by Tig Hague
I gave him a pat on his shoulder as he slumbered, whispering: ‘See you in the Great Fuck-All, big man!’
Zubi pulled me closer and said: ‘Remember this, the motto of the Zones: Ne veri, ne boisia, ne prosi. Don’t trust, don’t be scared, don’t ask. Bon voyage, English boy. Watch your back now,’ he smiled.
The other three had only a small sumka each, while I was carrying a large one as well as two shopping bags and my ostentatiously plush black Samsonite suitcase. Mum had bought me a whole wardrobe’s worth of winter clothing to take to Mordovia, where the temperature sometimes fell to thirty, even forty, degrees below, and it was a struggle to carry it all across the room without bumping into the bodies sprawled out in various postures on the floor. I took special care not to knock into one of the five Chinese guys, recently added to the cell following their conviction for the brutal murder of two Russian men on the border. They were hard, miserable little fuckers when they arrived, but after they were handed life sentences, they really didn’t give a flying shit who they upset. If they got into a fight, or stepped out of line, what more did they have to lose?
The truck reversed violently and I had to cling on to the bench and press my feet down on the floor as the driver brought it to a juddering halt. The doors were thrown open and a few yards in front of us there was an old railway carriage with bars on the windows. A guard in combat gear and a black balaclava waved his sub-machine gun at us and then at the door and we followed him up the short steps into the carriage corridor. With a flick of his head he told us to enter one of the small compartments strung out along the length of the train. It was roughly the size of one of the first class apartments on the old British Rail trains and it was empty except for four wooden bunk shelves, two on each side, bracketed on to the walls. The four of us squeezed into the tight space, but we had so much luggage between us that we ended up stepping and falling over each other’s bags as we tried to manoeuvre ourselves round the restricted area. Leaving my bags on the floor I pulled myself up to one of the top shelves, lay down and stared at the ceiling about eighteen inches from my face.
Judging by the fading light it must have been mid-afternoon, but I had no real idea how long we’d been waiting when the old train finally started to move, shunting clumsily back and forth. For an hour or so I gripped the side of the bunk and wedged my knees against the ceiling to stop myself rolling out on to the bags below as the engines pulled and tugged, first in one direction then the other. The train’s heating was on full blast and I soon began to feel my sweaty underclothes clinging to my chest and back, so I got down from my bunk in order to take off a couple of layers. It was difficult to keep my balance against the shunting as I got undressed, and I kept lurching over from side to side and hanging on to the shelves, but after one especially powerful jolt I shot forward and cracked my forehead against the wooden shelf on the other side. Blood flooded over my eyes and nose, but as I grabbed one of the bars of the window to steady myself, almost immediately I felt the butt of the guard’s machine gun slam against my fingers and I fell backwards on to the bags in agony. The young Vietnamese guy gave me a handful of toilet paper from his sumka to soak up the blood, and all three of them helped me back up to my bunk. ‘Thank you, thank you, spasiba, spasiba,’ I said, but they just nodded impassively, like they were only doing their duty to a fellow prisoner in difficulty.
I had been drifting in and out of sleep for hours when I heard a growing commotion in the corridor as the train ground and spluttered to a halt. The guards were walking down the carriage hollering orders, while banging the walls and unlocking the compartment doors. A balaclava-ed face shouted through the bars of our door and I didn’t have to understand what he was saying to know that he wanted us to get off the train. And fast. We grabbed our bags and hurried out to join the dozens of other prisoners piling out of the compartments and carriages on to an icy, brightly lit platform. A row of policemen, standing with their legs apart, were lined up facing the train with their backs against a high mesh fence. The barking of their dogs shattered the crisp, still air.
