by Tig Hague
After supper I went to the office to sign for the delivery, and the entire contents of the three foot by three foot cardboard box had been laid out on a table in the reception area. My eyes lit up at the sight of them as I stepped out of the swirling snow and pulled the door shut. There were fifteen packs of noodles, 800 cigarettes, six jars of Nescafé, six tins of a pea and sweetcorn mixture, six tins of peaches, four kolbasa salamis, four bulbs of garlic, a bag of apples, a bag of oranges, six bars of chocolate, some Bic razors, a tin of shaving foam, a bottle of shampoo and a bar of soap, some biros and exercise books. A stout, middle-aged woman called Raisa Petrovna, who acted as the prison liaison officer and had a reputation for being the only kind official in the administration, pushed a document across her desk for me to sign. As I leant forward and took the pen from her she looked me in the eye intently and, smiling, opened the top drawer of her desk and left it there. I turned round to the table, picked up a bar of Lindt Milk Chocolate and slid it into the drawer, which she immediately closed.
I had just finished packing up the box and was heading towards the door when the sound of clicking fingers made me turn round. The guard who’d kicked me up the arse on my first night was standing in the doorway of the corridor with an unlit cigarette hanging off his lip, slowly curling his index finger back and forth as if to say, ‘Not so fast, my sneaky little Englishman.’ Regarded as the most severe and vindictive of the guards, he was known as the Undertaker because he always volunteered to deal with the body of anyone who died in the Zone. I went to put the box down on the table, but immediately he blurted out, ‘Nyet! Nyet! Nyet!’ I followed him the few yards down the corridor and left into the observation room, where three other guards were standing near the big bay window at the front, facing me as I walked in carrying my box. The Undertaker indicated that I should put the box down on the table by the wall, then dispatched me to the corridor with a dismissive wave of his hand. As I stood outside the door, in the Zone pose of legs wide apart, hands out in front, staring at the floor, I could hear the Undertaker and his friends ransacking the box, making muttering noises of surprise and delight. After a few minutes, the Undertaker barked, ‘Hague Tig,’ and I re-entered the room to see all of them with their backs to me, looking out of the window. What remained of Alexi’s shopping, which was roughly half of it, was scattered across a table. ‘Filthy thieving fucking pigs!’ I muttered under my breath, as I started shoving the remains back into the box as fast as I could. The Undertaker swung round from the window and grunted something in Russian, which I read as, ‘What did you say, you little shit?’ He was glaring at me with hatred and disgust in his eyes.
Panicking, I replied in a quiet, grovelling voice: ‘Sorry, sorry. Nothing. Spasiba, nachalnik…’
Back in the atrad, a dozen of the poorer inmates were waiting in a small crowd by the cupboards near the entrance. Ahmed was there too, ready to open the food lockers, and when I started stacking the food on to the shelves, they pushed forward, holding out their hands and saying: ‘Di menya!’ which means ‘Give it to me!’ It sounds blunt, even rude, in translation, but that was just the common phrase used in Russian prisons and I’d become accustomed to it. Looking on to the shelves behind me they could see all the piles of packets, bags and tins and I didn’t have the heart to turn them away – they didn’t have so much as a plain biscuit between them. I began to hand out small items to anyone who appeared: I opened an orange and broke it into segments, I split open a garlic bulb and passed out a couple of cloves, some biscuits… all meagre offerings in themselves, but each prompting a gush of grovelling thanks, as if I’d handed them each a Harrods’ Christmas hamper.
‘Spasiba! Spasiba! Mr English… Englishman very kind man… God love you… Anglichanin is Robin Hood, yes?’
All day, every day, people begged for cigarettes, which they often used to keep to use as bribes for the guards, but it was the food that they wanted above all else and I was taken aback by the shameless insistence of the beggars. The three small prison meals failed to provide the energy we needed, especially with the cold and the labour forcing our bodies to burn up the calories at a rate of knots. Everyone in Zone 22, to varying degrees, was malnourished, and as a general rule the longer a prisoner had served, the bonier, paler and gaunter he became. The beggars that evening were among the least healthy-looking characters in the atrad.
