The English Prisoner

by Tig Hague

  He went to one of the bunks and started searching through a giant checked laundry bag with handles. ‘These, my friend, are called sumkas and that’s where you’ll end up keeping all your worldly possessions.’ He came back and handed me some soap, a new toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste, a bottle of Timotei shampoo, and a clean towel.

  ‘We’re going to have to wash those shitty trousers and that shirt of yours,’ he continued, heading back to his sumka. ‘You’ll need those for your court appearances. Here, take this,’ he said, throwing me a clean pair of dark tracksuit bottoms and a brown and yellow T-shirt. Ranjit walked over and presented me with a grey fleece top and a pair of brown and red tartan slippers. When the large bowl of water, with two elements in it, had boiled, Zubi said: ‘Right, go get cleaned up,’ and he pulled back the screen around the toilet. Plastered over the wall were more images of semi-naked girls, and there was Jordan again, grinning and squeezing her mighty boobs out towards me.

  I’d barely spoken a word in the fifteen minutes since my arrival, muttering only, ‘Great… brilliant… God, thanks… cheers, mate… wow… lovely…’ At the back of my mind I kept wondering if there was some elaborate con trick being played. Was I being stitched up in some way? The experiences of the previous few days had made me nervous and suspicious of everyone. But these guys seemed genuine, and they were foreign, which was reassuring, and they spoke English.

  ‘Go on, my man, we’re not going to jump you…’ said Zubi, holding the screen open for me. I walked in and he passed through the bowl of steaming hot water. I stripped off quickly and started washing furiously, squeezing the shampoo into my hair and lathering the soap into my skin. The feeling of hot water was magical as I splashed and rubbed it all over my sticky body and grimy hair. When I’d finished I poured the remainder of the water over my head and stood and savoured the feeling of cleanliness for a minute or so.

  ‘You ready for a shave now?’ said Zubi, passing through a smaller bowl of hot water, a razor and some Gillette shaving gel. The razor was new but it was still painful removing five days of stubble. I emerged from behind the sheet screen, washed and scrubbed from head to toe, comfortable but a little awkward in my new clothes. Zubi exclaimed: ‘Food now! You must be hungry!’

  ‘I’m bloody ravenous!’ I replied.

  ‘Hey, the guy says “bloody”, Ranjit. He may look Italian but he really is English. Make the gentleman some supper.’

  Zubi took my dirty clothes from me, put them in the large washing bowl with some powder and water, and left them to soak on the floor. I watched Ranjit open up the large, deep cupboard screwed into the wall…

  ‘Fucking hell!’ I blurted, my eyes popping out as he pulled back the two doors to reveal three shelves groaning with food. I could see dozens of packets of noodles, I could see salamis, and garlic cloves, and onions, some biscuits, a few oranges and lemons and apples…

  ‘Treat this as your own,’ said Zubi. ‘Take whatever you want. Mi casa es su casa. We all share in here. When you get a delivery, it all goes in there. All for one and one for all.’

  Twenty minutes later Ranjit presented me with a bowl of steaming noodles, containing chunks of salami, onion and bits of garlic. ‘The house speciality,’ he smiled, as he put it down on the metal table. I launched myself at it, bolting it like a dog, and finishing it in no more than two or three minutes. It was the most delicious meal I’d ever eaten.

  ‘Would Sir enjoy a cigarette after his dinner?’ asked Zubi, holding open a shopping bag half full of individual cigarettes. There must have been at least 400 in there.

  I took one and sparked it up, leaning back and blowing the smoke high into the air, and I could feel the muscles starting to release their iron grip on my neck and shoulders. Zubi sat down on the bench facing me and said, ‘So, tell me your story, English boy, and I tell you how to get out of here. Trust me, I’m an expert.’

