The five works that appear here are excerpted from This Prison Where I Live: The PEN Anthology of Imprisoned Writers, to be published this month by Cassell. The book celebrates the seventy-fifth anniversary of PEN (Poets, Playwrights, Essayists, Editors, Novelists), an international association defending writers who face imprisonment, torture, and death.

In editing the anthology, Siobhan Dowd says she resisted the temptation to divide the collection by region, language, or chronology. Instead she intuitively arranged short sections of longer works to create a seamless journey through prison life; as she describes it, “a journey through hell, a journey from day to night and back to day, a journey from confinement to freedom.”

Each work is followed by the name of the author, the country of imprisonment, and the year or years in which the events described took place. Arthur Koestler is the Hungarian-born author of the novel Darkness at Noon. Jacobo Timerman is a journalist imprisoned during Argentina’s “dirty war.” Zhang Xianliang is a renowned Chinese novelist who spent a total of twenty-two years in prisons and labor camps. Primo Levi was arrested in Italy during World War II for joining an anti-Nazi group and sent to Auschwitz. Albie Sachs is a law professor who was arrested for anti-apartheid activities in his native South Africa.

— Andrew Snee

 

The Cell Door Closes

It is a unique sound. A cell door has no handle, either outside or inside. It cannot be shut except by being slammed. It is made of massive steel and concrete, about four inches thick, and every time it falls to there is a resounding crash just as though a shot has been fired. But this report dies away without an echo. Prison sounds are echoless and bleak.

When the door has been slammed behind him for the first time, the prisoner stands in the middle of the cell and looks round. I fancy that everyone must behave in more or less the same way.

First of all he gives a fleeting look round the walls and takes a mental inventory of all the objects in what is now to be his domain:

the iron bedstead
the washbasin
the WC
the barred window.

His next action is invariably to try to pull himself up by the iron bars of the window and look out. He fails and his suit is covered with white from the plaster on the wall against which he pressed himself. He desists, but decides to practice and master the art of pulling himself up by his hands. Indeed, he makes all sorts of laudable resolutions; he will do exercises every morning and learn a foreign language, and he simply won’t let his spirit be broken. He dusts his suit and continues his voyage of exploration round his puny realm — five paces long by four paces broad. He tries the iron bedstead. The springs are broken, the wire mattress sags and cuts into the flesh; it’s like lying in a hammock made of steel wire. He pulls a face, being determined to prove that he is full of courage and confidence. Then his gaze rests on the cell door, and he sees that an eye is glued to the spy-hole and is watching him.

The eye goggles at him glassily, its pupil unbelievably big. It is an eye without a man attached to it, and for a few moments the prisoner’s heart stops beating.

The eye disappears and the prisoner takes a deep breath and presses his hand against the left side of his chest.

“Now then,” he says to himself encouragingly, “how silly to go and get so frightened. You must get used to that. After all, the official’s only doing his duty by peeping in. That’s part of being in prison. But they won’t get me down, they’ll never get me down. I’ll stuff paper in the spy-hole at night. . . .”

As a matter of fact, there’s no reason why he shouldn’t do so straightaway. The idea fills him with genuine enthusiasm. For the first time he experiences that almost maniac desire for activity that from now on will alternate continually — up and down in a never-ending zigzag — with melancholia and depression.

Then he realizes that he has no paper on him, and his next impulse is — according to his social status — either to ring or to run over to the stationer’s at the corner. This impulse lasts only a fraction of a second. The next moment he becomes conscious for the first time of the true significance of his situation. For the first time he grasps the full reality of being behind a door which is locked from outside, grasps it in all its searing, devastating poignancy. . . .

And this is how things are to go on — in the coming minutes, hours, days, weeks, years.

How long has he already been in the cell?

He looks at his watch: exactly three minutes.

Arthur Koestler, Spain, 1937
(from Dialogue with Death)

The Eye

Tonight, a guard, not following the rules, leaves the peephole ajar. I wait awhile to see what will happen, but it remains open. Standing on tiptoe, I peer out. There’s a narrow corridor, and across from my cell I can see at least two other doors. Indeed, I have a full view of two doors. What a sensation of freedom! An entire universe added to my Time, that elongated time which hovers over me oppressively in the cell. Time, that dangerous enemy of man, when its existence, duration, and eternity are virtually palpable.

