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

"They've Brought the Fascists!"
I 18S
Zhora Ingal, who was not exhausted by his work during the
day, really did refuse to sleep the first half-nights-and thus
defended. the freedom of the creative spirit. He sat up on the
upper panel of the multiple bunk, without mattress,. pillow, or
blanket: in his padded jacket (it was not warm in the rooms, for
the nights were autumn nights), in his shoes, h~ feet stretched
out on the panel, his back leaning against the wall, and sucking
on his pencil, looked sternly at his sheet of paper. (One could
not have dreamed up worse behavior for camp! But neither he
not we understood yet how all that stood out like a sore thumb
and how they kept watch over such things.)
Sometimes he simply gave in to his frailties and wrote an
ordinary letter. His twenty-three-year-old wife had not even worn
out the shoes in which she'd gone with him that winter to the
conservatory-and now she had left him: security questionnaires,
a blot on one's record, yes, and a person wants to live; He wrote
to ano~er woman, whom he called a dear sister, concealing from
himself and from her that he also loved her or W8!l ready to love
her (but that woman, too, soon got married). He could write
like this:
"My dear little sister! Harken to the wonderful intimations of
humanity: Handel, Tchaikovsky, Debussy! 1, too, .wanted to l:>ecome
an intimation, but the clock of my life has come to a
stop .... "
Or simply: "You have become much closer to me during the -
course of these months. It has become clear that there are very
many real, genuiiie people in the world, and I v.ery much hope
that your husband will also be a real human being."
Or like this:
"I have wandered through life; stumbling and in search of
myself .... There is a bright light in the room, and I have never
seen darkness that is blacker. But only here have I found myself
and my own fate, and this time not in books either. And do you
know, my little bird, I have never been such an optimist as I am
right now. Now I know once and for all that there is nothing
more precious in life than the idea one serves. And I also now
know how and what I must write--that's the main thing."a
3. No, he did not yet know how to write. Accor4lng to the account of Arkady
BeUnkov, later on in another camp Ingal kept on writing like that,
keeping to himself on the bunks. The prisoners first asked, and tl1en subae-
186 THE GULA.G ARCHIPELAGO
And for the time being, he wrote at night and hid during the
day a story about EI Campesino-theSpanish Republican with
whom he had shared a cell and whose peasant common sense had
delighted him. EI Campesino's fate was a simple one: after having
lost the war to Franco he came to the Soviet Union, and·after a
while he was imprisoned here! -
Ingal was not. a warm person. He did not inspire one to open
one's heart ~o him. at the first impulse. (l have just written this
and stopped to think: Was I called a warm person either?) But
his st~adfastnes was a worthy model. To write in campI I might
someday be able to rise. to it -if I didn't perish. But for the time
being I was tormented by my own restless search, depressed-by
. my first days as a clay digger. On a serene September evening
Boris Gammerov and I cowd find time only to sit awhile on ~
pile of cinders at.the approach to the camp perimeter.
'. In the direction of Moscow thirty-seven miles away the. heavens
flamed with salutes--this was the "holiday of victory over Japan."
But the lanterns of our camp compound burned with a dull tired
light. A hostile reddish light emanated from the plant windows.
And in a long and drawn-out string, as mysterious as the years.
and the months of our prison terms,. the lanterns on the poles of
the bm.ad brickyard compound receded into the distance.
Aans .. 1I.ff1D!Dd . his knees, thin and coughing,- Gammerov re-·
peJted:
Nor desire it.
.. For thirty years I· have nurtured
My love for my native land,
And I shall neither expect
.. : your leniency ... *
quently began to demand, that he show them what he was writing (denunciations,
perhaps?). But regarding this only as one more act of violence against
creative art-although from the opposite IIirection-he refused! And they ...
beat him up unmercifully.
·1 have quoted here these lines from his letters so that his grave may be
marked with this tiny monument at least.
4. Ingal could never complete this short story about EI Campesino because
he never knew EI Campesino's fate. EI Campesino outlived his describer. I
have heard that at the time of the great Ashkhabad earthquake he led a group
of zeks out of a wrecked camp and shepherded them through the mountains
into Iran. (Even the border guards had panicked.)