“But those aren’t thieves!” the connoisseurs among us explain. “These are the bitches—the ones who work for the prison. They are enemies of the honest thieves. And the honest thieves are the ones imprisoned in cells.” But somehow this is hard for our rabbity brains to grasp. Their ways are the same; they have the same kind of tattoos. Maybe they really are enemies of those others, but after all they are not our friends either, that’s how it is….
And by this time they have forced us to sit down in the yard right underneath the cell windows. The windows all have “muzzles” on them and you can’t look in, but from inside, hoarse, friendly voices advise: “Hey, fellows! You know what they do here? When they search you, they take away everything loose like tea and tobacco. If you have any, toss it in here, through our window. We’ll give it back later.” So what do you know? We are suckers and rabbits. Maybe they do take tea and tobacco away. We have read about universal prisoner solidarity in all our great literature, that one prisoner won’t deceive another. The way they spoke to us was friendly. “Hey, fellows!” And so we toss them our tobacco pouches. And the genuine pure-bred thieves on the other side catch them and guffaw: “You Fascist stupes.”
And here are the slogans with which the whole transit prison welcomes us even though they don’t actually hang them on the walls: “Don’t look for justice here!” “You’re going to have to hand over everything you’ve got to us.” “You’ll have to give it all up.” This is repeated to you by the jailers, the convoy, and the thieves. You are overwhelmed by your unbearable prison term, and you are trying to figure out how to catch your breath, while everyone around you is figuring out how to plunder you. Everything works out so as to oppress the political prisoner, who is already depressed and abandoned without all that. “You will have to give it all up.” The jailer at the Gorky Transit Prison shakes his head hopelessly; and with a sense of relief, Ans Bern-shtein gives him his officer’s greatcoat—not free, but in exchange for two onions. And why should you complain about the thieves if you see all the jailers at Krasnaya Presnya wearing chrome-leather boots they were never issued? They were all lifted by the thieves in the cells and then pushed to the jailers. Why complain about the thieves if the instructor of the Cultural and Educational Department of the camp administration is a blatnoi, a thief, himself and writes reports on the politicals? (The Kem Transit Prison.) And how are you ever going to get justice against the thieves in the Rostov Transit Prison when this is their ancient native tribal den?
They say that in 1942 at the Gorky Transit Prison some officer prisoners (including Gavrilov, the military engineer Shchebetin, and others) nonetheless rebelled, beat up the thieves, and forced them to stay in line. But this is always regarded as a legend; did the thieves capitulate in just one of the cells? For long? And how was it that the bluecaps allowed the socially hostile elements to beat up the socially friendly ones? And when they say that at the Kotlas Transit Prison in 1940 the thieves started to grab money right out of the hands of the politicals lined up at the commissary, and the politicals began to beat them up so badly that they couldn’t be stopped, and the perimeter guards entered the compound with machine guns to defend the thieves—now there’s something that rings true. That’s the way it really was.
Foolish relatives! They dash about in freedom, borrow money (because they never have that kind of money at home), and send you foodstuffs and things—the widow’s last mite, but also a poisoned gift, because it transforms you from a free though hungry person into one who is anxious and cowardly, and it deprives you of that newly dawning enlightenment, that toughening resolve, which are all you need for your descent into the abyss. Oh, wise Gospel saying about the camel and the eye of the needle! These material things will keep you from entering the heavenly kingdom of the liberated spirit. And you see that others in the police van have the same kind of bags as you. “Ragbag bastards!” the thieves have already snarled at you in the Black Maria—but there were only two of them and there were fifty of you and so far they haven’t touched you. And now they were holding us for the second day at the Krasnaya Presnya station with our legs tucked beneath us on the dirty floor because we were so crowded. However, none of us was observing the life going on around us, because we were all too concerned with how to turn in our suitcases for safekeeping. Even though we were supposed to have the right to turn in our things for safekeeping, nonetheless the only reason the work-assignment clerks permitted us to do it was because the prison was a Moscow prison and we ourselves hadn’t yet lost our Moscow look.
What a relief—our things had been checked. (And that meant we would have to give them up not at this transit prison but later on.) The only things left dangling from our hands were our bundles with our ill-fated foodstuffs. Too many of us beavers had been assembled in one place. They began to distribute us among different cells. I was shoved into a cell with that same Valentin whom I had been with the day I signed for my OSO sentence, and who had proposed with touching sentiment that we begin a new life in camp. It was not yet packed full. The aisle was free. There was plenty of space under the bunks. According to the traditional arrangement, the thieves occupied the second tier of bunks: their senior members were beside the windows, their juniors farther back. A neutral gray mass was on the lower bunks. No one attacked us. Without looking around and without thinking ahead, inexperienced as we were, we sat down on the asphalt floor and crawled under the bunks. We would even be cozy there. The bunks were low for big men to get under, and we had to slide in on our bellies, inching along the asphalt floor. We did. And we were going to lie there quietly and talk quietly. Not a chance! In the semidarkness, with a wordless rustling, from all sides juveniles crept up on us on all fours, like big rats. They were still boys, some twelve-year-olds even, but the Criminal Code accepted them too. They had already been processed through a thieves’ trial, and they were continuing their apprenticeship with the thieves here. They had been unleashed on us. They jumped us from all sides and six pairs of hands stripped from us and wrenched from under us all our wealth. And all this took place in total silence, with only the sound of sinister sniffing. And we were trapped: we couldn’t get up, we couldn’t move. It took no more than a minute for them to seize the bundles with the fat bacon, sugar, and bread. They were gone. We lay there feeling stupid. We had given up our food without a fight. And we could go on lying there now, but that was utterly impossible. Creeping out awkwardly, rear ends first, we got up from under the bunks.