The English Prisoner

by Tig Hague

  There were about ten of us from the train and we were steered by a line of guards down a corridor of high wire-mesh fences and into a large holding pen, where we lined up facing a row of guards and prison officials. To a man all of us were stepping from foot to foot and blowing into our cupped hands to try to keep warm. When it was my turn, I picked up my bags and presented myself to the most official-looking character in the middle of the guards facing us, just as the others before me had done.

  ‘Name, conviction, sentence?’ he snapped, in Russian, without looking up from his clipboard.

  ‘Hague, Tig, acquisition and possession of illegal contraband, three years and six months.’

  14

  The prison guard pointed to a little black man, in a dark prison uniform with a homemade baseball cap, standing just outside the pen. ‘Idi! Idi!’ (‘Go! Go!’) he shouted, waving me away with a flourish of his hand. I left the pen and immediately started following the man across the compound, dragging my bags behind me across the compacted snow. When we were out of earshot of the holding pen, he leant towards me and whispered, ‘I’m Alan.’ As we walked towards the bottom of the compound I could see the outline of dark figures, their faces shrouded in steaming breath, moving around in smaller pens outside three long, low shed-like buildings to my left. They had their heads down as they paced up and down, up and down, up and down. Only the odd bark of a distant dog broke the silence. ‘Atrads. For sleeping,’ Alan whispered, nodding towards the buildings. ‘Atrad 1 for prisoners in normal obshi regime, Atrad 2 for sick prisoners, Atrad 3 for long-sentence and bad prisoners in stroggi regime.’ Each pen contained a small pagoda-style structure with a roof and open sides. I could make out the small bright orange lights of four cigarettes burning in the shadows. ‘For smoking,’ whispered Alan.

  To our right, directly facing the accommodation blocks, there was some kind of administration office, and as we walked into the light streaming from its long bay window, four guards stared out at us with grim, impassive faces. Their heads turned and followed us as we disappeared from view.

  The fur-lined boots Mum had bought me in Moscow crunched into the crisp fresh snow blanketing the ground, accentuating the silence that clung to the Zone. We headed across a further open space towards another row of huts lying at right angles to the ones we’d just walked through. ‘One for the cooking, one for the eating, one for the books,’ Alan said. Pointing to a small red-brick building to our left, he added: ‘For praying for the Almighty’s Salvation and for the forgiveness of our sinning.’

  We were moving towards a building at the bottom left-hand corner of the Zone, close to the perimeter fence. There was a dull mechanical hum coming from inside that grew louder as we approached. Smoke and steam belched from two chimneys in its corrugated iron roof. A huge heap of coal, higher and wider than the building itself and draped in snow, was piled up against the side wall. As Alan slowly pushed open the heavy metal door with his shoulder, a cloud of steam gushed out into the cold, still air and a great roar of industrial machinery ruptured the silence. It was pitch black inside. Alan beckoned me to follow him, but I couldn’t move. I swallowed back a surge of nausea and steadied myself against the wall.

  My instinct told me not to go, but Alan was frantically signalling to me to hurry up. He was saying something too, but I couldn’t hear a word above the noise of the churning machinery. The door closed behind me and I could see nothing, not even Alan. The growl of the machines suffocated all other noises and a powerful stench of oil and coal filled my lungs. A drip of condensation landed on the back of my neck and made me jump. Slowly my eyes adjusted a little to the darkness and I could see Alan holding open another door leading into a dark corridor. Again, he beckoned me to follow, but I didn’t move an inch. Alan came back and seized me by the arm.

  The door closed behind us. The darkness was total again. Alan, still holding my arm, slowly led me forward. The noise ahead of us grew louder and louder. I was breathing rapidly. We came to a stop and I was aware only of the pounding of the machines that I heard and felt but could not see.

