Men in Prison by Victor Serge Read Free Book Online Page A

these miserable wretches; you have nothing in common with them … Come now!”
    While he was talking to me, the moment came. All I could see in the shadowy room was the dull, wan oval of his face across from me. I felt a choking sensation in my throat. Like a drowning man, I saw a series of incoherent images pass, with extraordinary rapidity, before my eyes: a street corner, a subway car, the scaffolding I had glimpsed earlier. Things were fading away. I took a deep breath and forced myself to speak in a normal tone of voice:
    “Lock me up. But I’m terribly hungry. I’d be much obliged if someone could bring me some supper.”
    It was late; it would be a problem. But as soon as we started talking about it, I felt different, calm again, strangely
free,
and in control of myself. The moment had passed. I had crossed the invisible boundary. I was no longer a man, but a man in prison. An inmate.
    I was to live one thousand eight hundred and twenty-five days in prison. Five years.
    A few months later, while searching the empty apartment of an anarchist storekeeper, that same policeman came to a dark, tightly shuttered back room. Bravely, and at any rate unaware of any immediate danger, he entered; an instant later, he was locked in a violent hand-to-hand struggle with the man he had been tracking—a desperate anarchist bandit. In the wild embrace of the two bodies thrashing about on the floor, three bullets—fired point-blank—put an end to his career.
    Another time, the moment came in a golden Mediterranean city on a brilliantly sunlit day, heavy with heat, a day of rebellion. We had lived for weeks waiting for the battle. That evening, feverish crowds seethed in dark, quiet waves against the foot of the rock where the citadel stood. In the streets, patrols of comrades filed silently past the patrols of gendarmes. Four o’clock in the afternoon: the hot, orange-tinted hour. The stucco façades of the squat, workers’ homes, usually ocher, glowed red; the trampled earth underfoot, orange or pomegranate red. A muffled din could be heard coming from a nearby boulevard, blocked off by troops, where the police were charging into running crowds. Walking rapidly, I left a house, surrounded by police, from which one of the leaders of the growing insurrection had just slipped away. My heart was still pounding with the joy of his escape. What light! As I emerged abruptly into the street, two plainclothesmen looked me up and down, hesitated … Then their steps fell in with mine—rapid, more rapidly; close, closer … Better not turn around. If only I could get to the street corner just ahead! My mind was absurdly fixed on that corner, as if it offered me some unhoped-for chance of safety. A voice hailed me:
    “Señor! Hey, Señor!”
    The man was already beside me; his dark eyes looked me over coolly. He pronounced the formula:
    “In the name of His Honor the Civil Governor …”
    Another ran up. The street suddenly seemed to darken. It closed in on me. The moment! In my mind, I started immediately to prepare a vigorous protest.
    That time it was nothing serious. The police of that city knew they were living on the edge of a storm of revolt. And they were afraid. The workers’ power could be felt hanging in the air. An old police sergeant who was very correct, very polite, talked to me about Esperanto—one of his hobbies—and set me free after an hour.
    Paris, the war, waiting to be mobilized. Camp Mailly? The front in Champagne? Stages to be passed through, luck providing: It would really be a shame to fall along the way. In the distance, the goal: the revolution unfolding its red flags in the streets of Petrograd. A day of high tension, anxious apprehension. Kornilov goes down in defeat. The Revolution lives! Over here, old Clemenceau carries out his slogan: “Make war!” Almereyda is dead, strangled in Fresnes prison. People are spied upon, arrested. Suspects and informers everywhere. The end of a workday, working