^^”DEN international is working for your release,” myn± lawyer told me. In the bare, mean interview room ofnthe Belgrade District Prison he smiled at me, and I smilednback, because the mikes could not pick that up. There werenno TV cameras there, yet, to monitor our winks andnnods — the language of slaves, as Karl Marx so aptly termednit.nPEN international, based in London, headed by MichaelnScammell and held together by Ms. Elisabeth Paterson, annadministrative secretary, and Mrs. Kathleen Simson, thensecretary of the Writers in Prison Committee, was actuallynapplying for my release. Writers like Mario Vargas Llosa,nHeinrich Boll, Arthur Miller, Alan Sillitoe, Josef Skvorecky,nand others, I thought, were concerned with the freedom of anYugoslav who had written a pamphlet against President Titon(a good friend of Heinrich Boll’s at least).nMy spirits rose. I paced in the darkness of my solitarynswinging my arms, my US Army field jacket feeling like ansteel breastplate. I sang, not too loudly (I’d heard the guardsnbeating other prisoners for less). The tune was the BattlenHymn of the Republic, vaguely remembered from mynAmerican grade school days. “John Brown’s body liesna-mouldering in the grave,” I whispered, “while his soulngoes marching on!”nThough I was not in a grave, but in cell No. 10, rightnbehind the blower unit, the thought of PEN being on mynside — a boost even more powerful than adoption bynAmnesty International — made me smile at the guardsnwhen they came to take me out for the walk. In the exercisenyard, I trotted past them limbering my arms, glad of thensnowflakes touching the concrete.nIn 1984, after emigrating from Yugoslavia, I found myselfnin London, doing a videotape on Yugoslav dissidents fornthe AI. I phoned PEN international and tried to see at leastnMrs. Simson, only to find out that PEN was a part-time,nMomcilo Selic is managing editor of Chronicles.nWriters’ Unionsnby Momcilo Selicnunderstaffed affair, not much different from the Index onnCensorship — an outpost of Writers and Scholars Internationalnthat helped harassed scribblers from totalitarian countries.n”Do you know,” my interrogators in Yugoslavia told me,n”that both the Amnesty International and the InternationalnPEN are nothing but CIA operations, in a Special Warnagainst Yugoslavia and other socialist countries?”nMuch later, in America, I was cautioned that both PENninternational and AI (not to mention the Writers andnScholars International) are leftist conspiracies, bent onntoppling democracy in the West. I thought of Ian Parker andnHugh Poulton at the Yugoslav desk of AI, who poured overnnewspapers in Cyrillic, looking for names of “politicals”; ofnMelanie Anderson who had written me in exile, askingnabout other Yugoslavs hounded by The Imagination of then[Yugoslav] State; of the founder of Amnesty International,nPeter Benenson, whose father had rooted for a Yugoslavia inn1918, confident that it would become another Switzerland,nand I found it hard to see anything in what they were tryingnto do but a search for freedom.nAnd, if Mrs. Simson of the International PEN was anCommunist agent—she who had taken my story aboutna Belgrade neighborhood to Index on Censorship, wherenKarel Kyncl, an exile from post-1968 Czechoslovakia, hadnpublished it, with a blessing from another Czech survivor,neditor George Theiner — then I was a Communist agentntoo, despite anything Tomislav Tacic, the warden of thenZabela Penitentiary and a ranking member of UDBA (thenYugoslav secret police) might have thought.n”Selic,” Tacic used to say, “you hate your people andnyou’re a traitor to your family and class. Too bad they didn’tngive you more, like 15 years at least!”nSeven, however, was more than enough for me. Incouldn’t really hate Tacic because he was earnest: when Intold him I liked Nietzsche, he respectfully listened to hisnsubordinate, the warden of the quarantine, who informednnnJANUARY 1989/23n