The English Prisoner

by Tig Hague

  ‘The system is pick, sew, push,’ said Ergin. We walked slowly down the room, over the uneven flagstones which had been worn smooth and shiny from thousands of boots tramping back and forth over them through the decades. Each station had an old-fashioned Singer-style machine with a foot pedal, and not one of them could have been under fifty or sixty years old. Patched together with random pieces of metal, wire, string and cloth, it was a miracle the Heath-Robinson contraptions worked at all.

  ‘You can see how bad are the machines,’ continued Ergin. ‘It is thanks to the Afghan maintenance man. Very skilled, clever man. In Afghanistan, he mechanic. When machine is broke his job fix quickly. He always have machine to working. Sometime he taking the screws and wires from other machines; sometime he giving guard many cigarettes to buy pieces from shop in town. His very difficult job, most pressure. The guard they always saying to him: “Go away and fix it… Now!”’

  We had reached the end of the room when one of the prisoners at the back bellowed ‘Zdrastvitay, chalnik!’ (‘Welcome, sir!’), and at once all the jabbering and humming came to a stop. A guard had entered the room and the only noise came from the squeak of his rubber-soled combat boots on the shiny floor as he ambled slowly down the work stations with his hands behind his back, swinging his long truncheon from side to side, like a dog wagging his tail. He was the middle-aged man with the droopy moustache and the pot belly I had seen at my first preverka. ‘He Maximovich, the master guard in the factory,’ said Ergin, raising his eyebrows, and, as we turned away, he imitated a man swigging from a bottle and then rotated his finger around his temple.

  Ergin led me through the maintenance room where the Afghan fixer, who had the round face of a Chinese or an Uzbek, was hammering away at a piece of bent metal on his workbench. The room adjoined a large delivery area where two Vietnamese guys were busy unloading piles of old clothes and material from the back of a truck and sorting through them on two huge tables. In the corner a small, greying African man was throwing bundles of finished clothes tied up with string through a large hatch.

  ‘This is the one toilet for the whole factory…’ said Ergin, holding open a door and turning away as a stench of sewage filled the air. A single low-wattage light bulb hung from the ceiling near the door and I could only just see the other end of the room in the gloom. On the left-hand wall there was a tap and a bucket and through a square opening cut into a dividing wall I could see a hole in the middle of the floor surrounded by turds.

  Gagging, I quickly followed Ergin to a room beyond the delivery area, where dozens of prisoners, most of them Vietnamese or Afghans, were bent over desks, busily carving little wooden chess pieces. In the adjoining paint-dry area, where they were applying the lacquer, Ergin handed me a couple of finished pieces from the hundreds that lined the shelves. I was struck by how intricate and attractive they were. I wasn’t expecting to find beauty in Zone 22, and the fact that it was three inches high and made of wood didn’t take away any of the surprise. ‘The Zone want many carvers,’ said Ergin. ‘Much money to make from the chess pieces for the authorities and also for…’ He stopped talking and imitated someone stuffing money into their pocket. ‘Many pieces go from the back door,’ he added with a wink. ‘One day you can try, but very difficult. Much skill you needing. Many injuries with carving knives and the tools. Look at the hands…’

  Ergin led me back to his office, off the main entrance, where he and his two Vietnamese assistants demonstrated the way in which they worked out how to design items of clothes from the pile of blue-dyed rags that lay on the floor around the central table. Molloi sat at a sewing machine producing a mock-up, while Ergin and Mafia cut out shapes from the cloth. Using cardboard cut-outs of bodies and arms and collars, they tried to work out how to complete their quota from the limited amount of cloth available. ‘We need make 2,000 jackets,’ said Ergin. ‘Nothing to waste.’

  We talked as they worked and I watched. Ergin was a serious character but there was an air of decency and fairness about him, which could not be said about the majority of people I’d come across in Zone 22. It was only in the company of Papi and the boiler-room Africans that I had felt at ease. There were a lot of hardened criminals in the prison, men like Chan and Ahmed and Mehmet, who radiated menace. Ergin was different. He had been a successful tailor in Moscow – hence the top job in the clothes factory – and although he and his family had led a comfortable, middle-class life he had been lured into some kind of fraud scam and been sentenced to eight years. During the fifteen-minute break at mid-morning, when most of the Zone braved the driving wind for a smoke, Ergin produced a creased photograph from his jacket pocket. ‘My family,’ he sighed. The picture showed a well-dressed woman with long dark hair tied up at the back, with her arms around two young girls. All of them were smiling. ‘Now their daddy is criminal. I miss them so very bad.’

