The Gulag Archipelago Vol. 2 An Experiment in Literary Investigation - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"They've. Brought the Fascists!" I 183
!TR's, but nonetheless. they did each time issue me my meal, and
even without protesting after it while, so that I myself came to
believe that I was on their list. As I thought it over later-I was,
for the kitchen, still a question mark: hardly had. I arrived than
I acted big;! had borne myself proudly and gone about in military
uniform. Such a person might very easily in a week become a
senior work assigner or the senior camp bookkeeper or a doctor.
(In camp everything is possible!!) And then they would be in
my hands. So even though in actual fact the plant waS only trying
me out and had not included me on any list at all-the kitchen
kept on feeding mejust in case~ But one day before my fall, when
even the plant didn't know, the camp kitchen already knew all
about it, and slammed the door in my mug: I had turned out to
be a cheap sucker. This tiny episode typifies the atmosphere of
the camp world.·
This so prevalent human desire to be set apart by clothes discloses
us in fact, particularly to the· keen eyes of camp. It seems
to us that w.e~l'e clothing ourselves, but in fact we're' baring ourselves,
we,..-showing what we're worth. I did not understand that
my military uniform had the same price as Matronina'sred scarf.
But there was an unslumbering eye which had spied it all out
from a hiding place. And one day an orderly was sent to get me.
A lieutenant wanted to see me--over here, in a separate room.
The young lieutenant conversed with me very pleasantly. In
the cozy, clean room he and I were alone. The sun was shining
just before sinking in the west and the wind was blowing the cur- .
tain. He told me to be seated. For some reason he asked me to
write my autobiography-and he could not have made a more
pleasant proposal. After the protocols of interrogation in which
I had only spat on myself, after. tire humiliation of the Black
Marias and the transit prisons, after the convoy and the prison
jailers, after the thieves and the trusties, who had refused to see
in me a former captain of our glorious Red Army, here I sat
behind a desk and without being pUShed by anyone at all, and
beneath the benign glance of a friendly lieutenant, I wrote at
just the right lengt~ in thick ink on excellent smooth paper which
did not exist in camp that I had been a captain, that I had commanded
a battery, that I had' been. awarded some decomtiOnli.
And thanks to the actual writing, it seemed thilt I had regained'
my own personality, my own "I/'-(Yes, my gnoseological sub-
184 I THE GULAG AllC.HIPELAGO
ject, "r'! And yet I was, after all, a university man, a civilian, in
the army by c~ance. Imagine how embedded it must be in a career
officer-this insistence on being held in esteem!) And the lieutenant,
on reading·my autobiography, was quite satisfied with it.
"So you are a Soviet person, right?" Well, to be sure, well, of
course, why not? How pleasant it was to rise again from the mud
and ashes, and once again become a Soviet person! It was onehalf
of freedom.
The lieutenant asked me to come see him in five days. During
these five days, however, I was forced to say good-bye to my
miUtary uniform because it was bad to be digging clay in it. I hid
my field shirt and my military britches in my suitcase, and at the
camp storage room I received some patched and faded rag which
appeared to have been washed after lying for a year in . a trash
bin. This was an important step, thougI!. I did not as yet recognize
. its significance: my soul had not yet become that of a zek, but
my skin therewith became a zek's. With shaven head, tormented
by hung~r, and squeezed by enemies, I would soon acquire the
glance of a zek too-insincere, suspicious, all-observant.
This was how I looked when in five days' time I went to see
the security chief, still not understanding what he was getting at.
But the security chief was not there. He had stopped coming there
entirely. (He already knew, but we did not, that in another week
we would all be dispersed and that they would be bringing Germans
toNovy Iyerusalim to replace us.) And that is how I missed
seeing the lieutenant. _
I discussed with Gammerov and IJ;l.gal why it was that I wrote
my autobiography, and we did not guess, innocents, that these
were already the first claws of the beast of prey reaching into our
nest. And yet meanwhile the picture was so clear: Three young -
men -had arrived in the new prisoner transport, and they kept
4iscussing something· all the .time, arguing among themselves,
and one of them-swarthy, round, and gloomy, with little mustaches,
the one who had gotten himself a place in the bookkeeping
office---didn't sleep nights and kept writing something on the
bunks, writing and hiding it. Of course, one could send someone
and grab what he was hiding-but without causing an alarm it
was simpler to find out about it all from the one of them who wore
army britches. He, evidently, was an army man and a Soviet
person, and he would assist iIi. the spiritual surveillance.