The English Prisoner

by Tig Hague

  ‘The way I see it, there’ll be some bother for a week or two, then it’ll die down. They’ll tap and tap and tap but we won’t reply. We don’t take our exercise hour on the roof for a while either, ’cos that’s just more room for friction and confrontation. The only thing we gotta watch is shower day – Tuesday, which is tomorrow…’

  Zubi shot a glance at me. He could see I was worried.

  ‘Don’t worry, you’ll be just fine, English boy. They know it’s not you calling the shots in the cell. They know it’s Zubi, the black guy with the mouth, the only black guy in the whole goddam place! They don’t like niggers in here, so if anyone’s going to get it in the back it’s me. You can just stand there smiling and looking pretty, English boy. Leave it to Zubi. By next Tuesday the whole fuss will have blown over.’

  We said farewell to Ranjit with a hug and a slap on the back as he was led away after breakfast for his trial, dressed in his best shirt and trousers, which he had pressed by folding them under his mattress and sleeping on them. ‘Divide all my belongings between you,’ he said, carrying only his court papers. He was a sweet, gentle guy, Ranjit, but I hoped with all my heart that I never saw him again, at least not in the Russian prison system, because what happened to him at trial that day would give me a pretty strong idea of my own fate. If he didn’t come back, the outlook looked promising for me, our cases being so similar. If he returned, I knew I was going to feel crushed because Ranjit couldn’t have been in a better position to walk free: he had no criminal record, his family had paid off all the relevant people and he had an excellent legal team. If he went down, I’d be following him in a couple of months.

  My own lawyer, Alfred Piskin, the grey-haired Russian guy brought in by the law firm at the bail hearing, was coming to visit me that day, and I woke up with a sense of renewed hope despite the daroga dramas in the night. I grew increasingly fidgety as the day wore on and still no one had come to take me down to the interview rooms on the ground floor. I wrote my diary, smoked twice as many fags as normal, washed my hair, paced around the room, and still the guard never came. At one stage, on Zubi’s suggestion, I even shaved my entire body – every last inch of it – so that I didn’t get any lice or nits. It was standard prison practice, he told me, and I had to do it once a week at least from now on. He asked me to shave his head for him for the same reasons. It was a weird feeling, an uncomfortably intimate act, as I smothered his scalp – a virtual stranger’s – with foam and then carefully shaved off the stubbly growth, trying not to nick him.

  Finally, at around five o’clock, I heard the rattle of the keys and a guard opened the door, exclaiming: ‘Hague, Tig!’ As he waited outside in the corridor I gathered up my court papers and slid a letter to Lucy inside my slipper, feeling my heart starting to race as I did so. As we made the long walk down endless corridors and flights of stairs to the basement, the metal gates crashing behind us, one after the other, I had a job keeping the letter from sliding out of my backless grandad slippers, given to me by Ranjit, and I had to curl my toes up really tightly to hold it in place. When we reached the metal-barred door, before we could enter the visiting area, I started shitting myself again when I was told to spread my arms and legs and lean against the wall while they gave me the pat-down, right down to my ankles, then up again. It was a nerve-racking moment even though the letter contained nothing compromising. It was just a love letter.

  I was put into a dimly lit booth, one of about twenty in the holding area, which felt like an upside down coffin, or a cubicle without a toilet. It was so tight you could barely have squeezed one more body in there. It contained a narrow bench fixed to the wall and nothing else, and I sat down on it, trying not to look at all the bogeys and what looked like shit and dried blood that had been smeared down the walls and the door. I lit a fag and stared at the floor, and despite the grim surroundings I was excited about the meeting and my knees were quivering and bouncing up and down. Who knew what good news the lawyer might bring? He might even have a done deal? Perhaps Garban Icap had brought some money and pressure to bear on the authorities. They were, after all, as they liked to tell everyone, ‘the world’s largest derivatives broker’ and presumably that meant they had a bit of political clout with an emerging economy like Russia’s. Besides, it couldn’t be good for their reputation to have one of their brokers languishing in a prison on trumped-up drugs charges. Surely they’d want the matter dealt with quickly.