Suddenly we were all frantically scrambling through a large gate and towards some kind of fenced-off precinct a few hundred yards from the train station. Weighed down by my luggage, and with my injured left hand throbbing as I gripped the handles of my sumka, I was soon struggling to keep up on the ice-bound tarmac. We were being run like buffalo into the precinct, with the dogs and guards yelping and snapping at our heels, and my heart was pounding with effort and fear. In my stumbling attempt to keep up, I lost my footing, somersaulted over my sumka and landed on the compacted ice, sprawling and panting. As I got to my feet I felt the heel of a boot dig into the bottom of my back and I collapsed back on to the ice with clothes spilling out of my sumka. The policeman was screaming at me to get a move on, while his snarling Alsatian strained on its leash at his side. Inside the precinct I joined a line of roughly forty prisoners strung out in the snow, facing about half that number of policemen. We were all panting hard from the sudden burst of exertion and a long cloud of steam floated away above our heads into the almost blinding brightness of the floodlights.
All fell quiet except for the occasional bark of a dog, and one of the guards shouted something in Russian and pointed over to his right with his baton. Roughly a dozen prisoners, including a Nigerian from my cell in Prestnya, stepped forward and walked over to form a separate line.
I elbowed the Chinese guy to my right and asked him what was going on by shrugging my shoulders and holding out my hands.
‘Plisoners with the HIV,’ he replied. ‘They go AIDS plison.’
They were taken away to a waiting truck and the rest of us were escorted inside a large depot building, where we were locked in a holding pen.
We spent three nights and two days behind the meshed walls of the cage, hunched in balls on the stone floor to try to keep out the freezing cold that seeped in through the concrete walls and hung in the air of the cavernous warehouse. Twice a day the guards let us out to stretch our legs around the compound for half an hour at a time, and we were given the regulation three crappy meals a day (more ‘porridge’ and ‘soup’). No one seemed to know why we were being held there, and as the hours and then the days slid by, we became a restless mob ready to erupt. The place was called Portma, that’s all anyone knew. By the second day all forty or fifty of us were pacing round the cage and some began to cling to and shake the mesh fences, shouting whenever a guard appeared to try to find out what the fuck was going on.
At the end of the second day a furious fight broke out between the Chinese and the Middle Eastern guys. I didn’t see how it began because I was hunched up with my face on my knees, trying to sleep, but in a split second, there was uproar. The rest of us pinned ourselves against the fencing as the two rival groups punched, kicked and spat at each other in a wild frenzy. The furore alerted the guards outside the warehouse and within two minutes they were running through the main door, pulling their truncheons from their belts. The dog-handlers waited outside the cage while the truncheon boys, about a dozen of them in total, set to work on the brawlers, thrashing them on to the floor or up against the fences. They covered their heads and screamed under the blows and when the guards marched out, half of them lay on the floor curled up or rolling around in pain.
On the morning of the third day we were led back to the train and we set off once again, chugging and spluttering deeper and deeper into the flat, snowbound plains of central Russia, my heart growing heavier with every mile we advanced. I had barely slept for three days and the world outside had a dream-like, almost hallucinogenic quality about it as it rolled past the steamy window. For hour after hour, fields of snow and mile upon mile of forest rolled past the barred window under a blanket of low grey cloud. After a while, we passed the first of several Zones and I pressed my nose to the condensation on the window for a closer look. They seemed more like army bases than conventional gaols, with their observation posts in each corner, barbed wire fences
running around the outside and pairs of guards in combat gear on patrol. Through a gate or a fence I caught the odd, fleeting glimpse of prisoners in dark uniforms and hats standing in columns like a ragdoll army or walking up and down the exercise yard, their arms pulled against their chests as they huddled up against the biting cold. I couldn’t hear anything over the noise of the puffing and grunting of the old train, but it looked like a silent, still world out there, as if life had ground to a frozen halt.
Around each prison was a scattering of old wooden houses nestled back among the pines, smoke wafting vertically from the chimneys into the windless air; dogs and chickens scratched around in the snow but, except for the odd moving car and an old woman in a headscarf carrying a basket of sticks on her back, there was no other sign of human activity. The cars were decades old, but they were the only sign of modern life. I could see there was little point trying to run away from the Zones because if I managed to avoid being shot by one of the snipers in the watchtowers, or mauled by a pack of guard dogs, I’d just get lost in the forests or freeze to death in the snowbound plains.