  I saw the whites of eyes and the glint of teeth. I started to walk backwards, when close by and booming above the noise, I heard a heavy African accent say: ‘Relax, my friend. Don’t be scared. We are the same as you. Prisoners. No guards, no Russians here. It’s cool.’ My eyes were adjusting fast and four Africans came into focus. Someone turned on a dim, flickering lamp mounted on the wall. One of them got up from a chair and walked towards me, his huge frame towering over mine. He smiled as he put an arm around my shoulder and said: ‘First, the barber shave your head. Then you have the hottest shower. Then we talk. We will be your friends. We protect you. Have no fear. My name is Julian, this is Boodoo John, this is Hulk and this is Eke Jude.’

  Julian shook my hand and gently led me by the arm into a small adjoining room, where a Middle Eastern man with greying temples was sitting smoking a cigarette. He stood up, inviting me to sit on his stool, wrapped a large oily cloth around my shoulders and turned on his electric shaver. Two of the Africans were standing in the doorway, grinning. ‘He make you look like a sheep in the spring,’ one of them said. The sensation of the shaver touching the back of my neck made me shudder and then, with the first of a dozen firm sweeps of my scalp, my thick black hair began to tumble down my face and shoulders. I stood up and rubbed the thin coat of soft bristles and tried to wipe the hair from my face.

  ‘Welcome to Zone 22,’ said the barber, with a toothy grin.

  Like all new arrivals in Zone 22, I was to spend my first two weeks in ‘quarantine’, a small room inside the administration building where the prison governors and officials had their offices. The room was across the corridor from the observation area where the guards had watched me being walked down to the boiler room, and as Alan led me into the building after my shower, one of them summoned us with a shout. I followed Alan into the room and half a dozen guards turned round and looked me up and down with a mixture of curiosity and contempt. Three were slumped in their chairs, and a couple leant against the wall by the window with half an eye on the three prisoners’ quarters fifty yards across the compound. Fixed into the wall to my right was what looked like an old telephone switchboard with dozens of sockets, wires and receivers. Across the other side of the room was a small kitchen area where a sixth guard, fat and middle-aged, was stirring a mug of something while eyeing me with the same disdainful sneer as his colleagues. He pointed at me and shouted. I had no idea what he was saying. He shouted again and started quickly walking towards me.

  ‘Take your hat off! Take your hat off!’ whispered Alan at my side, and I noticed that he was holding his own hat in front of him as he looked at the floor. I quickly whipped mine off as the guard approached and stood so close to me that his belly was almost touching mine. He snarled something in Russian and I could only hold his stare for a few moments before I looked down at my boots and muttered my apologies: ‘Izvini, nachalnik! Izvini, nachalnik!’ (‘Sorry, boss! Sorry, boss!’)

  He put his hands into my coat pockets, took out my packet of Marlboro and walked round the room offering them to his colleagues. He pulled one out with his teeth, slid the packet into his shirt pocket and then lit up, blowing the smoke up towards the ceiling. He let out a sigh of satisfaction and walked back towards me with a smile, saying in English: ‘Nice English boy! Nice English boy!’ Almost immediately his face lunged towards mine and I recoiled as he shouted, ‘Idi, anglichanin! Idi, anglichanin!’ and pushed me violently towards the door. As I spun round I felt the toe of his boot against my backside and I crashed out into the corridor with the sound of mocking laughter in the background.

  I was still breathless with shock as Alan led me into quarantine, a small drab room ten yards further down the corridor facing out the back of the building. There were three sets of double bunks, two on the left-hand wall and one in front of me on the right. At the far end there was a small window looking out towards the prison wall, with only a shed and w
hat looked like a long washing-line in between. Two Mongolians with round weather-beaten faces and sad eyes, and a slightly camp Vietnamese boy, nodded a welcome from the two bottom bunks on the left where they sat. The younger Mongolian stood up and introduced himself as ‘Baska’. I shook his hand and, gulping for breath, said: ‘Tig.’ The other Mongolian, a skinny man with almost luminously yellow-brown skin, stood up and said: ‘Greecia.’ The Vietnamese boy just looked up shyly and said: ‘Fam.’ Alan left and returned a few moments later with my bags. He said goodbye and I sat down on my bunk, at Baska’s invitation. Greecia started to brew some tea and slowly a very basic kind of conversation developed. Baska did most of the talking, in a mixture of broken English and prison Russian, and I nodded and ummed, smiling when he smiled and frowning when he frowned.

