Transfusion

24

Life was furtive here, as in an anthill, and we were disciplined like ants, each man knowing the solitude of a grain of sand on a beach. Silence became the loudest sound in the world. There were sharper noises and more ringing ones, the clang of metal gates, the liquid clicks of keys turning and occasionally the scream of men. But after dark there was generally silence, and it was vast then.

During this year I felt like a spectator watching a familiar part of myself going away. I knew I was married and had been in love, and over and over I used to repeat to myself that I still was in love, but as time wore me a numbness set in like the rigour of death and I felt like an old man in summer. I wrote letters and sent them into the void, and letters from Jean and Anne and Nicholas came back to me out of the void. The numbness I had induced to save myself during the first months hardened as time passed into a numbness of the spirit, an anaesthesia at the very core, and though I knew there was a great heat down inside I never believed it would grow into a fire again. Only the mind was active; it used to think and ponder and race and insist that it was sane. In the first five months I was put at hard labour in the quarry, working eight hours a day in the sun or rain and being regimented the rest of the day until finally the lights went out and the convicts settled in their cells and the long, barred corridor buzzed with muttering voices until the silence set in again for another night.

After the trial I seemed to lose all interest in the outside world. I was exhausted and needed a holiday, and now was being driven to work like an animal. It was hard and merciless, for politicians made money out of what we did and wanted some results, yet I never cared much what happened to my body now that I had no use for it. It was my spirit that was exhausted. It was utterly worn out and looked forward to nothing, for the world beyond the prison seemed hardly more profitable than the world within. This mental exhaustion verged on acute nervous breakdown and the months neither improved nor lessened it. My only care was to keep it a secret, and I did this until the secret became still another neurosis.

I had good reason for wanting this hidden. The prison believed in a robust code and I saw two men broken that year. One became a sodomite, the other lost his head and hit a guard, and to improve him the authorities beat him unconscious and put him in the hole for two weeks. He lay there in indescribably bad air and total darkness, seeing no one and hearing nothing but the beat of his blood for two weeks. He was given very little to eat and one-quarter the supply of liquid considered necessary to maintain life in a human body. His eyes ached from the darkness and after three days he was attacked by claustrophobia. He came out raving and the state then removed him to an asylum where he was to stay until fit to serve the rest of his sentence. I saw this in my first week in prison, and one of the guards who seemed to like me went out of his way to give me a warning.

“Don’t let it get you, Bud,” he said. “I read about you and I suppose you think you was framed. Well, it don’t make no difference what you was. That guy there was framed too. The politicians got him and he was sore. Take my advice and don’t get sore.”

I did not need his advice to realize that there was no right and wrong in a prison, and that the punishment is totally irrelevant to the crime. To have thought of right and wrong here would have produced madness. I knew this before I entered the place. I learned no specific facts about a jail that I had not known before. Does a medical man know intellectually more about ether after he has submitted to an operation than he knew before?

Here we had the crab-like potency of discipline. For a man in my nervous state to have thought about his wife would have produced something like insanity, so quite deliberately I tried to erase Anne’s image from my memory. I tried to think of her as a name. After a time she became in memory like someone I had known casually years ago, and if thought of her gave me horror, the horror was not caused by the thought itself but by the fact that it had been possible for me to have it.

And sometimes she came to see me. On these occasions we smiled at each other through a steel grating and muttered for fifteen minutes back and forth, telling each other how good we felt. Jean and Nicholas went through the same ritual. And I learned that things were worse for Nicholas than they were for me, for they had put him in solitary confinement in his jail lest his communism corrupt the criminals.

There was no doubt, however, that after the first month things grew better for me and stayed so until winter. One of the convicts in my section had stolen a key and they shifted us all to a different wing of the building and put us into different cells. Things were always being stolen and hardly a week passed without the guards making a search of the cells. The warders would shout that an inspection was about to take place, then duck out of the way while a rain of knives and cups and saucers and files and nuts and bolts and keys and jimmys descended from the cells. The guards would then search in what had been thrown out and if they couldn’t find what they wanted, usually a key, every man had his cell changed to another section where there were no locks that the key might fit.

However, this first move after I began my sentence was fortunate for me because my new cell faced outward and had a southern exposure and in the nights I could see bright moonlight or count the stars, and it became easier to believe that the outside world still existed. To watch the solitude of the sky became a benison.