After a week of handouts, half my provisions had gone and I was in danger of running out before the Embassy came down. I had just come from the locker area, where I’d spent ten minutes doling out more bits and pieces, and I was cutting up some kolbasa to put in with the noodles I was making for Boodoo John and myself, when a queue of five or six people formed at the table. The Vietnamese guy at the front was staring at me, holding out his hand, like it was automatic now that I just gave him some of my supper.
‘For fuck’s sake, this is getting out of hand!’ I sighed, turning to Boodoo John at the end of the table. ‘They expect it now. What do you think I should do? There’s going to be nothing left in a few days at this rate.’
Boodoo John shrugged and said: ‘Just tell them to go away. They know the score in here. It’s your food, not theirs.’
I turned round to the small mob that had now gathered round me and, holding out my hands in front of me, said: ‘No! Nyet! No more! Finished! Caput! Food over!’ Immediately, they turned around and melted away without a word of complaint or a frown.
The only provisions Boodoo John had were powdered mashed potato and a couple of packets of instant soup, to which he treated himself roughly every three or four days, depending on how much he had in his locker. He made the foo-foo by mixing bread with some water into a paste and then once it had set he swallowed it whole, as was the custom in Nigeria. Mostly, though, we ate my noodles, and once the parcels had arrived we were able to liven them up with some kind of combination of garlic, kolbasa and some tinned sweetcorn and peas. In the first week we ate the apples and oranges before they went off, and saved the cans of vegetables for the following week when there was going to be nothing left but carbohydrates in the form of noodles and biscuits.
The evening after Alexi had made his visit I went to introduce myself to Zanpolit. I’d wanted to go earlier but I didn’t have any coffee or other ‘luxuries’ to offer him. When Ahmed opened the locker I took out one jar of Nescafé Gold, four packets of Marlboro and a bar of Lindt chocolate. I put the coffee and chocolate into my underpants and the smokes into my socks, and waited by the front window in the television room. As soon as the light in Zanpolit’s office came on, I went to the atrad office, slipped two Marlboro and a teaspoon of coffee wrapped in a piece of foil from my cigarette packet on to the table in front of the young guard, and said, ‘Zanpolit.’ His spots looked especially livid under the glare of the unshaded light bulb when he looked up from his magazine – it was about guns and featured a front-page picture of a cardboard human target riddled with bullet holes, with a man in combat gear and a hunter’s hat holding his automatic rifle and grinning from ear to ear. Pocketing the cigs and coffee but saying nothing, he got up and we walked to the entrance. As I headed across the exercise yard to the electric mesh gate, he leant out of the door behind me and raised his arm to the observation window. The gate buzzed open and with my trousers bulging I waddled across the tarmac, leaving a trail of boot prints on the blanket of fresh snow. There was no one in reception and so I nervously approached the doorway of the guards’ room, where I could hear the muffled noise of a football match emanating from the TV.
The Undertaker was waiting for me in the doorway with his head turned to one side, wearing a face of mocking curiosity.
‘Zanpolit, spasiba,’ I said.
He looked the other way, whistling to himself as if he was waiting for something. I took out my open packet of Marlboro from the shirt pocket inside my coat, pulled out two cigarettes and placed them in his outstretched hand. Leaning forward and putting his hand towards my face, he flicked his middle finger over his thu
mb, like he was trying to get rid of a fly or bogey. I took that as my cue to leave, but just as I turned to go, he pulled me by the arm and ripped open the poppers on my black jacket, revealing the bulge in my groin. He turned and shouted something to the other guards, and four of them stood up and walked over and began to laugh as the Undertaker pointed at my balls. ‘English boy like the Russian man very much!’ said the Undertaker, and then repeated it in Russian, triggering gales of laughter among his friends as they ambled back to their seats and my cheeks burned with anger.
I shuffled down the corridor, took a deep breath and gently rapped my knuckles on the door. At the sound of a grunt within, I pushed down the handle and walked in.