  After fifteen minutes a guard led me into a square, windowless room with a metal table and chairs fixed to the middle of the concrete floor, presumably because they were potential weapons. There was a doorbell buzzer fixed on to the table, to alert the guards, and the scene was made all the starker by the strip of bright fluorescent light above our heads. First Piskin, then Julia, the translator from the bail hearing, shook my hand. She had a friendly face with a generous smile – unlike Piskin. I arrived pent up with hope, but by the time I shook his hand an hour later I was totally deflated. Julia smiled at me for England but there was no disguising that the meeting was a depressing waste of everybody’s time. We went through the events of my arrest at the airport again, and when I protested forcefully that the weight of the drug had been increased by at least ten times at the airport, speaking slowly and mechanically he replied through Julia: ‘And who do you think the judge is going to believe? You, a man who admits smoking hashish, or the Customs authorities and Russian police force? Is there any evidence to prove that they have fabricated the evidence?’

  At the end of the meeting I gave Julia the letter to send to Lucy and I was asked to sign a form giving permission for them to send the belongings in my suitcase back to England, or to be kept by a friend in Moscow until my trial and/or sentence was over. The only positive to be drawn from the meeting came when I asked him what he thought would happen at the trial. A suspended sentence and a fine was the most likely outcome, he said with the faintest glimmer of a smile. Especially as I would already have served a couple of months, at least, he added. That was no more than I had been expecting, but at least he hadn’t raised the possibility that I might be detained even longer.

  When I shook his hand I tried to hold eye contact with him – as I couldn’t talk to him this seemed the most direct way of communicating with him – and I was hoping that the look on my face said: ‘Please, please do your best for me. You’ve got to get me out of here.’ After they’d left, Peter the Embassy guy came in and there was, at least, some basic satisfaction to be had from talking directly to someone in my own language. He was a nice enough guy with a winning grin and he made lots of reassuring noises about making sure I was being treated properly and that my human rights were being respected. He said – and this gave me a lift – that he had been fielding a lot of calls from family and friends back home. ‘Your brother Rob doesn’t mince his words, does he?’ he said, and I smiled at the thought of my little brother, a big aggressive character but generous and loyal to a fault, giving it some lip down the line to the British Embassy. Good old Rob, he wouldn’t let me rot in here.

  At the end he asked me to write out a list of clothes and provisions that I wanted the Embassy to bring in, which they would do after receiving the funds from back home. There were strict rules and limits, he explained, on what prisoners were allowed. For instance, you weren’t allowed sugar or rice or potatoes because you can make alcohol from them and you weren’t allowed glass jars because they could be fashioned into weapons. My shopping list contained the following: two sheets, two pillow cases, two tracksuits, some socks, pants, T-shirts, a fleece, a water boiler, as much fresh food as possible, especially fruit and veg, noodles, coffee, onions and garlic and as many cigarettes as they could fit in the truck. Cigarettes were the main currency in Piet, Zubi had told me, because we could use them to bribe the guards and pay off the volk. Every few weeks all the cells were required by the volk to make a contribution to a general pot so that goods could be handed out to the less fortunate prisoners, the ones with absolutel
y nothing of their own who didn’t have people on the outside to help them out. Contributing a block of smokes would win me a lot of Brownie points.

  As I began to write out my wish list I felt a minor thrill that I’d soon be receiving a delivery of material comforts to help me through the coming weeks, or months, but by the time I’d completed it a heavy melancholy had descended on me. The realization had sunk in that by storing up on supplies I was effectively preparing for a long period of hibernation; I was hunkering down, building and feathering my nest for the harsh months ahead.

  When I got back to the cell it was about seven o’clock and there was a cup of stone cold liquid left by the bilander man. Looking at it, it was impossible to tell whether it was the soup shit, or the porridge shit. Both were grey with lumps in. I threw it down the toilet hole and cooked up some noodles with onions and a few slices of the cold sausage the Russians call kolbasa. There was still no sign of Ranjit, which was highly promising, but Zubi explained that sometimes you didn’t get back from court until almost midnight because they drove around Moscow for hours, often in bad traffic, dropping prisoners off at different gaols and detention centres. ‘If he ain’t back by midnight, we can start celebrating for him – and for you!’ said Zubi.

