500
PARTISAN REVIEW
"important holidays"; his teacher "in a frightened and sad voice" cowers
and instructs his charges to obey this order. Crouching in the bushes
with friends, he observes a deportation. He listens in terror to the moans
and cries as four NKVD men, with icy detachment, lock and secure the
heavy doors with wire, then busy themselves counting and writing down
all
the petty details.
As Kapuscinski trudges through his forty-thousand-mile journey from
the edge of Afghanistan, to far-eastern Siberia, into the Arctic Circle,
and through Central Asia, he will revisit these childhood themes - ter–
ror, starvation, incarceration, and the psychotic attention paid in a total–
itarian regime to minutiae. His running commentary on man-made
boundaries and barbed wire includes a madcap calculation of the thou–
sands of kilometers of wire it must have taken to fence in Russian's
twenty-two million miles of borders, to say nothing of the wire used to
fence in the Gulag Archipelago. This, Kapuscinski explains, is why "in
the shops of Smolensk or Omsk, one can buy neither a hoe nor a ham–
mer, never mind a knife or a spoon." The metals have all been used up
in the manufacture of those endless reams of barbed wire. Kapuscinski
envlslons
thousands of commissions and control teams dispatched across the
entire territory of the Imperium to make certain that everything is
properly enclosed, so that fences are high and thick enough, so
meticulously entangled and woven that even a mouse cannot squeeze
through... . Instead of building houses and hospitals, instead of re–
pairing the continually failing sewage and electrical systems, people
were for years occupied ... with the internal and external, local and
national, wiring of the Imperium.
Traveling on the Trans-Siberian Railroad in 1958, he thinks, "It is
safe to assume that half of those who have ever walked upon our planet
and lost their lives in the field of glory gave up the ghost in battles be–
gun over a question of borders." The "thorny, rapacious" barrier of
barbed wire stretching across Russia's myriad borders seems to him "an
absurd and surreal idea, for who would forge his way through here?"
The message behind these endless walls of wire is clear: No escape. You
have entered a world "of deadly seriousness, orders and obedience. Learn
to listen, learn humility, learn to occupy the least amount of space pos–
sible. Best mind your own business. Best be silent. Best not ask ques–
tions," especially when the very inflection of a sentence could fore–
shadow a sinister fate. Kapuscinski posits that a national muteness has
