by Tig Hague
‘Hague Tig, I understand that tonight you have opened your account with us. Let me congratulate you. Let’s hope Alla in the Embassy is quick to send you some money,’ he said, Sacha translating. The bastard had been listening in on my conversation. ‘As a former banker I’m sure you understand better than most how money helps to make the world go round. I’m sure you will know how to spend your money wisely in here.’
He paused, and I filled the awkward silence by saying clumsily, ‘Thank you, Zanpolit. Those are kind words.’ I stood, Oliver Twist style, looking at the floor and holding my black woolly hat out in front of me.
‘It’s a great coincidence that tonight we were saying how much the guards’ room needed a new television and how useful it would be to have a video recorder for the Zone. And it got me thinking: I wonder if Hague Tig would like to make a contribution, now that he is soon to have a Zone 22 bank account!’
Zanpolit chuckled at his little joke and ran his hand through his heavily gelled hair, adding, ‘So what do you say, Hague Tig? Do you want to be a popular man in the Zone, and make a little contribution towards the improvement of our little community?’
‘Well, er… of course… well, yes… how much?’ I stammered.
‘Well, as your friend Sacha was recently kind enough to make the full contribution to pay for some important pieces of furniture, perhaps you would like to match his generosity, and the administration can then continue to look on both your parole applications favourably when the time comes. I think 100,000 roubles should cover it.’
‘And if I’m unable to raise the money back home?’ I asked.
Zanpolit put on a mock-serious face and got up from his chair. ‘Well, Hague Tig, some of those guards have set their hearts on this for a long time, and you wouldn’t want to be the one to disappoint them, would you? You know how they are with their black marks. But perhaps you like it in here so much, you want to spend an extra six months with us?’
The freezing cold of the Mordovian winter had one very small consolation for us: the steam from our breath meant we could sometimes have a crafty cigarette without having to crowd under one of the four little pagoda-style shelters that had been designated as the smoking zones. If a guard caught us smoking outside the shelters we were automatically handed a black mark, but in the factory compound, where Maximovich and the other guards tended to stay inside during break, we could risk it in the colder months. During the ten-minute break one morning towards the end of March, I lit up a Marlboro and, cupping it in my hand and scanning the compound for an approaching guard, wandered over to the stables facing the factory to say hello to Baska and see the foal, who’d become the unofficial Zone mascot. For three weeks since her birth the little grey had been the centre of attention in the factory area. Baska had called her ‘Nadezhda’, which means ‘hope’ in Russian, and during every break almost the entire workforce filed outside to stroke and pat her and watch her prancing about the little paddock area on her tall skinny legs. There was something enchanting about Nadezhda. Perhaps it was the animal’s innocence, the fact that she had no idea she was living in a shithole among miserable criminals and mean-spirited guards; or perhaps it was her youthful exuberance and the happiness she showed as she trotted around the paddock, showing off to us. Whatever it was, Nadezhda was more than just an ungainly young grey horse to us. She was a rare source of joy.
It had snowed heavily overnight and half the factory area lay under a thick blanket of white, while the other half had been shovelled into great piles around the ramshackle wooden stable block and the perimeter of the tarmac square in front of the factory. Nadezhda was roped up to a hook outside the stable door as I approached, and I stroked her nose and mane before stubbing out my cigarette with my boot and going inside. Baska was shovelling the manure and dirty straw into a wheelbarrow and struggling to manoeuvre himself between the two big horses, Babushka, Nadezhda’s mother, and Molloi, a hot-blooded black colt.
‘All right, Baska?’ I smiled as he looked up from between the two horses and jumped towards me as Molloi twitched and fretted.
He leant his spade up against the wooden slats of the wall and handed me Babushka’s rope, pointing outside with his other hand. ‘Idi, anglichanin, spasiba.’ The closest I’d ever been to a fully grown horse was in the paddock at Epsom on Derby Day, and I was nervous as I led the mare out into the slippery paddock where the ice and snow lay in hazardous patches.