The light in the corridor is strong. Momentarily blinded, I step back, then hungrily return. I try to fill myself with the visible space. So long have I been deprived of a sense of distance and proportion that I feel suddenly unleashed. In order to look out, I must lean my face against the icy steel door. As the minutes pass, the cold becomes unbearable. My entire forehead is pressed against the steel, and the cold makes my head ache. But it’s been a long time — how long? — without a celebration of space. I press my ear against the door, yet hear no sound. I resume looking.

He is doing the same. I suddenly realize that the peephole in the door facing mine is also open, and that there’s an eye behind it. I’m startled: they’ve laid a trap for me. Looking through the peephole is forbidden and they’ve seen me doing it. I step back and wait. I wait for some Time, more Time, and again more Time. And then return to the peephole.

He is doing the same.

And now I must talk about you, about that long night we spent together, during which you were my brother, my father, my son, my friend. Or are you a woman? If so, we passed that night as lovers. You were merely an eye, yet you, too, remember that night, don’t you? Later, I was told you had died, that you had a weak heart and couldn’t survive the “machine,” but they didn’t mention whether you were a man or a woman. How can you have died, considering that night we conquered death?

You must remember, I need you to remember, for otherwise I’m obliged to remember for us both, and the beauty we experienced requires your testimony as well. You blinked. I clearly recall you blinking. And that flutter of movement proved conclusively that I was not the last human survivor on earth amid this universe of torturing custodians. At times, inside my cell, I’d move an arm or a leg merely to view a movement that was nonviolent, that differed from the ones employed when I was dragged or pushed by the guards. And you blinked. It was beautiful.

You were — you are? — a person of high human qualities, endowed certainly with a profound knowledge of life, for you invented all sorts of games that night, creating Movement in our confined world. You’d suddenly move away, then return. At first I was frightened. But then I realized you were re-creating the great human adventure of lost-and-found, and I played the game with you. Sometimes we’d return to the peephole at the same time, and our sense of triumph was so powerful we felt immortal. We were immortal.

I was frightened a second time when you disappeared for a long interval. Desperately, I pressed against the peephole, my forehead frozen on that cold night — it was night, wasn’t it? — and I took off my shirt and propped it under my forehead. When you returned I was furious, and you undoubtedly saw my fury, for you didn’t disappear again. This must have been a great effort for you. A few days later, when taken for a session with the machine, I heard one guard comment to another about his having used your crutches for kindling. I’m sure you’re aware, though, that such ruses were often used to soften up a prisoner before a machine session — “a chat with Susan,” as they called it. And I didn’t believe them. I swear to you I didn’t believe them. No one could destroy for me the mutual immortality created during that night of love and comradeship.

You were — you are? — extremely intelligent. Only one possible outgoing act would have occurred to me: looking out, looking, ceaselessly looking. But you unexpectedly stuck your chin in front of the peephole. Then your mouth, or part of your forehead. I was desperate. And frightened. I remained glued to the peephole, but only in order to peer out of it. I tried, I assure you, even briefly, to put my cheek to the opening, whereupon the inside of my cell sprang into view and my spirits immediately dropped. The gap between life and solitude was so evident; knowing that you were nearby, I couldn’t bear gazing back toward my cell. You forgave me for this, retaining your vitality and mobility. I realized that you were consoling me, and I started to cry. In silence, of course. You needn’t worry. I knew that I couldn’t risk uttering a sound. You saw me crying, though, didn’t you? You did see that. It did me good, crying in front of you. You know how dismal it is to be in a cell and to say to yourself, It’s time to cry a bit, whereupon you cry hoarsely, wretchedly, heedlessly. With you I was able to cry serenely, peacefully, as if allowed to cry. As if everything might be poured into that sobbing, converting it into a prayer rather than tears. You can’t imagine how I detested that fitful sobbing of mine inside the cell. That night, you taught me how we could be comrades in tears.