  Before lunch the entire factory lined up at the gates for the second head-count of the day, and when we were released ten minutes later, my hands and face stung and my feet ached from the cold. Lunch was served in a dining area next to Ergin’s office by the front door, and the room was so small that there were four sittings at the two long tables. There was a small table behind the door with a giant vat of pale, watery soup and next to it a pile of black soda bread. I helped myself and squeezed on to the end of a bench between Ergin and Baska, who nodded and smiled at me as he tried to create an extra inch or two of space. Chan was sitting directly opposite me, next to Mafia. There were four benches in all, and although they were designed to take no more than six people, I counted ten on each and there was barely any room to lift the spoon to our mouths.

  The soup was lukewarm and virtually tasteless – there was the vaguest hint of potato and onion – and yet everybody was going at it as if it was the first food they had seen in days. To a man – even middle-class Ergin – they ripped the chewy bread in their teeth like wild dogs tearing meat from a carcass and with their mouths no more than three inches above their bowls spooned the soup in, like they were in a race. I was hungry too, but I knew I had noodles and kolbasa sausage and some biscuits back in the atrad and by the time I got towards the bottom of the bowl, my soup was virtually cold and everyone else had finished. Half the table were watching me as I looked up, and I realized they were waiting to see if I was going to leave any. Embarrassed that I was wasting food, I pointed to my stomach and grimaced to indicate that I wasn’t feeling great. Immediately, Chan and Mafia dived forward to grab my bowl. Chan, who was marginally closer, got there first and dragged the bowl back to his place, as Mafia threw his hand up in the air and cursed at him. For a few seconds the pair stared each other down, their noses a few inches apart, until Ergin leant forward to Mafia and pointed to the door. Scowling, Mafia got up and slowly walked out of the room. Following him into the office, we watched as he paced up and down, kicking the walls and punching the air in front of him. Ergin walked over to him and put his hand on his shoulder. ‘Forget Chan,’ he said. ‘Forget Chan.’

  As they sat down to work, and I pulled up a chair alongside Ergin, he gave me the background of his two assistants. ‘There are many lazy people in factory, but Mafia is one of most lazy – don’t worry, they no speak English – he always leaving to the chess area to talk to his zemliaki, the other men from his country. I always taking him back before guard find him. I am like father to Mafia. I promise my old smelnik, old Vietnamese man who gone away from Zone one year before, that I am protecting Mafia. Mafia wild boy. Rebel. He do many crimes before Zone, the violence and stealing. He with Vietnam Mafia in Moscow. In here, he no care. No fear. He need father man or he die in here, in fight or in the solitary prison.

  ‘Molloi, he seventeen years. He arrive from Zone for young boys for hurting Russian man with knife in fighting in street for his father. His father attacked by fascists, hooligans, skinheads. Molloi save father. He just fourteen. He twenty-three when leave Zone 22. His father dead now. Everybody has bad story in Zone 22. Not one happy.’


  Ergin started me on one of the easier jobs in the factory, marking up where the buttons were to be sewn on the blue smock-style jackets. My station was at the far end of the factory, facing the two columns of machine operators stretching back towards the entrance. Ergin handed me a piece of chalk no longer than a cigarette butt, saying: ‘Treat it like gold. Don’t lose it, don’t waste it. You must do 1,000 jackets with this.’

  The jackets began life at the back of the factory in the form of different-shaped pieces of dyed cloth. There, the first prisoner cut the body into shape using a cardboard cut-out and passed it forward to the guy in front, who sewed on a left arm. He then passed it forward to the next person, who sewed on the right arm, and by the time it had reached me at the front, fifteen minutes later, the jacket had arms, pockets, a lining, collar and cuffs. My job couldn’t have been more straightforward. There were four different sizes of jacket and, using cardboard templates with four little holes, I chalked up the spots where the buttons went (extra large had five buttons). I stood facing the two columns of machine operators with a pile of jackets to my right, and when I had chalked one up, I passed it to my left where Baska ran it through the button machine and threw it over his shoulder into the collection pile.