  Zubi and I sat up into the small hours of the morning, and I hung on to his every word as he explained about Russian gaols: how they operated, how to survive them and how to get out of them. We sat on his bunk behind the overhanging sheet, talking in hushed tones so that the night guard patrolling outside couldn’t hear us. The dull murmur of the prison had given way to a crisp silence, broken only by the rhythmical tapping of the pipes. I knew roughly how long we talked because I heard the guard pull back the eye-slot for his hourly check at least five times. By the time I slumped back to my bunk, my head was swimming with knowledge, advice, warnings, handy tips… Boy, the man could talk, and he certainly seemed to know what he was talking about. Zubi was a proper drugs dealer, who had come to Moscow from Nigeria to make his illicit fortune. He had married a Moscow girl about five years ago, and he was now as good as fluent in Russian. With tears in his eyes and emotion in his voice he twice showed me a picture of his pretty little daughter and told me that one day, when he was a rich man, he was going to take her back to Lagos and drive her around in an open-top sports car. He had been caught with five or six grams of heroin two months earlier and was looking at up to twelve years if convicted. His advice to me was to start learning the language as fast as possible. ‘The better you communicate,’ he said, ‘the better the chance you have of getting by and of getting out. Misunderstandings are dangerous. If you can’t speak or understand, you are powerless. You may as well be a deaf mute.’

  He explained that there are two types of prison in Russia: Krastnaya Zona (‘Red Zone’) and Churnaya Zona (‘Black Zone’). Piet was a Red Zone, meaning that the prison was effectively controlled by a hardcore of prisoners led by the ‘volk’, which is Russian for ‘wolf’. His authority was absolute. If you had a problem with another prisoner you got word to the volk; if the volk asked you to do something, you just did it. Piss off the volk, or one of his people, and your life was on the line.

  The prison guards had no real control over day-to-day life in Piet. They were just minor officials who unlocked doors, delivered the food and took prisoners down to the interview rooms or the wash area for the weekly shower. That didn’t mean you could ignore them or show disrespect to them, because they had the capacity to make life very uncomfortable, it was just that the real power didn’t lie with them, but with the volk and his henchmen. ‘Every few weeks, though,’ Zubi continued, ‘the authorities like to assert themselves and send in their riot cop hooligans, known as the shmon, who turn the place over in a frenzied search for drugs, needles, weapons, mobile phones and any other illegal possessions…’

  The Black Zones, meanwhile, were prisons controlled by the KGB, or FSB as they are known today, and in there the guards had total control over day-to-day life. It wasn’t a case of one type of prison being more preferable to live in than another, Zubi stressed; each presented its own survival challenges and it was more a question of understanding how the systems worked and learning how to play the game. Get it wrong with the volk, and you ended up with a knife hanging out of your back. Get it wrong with the guards and you ended up in ‘Razburg’, the penal block in the basement where all rights were taken away and where you either lived in solitary confinement or you shared a windowless booth with another prisoner. ‘Razburg’s basically a dungeon. There’s no daily walk up on the roof, you go weeks without a shower and your visits are restricted. In Razburg, you’re left to rot.’

  Each cell had a ‘smatriashi’, which meant ‘watcher’ or ‘monitor’, who was in charge of life in that room and reported to the volk. ‘I’m our smatriashi, but as we’re a foreign cell, we’re not as strictly controlled by the volk as the Russian cells,’ he added. The smatriashi settled disputes within his cell, and with so many desperate men living in such crowded conditions with so little to do, flare-ups were almost daily occurrences. The smatriashi also oversaw the contributions each prisoner made to the ‘obshi’ (general or shared) running of the cell, whether that was in the form of goods from the outside such as cigarettes or food, or in tasks performed such as cleaning, or collecting the food at the hatch from the bilander
man.

  ‘Most of the Russian cells also have a peederaz – and that’s one fucking prison job you don’t want!’ said Zubi, bursting into nervous laughter. ‘Peederaz means queer. In here he’s an inmate chosen by the long-term prisoners to abuse, rape and humiliate as and when they feel the urge. The peederaz sleeps on the floor, he doesn’t sit at the table with the others or shower with them. He cleans everything in the cell and he’s forced to have sex with anyone who wants it. If somebody wants a blowjob, the peederaz gives it to them. If they want a bugger, the peederaz bends over for them. If the peederaz refuses or complains, then he’s beaten up or stabbed, and the hardcore guys simply choose another one. The peederaz is normally a new arrival in the cell and he’s normally young and good-looking…’

  When Zubi moved on to examine my court papers, he seemed genuinely taken aback that I had managed to end up so far into the system for such a comparatively minor offence, just as the guys in the first cell had been. Perhaps he was trying to cheer me up after all his tales of riots and buggery and solitary confinement, but he was convinced that, if I played the system right and took his advice, I’d be back at home in time for Christmas.

