Winter had turned to summer with only a glimpse of spring in between: a row of flowers the work-camp prisoners had planted outside their barracks.
“The weather is getting hot here,” I wrote home. “We haven’t had any rain for several weeks, and most of the days are clear and sunny. I have already got a good suntan by taking my shirt off during my walks. Not everyone can spend a couple of hours each day sunbathing.”
There was very little else to write home about.
I was again persisting in my study of Russian, but with minimal progress; by the time I’d finish translating an article in Pravda it was no longer news, but ancient history. Having run out of the right colors of wool, I’d had to leave the second carpet uncompleted, and was now well into a third, this one larger and more ambitious than the first, measuring 25½ by 31½. inches and with seven colors—gold, black, brown, yellow, and light, medium, and dark blue. Reading material was no longer quite so scarce. Barbara had sent thirty paperbacks, including Robert Lewis Taylor’s The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters and James Michener’s Hawaii. In addition, I systematically devoured the English books in Moscow University library: The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle and The Adventures of Roderick Random by Tobias Smollett; The Apple Cart by George Bernard Shaw; Arrowsmith, Babbitt, Main Street, Elmer Gantry, and Kingsblood Royalby Sinclair Lewis; Candide by Voltaire; Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, Heartbreak House, Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens; The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy; Henry Esmond by William Makepeace Thackeray; Tom Jones—A Foundling, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams by Henry Fielding; Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy; The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling; the complete works of William Shakespeare; the continuation of Mikhail Sholokhov’s Don novels, Seeds of Tomorrow and Harvest on the Don; War and Peace and Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy; Octopus by Frank Norris; The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain; The Store by T. S. Stribling; The Titan by Theodore Dreiser; Typee by Herman Melville; and Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.
Even visits to the dentist became memorable breaks from the routine. I lost a filling, which had to be replaced, not once but several times. It finally stayed, but became badly discolored. The dentist’s equipment was extremely primitive. Even here were those jars of leeches. By this time I had no doubt as to how they were used, having seen doctors applying them to people’s backs in the prison movies. But I never could understand why the dentist had them. Fortunately, I never found out.
“Well you heat it and it bursts, and becomes a big, white, fluffy, soft—”
Finally I gave up. How do you explain popcorn to a man who has never seen or tasted it?
A pigeon flew through the top of the window and got caught between the panes of glass. I climbed on to the cabinet and got it out, bringing it back into the cell with me. But I’d been spotted. Hearing a rush of feet up the stairs, I released it before the cell door opened.
Did they think we were going to try to cook it and eat it, or use it to send a message?
Actually, I’d hoped to have it for a pet for a little while. Yet I knew that even if we could manage to hide its presence from the guard—a nearly impossible feat—I wouldn’t have been able to keep it long. I could never have made it a prisoner too.
We were never sure whether our cell was bugged. Occasionally, out of boredom and curiosity, we would voice the most fantastic lies, or denounce the Soviet authorities in the vilest possible terms, hoping for someone to come in and reprimand us. Then we’d know. No one ever did. Somehow this was in itself depressing, knowing that no one really cared that much.
When starting my journal I had been careful to include only things which would not irritate my captors, hoping in this way to ensure their letting me take the journal with me upon release. Now I no longer bothered to censor myself. Many pages were devoted to the lack of freedom of expression in the Soviet Union; the prevalence of one viewpoint and one viewpoint only, the “correct” one; the use of lies which, through constant reiteration, became credible truth. Listening to Radio Moscow one day, I heard an American Communist denounce the United States as a place where there is no freedom. “Of course the Russian people believe this,” I wrote. “They do not stop to think that this man is going to return to the country where he knows no freedom, and that once there he won’t be sent to prison for what he has said. While here he would be tried and convicted of uttering anti-Soviet propaganda.” Yet the Russian people believed this, just as they believed their leaders alone were for peace, that only the United States stood in the way of disarmament.
In my opinion, I noted, the controlled press, as found in the Soviet Union, is as insidious a form of brainwashing as exists.
This one-sided interpretation of the news bothered me greatly, not only because of its obvious effect on the thinking of the Russians but also because I realized a man subjected to it for a long period, denied comparisons, other sources, would almost inevitably emerge thinking like a Communist.
How long would it take? I wasn’t sure. But I suspected that by the end of ten years the process would be fairly complete.
July 4 was a particularly bad day. But all holidays were, as I’m sure is true with prisoners everywhere, whatever their sentences or crimes. When you lock up a man, you lock up his memories too.
There were few periods of excitement or elation now. Only mail affected my mood.
With one exception, my outgoing letters from Vladimir were not censored in the sense of words being crossed out or letters returned for rewriting, though every letter was read, which in itself imposes a subtle form of censorship on the writer. The exception was a letter in which I mentioned my cellmate’s name and sentence. This was not permitted, and I had to rewrite the letter, deleting this information. Also, as far as I could determine, I had received every letter written by my wife or parents, and none of these had been censored.
Therefore I was surprised when, in early July, I received a letter from my father, dated June 14, in which a number of words were inked out. Reading to the end, however, I discovered a P.S. in my father’s handwriting: “I blocked out a few names that I didn’t want to mention in this letter. We are still doing our best to help you. Will continue. Your Pop.”
My father wouldn’t have made a good spy. Holding the letter up to the light, I was able to guess at a few of the deletions. The edited portion read: “I could not find out what was discussed at the K.K. meeting June 3, but I did have a call from _____________ [Abel’s?] lawyer in N.Y. He is in touch with _____________ [Abel’s wife in?] East Germany and ____________ is working for a ____________ release from that end and Mr. Donovan ___________ this end. Just how much good it will do is yet to be seen. I was told I would receive a letter from ____________ in E. Germany. I have not received it yet but will soon, I know.”
What was this all about? As far as I could determine, my father was attempting to arrange something with Abel’s wife and this Mr. Donovan, who I assumed was Abel’s attorney. As far as I was concerned, he was wasting his time, and I wrote him to that effect.