I don’t know why, but I’m sure that you are — that you were? — a young man of medium height. Let’s say thirty-five years old, with a great sense of humor. A few days later, a guard came to my cell to soften me up. He gave me a cigarette: it was his turn to play the good guy. He advised me to spill everything, told me that he’d had plenty of experience and that a person my age winds up dying in Susan’s arms because his heart can’t withstand the electric shocks for long. And he informed me that you’d been “cooled out.” This is how he put it: “Look, Jacobo, the only obligation you have is to survive. Politics change. . . . You have children. In the cell facing yours there was a crazy person. We cooled that one out. Look, Jacobo . . .”

I didn’t believe him. If I was able to withstand it, certainly you were. Did you have a weak heart? Impossible. You were strong hearted, generous, brave. Such hearts are not destroyed by Susan. Do you remember, once, how the lights went off? Do you know what I did? I sat down on the mattress, wrapped myself in the blanket, and pretended to sleep. I was very frightened. Suddenly, I realized that I hadn’t put on my shirt. I did so hastily. But the lights went on again. And I remembered that the guards sometimes amused themselves by turning the lights off and on. It’s possible, of course, that a large amount of current was being consumed by Susan. Undoubtedly, several new prisoners had arrived, and the first thing automatically done to them was to put them through the machine, even before they were asked who they were. The prisoner’s first sensation had to be a session of electric shocks in order to lower his defenses upon admittance. I found out later that this technique was changed after some individuals were cooled out before they could even be questioned. Not even the doctor on duty (by the way, do you remember how that doctor kept letting his beard grow, then after a few weeks would shave it off, then let his mustache grow, then only his sideburns, then he’d wear his hair long, then short, all because he was so scared of being identified?) — no, not even the doctor was always able to save them.

Yet both of us survived. Do you remember when I got a cramp in my leg while they were torturing me and suddenly my outcries ceased? They thought I had “gone,” and were alarmed. They had orders to get me to confess because they wanted to build a big case around me. I wasn’t any use to them dead. Yes, I was paralyzed for a moment due to the cramp. It’s curious how one can experience pain and joy simultaneously. Although my eyes were blindfolded, I sensed their fear — and rejoiced. Then I began moaning again on account of Susan.

No, I don’t think you remember this, though I tried to tell you about it. Yet your eye was much more expressive than mine. I tried to convey the episode to you, for it was as if a battle had been won against them. But at that point I was terribly confused, and it’s possible that I meant to tell it to you without actually having done so.

My friend, my brother, how much I learned that night from you. According to my calculations, it must have been April or May 1977. Suddenly, you put your nose in front of the peephole and rubbed it. It was a caress, wasn’t it? Yes, a caress. You’d already incorporated so many levels of experience into our captivity, yet persisted in the restoration of our humanity. At that moment you were suggesting tenderness, caressing your nose, gazing at me. You repeated it several times. A caress, then your eye. Another caress, and your eye. You may have thought I didn’t understand. But we understood each other from the start. I knew clearly you were telling me that tenderness would reappear. I don’t know why you felt the urgency that night to affirm the equal importance, or even greater importance, of tenderness over love. Is it because tenderness contains an element of resignation, and perhaps that night you were feeling resigned? Is it because tenderness is consoling to someone already resigned? Tenderness is indeed a consolation, whereas love is a need. And you assuredly needed to be consoled. I didn’t understand that, but you, my brother, my friend, my comrade in tears, were you already aware of this and resigned to it? If so, why and for whom am I uttering all these inanities? Am I babbling to myself like a fool? Is there really no eye gazing at me?

Jacobo Timerman, Argentina, 1977
(from Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number, 1981, translated by Toby Talbot)

Grass Soup

In the period when the rule was “lowered rations to be substituted with gourds and greens,” vegetables became the main course of the meal, not the side dish. Indeed, people kept themselves going by eating nothing but vegetables. In order not to confuse the reader, I should add that the vegetables we ate were not the kind found on a menu. They were more likely to be found in a textbook on botany. Many varieties were available, like the weeds in the rice paddies; for example, there was just about every kind of grass.

It is true that I enjoy eating all kinds of grass, but I particularly favor bitter green and purslane. Kukucai and dandelions are in the “composite” family, like chrysanthemums. Dandelion greens have apparently become the rage on the tables of Europe and Japan. At that time we had no inkling of their fashionable future — we knew the plants simply as “grass,” or “wild green,” and we ate a lot of them.

