by Tig Hague
‘Bail?’ I blurted out, and the whole court heard. ‘They’re not seriously thinking of detaining me, are they? You’ve got to be kidding me,’ I said more quietly through the railings to the translator.
‘He says you have some friends and clients who have said they are happy to put you up ahead of the main trial,’ she continued.
‘Main trial?’ I cried out, loudly again. ‘This is ridiculous!’
Piskin sat back down, and there was silence while the judge looked down at her notes and scribbled something. The court usher motioned to me to stand up. The judge spoke clearly in two bursts, allowing the translator to relay the message. Sentence One: ‘No bail is granted.’ Pause. Sentence Two: ‘You will be detained for two months while the state investigates your case, the standard for foreigners.’
I felt dizzy and my chest began to tighten. I started falling. I saw the translator’s alarm as I lurched towards her. A hand grabbed my upper arm and yanked me back. It was the policeman. He steered me through the door and back into the corridor. Tears streamed down my cheeks and the back of my throat was sore. I was aware of Pete Smith and the legal team standing around me, trying to reassure me: ‘You’ll be OK, we’re going to help you… we’ll keep your family informed… chin up, it won’t be as bad as you think… we’ll come and visit and make sure you’re not maltreated in there… just keep your head down, avoid confrontation, do what they say…’
All I could manage, shaking my head and looking at the ground, was: ‘But this is absurd, this is absurd…’ We began walking down a dark stairwell, all six of us, our careful footsteps echoing off the stone walls. It was so dark I could barely see. A buzzer sounded and suddenly we were standing in bright sunlight and I shielded my eyes with my cuffed hands. One of the young lawyers put a packet of Parliament cigarettes in my pocket and said with a smile: ‘Don’t worry, you’re going to be all right. Some people would pay good money for an experience like this. Don’t drink and don’t play cards and you should be OK.’
He walked off towards the cars parked outside the courthouse and it was clear that all of them were in a hurry to move off. Pete Smith gave me a sympathetic look and said: ‘We’ll come and see you at the beginning of next week. Chin up, old chap.’
I stood on the pavement with the sunlight pouring through the trees as the two cars disappeared round the corner.
My body was quivering so much I couldn’t lift the cigarette to my mouth with my cuffed hands. The young policeman who’d driven me from court lifted my arms for me and guided the cigarette between my trembling lips, but I was crying so hard I couldn’t inhale. I spat it on to the floor and fell to my knees. He helped me up and sat me down in the back of the car. Why was this one being nice to me? I wondered. He looked genuinely upset.
I was outside the giant gates of Piet Central prison. I could hear banging and shouting, reverberating from its towering walls. Two men in uniform emerged from a small door built into the gates and started walking towards the car. They were coming to get me. I tried to climb back in, pulling my knees up to my chest, but the bigger of the two grabbed my arm and pulled me out. I couldn’t walk properly, or didn’t want to (I couldn’t tell which), so they had to drag me across the road and inside the massive walls. We passed through three or four barred gates, which closed behind us with a loud metallic crash that echoed down the endless corridor. The human sounds were getting louder and louder. At first I could hear only murmuring and a dull din somewhere in the distance but as we headed deeper into the gaol the noises became more distinct and coherent. There was shouting and groaning. It was clear that there were a lot of people in there somewhere.
We stopped outside a door and the guard gestured to me to take my clothes off. They took off my cuffs but I couldn’t undo my shirt buttons because my arms and hands were trembling so badly. One of the guards had to undo them for me. When I was naked the other guard opened the door and pushed me into the dark and the door slammed behind me. I couldn’t see anything in the pitch black and I stood there for a minute or so, too frightened to move. My eyes started to adjust and I made out a kind of arch in the wall beyond which a tap was dripping. The room stank of shit and the ammonia of old piss and beneath my feet it was cold and slimy. I stood underneath the freezing cold trickle that was my shower and I was so thirsty I craned my neck backwards and opened my mouth. The moisture in my parched gums was glorious.