The quarry where the criminals worked had a beautiful location near a narrow stream beyond which a plain extended far enough to make the hills that ringed it appear blue. Evergreens stood on the quarry hill and gave out a rich pungence whenever the sun warmed them, and in harvest time we could see farmers in wide-brimmed straw hats coming and going in the fields and we could hear the sound of reapers and mowers and feel the sun on sweat-covered skin. I began to see things as Van Gogh had seen them, sensing a diabolical life writhing out of the soil.

I remember one day working in the quarry and watching a gusty wind blowing the wheat in the fields that lay beyond the stream, lifting and bending the fronds and making them swirl into writhing tufts. The farmers in the distance acquired an aspect of strange motion from the turbulence in the field; they seemed to be scurrying, half submerged in grain, like medieval dwarfs terrified of devils or like men who knew that snakes were in movement among the stalks. As the wheat tufts turned and swayed and eddied there was such a flux of shadow and straw yellow and dark yellow that the world became unfamiliar and ominous, the bright sky seemed to press like metal and I felt like a child alone on a plain before a thunderstorm. As I watched the gang working, the men seemed abject on the soil and among the rocks, they seemed to sense their triviality and therefore to snap and bite at the air and each other like hungry dogs; and from them the inference extended far away, embracing the whole of human life.

Yet perceiving these things I had no desire to paint them. I had no desire even to see another Van Gogh. At times when my nerves were quiet I spent hours pondering a new style, for I realized that after I was released painting would be the only hope. I must not try to represent the perceptions I was having here. That would be madness. I envied Renoir his childlike fruitfulness, even while I knew I should never desire to paint as he did. I wanted something more exact, less cloyed with the smell and feel of humanity. Though I did not know it then, the prison distilled my perceptions and made me at last what I had desired to become—an artist.

During the summer I shared a cell with a big tough man called Barm Greb, who was in for robbery and took a wonderful pride in his muscles, the loudness of his voice and the number of times he had been in stir. When they put me in with him he glowered over the top of his bunk and said nothing when I spoke to him. I knew this was intended to intimidate me and instinctively I tensed myself for what would follow after the guard left. When the door at the end of the passage closed, Barm shouted for cigarettes and finding none offered, swung at me and nearly knocked me down. I drove my knee into his groin and collapsed him, then knelt and rubbed his stomach and talked quietly until he felt better. I hardly realized what I had done, it had been so quick, but the instinct had been a good one. Barm finally sat up and began to laugh.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, “if you ain’t one bastard! Say, do you know what I thought you was when they shoved you in here? I thought you was a punk.”

“That’s where you made a mistake,” I said, still careful.

“What the hell!” he said. “Why not be friends? Say, a guy needs a friend in this dump. I been in Leavenworth and Joliet and Sing Sing. I been all around, see? Now I’m gonna tell you something. This is the loudest goddam jail I ever struck. If they don’t spring me soon you know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna bust the joint wide open.”

“The hell you are,” I said.

He scratched his head and swung his legs slowly back and forth against the bunk.

“Well, maybe not. Something to talk about though. I got friends outside. They was a couple of house jobs done last week by friends of mine, I’m gonna tell you. Well, there’ll maybe be some dough getting into this dump soon. I’m telling you.”

We were allowed to see newspapers, but all stories about crime were carefully cut out of them; yet the convicts seemed to know more details about recent crimes than the newspapers or the police. So I suppose Barm knew what he was talking about.

“Whatja in for?” he said.

“Perjury.”

“What!” His mouth opened, showing large white teeth. Then he began to laugh as though this was the funniest thing he had ever heard. “For Chrissake, they ain’t putting guys like you in for perjury, are they?”

“That’s what I’m here for. Want a cigarette?”

“I thought you said you didn’t have none.”

“So I did. I’ve got some now, though.”

Barm scratched his head and took a cigarette and I realized that he liked me. In a strange way I came to like him too, and the relationship was fortunate for me, for Barm had a vague prestige among the others and used to go about saying how much brains I had and that there was nothing I didn’t know. Some of the others even suspected I was in on one of the larger rackets and asked me for a job after they got out. I let them think whatever they wanted and was careful to keep up the illusion before Barm. This was not difficult, for he combined the reasoning power of a twelve-year-old with the instincts of a ruminant and the habits of a beast of prey, and was therefore so disintegrated that he had never understood anything straight nor done anything straight in his life. He was so strong he could swell the muscles of his back and split a tight-fitting suit, and he had a violent animal vitality that made him hit things and shout and swear and try to horrify people he sensed were more intelligent than himself. The slicker criminals called him a stooge and I was always expecting to see him take the rap for someone else. He was getting into trouble every week and already they had added another year to his three-year sentence. He had two more years left to serve when I first met him. He told me his life story several times over and each time it was different. I only know he had spent a good deal of his life behind various walls and bars, for he had been sent to the Rahway reformatory when he was sixteen.

