The Long Walk Read Free Page A

envious.
    They strapped me with my feet pulled stiffly out under the now familiar ‘operation table’. My arms were stretched out along the table surface, each hand tied and held separately. My
body was arched in a straining bow around the table end and the pain grew into searing agony as they hauled taut on the straps. This, however, was preparatory stuff like climbing into the
dentist’s chair with raging toothache. The operation was yet to come. Over the table was suspended an old-fashioned small cauldron fitted with a spout. It contained hot tar. There followed
the usual pressing invitation to sign, with a promise that if I agreed I should be released immediately and returned to my cell. I think they would have been most disappointed if at that stage I
had agreed to sign. The first drop of tar was hell. It burned savagely into the back of my hand and held its heat a long time on the puckered and livid skin. That first drop was the worst. It was
the peak of pain. The rest were faintly anti-climax. I held on to consciousness and to my will to resist. When they said I should be glad to sign with my left hand at the end of the session, I
proved them wrong. I had learned my fortitude in a very hard school.
    That was the last major assault. I had been in the Lubyanka only about two weeks when I was led forth to my first and only experience of a Soviet court of justice.
     
2
Trial and Sentence
    T HE LIVELY buzz of conversation in the courtroom suddenly died down. Mischa, his snow-white collar and shirt and elegant
grey silk tie eye-catching among the uniforms and the normal utilitarian Russian civilian dress, said brightly, ‘Well, I suppose we might as well make a start.’ I had been standing then
for about half-an-hour and for the first time the members of the court looked at me. The guards behind thumped to attention. Sheaves of papers were handed round.
    The central seat on the long table was taken by a quiet-voiced, white-haired Russian of about 60. He wore the customary long jacket over his buttoned-to-the-throat blouse, which was black,
ornamented at the neck and cuffs with cross-stitching embroidery in green and red. Flanking him were two N.K.V.D. officers in their dark blue uniforms with red flashes on the collar and red
hat-bands round their military peaked caps. Mischa’s seat was at the end of the table to my left. He, I was to learn, was the chief prosecutor, and as the court prepared to start work he sat
coolly looking me over. I hitched my trousers and looked at a point just above the President’s head.
    It was the President, who, after a whispered consultation with the officers beside him, started the proceedings. The opening gambit was one I now knew by heart. Name? Age? Date of birth? Where
born? Parents’ names? Their nationality? Father’s occupation? Mother’s maiden name? And so on through the long catalogue lying before him, complete, I have no doubt, with the
answers I had wearily repeated in all my encounters with the N.K.V.D. from my arrest in Pinsk to my arrival in Moscow. If by this repetition they hoped I might vary an occasional answer, it was
poor psychology. So often had I answered that any one of these questions produced always the same reply because I had ceased to have to think. It had become habit, a reflex action. The same old
questions, the same old answers . . .
    The charges were read over to me. The President (this may not have been his title but it appeared to be his function) took a long time going through the indictment. It bristled with place-names,
the names of alleged Polish ‘reactionaries’, and dates covering a period of years on which I was accused of having committed specific acts of espionage against the Soviet Union. Their
scope was so sweeping that I have never ceased to marvel that they missed the occasions when, as a teen-ager looking for danger and adventure, I had indeed crossed the Polish-Russian border.
These charges were completely without