The English Prisoner

by Tig Hague

  I was asked to stand and give my name and date of birth and then the clerk read out the charges against me. I had just sat back down when the judge, via the translator, asked me if I had received a particular document to sign. I had no idea what document she meant and I looked helplessly at the translator, not knowing which one of them wasn’t making herself understood. The judge repeated the question, but I still didn’t know what she was talking about and I launched into one of my pre-prepared answers about what had happened at the airport and the pressure I’d felt under, in the absence of a lawyer, to sign the Russian document they had put before me. She listened to about ten seconds of Julia’s translation before cutting her off with a wave of the hand and motioning to the prosecutor to start.

  As the prosecutor opened his case and one sentence fell upon the next in rapid succession, it was obvious it was going to be hard to keep pace with what was being said. The translator was hunched forward listening to the proceedings and every half a minute or so she leant back and fired a burst of translation through the railings. I was only getting a fraction of the action, no more than a brief, loose summary of what was being said.

  The small Gollum-like Customs official who had stopped me at the airport was the first witness to be called, and he kept his head down as he walked to the front of the room and read out his statement, occasionally interrupted by the prosecutor and the judge – and just once, very briefly, by Piskin. It was difficult to know exactly what he was saying, but three of his assertions were blatantly untrue. First, he said I had tried to run for the exit in the Customs hall before he called me back. Second, he said that all the clothes in my suitcase were grey, including the jeans in which he had found the hashish. (My suit and socks were the only grey items.) Third, he said the piece of hash was very large and that there were lots of packets of rolling papers.

  I started shaking my head and muttering under my breath, ‘Not true! Not true!’ and I tried to attract Piskin’s attention to get him to interrupt and challenge, but he just carried on, looking straight ahead or jotting down notes in his pad. I presumed he was respecting Russian court procedure, biding his time and waiting for his opportunity to hit back. Infuriated by the Customs officer’s lies, half-truths and exaggerations, I frowned over at Lucy and shrugged my shoulders, a sense of disquiet growing in me by the minute. When the Customs officer said that the lump of hash was ‘very large’, I put my hand up and looked at the judge but nobody paid me any attention and after ten seconds or so I sheepishly put it down.

  The prosecutor continued to lay out his case, reading out the statements I had signed at the airport and at the police station the day after my arrest. The translator, constantly umming and aahing and tripping over her choice of words, relayed, at a generous guess, roughly 25 per cent of what was being said. I started getting restless, leaning back and forth in my chair in exasperation, shuffling my feet, biting my nails, running my hands through my hair, exchanging concerned glances with Lucy and Mum. My experiences, my fate, my life were the subject of the exchanges going back and forth across the room but I barely had a clue what was being said. It was as though I was watching a show about my life in a language I didn’t understand, a foreign film without subtitles.

  After twenty minutes the judge invited me to stand and the prosecutor walked over to begin questioning me. I had learned my lines to perfection, but they were no use now as the very ugly young man, whose eyes I couldn’t see behind his tinted glasses, started to unload a quick-fire series of questions at me, barely giving me time to compose my thoughts before piling in with a follow-up question. It made it even harder that I was having to pause to try to understand exactly what the translator meant when she passed on his questions. I kept trying to impose my own order on the cross-examination by going back to the beginning and describing in simple, plain language what had really happened. But after five minutes I was struggling for the right words and starting to panic; and the more I panicked the more confused my thoughts became. All eyes in the courtroom were turned to me as I flailed around in my head trying to get my answers right, but I was aware, as I spoke, that everything I was saying was going to be mashed up in translation anyhow. From time to time, I caught sight of Mum and Lucy’s desperate faces, creased up in anxiety and sympathy, as I tripped over my words, sounding anything but polished and convincing.

  I had been waiting for three months for this chance to put the record straight, imagining that when the moment came I would get to my feet and, with a rhetorical flourish, would lay out the truth, simply and eloquently. I would speak without bitterness or anxiety as the court hung on my every convincing word and at the end of it, common sense and decency would win the day and I’d be sent on my way with a fine and perhaps an apology for my long detention and the way I had been treated.

