Men in Prison by Victor Serge

infection sends neuralgic pains through his head, he signs up for a “visit with the doctor.”
    Around eleven o’clock, a guard rounds up the sick. Ten or so prisoners come together with joyful surprise in their sullen eyes and line up in the ground-floor corridor. While they’re waiting for the last of those who have signed up, a man with a swollen cheek discreetly makes the acquaintance of a man with varicose veins who complains of not being able to walk anymore; a consumptive gives a slight cough as he contemplates the blood-specked sputum in his handkerchief, on whose display he is counting to get some medicine. A fishy-looking financier— delighted to escape for a few minutes from solitude so cruel for an ex-playboy—engages in a hasty conversation with tall, cunning-eyed Jadin (“You know Jadin, from the Bagnolet holdup …”), who has only signed up for the visit himself to pursue some subtle scheme …
    “Forward march!”—in Indian file under the direction of a guard. In front of the ground-floor cell which is used as the doctor’s office, more meetings, exchanges of furtive signs, top-secret missives passing from hand to hand concealing more than one criminal secret—and also more than one message of friendship. The whole value, even purely medical, of the visit to the sawbones consists in these meetings andcorrespondences. Psychosomatic afflictions subside in these moments of contact with
other men.
    A white table. On it, a large register. Seated behind it, a gentleman in a white coat flanked by two inmate-orderlies. A kind of administrative tribunal. A guard calls the patients.
    “Pirard, Marcel …”
    Pirard, Marcel, emerges out of the gray corridor wall and appears before the table of the sawbones, who is still busy with the previous patient (Crispin, Gustave-Leon, twenty-two years old; bronchitis), for whom he is writing, under the
prescriptions
column in the big register: “tinct. iod.” Eight
tinct. iod.
for today: November! Without lifting his eyes from his register, where he reads the records devoted to Pirard, Marcel, the sawbones questions:
    “What’s your trouble?”
    Pirard, Marcel, a teamster by trade (in the register: “assault and battery”; he broke his whip handle over the back of a dishonest subcontractor), has been preparing his lesson for two days. Being in a cell is driving him mad. He can’t sleep anymore; he has cold sweat, nightmares, buzzings in his ears: He can’t go on! He would like them to “pair” him off—that is to say, give him a companion, a living man, to talk to, since these walls, these naked empty, silent, cold walls are driving him out of his mind! … But how to say everything in this fleeting minute!
    “Doctor, I don’t know what’s the matter; I’m going crazy …”
    The two orderlies—two augurs—standing behind the doctor smile indignantly. Another faker! (“He’s going crazy! What’s that to us, buddy?”) The doctor at first raises his head, but immediately remembers that he has forty-seven men signed up for consultation this morning, and that this is only the twenty-third. Without even having seen Pirard, Marcel, the doctor himself clarifies:
    “Headaches?”
    “Yes, that’s it, Doctor!” murmurs Pirard, Marcel, in ecstasy.
    He is already being gently pushed outside. The doctor writes “Bromide” in the
prescriptions
column. Maekers, Henri, is called in. Each visit lasts from forty to sixty seconds, the time necessary to fill out the
prescriptions
column with a rapid scrawl. Pirard, Marcel, returns to his cell weak and dejected. He continues “going crazy” noiselessly until the day—if his pretrial examination drags out—when we hear him dashing himself furiously against the door, beating his head against the wall, howling like a wild beast. Then they knock him senseless for a while,give him a shower, throw him into the hole; afterwards they “pair” him without medical assistance.
    I have never seen the sawbones touch a