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| Arrested 1948, here some 5 years later still in prison (KPD) in 1953 |
The following was translated © 1993 by Christina Pribićević-Zorić and published in ‘Vengeance!’ a Passport Anthology: Number 6, 1993
The night of the six to seventh of November 1948[1]. The door opens and, as I stir awake, in the gaping hole, two shadows, like golden aura, slowly take shape against the light of the naked kitchen bulb. One of them switches on the light in the little maid’s room where I sleep in the winter and the two hazy shadows become two men in brown leather coats. This is the ultimate in 1917 revolutionary chic, the top hat and boater of the triumphant proletariat[2]. At first, however, they remind me of pilots who have veered off course and crash-landed by my side. I have no reason to see them as angels bearing glad tidings. Glad tidings disappeared from my life long ago.
In between the two of them, in the distance, in the clinical whiteness of the enamel tiles, is my mother’s blood-drained face. Above it hangs a mirror framed in red celluloid, stained with old-age lead freckles. In it the glare of the light bulb obliterates the contours of the kitchen furniture, enveloping my midnight callers in a spectral shroud. To the right, stripped kitchen towels hang from the wall. Farther back, the flower balcony is engulfed in darkness. Below, dishes are drying in the sink[3].
Schumann is playing but distinctly on the radio.
"Du bist meine Ruhe". ("You are my peace").
I had forgotten to turn it off. My gaze turns to the crystal ashtray and its cigarette butts, to the pack of Moravas, the matches and the green book jacket. Nietzsche’s Will to Power from the ‘Cosmos’ Caryatid series.
Wonderful, I think to myself. Whatever kind of power you may have learned from it, it doesn’t look as though you’ll be using it much now. Henceforward, power will be turning itself on you.
The door shuts. My mother’s face vanishes.
I lie still. I just kick my foot free of the bedcover, a blanket fitted into a slip of sheets. I try to assume an expression of faint surprise. I know that is what people do when they are about to be arrested. They are always surprised at being dragged out of the hiding-place they have dug for themselves in their own imagination. But, except for ones imagination, there is no other hiding-place[4].
I know this is an arrest. Dj. M. was locked up three days ago. Today was November 6th. I believed in Dj. M.’s courage and stamina, but I also believed in the stamina of the police. I had been prepared for this since the 4th. (Never, I think truly prepared. I am afraid that had I truly expected arrest to be the final outcome of my activities, I would never have embarked upon them in the first place. Or else, I would have done so in any event, which, considering my uncompromising anti-communism, is equally possible. The reason why I am uncertain about where the truth lies in that at least two persons are in conflict in this manuscript: the one who was arrested on the night between the 6th and 7th of November 1948, and the other who talks about that arrest, empathizes with the former, but does not entirely believe him. The Character of the arrested man despises and detests the Reason of the narrator, while the Reason of the narrator distrusts and secretly derides the Character of the arrested man. Unequal to the task, Reason has no other choice.) So, I was prepared. The secret is one indivisible whole. It lasts only as long as its relevant components remain secret.
Is what I feel fear? It’s no use lying to myself. It is fear. The abrupt hollowness, the giddiness of suddenly hurtling through space and not seeing its boundaries. The sinking stomach, wrenched out of me, something I later only experienced in the drop of an airplane.
The elder of the two, both are very young, asks me my name[5].
The procedure starts. Now I must prove my mettle. On no account must I reveal that I am afraid. I must act the way I would in front of a dangerous animal. Coolly and calmly. (The delusion is obvious. By staying cool and calm in front of a wild stray dog, we expect it to retreat. But when we act coolly and calm in front of the police, we do not really expect them to retreat. On the contrary, we know that they will pounce on us twice as ferociously. How, then, does one act cool and calm? How and why?)
I squeeze out my name. It does not sound quite as pathetic as I feared; shamefaced, rather. All those books about arrests are of no help. All those stories about arrests are of no use[6]. It always looks entirely different when it is you they come for. As though it were happening for the first time. As though this were the first arrest since the world began. The genesis of arrest as a process. A miracle.
‘I arrest you in the name of the people. Get up.’
