by Tig Hague
Before supper, Alan arrived to escort me to my first head-count, known as preverka, when the whole prison assembled on the concourse between the atrads and the office building. Preverka took place three times a day before meals, and I could tell by the way Baska and the others, at the blast of a siren, had scrambled out of bed and rushed from the room for the first one of the day, pulling on their clothes as they went, that getting there on time was a matter of the greatest urgency. Now that I’d been issued with my uniform, I could officially join the black ranks and I jumped from my bunk, in synch with the others, when the first of the three long blasts of the siren erupted through the public address system. The second blast followed two minutes later, and I was still tying up my boots when Baska tugged me as if to say ‘Get a move on,’ pointing to his eyes to tell me that I should watch what he did as I leapt up and we rushed down the corridor and out into the frozen darkness.
Across the compound from us, lit up by the glare of the floodlights, prisoners were pouring from the three atrads into the exercise pens and through the metal gates, buttoning up jackets or hopping on one foot as they pulled a shoe or boot on to the other. From the air they would have looked like a colony of ants streaming out of their nest after some kind of trauma below ground, and I saw the stress etched in people’s faces as well as in their frantic movements as they took up their positions. In spite of the commotion of movement, a powerful silence hung over the gathering crowd. Whenever there was a break in the flow of prisoners, the mesh gates of the exercise pens swung shut with a metallic bang. The gates were opened by a guard operating a buzzer in the observation room behind him, and I watched the anxiety on the faces of the last prisoners to emerge as they clawed at the mesh and waved anxiously at the window to be let out. After a few moments the gates were buzzed open and a couple of guards chuckled to themselves as the stragglers sprinted into columns and rows, facing the buildings from which they had just emerged.
Slowly the tramping of boots on the icy ground came to a stop, and 300 prisoners, dressed in black from head to foot, stood stock still under a thick flurry of snowflakes, looking directly ahead of them. I was standing right in the middle of a group of roughly 100 men from Atrad 1, where I was to be housed after my spell in quarantine. Half the faces around me were black African and the rest a mixture of Middle Eastern characters, Chinese and what I guessed were Afghans, North Africans, Vietnamese and maybe half a dozen white Europeans or Westerners. And they were all staring at me. I looked at the ground, half embarrassed, half freaked out by the attention I was drawing. I heard the wooden door of the office building behind us swing open on its creaking hinges and slam shut, followed immediately by the sound of footsteps crunching through the snow.
All of a sudden, there was a commotion over in Atrad 3 and all our heads turned to the right, like soldiers on parade. I saw a young Vietnamese guy bursting out of the building and flinging himself against the pen gate. He was signalling crazily to be let out while at the same time bending down to tie up his laces. A guard marched down to the gate and started bawling at the lad, who was pleading and apologizing, putting his hands together in prayer and screwing up his face in contrition. When the entry buzzer sounded, the boy fell forward through the gate. The guard seized him by the collar and pulled him, still apologizing, past the lines of other prisoners and round into the offices.
The other guard walked up and down the rows, inspecting the inmates, stopping from time to time to give someone the eyeball. A pair of dark glasses sat above his bulbous nose and droopy moustache, his pot belly hung over his trousers and he tucked his thumbs into the belt carrying his truncheon, mace spray and handcuffs. His gunmetal-blue fur hat with the ears up, perched awkwardly on top of his big fat round head, gave him a faintly comic-book appearance. I closed my eyes and was able to hear only the crunch of slow footsteps. He was counting to himself as he walked among us and when he got to the end he just sauntered away, up the steps and into the offices without a word. At the sound of the door shutting we began to melt away into the falling snow back to our sleeping quarters, and I was immediately surrounded by a dozen or so of the prisoners, slapping me on the back and whispering: ‘Hey, English boy… Englishman… how are you, friend?… you eat with me… UK is best… you want cigarette… Tony Blair great king… we share food, OK, you my friend in Atrad 1?…’
Alan and I walked into the office building and I saw the young Vietnamese guy standing nervously in the corridor outside one of the governors’ doors. He was biting his thumbnail and cursing to himself as he waited, legs apart, staring down at the floor. We sat on our bunks and Baska exhaled and shook his head sympathetically.
