My only problem was to memorize my poems.  On the first day I thought up only twenty lines, but gradually I increased it to an average of fifty lines a day.  I repeated each line twenty times, and all the previous lines three times in succession.  By evening I had always forgotten the whole poem but the next morning I knew it without mistake.  My preoccupation changed even in the subjective length of a day: to me the time from six o’clock in the morning when the guard appeared with the soup until between nine and ten in the evening when he collected the dixie, never seemed longer than three-quarters of an hour.  Thus, I completely forgot the present and the future and even came to disregard the noises seeping into my cell; except the brief howling to be heard once or twice a week, usually late in the evening that ended in a  short, strangled death-rattle.  The howl was always preceded by the guards dragging something mute and lifeless, probably an unconscious or drugged man, along the corridor, and by the sound of a body dropped into a bath filled with liquid.   The basin must have been somewhere at the end of the corridor, behind a cell door.  Five or six seconds after the howl I could smell acid, but whether it was hydrochloric acid or sulphuric acid I was never sure.  I supposed that the victim, become useless to the AVO either because he had already signed a confession or because he refused to make one, was beaten half dead and then thrown into the bath of acid.  For a few minutes I would stand petrified in my cell, but immediately afterwards I would find rhymes more beautiful and metaphors more unexpected than had ever occurred to me before.

In a month’s time I could whisper to myself a whole volume of poems.