Grass that had been dug from the fields and carted into the kitchen had to go through a process of being picked through before it could go into the pot. The convicts who dug up the plants often handed over roots and all to the kitchen. They knew that they were going to eat these things, but that didn’t make them more careful. As with everything else, there was a daily quota on the quantity of greens a convict had to dig up. Leaving the roots and dirt on greens would increase the weight. . . .

“Picking through the greens” was not a matter of dividing edible plants from inedible ones. There was no plant that had been dug up and brought in that we wouldn’t eat. The phrase also did not refer to removing dead leaves and crushed stems — if you did that, you were considered unfit for the job and the cook would yell at you. No, “picking” meant nothing more than shaking the dirt off the plants. And that was a splendid job. It was even better than hauling clods. When I did it, all I had to do was bring along a clod of earth to use as a stool. I would sit beside a great pile of grass, then slowly, slowly, I would shake the plants stalk by stalk. If a piece of bitter green or purslane was especially juicy and lovely, naturally I would taste it. By the time the greens were picked, I would have eaten my fill.

The weather most days was fine and hot. The sun did its best to shine out over the land and the people on it. Often, I would move my pile of grass and my clod over to a shadier place — I doubt if people sitting under awnings at the beach could have been any more content. A lot of grass would already be limp and shriveled after being dug up, carted to the kitchen, and left for a while. What I ate, however, was generally buried in the middle — it was grass that still exuded the moist fragrance of the earth. What’s more, after being sealed in the middle of the pile, the juicier plants would sometimes have begun a natural fermentation.

In the outside world, people used to joke about a poor man who pretended to be living in luxury. Every time he finished eating, he would wipe his mouth with pork rind, so that when he went out people would think he’d just eaten meat. Here in the camps, the trick was to see whether or not a convict’s mouth was green. He would be envied and considered a lucky man if he had any chlorophyll on his lips.

Zhang Xianliang, China, 1960
(from Grass Soup, 1994, translated by Martha Avery)

Dreams In Auschwitz

The light goes out a first time for a few seconds to warn the tailors to put away the precious needle and thread; then the bell sounds in the distance, the night guard installs himself, and all the lights are turned out definitively. There is nothing to do but to undress and go to bed.

I do not know who my neighbor is; I am not even sure that it is always the same person because I have never seen his face except for a few seconds amidst the uproar of the reveille, so that I know his back and his feet much better than his face. He does not work in my Commando and only comes in the bunk at curfew time; he wraps himself in the blanket, pushes me aside with a blow from his bony hips, turns his back on me, and at once begins to snore. Back against back, I struggle to regain a reasonable area of the straw mattress: with the base of my back I exercise a progressive pressure against his back; then I turn around and try to push with my knees; I take hold of his ankles and try to place them a little further over so as not to have his feet next to my face. But it is all in vain: he is so much heavier than me and seems turned to stone in his sleep.

So I adapt myself to lie like this, forced into immobility, half lying on the wooden edge. Nevertheless, I am so tired and stunned that I, too, soon fall asleep, and I seem to be sleeping on the tracks of a railroad.

The train is about to arrive: one can hear the engine panting; it is my neighbor. I am not yet so asleep as not to be aware of the double nature of the engine. It is, in fact, the very engine which towed the wagons we had to unload in Buna today. I recognize it by the fact that even now, as when it passed close by us, I feel the heat it radiates from its backside. It is puffing, it is ever nearer, it is on the point of running over me, but instead it never arrives. My sleep is very light; it is a veil. If I want I can tear it. I will do it. I want to tear it, so that I can get off the railway track. Now I have done it and now I am awake: but not really awake, only a little more, one step higher on the ladder between the unconscious and the conscious. I have my eyes closed and I do not want to open them lest my sleep escape me, but I can register noises: I am sure this distant whistle is real, it does not come from an engine in a dream, it can be heard objectively. It is the whistle of the small-gauge track. It comes from the yard where they work at night as well. A long, firm note, then another one a semitone lower, then again the first, but short and cut off. This whistle is an important thing and in some ways essential: we have heard it so often associated with the suffering of the work and the camp that it has become a symbol and immediately evokes the camp’s image like certain music or smells.

