I was certain I wouldn’t be put through, but I was! And it is Alya 2 herself who answers the phone-she is at home! So I manage to assure her with my own voice that I am alive and that I have arrived at Böll’s. No sooner had I arrived at Böll’s house than I asked if a long-distance call to Moscow could be arranged. But from those very first hours-perhaps because of the astonishing openness here in the West-it was as if something inside me had clammed up. Wasn’t that strange? All my life I suffered under the prohibition that barred us from speaking finally I had broken free-should I not be holding forth, lobbing salvos at our tyrants? 1 But, to my own surprise, I told them: “I said enough in the Soviet Union. N a whirlwind of just a few hours I was transported from Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison, and from the whole Great Soviet Prison itself, to Heinrich Böll’s country house near Cologne, into a dense crowd of over a hundred reporters waiting for my thundering pronouncements.
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