After a short while, we heard the door of the governor’s office open and close, and we all looked up as the Vietnamese boy passed by the open door, moaning as he rubbed his hands over his face and disappeared out into the night.
‘Boy, now more time for him in Mordovia. Six month time!’ said Baska, with anger in his voice. ‘No udo! Many prisoner get no udo! No go home to family. No to freedom. Six month more in Mordovia for be bad. Always the six month more. You careful no be bad, Englishman. Six more month.’
I knew ‘udo’ was the Russian word for parole and it was difficult to say what was more shocking and depressing: the fact that no one got out of there at the time of their scheduled parole date, or how terrifyingly easy it was to have an extra six months slapped on to the end of your sentence. Freedom in Zone 22 was not a date fixed in the calendar, like a birthday, but a moveable feast that could be delayed indefinitely.
16
Fam left quarantine on my second day, but Baska and Greecia were to remain until the end of the week and they passed on as much prison wisdom as possible. I was an eager student and I concentrated hard to understand what they were trying to teach me. Baska showed me practical details like how to make my bed, the Zone way, with the top of the sheet turned down on the blanket, all creases smoothed out, the pillow perfectly straight, and my towel folded into a triangle next to the pillow. When I practised and failed to get it exactly right, he became angry with me and started gesticulating and raising his voice. He showed me how I must stand up as soon as a guard or governor walked into a room, take off my hat and look at the ground humbly, never making eye contact unless ordered to do so.
We left the room only to attend preverka before each meal, and to use the toilet hole in the room next door, but on the fourth morning Baska gestured that I should put on my outdoor clothes and boots, saying over and over, ‘Divzhenya! Divzhenya!’ and pointing to his eyes to indicate that I was to watch what he did. He took a handful of cigarettes out of their packet, kept two for himself and put the rest in my pocket. I followed him out into the corridor and into the reception area by the front door of the building, where a fresh-faced young guard with corn-coloured hair sat at a desk reading a newspaper. On the back I could see a picture of an ice-hockey player wheeling away from goal with his stick held aloft in celebration. A cup of steaming black coffee sat in front of him and Baska placed the two cigarettes next to it, neither of them acknowledging the exchange. Baska mumbled something in Russian and the guard nodded, slipping the cigarettes into his pocket at the same time.
‘Divzhenya! Divzhenya!’ Baska smiled at me as the door slammed shut behind us and we strode across the concourse between half a dozen road-scrapers who were keeping it free of snow by piling it on to the great heaps using giant wooden shovels rimmed with metal, known as ‘lapats’. The sound of metal on tarmac had the same effect on me as nails down a blackboard, and I grimaced as we headed the 100 yards down to the kitchen, which adjoined the dining area. ‘Divzhenya! Divzhenya!’ Baska repeated, as he walked into the kitchen. An African man was washing dishes while a Vietnamese chopped potatoes at the table in the middle. A Middle-Eastern-looking character with a receding black hairline, sharp nose and mess of craggy teeth turned round from the stove, where he was stirring a giant metal vat of soup with a long wooden spoon. The vast majority of prisone
rs I’d seen were slim or positively skinny, but the cook was fat and his belly hung out over his dirty apron.
Baska introduced him as ‘Mehmet’, and he nodded at me without smiling as he wiped his hands on the apron before flicking his head back at Baska, as if to say: ‘Yeah, so what do you want?’ Baska reached into my coat and took out four cigarettes, saying something in Russian as he handed them over. The cook winked as he slipped the Marlboro into his shirt pocket and turned to the table to pick up part of an animal carcass stripped of everything but some tendons. With one violent swipe of his meat cleaver he chopped off a piece of bony gristle, picked a potato from the hessian sack on the floor and presented them both to Baska, who shoved them into his deep jacket pocket. The pair nodded at each other, and Baska and I turned and left the room.