  But in the event I was seized by confusion and panic, and once my garbled answers had passed through my shredding machine of a translator, I must have come across like an incoherent fool who didn’t know his own mind.

  My mouth was dry and my stomach knotted when the judge cut off the prosecutor and asked me to explain the contradictions between the statements I had made at the airport and the following day, and the one submitted by Piskin several weeks later. She was presenting me with a golden opportunity to recover some ground, and I took a deep breath to try to compose myself before slowly and deliberately rolling out my explanation, so that the translator would understand every last word. I told her how I’d been made to sign documents in Russian that I didn’t understand, how I had been denied a lawyer or an official from the British Embassy, how I had felt intimidated and confused, how the airport authorities had grossly exaggerated the weight of the piece of hashish, and how sorry and stupid I had been not to check my clothes and luggage properly before coming to Moscow.

  My performance was a slight improvement but, with the translator stammering her way through a few scraps of my testimony, there was barely any point in me saying anything at all. To compensate, I tried to communicate with the judge using facial expressions and hand gestures, hoping they’d tell her more than the abridged, emotionless, faltering version she was getting from the girl. When I was told to sit down, and the court broke for a forty-minute recess, I sat with my head in my hands for a few moments, convinced I had blown my big moment. I was put back in my cuffs and as the guard led me round the corner and back along the corridor I could see Lucy approaching from the other direction. As we crossed I quickly leant towards her and whispered, ‘I love you,’ but as I turned my head the guard nudged me in the back to move me on. He didn’t understand that she was the reason I got up in the morning.

  Lucy was the first to give evidence when the trial resumed, and my heart went out to her as she walked to the front of the court. She looked beautiful in her brown woollen top and jeans and her boots that clicked as she walked across the courtroom floor. She stood near the judge’s bench with her hands out in front of her, like a schoolgirl called to the front of the class to explain her conduct. The prosecutor rose to begin his cross-examination and I could see Lucy’s left leg shaking violently as he began to ask her about the suitcase she had allegedly packed for me on the eve of my flight. The prosecutor tore into her, asking her repeatedly to list every item she had put into the case. Every time she paused the prosecutor harried her for an answer. I closed my eyes and put my head in my hands, muttering, ‘Stay cool, Babe, just stay cool, in your own time…’ but she was clearly flustered. It wasn’t helping that she didn’t know whether she should be addressing the court translator, the prosecutor or the judge, and ended up looking from one to the other. I could see the growing desperation on her face as she shifted from one foot to the other and fidgeted with her hands and cuffs under the prosecutor’s aggressive line of questioning, and I had to restrain every instinct in my body from leaping the barrier and ripping his fucking head off his shoulders.

  The main issue of her cross-examination was the colour of the trousers in which the piece of has
h was discovered, with Lucy contradicting the Customs officer’s statement by saying, correctly, that they were light blue, not grey. The prosecutor accused her of lying, and she started cracking up, and there followed a horrible pause in the proceedings where the only noise in the courtroom was the sound of her sobbing and choking. It was at that moment that I remembered I had the very pair of jeans downstairs in my holding booth, and I leapt to my feet, shouting, ‘I’ve got them, I’ve got them. They’re downstairs!’

  Arseny shouted from the public benches, ‘Go get them!’ and for a brief moment there was an electric tension in the courtroom. I looked at Piskin, waiting for him to say something, but he remained stock still, staring vacantly ahead of him, and the judge motioned to me to sit down. What the hell was Piskin playing at? He might as well have stayed at home. Except for two or three brief exchanges with the judge about procedure, he’d sat through my trial in total silence! He didn’t challenge the integrity of my original statement, he didn’t cross-examine Lucy. He didn’t even cross-examine me!

