I know why it was possible. The solution of the riddle is that there was no mask. Both of his faces were genuine. Azef was a revolutionary and a police agent at the same time.
The police and the revolutionaries acted by the same methods, and in the name of one goaclass="underline" the good of the people. They resembled each other, even if they hated each other. That’s why Azef didn’t stand out among the revolutionaries and among the police. The police and the revolutionaries spoke the same language.
And here I’d like to speak about what’s most important, about what gets at the essence of prison-camp life. About the thing that had the most impact on the former prison-camp guard. About the suspicious similarity of characteristics between guards and prisoners or, speaking in the broadest terms, between “prison” and “freedom”.
It seems to me this was the main thing I learnt.
It’s too bad that literature is written to no end. Otherwise, I would have said that my book was written for the sake of this truth.
“Prison” literature has existed for several centuries. Even early in Russian belles-lettres, the theme was represented by great works, beginning with The House of the Dead and ending with The Gulag Archipelago. Plus – Chekhov, Shalamov, Sinyavsky.*
Alongside “prison” literature, we have had “police” literature, which is also rich in significant figures, from Chesterton to Agatha Christie.
These are different literatures. More exactly, they’re opposites, with opposing moral orientations.
In this way, two moral bills of fare exist, two ideological points of view.
According to the first, the inmate appears as the suffering, tragic figure, deserving of admiration and pity. The guard, correspondingly, is a monster and villain, the incarnation of cruelty and oppression.
According to the second point of view, the inmate appears as the monster, the fiend, while it follows that the policeman is a hero, a moralist, a vivid artistic personality.
When I became a guard, I was ready to see the prisoner as the victim, and myself as the punisher and oppressor. That is to say, I was inclined towards the first, more humane point of view, the one more characteristic of Russian literature which had nurtured me and, of course, the more convincing one. (After all, Simenon* is no Dostoevsky.)
After a week, it was all over with these fantasies. The first point of view turned out to be completely false. The second, even more so.
Following in the footsteps of Herbert Marcuse* (whom, naturally, I haven’t read), I detected a third alternative.
I detected a striking similarity between the camp and the outside, between the prisoners and the guards, between the burglar recidivists and the controllers of the production zones, between the zek foremen and the camp administration officials. One single, soulless world extended on either side of the restricted areas.
We spoke the same criminal slang, sang exactly the same sentimental songs, endured exactly the same privations.
We even looked alike. We all had crew cuts. Our weather-beaten faces were coloured with purple blotches. Our boots gave off the smell of a stable. And from a distance the prison uniforms seemed indistinguishable from the worn soldiers’ jackets.
We were very similar to each other, and even interchangeable. Almost any prisoner would have been suited to the role of a guard. Almost any guard deserved a prison term.
I repeat – this is the main aspect of prison life. Everything else is peripheral.
All of my stories are written about this.
Apropos of this, recently a package arrived from Dartmouth. Two pieces of microfilm and four pages of text on cigarette paper.
Some part or other, I heard, appeared in the Blue Lagoon Anthology (in Texas). It would be too bad if something really good got lost.
On my way back from Minneapolis, I’ll stop in Detroit. If you can pick me up – good. If not, I’ll find your place on my own.
Repairing the roof in my honour is not required.
BEFORE YOU REACHED the logging sector, you had to go through the famous Osokin swamp, then cross the railroad embankment, then go down a hill around the dreary buildings of the generator. By then you had only got to Chebyu, a settlement in which half the population consisted of seasonal workers who had once been prisoners. They were people whose feuds and friendships didn’t look much different.
They had waited out their prison terms for years. Then one day they changed into civilian clothes that had lain in a storeroom for twenty years. They walked out of the gates, hearing the cold clank of the bolts behind their backs, and then it became clear that the freedom they had longed for was no more than the familiar refrain of a song. They had dreamt of freedom, sung and swore. But they left prison camp – and the taiga stretched to the horizon.
Evidently, they had been destroyed by the endless monotony of prison days. They didn’t want to change their habits or re-establish lost ties. They settled down between camp zones within the sentries’ fields of vision, maintaining, if one can put it that way, our country’s ideological balance, which has spread to both sides of the prison fences.
They married God knows whom, and crippled their children by drilling them in camp wisdom: “Only the tiny fish gets caught in the net.” As a result, the settlement lived by the prison code of law. Inhabitants paraded their criminal conduct. And even the third generation of any given family shot up morphine. And, for good measure, they smoked junk and maintained their hatred of the guards.
It was not advisable for a drunk serviceman to show his face here. Storm clouds quickly gathered above the red cap band, doors slammed. It was best for the fellow not to walk alone.
About a year ago, three woodcutters escorted a pale serviceman out of a beer joint. Flannel epaulettes bristled on his shoulders. He begged, resisted and even commanded. But they hit him so hard that his cap rolled underneath a porch, and then they did the “see-saw” – they put a board on his chest and stamped on him in steel-reinforced boots.
The next morning, storehouse workers found the corpse. At first they thought: drunk, but then they suddenly noticed the narrow trickle of blood coming out of his mouth and going underneath his head.
Then a military investigator arrived. He spoke of the dangers of alcohol before showing a film called The Elusive Avengers. In answer to the questions: “So how is Corporal Dymza? Checked out, did he? And that’s that?” he answered, “The investigation, comrades, is on the only true path!”
As for the woodcutters, they got away with it, though every dog in Chebyu knew who they were.
To reach the logging sector, you had to cross railroad tracks, and before that, shaky planks over water that looked white in the sun, and before that, the Chebyu settlement, filled with fear and torpor.
Here is a portrait, or something more like a photograph. Alabaster lyres above the boarded door of the local club. A poor excuse for a store, crammed with gingerbread and horse collars. Artistically lettered signs in its windows promising meat, eggs, wool and other goods that intimate the good life. A poster of Leonid Kostritsa, the singer. A dead man or a drunk lying by the side of the road.
And over all this, the barking of dogs and the deafening roar of the power saw.
Instructor Pakhapil walked in front with Harun. He held a canvas dog leash in his hand. Lighting a cigarette and breaking the matches, he was saying something in Estonian.
Gustav taught Estonian to all the dogs in the kennel. The dog handlers were unhappy about this. They complained to Sergeant Major Yevchenko, “You order her to ‘Heel!’ and the bitch responds: ‘Nicht verstehen.*’”