I stroked the animal’s nose, patted her back and talked nonsense into her ear, then Baska signalled to me to bring her back inside and handed me the rope around Molloi’s head. The colt was a much livelier beast altogether than his stablemate and he seemed to take an instant dislike to me, backing away as I tried to guide him out through the door. When Baska gave him a word of encouragement and a gentle slap on his haunches, the horse made a sharp bolt through the door, forcing me to jump aside and pull back on the reins as he dragged me into the snow. For a few moments the horse tugged his head from side to side and we were both growing jumpier by the second. He was so strong, and the more I pulled the rope, the more he tried to resist. The other prisoners, under the smoking shelter, had all turned round to watch as Molloi pushed me round in circles with his hindquarters, both of us slipping and sliding on the pools of ice, him whinnying and me cursing at him to stand still. It wasn’t so much that he was trying to run away, he just didn’t like being handled by me.
Suddenly, in one quick movement, he barged me with his flank, the rope slipped from my hand and I found myself cornered between the wall of the stable and a giant pile of fresh snow that reached up to my shoulder. Molloi’s back legs were just three feet away; he flicked one of them out at me, violently, and the waft of air from his hoof told me he had missed my face by no more than an inch or two. He was a big, powerful horse, Molloi, and he was going to cause me some serious harm unless I managed to get clear. If he got me in the head, I was a goner. I was starting to panic, because I had nowhere to run and he was scraping and flicking his hind legs as he backed towards me. I withdrew into the corner between the stable and the wall of snow, and when I saw Molloi lining himself up for another kick, I immediately hurled myself out of the way, shouting, ‘BASKA!’ before disappearing upside down in the giant pile of fresh snow. For half a minute or so I wriggled around trying to extricate myself, and I was panicking even more now. It was a little like being turned over by a giant wave in the sea, and I couldn’t work out which way up I was until, finally, I emerged into the sunlight with half a foot of snow on my hat. Baska, who was holding Molloi by the rope, and the rest of the prisoners were creasing up with laughter. Even the sniper in the watchtower was chuckling, and soon my own shoulders were bouncing up and down with amusement too. For half a minute or so, 100 prisoners rocked and fell about, holding their stomachs and pointing at me, and I could feel the tears of laughter starting to ice up as they streamed down my cheeks.
I hadn’t laughed so hard since Dad and Rob had come to visit me in Moscow. I had wound myself up into a frenzy of anguish over the abrupt end to my phone call with Lucy, but all the tension flooded from me as I laughed like a madman, covered in snow from head to foot.
24
I first noticed the signs of the spring thaw when I was leaving the office building after breakfast following a visit to the doctor about my ongoing chest infection, which had flared up again and was refusing to budge even after I’d given up smoking for a couple of weeks. The fear of TB haunted me every time I coughed or felt a stabbing pain when I breathed in deeply. The glands in my throat were still up, I felt weak and tired from the moment I woke, and at night I’d been sweating like a Turk in a hamam. What was really freaking me out was the fact that the tetracycline antibiotics I’d bribed off the doctor with a full jar of coffee and sixty smokes had done sweet FA except make my diarrhoea even worse than normal. ‘Cushion bum’, as she was known to the African boys, had written me out a sick note, signing me off work for three days. I was standing outside the door of the o
ffice before heading back to bed, hacking into my sleeve while bending forward with the pain, when I felt a drip land on the back of my exposed neck. I looked up and saw that the icicles that hung along the entire length of the guttering were all dripping like leaky taps. The chest infection had left me feeling cold and shivery, but when I exhaled, for the first time since I’d arrived in the Zone, I was unable to see my breath. Spring was on its way.