Unable to stand the cold any longer, I shuffled across the greasy floor back into the first room. I had no towel and no clothes. There was a thin wooden bench along the far wall and I lay down on it on my side, shivering. I was happier now. I was safe in there. I didn’t mind that hours seemed to be passing. I felt delirious and occasionally a warm, dreamy feeling swept over me. It was all going to be OK now. This was the beginning of the end.
I heard the key in the door, which opened to reveal the dark silhouette of a guard against the light. ‘Anglichanin!’ I was terrified again. I just wanted to stay where I was. I walked slowly across the room and re-emerged into the dim, unnatural light of the corridor, covering my balls. The other guard opened a door almost opposite and pushed me into another tiny cell.
A light bulb hung from the ceiling, casting a dim light over the filth on the floor and the walls. There was a pile of shit in one corner and what looked like an old half-eaten orange in the middle of the room. The walls were covered with graffiti and smeared with stains. I stood retching and swallowing back the bile from my cramping stomach. I was naked, quivering with cold and fear. I stood in the middle of the room, unsure what to do. After a few minutes I heard shouts and screams outside and the door was flung open. I jumped backwards as the guards threw in two young skinheads. Their Doc Marten boots were laced up to the knees. Their heads and faces were covered in blood, some of it fresh, some of it congealed and matted on to their skin and hair and T-shirts. One of them had blood pouring from his mouth; the other could barely see because his eyes were so swollen from the beating he must have taken.
They were highly distressed and high as kites, jabbering to themselves as they paced up and down the room, like animals in a cage. They didn’t even acknowledge me as I leant against the wall. They didn’t seem to know I was there. They walked past me, brushing me as they went, touching the wall, then turning and walking back the other way. Over and over again. Talking, talking, talking. I was petrified. I didn’t move a muscle for half an hour as I clung to the damp wall. Was this what I would be like before they’d finished with me?
I felt the sudden onset of a dark madness. I couldn’t take this! I couldn’t fucking take this! I’d been staring at two wires sticking out of the ceiling where a light must once have hung. The two skinheads were about to turn at either end of the cell and I jumped into the middle of the room and grabbed the wires, which came loose and scattered plaster into my eyes. With one hand I held the two wires and then I lifted up the wrist of the other towards the frayed metal wiring sticking out of the plastic tubing. I was shaking harder than ever, but I couldn’t cry any more. I’d shed all the tears I could and my eyes were parched and itchy. And then I heard Lucy’s sweet voice and saw her smiling face somewhere in my head. ‘Tig, what the hell are you doing, my love?’ Then everything was black.
4
I have no idea how long I lay there. It could have been five minutes or two hours. When I came round, woken by the slamming of doors and the shouting of the guards, the skinheads were gone and, through the small grimy window high up on the wall, I could see that night had started to descend over Moscow. I was lying on the filthy floor, naked and shivering, my arms and chest covered in a light dusting of plaster from the ceiling. Had I really tried to top myself?
I was getting to my feet when a guard opened the door, lobbed my clothes at me and then disappeared, leaving the door wide open. I was balancing on one foot trying to put on a sock when he came back, holding a thin brown mattress rolled into a tube. Even in the gloom I could see it was a disgusting object, covered in patches a
nd holes and stains. The stuffing, bursting from every seam and gash, looked like the contents of a Hoover bag. Fuck knows how many prisoners had slept on it and sweated and dribbled into it over the years. As the guard threw it at me, I recoiled and parried it to the ground. He laughed, turned away and came back a minute later to hand me a metal bowl, a spoon and a heavily stained cup, with a smile that said: ‘Welcome to your new home. These will be your material comforts over the coming months.’
