Free Men in Prison by Victor Serge

civilian disguise—derby hats, canes as thick as billy clubs, heavy shoes—makes it impossible for anyone to mistake them for ordinary plain people in the street.) This one reported a difficult “tailing” job to his superior; then, embarrassed, lowering his voice, he explained his misadventure of the day. His wife had just been arrested, red-handed, for shoplifting in a department store. The sergeant reassured him without appearing at all surprised. It would be taken care of.
    The next day, while being taken to the anthropometric service by a man from the Sûreté or from headquarters—I wasn’t sure which, because we never opened our mouths—I heard my guard become vehemently indignant to an acquaintance:
    “Really, what a lousy joint! What bastards! You know what? I leave my overcoat on the coathanger, see? Well, somebody came along and stole my handcuffs! I had to borrow a pair to bring over this customer.”
    I wasn’t in a happy mood, but I had to stifle a wild desire to break up laughing. Steal a pair of handcuffs! This low point in thievery could only have been reached by a cop. A genuine thief would have seen it as a low point in perversion.

    2 Through the starry air
Climbs into the very sty, erect like a héro,
The bright tower which rules over the waves.

THREE
Transitions
    THE TRANSITION—THE TRANSFER—FROM THE HOUSE OF DETENTION TO THE Santé Prison takes an hour in the darkness of a Black Maria, or police van. Thirty men as unlike each other as thirty kinds of misfortunes, are dragged one by one out of the gray void of their cells, bustled for the twentieth time down corridors lined with Judases, dazzled for an instant by the bright daylight of the courtyard, and swallowed up by the blackness of the waiting vans. A city trooper hustles them up the step. The van is divided down the middle by an iron-plate corridor half a yard wide. Inside, another trooper armed with a key opens one of the narrow lateral doors. The man drops in there like a billiard ball into a pocket. The inside is so narrow you can’t turn around, so low you can’t stand up: hunched up, automatically seated. The darkness seems to melt little by little. Your dilated pupils capture the faint light that sifts in through a dusty ventilator. On the wall I read:
    Mon coeur à ma mere,
    Ma tête à Deibler,
    Mon corps à la terre.
    H. bon pour la tronche.
3
    An “I love Louey-the- …” in small block letters partly covers over this allusion to the guillotine. The wall is covered with inscriptions. Another one reads: “Petty theft, May 2. Shit on the Republic and long live Rochette!” The van is now rolling along through the soft smile of the Paris lights. The Seine has been crossed; here we are on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. I can hear the sounds of the living Boulevard: even thesudden bursts of conversation from strolling passers-by. Pulling myself up to the grill of the air filter, I attempt to look out; I see the corner of a building:
Pâtisserie
in big gold letters, a horse’s head, two students hurrying along … Nothing about this astonishes me yet; I sit down again. What is astonishing is to be going up Boulevard Saint-Michel like this, exactly like a dead man in his coffin.
    My coffin is perpendicular.
    From one coffin to another, a conversation begins:
    “Hey, Martingale! You there?”
    Martingale gives vigorous evidence of his presence:
    “Ay!”
    In covert language, half-slang, half-Javanese—Javanese being a language, unknown to philologists, formed by interposing made-up syllables between the syllables of each word—Martingale and his buddy tell each other a strange story—punctuated by scatological exclamations (in French) and laughter.
    Glimpsed in transit:
    The outer wall, towering, gray; the paved inner court; the gate, yawning open like a grave.
    On the inside, cleanliness, light filtering down from an open transom twelve yards above, wide hallways forming little streets. The impression of entering a