  ‘Christmas!’ I yelled. ‘You’re fucking having me on – that’s almost six months away! They said it’d take two months to investigate my case…’

  ‘Man, don’t be a pussy!’ Zubi howled, then immediately covered his mouth in case he had attracted the attention of the night guard. ‘This is the Russian judicial system you’re dealing with here,’ he continued in a whisper. ‘It ain’t the Swiss rail network where all the trains run on time. They’ll get round to you eventually, but you gotta be prepared for the waiting or the delays are gonna drive you outta your mind…’

  Encouragingly, my case was almost exactly the same as Ranjit’s. Like me, Ranjit had been caught with a small amount of hash at the same airport when he arrived from India to visit his brothers living in Moscow. The only difference was that from the moment he was arrested he had denied all knowledge of how the little lump had found its way into his suitcase. The other crucial factor was that Ranjit’s family were well off and they had paid their lawyer 20,000 US dollars to bribe the prosecutor and the judge to secure his freedom. ‘If you got money, you should walk every time,’ Zubi said. ‘Ranjit’s trial is later this week, and I guarantee he won’t be coming back here when it’s over. And, English boy, like Ranjit, you’re a millionaire compared to everyone else in here. It’s all about the money, and if you’ve got it, or you can get it, you gotta use it. It’s the only guaranteed way out of here. You gotta get yourself a lawyer who’s prepared to play the bribery game, or they’re gonna fuck you. You’ll end up in a camp in the middle of fucking nowhere for fuck knows how many years where they’ll just leave you to decompose or go crazy. You can’t afford to gamble with the system, or expect the court to be fair and reasonable, ’cos they don’t give a shit about you. To Russians, human rights is just something that happens to other people. Man, this country has sent more of its own people to camps than the rest of the world put together. To them, you’re just an English pussy drug smuggler. But right now, for the next few weeks, your first priority is to learn how to survive in here, and Zubi’s gonna show you how it is. Watch what I do, listen to what I say and trust me, and you’re gonna be just fine. Zubi’s gonna look after you. Zubi’s the man.’

  6

  It was barely light when I found myself leaping to my feet at the crash of the hatch in the door. God knows what time it was when we’d gone to bed but we couldn’t have had more than three or four hours’ sleep. Zubi rolled out of bed from behind his drape in one motion and, walking towards the cupboard, looked at me and pointed to his eyes, as if to say, ‘Look and learn.’ He picked up the large metal bowl and took a cigarette from the shopping bag. When he placed the bowl on the fold-down hatch, a hand appeared from the other side, ladled out four servings of porridge gruel and then passed through a little bowl of sugar. Zubi put the fag into the hand and there followed a short exchange in Russian that ended with both men laughing. Zubi pulled the hatch up and, carrying the bowl over to the table, said: ‘You can’t let these mother-fucking pussies get the upper hand on you. If they say something to you, come back at them with a wisecrack. Make them laugh. Dominate them with banter, because if you play the wet pussy with them, they’ll walk all over you. Talk the talk with them and they’ll show you a bit of respect.

  ‘Rule number two: keep the bilander man sweet with cigarettes and coffee, and occasionally he’ll bring you an onion, or a potato, or some bones for making stock, or even the odd piece of meat. You want to look after your nutrition in here, or you’re gonna get sick like a dog. There ain’t nothing but shit in them bowls. Keep all the guards sweet when you can afford to, because there’s not one of them that doesn’t take a bribe. These guys are poor and they want stuff just like everyone else. One day you’ll need them to do you a favour…’

  ‘Rule number three: always take the food they offer you, even if you ain’t gonna eat it ’cos your embassy has brought you your shopping that month. If you turn down your food, it sends out the wrong message. They don’t like it, and they’ll start giving you a hard time for not playing the game. If he puts shit in your bowl, you thank him, then chuck it down the toilet hole when he ain’t looking and go make yourself some noodles.’

  I watched Zubi like a hawk the whole day, and asked him endless questions about life in the prison, desperately trying to gather as much information as possible. Ranjit chipped in occasionally but otherwise lay on his bunk, reading his court papers and preparing answers for his cross-examination. Pasha, meanwhile, said nothing. He just sat and stared vacantly, or lay and stared vacantly, or walked around and stared vacantly. ‘Fried his head in India,’ said Zubi. ‘He’s away with the fairies now. Didn’t even bother to hide the dope he was smuggling. He was changing flights in Moscow when they caught him.’ Zubi tapped his temple and raised his eyebrows, just in case I didn’t get it that Pasha wasn’t all there upstairs.