(The people, meanwhile, know nothing about me. Yet here they are arresting me. They are no better informed even if I fight for them, even if I make certain demands in their name, yet that is what I do. The symmetry is perfect. The people know as much about me as I know about them; as much as I have acted on their behalf, so much do they want my arrest.) I get up. My powers of observation are hazy, disjointed, confused. I decide that the tales of exceptional lucidity in times of crisis are not true. At least not always. Certainly not in my case. I am conscious only of the inconsequentials of the scene. That I haven’t cut my toe nails in ages. That the room hasn’t been aired and reeks of cold stale ashes. That I have a date with J. in the afternoon. That one of the police agents has thin blonde hair and the other a stain the size of a fist on his leather coat (a stain I will later associate with blood, somebody else’s to be sure, and later still, perhaps with his blood, because, of course, it had to be somebody else’s and it had to be blood simply because it was on the coat of a policeman – a revolutionary not a civilian policeman – just as, of course, the stain would have to be from petrol if it were on the uniform of a driver).
The younger of the two tosses a suit on my bed. A jacket and brown plaid trousers. It couldn’t have been less pleasant to the touch had it been made of poison ivy. This is not the suit I wore last night. I realize now they have been in the house for some time. That I wasn’t woken up right away. That they may have already searched the place. That all that remains is for me to get dressed and – leave. (The search doesn’t worry me. There is nothing in the house to incriminate me. Nothing but me.)
My nakedness embarrasses me. I hide my sex with the sheet. Its whiteness is deathly. The trouser legs are tight. Tighter than ever before. First they have been narrowed by fashion, then by fear. ‘Sulundari’, I think ‘sulundari’[7]. I suddenly take an immense liking to the word. It could be the name of a magus. Albertus Magnus, Cagliostro and Sulundari. Sulun Dari or perhaps Su Lun Dari?
The older of the two walks over to the night table and picks up Nietzsche.
‘Ha!’, he exclaims. Then he treads on my bare foot with his boot. ‘Sorry. The room is so small.'[8]
Schumann’s wistfulness comes over on the radio. The heel of my foot is killing me. And again, contrary to every theory about the mind becoming lucid in times of crisis, I see nothing useful, I notice only inanities. I imagine Schumann in a crumpled white shirt, sitting at the piano. I see his thin wire-frame spectacles. The children around him. Elizabeth, the eldest daughter turns the music sheets for him.
The police agent turns off the radio. The image remains. As does the pain in my foot. Then the image disappears. The pain is still there.
I’m dressed. There is a knock at the door. My mother’s hand offers a thick pullover. She’s the only one here who is using her head. I am afraid, parenthetically thinking about Schumann. The police agents are doing their job. We are all too busy to worry about tomorrow. That only our mothers do.
After Dj. M.’s arrest I had decided to prepare a few of the usual things in case they came for me as well. But I didn’t prepare them because that would be evidence of my guilt. I was an idiot. They have certainly got stronger evidence against me than a blanket under my bed.
If they haven’t, they’ve got Dj. M.
Now they’ve got me as well.
The evidence will come of itself. (If it proves at all necessary since they’ve already got the people they want. The purpose of evidence is to remove certain people. If and when they are removed, what is the point of evidence?)
But there is one question that is a must. A senseless question. And it is because of its glaring senselessness that it must be asked. It is simply a ritual. The whole ceremony is a ritual. The same canonic answers always follow the same canonic questions.
‘Why?’
‘What do you mean, “why”?’
‘Why am I being arrested?’
‘You know that better then anybody.’
I do, unfortunately. I do not ask myself whether it would be better if I did not know. I know it is better that I do know. It is harder to invent guilt than to bear it. Real guilt is always easier than fabricated guilt. A person who has a concealed revolver will show it (even though I personally did not show mine). A concealed tank does not have to be shown. (That, fortunately, I did not nave.) You are taken at your word.
I put on my shoes. I try to control my fingers (if not my fate, then at least my fingers). When I master my left hand, the right hand shakes. When I calm my right hand, the left trembles. No one hurries me. They are politer than I expected. That offends me. They have no right to be different from what I imagined. The waning pain in my foot reassures me. They may not be so different after all.
