Men in Prison by Victor Serge Page B

murderer. She: supple and feline from buttocks to breasts to golden hair. She: love, sold by night, given by day, a bogus “sister” come today to look at her man and to cry out to him:
    “I’m yours, you see! Down to the depths of me! You’re my man!”
    She is glued right against the wire mesh, straining toward him. Because it was for her that he bloodied his knife! Teeth clenched, he stares with dull eyes at that mouth which is proffered, given, but unreal; murmurs with the affectation of disdain for love proper to a male:
    “Send me some tobacco.”
    On the right, a mother and her son.
    Twenty minutes. The mother, somewhat paler, leaves her cage with a hesitant step. She looks drunk. Her hat has slipped down over one ear. Her damp eyes are burning, her lower lip trembles … She is probably ashamed of crying “in front of people.” She is in a hurry to leave:“The street will do me good,” she thinks—and the walls of the jail turn about her, angular, shattered, crooked, falling in. “So it’s true, it’s all true, everything the papers said. My God! My poor little Marcel! My poor little Marcel! …”
    … On his side, he moves off, staggering a bit himself, his eyes still clinging to the image of an old mama’s pained, ruined face. His shouted confession keeps vibrating in his throat. But it’s over, over. What a relief! She knows everything now, everything: that he did it in order to become a pilot …
    In his cell he finds the gift of maternal hands: a jar of jam, some white bread, a can of sardines which has just been opened. A clean shirt. The shirt is spotted with grease.
    In the neighboring cells, the jealousy of abandoned prisoners stirs with the clanging of the bolted door.
    From time to time, inspectors come through. A gentleman in a silver-braided
képi
stands haughty in the doorway. Behind him, the guard on duty, the chief guard—bedecked with braid from cuff to shoulder—or some fat sergeant.
    “Do you have any complaints to make?”
    I have none. No one has any. Nobody wants to get on the wrong side of the omnipotent authorities. The pale, skinny kid whose guard calls him a “stinking little bastard” from dawn to dusk (lucky when his guard’s heavy key doesn’t whack him between the shoulder blades “on the sly”), gazes, full of deference, at the three rows of silver braid on the
képi,
squints at his torturer’s lantern jaw, stares out with the hate-filled eyes of a beast at bay—and keeps quiet.
    Whistling, humming, talking to yourself out loud, making any noise, is forbidden. It might seem easy to maintain discipline in a cell. But punishments of dry bread, loss of canteen privileges, even of being sent to the hole, are dealt out each day to a steady number of celled prisoners, Most of whom are guilty of attempting to communicate with each other, either by tapping, by writing, or by other means. The use of the “telephone,” for example, is severely punished. The toilet bowls are connected to wastepipes which pass perpendicularly from story to story, so that when you speak into the opening you can be heard on the floors above and below you. By means of this bizarre “telephone,” it is possible to have actual conversations, albeit conversations interruptedby untimely waterfalls and requiring a great deal of skill: The whole thing is to talk loud enough to be heard on the next floor without being heard from the guards’ catwalk.
    The regulations could be summed up in three peremptory words:
    Living is forbidden!
    But is it possible to forbid living men to live? With all the weight of its mighty edifices of stone, cement, and iron, the hulking prison affirms that it is possible.
    The large number of inmates makes it impossible for the prison authorities to respect the principle of isolation. Thanks to an insufficient number of cells, a handful of culprits escape this special torture. Three men are put together. There is only one bed: Two spread their mattresses on the