Men in Prison by Victor Serge Read Free Book Online

Mirror, writing in Book News (Minneapolis), Sunday, January 18, 1970.
    35 Many of the U.S. soldiers accused of tormenting Iraqi prisoners were prison guards in civilian life.

ONE
Arrest
    ALL MEN WHO HAVE EXPERIENCED PRISON KNOW THAT ITS TERRIBLE GRASP reaches out far beyond its physical walls. There is a moment when those whose lives it will crush suddenly grasp, with awful clarity, that all reality, all present time, all activity—everything real in their lives—is fading away, while before them opens a new road onto which they tread with the trembling step of fear. That icy moment is the moment of arrest.
    The revolutionary living under the shadow of the prison wall or the gallows, who, suddenly, in a busy street, feels he is being watched; the underground agitator coming home at night, having finished his work as organizer or journalist, who is suddenly aware of a shadow clinging to his shadow, of firm footsteps dogging his own; the murderer, the thief, the deserter, the hunted man, whoever he may be— they all know that moment of panic. It is a moment as painful to anticipate as to live through, courage and will power notwithstanding. The only difference between cowards and other men is that the others, after living through this moment without revealing their emotion by the slightest gesture, recover full possession of themselves. The cowards remain broken.
    I have experienced this moment several times. Once it came after I had actually been under arrest for five or six hours. A plainclothesman had picked me up at the office of the anarchist paper I was editing. He had said it was merely a question of signing receipts for the documents that had been seized during a search that morning at my home. I caught on, but was not really alarmed. For prison is also something we carry within us. I had allowed for this as an occupational hazard, not to be taken too seriously. At police headquarters a fat sergeant of the Sûreté, gross in gesture and speech, told me calmly:
    “I’ve got you. You’ll do at least six months awaiting trial. Talk, or I’ll arrest you.”
    Through the window over his shoulder, I could see some bricklayers working on a scaffold. I thought to myself, “Maybe this is one of your last views of life,” but without believing it, without any fear. The moment had not yet come. I answered with a shrug:
    “Go ahead. Arrest me.”
    And I was left in that large room, which was furnished with desks and filing cabinets and decorated with anthropometric diagrams (“Nose shapes, Ear shapes, How to read and draw up a description”), for several hours, calmly reading newspapers from one end to the other, ads included. That evening they took me into the comfortable office of the Assistant Chief of the Sûreté. Two leather armchairs before a broad desk, the soft light of a table lamp. Across from me in the shadows, the refined, slightly elongated, regular features of the urbane, well-mannered policeman whom I had guided that morning from our editorial office to the print shop. His behavior on that occasion had been courteous: the intelligent affability of a clever sleuth who knows the value of taking in his opponent, of seducing him a bit. He had told me:
    “I sympathize with you. I am quite familiar with your ideas. In the old days I even used to go to meetings where F*** spoke; a marvelous speaker, a marvelous speaker … But you people are too advanced; you’re bound to be a minority …”
    Then, with cold, almost negligent, but predatory, glance, he had scrutinized faces, papers, objects—and had arrested just about everybody.
    Now he was again extremely polite, rather sad, and seemingly distressed at having to carry out his duty. And once more, ingratiating and persuasive, he invited me to talk. “We know everything; all you can tell us are a few corroborative details; none of your comrades will ever find out; you’ll spare yourself months, if not years, of prison; you have no moral obligation toward