The English Prisoner

by Tig Hague

  We headed down the corridor, through a final series of metal gates and doors. Through the open doors of the offices and guards’ rooms to my right, I could see small barred windows high up on the walls that looked out on to a courtyard at ‘street level’. As we hurried past I caught fleeting glimpses of car wheels and the legs of prison employees as far as the knees, which gave me hope that we might still be able to get a mobile signal in our new cell. The corridor was long, like all the others in Piet, but the ceiling was much lower, which gave it the feel of a bunker. It was also damp, poorly lit and most of the pale green paint had started to come away from the walls. But what struck me the most was the quiet of the place, the stillness. There was no tapping, no muffled voices coming from behind the doors we passed, no sound of human activity. It was dead space.

  We turned right, into a small alcove off the main corridor with two cell doors on either side, and the guard unlocked and opened the first door on the left to reveal a very small room. I followed Zubi in and the door crashed shut behind us. Even with the low-wattage light bulb hanging from the centre of the low ceiling it took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the murkiness, but it was obvious why they called it ‘the dungeon’. The room was no more than eight feet long by eight wide by eight high, a cube of gloom, with two bunk beds on the wall opposite the door and two to the left that joined each other in the right angle of the walls. To the left, between the door and the head of the bunk opposite, was a hole in the ground and above it a small stained, chipped basin with a cold tap that was leaking and whistling. There was just enough room for Zubi and I to stand up next to each other, though we were uncomfortably close, but there was no space for our bags, which we had to lift on to one of the lower bunks. Zubi took the top bunk opposite the door because it was slightly longer than the other, and on the wall above it there was a small slatted ventilation opening, which he immediately inspected. ‘That should get us a mobile signal,’ he said, sitting on the bunk with his legs dangling over the side and bending his head forward to avoid hitting the ceiling. We sat in silence for a while, sighing loudly, not needing to articulate our despair. I lit a cigarette and almost immediately stubbed it out on the damp stone floor. For twenty minutes we lay on our backs on the top bunks staring at the ceiling less than two feet above us, until the silence was broken by the sound of the door being opened.

  In walked a chubby man with bouffant blond hair, a pasty complexion and dark bags under his eyes, early thirties going on early fifties – an ugly, unhealthy version of the cricketer Shane Warne. He placed his matras and sumka on the bunk below and muttered some kind of greeting to us before breaking out in a coughing fit. I grunted back, making little effort to disguise my disappointment at his arrival. I realized I’d seen him before. During the fight in the showers with cell 309 he had been the one knocked unconscious when it all kicked off. Zubi started a conversation with him, which was hard going because the guy couldn’t stop wheezing and spluttering. In between sentences he cleared his nose and throat and spat noisily into the toilet hole next to where he was standing.

  ‘Man, this is quickly going from bad to worse to Hell itself,’ Zubi said to me in English. ‘I know for a fact that this fat piece of shit’s a fucking grass. They’ve put him in here to spy on us and find our phone.’

  Edik was a repulsive piece of work and I loathed him like I’ve never loathed anyone, even though we were unable to communicate with each other and barely a dozen words ever passed between us. He was an informer, a scumbag scab, a ‘kaziol’, the lowest form of life in a prison, whose vile presence in that tiny hole of a room denied me my contact with home and the world beyond. For five weeks I spent twenty-three out of twenty-four hours of every day doing nothing but lying on my top bunk – and there was barely a conscious moment during that time when I didn’t want to swing my leg round and kick that fucking animal in his fat, gormless face.

  He told Zubi he was in for fraud and that he had a trial pending, but his story and the slippery way he conducted himself didn’t add up to that. Zubi was convinced he had committed some kind of sex crime and that he had cut some deal with the authorities whereby he agreed to work as an informer inside Piet in return for a reduced sentence. The guards used to keep him supplied with cheap alcohol and foul-smelling, fatty cuts of pork, both of which he claimed his wife paid for on the outside. He was also allowed to leave the cell several times a week – where he went, God only knows – and his relationship with the guards was suspiciously cosy and easy-going. There was something not quite right about him and even I, with no Russian, could tell that.

