“Hey, wait a moment,” he cried. “I must lock your cell door first.”
“But I tell you I’m out of ‘solitary’!”
“I believe you, though I don’t know officially. I’m not going to lock you in, but lock the door I will. If we leave it open, you’ll find all your things gone when you come back. These Poles would take anything they can lay their hands on, and small blame to them. Most of them haven’t a shirt to their back.”
I did not return to my cell until lock-up time, feeling comfortably replete from various teas I had had, and my throat raw from incessant talking.
The part of our block reserved for men in solitary confinement, one side of the triangle, was separated from the rest by iron gates on each landing. These gates barred access to the military part as well. They were always kept locked. To clamber over them was easy enough; to be seen doing so spelled seven days’ cells. My first care, consequently, was to get a cell “in front of the gate.” This term was equivalent among us for ordinary confinement as opposed to solitary, for, in ordinary circumstances, nobody would willingly stay in a cell “behind the gate” if not in “solitary,” and was, in fact, not supposed to do so.
An unexpected physical phenomenon, which I afterward observed in others, made itself unpleasantly felt in my case. The first days following my release from “behind the gate” I was extremely nervous and restless; at times I longed to be back in “solitary” with the cell door securely locked upon me.