This is my sister here, with some unidentifiable friend and many other people. They are all listening to me and it is the very story that I am telling: the whistle of three notes, the hard bed, my neighbor whom I would like to move, but whom I am afraid to wake as he is stronger than me. I also speak diffusely of our hunger, and of the lice control, and of the Kapo who hit me on the nose and then sent me to wash myself as I was bleeding. It is an intense pleasure, physical, inexpressible, to be at home, among friendly people, and to have so many things to recount: but I cannot help noticing that my listeners do not follow me. In fact, they are completely indifferent: they speak confusedly of other things among themselves, as if I were not there. My sister looks at me, gets up, and goes away without a word.

A desolating grief is now born in me, like certain barely remembered pains of one’s early infancy. It is pain in its pure state, not tempered by a sense of reality and by the intrusion of extraneous circumstances, a pain like that which makes children cry; and it is better for me to swim once again up to the surface, but this time I deliberately open my eyes to have a guarantee in front of me of being effectively awake.

My dream stands in front of me, still warm, and although awake I am still full of its anguish: and then I remember that it is not a haphazard dream, that I have dreamed it not once but many times since I arrived here, with hardly any variations of environment or details. I am now quite awake and I remember that I have recounted it to Alberto and that he confided to me, to my amazement, that it is also his dream and the dream of many others, perhaps of everyone. Why does it happen? Why is the pain of every day translated so constantly into our dreams, in the ever repeated scene of the unlistened-to story?

While I meditate on this, I try to profit from the interval of wakefulness, to shake off the painful remnants of the preceding sleep, so as not to compromise the quality of the next dream. I crouch in the dark, I look around, and I listen.

One can hear the sleepers breathing and snoring; some groan and speak. Many lick their lips and move their jaws. They are dreaming of eating; this is also a collective dream. It is a pitiless dream which the creator of the Tantalus myth must have known. You not only see the food, you feel it in your hands, distinct and concrete, you are aware of its rich and striking smell; someone in the dream even holds it up to your lips, but every time a different circumstance intervenes to prevent the consummation of the act. Then the dream dissolves and breaks up into its elements, but it re-forms itself immediately after and begins again, similar, yet changed; and this without pause, for all of us, every night and for the whole of our sleep.

So our nights drag on. The dream of Tantalus and the dream of the story are woven into a texture of more indistinct images: the suffering of the day, composed of hunger, blows, cold, exhaustion, fear, and promiscuity, turns at nighttime into shapeless nightmares of unheard-of violence, dreams which in free life would occur only during a fever. One wakes up at every moment, frozen with terror, shaking in every limb, under the impression of an order shouted out by a voice full of anger in a language not understood. The procession to the bucket and the thud of bare heels on the wooden floor turns into another symbolic procession: it is us again, gray and identical, small as ants, yet so huge as to reach up to the stars, bound one against the other, countless, covering the plain as far as the horizon; sometimes melting into a single substance, a sorrowful turmoil in which we all feel ourselves trapped and suffocated; sometimes marching in a circle, without beginning or end, with a blinding giddiness and a sea of nausea rising from the precordia to the gullet; until hunger or cold or the fullness of our bladders turns our dreams into their customary forms. We try in vain, when the nightmare itself or the discomforts wake us, to extricate the various elements and drive them back, separately, out of the field of our present attention, so as to defend our sleep from their intrusion: but as soon as we close our eyes, once again we feel our brain start up, beyond our control; it knocks and hums, incapable of rest, it fabricates phantasms and terrible symbols, and without rest projects and shapes their images, as a gray fog, onto the screen of our dreams.

For the whole duration of the night, cutting across the alternating sleep, waking, and nightmares, the expectancy and terror of the moment of the reveille keeps watch. By means of that mysterious faculty of which many are aware, even without watches we are able to calculate the moment with close accuracy. At the hour of the reveille, which varies from season to season but always falls a fair time before dawn, the camp bell rings for a long time, and the night guard in every hut goes off duty; he switches on the light, gets up, stretches himself, and pronounces the daily condemnation: “Augstehen,” or more often in Polish, “Wstavac.”

Very few sleep on till the Wstavac: it is a moment of pain too acute for even the deepest sleep not to dissolve as it approaches. The night guard knows this and for that reason does not utter it in a tone of command, but with a quiet and subdued voice of one who knows that the announcement will find all ears waiting, and will be heard and obeyed.