I was to spend a week at a hospital prison undergoing a series of medical examinations before being taken to my Zone. One of my Russian clients had generously paid for the visit to make sure I hadn’t picked up tuberculosis or any other hideous illness in the Moscow prisons. My cough had never gone away, even when I quit smoking while in Razburg, and the fear that I had picked up TB constantly nagged away at me. I was the only person to get off the train at the hospital, a huge sprawling community of drab buildings, and it was eerily quiet as a guard led me across the compacted ice and into the warmth of the crumbling red-brick reception centre.
An orderly led me along a series of corridors and corners and into a large ward housing roughly two dozen other patients. Naïvely, I had imagined that the hospital would be a clean, peaceful, organized place where I could enjoy some rest and privacy and some half-decent food before beginning my sentence proper in the strict regime of the foreigners’ Zone. But it was a dispiriting sight that greeted me when the orderly pushed open the door and walked me down the aisle between the two lines of beds. It was like a cross between an army field hospital and a lunatic asylum, The Longest Day meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. All but a few of the inmates had shaved heads or short-cropped hair; roughly half were missing either a limb or an eye, or were nursing serious wounds, and the rest looked straight sick and were lying motionless or shuffling slowly among the beds.
As I stowed my bags under my bed, a man missing an eye and half a leg hopped towards me, grinning and holding out his hand. ‘Marlboro?’ he asked. I gave him a Marlboro and he hopped back down the ward to smoke it on his bed. Within a minute a dozen men were swarming around my bed, smiling and patting me and holding out their hands or putting them together in prayer. I doled out the remaining cigarettes in the packet and opened a packet of sweet biscuits for everyone to share.
It was more like a Victorian freak show than a hospital ward and I quickly became fed up with the begging. I had far more provisions than the other patients, but I didn’t want to exhaust them all before the Embassy visited me in the Zone. (I’d been warned that in deepest winter visits were sometimes delayed owing to the weather.) At first I tried not to look at them when they came and pleaded for food and fags, and I stared at the ceiling, hoping they’d get the message and go away, but after a while I began to lose my patience at their insistence, and I snapped ‘No!’ and waved them away with my hand. ‘No’ and ‘Nyet’ were virtually the only words I uttered in that room for a week.
The food was better than the prison slop, but only marginally, and none of it was fresh as I’d been hoping for. It had been almost a month since I’d finished the fruit and vegetables Mum had left me before flying home, and my body was starting to crave them with the same intensity I usually crave nicotine. I lay on my bed dreaming of apples and oranges as well as piping hot cups of tea and strong coffee, pints of lager and glasses of red wine. Except when I was led away for my daily test, I did precisely nothing in the hospital other than lie on my bed and sleep, write up my diary and daydream – mainly about Lucy and the life we’d lead together when I got out. They weren’t fantastic, outlandish dreams, like living in a mansion or holidaying in Barbados or eating out in swanky restaurants, but modest and homely, like reading the weekend papers in bed, cooking up a meal or watching a DVD wrapped in each other’s bodies.
I played a game trying to guess what she would be doing at a particular time of day: perhaps making herself tea, taking a bath, chatting with her friends on the phone, and when I pictured her it was like I was there in the room with her, like a ghost or a fly on the wall, unable to communicate, but in her presence all the same. I tried to imagine her happy, or at least putting on a brave face and not crying all the time, but then I got a vision of her curled up on the sofa watching the telly, by herself, and a wave of despair rolled over me like a heavy weight. I hated myself for condemning her to such a miserable existence and I yearned to make it up to her. I kept writing it in my diaries: ‘I’m going to make you the happiest girl on the planet.’
When night fell, thoughts of home were replaced by fears of what lay in store for me in the Zone. I tried not to think about it during the day, but at night I woke up every few hours, wriggling and wrestling with the demons from the deep of my unconscious mind. In six months, I had yet to hear a good story about Mordovia.
