How was I to answer them? I was forbidden to order a single word, and I would have had to explain my entire life to each and every one of them. What could I do to make them understand that I was not a spy, a saboteur? That I was their friend? That it was because of them that I was here? I smiled. Looking up at them, I smiled at them from a column of prisoners under escort! But my bared teeth seemed to them the worst kind of mockery, and they shook their fists and bellowed insults at me even more violently than before.
I smiled in pride that I had been arrested not for stealing, nor treason, nor desertion, but because I had discover through my power of reasoning the evil secrets of Stalin. I smiled at the thought that I wanted, and might still be able, to affect some small remedies and changes in our Russian way of life."
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. VOL 1.
No comments:
Post a Comment