Zanpolit was sitting in a leather-bound chair behind a wooden desk cluttered with papers and files, smoothing back his gelled brown hair, which ran over the top of his shirt collar. A Russian flag dangled limply from a pole behind him, next to a framed painting of a wintry landscape. I was breathing faster than normal. Along the wall adjoining the corridor was a bank of filing cabinets. Through the three windows on the wall opposite I looked across to Atrad 1 and Atrad 2, the red night-lights clearly visible in the dormitories at the front. He held out an open hand, inviting me to approach, and I was conscious of the wet footprints I left as my boots squeaked across his red linoleum floor.
I turned away from him to extract my gifts from my underpants and the chocolate was slightly soft as I pulled it out. Along with the coffee, I placed it in his drawer while he carried on pretending to read a document. I added the four packets of Marlboro, stepped back from the desk and looked down at the floor, waiting for him to speak. After half a minute of silence I looked up. He was looking at me with his fingers entwined on his lap, and then he held out his hands at his side as if to say: ‘So what can I do for you?’
‘Hello, spasiba, Zanpolit, me Tig Hague,’ I stammered nervously, pointing at myself and trying to smile.
‘Uh-huh?’ he replied, raising his eyebrows and holding them there. ‘And?’ was what his face seemed to be saying. I had no idea what to say. My Russian wasn’t good enough to start a conversation. I knew quite a few nouns, mainly words for physical objects, but my inability to communicate properly made me panicky and I started stuttering.
‘Um, er, spasiba, er… udo? My udo good?…’
‘Udo?’ he said, sounding bemused. He pointed at his watch and, not knowing whether he meant ‘Don’t waste my time’, or that my parole date wasn’t for over twelve months, I started walking backwards to the door, nodding my head and muttering: ‘Spasiba, Zanpolit, spasiba…’ He looked back down at his papers and I pulled open the door, desperate to escape from my embarrassment, but as I rushed through the door with my head down I stopped in my tracks. Two feet in front of me, with a guard at his side, was a black man with eyes bulging so far out of their sockets they looked as if they’d been stuck on to his face with superglue by a mad scientist. His hands were held out in front of him in handcuffs. For a few seconds I froze, unable to extract myself from the intensity of his stare. Shaking his head from side to side, he started singing in a nursery-rhyme style: ‘Cosmos is going to solitary, Cosmos is going to solitary…’
22
It kept coming back, every time harsher, clearer, louder, more graphic, more unsettling. It disrupted my sleep and haunted me during the day, like a short video on a loop switch that rewound automatically and played itself over and over again. And the more it tormented me at night, the more it stayed with me in the day, the images burrowing themselves deeper and deeper until they had become a permanent fixture in my mind…
Lucy, heavily pregnant, lying on a floor, howling in pain, and crying out for me to come and rescue her. Me trying to board some form of transport but it’s always too crowded to get on, or the ticket collector or cabbie won’t let me in; me waiting for a bus that never comes; finally getting on the train or bus or into the car that never arrives at its destination or a plane that never lands, and Lucy carries on screaming and wailing…
I wrestled myself awake and lay on my back panting. My woolly hat had come off and was lying on the floor five feet below, and although my scalp was cold I was too worn out to get down from the bunk and get it. I lifted the blanket over my head and curled up into the embryo position, trying to chase away the images of Lucy in agony and fill my mind instead with happy memories and plans for the future. Judging by the groans it was getting on for five o’clock, the noisiest time of the night, an hour before we got up, when half the room began to stir. The sounds of coughing, snoring, moaning and sleep-talking filled the dormitory, half hell, half farmyard. There was never silence in the dormitory, not lasting more than three seconds at any rate, and by that time of night the room stank of rotten bodies and putrid breath.