Once a day I left the ward to go for some form of medical examination – a chest X-ray, a blood test, a urine test, a stool test, an eyesight examination, or just a general stick-your-tongue-out-say-aah check-up. No one ever came to fetch me – I had to go down to reception each morning and through a mixture of pidgin Russian, basic English and hand signals discover when and where I was meant to be going for that day’s test. So on chest X-ray day, the receptionist pointed to his chest, coughed, showed me on his watch the time it took place and then, scrawling a map on a piece of scrap paper, showed me how to get there. At the appropriate time, I’d set off into the vast network of roads and buildings looking for the right clinic. All the signs were in Russian, and although I had learnt the Cyrillic alphabet and some basic words, phrases and numbers, I had no chance of understanding the names of the various medical departments. I was forced to engage in a further exchange of hand signals in order to find my way – generally with unhelpful officials and guards who despised the sight of me and just grunted a one-word answer and pointed in a vaguely northerly direction.
I wandered around and got lost every day, tramping through the snow, sliding on the icy roads and gesticulating with men in uniforms, and as I did so it dawned on me that I hadn’t enjoyed such freedom since leaving Heathrow six months earlier. And until my arrival there, I hadn’t felt the sky over my head or the weather on my skin for longer than a minute, or however long it took to walk from the prison wagon to the courthouse. To be outside was a modest thrill, a mini-adventure, but when the time came for me to return to the train station, I said goodbye to no one and marched as fast as my two heavy bags would allow to the platform to join two dozen others waiting for the signal to climb aboard. Next stop Zone 22.
For hour after hour I sat on my sumka, wiping away the condensation on the window and staring out at the grey skies merging into the flat, snowbound horizon as the old train hauled its cargo of criminals through the nothingness that is Mordovia. Every hour or so the train spluttered into one of a dozen prison camps, or Zones, and disgorged a handful of prisoners on to the caged platform where the guards and their dogs were waiting for them. With mounting apprehension, I watched their dark figures being led away inside the prison walls beyond.
There are as many Zones in Mordovia as there are types of criminals: Zones for lifers, Zones for women, Zones for violent sex offenders, Zones for corrupt officials, Zones for psychopaths, Zones for those sentenced to hard labour, Zones for your regular bog-standard petty criminals. I was going to Zone 22, or the ‘Forgotten Zone�
� as they called it back in Moscow. It’s for foreigners, and they called it ‘forgotten’ because it was bottom of the list of priorities for the Russian judicial system. Prisoners languished in there for months, even years, after their udo (parole) date. They weren’t just criminals; they were foreigners. Who cared? Fuck ’em.
Each Zone looked just like the one before, a makeshift fort made from wood, mesh fencing and barbed wire with sniper towers at each corner. As the train slowed and bumped to a stop along yet another platform, I didn’t know that we had reached Zone 22 until the train guard stuck his face to the bars of the door and barked, ‘Hague, Tig!’ Quickly I gathered up my sumka and suitcase and jumped out of the wagon door on to a caged platform where four guards and their Alsatians were waiting to lead us away. The frozen air seized me like an electric current and for a moment I couldn’t move. Never in my life had I felt cold like it, and it was all the more shocking for having spent ten hours in an overheated train compartment. Men were emerging from all eight carriages along the platform and, though no one told us to do so, we all gravitated towards each other like iron filings to a magnet, forming a scruffy line in front of the guards.
From the caged platform we filed through the set of huge metal gates and into the Zone itself. It was almost dark but, squinting, I was able to make out a series of low wooden buildings in the middle of the compound, a scattering of other buildings and four watchtowers, one at each corner. It looked a little like the POW camp in The Great Escape, only more run-down. If only the cheery figure of Dickie Attenborough had been there to greet me, bounding across the snow with his outstretched hand. ‘Jolly good show, Hague. Let’s get you a nice warm cuppa. We’ll tunnel you out of here by Easter.’ I could have done with seeing a friendly face right at that moment, because I was absolutely shitting myself.