Barm taught me most of the prison pleasures except sodomy, and would have taught me that had I let him. We used to earn from ten to twenty cents a day by our labour and with this were allowed to buy coffee and cigarettes from the canteen. Barm used to spend an hour a night boiling coffee in a tin can on the floor of the cell. He got the water for it from the lavatory bowl and boiled it over newspapers and odd bits of sticks he smuggled out of the workshops. Most of the convicts made coffee in this way at night, not so much for the brew as because they felt they were getting away with something. The guards generally let them do it, although technically it was against the rules. As jails go, this was not supposed to be a bad one. The food was poor, but not bad enough to cause a riot, and personally I found some of the guards decent men. It was only in the winter that I learned what hell a bad guard could make of a convict’s life.

And so the first half of my sentence went by, and my spirits became so low I found I could not think of Anne and keep from cracking. Almost every day a letter arrived from her telling of herself and Jean. They were still living in my apartment and were keeping on with their work. Beati and Luigi both wrote me letters urging me to come to Lorbeerstein at the end of the year. When I heard from them it became still more difficult to believe in anything except the present.

One night the harvest moon shone into the cell and turned Barm’s face a ghastly white and made him say, “Jees, that goddam light makes me feel dam funny. I’d like to kick the guts outa someone!”

I had been looking through the bars to the wheat-fields, where the stooks were standing and throwing shadows across the lime-white earth. The moonlight lay over the land like snow and the steam was still as ice; it shone as though planetary fires smouldered under it, and a wrack of smoke rising from a distant farmhouse went up heavily like the winter smoke that is too cold to climb. When I heard Barm speak I turned back from the window and looked at him. The moonlight made a rhomboid which framed a part of the floor and the two bunks and the face of Barm Greb protruding over the edge of the upper bunk. His eyes were rolled up and the whites showed like a negro’s. He seemed at once grotesque, impressive and ominous, like a primal man wondering about God.

When I turned around he said, “I’ll be a son of a bitch!”

The prison was silent, vastly silent. On an abutment a guard’s rifle was silhouetted against the sky. I felt I needed a charm to escape the moment and without thinking muttered the first line of a Latin grace I had heard a long time ago and for some reason remembered.

“Benedicte Deus, qui pacis nos a juventute nostra …”

“What’s that?” Barm said.

“Nothing.”

Still motionless on the bunk, he suddenly ejaculated, “Christ, it’s all in the cards, ain’t it?”

“What’s all in the cards?”

His face wrinkled and he hammered the bunk with his feet.

“The whole goddam works is in the cards. Jees, I wish I had a curtain or something. That light’s bad. It gets me, kinda. How the hell do they expect a guy to sleep with that jeezly white way blinking at him?”

His body began to writhe and he kicked the mattress again, then suddenly he jumped to the floor and shouted and cursed at the top of his voice. He clenched his fist and smashed it against the stone wall, then looked around at me with an inane grin and said, “Howja like a load of that? Short arm to the body!”

“Shut up,” I said. “They’ll hear you.”

“I don’t give a damn if the whole goddam joint hears me! They needn’t think they can get away with anything on me, see? Damn right they needn’t! Me an’ you ain’t scared of no one, that’s what I tell them. We ain’t scared of no one or nothing! We’re gonna bust this joint wide open some day, and it ain’t gonna be long before we does it, neither!”

“Shut up!” I said. “Damn fool!”

The silence had ceased; or rather, it was like a room in which unseen things had begun to stir furtively. Suddenly someone’s voice broke out.

“Shut up, can’t ya?”

Barm quivered and crawled back to his mattress, where he buried his face in his hands. The moon, traveling fast, was beginning to leave his head. Only half his face was white now. I watched him gloomily. He had a stubby neck, pock-marked; a sandy, hard skin and a tight mouth; an enormous chest and wide, slow haunches. Dumb and clumsy as an ox, I thought. Does Nicholas really believe he could civilize that?

Barm was screwing his eyes up again. He was examining his knuckles which were gashed and bleeding.