  I had been able to see my breath all day in the factory but from about three o’clock, when the darkness began to descend, the big airy hangar of a room got progressively colder. We all started working faster and faster just to keep warm, and the pile of jackets began to pile up in front of me. When the buzzer sounded at five o’clock to signal the end of the day and the start of the night shift, my legs and lower back ached from four hours of standing up and leaning forward over the low desk. I dropped the jacket I was holding and quickly joined all the others streaming out for check-in just inside the factory gates. On the way out, two guards patted us down and made us turn out our pockets to make sure we weren’t smuggling out any knives or tools. Maximovich, the master guard, was unsteady on his feet and his breath stank of liquor as he ran his hands up and down my legs and chest.

  Outside, we lined up by the gates in the stunning cold for the day’s third preverka, stamping our feet and wriggling inside our jackets as Maximovich lurched his way up the columns with his fur hat almost falling off the side of his head. Twice he walked up and down our lines, and we all started stamping our feet harder and faster because the cold had passed from being uncomfortable to painful. We were not allowed to stand down and return to the warmth of the atrads until every single prisoner in the Zone had been accounted for. No one was missing on this occasion, it was just that Maximovich was drunk and had counted incorrectly. Finally, halfway through his third count, he gave up, waved us all away with a loud grunt and stumbled off back towards the factory door.

  It was difficult to avoid the conclusion that preverka was more than just a way of imposing some order on us, a drip-drip discipline to instil some respect for authority in us wayward souls. It was also a subtle way of inflicting pain, at least in the frozen months of winter. To stand outside doing nothing for more than five minutes in temperatures plunging to 30 degrees below was an ordeal; for more than ten minutes it was agony, and for more than fifteen minutes it became positively dangerous, especially for the poorer prisoners among us who had crap, thin clothing and shockingly inadequate prison-issue footwear. Ten minutes after returning to the atrad after work, still frozen solid from the count outside the factory, the first blast of the siren sent us rushing to put our outdoor shoes on again for evening preverka.

  Once again we lined up five deep and about twenty-five long in front of the atrad and waited for the noise of the wooden door to the pen behind us, willing the guards to get up from the warmth of the observation room, put on their fucking coats and hats and get the fuck outside and start counting.

  After ten minutes, there was still no sign and I heard a handful of prisoners starting to whimper as we danced from foot to foot. My fingers were so cold I took them out of my armpits and put them in my mouth. Another couple of minutes passed before the door opened and the guards slowly tramped past behind us. The guard checking Atrad 1 was counting to himself in threes: ‘Tree, shrest, deyvat…’ as we continued to wriggle and stomp and shake our heads and do anything to stave off the cold. ‘Surely that must be it now?’ I heard myself say out loud. The moans of pain and the stamping on the icy tarmac were growing louder when the guard counting the men of Atrad 3 barked an order and someone scampered away down towards the boiler-room area, a black silhouette against the glare of the floodlight. Three minutes later he emerged – he looked like an African from where I was standing 150 yards away – and he was pulling another man by the elbow. The other man was half bent over and coughing violently. As the pair drew closer, his legs gave way beneath him and he slumped to his knees and then fell forward into the snow. It was little Philip, whom I’d befriended in Moscow.

  20

  January was a cruel month in Mordovia. It was dark for eighteen hours a day, and it was as cold as anywhere on the planet outside of the North and South Poles. There were some mornings and evenings when the temperature suddenly plunged so low that everyone, prisoners and guards alike, had to remain inside the atrads or the office building. The heating system in the wooden living quarters was not powerful enough to keep out the very worst of the cold, and often we had to pull on as many layers as we could and wrap ourselves in our blankets, but still we shivered and shuddered. At night I slept with my thick coat and woolly hat on. One morning we woke to discover that the Zone boiler had broken in the night – a common occurrence, apparently. The pipes inside the atrad went cold and all 100 of us took refuge in the TV room, trying to get as many bodies as we could into one space, to try and generate some warmth.