  This eruption of excitement over the trousers signalled the end of Lucy’s cross-examination and she turned and gave me a loving, apologetic smile as she returned to her seat, wiping the tears from her face. Piskin stood up and started reading out some character references from people in the UK and clients in Russia, but after a couple of minutes the judge cut him off and he just sat down. We’d paid him thousands and thousands of dollars, to do next to nothing. The judge proceeded to sum up the evidence and then asked the prosecutor what the State recommended as a sentence. He stood up and said: ‘The State recommends five years for smuggling, and two for possession and acquisition.’ I’d known that was coming, but it didn’t make it any less painful when I heard Mum let out a cry and I watched her get up and disappear through the main door into the corridor, choking on her tears as she shuffled down the aisle. The judge said she would give her verdict in five days’ time, on Tuesday 14 October, and banged her gavel on the bench to signal the end of the trial.

  When the guard put my handcuffs back on he did it gently, and I was surprised that he was looking at me sympathetically, sighing quietly and shaking his head. His face said: ‘Well, you fucked that one up, eh, buddy?’ I tried to hold myself together as he led me back along the corridor through a blur of figures. I looked straight ahead, focusing on the wall at the end, but in my peripheral vision I could see Piskin, the prosecutor and the translator milling around by the main door to the court. As I approached Piskin, he looked over his shoulder at me and I leant forward, about twelve inches from his face, and said: ‘Thanks very much, Alfred. You’re a legal legend. Fucking brilliant.’ The guard kept me moving, and as we walked round the corner Lucy was standing near the door to the booths, tears pouring down her cheeks. Neither of us spoke. She blew me a kiss. I tried to return one but realized my hands were cuffed and she laughed as I disappeared down the stairs.

  As soon as I was back in the privacy of my booth below stairs I broke down, my head swarming with one grim vision of the future piling on top of another. Seven years! I’ll be thirty-eight – thirty-five if I get parole – by the time I get out. There’s no way Lucy will wait for me that long… Was that blown kiss a farewell?… I’ll never get a professional job again… or a mortgage… or a credit card… I’ll be an ex-con… I’ll get TB or HIV and die in a Russian camp in the middle of fucking nowhere… I’ll never see my family again…

  I was heaving and sobbing and moaning when Zubi, also in court that day, suddenly burst in, saying, ‘What’s wrong? What’s up? English boy, what happened?’ He put his arm around me and soon he started crying too.

  ‘I fucked it up, Zubi, I fucked it up! I’m going down! My life is fucked!’

  ‘Me too, man. Me too.’

  I put my head on his chest and we sobbed like babies.

  The journey to court the following Tuesday was a nightmare. One of the prisoners shat himself, filling the crowded truck with a nauseating stench that not even the cigarette smoke of thirty men could overpower. But the worst problem was sitting right opposite me in the form of a junkie, already delirious with drugs, who was drifting in and out of consciousness while trying to inject himself with a further hit. My legs were interlocked with his and he was so floppy that his head kept lurching forward as the truck kangarooed its way through the Moscow morning rush hour. In one hand he held a filthy syringe, loaded with God knows what, and every minute or so he’d make a feeble effort to stick it into his other arm. But he was away with the fairies and never succeeded. It crossed my mind that he was trying to top himself before he got to court. For an hour I didn’t dare take my eyes off him in case he fell forward and stabbed me with the syringe, and several times I had to gently lift his hand and put it back on his lap when it slid too close for comfort. After the first courtroom drop, when a couple of dozen prisoners were shipped out, the four of us sitting closest to the junkie lifted him down to the far end of the truck, letting his syringe fall to the floor, and then we all sat as far away as possible in case he puked.

  Mum and Lucy cried throughout the ten-minute verdict hearing. I sat impassively until I was asked to stand. The verdict came to me in staccato bursts of pidgin English through the railings…

  ‘Your sentencing is five years… You are four years for smuggling drugs and one years for the possessing… In Russia law, two sentences are being together, it is because four years, six months… You are in the Russian prison for four years and six months…’

  The judge brought her hammer down with a sharp rap, and as she rose from her chair and the rest of the courtroom followed suit, I sat down with a thud while she disappeared through the door. I looked around for Mum and Lucy but they had gone. Out in the corridor, I saw Mum from behind, sitting at the top of the main steps and leaning against the wall, her back and her head heaving up and down.

