Prosthetic Appliances
The camp’s solitary confinement block was old, old. It seemed that all you had to do was to kick one of the wooden walls and its logs would collapse, disintegrate. But the block did not collapse and all seven cells did faithful service. Of course, any loudly spoken word could be heard by one’s neighbors, but the inmates of the block were afraid of punishment. If the guard on duty marked the cell with a chalk X, the cell was deprived of hot food. Two Xs meant no bread as well. The block was used for camp offenses; anyone suspected of something more dangerous was taken away to Central Control.
For the first time all the prisoners entrusted with administrative work had suddenly been arrested. Some major affair, some camp trial was being put together. By someone’s command.
Now all six of us were standing in the narrow corridor, surrounded by guards, feeling and understanding only one thing: that we had been caught by the teeth of that same machine as several years before and that we would learn the reason only tomorrow, no earlier.
We were all made to undress to our underwear and were led into a separate cell. The storekeeper recorded things taken for storage, stuffed them into sacks, attached tags, wrote. I knew the name of the investigator supervising the ‘operation’ – Pesniakevich.
The first man was on crutches. He sat down on a bench next to the lamp, put the crutches on the floor, and began to undress. He was wearing a steel corset.
‘Should I take it off?’
‘Of course.’
The man began to unlace the cords of the corset and the investigator Pesniakevich bent down to help him.
‘Do you recognize me, old friend?’ The question was asked in thieves’ slang, in a confidential manner.
‘I recognize you, Pleve.’
The man in the corset was Pleve, supervisor of the camp tailor shop. It was an important job involving twenty tailors who, with the permission of the administration, filled individual orders even from outside the camp.
The naked man turned over on the bench. On the floor lay the steel corset as the report of confiscated items was composed.
‘What’s this thing called?’ asked the block storekeeper, touching the corset with the toe of his boot.
‘A steel prosthetic corset,’ answered the naked man.
Pesniakevich went off to the side and I asked Pleve how he knew him.
‘His mother kept a whore-house in Minsk before the Revolution. I used to go there,’ Pleve answered coldly.
Pesniakevich emerged from the depths of the corridor with four guards. They picked Pleve up by his arms and legs and carried him into the cell. The lock snapped shut.
Next was Karavaev, manager of the stable. A former soldier of the famous Budyony Brigade, he had lost an arm in the Civil War.
Karavaev banged on the officer of the guards’ table with the steel of his artificial limb.
‘You bastards.’
‘Drop the metal. Let’s have the arm.’
Karavaev raised the untied limb, but the guards jumped the cavalryman and shoved him into the cell. There ensued a flood of elaborate obscenities.
‘Listen, Karavaev,’ said the chief guard of the block. ‘We’ll take away your hot food if you make a noise.’
‘To hell with your hot food.’
The head guard took a piece of chalk out of his pocket and made an X on Karavaev’s cell.
‘Who’s going to sign for the arm?’
‘No one. Put a check mark,’ commanded Pesniakevich.
Now it was the turn of our doctor, Zhitkov. A deaf old man, he wore a hearing-aid. After him was Colonel Panin, manager of the carpentry shop. A shell had taken off the colonel’s leg somewhere in East Prussia during the First World War. He was an excellent carpenter, and he explained to me that before the Revolution children of the nobility were often taught some hand trade. The old man unsnapped his prosthetic leg and hopped into his cell on one leg.
There were only two of us left – Shor, Grisha Shor the senior brigade leader, and myself.
‘Look how cleverly things are going,’ Grisha said; the nervous mirth of the arrest was overtaking him. ‘One turns in a leg; another an arm; I’ll give an eye.’ Adroitly he plucked out his porcelain right eye and showed it to me in his palm.
‘You have an artificial eye?’ I said in amazement. ‘I never noticed.’
‘You are not very observant. But then the eye is a good match.’
While Grisha’s eye was being recorded, the chief guard couldn’t control himself and started giggling.
‘That one gives us his arm; this one turns in his leg; another gives his back, and this one gives his eye. We’ll have all the parts of the body at this rate. How about you?’ He looked over my naked body carefully.
‘What will you give up? Your soul?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘You can’t have my soul.’