‘Can I take my cigarettes with me?’
‘Go ahead.’
Lying on top of the radio are my wallet, my watch, my fountain pen. There is no money in the wallet, the fountain pen is dry, the watch has stopped. I assume it is after 1.00 a. m. The German station I had been listening to plays classical music until 2.00 a. m. For the first time I take the advice given in books and willfully extract permission to take my cigarettes with me. I shove everything into my pocket. My wallet, my fountain pen, my watch.
‘You won’t be needing that’, says the younger of the two.
‘What will I be needing?’
I get no answer. It seems I won’t be needing a thing. Nothing, except for my memory. That’s what the police agent should have said. What will I be needing?, I’d ask. Memory, he’d replay. That would be the right dialogue. The definitive dialogue.
But the articles stay in my pocket all the same (only to be taken away from me half an hour later). The wallet, the watch, the fountain pen. I had been given the fountain pen for my eighteenth birthday, a few months before graduating from high school. It had been hoped I would write better homework with it. Instead I wrote perfectly decent proclamations. The reputation of the Third Boys’ Gymnasium did not profit much from that pen. It was gold, with a black-and-green cylinder. A ‘Pelican’. But it never had any ink in it. I always wrote with a pencil. I didn’t write homework on principle. But I curried the pen with me. It looked intellectual. I didn’t wear glasses and you had to have something to show you were a thinking man. The pen has a dramatic history to it, it is one of the jewels in the crown of my resistance, and although it relates not to the interrogation but to the beginning of my parole. I copy it down from my Diary – Where the Vines Weep.[9]
‘Finally I was returned the possessions that have been taken away from me on the night of my arrest. The wallet, the watch. The fountain pen wasn’t there. Did I have it that night? Of course I did. Am I sure? Of course I am. What kind of fountain pen was it? I describe it as something quite gorgeous. Gorgeous and expensive. The two men at the desk confer quietly. They will check and see. You do that, I say.
‘Some ten minutes later they return from somewhere, from the recesses of the storeroom, with blank faces and information that my fountain pen isn’t there and that I have to leave without it. They expect me to go. I don’t give up easily. I give them a hard time. That without a doubt is my revenge. It may not be all that great, but it is instantaneous, and that counts for something.
“I want my fountain pen”, I say softly. “I had it. It was taken away from me when I was arrested.”
“Is it so important now?”, one of them asks, laughing.
“It’s important.”
“Then loge a complaint.”
“That’s what I’m doing.”
“What are you doing?”
“Lodging a complaint.”
“I didn’t mean right now.”
“When then?”
“When you get out.”
“I’m getting out now.”
“So go.”
“When I get my fountain pen.”
‘I keep repeating stupidly that I had it, that I expect to get it back, that I will do whatever it takes to get it. I show no intention of budging without it. That fountain pen is now my raison d’etre. What’s the use of freedom without a fountain pen? What’s the use of living without a fountain pen?
‘They become impatient.
“Listen’, says one of them. “All your things are here.”
“Not my fountain pen.”
“Fuck your fountain pen!”
“It’s mine”, I replay as though thereby definitely siding with the pen.
“Fuck it!”, he now says with enjoyment. “Fuck your fountain pen!”
‘The other one has better nerves. He realizes that I won’t leave without the pen. He opens the desk drawer and takes out a fountain pen.
“Here’s your fountain pen! Satisfied now?”
“No”, I say, “That’s not mine.”
‘I describe my pen. Gold, with a shiny black and green cylinder. I don’t get to give any details. They throw me out. One throws out my things, minus the fountain pen, the other my person, again minus the fountain pen.
‘The gate creaks open and I come out – and go in…’
‘Sign the warrant’, says the older of the two, handing me a small form.
It is a warrant for my arrest. It already has one signature on it. Mine symbolizes the gigantic progress made by the judicial system and an awareness that the individual is inviolable.
