“Drilled, Herods!”
Part 2
Before even fictitiously getting a job, I demanded an urgent consultation with a surgeon. On June 17, I suffered an injury to my ring finger, but still without medical attention. The tumor has almost gone away in forty days, but I can’t even force my finger to straighten. Apparently I’ll have to break it anew, I can’t go around with such a hook.
Pavel Motin’s wife just got a job as a nurse in the zone, but she is already setting the tone in the team as the first lady. The entire medical unit is indignant at “Shestun’s whims because of some finger.”
So, on July 19, at the disciplinary commission, I was punished by being placed in the PKT for a month, and given a stack of papers to sign. I began to look at all the sheets, but the head of the SUS detachment, Mikhail Makarov, lost his temper, crumpled the papers and threw them in my face in front of all the members of the commission. This psychopath thought that I should sign them without reading them. Previously, PKT was called BUR – a high-security barracks, which is what prisoners now use colloquially. Both of these abbreviations sound unpleasant to the ear. Something sinister is felt in them even without decoding. In BUReshkonka is fastened to the wall for a day. They are given a suit with huge orange stripes: the color of danger, as in US prisons. When leaving the PKT building to go to court or to see a lawyer, the employees insistently recommend changing bright clothes to a regular prison uniform, but I shock the public with my new outfit.
BUR prisoners, as a rule, deny any demands of the regime. I feel like a black sheep here, following the rules of the routine. And in terms of age, I am much older than my neighbors. Every day, when I sign in the log book next to all the names except my column, I see the word “refusal” instead of a signature. However, among the authoritative prisoners there is no swearing. Everyone reads a lot. Sound reasoning in intellectual discussions creates the illusion of being in the scientific community. I will look for the advantages, and there are many of them: silence, no tobacco smoke, light, no restrictions on reading and working with documents…
Usually there were 2-3 people sitting here, but now it was completely sold out – 9 prisoners. In the entire history of BUR observations, no one remembers such a dense filling, especially contrasting against the backdrop of the empty zone of Bezhetsk. At least put up a sign: “Everyone has gone to the front!”
“ВЧК ОГПУ”