Even if it sounds strange the prison regime has one privilege: you can be absorbed in reading all day long. At noon it was prohibited to sleep, and in conditions of faint light my eyes got overstrained from long reading and wanted extra rest. In general, my only contact with the outer world, let it be in “Stolipin”, “Voronok” or in the punishment cell, was to instantaneously look оut of a narrow one-side window with a 30-degree slope and 2-cm-distant bars. That was the interrelation between us and the free world. Here, when I got tired of reading, I “enjoyed” my rest looking out of my window. Beyond prison bars I could feel the freedom completely indifferent to us-prisoners.
This time inside the frame of my prison window a usual urban-like view was depicted: a picture of unchangeable and inanimate, dull freedom, which, out of the blue, came to life, became moveable and started living…
Far away I could see a residential building. On the very first day I noticed that a girl frequently appeared in the veranda of the 4th or 5th floor of the building. She was a frisky girl with short hair and a short dress. Her daily apartment cleaning started or ended in their open balcony. Some time later, seeing that far-away stranger became a demand for me that was getting stronger and stronger. I could instinctively feel the moment she was coming out to the verandah. Something was going on in my inner world. Seeing that girl, my emotional experience-all this had become a vital need for me.
Once I got absorbed in reading and couldn’t tear myself away from the book. Suddenly I noticed that my cellmate was looking out of the window longer than usual. Something dreadful came all over my body. Only God knows what a baleful look I cast to him. My cellmate thievishly had his tail between his legs like a cat and made way for me. In our territory, that is in the cell, only I had the right, as I was already found guilty and the measure of my punishment was definite. The measure of the penalty of those still under investigation was not yet decided, consequently their status-as well. But that wasn’t the only reason why I didn’t reckon them my “rivals”. The balcony girl for them could never be as important and as much longed-for as she was for me. Barbed wires, convoy, dogs, halting place, privations… Being hardened from all this, my heart had become soft and tender. That girl was mine like my own discovery. I was confident of that. It was the very look full of confidence that made my cellmate cede the window to me. Henceforth, when looking out of the window, my cellmates “invited” me to the window every time the girl “by mistake” appeared in the balcony.
And so, we “met” for several times a day. The girl’s open balcony, her short dresses and her unawareness of my being visible… I felt utterly exhausted by all this. I was jealous. I strongly wished I could do something to make her learn that she was possibly followed by numerous brute eyes of prisoners from the building not so far from her place. If nobody in my cell dared to look at her, I couldn’t control prisoners’ looks in other cells. Soon it happened so, that her “remote” presence turned into a real suffering for me. The very balcony that reminded me of the taste of freedom redoubled my non-freedom.
Once I was taken to pass a medical examination. You just couldn’t fancy how much I had missed the asphalt of the town. All around me there were people negligently enjoying their freedom, including young girls. Oh My God, I had an opportunity to see them not so far from me, incomparably near. How alien they were to me. For the first time in my life freedom seemed to enchain me. My loyalty directed the steps of my thought to my cell, to my narrow window “to envelop”, “to conceal” her by my look, the very girl, who from time to time appeared in her open verandah and gave a meaning to my banistered existence-the banistered existence full of the horror of sharing her with somebody else.
Some time later they put an end to my silent, wordless sufferings. Her parents had closed down their verandah. Henceforth “my girl” could be seen only from above her waist, however, the closed window was my greatest mirth and consolation. After that “disguise” my intimacy with that girl seemed to have deepened more. Nevertheless, that was the feeling I had. Protected and hidden from others, when one could hardly get interested in her, she seemed to have become wholly mine.
I already have a great experience in telling this story in a special way (perhaps this wasn’t one of those cases) and I always had a feeling that it made a great impression on my audience. It’s strange: almost all of them, after keeping silent for a moment, asked me the same question, “Didn’t you try to find her after?” No, I didn’t. And I think I did right. Let my tale remain incomplete, unfinished. Who knows, maybe this is the end of my tale; this incompleteness…I lived my life deep in my thoughts, didn’t I?
Nevertheless, I managed to find out something about her. The building she used to live in was a special one handed over to Communist “distinguished” political figures. And she, in fact, was the daughter of one of them.