  Our basic rights, by contrast, were denied to us. We were never asked if we wanted to take our daily walk up on the roof, and for the first two weeks we weren’t even allowed a shower. Some days they never even brought us any food. For fifteen days we never left that hole in the ground, which was so small you couldn’t even pace up and down to walk off some frustration and get the circulation going. In the open area below the bunks, you could take only two steps in any direction before you walked into a wall, a door, a bunk or a toilet hole. The only times I stood up were (a) when I cooked myself some noodles or a coffee, using Zubi’s hand-held element, (b) when I used the toilet, or washed, and (c) when a guard opened the door and we all had to stand to attention. When that happened, two of us had to stand back to back because there wasn’t enough room for us all to line up shoulder to shoulder. And when one of us was cooking or washing or using the toilet, the other two had to retreat to their bunks to create some space.

  The rest of the time I lay on my bunk and slept and day-dreamed and read my court papers over and over again, trying to perfect what I’d tell the court during my cross-examination. And all the while, not three feet from where I lay and breathed, Edik chain-smoked and coughed and spat and shat and masturbated and cooked pork fat over his little electric cooker. He had some kind of problem with his bowels from the day he arrived. At least three or four times a day he squatted over the hole in the ground and farted and strained and splattered the floor with diarrhoea, then wiped his arse with his hand, running it underneath the tap between wipes. Every time Zubi and I saw him pull down his tracksuit bottoms, we rolled over to face the wall and pulled our heads inside our T-shirts while wrapping our arms over our heads to block out the horrendous noise and smell. I never once saw him brush his teeth, or go to the showers. In short, Edik was an unhygienic chain-smoker with diarrhoea, a bronchial disorder and the manners and charm of a sewer pig.

  The room was so thick with his cigarette fumes that after a few days I gave up smoking. I didn’t need my own cigarettes because, in that tightly confined airless space, it was passive smoking bordering on the active. I was worried about my health too; falling ill was a very real possibility in the squalid, smoky, damp conditions. The most exercise I got was climbing on and off my bunk, and my main source of nutrition came from a packet of cheap Russian noodles.

  Within a few days of our arrival, perhaps a week, a heavy melancholy descended on me. It was different and altogether bigger and more alarming than plain sadness or frustration or anger. It felt almost physical as it seeped into every corner of my soul and body, squeezing out the rising sense of hope I had begun to feel in the days and weeks since my family and Lucy had come to visit. For hour upon hour I lay on my back staring listlessly at the ceiling, and soon the smallest task began to feel like the mightiest effort, even getting off my bunk to boil up some noodles or holding a conversation with Zubi that involved me producing more than two sentences. I was weighed down, almost crushed, by lethargy and misery – and once again, I was indebted to Zubi for keeping me afloat. He, too, was suffering the blues, but his innate exuberance refused to be killed off completely and every now and then, maybe once a day, he’d burst into colourful life.

  ‘Right, English boy!’ he’d suddenly shout, bounding down from his bunk. ‘It’s about time you shaved my head again ’cos I ain’t catching the insects hiding in that fat fucker’s pubes. Isn�
�t that right, Edik? You’re a fat, disgusting animal covered in insects and when I’m out of here I’m gonna hunt you down and stab you through the fucking heart!’ he added, smiling at Edik as he abused him.

  Zubi made me laugh at least a couple of times a day, and that was enough to snap me out of my gloom for a short while. There were two other good moments in the week: first, when Edik left for one of his alleged interviews with his lawyers, which used to happen every two or three days, and, second, when we bribed the guards to let us use the showers, which we managed to do twice a week after the first fortnight. I managed to call home three times, once to speak to Lucy and twice to Mum and Dad, but the conversations were rushed and unsatisfying and I was no happier – and none the wiser about my case – as I hurriedly stuffed the phone back inside Zubi’s matras after only a few minutes in case Edik or a guard returned.

