Fastenko, on the other hand, was the most cheerful person in the cell, even though, in view of his age, he was the only one who could not count on surviving and returning to freedom. Flinging an arm around my shoulders, he would say:
Or else he taught me to sing this song from Tsarist hard-labor days:
And I believe this! May these pages help his faith come true!
The sixteen-hour days in our cell were short on outward events, but they were so interesting that I, for example, now find a mere sixteen minutes’ wait for a trolley bus much more boring. There were no events worthy of attention, and yet by evening I would sigh because once more there had not been enough time, once more the day had flown. The events were trivial, but for the first time in my life I learned to look at them through a magnifying glass.
The most difficult hours in the day were the first two. At the rattle of the key in the lock (for at the Lubyanka there were no “swill troughs,”[114] and it was necessary to unlock the door even to shout: “Time to get up!”), we jumped up without lingering, made our beds, and sat down on them feeling empty and helpless, with the electric light still burning. This enforced wakefulness from 6 a.m. on—at a time when the brain was still lazy from sleep, the whole world seemed repulsive and all of life wrecked, and there was not a gulp of air in the cell—was particularly ludicrous for those who had been under interrogation all night and had only just been able to get to sleep. But don’t try to steal extra sleep! If you should try to doze off, leaning slightly against the wall, or propped over the table as if studying the chessboard, or relaxing over a book lying conspicuously open on your knees, the key would sound a warning knock on the door, or, worse yet, the door with that rattling lock would suddenly open silently, since the Lubyanka jailers were specially trained to do just that, and like a spirit passing through a wall, the swift and silent shadow of the junior sergeant would take three steps into the cell, hook onto you as you slept, and maybe take you off to the punishment cell; or maybe they would take book privileges away from the whole cell or deprive everyone of their daily walk—a cruel, unjust punishment for all, and there were other punishments, too, in the black lines of the prison regulations. Read them! They hang in every cell. If, incidentally, you needed glasses to read, then you wouldn’t be reading books or the sacred regulations either during those two starving hours. Eyeglasses were taken away every night, and it was evidently still “dangerous” for you to have them during those two hours when no one brought anything to the cell, and no one came to it. No one asked about anything, and no one was summoned—the interrogators were still sleeping sweetly. And the prison administration was just opening its eyes, coming to. Only the vertukhai, the turnkeys, were active and energetic, opening the peephole cover once a minute for inspection.[115]
But one procedure was carried out during those two hours: the morning trip to the toilet. When the guard roused us, he made an important announcement. He designated the person from our cell who was to be entrusted with the responsibility of carrying out the latrine bucket. (In more isolated, ordinary prisons the prisoners had enough freedom of speech and self-government to decide this question themselves. But in the Chief Political Prison such an important event could not be left to chance.) So then you formed up in single file, hands behind your backs, and, at the head of the line, the responsible latrine-bucket-bearer carried chest high the two-gallon tin pail with a lid on it. When you reached your goal, you were locked in again, each having first been handed a small piece of paper, the size of two railway tickets. (At the Lubyanka this was not particularly interesting. The paper was blank and white. But there were enticing prisons where they gave you pages of books—and what reading that was! You could try to guess whence it came, read it over on both sides, digest the contents, evaluate the style—and when words had been cut in half that was particularly essential! You could trade with your comrades. In some places they handed out pages from the once progressive Granat Encyclopedia, and sometimes, it’s awful to say it, from the classics, and I don’t mean belles-lettres either. Visits to the toilet thus became a means of acquiring knowledge.) But there’s not that much to laugh at. We are dealing with that crude necessity which it is considered unsuitable to refer to in literature (although there, too, it has been said, with immortal adroitness: “Blessed is he who early in the morning…”). This allegedly natural start of the prison day set a trap for the prisoner that would grip him all day, a trap for his spirit—which was what hurt. Given the lack of physical activity in prison, and the meager food, and the muscular relaxation of sleep, a person was just not able to square accounts with nature immediately after rising. Then they quickly returned you to the cell and locked you up—until 6 p.m., or, in some prisons, until morning. At that point, you would start to get worried and worked up by the approach of the daytime interrogation period and the events of the day itself, and you would be loading yourself up with your bread ration and water and gruel, but no one was going to let you visit that glorious accommodation again, easy access to which free people are incapable of appreciating. This debilitating, banal need could make itself felt day after day shortly after the morning toilet trip and would then torment you the whole day long, oppress you, rob you of the inclination to talk, read, think, and even of any desire to eat the meager food.
People in the cells sometimes discussed how the Lubyanka system and schedule, and those in other prisons as well, had come into being, whether through calculated brutality or as a matter of chance. My opinion is that both factors are involved. The rising time is, obviously, a matter of malicious intent, but much of the rest evolved automatically at first (which is true of many of the brutalities of life generally) and was then discovered by the powers that be to be useful and was therefore made permanent. The shifts change at 8 a.m. and 8 p.m., and it was more convenient for everyone to take the prisoners to the toilet at the end of a shift. (Letting them out singly in the middle of the day was extra trouble and meant extra precautions, and no one got paid for that.) The same was true of the business with eyeglasses: Why should one worry about that at 6 a.m.? They could be returned to the owners just before the end of the shift instead.
114
13. Special large openings in the cell doors of many Russian prisons [known to the prisoners as “kormushki,” meaning “swill troughs” or “fodder bins”]. Their lids dropped down to make tiny tables. Conversations with the jailers were carried on through these openings, food was handed through, and prison papers were shoved through for the prisoners to sign.
115
14. During my time this word “vertukhai” had already come into wide currency for the jailers. It was said to have originated with Ukrainian guards who were always ordering: “Stoi, ta ne vertukhais!” And yet it is also worth recalling the English word for jailer, “turnkey,” is “verti klyuch” in Russian. Perhaps a “vertukhai” here in Russia is also “one who turns the key.”