  A few days later, during evening preverka, a dramatic freeze, a kind of ice storm, descended on the Zone and left us all standing in awe as if we were witnessing a biblical experience. The temperature had risen steadily during the day, and just as darkness began to fall there was a heavy shower of sleety snow that soaked our hats and coats as we stood waiting for the guards to hurry up and count us. It was then that the cold came down in a snap, an invisible but audible force rolling off the flat landscape beyond and enveloping the Zone. The branches of the trees crackled, the wood of the buildings creaked as the air tightened its icy grip and the cold hit us in the face like a stinging slap. It was beautiful and thrilling to watch and hear, but as soon as the guards disappeared inside, the rest of us made a run for the atrads to escape its painful clasp.

  It was easy to understand why there was so much illness in the Zone. Bodies, already feeble from a poor diet and hard work, were weakened further by the perishing cold. The atrads were hothouses for germs, with eighty or so of us – and almost twice as many in Atrad 3 – living and sleeping, literally, cheek by jowl. Often I rolled over and woke up in the night to find the snoring, wheezing face of my Afghan neighbour less than a foot from my own, or an arm accidentally draped over my bed. A Nigerian called Uba had the bunk below me, but as he worked night shifts the only contact we had was when we passed each other heading to and from the factory. During the day, the building resounded to the sound of men hacking, sneezing, and clearing the snot from their noses and throats. All the Far Eastern guys, especially the Chinese, and most of the Arab characters, were in the habit of spitting whenever they were outside, and the ground in the exercise pen was covered with frozen smears and gobs of greeny-brown phlegm.

  My chesty cough was no worse than when I had left Moscow, but, barring miracles, it was just a matter of time before one of the more severe infections that were rife throughout the Zone found its way into my system. My great fear was that the name of that condition was going to be tuberculosis. When Philip, one of the frailer inmates, had collapsed in the snow, coughing blood, during preverka, TB was suspected, but after a week in his bed in Atrad 3 he started to show signs of recovery and the doctor was optimistic that what he was suffering was a very severe chest infection
. While he recuperated, the devout Africans were delighted that the prayers they had been saying for him in the little red-brick chapel had been answered.

  The first time I stopped feeling cold, if only for a few wonderful minutes, was six days after leaving quarantine when I joined the rest of the atrad for our weekly shower down in the building that housed the boiler room, a workshop for general maintenance work and the barber’s room. It had been almost three weeks since I’d arrived in the Zone and enjoyed the heat of the hot shower I’d taken after having my head shaved; although I had washed as thoroughly as I could in the sink every morning and evening, the grime had started to cling to my body and whenever I put my nose inside my fleece to breathe in some warmth, the smell of my own stale body odour was truly disgusting. After twenty-odd days without a full body wash I stank like an old tramp.

  I’d been looking forward to Sunday all week, partly because it was the only day off we had, and it gave me the chance to check out the library, maybe even the church, but mainly because Sunday was shower day and I was desperate to clean my body and my clothes. I had run out of fresh underwear at the start of the week and had been wearing the same pants, thermal T-shirt and socks ever since. We weren’t allowed to wash our clothes in the sinks in the atrad because they didn’t want to have dripping clothes constantly hanging from the water pipes. The only opportunity we had to wash them came in the few minutes we were allowed under the shower on Sunday.

  At ten o’clock the buzzer sounded, signalling that it was time to assemble, but most of the atrad was already standing near the entrance ready to go. The scramble to get outside that followed was even more frantic and urgent than it was for the head-counts, which I didn’t understand, and I stood there bemused as I was elbowed and jostled to the back of the mêlée and the rest pushed their way outside. Running was strictly prohibited in Zone 22, but people were close to a jog as they streamed into formation on the tarmac, lining up, as we did for preverka, three men wide and about twenty-five long, holding the plastic bags full of dirty washing that we stored in the cupboards with our provisions. On this occasion the columns had turned ninety degrees away from the atrads and were facing down the compound past the kitchen and dining area to the boiler building at the bottom. There had been fresh snowfalls over night, and only the concourse, which had been scraped all morning, was clear. The rest was blanketed in snow, including the pine trees and marshes that I could glimpse stretching away for miles over the top of the barbed wire.