Carrying my bundle I followed him out into the long corridor and through a series of large metal gates, slowly moving deeper into the bowels of a huge labyrinth of corridors and cells, each of the gates shutting behind us with a heavy clunk that reverberated along the stone walls. We passed cell after cell, on either side of the corridor, and from behind the doors I could hear a dim murmur of voices, like the rumble of distant traffic. But there was another noise too, a faint but rhythmic tapping, deliberate and structured, like Morse code. Three clear taps, pause, two clear taps, pause, three clear taps, pause… This wasn’t the random creaking and groaning of an old building, but a crude form of communication. The cells were talking to each other.
We had passed through a fourth gate into the last section of the corridor when the guard stopped in front of the last cell door but one on the right-hand side. He opened the eye-slot and pressed his face against the peeling green door, then he lifted up his giant hedgehog of keys and – with a noise that couldn’t have sounded more like a key turning in a lock if it had tried – turned his hand and pushed the door open. I suddenly became aware of my heart thumping against my ribcage. He motioned me to go in. As I reached the doorway I felt his hand shove me between the shoulder-blades. I stumbled forward, clutching my mattress and eating utensils, and as I corrected myself the door slammed behind me and the loud lock turned again.
Through the gloom I could see roughly two dozen faces staring at me, most of them registering barely a flicker of interest in the latest addition to their cramped world. The room was small, and the number of bodies in there made it feel even smaller. It wasn’t a difficult calculation to work out that there were roughly twice as many men here as there were wooden shelves to sleep on. Each ‘bunk’ was occupied by a prostrate body, but most people were crowded together on the floor, crouching down on their haunches with their bums just above the ground and their arms resting on their knees. Half the crouchers were smoking and the room was thick with cheap tobacco, but through the fug there was a powerful stench of shit and ammonia and body odour, stale and fresh. The air was hot and damp and I was breathing it heavily. I stood at the door squeezing my mattress to my chest, paralysed by indecision and fear. The room had two barred windows high up on the wall opposite me, one of them with a pane of glass, the other open to the elements – the ventilation system, presumably.
The rows of double bunk shelves were on the walls to the left and right and straight ahead. Squeezed between the bunks in the far left-hand corner there was a toilet area behind a low brick wall, surrounded by a large puddle that leaked into the centre of the room in a meandering stream through the crouching bodies. I knew it was a toilet of some sort because I could see the head and shoulders of a man crouched behind the wall, and I could hear him farting and grunting.
No one stirred as I walked the few steps towards some space in the middle of the cell and got down on my haunches, holding on to my stinking bedding so that it didn’t touch the filthy damp floor and at the same time trying to avoid bumping into anyone. As I lowered myself down, the muscles in my lower leg and knees stretched so tight they felt like they were going to snap. I bounced as gently as possible on the balls of my feet, trying not to fall forward into the gaunt man with long matted hair crouched no more than two feet in front of me. By the look and smell of him, he was some kind of vagrant and/or junkie. As far as I could see everyone was wearing trainers or slippers, tracksuit bottoms and T-shirts of various different colours and designs, even the older-looking characters. Two guys had bruised, cut faces and one of them, a fat guy who must have been at least fifty, had eyes so badly swollen that there was no way he was able to see out of them.
After about two minutes I had to stand up because the pain in my legs was becoming unbearable, but I felt very self-conscious standing there in the murky stillness. By the sound of it, the guy taking a shit behind the wall, about six feet from where I was trying to squat, had a bad case of diarrhoea. When he stood up and pulled up his trousers he filled a bowl of water from the tap on the wall and threw it over the floor where he’d been crouching. He repeated this a couple of times and then began to curse as the liquid oozed out from behind the wall. There was clearly a problem with the drainage and I watched him scraping at the floor with his feet in an apparent attempt to push his waste down the hole in the ground.