Habeus corpus (I have the body)! Indeed I have. That is what they are about to lock up. The body that is inviolable without my consent. The body whose foot is hurting me because it is injured, although I didn’t ask anyone to tread on it. Namely, no one can be deprived of his liberty until he personally approves the act. I, of course, do not personally approve of it at all, I am wholeheartedly against it. But this has not the slightest effect on my arrest, which simply takes its course. Up to this point I have been in some disagreement with the people, but since the people are not here, it is a rather moot debate. My signature disposes of the disagreement (although the battle continues). And so the people and I now agree. We are both for my arrest.
The actual warrant looks like a receipt. I am presenting myself like a piece of merchandise, to be used by another owner.[10]I am renouncing my own liberty. I am, in fact, arresting myself. I no longer have the body.
‘Let’s go!’
I step into the glaring light of the kitchen.
Have I taken a good look at my mother? Have I remembered everything I will need to remember? For a long time to come, probably.
My friend ( ) called my mother Marie Antoinette. Because of her gray hair on her young-looking head and the slight trepidation with which she would open the door. Have they arrested him as well?
Through the hallway, as through a tunnel steeped in half-shadows, I see my father. His head held high, he is sitting on the piano stool[11]. He has thrown a housecoat over his pyjamas. Standing beside him is our next-door neighbour. He is in his pyjamas and a housecoat too. The third police agent is standing off to the site. This one finally looks the way he’s supposed to. He is dark. His jaw is square and stained with a beard that can never be shaved off. His leather coat is unbuttoned.
The scene looks unreal. But it tells me that they have probably not searched the place yet. The neighbour will attend the search as a witness. An impartial, neutral witness, in keeping with the law[12]. And the neighbour comports himself accordingly, quite impartially and neutral. As though he has been transported in his sleep to another planet whose customs he has yet to learn. As though he neither understands nor recognizes anything here. Least of all – me. He makes no move to shake my hand. He gazes into some obscure distance, that of his safe planet probably, there behind the dark windows. I don’t think it’s deliberate. He feels uncomfortable. Like an accomplice in this arrest, which, after all, is better than having to feel like my accomplice, like an instrumental part of the arrest, which again is better than feeling like a part of my conspiracy. I know he has been planning to go abroad for some time, and has been having problems with his passport, problems that are universal. I am sure that tomorrow he will be attacking them with renewed vigour.
A recent scene floats eerily through my mind.
I am walking down a street in the Čubura part of town, going to visit my close friend ( ), a medical student. The iron gate is opened by a man in a leather coat. He’s very like my man in the leather coat. Knitted out of the same human fabric. As impersonal as a machine. Just – functional. I realize my predicament. I try to convince him that it’s nothing urgent. I can just as well see my friend tomorrow. It depends which one, he says. I don’t know who is being arrested, ( ) or his brother, And on that depends my answer.
It’s idiotic to have a friend who is being arrested. And only slightly less idiotic to be the friend of someone whose brother is in prison. I’m confused. I like to say – neither. I like to say I made a mistake, it’s the wrong house. The wrong street, the wrong town. It’s the wrong country, that’s for certain. I am so sorry I am not an Englishman or American, whose views sit in the Senate not in prison, and opposing views, even when not in the Senate, are not in prison either. (I am not so sorry any more; now I am sorry I am not in my own country, whatever it’s like, which just goes to show how impossible I am to please.)
The inner betrayal was as quick as lightning. And futile. I had to go in, no doubt to gratify the police’s logic that a friend of an enemy is an enemy himself, which in principle is stupid, but in my case happens to be true. As I step in, I try to conceal my betrayal behind the fact that I have a secret of my own, that the scene I am about to witness may be an advance on one in which I will be starring in myself. In the drawing room, whose glass door look out onto the arboured veranda, my actual friend is sitting on a chair. They plonk me on another. Name? Address?
Moving between the two police agents with robotic assuredness, his older brother ( ), an architecture student, is packing his things. His wallet, his watch, his fountain pen. The third and last question is: whose friend am I? I almost say: not his, not the one who is packing away his wallet, his watch, his fountain pen. Their amazingly calm mother, Mrs. ( ), asks whether her son can take his shaving kit with him. No, replies the agent. I stand up. Why not? Why can’t he? And anyway! (This is primarily a point of class and political delineation: if they don’t care how they look, we do. A good upbringing and decent manners are our weapons. To look civilized is a matter of political conscience and class consciousness[13].)