  Baska pointed at me and asked: ‘Statya?’

  I put my fingers to my lips and mimed smoking a joint, aware of the absurdity of my predicament as I did so. It was insane that that was the reason why I was sitting, shaven-headed, in that little room in the middle of the frozen Russian wilderness, trying to hold a conversation with a man from Mongolia.

  ‘You?’ I asked, pointing back at him. Baska smacked his fist into his open palm three times, then clenched both fists and held them out in front of him to show that he had won the fight. He nodded towards Greecia, putting one hand over his mouth as he pulled his head back and ran the fingers of his other hand along his neck in a cutting motion. Fam stood up and lifted an imaginary wallet from his back pocket.

  ‘Fam, peederaz, Moscow,’ said Baska, simulating a blowjob with his hand and mouth. ‘He no like, much fighting. In Zone 22, more sex problem. He go quarantine for his safe sleeping.’

  Fam smiled in agreement, but I looked away, embarrassed and unnerved by the images of his abuse that sprung into my mind.

  ‘Greecia and me go quarantine, fighting Chan. We always the fighting Chan. Chan, bad Chinese, bad man…’ Baska pointed to a lump on the bridge of his nose as evidence of their encounter.

  Six months in the Russian prison system had taught me that language is just one way of communicating; slowly I was able to piece together a rough picture of the life in store for me in the camp as Baska explained about life inside Zone 22, using hand gestures, mime and scribbles in the back of the cheap school textbook I was using as a diary to fill in when speech failed. The main message that kept coming through was that the guards (‘nachalnik’) in Zone 22 were as great a threat as the most violent inmates. Baska stood up and mimicked the beatings they handed out, taking Greecia by the shoulder and bringing down a flurry of imaginary blows on his back. He described the threat of solitary confinement by making Fam go and stand in the corner away from the rest of us.

  I listened to Baska with growing dread for a couple of hours, saying little in reply but concentrating till my head hurt, and it was almost a relief when one of the guards came to turn off the light and I slumped back on my mattress and wrapped myself in the rough blanket. I was desperate for sleep but I lay awake in the blackest of moods, listening to the wind that had started to whistle around the building and the sound of muffled laughter coming from the guards’ room along the corridor. Through the small window I saw the snow swirling around the silhouette of the sniper in his tower, and beyond the prison walls, lit up by the Zone floodlights, I saw the tops of waving trees and the lumpy outline of clouds on the horizon. I tried to work out which way was west and I thought of London, 2,000 miles away, where my former colleagues at Garban Icap joined the tens of thousands of other City workers flooding out into the streets and down into tube stations or into the noisy bars and pubs, ordering a round of drinks, hailing taxis, rushing home to be with their families and loved ones… To think I ever used to moan about that daily commute, the delayed trains, the packed tubes, the stress of my job, the queue for a sandwich, the cost of a pint. And all these thoughts led my mind in the same direction – to Lucy. I could picture myself stepping in from work and into her arms as I walked in the door at her mum’s in Leytonstone, or at my mum’s in New Eltham, squeezing her close and never once imagining that we’d ever be separated for more than the few days of a business trip. I felt the tears running down my temples as I stared up at the wooden ceiling above my bunk and tried to imagine what she would be doing right then, at that very time of day when we used to be reunited after work and settle down for a bowl of pasta, a glass of wine and an evening in front of the telly, saying and thinking little, just happy in each other’s company. But then I disappeared from the image, and it was just her left in my mind, curled up by herself on the sofa, her face taut with worry about what was happening to me in my strange little world at the other end of Europe.