I still felt unsettled by the looks I was starting to draw as I tried to get comfortable, shifting from foot to foot, then squatting, standing up again, over and over… up, down, up, down… for about half an hour. I guessed once you’d been in there a while your squatting muscles loosened up a bit, and it became easier. I was starting to fret about how I was going to find a place to lie down and sleep when a very young fresh-faced guy with cropped blond hair climbed off one of the bottom bunks and, with a kind smile, motioned to me to take his place. Stepping this way and that between the squatting figures on the floor I reached the bunk and the young guy said something in Russian, pointing to the bed. I sat down – and so did he, right next to me. I smiled at him nervously and he smiled back. He asked me something in Russian, but I could only shrug and make a silly, apologetic face in reply.
The thought that he might be offering himself to me in some way passed uncomfortably through my mind. Wasn’t that kind of thing rife in prisons? Don’t bend over for the soap and all that. I pulled out the packet of Parliament cigarettes one of the lawyers had given me and offered them to him in an attempt to show I appreciated his thoughtfulness. Within seconds there were half a dozen guys forming a circle around me, some patting me, others putting their hands together as if in prayer, all of them with an air of desperation. Within two minutes, the whole pack had gone. As he pulled out a cigarette, a guy with an eye-patch and two slash scars running right across his face said, ‘Merci beaucoup, monsieur. Gentil.’
‘Pas de problème. C’est mon plaisir,’ I replied instantly, jumping on the opportunity to communicate with someone. It had been so long since I’d spoken that I had to clear my throat halfway through.
We began to exchange small talk in near-whispers so as not to stir up the moody silence hanging over the room. I’d studied French at Leeds University, and I was able to speak it freely, but his grasp of the language, I quickly learned, was pretty limited. He asked to see my court papers and immediately a couple of others gathered around him, reading over his shoulder, to find out what I was in for. Their reaction to what they were reading was surprise, bordering on astonishment. One of them started laughing with incredulity, pointing his finger at me and exclaiming, ‘Anglia! Anglia!’ The other guy held out his hand and rubbed his fingers against his thumb, just like the Customs guy at the airport. The general message seemed to be: ‘What the fuck’s an English businessman doing in this hellhole? And why the fuck didn’t you just bribe your way out of it, you fool?’ I could only shrug and blow out my cheeks.
The young blond guy took the papers and handed them back to me, then pointed at the bed and put his hands to one side of his head, indicating that I should take the chance to sleep. He continued with a series of hand signals and I eventually twigged: I was to sleep there now, then it would be his turn. We were to be bunk partners. I laid out my sordid thin mattress and, not wanting to put my face anywhere near it, stretched out on my back, being careful not to kick the head of the guy in the bunk along from me.
I must have fallen asleep within seconds, and I had the feeling it was the dead of night when I woke up with a start, almost hitting my head on the bunk above, however many hours later. Most of th
e room was asleep, including the majority of the guys on the floor, who had given up their squatting positions and were now either curled up in a ball on their side or – like my bunk partner – were sitting on their backsides leaning up against the bunks behind. I lay there for a few minutes, listening to the tapping on the water pipes, a series of calls and answers, being passed between neighbouring cells. What the hell were they saying to each other? It was another language, or code, that I didn’t understand.
Someone had wrapped a small piece of wire around the slats of the bunk above me and, without thinking, I unravelled it and immediately used it to start writing on the back of my court papers. In the half-light of the room I couldn’t quite make out the impressions I was making on the paper but I was scribbling furiously, trying to recall and record every last detail of what had happened to me since arriving in Moscow. I was trying to make sense of the experience.
Every now and then I cursed under my breath at my stupidity. If only I had realized that all that greasy little Customs guy had wanted me to do was slip him a couple of hundred dollars, that would have been the end of the matter – and instead of lying in a cramped, squalid, shit-soaked, pissy cell with twenty-five low-lifes, I’d be in one of Russia’s finest hotels, sleeping off a night out with the boys, dreaming about my beautiful girlfriend. Why didn’t I stand my ground at the airport and insist on a lawyer or an Embassy official? Why did I admit it was my dope and why the hell did I admit that I smoked it back in England? Why didn’t I call one of my Russian clients to come down to the airport, rather than just blub down the phone to my boss like a big fucking baby?