I realize that, by making a fool of myself, I am now atoning for my cowardice at the front gate. And that I am not made of the same stuff as those who work for the underground[14]. And I am too concerned with the moral side of things. With having clean hands. With how I will appear to myself in my own eyes. I know that in the eyes of the police agent who led me in, I look like a moron. He eyes me with sympathy, he seems to be saying: Sit down, you fool!
I sit down. The hell with razors! The hell with morals! But when they take ( ) away, I offer him my hand and give his a strong squeeze. I am with him. I am wrong. How wrong I am! No one is with him any more. He’s alone.
Like me now. Like everyone before me. Like everyone after me.
My father stands up. His face is drawn. We shake hands. It is a reconciliation. The past year has been hard for both of us. I was insufferable. Irritable, worried, intolerant. Now that it is all over, I am calm again. There is still no real relief, the relief that will come only after the verdict; many uncertainties still lie ahead, the most fateful of which concerns not my fate but rather the answers to the question: who am I, what am I like as a man; but the main uncertainty is gone. I haven’t got the time to tell him that. And there is no need. He understood it all tonight, remembering perhaps his own dilemmas before joining the irregulars in the Great War. We always understood each other well. Even when to others it looked as though we were no longer capable of it.
I say good-buy to my mother. My uncle is out somewhere. She does not cry. I am grateful to her for that. But I expect no less. She is strong. She has always been strong. Strong and rational. She slips a couple of clean, impeccably ironed handkerchiefs into my pocket. One must always be neat, no matter what. Whether paying a visit or dying. (Good manners are our only defence against barbarians, I was once told by one of the more prominent pluperfects of my counter-revolutionary youth. Bayonets are better, sir, I replied. At the time I was not distinguished by any particular love for humanity. Nor, as evident, by any manners.) She brushed my collar clean of hair from my last haircut. She does what she always does whenever I leave the house. Finally she passes me my coat, altered from my father’s official coat which he had worn with his parade uniform as provincial head in 1936.
Two of my mother’s oils hang in the front hall. 'Landscape at Dusk’ and ‘Mountain Stream’. Two forbidding Drobnjak landscapes seen through the terrified eyes of a Panonian woman. They have been in the house since my earliest childhood. Like two gentle mementos of times gone by, never to return again. Like sentries at the grave of one’s last memories.
I feel an elbow poking my ribs.
I feel – the future.
The door of the past closes behind me.
Solitude…
Translated © 1993 by Christina Pribićević-Zorić published in ‘Vengeance!’ a Passport Anthology: Number 6, 1993
More about Pekić's prision experience HERE
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Footnotes:
This text, written much earlier and revised with footnotes in 1985, is taken from the 12th volume of Selected Works (Odabrana dela), a book of essays and diaries entitled Where the Vines Weep (Tamo gde loze plaču), ‘Partizanska knjiga’, Beograd 1984.In Yugoslavia the revolutionary elite did not adopt working class blue as its civilian uniform. (As far as I know, only the Chinese did that.) Nor did it take to the black suits of the Soviets (which made them look like the grim managing executives of a funeral home.) From the very outset, the fashion style of Yugoslav revolutionaries was distinguished by a certain individualism, ranging from spontaneous or affected nonchalance to striking elegance and even regal splendour. I am not saying, of course, that this led to 1948, but any divergence from the acknowledged model is already a form of rebellion. As were for us, in the immediate postwar years, ties with unnatural small knots, narrow trouser legs, braces instead of belts, platform shoes, felt hats; as are, in relation to today’s highly individualized urban dress (still successfully resisted only by London’s City), the samely uniforms of hippies, punks and the motorbiking Hell’s Angels. Because when diversity becomes the universal standard, uniformity is the only way to resist it.