  When Edik was gone I also tried to use the toilet, because I couldn’t bear having to squat down right next to him with his face no more than a couple of feet from mine. (Zubi, though, liked to shit right next to him, especially when he was cooking up his pork fat.) It was while he was gone, too, that I took the chance to shave my body to prevent it becoming infested with lice. I tried to shave as often as possible, every two or three days if I could, because the longer I left it the harder it was to remove the hair and the more likely it became that I’d cut myself. And I really didn’t want an open wound in that filthy hellish pit, no matter how small. But I didn’t want to be stark bollock naked, trimming my privates or my arse, with that grim little ogre sitting an arm’s length away.

  It wasn’t long before my health started to give way. A week or so after we’d been transferred I picked up a chest infection, presumably from Edik, which began mildly enough but became increasingly painful as it burrowed deeper into my lungs. It got to the point where it was agony to cough and Zubi, fearing I might have developed tuberculosis, started badgering the guards to get them to arrange an appointment with a prison doctor. TB was rife throughout the Russian prison system, and if I was found to be suffering from it I would be removed from Piet and placed in a hospital prison with fellow sufferers. I was taken to the medical area for an X-ray and then for five days I lay in the cell nervously awaiting the news. Finally, one of the guards came to tell Zubi to inform me that the results were negative and that I was suffering nothing worse than a severe chest infection and didn’t need treatment.

  If putting Edik in to live with us in that disgusting little cell was intended as a punishment, it certainly worked. Together with the squalor and the denial of our basic rights, his presence made our detention a form of torture. Living in those conditions amounted to a slow, insidious, relentless assault on our mental well-being or health, and by the time I was taken out to go to court, the edges of my sanity were starting to crumble and crack.

  Of all Edik’s revolting habits, the one that wound me up more than any other was his practice of getting up in the dead of night and cooking up his pork fat. Sala, as it is called in Russian, is a slab of rubbery fat with a meagre strip of meat along the bottom, like a massive, uncooked pork scratching. It is the cheapest cut of the animal but it has one virtue in that being mainly fat it takes ages to go off, and Edik was able to keep shopping bags full of the stuff. At least once a day he used to assemble the makeshift cooker by bending a metal coil into a circle and attaching two wires to the ancient electricity socket in the wall. When the coil turned red with heat, Edik removed four tiles from above the toilet area and built a stand on which to rest his pan. As soon as he started frying the pork, greasy fumes rose up into the already fetid, smoky atmosphere, but the worst part was watching and listening to him eating it. He reminded me of a dog with a bone, the way he sat on the edge of his bunk noisily tearing off strips of the slimy fat, licking his fingers and wiping his mouth on his sleeves, quietly moaning and growling with satisfaction.

  One night, during the third week in Razburg, towards the end of September, I’d dozed so much during that day that I was still wide awake in the small hours, rolling around in frustration, my head full of the dark fears that the night always brought. It was always hot in Razburg, partly because there was no proper ventilation, but mainly because there were three human beings living in a room the size of a bathroom, and when Edik fired up his mini-cooker, it got hotter still. Ten minutes earlier, I had listened to him carrying out his other favourite pastime when he rolled over to face the wall and pleasured himself into a tissue, making no effort to conceal his joy and excitement as he reached his climax. You don’t want to hear anyone masturbating, but with Edik, half-man half-animal, the sound was especially hideous.

  I watched him rise from his bed, adjust his grimy tracksuit bottoms and drop his soiled tissue into the open bucket for used toilet paper next to the hole in the ground. Immediately he plugged in his cooker, tore off a strip of sala from a plastic bag and chopped half an onion in among the sizzling pig flesh. I was lying on my side, staring with repugnance and hatred, and I watched him flick a cigarette into his mouth and leave it hanging there as he sat on his bunk and began flipping his piece of fat.