Yasir, a heavy-smoking Afghani with serious bronchial problems, was lying on his side on the bunk next door, his long craggy face eighteen inches from mine, wheezing like an asthmatic donkey with a crisp packet stuck in its throat. I turned over to the other side of the bed and, two bunks away on the bottom bed, Abuzuike, a Nigerian guy, was reaching the climax of his twenty-seventh wank of the night, his hand going like a piston in overdrive under his rough blanket. Everyone wanked in Zone 22. Even the devout Christians wanked. But Abuzuike wanked for Nigeria. Barely were the lights out and he was off, hammering one out, like he was in a competition with himself to see how many he could squeeze in per night. By day, he moped around the atrad a picture of listlessness and misery, shoulders stooped, feet shuffling, eyes somewhere in the middle distance. In the factory he was in constant trouble for causing congestion in the manufacturing process because he was so slow and idle at his machine. Eventually, Ergin was forced to move him off the machines and give him the easier job of distributing and collecting piles of cloth around the floor. But at night he came alive. He was always the first in bed, and whenever I woke up or couldn’t sleep he too always seemed to be awake, lying on his back with his blanket shaking above him. He was just about to ejaculate, judging by the acceleration of his hand, when a Vietnamese suddenly sat up at the far end of the room and jabbered something in his native tongue. The moment he fell silent, one of his compatriots down at my end started babbling a response, and for five minutes it went back and forth like a long-distance telephone conversation. The Vietnamese, for some reason, were by far the chattiest sleep-talkers.
As ever when I woke up in the night, I ended up on my back staring at the wooden ceiling and listening to the rats and mice, scurrying and gnawing, a couple of feet away on the other side of the thin boarding. There were vermin all round the Zone, but they were concentrated above and below the atrads, drawn by the smell of the food in the cupboards and the bags of clothes they could unravel and steal for bedding. The only people who didn’t mind the rats were the Vietnamese, who liked to eat them. They could skin one faster than the rest of us could take our clothes off, and then they would bribe the boiler-room guys to let them cook it in the fires of the furnace. They ate anything, the Vietnamese: insects, weeds, birds, mice and rats. Boodoo John said they even ate dogs and cats, but I think he was joking. ‘If it moves or grows, cook it’ was their philosophy, and it served them well because as a rule the Vietnamese community was probably healthier than any other in the Zone.
Whenever I woke up early it was always a relief to hear the sound of the Zone buzzer, telling us we had ten minutes to get dressed and lined up outside for exercises, and that I was able to escape the fetid, germ-ridden, vermin-infested, shit-stinking wankhole that was our dormitory and get out in the fresh air, no matter how cold. But that morning, my mind was heavy with dark thoughts and worries about Lucy and I was one of the last to get dressed and line up outside. I hadn’t spoken to her for almost three months, since the failure of my appeal at the beginning of December, and although I had written her ten letters in just under two months I was yet to receive one from her. Boodoo John reassured me that the postal system, which came via the embassies and through the prison administr
ation, was incredibly unreliable. The suspicion was that they used to sit on letters for weeks and months on end and then give them to prisoners in a big bundle, so that the earliest ones had become virtually meaningless by the time they were read. The fact that I’d not heard from Mum and Dad either supported his explanation, but still my mind filled with paranoid thoughts: Had she left me for someone else? Had the pressure got to her? Was she seriously ill?
I stood shivering outside the factory gates waiting for the guard to get to the card with my name on it and summon me across Sniper Alley and into the relative warmth of the factory floor. The dark novelty of arriving in a new prison had worn off after a couple of weeks in the atrad, and I had long since surrendered myself to the mind-numbing, soul-crushing daily routine of the Zone. Like everyone else in the factory, I’d quickly become a human automaton on the production line, mindlessly, silently chalking hundreds of faint marks on the jackets through the cut-out buttonholes of the cardboard model, throwing the jacket on to Baska’s pile on my left and taking another jacket from the heap on my right. Every day was Groundhog Day: exercises in the cold, head-count, wash, porridge, factory, sun comes up, ten-minute cigarette break, factory, head-count, soup, factory, ten-minute break, sun goes down, head-count, another head-count, porridge or soup, write a letter, smoke a cigarette, bed… all carried out in a cold so bitter and unforgiving it was physically painful at times.