‘Divzhenya! Divzhenya!’ said Baska, smiling from ear to ear. We strode back to the office building, blowing into our hands and shivering against the cold. When our soup arrived for lunch, Baska poured it into his metal bowl, added the potato and the bone and heated up the mixture with the heating element they otherwise used to make tea. Fifteen minutes later it was ready and he poured some into my mug, looking the very picture of pride as he handed it over. ‘Divzhenya! Divzhenya!’ he laughed. I thought divzhenya was another word for bilander, meaning soup, but the penny dropped when Baska held out a couple of cigarettes in one hand and the bone in the other. ‘For food, you give cigarettes or coffee. To go kitchen, give cigarettes or food for guard. To no go factory for day, you give doctor much, much cigarettes, chocolate, coffee… Understand divzhenya?’ he said. ‘All stashoi, all prisoner are do divzhenya. Every day!’
Mehmet was ‘very bad man’, Baska stressed, grimacing and shaking his head. ‘You careful with Mehmet. He trouble. Guards like Mehmet. He give guards food, he give guards meat for the prisoners.’
‘Why he Mordovia?’ I asked.
Baska put down his soup. ‘He sex with young woman, and kill with knife many times.’ To make sure I got the point he pointed to his balls, made a violent thrusting movement and then acted out a frenzied attack. I looked into my soup and felt sick.
While he was talking, two faces, one Chinese, one black African, had appeared in the doorway, but they stared not at him but at me, without embarrassment, for half a minute before disappearing down the corridor. All week, a parade of prisoners who’d come to the admin building to see one of the officials had been sticking their heads through the quarantine door to check me out. All the guards had done it too. It didn’t bother me at first, but the more they came the more uneasy I felt. Some waved and smiled, some did a thumbs-up sign, but most just stared without expression, which I found even more unsettling. I didn’t know whether to smile, turn away or to try to look hard and scary whenever a face appeared at the door. When I shrugged my shoulders at Baska and said, ‘Why? What they doing?’ he threw his hands up in the air as if I was stupid and said: ‘You English! You English!’
Greecia’s English was virtually non-existent and he spoke very little (the only English word I heard him utter was ‘tea’), but he was an extraordinary-looking man and I found it difficult not to stare at him, as the others stared at me. There was barely an ounce of flesh on him and his yellow-brown skin, which looked like it had been stained or painted, clung to his face like cellophane. He ate next to nothing and gave away most of the food brought to us by Alan. From what I could tell, the only things to pass his lips were cigarette smoke and incredibly strong tea known as cheffir. On the day the two of them were to return to the atrads, I accepted his offer of a cup of cheffir as a kind of farewell present. The pair were housed in Atrad 3, which was for those sentenced to the more severe stroggi regime. I was to be moved to Atrad 1 (obshi or ‘normal’), which was only 100 yards away at the other end of the building, but they were separate worlds and we would never have the chance to eat and drink and talk together as we had done that week.
I watched Greecia place six heaped teaspoons of black tea into a small cup, which he covered with boiling water and left to infuse. Half an hour later he handed me a cup of thick black tar and, just as he had done, I bolted it in one gulp. Almost instantly my head began to spin and I could barely stand up to hand back the cup and take the little boiled sweet you were meant to suck straight afterwards to take away the foul bitterness of the tea. It was the biggest caffeine hit I’d ever experienced. I was rushing.
‘Greecia big love the cheffir,’ Baska said with a laugh. ‘Greecia always divzhenya for the tea.’
It was no wonder they were always fighting Chan and getting into trouble, drinking that stuff. It gave me such a rush that for half an hour I was unable to sit back down on my bunk, and much to their amusement, I had to walk up and down the small room before I calmed down. When they packed up their sumkas and Alan came to escort them back to their living quarters, I was still sitting on my bunk, wild-eyed and taking deep, slow breaths in an effort to slow my racing heart. I stood up to shake their hands as they left. ‘Thank you! Thank you! Spasiba, spasiba,’ I said, also nodding my gratitude.
‘Good luck for Mordovia, Englishman,’ replied Baska, patting me on the shoulder. ‘Careful udo, careful guard.’