  ‘Mum! Mum!’

  13

  Christmas time, December 2003

  I woke up with a jolt as the guard jabbed his riot stick into my ribs. ‘Anglichanin, Mordoviya,’ he muttered down at me, barely opening his mouth. I sat up on my elbow, my head heavy with sleep, as he stepped among the prostate bodies, prodding an African, a Kurd and a Vietnamese with his stick. ‘Mordoviya!’ he mumbled at each of them. It was pitch black outside, and though the sun didn’t rise until about nine o’clock and I could only guess at the precise time, my body was telling me that it was still the dead of night. The four of us were slow to move and after a few moments the guard shattered the sleepy silence, bellowing in Russian, ‘Idi! Idi!’ (‘Go! Go!’) I was in no hurry to go to Mordovia, but I leapt to my feet. ‘The Great Fuck-All’ was what Zubi called the backwater province, famous for nothing but its prison camps. That’s all there was in Mordovia, just the ‘Zones’, or the gulags as some Russians still called them. Prison camps and snow and forests of pine and birch. In the middle of fucking nowhere, roughly 500 miles or, weather permitting, a long day’s drive from Moscow.

  Shortly after my trial they had transferred me from Piet Central to Krastna Prestnya, the transfer prison for convicts being moved to the Zones. My appeal failed a few weeks later in spite of hiring a new – supposedly hotshot – lawyer, who tried to get me off on a technicality. The judge reduced my sentence by a year, but that was no consolation or victory. Three years? Four years? What’s the bloody difference? Since then, I had done little but lie on my mattress – on the floor for the first week before graduating to a bunk – and wait to be taken away, keeping my head down and trying my best to avoid contact with my new cellmates. We were a motley collection of foreigners in cell 208. There were half a dozen sullen Chinese, some Vietnamese, a scattering of Africans, silent Afghans praying to Allah, a violent Bulgarian drunkard, a Hungarian kaziol, a few Kurds and two hard-nosed Turks who ran the cell – and me, the English boy with all the cigarettes and the noodles and the fancy trainers.

  The only guy I wanted to talk to in there was a middle-aged Nigerian called Philip, a very small, insec
ure, religious character with lively, intelligent eyes and unnaturally massive lips. He was not a well man: his eyes were yellow and he wheezed and coughed like a chronic asthmatic. On my arrival in the cell, he came and sat next to me and I gave him my sob story, but I felt a little ashamed when he began to spout his own woes. He had absolutely no one and nothing to comfort him: no money, no support from his embassy, no family or friends on the outside. Like most of the Africans, Philip had been convicted for selling drugs – he’d been sentenced to twelve years and, like many of his black brothers, he had seen the error of his ways and become deeply religious. He had been to Mordovia once before for a previous offence and was terrified about going back. More than anyone else Philip had filled me with dread about being moved to Mordovia, with his tales of how the guards worked him to the bone and were quick to hand out the beatings. But it was the malnutrition and health threats in Zone 22 that worried him the most, and in those few weeks before he was put on the convicts’ train, I shared all my food with him and gave him as much of it as I could to take to Mordovia to build up his strength.

  When he left, two weeks before me, he hugged me and said: ‘Thank you, thank you. I won’t forget your kindness. God will reward you.’

  Zubi had arrived a few days earlier, and it was a relief to see his friendly face in that grim, overcrowded cell. But in the space of a few weeks poor old Zubi had become a shadow of the person I’d met six months earlier. The judge had given him ten years, and he dragged his disappointment round like a ball and chain, visibly crushed by the length of his sentence. The fighting talk was gone, the shoulders were stooped, and he barely had the will to argue with Kadri, the Turkish smatriashi, or his hairy little right-hand man with the wonky eyes. He was appealing but he wasn’t optimistic about the outcome.