  Waiting for nothing to happen, willing nothing to happen, was an odd feeling. I lay on my bed praying for Ranjit’s freedom, but really I was praying for my own. I told Zubi about my frustrating meeting with Piskin and he was up off his bunk and throwing his arms up in the air, telling me that a good lawyer with some cash in his back pocket would have had me out by now. ‘Sack him! Sack him now! Zubi’ll arrange a new legal team who will get you out of here, guaran-fucking-teed.’

  It was difficult to know who to put my trust in: a drug dealer who sounded like he knew the system and all the underhand tricks, or a steady, dull, middle-aged lawyer with years of experience? And did I hand over up to 30,000 dollars of my family’s money to a shady Russian lawyer, linked to a drugs dealer, whose only guarantee was his word? If we had money to burn, fine, but I had nothing like that in my account. There was about 1,000 quid to see us through to the end of the month, plus about 5,000 quid in savings – but that was for the deposit on the house we were trying to buy.

  I was wrestling with all these dilemmas when, at around eleven o’clock, a guard pulled back the eye-slot and summoned Zubi. I sat bolt upright and listened to their brief muffled exchange. ‘Ranjit’s free,’ smiled Zubi, as the eye-slot slid shut with a metallic clink. ‘He got a suspended sentence and a fine.’

  ‘Good on him,’ I said, punching the air. I sparked up a cigarette and started pacing the room excitedly. A tremor of guilt ran over me as I realized I didn’t actually give a flying toss about Ranjit. I was only happy for me.

  8

  I had to squeeze my towel as tight as I could so that nobody could see how much my hands were trembling as we lined up in the corridor outside the shower area in the basement. ‘These are the dudes from cell 309 next door,’ whispered Zubi. ‘And they ain’t happy. Stick close to me.’

  Zubi had explained earlier that there were three rooms in the wash area, each of them occupied by one or two cells at a time with a fourth cell waiting its turn in the corridor outside. In the first room you got changed, hung your clothes up on a trolley and waited to be called into the showers. When they were turned off, you moved through into a third room where the guard had wheeled the trolley with the clothes, and the next cell was brought into the showers. And so on until the whole prison had been washed.

  The guards stood outside as we filed silently into the first room, which was no bigger than our cells. Slowly, we started to undress. The floor beneath my slippers was slimy and I had to be careful not to slip as I began to peel off my T-shirt and then my tracksuit bottoms. It was cramped, though, and it was impossible not to come into contact with the people standing around me. There were two dozen bodies in the dank, airless room less than half the size of a squash court, and the stench coming off the other guys was nauseating. It was the smell of mildly rotten human beings. Clearly these guys didn’t wash between showers, or brush their teeth, or clean their clothes.

  Most of us had completely stripped off and were cupping our hands over our cocks waiting for the call to proceed to the showers when one character started ranting at Zubi, who was standing right next to me. The guy was early twenties, dark and hairy, with craggy teeth and wild ‘fuck you’ eyes. He wasn’t big, but wiry and knotty. He looked like he didn’t give a shit about himself, let alone anyone else. He started tugging at Zubi’s shirt, while angrily remonstrating with him. Without turning to me, Zubi said in English:

  ‘This joker says I should give him my clothes because I’m a piece of nigger shit, and he’s a nice white boy. And I told him he’s an ignorant cunt who can kiss my black ass.’

  One of the other older Russians grabbed the arm of his cellmate and told him to cool it. Zubi didn’t take his eyes off his tormentor as he unzipped his tracksuit and hung it on the rail with his T-shirt. We were all naked, standing and waiting in silence, when the young guy lunged forward and went to grab Zubi’s clothes.

  The room went into slow motion. It was just a sequence of images, stills almost, or a slideshow. I saw Zubi’s hand thrust out and push the hairy guy in the chest. The hairy guy flew backwards, his feet flying up in front of him as he slipped and landed smack on his backside in a pile of bodies. His face curled up in rage as he scrambled to his feet and hurled himself at Zubi. I found myself trying to back away towards the wall, but there were too many bodies in the way, and there was uproar.