The quarantine room looked especially drab and bare after the Mongolians had left, and the five empty beds and the silence seemed to be mocking me in my isolation as I lay or sat on my bunk, at a loss over what to do with myself. What to do? That was the nagging question that the loneliness asked. From time to time, I got up and walked to the window or touched my toes or shadowboxed around the room, just for something to do. I screwed up small pieces of paper into balls and used them to throw at various targets around the room, quickly picking them up afterwards in case a guard came in and saw the mess. I put my hands behind my head and made dreamy plans about my life with Lucy back in England after my release, but the optimism was always driven out by a swarm of doubts and fears. How was I going to get a job with a criminal conviction? What would we do for money? Was my working life over barely before it had started? Alan came to deliver my meals three times a day, but the only other human contact I experienced for forty-eight hours came during the jostling, nerve-jangling chaos of preverka. Quite why it was taking so long to process me through the Zone system was a mystery.
On the morning of the third day by myself, I was sitting on the lower bunk, glumly tossing my set of paper balls into my metal mug, when the sound of a man gently clearing his throat made me turn around with a start. A small black guy was leaning in the doorway. He was wearing a silk shirt, designer trousers and smart leather shoes, all in black like the rest of the prisoners, but these were clearly his own clothes. He had a very slim, baby-like face but he was good-looking. He was standing with his hands in his pocket and his hat tilted to one side, holding out a shallow cardboard box.
‘Fancy a game of chess?’ he said with a smile.
‘I’m Papi,’ he said, putting out his hand for me to shake before sitting down on the bunk opposite, leaning back on his elbows and crossing his legs like he owned the place.
‘Parlez-vous français?’
‘Oui, bien sûr.’
Our conversation continued in fluent French as Papi laid out the chessboard on the floor between us.
‘So how come you’re not at work with the rest of the Zone?’ I asked.
‘You probably think I’m some kind of informer sent to spy on you, eh?’ he replied with a grin. He handed me a note with Russian handwriting and a signature, adding: ‘Sick note from the doctor. She says I’ve got a severe chest infection!’ Papi laughed and rocked back on the bunk. ‘Truth is I just gave her 100 Marlboro and three Toblerones. Cigarettes, chocolate and coffee – they’ll be your best friend in here. You should start loading up on them. There’s not one guard, governor or official in the whole Zone who’s above a bribe. These guys earn less in a month than an Englishman or a Frenchman earns in a day or two. They’ll do anything for a packet of Marlboro or a jar of Nescafé!’
Papi put the
cardboard box between us and started setting up the white pieces as I reached in for the blacks.
‘Most prisoners in here are so damned poor they’ve got nothing but a few boiled sweets, a bit of black tea and the cheapest of the cheap Russian cigarettes. But you, an Englishman, with a good embassy behind you… Man, you might even get out of here on time! If you got money, you got power and influence. At the moment, I’m the richest dude in the joint because my smelnik – that’s your eating partner you share your provisions with – was a Danish guy called Erik. When he left a couple of weeks ago he left me a suitcase and a big sumka full of gear – bags and bags of food and cigarettes that his embassy had brought down by the vanload. The Danish Embassy are the best! I’ve been a virtual free man inside the Zone ever since he left. I haven’t been to that hellhole of a factory for two weeks. I just hang out doing a few light chores around the camp, like sweeping the corridor in the office building and emptying the waste paper bins. It’s not going to last, so I’m just enjoying the break while I can… as soon as the supplies run out, the fuckers will start giving me a hard time again; get their own back on me, for playing Mister Big. They don’t like any of the prisoners but they like black prisoners even less and most of all they hate black guys throwing money around!’
Papi leant down and moved the pawn in front of his queen two squares forward. Talking! What a joy it was to be able to have a conversation with someone and understand every word they said. And an intelligent, amusing person at that! Not since I’d left Zubi and Philip back in Moscow, almost three weeks earlier, had I enjoyed the pleasure of a conversation that didn’t involve hand gestures, monosyllabic grunts and endless repetitions amid a general fog of misunderstanding.