  It was difficult to know the exact time at any point in the day because there was no clock in the cell and nobody had a watch, but the day’s schedule went like this: breakfast at six, followed by ‘cell check’ between eight and nine, soup at around midday, an hour-long walk on the roof at some point in the afternoon, cell check at about five or six, into bed by eleven.

  During the cell checks the guards looked for ‘contraband’, which meant anything prisoners weren’t allowed: drugs, mobiles, alcohol, tools, wires, ropes, syringes… and the only reason they gave a shit and made an effort, Zubi explained, was because if they ever found something, behind a brick or stuffed in a mattress, for instance, they would sell it back to the cell, or the prisoner, a few days later. In preparation for their first visit of the day, we made our beds, tidied up the cell, and folded away all the sheets that hung over our bunks and the toilet area as privacy screens. They knew we had the sheets because they could see them every time they looked through the eye-slot, Zubi explained, but it was prison ritual that we hid them for the cell check.

  I could tell when it was almost our time to be checked, because I could hear a low commotion that grew louder as they moved along the corridor from one cell to the next, towards ours, virtually at the end. I was starting to feel nervous as the key turned in the lock. ‘Just do what I do,’ said Zubi, shooting me a reassuring look. ‘If in doubt, just nod and say “Spasiba, nachalnik.” It means “Thanks, boss.”’ Three guards strolled in, each holding a truncheon in his right hand, and all four of us got off our bunks and stood to attention. All three guards walked past me slowly, looking me up and down as I stood staring at the wall opposite. Zubi began bantering with them, trying to draw their attention from me, I guessed, and then we filed out into the corridor where we stood facing the wall with our hands behind our backs for about ten minutes while the guards hunted for their contraband. I could hear scraping and grinding and swearing and banging and the odd burst of conversation. I s
hot Zubi a worried look, wondering whether this was normal, and he winked back at me. When the guards re-emerged and motioned us back in, Zubi made some cocky comment, triggering a mock argument between the four of them.

  ‘I told the mother-fuckers they’d never find my Kalashnikov or my heroin,’ said Zubi smiling. ‘Looks like the fuckers have helped themselves again,’ he added, looking over at the cupboard where packets of noodles and sachets of coffee lay strewn over the shelves. The room looked as if a small typhoon had passed through. All our beds had been stripped and my matras had been slashed open, all its revolting stuffing scattered over the bunk and the floor below.

  ‘Welcome to cell 310,’ said Zubi, handing me a needle and a ball of coarse thread from the cupboard. ‘They just want the new boy to know from the start that they’re gonna be watching him carefully. Man, you think this is bad, you wait till the shmon show up.’

  In the late afternoon, a guard entered the room and we all jumped off our bunks and stood to attention.

  ‘Gulet?’ he asked Zubi.

  ‘You guys fancy a walk on the roof today?’ Zubi asked, turning to the three of us. ‘English boy, the daily walk rule is that we all go or we all stay.’

  From the look on their faces, the others weren’t exactly wetting themselves with excitement at the prospect, but I’d been looking forward to exercise hour all day, up there on the roof, stretching my legs with the sky above my head and maybe even a good view across Moscow.

  ‘Yeah, lovely, I fancy a bit of fresh air,’ I said.

  I had it stuck in my imagination that the yard was going to be like the ones you see in the films: a couple of guys doing some weights, a few others playing basketball or football, others walking, chatting and smoking, all of them happy to be out of the confinement of their cells. The reality was something else. The outdoor exercise area, two floors above our cell, was barely outside at all. It was a dingy, corrugated iron shack, almost entirely enclosed from the elements. There was a one-foot gap between the roof and the top of the walls, which were far too high to see over, and there were also a few narrow cracks between the joins of the iron sheets through which I could just about make out the city in the distance when I squeezed one eye up against them. Nor was it the great open area I’d been imagining as we were led up the four flights of steps from our corridor. It can’t have measured much more than twenty foot by twenty, which was not much bigger than our cell.