  The fumes were getting ever thicker and more acrid, and the anger started to well up from my stomach. Before I knew what I was doing, in a single bound I was off my bunk and screaming in his face. He knocked over his pot of pig and bashed his shoulder on Zubi’s bunk above as he jumped to his feet and backed away into the corner, cowering. With both fists clenched out at my side, I was bending forward over the cooker between us, a tirade of ranting abuse rushing from my mouth: ‘You fucking filthy fucking low-down fucking animal! You’re ruining my life, you fat fucking nobcunt! Turn that fucking cooker off you fucking disgusting pikey cunt, scab, goat bastard, mother-fucker or I’m going to shove that lump of pig fat right up your fat fucking arse…’

  I felt Zubi’s hand on my shoulder, reaching down from the bunk and trying to pull me away as Edik whimpered, in English, ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry…’ I raised my right fist above my head and gritted my teeth at him, making him flinch and lower himself further down the wall. ‘You make me fucking sick,’ was all I could say before climbing back on to my bunk, coughing violently and shaking all over.

  It was at that moment that I realized quite how far my head had gone. I was turning into some kind of animal, or at least into a much lower form of human life than the one that had boarded the plane at Heathrow two and a half months earlier. My only encouragement was that the longer I’d spent in Piet, the less likely they were to hand me a custodial sentence at my trial, and my only comforts were the dreams, both conscious and not, of being reunited with Lucy. I’d never thought I could love her more than I did when I had left England, but my longing for her became almost unbearable.

  I had to stay strong for two more weeks before my nightmare was over once and for all. My trial had finally been scheduled to take place on 9 October.

  12

  ‘Tomorrow you go home, eh?’ said the guard as he took off my handcuffs and led me through a side door into the dock of the empty courtroom. To my left was the judge’s bench, raised a couple of feet from the ground, and behind it there was a wooden carving, depicting Russia’s coat of arms – a two-headed eagle in gold on a bright red background. The Russian tricolour, three horizontal stripes of white, blue and red, hung on the wall next to it. The lawyer’s tables were straight ahead of me and to my right there were half a dozen benches for family and friends. I sat in silence for ten minutes, trying to steady my nervous, irregular breathing while going through my well-rehearsed explanations for a final time.

  The doors at the rear of the room were opened by a court official and slowly the room began to fill with the dozen or so people connected to my case. Nick, the British Embassy official who had taken over my brief from Pete Smith, was the first through the door, followed by Piskin and Arseny, my old client who had brought in Artur, the legal ‘fixer’. Arseny winked and gave me the thumbs-up sign, and I waved back, but Piskin didn’t look over as he
walked to the table closest to me and unloaded papers from his fat briefcase. I was barely aware of him anyhow, because my eyes were drawn to Mum and Lucy as they came in with big warm, apprehensive smiles wrapped across their faces. I wanted to hop the railings and run over to them, or shout out, but all we could do was sit and blow kisses and make silly, upbeat faces and hand signals at each other.

  A state-appointed translator came and sat next to the dock, positioning herself close to the railings. The prosecuting lawyer, a young man with poor skin and tinted, yellow-lensed aviator-style glasses, sat at his table and arranged his documents. The court clerk and recorder took their seats close to the judge’s bench and a guard or a policeman took his position by the rear door. The room was silent but for the shuffling of papers and feet and my occasional, phlegmy coughing.

  The judge appeared through a side door opposite me and strode purposefully to her seat behind the bench as we all stood in respect. It was the same judge who had sat at my bail hearing, and she wasted no time in starting the proceedings. I had imagined that my trial would be a painstakingly slow affair, but this judge was clearly trying to move the action along at a brisk pace, snapping at Piskin, the prosecutor and the clerk from the moment we sat down. I didn’t understand a word they were saying, of course, but I could tell from the snippets of translation returning to me and by the rate of exchanges taking place that she was in no mood for dallying. I was encouraged by her sense of urgency because it chimed with my own feelings over the past three months: Come on, let’s get a bit of snap into this case and put this whole trivial affair behind us and move on! Zubi had told me that she was the same judge who’d released Ranjit and that gave me even greater confidence as she nodded at the clerk to get the trial under way.