536
PARTISAN REVIEW
knew who the masters were, and I knew that I had no other choice,
that one day sooner or later it was going to happen that I would be in
that position. I didn't expect a worse position; I didn't expect a better
position. It didn't surprise me in the least that it happened, and the
only thing I was interested in was what kind of sentence I was going
to get. It looked rather dreadful, because there were lots of people. It
looked like what I've seen of a Nuremberg trial, in terms of the
number of police in the room . It was absolutely studded with police
and state security people.
It's funny how -looking back now with the benefit of hind–
sight - I didn't really pay very much attention to what was going on,
because attention was exactly what the state would have liked you
to
display . Or feel, indeed. The state wants you to get ... well, you
don't allow yourself to get scared, and you just think about some–
thing else. You pretend it isn't happening. You simply sit there and,
as much as you can, you try to ignore it. In fact, the only time I was
moved during the whole thing was when two people stood up and
defended me - two witnesses - and said something nice about me. I
was so unprepared to hear something positive that I was a little bit
moved. But other than that, no. So, I got my five years, and I walked
out of the room and was taken to the prison, and that was it.
DM:
You had already spent three weeks of interrogation in a
hospital?
JB:
It was more than that. It was the mental institution. But that
wasn't for the first time. It wasn't the first arrest either. It was the
third, I think. I'd been twice to mental institutions, three times to
prisons. All that sort of thing. And since it wasn't terribly new or ter–
ribly fresh, I wasn't shocked then.
DM:
Why did you feel that this would eventually happen?
JB:
Because one way or another I knew that I was running my own
show, that I was doing something which amounts essentially to
private enterprise in what is otherwise a state-owned economy, so to
speak. And I knew that one day I would be grabbed.
It's simply the different tonality, the different use of the lan–
guage. In a society where everything belongs to the state, to try to
speak with your own voice, etcetera, is obviously fraught with conse–
quences. It's not so interest.ing. It's simply an idiotic situation, and
you find yourself in the position of a victim, as a sort of martyr.
Well, you find you're sort of ashamed of it. It's
embarrassing.
DM:
You said once that your months of forced labor near Archangel
in
1964-65
were perhaps the most normal time in your life.
