And the holy bread, broken in two, was left to lie in the dust while we were driven off.
In general, those minutes of sitting on the ground there at the station were among our very best. I remember that in Omsk we were made to sit down on the railroad ties between two long freight trains. No one from outside entered this alleyway. (In all probability, they had stationed a soldier at either end: “You can’t go in there.” And even in freedom our people are taught to take orders from anyone in a uniform.) It began to grow dark. It was August. The oily station gravel hadn’t yet completely cooled off from the sun and warmed us where we sat. We couldn’t see the station, but it was very close by, somewhere behind the trains. A phonograph blared dance music, and the crowd buzzed in unison. And for some reason it didn’t seem humiliating to sit on the ground in a crowded dirty mass in some kind of pen; and it wasn’t a mockery to hear the dances of young strangers, dances we would never dance; to picture someone on the station platform meeting someone or seeing someone off—maybe even with flowers. It was twenty minutes of near-freedom: the twilight deepened, the first stars began to shine, there were red and green lights along the tracks, and the music kept playing. Life was going on without us—and we didn’t even mind any more.
Cherish such moments, and prison will become easier to bear. Otherwise you will explode from rage.
And if it was dangerous to herd the zeks along to the Black Maria because there were streets and people right next to them, then the convoy statutes provided another good command: “Link arms!” There was nothing humiliating in this—link arms! Old men and boys, girls and old women, healthy people and cripples. If one of your hands is hanging onto your belongings, your neighbor puts his arm under that arm and you in turn link your other arm with your other neighbor’s. So you have now been compressed twice as tightly as in ordinary formation, and you have immediately become heavier and are hampered by being thrown out of balance by your belongings and by your awkwardness with them, and you sway steadily as you limp. Dirty, gray, clumsy creatures, you move ahead like blind men with an ostensible tenderness for one another—a caricature of humanity.
It may well be that no Black Maria at all is there to fetch you. And the chief of convoy is perhaps a coward. He is afraid he will fail to deliver you safely—and in this state, weighed down, jouncing as you go, knocking into things, you trudge all the way through the city to the prison itself.
There is one more command which is a caricature of geese: “Take hold of your heels!” This meant that anyone whose hands were free had to grab both his legs at about ankle height. And now: “Forward march.” (Well, now, reader, put this book aside, try going around the room that way! How does it work? And at what speed? How much looking around could you do? And what about escaping?) Picture the way three or four dozen such geese look from the side. (Kiev, 1940.)
And it is not necessarily August out; it might be December, 1946, and, there being no Black Maria, you are being herded at 40 degrees below zero to the Petropavlovsk Transit Prison. And it is easy to guess that during the last hours before arriving the Stolypin convoy refused to go to the trouble of taking you to the toilet, so as to avoid getting it dirty. Weakened from interrogation, gripped by the cold, you have a very hard time holding it—women especially. Well, and so what! It’s for horses to stand stock-still and loose the floodgates! It’s for dogs to go lift a leg against a fence. But as for people, you can do it right there, while you keep moving. No need to be shy in your own fatherland. It will dry at the transit prison…. Vera Korneyeva stooped down to adjust her shoe and fell one step behind, and the convoy immediately set the police dog on her and the dog bit her in the buttocks through all her winter clothing. Don’t fall behind! And an Uzbek fell down, and they beat him with their gunstocks and jackboots.
Well, that’s no tragedy: it won’t be photographed for the Daily Express. And the chief of convoy will live to a ripe old age and never be tried by anyone.
And the Black Marias, too, came down to us from history. In what respect does the prison carriage described by Balzac differ from a Black Maria? Only that the prison carriage was drawn along more slowly, and prisoners weren’t packed so tightly.
True, in the twenties columns of prisoners were still being driven afoot through our cities, even Leningrad. They brought traffic to a halt at intersections. (“So you got caught stealing?” came the reproaches from the sidewalks. No one had yet grasped the great plan for sewage disposal.)
But, always alert to technological trends, the Archipelago lost no time in adopting the black ravens, more familiarly known simply as ravens—Black Marias. These first Black Marias appeared at the same time as the very first trucks on our still cob-blestoned streets. Their suspension was poor, and it was very rough riding in them, but then the prisoners weren’t made of crystal either. On the other hand, they were very tightly corked even at that time, in 1927: there wasn’t one little crack; and there wasn’t one little electric light bulb, and there wasn’t any air to breathe, and it was impossible to see out. And even in those days they stood so tightly packed inside that there wasn’t any room left at all. And it wasn’t that all this was intentionally planned; there simply weren’t enough wheels to go around.
For many years the Black Marias were steel-gray and had, so to speak, prison written all over them. But in the biggest cities after the war they had second thoughts and decided to paint them bright colors and to write on the outside, “Bread” (the prisoners were the bread of construction), or “Meat” (it would have been more accurate to write “bones”), or even, simply, “Drink Soviet Champagne!”
Inside, the Black Marias might consist of a simple armored body or shell, an empty enclosure. Or perhaps there were benches against the walls all the way around. This was in no sense a convenience, but the reverse: they would push in just as many prisoners as could be inserted standing up, but in this case they would be piled on top of each other like baggage, one bale on another. The Black Maria might also have a box in the rear—a narrow steel closet for one prisoner. Or it might be boxed throughout: single closets that locked like cells along the right-and left-hand walls, with a corridor in the middle for the turnkey.