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

clothes, the contented weariness of evening. Coming out of a friend’s house—chancy—I run into a slovenly, badly dressed, pallid little man with shifty eyes. I’ve noticed those shifty eyes several times during the past few days. Just to clear the suspicion from my mind, I turn around and walk right toward him. He slips away. This place is one of the most attractive spots in Old Paris: a modest little street between tall buildings, a little-known byway they say Balzac used to haunt. The street is not deserted this time. A gentleman waits at the end, idle. Another walks slowly away. Behind me, in a hallway, a third.
    I have a record: anarchist “bandit.” There is an expulsion order out against me. I am “Russian.” Under suspicion. The day before yesterday—after meeting those shifty eyes—I put my papers in order and left detailed instructions with a comrade “in case of arrest.” Now this placid old street in the heart of Paris, whose silence I love so much, has become a vise tightening around me. I stop. I raise my head toward familiar windows. One of them is edged with flowers.
    Le ciel est par-dessus le toit
    Si bleu, si calme! 1
    The shifty-eyed man sidles shiftily up to me. I can feel his fear. My God! It’s all so stupid and tiresome! Let’s get it over with quickly. The moment has passed. I start walking again, I can hear the other man’s footsteps; I know he is afraid and that there is nothing to be afraid of.
    “Your name?”
    He expects a false one. His face is pale. The others are still far off— ten paces away. But they are walking faster. I give my name.
    “That’s a lie! Your papers!”
    He expected a false name so much that he automatically contradicts my answer, barely moving his bloodless lips! I put my hand into my pocket to take out my letter of transit, but my movement is checked. Violent hands grab both my wrists from behind. Hot breath blows into my ear: “Don’t try anything!” Three men, three bodies, brutal and heavy, bear down and crush me. Our faces almost touch. At last they realize that I am not struggling—I have no weapon, I am weak. They take a deep breath. So do I. We walk through the pale-blue street like any other passers-by … Those three men around me already constitute a prison, unseen by everyone but me.
    When I finally recovered my freedom—after nearly dying in the meantime—I was fifteen months and twelve hundred and fifty miles from there, during a night barren of stars but velvet with snow, on the Finnish border.
    There, keeping the watch, stood an emaciated soldier. The red star on his cap seemed almost black in the darkness. The trenches of the Revolution were behind him.

    1 The sky above the roof So blue, so calm! —Verlaine (Tr.)

TWO
The Lockup
    MAN IMPRISONED DIFFERS FROM MAN IN GENERAL EVEN IN HIS OUTWARD appearance. Prison marks him from the very first hour. Incarceration begins with the search. Necktie, collar, belt; suspenders, shoelaces, pocketknife, anything that might be used in secret to free a desperate man from the power of the law by stabbing or strangulation; papers, notebook, letters, snapshots, everything that characterizes a man, the little objects that accumulate around his private life—all this is taken from him. He feels as if he has been stripped of part of himself, reduced to an impotence inconceivable an hour before. His clothes hang loose, with nothing to fasten them, constantly in the way. His shoes yawn open. He is disheveled from head to foot. Personal effects and toilet accessories are gathered up in my handkerchief by a jailer’s hands—fat, hairy, soiled, accustomed to handling these cast-off objects. From now on, they are only Number 30’s “bundle.”
    This first night’s cell is apparently nothing more than a lockup set aside for prisoners in transit. A windowless hole, ten feet deep and eight feet wide, somewhere down a corridor. During the day a pale light filters in through the dirty panes of the wire-mesh