In his cell M. sometimes heard a woman's voice coming from a distance and thought it was mine. It sounded as though I was complaining, groaning or talking very quickly about something, but it was so indistinct that he could make out no words at all. He concluded that the interrogator's hints that I too had been arrested must be true. When we later discussed this, we were not sure whether or not it had been an auditory hallucination. Why hadn't he been able to make out any words? In a state of hallucination the words he heard were all too distinct. Moreover, many other people who went through the Lubianka in those years also thought they heard their wives talking or screaming, only to learn later that they had never been arrested. Could they all have had hallucinations? And if so, how were they caused? There was some talk of the secret police having among their special equipment phonograph records with the voice of a "standard" wife, mother or daughter which were used to break a prisoner's spirit. After these more subtle torments and psychological methods had been replaced by exceedingly primitive ones, nobody complained any more that he had heard his wife's voice. Among the cruder methods, I know, for instance, that they would arrange for a woman prisoner to catch a glimpse of a man hideously beaten up and covered in blood, and then say that it was her son or husband. But there was no more talk of voices coming from a distance. Were there such recordings? I do not know and have no means of finding out. In view of the hallucinations from which M. suffered on leaving prison, I am inclined to think that this woman's voice was of the same order as the inner voices that plagued him in Cherdyn. There are still rumors about a laboratory for experiments with drugs.
Methods like these are possible only if a prisoner's links with the outside world are broken from the moment of his arrest. Apart from the signatures in the receipt book for packages, he is left completely in the dark about the people he has been torn from—and by no means everybody is allowed to receive packages. The first means of pressure brought to bear on a prisoner is the withdrawal of his right to receive packages—the last thread that binds him to the world outside. This is why it is better in our sort of life to have no ties. A man feels so much stronger if he doesn't have to watch out all the time during his interrogation for hints and pretended slips of the tongue about the fate of members of his family. It is harder to unhinge a single man, and he is better able to look after his own interests and conduct a systematic defense of himself. Even though the sentence was decided beforehand, a shrewd self-defense could still make some difference. One friend of mine was able to outwit his interrogator— admittedly a provincial one—in an extraordinary way. After a long battle he agreed to go back to his cell and write down all the nonsense required of him. He was given paper and he put down everything the interrogator wanted, but without signing it. The interrogator was so pleased that he didn't notice this. My friend was obviously born under a lucky star, because about this time Yezhov was dismissed. His case hadn't yet come before the tribunal, no sentence had been passed and he was able to get a reversal on the grounds that his deposition was not valid without a signature. He belongs to those few who were released after Yezhov's fall. But to be born under a lucky star is not enough—it is also advisable not to lose one's head, and this is easiest for people with no family ties.
20 Christophorovich
's interrogator, the celebrated Christophorovich, was not
• without his arrogant side, and he seemed to take pleasure in his work of intimidating a prisoner and reducing him to a nervous wreck. By his whole appearance, the way he looked at you and his tone of voice, he seemed concerned to show up his prisoner as a nonentity, a miserable creature, a disgrace to mankind. "Why is he so stuck up?" we would have asked if we had met him in the ordinary way of things, but during his nightly interrogations the prisoner was supposed to squirm under his gaze, or at least to feel utter impotence. Christophorovich behaved like a person of superior race who despised physical weakness and the pathetic scruples of intellectuals. This he made clear during the interview by the whole of his well-practiced manner, and I too, though not frightened by him, could feel myself growing smaller under his gaze. Yet I already had a suspicion that such latter-day Siegfrieds, the heirs to the supermen, cannot themselves stand up to the ordeals they inflict on others. Magnificent before the defenseless, they are only good at savaging victims already caught in a trap.
The interrogator's arrogance was reflected not only in his manner, but also in occasional very superior remarks that smacked of the literary drawing room. The first generation of young Chekists, later to be removed and destroyed in 1937, was distinguished by its sophisticated tastes and weakness for literature—only the most fashionable, of course. In my presence Christophorovich said to M. that it was useful for a poet to experience fear ("you yourself told me so") because it can inspire verse, and that he would "experience fear in full measure." Both M. and I noted the use of the future tense. In what Moscow drawing rooms had Christophorovich heard this kind of talk?
Both M. and I had the same general impression that, as M. put it, "this Christophorovich has turned everything upside down and inside out." The Chekists were the avant-garde of the "new people" and they had indeed basically revised, in the manner of the Superman, all ordinary human values. They were later replaced by people of a completely different physical type, who had no values at all, revised or otherwise.
It turned out, however, that the technique used by the interrogator to frighten M. was an utterly primitive one. Mentioning somebody's name—mine, Akhmatova's or my brother's—he would say that he had obtained certain statements from us. When M. inquired whether whoever it was had been arrested, the interrogator gave no definite answer, but dropped a casual-sounding hint that "we have them here," only to deny a few minutes later that he had said any such thing. Uncertainty about such matters always has a devastating effect on the prisoner, and it is only possible under a prison system like ours. In playing this cat-and-mouse game with M. and only hinting that his family and friends had been arrested, Christophorovich was behaving like a top-level interrogator, since it was more usual to inform the prisoner straightaway, without any beating about the bush, that everybody had already been arrested, or questioned and shot. Then you could go back to your cell and wonder whether it was true or not.
Christophorovich, as a "literature specialist," made great play with his "inside knowledge," claiming to know everybody and everything that was going on. He tried to create the impression that all our acquaintances came to see him, and that he knew all our little secrets. He referred to many people only by their nicknames or by some telltale feature: one was "the bigamist," another "the ex-Party member" and a woman acquaintance of ours "the actress." These three examples I heard during the interview, but M. told me he had called many other people by nicknames like this. Apart from showing how well informed he was, this had another purpose. Since police informers are always referred to only by code names, he was trying to cast a shadow on all these people. The high police official in Tashkent who committed suicide, according to his daughter, also always knew everybody's nickname, and himself invented them for people. Realizing what the intention behind the use of them was, M. paid no attention to his interrogator's innuendoes.