  Except for about eight or ten guys who had squeezed up against the walls, everyone else was piling in, punching and kicking the fuck out of each other randomly. The scene would have looked almost comical to onlookers, with twenty-five cocks flapping around and everyone trying to keep their balance on the slimy floor as the fists flew. But it didn’t feel in the least bit funny where I stood. The room appeared to have moved around 180 degrees and I found myself right next to Zubi in the corner, both of us thrashing out at anyone within arm’s length. I was gasping for breath as the adrenaline coursed through me, but Zubi was somehow managing to throw some Russian insults with the same speed as his fists. At six foot four, two or three inches taller than me, he had a long reach and very few of them managed to lay a blow on him. I held out my upturned left hand like a traffic cop to try and stop the blows, but one fist smashed my arm out of the way and caught me above the eye. My right arm and fist, meanwhile, were going back and forth like an out-of-control steam piston, but I was making only glancing contact with the guys flailing in front of me. Only once did I make proper contact and that was right on the side of the hairy guy’s head, which hurt me a lot more than it hurt him.

  The fight was barely two minutes old when the guards burst through the door, holding their truncheons above their heads, and screamed for order. Almost instantly, the whole room stopped and we all stood panting, slowly dropping our fists to our sides. A fat guy with a pasty face and a mop of blond hair was on the floor, completely sparko, and half a dozen others had blood wounds on the face. Zubi had a slight swelling under his left eye and I had a trickle of blood coming from my eyebrow. Two guards lifted the unconscious guy out into the corridor while a third opened the door to the shower room, the steam bellowing out as he motioned us in with his truncheon, barking something in Russian as we filed past him. Through the haze of the showers I could see people’s chests heaving quickly as they tried to recover their breath and composure. It was over now, you could tell by the atmosphere. All the tension had disappeared as fast as the water down the big drain in the middle of the floor, and as I stood with my face under the stream of hot water, I heard Zubi’s voice chuckling through the steam: ‘What did I tell you, English boy? Bunch of pussies, eh?’

  I was set for a meeting with my lawyers the following day, and I’d needed to speak to everyone back in England to find out what was going on at their end and tell them
what to do next – in accordance with Zubi’s advice. I’d needed to let them know that I had next to no faith in Piskin and that we needed to be looking at all the alternatives. I also wanted to press them to start raising a ‘bribery fund’ to buy our way out. Zubi was insistent that hard cash was the only way I could guarantee walking free, partly because that’s the way the system worked but especially because I’d been naïve enough to admit my guilt. To a Russian court faced with a congested backlog, my case looked cut-and-dried, as Zubi kept pointing out. ‘What kind of mother-fuck is going to believe the self-confessed drug-taker’s claims that the authorities exaggerated the amount he was carrying and then trumped up the charges to get him on smuggling? Answer: no one, English boy. I’m afraid it’s good night, Vienna, see you in seven years, English boy, unless you get the wallet out and start doling out all them dollars you earn back in London.’

  Zubi was constantly pressing me to take control of the situation, to start running the show from the inside and not to let the case drift with the state lawyer, who was going to pick up the same size cheque whether he gave a shit about me and my case or not. The only way I could do that was with the mobile phone, but disaster struck that evening when Zubi plugged the charger into the socket and, literally, it went up in a puff of smoke – along with all the hopes I’d been building up of negotiating my escape from the inside. It was a crushing moment. My one cause for hope, my one source of comfort, my one means of power, my one way of communicating with the outside world – they all disappeared in one heart-stopping instant.

  I was now completely cut off from outside help, abandoned to the mercy of fate and the whims of the Russian judicial system. There had been a great deal of low moments in the previous week, but that was the lowest. Even Zubi, a spring of positive thinking so far, appeared at a loss. He put his head in his hands, muttering: ‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’ Angrily, he wrapped the cord around the plug, leapt on to the top bunk in a single bound and, sticking his right arm through the bars, hurled it as far as he could into the darkness of the giant courtyard below. A couple of seconds later I heard it crack on the paving stones.