  15

  The shock of the cold made me withdraw into the doorway as Alan led me out of the office building to go and collect my prison uniform and utensils from the storeroom, down by the boiler room where I’d been taken the night before. I was wearing a thermal shirt and underwear, long johns, two T-shirts, a thick fleece, a heavily padded black jacket, a thick woollen scarf, a bobble hat and a pair of gloves (all in regulation prison black). My face was the only exposed part of my body and the blast of frozen air slapped my cheeks and stabbed my nose as I stepped through the door into the blinding low sunlight and a bustle of early morning activity. I had slept poorly and woken early, struggling to free myself from a horrible nightmare that seemed to go on for ever. I dreamt that Lucy was pregnant and she needed me to come to her aid, but no matter how hard I tried to reach her, I never got there. I took a bus, a taxi and a train, but they all went the wrong way or stopped moving or broke down. I walked, I ran, I crawled but still I couldn’t get to her. Lucy started to cry out louder and louder, her face riven with pain, and I grew increasingly frantic but I was powerless to help. It was so vivid that it felt like a real experience and I was still feeling shaken up by it when Alan came to collect me.

  We stood at the door, waiting for three columns of roughly 100 black-uniformed prisoners to trudge past, up towards the main gate where they waited to be escorted through to the factory beyond. They weren’t quite marching in step, but they had the air of a defeated army about them as they tramped wearily by, heads down, in silence. A dozen others were busy clearing the concourse and road of overnight snow and ice, noisily scraping the tarmac with giant snow shovels; snipers looked down from the four observation posts with their rifles slung over their backs, blowing and rubbing their hands; two handlers and their dogs were patrolling the bottom wall of the Zone while other guards, most in combat gear but some in olive green uniforms, wandered to and from the camp’s scattering of wooden buildings. The Zone was surrounded by high concrete walls but right at the far end of the factory area the perimeter was made up of two parallel mesh fences, topped with barbed wire, through which I could see the landscape beyond: a stretch of flat marshland extending to the horizon, a sheet of white punctuated by clusters of pine and birch trees.

  I was looking around, trying to take in my new surroundings, when a sudden clatter of hooves and the grinding of wagon wheels made us spin round. Trotting down the main thoroughfare from the gates, between the office building and the atrads, was a horse and cart being driven by a prisoner of Middle Eastern appearance. He was standing at the front of the open flatbed wagon like a charioteer as he drew alongside us, gently pulling back on the reins to bring the two great horses to a stop. On the back of the cart was a large silver churn, a few lumpy brown sacks of what looked like potatoes or onions and a handful of cardboard boxes. As he chucked a sack over his shoulder and disappeared through the door of the kitchen, I couldn’t help but stare at his nose, which was the largest I’d ever seen on a human being.

  We walked on towards the bottom of the Zone, where the African boys were busy shovelling coal into large metal buckets, watched by a guard leaning up against the side of the building, lazily drawing on his cigarette. It looked like punishing work, even for men of their colossal build, and a cloud of steamy breath env
eloped their heads as they scooped up the black lumps and slid them noisily into the containers. I presumed it was the presence of the guard that made them less friendly towards me than they had been the night before. They winked or nodded or smiled, but no one said anything and they carried on working as Alan and I approached and entered the storeroom.

  I re-emerged five minutes later, the owner of one metal bowl, one metal cup, one spoon, one horsehair mattress, one rough sheet, one horsehair blanket, one small hard pillow, one pair of thin socks and one pair of the largest, worst cut underpants I’d ever seen. My uniform consisted of a black smock shirt with an inch-wide green stripe across the back and over the pocket on the left breast, a pair of baggy black polyester trousers, a black peaked cap made of cardboard and different cuts of dyed black cloth, and a very thin pair of black shoes stitched together with a variety of different materials.

  ‘Most prisoners are very poor and wear the prison shoes, made in another Zone,’ said Alan. ‘They are bad shoes, very, very cold for the feet. You can wear your own black hat and shoes, but if they are expensive, like Reeboks or Nikes, be careful – in a week you can bet the guards will be wearing them at home.’

  We walked back up towards the office building and I looked down nervously at my fur-lined walking boots, which the Embassy had bought me with money from Mum and Dad.

  The rest of the Zone had already eaten their breakfast in the dining area, but Alan delivered our porridge and sweet black tea to us in quarantine and we ate it on our knees. Three hours later, he delivered lunch: a slice of black soda bread with a kind of soup containing marginally more evidence of vegetables than the shit we had had in Moscow. There was greater nutritional value and taste to be found in a cardboard box, but at least it didn’t make me retch.