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The house itself, seen from the road which led to the camp from the village, made a pleasant impression. It was built of rough pine beams, the gaps filled in with oakum, the roof was laid with good tiling . . . The door outside the zone, which could be used only by the free visitors, was reached by a few solid wooden steps; cotton curtains hung in the windows, and long window-boxes planted with flowers stood by the window sills. Every room was furnished with two neatly made beds, a large table, two benches, a basin and a water-jug, a clothes-cupboard and an iron stove; there was even a lampshade over the electric-light bulb. What more could a prisoner, who had lived for years on a common bunk in a dirty barrack, desire of this model petit bourgeois dwelling? Our dreams of life at liberty were based on that room.⁴²

And yet—those who had anxiously anticipated that “dream of liberty” often felt far worse when the meeting turned out badly, which it often did. Fearing they would remain behind barbed wire for life, some prisoners greeted their relatives by telling them not to come again. “You forget this place,” one told his brother, who had traveled for many days in freezing temperatures to meet him for twenty minutes: “It is more important to me that everything should be all right with you.” ⁴³ Men meeting their wives for the first time in years suddenly found themselves beset with sexual anxiety, as Herling recalls:

Years of heavy labor and hunger had undermined their virility, and now, before an intimate meeting with an almost strange woman, they felt, beside nervous excitement, helpless anger and despair. Several times I did hear men boasting of their prowess after a visit, but usually these matters were a cause for shame, and respected in silence by all prisoners . . . ⁴⁴

Visiting wives had their own troubles to discuss. Usually, they had suffered a great deal from their husbands’ imprisonment. They could not find jobs, could not study, and often had to hide their marriages from inquisitive neighbors. Some arrived in order to announce their intention to divorce. In The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn recounts, with surprising sympathy, one such conversation, based on a real one he had with his own wife, Natasha. In the book, Nadya, the prisoner Gerasimovich’s wife, is on the verge of losing her job, her place in a student hostel, and the possibility of completing her thesis, all because her husband is a prisoner. Divorce, she knows, is the only way to “have a chance to live again”:

Nadya lowered her eyes. “I wanted to say—only you won’t take it to heart, will you?—you once said we ought to get divorced.” She said it very quietly . . .

Yes, there was a time when he had insisted on this. But now he was startled. Only at this moment did he notice that her wedding ring, which she had always worn, was not on her finger.

“Yes, of course,” he agreed, with every appearance of alacrity.