is the same as saying I won’t be released in the near future.”
Still no letter from Barbara, although other mail was coming through. Mother: “It hurt real bad to see the other two boys arrive back here and you not with them, but I’m happy for them and their families.”
On February 28 something odd occurred which took my thoughts, temporarily, off my growing concern. Because of its nature, I couldn’t trust it to my diary or journal, except for a coded reminder.
Earlier Zigurd had told me that prisoners sometimes exchanged messages by wadding them in bread and throwing them when the guard wasn’t looking.
While I was walking in the exercise yard, a ball of bread, apparently tossed from one of the second-floor cell windows, landed at my feet. Making sure the guard had his back turned, I quickly scooped it up and palmed it. Not until we were back in our cell did I take out the message and read it.
It was in English, but strangely worded: “Dear Friend! You will live by and by. In that glorie land below the sky… but you must live so interestly, that you would be able to say something to your grandmother, when you return home. I can… if you are the man.”
I puzzled over it for hours. By “grandmother” did the writer mean “Uncle Sam,” and was he trying to say he had information for him?
I didn’t, and still don’t, know. No further attempt at contact was made. Separated as we were from the other prisoners, Zigurd and I had no idea whether any of them could speak or write English. Occasionally some of them would yell a word or two from their windows, but it was always “Hello” or something equally simple, repeated several times as though it were the only word they knew.
The need to communicate can lead one to all sorts of extremes. Once, when I was looking out the window, I saw a pigeon carrying a message. Literally. A prisoner had tied a string about two feet long to the pigeon’s leg; at the other end a letter, in a regular envelope. I could even see the postage stamp.
The sight was both comical and sad, sad because one of the guards saw it too and brought the pigeon down with one shot.
That was the only time, in either Lubyanka or Vladimir prison, that I heard a shot fired.
It was no longer easy to make excuses for Barbara’s failure to write—yet I continued to do so in spite of the fact that she didn’t have a job and lived with her mother, receiving a monthly check from the agency, leaving her few responsibilities. I not only thought of every possible excuse, I even reached way out for improbable explanations, wondering for example, if some of her letters were on a plane I heard had just crashed in Belgium.
I couldn’t write to my parents, asking them to inquire. Relations between them and my wife were strained enough without letting them know that she wasn’t writing to me. All I could do was wait.
By the end of February, thirty-three days had passed since Barbara’s last letter, and thoughts of her had become an obsession. Coinciding as it did with my disappointment over not being released, it was as if in addition to the government abandoning me, my wife had done so also.
I suppose there exists in every prisoner’s mind doubts about those he loves, no mater how blameless they may be. The mere fact that they are free, and you aren’t, builds resentments. But such doubts can be overcome where trust exists. I was denied that. I couldn’t trust Barbara. And without trust love begins to die, not fast but slowly and painfully.
Some of the agony I was going through was poured into the diary and journal. Even more remained bottled up inside…. “I can never have a future with her, because the past will always be between us…. Although in principle I’m opposed to it, there seems no other way than a divorce when I return to the States. It should have been done in 1957…. I thought at the time I loved her too much to let her go, that I wouldn’t admit failure, but now I don’t know…. I am at my wit’s end as to what to do. That is the worst thing about prison life. The helplessness, the not knowing. All you can do is sit and wait and think, which, in my case, is very bad….”
On March 8 I requested and received permission to write a letter to the American Embassy, asking them to make inquiries to see if my wife were ill or had been in an accident.
Diary, March 9: “Today, after an afternoon nap, I started working on a carpet, and while I was working I became very nervous and my whole body was tense. My hands shook so badly my cellmate wanted to call the doctor, but I wouldn’t let him. It only lasted thirty minutes…. If this keeps up, I think it could drive me crazy….”