Afterwards my only thoughts were those of a prisoner.
I waited for the daily walk, which I took in the courtyard,
or for a visit from my lawyer. The rest of the time I
managed pretty well. At the time, I often thought that
if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with
nothing to do but look up at the sky flowering overhead,
little by little I would have gotten used to it. I would
have waited for birds to fly by or clouds to mingle,
just as here I waited to see my lawyer’s ties and just as,
in another world, I used to wait patiently until Saturday
to hold Marie’s body in my arms. Now, as I think back
on it, I wasn’t in a hollow tree trunk. There were others
worse off than me. Anyway, it was one of Maman’s ideas,
and she often repeated it, that after a while you could
get used to anything.
Besides, I usually didn’t take things so far. The first
months were hard. But in fact the effort I had to make
helped pass the time. For example, I was tormented by
my desire for a woman. It was only natural; I was young.
I never thought specifically of Marie. But I thought so
much about a woman, about women, about all the ones
I had known, about all the circumstances in which I had
enjoyed them, that my cell would be filled with their
faces and crowded with my desires. In one sense, i t
threw m e o ff balance. But in another, it killed time. I
had ended up making friends with the head guard, who
used to make the rounds with the kitchen hands at mealtime. H e’s the one who first talked to me about women.
He told me it was the first thing the others complained about. I told him it was the same for me and that I
thought it was unfair treatment. “But,” he said, “that’s
exactly why you’re in prison.” “What do you mean that’s
why?” “Well, yes-freedom, that’s why. They’ve taken
away your freedom.” I’d never thought about that. I
agreed. “It’s true,” I said. “Otherwise, what would be
the punishment?” “Right. You see, you understand
these things. The rest of them don’t. But they just end
up doing it by themselves.” The guard left after that.
There were the cigarettes, too. When I entered
prison, theytook away my belt, my shoelaces, my tie, and
everything I had in my pockets, my cigarettes in particular. Once I was in my cell, I asked to have them back.
But I was told I wasn’t allowed. The first few days were
really rough. That may be the thing that was hardest
for me. I would suck on chips of wood that I broke off
my bed planks. I walked around nauseated all day long.
I couldn’t understand why they had taken them away
when they didn’t hurt anybody. Later on I realized that
that too was part of the punishment. But by then I had
gotten used to not smoking and it wasn’t a punishment
anymore.
Apart from these annoyances, I wasn’t too unhappy.
Once again the main problem was killing time. Eventually, once I learned how to remember things, I wasn’t
bored at all. Sometimes I would get to thinking about
my room, and in my imagination I would start at one
corner and circle the room, mentally noting everything
there was on the way. At first it didn’t take long. But every time I started over, it took a little longer. I would
remember every piece of furniture; and on every piece of
furniture, every object; and of every object, all the details; and of the details themselves-a flake, a crack, or
a chipped edge-the color and the texture. At the same
time I would try not to lose the thread of my inventory,
to make a complete list, so that after a few weeks I
could spend hours just enumerating the things that
were in my room. And the more I thought about it, the
more I dug out of my memory things I had overlooked
or forgotten. I realized then that a man who had lived
only one day could easily live for a hundred years in
prison. He would have enough memories to keep him
from being bored. In a way, it was an advantage.
Then there was sleep. At first, I didn’t sleep well at
night and not at all during the day. Little by little, my
nights got better and I was able to sleep during the day,
too. In fact, during the last few months I’ve been sleeping sixteen to eighteen hours a day. That would leave
me six hours to kill with meals, nature’s call, my
memories, and the story about the Czechoslovakian.
Between my straw mattress and the bed planks, I
had actually found an old scrap of newspaper, yellow
and transparent, half-stuck to the canvas. On it was a
news story, the first part of which was missing, but
which must have taken place in Czechoslovakia. A
man had left a Czech village to seek his fortune. Twentyfive years later, and now rich, he had returned with a
wife and a child. His mother was running a hotel with his sister in the village where he’d been born. In order
to surprise them, he had left his wife and child at another
hotel and gone to see his mother, who didn’t recognize
him when he walked in. As a joke he’d had the idea of
taking a room. He had shown off his money. During the
night his mother and his sister had beaten him to death
with a hammer in order to rob him and had thrown his
body in the river. The next morning the wife had come
to the hotel and, without knowing it, gave away the
traveler’s identity. The mother hanged herself. The
sister threw herself down a well. I must have read that
story a thousand times. On the one hand it wasn’t very
likely. On the other, it was perfectly natural. Anyway,
I thought the traveler pretty much deserved what he
got and that you should never play games.
So, with all the sleep, my memories, reading my
crime story, and the alternation of light and darkness,
time passed. Of course I had read that eventually you
wind up losing track of time in prison. But it hadn’t
meant much to me when I’d read it. I hadn’t understood
how days could be both long and short at the same time :
long to live through, maybe, but so drawn out that they
ended up flowing into one another. They lost their
names. n y t e 0 I h d ” wor s yesterd ” ay and “tomorrow st1 ” ‘II
had any meaning for me.
One day when the guard told me that I’d been in for
five months, I believed it, but I didn’t understand it.
For me it was one and the same unending day that was
unfolding in my cell and the same thing I was trying to do. That day, after the guard had left, I looked at myself in my tin plate. My reflection seemed to remain
serious even though I was trying to smile at it. I moved
the plate around in front of me. I smiled and it still had
the same sad, stern expression. It was near the end of the
day, the time of day I don’t like talking about, that
nameless hour when the sounds of evening would rise up
from every floor of the prison in a cortege of silence. I
moved closer to the window, and in the last light of day
I gazed at my reflection one more time. It was still
serious-and what was surprising about that, since at
that moment I was too? But at the same time, and for
the first time in months, I distinctly heard . the sound
of my own voice. I recognized it as the same one that
had been ringing in my ears for many long days, and I
realized that all that time I had been talking to myself.
Then I remembered what the nurse at Maman’s funeral
said. No, there was no way out, and no one can imagine
what nights in prison are like.