The preciseness of the description, from which I have actually omitted various material details that would gladden the heart of any fan of the new novel, is deceptive in terms of my memory’s true powers. They have always been quite modest. Here, however, my memory has excelled, albeit in a superfluous direction. The reason may well be the role it played during my arrest. Namely, at the time, it was not performing its primary function of collecting and recording facts for the repository of the past, but rather was responding to the survival instinct, providing spontaneous psychological protection. By preoccupying itself with the irrelevancies of the scene, it prevented the mind from comprehending the tragic significance of what was actually taking place. It would have performed this same function in the event of my execution. But that does not make me grateful to it. I can imagine myself in a situation where I am drowning and, to protect me against despair, my memory preoccupies itself with registering the look of the waves and with metaphors for their rage. What I mean to say is this: if ever I find myself in a situation where the only thing that can save me from misfortune is total concentration on those aspects of it that are crucial to my salvation, but my memory, thinking it is doing me a service, focuses solely on the incidentals, on the ‘lead freckles’ staining the ‘mirror in red celluloid’, how on earth will I get out of it?
Nor is there really any hiding-place there either. Perhaps even less so, paradoxically enough, then in real life. In your imagination especially if you have a vivid one, they arrest you every night. In real life they do so once and it’s over. Naturally, then it is a serous matter. But when you are dreaming about being arrested, you do not know that it is not serious, so it amounts to the same thing.
Formalities are intended to protect the innocent against police error. But, in the ‘Night of the Long Knives’, correct procedure and the Germans’ renowned fastidiousness regarding form, did not save the musician Weiss from the S.A. They duly asked him his name. When he duly responded, they duly fired five bullets into his stomach. The only undue aspect to the entire affair was that the Weiss with the five bullets in his stomach was not the Weiss who was supposed to be killed. Other than the musician Weiss, though, no on suffered any consequences. Not even the real Weiss. He was killed anyway. So, procedure does not in itself guarantee justice, nor does it protect against mistakes. Perhaps it was this knowledge, during the big purges, that led the police, in the final stages of the massacre, to reject all procedural form as superfluous, so that if the person they had come for was not at home, they would take whoever happened to be there, and if the place was empty, they would take someone from next door or from across the street. Shalamov’s story about the man who was whisked off the street to stand in for a fugitive internee and round off the official number for transport, saving the guards from prison camp themselves, and who for this purpose, had to carry the name of the fugitive he had never seen in his life, illustrates the values of the police procedure better than any textbook. I do not wish to indulge in exaggerated comparisons, but there is not a police force in the world, not even those working under the strictest constraints of the law and the controlling eye of public opinion, whose favourite procedure isn’t – to scotch procedure.
Nor does it help that you have been arrested before. Mind you, my arrests prior to 1948 cannot be taken all that seriously; I was detained by the police twice. The first time, at the end of March 1941, in Cetinje, because I had participated in demonstrations against the Pact, which upsets me to this day; the second time in 1943, in Banat, because during a football game on my mother’s property in Bavaniste, I had cursed my team-mate’s ‘Kraut mother’. The ball was mine, and I considered myself to be within my rights of ownership, which pleases me to this day. The arrest were less serious because of my age (I was eleven in the first instance and thirteen in the second), and more serious because of the fact that in 1941 my father was the head of the Provincial Administration in Montenegro, and in 1943 the local police chief was one of his prewar employees. The Cetinje police chief’s two sons, Pavle and the late Dusko Vujisic, took part in the anti-German demonstrations and were arrested as well. And therein lies the reason for the collapse of the former Yugoslavia: not only had the sons of the Province’s two senior police officials demonstrated against it, but, instead of being sent to reform school, they were released from prison that very same night.
‘Sulundari’ are stove-pipes (translator’s notes).
This is just the beginning of the dirty tricks and underhanded chicanery (sometimes ordered, more often self-initiated) that constitute the history of prisons.
B. Pekić, Odabrana dela; Tamo gde loze plaču, ‘Partizanska knjiga’, Beograd 1984, Vol. 12, pp. 389-390.
The receipt does not have a clause saying that I must be returned in the same condition. The police would be in trouble if arrest warrants contained such a proviso. Mind you, less so if they were required to return the merchandise in approximately the same condition. After all, to enter prison on two legs and leave on one is approximately the same.