Like a stone, the foreign word falls to the bottom of every soul. “Get up”: the illusory barrier of the warm blanket, the thin armor of sleep, the nightly evasion with its very torments drops to pieces around us and we find ourselves mercilessly awake, exposed to insult, atrociously naked and vulnerable. Every day begins like every other day, so long as not to allow us reasonably to conceive its end. . . .

I climb down onto the floor and put on my shoes. The sores on my feet reopen at once, and a new day begins.

Primo Levi, Nazi-occupied Poland, 1944–45
(from If This Is a Man, 1959, translated by Stuart Woolf)

The Release Order

“We have come to release you.” It is Sunday morning, 29 December, the ninetieth day of my detention. The captain stands in the doorway of my cell, his large bulk blocking out most of the body of a small man in a neat brown suit whom I half see standing behind him. The captain continues:

“Your ninety days are up and you can go now.” I look back at him with suspicion. There is something false in his manner. I say nothing.

The captain moves aside and the short man enters my cell. I recognize him now. He is the colonel, the man in charge of the security forces in Cape Town.

“I am Colonel Macintyre,” he says. I notice that he is holding a piece of paper in his right hand. “This is for you.” He gives me the paper. His lips mash softly together as he speaks and I observe that his gums are bare. The colonel of the security forces is toothless — no doubt awaiting false teeth.

I take the paper and read it. The words are formal and precise:

. . . is hereby ordered that Albert Louis Sachs who is at present being detained in terms of Section . . . at Caledon Square police station, Cape Town, be released forthwith.

“I think we have met before,” I tell the colonel. “Weren’t you in charge of the police who dispersed the crowd at the ‘Remember Sharpeville’ meeting? In 1961 I think it was.” He was a captain in the uniformed police then, and I remember that he acted efficiently and with relative absence of provocation to the crowd. I want now to hear the colonel talk a bit more, for from the tone of his voice I should be able to tell whether or not I am really to be released. I do not believe what is written on the piece of paper in my hand.

“That is correct,” the colonel replies. “You had better pack your things now.” His tone is cool and the words splash quietly from his pouting lips.

“Am I really free?” I ask.

It is the captain who answers. “Yes, you are really free.”

“You mean I can go home?”

“Yes, you can go home.”

A constable is called to carry my blankets and food. The colonel and the captain push their way out of the cell, which is too small to contain four people, and we all proceed along the passage outside. The steel gate at the end of the passage is unlocked, and the procession passes through to the stairs that lead down from the cells to the charge office. I had almost forgotten that my cell was on a level one floor above the ground. When we reach the charge office my belongings are heaped on the counter, and I am asked to sign the receipt for my property.

“Are you going to arrest me again?” I ask as I sign the property receipt.

“You are now completely free,” the captain replies. We all stand quietly, watching each other. The captain looks at my belongings on the counter, smiles warmly at me, and says:

“How are you going to get all that stuff home?”

How are you going to get all that stuff home? The sentence echoes through my head and I feel myself tremble. Hope bursts through my defenses and swamps over me so that I am overtaken by overwhelming dizziness. Those words can only mean one thing: I am really free.

“You mean I really am free?” The words come faintly from my lips. I feel the pressure of tears on my eyeballs. My hand moves up to my face and my body begins to rock. The captain smiles genially. I want to hug him, and also to kick him.

“I don’t know what to say,” I whisper. “I don’t know whether to say thank you or f—” I do not finish the sentence. The occasion is too great to be marred with abusive language.

“Can I . . . can I telephone my mother?”

The captain is slightly startled by my request and looks to the colonel. The colonel nods.

“Certainly,” the captain assures me affably. “The phone is over there. Just wait a minute and we’ll get through for you.” I am swooning; I cannot stand. As I seat myself on a bench I notice the colonel walking out toward the street.

I’m free. It’s all over.

The colonel returns with Warrant Officer Vlok. The warrant officer walks straight toward me and holds out his hand in greeting. He is grinning and I see his brown-stained teeth. I stand up shakily and grasp his hand, ready to mumble something about my happiness.

“I am placing you under arrest,” he says.

Albie Sachs, South Africa, 1963–64
(from The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs, 1964)