“Well, I’ll be a bastard,” he muttered slowly, as though he had made a wonderful discovery. “Willya look at that, now?”

The blood had a dull blue colour in the moonlight. Barm made another of his convulsive movements.

“Boy,” he said, “but you got brains! You an’ me could go places.”

“Where, back to stir?”

“Hell, no! With your brains, and … well, with your brains and with me … well, why couldn’t we go places? That’s what I’d like to know.” His voice suddenly became tense and eager. “Say, whatja gonna do to that bastard that framed you? Let me tell you something. Me an’ you gets out, see, and then we gets him. I can handle a heater an’ it won’t be the first time neither. What about it, huh?”

Like an animal rolling in a bed of catnip he writhed his limbs, murmuring in a sort of ecstasy, “Jesus, an’ what we won’t do to them bastards! Screw ’em, boy, screw ’em!”

I shook my head slowly.

“Barm,” I said, “shut up!”

Then the way he looked at me was almost embarrassing; far underneath his consciousness it seemed as though some intuition of his own nature was stirring, for he thumbed his eyes and began to mutter.

“The trouble with me is I ain’t educated,” he said. “You … well, I don’t know what you got, but you got something. You can wait around, see. I wants to do something and … well, I does it. You guys … well, for Chrissake, you can wait around!”

He seemed to forget what he had said almost immediately, for he slumped to the floor and went to the window and looked out, clutching the bars with both hands. The moonlight hit him full in the face and with a violent gesture he crossed himself. He looked around at me and muttered something, then climbed back to the upper bunk.

“It would be swell if they gave us babes in here,” he said. “I know a guy that done a year in Spain and he told me that every month they brought in a batch of whores for the boys. One whore to every ten of the boys. Jees, that musta been swell!”

Towards the late autumn the rumour spread that a large sum of money had entered the prison. If this was true it likely meant that a break was imminent and my main interest was to make sure that Barm Greb had nothing to do with it. The chances of a successful break were not much better than one in thirty and Barm was just the sort of man who would think the chances were even. However, nothing happened this time. Whether the money was located or not I never knew, and like many prison rumours all talk of the break died out.

Meanwhile, work in the quarry became less heavy and I was transferred to the prison library. I spent hours more or less by myself, occasionally talking to the hacks, most of the time brooding. At Christmas another key was stolen and we were shifted to a different wing, and from then onward my time in prison was a nightmare.

The guard in charge was a man called Kelly and he took a violent dislike to Barm Greb as soon as he saw him. He used to steal our cigarettes and do everything possible to provoke Barm to hit him. Finally a fight broke out and Barm was slugged unconscious. The warden appeared in person and demanded explanations. Davis, myself and a man called Fratelli all testified that the hack had provoked the trouble, for unless the warden believed us Barm would be condemned to the hole. The warden left without comment, nothing further was done to Barm, and Kelly continued to hold his position. Apparently the warden had given him a warning, for he never spoke to us again unless he had to. He attacked us more subtly by withholding all our mail, and I suspected that my own letters were not posted. Day after day I waited to hear from Anne and each day Kelly said that nothing had arrived. I spoke to other hacks in the library and one volunteered to see what he could do, but nothing happened and the situation remained as before. The prison was a battlefield in which two armies waited and watched each other, and even the more decent of the guards knew that it was dangerous to befriend a prisoner. Had I been a guard I should have acted the same way myself or been discharged.

So during that winter I hardened in on myself and had only one idea. This was to stave off a nervous collapse. I read in the papers that the depression was growing worse and that many men had broken shop windows so that society in punishing them would give them food and a place to sleep. I saw that Roosevelt and Hitler had come to power and that the world had passed from a post-war to a pre-war period. I read all of this and it seemed totally unimportant, a flash in the pan when compared to the life of the universe, irrelevant when compared to myself. For my struggle had been reduced to the elements, and I knew that nothing could have importance beside the fact that with people as I had found them no satisfactory life seemed possible. I came to detest individuals just for being human beings and in my efforts to preserve myself against them I even thought of Anne with hostility. I wanted solitude though I knew it would drive me mad. And having no word from Anne, realizing that for all my knowledge she might be dead, I almost hoped I would never see her again.

And so the year wore itself out until May came with a burst of blossoms, and swallows darted through the prison yards in the early mornings and in the fields across the stream we could see that the horses and tractors were wearing the earth for another spring.