They say there are two seasons in Mordovia: a long unforgiving winter and a short unforgiving summer. Spring and autumn are no more than brief breaks between the two, little interludes of mildness and moderation between the extremity and intensity of the cold and the heat. By the time April came I’d begun to wonder whether Mordovia had a summer at all, because the snow and ice still lay thick on the ground, and the twiggy crowns of the silver birch trees beyond the barbed wire on the Zone walls were as bare as they had been when I had arrived in the dead of winter. But within a few days the icicles were gone, the snow had turned first to slush and then to mud, the trees started to bud and the birds began to sing, and by the middle of the month the only signs of winter were the piles of compacted snow in the shadows of north-facing buildings that never saw any direct daylight.
Every new sign of life was echoed in the mood of the Zone. Even Time itself seemed to have been frozen to a standstill in the depths of winter – March felt no further into the year than January – but once the ice had released its iron grip, there was a sense that life was free to start moving forward again. And the further and faster it moved, the closer I came to seeing Mum and Dad, and then Lucy, and to regaining my freedom… Spring was the first milestone on my journey out of Zone 22. But the change in the season was also a depressing reminder that my real life effectively remained on pause as the world beyond the prison walls moved on without me.
I went to bed for three days, desperate to get myself healthy before Mum and Dad arrived the following week. I was going to look bad enough as it was. My head was shaved almost to the scalp, I was a stone and a half below my optimum weight, and although there were no mirrors in the Zone I could tell from my reflection in the windows that my face was bony and gaunt. It was going to be traumatic enough for them as it was to visit their boy in a prison camp in the middle of one of the most miserable godforsaken regions of Eastern Europe, but to find me doubled over in agony and hacking my chest to shreds every few minutes might well be too much for them to bear.
For three days and nights I did little but sleep. I drank as much water as possible and I ate my remaining four tins of fruit (three peach slices, one mandarin segments) in an effort to try to get some Vitamin C into my system. My food and cigarette supplies were almost exhausted, and for the previous three or four weeks I’d been living off nothing but three biscuits for breakfast, prison soup for lunch and a small bowl of noodles in the evening. Occasionally I made an appearance at breakfast in the canteen, but mealtimes were fraught occasions, and the guards were handing out black marks at a rate of roughly one every ten days for the most minor ‘offences’, like, quite literally, stepping out of line, or not greeting them with proper respect, whatever the fuck that meant. The authorities were happy for prisoners to skip meals because it meant there was more food to go round, but only a few of the better-off prisoners, like myself, could afford the luxury of staying in the atrads.
After four days, the day before Mum and Dad arrived, the doctor said I was well enough to return to the factory, and although the fatigue still dripped from my limbs and my chest felt like a slab of raw meat, the infection was entering its final ‘clear-out’ stages.
A mixture of excitement and nerves had taken hold of me from the moment I woke up and got dressed into my civilian clothes: black polo neck, blue jeans and loafers. Not since my appeal hearing back in early December had I worn the clothes of a free man, and I felt a little self-conscious as I pulled them on, before shaving as close as my old Bic razor would allow and polishing my shoes to a fine buff. When I walked out of the wash area into the corridor, the others were waiting for the buzzer to signal the start of the day’s work. Boodoo John looked me up and down and gave me a builder’s wolf-whistle, and Julian slapped me on the back and said; ‘Hey, look at the English gentleman!’ They didn’t say it, but I knew they were happy for me.
It was a warm, bright morning as the guard led me out of the main gates and into the visitors’ bungalow, which was situated beyond the mesh-and-barbed-wire fence to the rear of Atrads 1 and 2, but within the outer concrete wall of the Zone. Raisa Petrovna was sitting behind the desk in the small reception area at the entrance when I was led into the building. She looked up and smiled as the guard unlocked the barred gate and waved me through into the long dark corridor. Off to the left were a kitchen and two bedrooms, as functional and drab as the Zone itself: peeling, off-white walls, dark linoleum floors, plastic chairs, brown curtains in the bedrooms, prison issue sheets and blankets and small hard pillows on the beds.
