In the evenings we exercise by shuffling around a small square. By unspoken agreement the walkers do not disturb each other. If you pace up and down for long enough you start to feel almost light-headed and detached from your surroundings. For a minute or two you can forget you are in a camp. Returning from one of these evening shuffles a tall Jew named Yura Kots approaches me and remarks casually: “Wine drinkers smell different in the morning.”
“So they do,” I reply, “but what makes you say so?”
“This is going to be the first sentence of the novel that I’ll write when I get out of here.”
“D’you know the joke about the madman who spent all day writing?”
“Tell me. I could do with a laugh.”
“A doctor comes up to him and asks: ‘What are you writing?’”
“‘A letter,’ he replies.”
“‘Who to?’”
“‘Myself.’”
“‘And what does it say?’”
“‘How should I know? I’ll find out when I get it.’”
“But I really am going to write a novel,” Kots insists.
“When?”
“When I leave here.”
After that Kots and I take our shuffles beside each other. Each month he receives a parcel of books which he passes on to me when he has finished. In the evenings we discuss our readings and study German together.
By profession Kots is a card-sharp, but he was sent to camp for theft. One day he lost to more experienced players. A card debt is a very serious matter. In order to repay it Kots robbed his former college. He was caught trying to make off with a tape recorder and given three years.
I am surprised to see that Kots subscribes to ‘Young Communist.’
“What’s up, need extra toilet paper?”
“No.”
“Then why do you order that rubbish?”
“There are a lot of things written here that you won’t find anywhere else.”
He shows me some notes on the last page about a debate between Sartre and Camus. This took place a few years ago but everything goes through the USSR like a giraffe’s neck and Kots has to keep up-to-date on western literature in order to maintain his pose as an intellectual.
Kots toured the country, presenting himself now as an architect, now as a doctor. He met his victims on long-distance trains or on the beaches of health spas. While he was swindling someone at cards he would remark casually to his victim: “Of course, Camus was not really an existentialist…”
Marcel Proust was Kots’ trump card, deadlier than a Kalashnikov in his hands. The credulous intelligentsia, who thought that culture was something you picked up with your university degree, were impressed. Kots would quickly empty his opponents’ pockets and then disappear.
Although I admire Kots and envy him his freedom I never think of following his example. A life of crime seems too complicated, and if I’m honest, I know it is beyond my capabilities. Besides, it will inevitably lead me back to prison. I have never held romantic notions about the brotherhood of thieves. They only band together when it is profitable to do so or when they are afraid. It’s not hard to give away what has been easily come by, so thieves are accustomed to dividing up their booty. But when it comes down to parting with their last it is a very different story. When they are in difficulties thieves display as much solidarity as spiders in a jar.
No one in my family has been to prison before me. I don’t count my father. Those were different times. Besides, that was for a political ‘crime.’ Nowadays political crimes aren’t regarded as crimes at all, although on the outside people still try to keep their distance from former political prisoners, ‘to keep away from sin’ they say.
Even though I am not attracted to a life of crime I do not condemn my fellow inmates. After two weeks behind barbed wire I learn not to judge others. At first I hold myself a bit aloof. I figure that the other prisoners are probably inside for a reason while I was only put away through a misunderstanding. But I soon realise that most of them are just like me. If you exclude the murderers, bandits and professional thieves, I could stand in the shoes of any one of them. It is only by some happy accident that I haven’t been thrown into prison before. I could have been locked up just for all the spirit I stole from work.
And we are not so different from those beyond the barbed wire. Everyone in the Soviet Union steals. Wages are calculated on the expectation that people will do so — if only for their own survival. Collective farmers work for years without seeing any money at all; they would die out like the mammoth if they didn’t steal.
This is no accident. Every member of a gang has to dirty his hands with a crime so our government deliberately pushes people towards committing them. If someone then turns round and complains about the system who’s going to listen to him if his hands are already dirty?
In fact most prisoners are in jail not for what they have done, but for the time and place of their appearance on this earth. I have to thank God that I was born in 1934 and not 15 years earlier. My wagging tongue would certainly have earned me a bullet in the head during the repression of the 1930s.
I am released in December, after exactly a year. Oleg has to stay inside for another three months. We arrange to keep in touch. His mother and sister meet me at the camp gate and see me off on a flight to Kuibyshev. I don’t intend to go back to my wife. I can’t forgive her for 365 days and nights behind barbed wire.
5
Opera
“Ahh, Christ just walked barefoot through my heart!” Ivan Shirmanov sighs as he knocks back his first drink of the morning. We are toasting my freedom with a renewed sense of brotherhood.
“Thousands of books have been written about prisons,” says Ivan, “but everyone’s experience is unique, especially their first. It’s been likened to first love, but in the case of love there are doubts: will there be a second? In the case of prison there are no doubts. There will be another and another…”
We finish the bottle and wander down to the market-place, picking up more vodka on the way. There are a few alkashi[21] gathered there. Beaming all over his moonlike face, Ivan offers them a bottle. He watches them drink with an expression as tender as that of a mother spooning porridge into her child’s mouth.
Ivan introduces me to one of the group: “This is our Levanevsky who is nothing like his famous namesake.[22] You can always trust him with cash to go and buy a bottle.”
Levanevsky only takes one glass from us.
“Have another?” I offer.
“I don’t want any more,” he replies. “God is no lovesick swain blinded by his passion. He sees everything. So long as he knows I’m trying he’ll give me another chance to sort myself out.”
I know that in an hour he’ll be shaking like death.
In the market we come across Sedoy the Poet of All Russia. He is standing on an old lady’s sunflower seed stall and declaiming to passing shoppers:
“Sedoy was once a teacher,” explains Ivan, “a head of department. He was so strict his students nicknamed him Crocodile. Then he took to drink. Now his mother looks after him. Every day you see him in the market in a clean shirt and freshly-pressed trousers.
“There are a lot of alkashi like Sedoy. As former members of the intelligentsia they blame society for their condition. They think it owes them something.” Ivan puffs up his chest. “A worker like me would be ashamed to beg or steal; I’ll take any portering job I can find.”
22
In the 1930s a Soviet pilot called Levanevsky disappeared while flying over the newly-opened Arctic. His plane was never discovered. It became customary to say ‘he’s done a Levanevsky’ when someone disappeared without trace.