The piano itself, like most of the things left behind in Cetinje after we were expelled from Montenegro (for being, to quote the press, ‘Belgrade toadies’), went to the popular fund for the new redistribution of goods. Since my father was not tried after the war – on the contrary, he was immediately given a high position in the federal administration – his property obviously did not fall subject to the multitude of reasons for confiscation and expropriation. But it did fall subject to the rudimentary possessive cravings of the anti-possession class. The end result was that we wound up with the piano stool instead of the piano.
Under the law I was supposed to attend the search as well, but being obviously partial, I didn’t. Even before, I had known that every law has a loophole. Now I had learned something more important: there was none for me.
Later, under detention, the effort to maintain a decent appearance and civilized behaviour, as a means of struggle, had to be more or less abandoned in the face of a more serious struggle, the struggle for bare survival. We were seldom visited by people presented to us as barbers. All that hair-plucking in the corridor outside the attic cells at Obilicev Venac left no room for personal requests regarding hair style. Later, in prison, we had our heads shaved, and sometimes more than that, because beards were not allowed. (When I grew one after I got out, becoming one of the first bearded faces in Belgrade, the favourite question of activists still active at the University was: ‘What’s that you’ve got there? The beard of a prophet, a wit, or – a shit?’ Most disillusioned people sport beards nowadays, perhaps in mourning. But even that doesn’t help). The need to individualize the gray prison physiognomies could be satisfied only by indulging in every possible shape of moustache.
Many years later, when I became more interested in prison and the historical, psychological and anthropological phenomena of its perennial prisoners – the police – I wondered when, how and why the modern technology of arrests had been established. Why had it not really existed until around the French revolution (although traces of a progressive concept of the individual and his reactions could already be detected in the acts of the Inquisition)? Romans were not, in principle, arrested at night. Rome’s forces of law and order found the daylight good enough. Admittedly, in the age of decadence a Caligula or a Nero might, even at night, send certain kinds of people submissions for their arrest or suicide – both alternatives being terminal – but they were basically the exception, notable for their number not for the time of day. Until modern times, no one gave any serious thought to what would be the best time, first, to arrest a person, and, second, to execute him. (From what we know today, the best time to arrest someone is after midnight, at the end of his first sleep cycle, and the best time for execution is dawn, right after his last sleep cycle). Nor were the other canons of modern arrest observed. No general technical procedure was established. Nothing was programmed. If a Greek arresting a Greek stepped on the latter’s foot with an iron shoe, it was either accidental or personal, but it was not to make a point. There is no record of any Assyrian police agent who, upon being asked the natural question: ‘Why are you taking me away? What have I done?’, replied: ‘You know better than anybody’. What happened in the long interim, while we advanced towards the stars? Why did we suddenly start paying attention to the when and the how of it (worrying least about the why of it)? Why, when and how did we invent a procedure which, despite fundamental differences, technologically links the police of democracies and dictatorships, tyranny and relative liberty, totalitarianism and liberalism? Danton was arrested at night. Robespierre was arrested (truth be told) at dusk. Marat finished in the light of day, but he was not arrested, he was duly killed. The Soviet Cheka did its arresting at night. The NKVD, its successor, arrested people at night. The Yugoslav UDBA did its arresting at night. Until I came to London I thought that the English, at least, did it by day, that’s to say when they’ve got the time. I was wrong. They like the dark too. You can be hauled away in broad daylight in only two cases: if you get drunk and impede circulation on the pavement, or if you plant a bomb by the pavement and manage to await the police, who in this country are always late. What happened? Science I think. It was only with the Renaissance that man started taking a real interest in himself. He started studying himself the way he had once studied other natural phenomena – scientifically, objectively, impersonally – until finally he reached the positivistic, rationalistic, materialistic (political-socialist) conclusion that man is first a social and only then a biological (and, in terms of prejudice, often also a godly) being, that his famous free will lies not within himself but within the circumstances that surround him, that these circumstances, and hence man’s own development, can be controlled, and, by scientific extension, that in order to achieve maximum effect he must be arrested after his first sleep cycle when he is enjoying his sleep the most, that his foot must be trod upon so that he understands what awaits him and confesses in order to forestall being stepped on again, and lastly that he must not be told why he has been arrested, because he either knows, in which case such information is superfluous, or he does not know, in which case, given the requirements of scientific investigation, it is more superfluous still.