I was expecting to have to wait for Mum and Dad, and I was startled when I walked into the living room at the end of the corridor to find them standing there, smiling from ear to ear. I took a step back, almost bumping into the guard behind, and Dad said: ‘Who were you expecting: Arsene Wenger and the Chancellor of the Exchequer?’ I swept towards them and into their outstretched arms and for a minute or so we just clung on to each other, like rugby players in a huddle. I was determined not to cry. I wanted their visit to be a happy occasion so that they could go home with some positive images and memories to sustain them over the rest of my sentence. Mum was sniffing and dabbing her nose with a tissue, but she was holding back the tears too. Dad was giving it the comedy treatment, just as he had done when he came to visit me in Moscow.
‘So how’s life in the five-star hotel then? All right for some, isn’t it? The rest of us have to work for a living…’
Mum interrupted him. ‘They’re not feeding you properly, are they?’ she said, running her hand up and down my ribcage like it was a xylophone.
‘No, no, they are, honestly, Mum,’ I protested. ‘It’s much, much better than Moscow. You mustn’t worry about that. It’s ten times better than Moscow in here, honestly. It’s clean, it’s pretty safe. It’s just bloody boring, Mum, and it was bloody freezing too, but it’s warmer now. Anyway, you two are looking brilliant considering…’
I didn’t mean to say ‘considering’, and I was lying, too, because I thought they looked at least two or three years older: greyer, more drawn, worry lines etched into their brows. Mum had lost at least a stone and there were dark bags under her eyes. Dad’s hair was now completely grey. Look what I’ve bloody done to them! I thought to myself, and the shame coursed through me.
The living room was no more than the size of a small front room in a terraced house. Against one wall there was a brown sofa made from cheap fabric, covered in stains and rips accumulated over twenty or thirty years. The two armchairs were brown and mouldy too. An old black and white television, a corner table, a brown carpet, faded orange wallpaper and a picture of some dogs playing cards, hanging at an angle, completed the decor. The whole place stank of stale smoke and the sweat of a thousand convicts.
Dad winced as he eased himself slowly into one of the armchairs, his new hip clearly still giving him a bit of grief, while Mum and I sat on the settee and started firing questions at each other. The rest of the day we chatted and chirped like the sparrows bouncing around on the windowsill outside, all talking across each other to pass on news and ask after one another.
I knew that Mum and Dad were only going to put a positive shine on life back home, but their faces and voices betrayed them when they said that everything was probably going to work out fine with Garban Icap when I got out.
‘So have you heard from them recently?’ I probed.
Mum let out a long sigh and leant forward.
‘Tig, darling, you’ll get another job. Don’t worry. We didn’t want to tell you, but they terminated your contract back in November
after you were found guilty…’
I had long suspected that Garban had sacked me, or were going to – relatively junior positions like mine could be filled overnight – and I’d known from the beginning that everyone was going to shield me from bad news at home as best they could, but the confirmation still came like a stab to the stomach.
‘I’ll make you a proper cup of English tea,’ said Mum, pushing herself up off the settee. ‘I brought you some PG Tips from home, and bags of goodies from the supermarket in Moscow. It’s not quite like Tesco’s but there should be enough to keep you going for a month or so…’
‘And the Embassy driver who brought us down from Moscow has delivered all the little contributions to the Zone: the video camera, the TV and the computers…’ interrupted Dad, giving me a wink.
‘So, Dad, how have we been paying for all this, plus the lawyers, the travel to and from Moscow, my food parcels, my Zone bank account, the contributions and everything… Where’s it all coming from, Dad? I hope it’s not your pension or savings…’
‘Let’s not worry about that, son,’ he laughed, getting up from his seat and ruffling my hair. ‘Everyone’s rallying around, boy. Your family and friends. We know you’d do the same, wouldn’t you? We look after one another. That’s what friends and family are for. That’s the last thing you should be thinking about. You’ve got enough on your plate.’
‘I want to pay everyone back when I can, Dad. Tell me, seriously, what’s the total cost so far?’
‘Forget it, boy. Forget it. Let’s just say it’s less than Thierry Henry earns a week, put it that way! It’s not important. Let’s just get you home, boy.’