duck-shooting with my father in the Pripet Marshes. Today, Mischa used this as a theme for a blistering, blustering attack on my character as a spy and saboteur. Beyond the Pripet was Russia and Mischa did not intend that either I or the court should forget it. Yesterday I had quietly boasted of my prowess with a sporting gun. Today I was not only the most despicable of spies but also a well-trained potential assassin, a crack-shot hireling of Polish Army Intelligence. And so it went on.
It was a crazy trial, run by madmen. It became in the end a test of endurance between one weak, half- starved, ill-used Pole and the powerful, time-squandering State machine. I had been given no food before I came in and I received nothing throughout the long day’s trial that ended, astonishingly, at midnight. Seventeen hours I stood there. There were no cigarettes, no coffee. Mischa would occasionally step out and punch or slap me, especially when I looked like keeling over or nodding to sleep on my feet.
Everyone else in the court, Mischa included, took a break at intervals during the day. Other people took over the examination. The composition of the court was constantly changing. During the afternoon the President came in for a few hours to allow his deputy a rest. The guards were regularly changed every two hours. Only I went on standing there, dry-throated, swaying, wondering dully if this day would ever end.
When I stumbled back into my cell there was still no food for me. At 7 a.m. the next day when I was led back again I was still without food and again, hungry, aching and deathly tired, I survived another marathon madmen’s session of Soviet justice. Why do they do it, I kept asking myself. Why do they waste all this time on one Pole? Why don’t they just sentence me and have done with it? For myself, I could have admitted all the things they charged me with and ended it all. But I still did not want to die. For me it was a struggle for life.
They did not break me down. They even re-introduced the Kharkov trick of taking me off my staggering feet and sitting me on the edge of a chair for a few hours. It got painful, but it was at least a change from trying to stop my knees buckling under me.
The fourth day was the last. There seemed to be many more people there than at any previous stage. I imagine all those officials who from time to time had acted as stand-ins for the principals wanted to be present for the last act. The atmosphere was much the same as it had been on the first day. The President was back in his accustomed position, riffling through his sheaf of papers. Everybody talked and Mischa was in laughing conversation with an N.K.V.D. captain.
The old preliminaries were gone through. Again I identified myself. I was tired, sick and still unfed. There were some more questions, which I answered automatically. They were straightforward and unbaited.
The President then asked me if I would give the court a specimen of my signature. When I hesitated, he made it clear that I was not being asked to sign any document. Someone came forward with a small piece of paper, a slip only big enough to take my name. I turned it over in my hand. Someone said, ‘We only want to see how you sign your name.’ I took the pencil held out to me and wrote my name. The President glanced at the slip, passed it along to the two N.K.V.D. men. All three remained in a huddle for a couple of minutes. The President looked at me, held up the slip in his right hand, screwed it up and threw it away.
The President held up a document. A court official took it from him and brought it over to me. ‘Is that your signature?’ asked the President. I looked closely for a full minute while the court waited. It was my signature. Wavery and thin. But unmistakably my signature. Kharkov, I thought. That night at Kharkov.
‘Is that your signature?’ repeated the President.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But I do not remember signing and it does not mean I admit anything contained in this document.’
‘That document,’ he continued, ‘is a full list of the charges against you.’
‘I know it well,’ I replied. ‘But no one would ever let me read it. I never knowingly signed it.’
‘It is your signature, nevertheless?’
‘It is my signature, but I cannot remember writing it.’
There were whispered consultations up and down the table. The President stood, the court stood. He read the charges at length. He announced that the court had found me guilty of espionage and plotting against the people of the U.S.S.R. It took quite a long time to get through all this and all I was waiting for was the sentence. It came at last.
‘You will therefore be sentenced to twenty-five years forced labour.’
‘And that,’ said the blue-uniformed major on the President’s right, ‘should be ample time to restore your shocking memory.’
I stood there for a moment looking down the table. I caught the eye of Mischa, the elegant, well-groomed Mischa. He was standing back slightly from the table. He smiled. There was no malice in that smile. It was friendly, the smile of a man who is stepping forward to shake your hand. It was almost as though he were encouraging me, complimenting me on the show I had put up. He was still smiling when one of the guards tugged at my blouse to turn me round. I passed through the curtain and was taken back to my cell.
Food was brought to me, a big meal by prison standards, and drink. The guards talked again. I felt a great weight had been lifted from me. I slept.
3.
THERE WAS evidence the next day that the prison authorities had taken immediate note of my change in status from having been a prisoner under interrogation and trial to that of prisoner under sentence. I was restored to full rations — coffee and 100 grammes of the usual black rye bread at 7 a.m. and, in the evening, another 100 grammes of bread and a bowl of soup. The soup was merely the water in which turnips had been boiled, without salt or any seasoning, but it was a welcome change of diet.
I was awarded, too, my first hot bath since my arrest. The wash-house to which I was escorted by my two guards was about twenty yards from my cell and differed from the others I had used only in having two taps in the wall instead of one. Off came my
The two guards, one armed with a Nagan-type pistol in an unbuttoned holster, the other with a carbine, lounged one each side of the door watching my antics. Said one, ‘You will be all right now. You are going away from here.’ ‘When?’ I asked quickly. ‘Where to?’ Both guards ignored the questions. I carried on with my bath, making it last as long as I could. Then I turned off the tap and danced about to get dry. I dabbed at myself with my blouse and finally ran some water over my clothes and kneaded the prison dirt out of them until it flowed away in a dark stream down the hole in the sink. I rinsed them, wrung them, shook them and put them back on my body, the steam still rising from them. ‘You look a nice clean boy now,’ said the man with the carbine. ‘Let’s go.’
Back in my cell I was given a cigarette. One of the guards rolled the cigarette, lit it and then put it down on the floor. As he walked back I moved forward and picked it up. This was always the procedure when I was given a smoke. No guard would directly hand the cigarette to me, and if it went out before I took my first puff a single match would be thrown to me. The used match would be picked up and removed from the cell. Most of the many rigid security measures had obvious significance, but I could never quite appreciate the need for this elaborate care over a cigarette in the presence of two fully-armed men in the heart of a prison like the Lubyanka.
In spite of the fact that a prisoner was hopelessly equipped to attempt escape, the security drill was unvarying. A prisoner leaving or returning to his cell was always escorted by two guards. When a man was being taken out the guards took up position one at each side of the door. The prisoner would advance between them and halt a pace ahead of them. The instruction would then be given, to quote a typical example: ‘You will walk down this corridor on the left, turn right at the end and keep going until you are told to stop. Keep to the middle of the corridor all the way.’ These instructions were usually ended by the recital of an ominous little jingle which went:
