by Tig Hague
They were doing what I was doing: giving an edited, upbeat, glossy version of the truth, sparing one another too much reality.
By the afternoon of the second day, we had exhausted most of our news and we sat in silence for long periods, playing cards, smoking and reading. We didn’t need to speak to enjoy the pleasure of our reunion. Dad even managed to watch some Russian TV on the ancient set in the corner, snoring from time to time in his chair while Mum and I dozed and chatted every now and then on the old brown sofa. For a few hours it felt like I was back in the front room in New Eltham again.
But as I watched their heads bouncing up and down as they nodded off, still exhausted from their three-day journey from south-east London to Mordovia via Moscow, I thought of all the picture frames on their mantelpiece and dresser at home, proudly showcasing me at various stages of childhood, from baby to toddler to goofy teenager and flanker for Kent Colts to BA (Honours) graduate from Leeds University in my mortarboard and gown; and I thought of all the hopes they must have had for me as I grew up. And what had it all come to? A prison camp in the Russian wilderness! How had I repaid their love and support over the years? By becoming a convicted drugs smuggler! I squirmed on my bum at the thought of them having to tell the neighbours what had become of me, and how the rumour mill would be doing overdrive in their circle of friends. I imagined them all down at the newsagent’s and baker’s in New Eltham, shaking their heads: ‘Good gracious, have you heard the news about the Hague boy? Who’d have thought he’d turn out to be a wrong ’un? Seemed like such a decent lad. Just shows you, doesn’t it? You never know, you just never know…’
In the evening, a new guard came down the corridor to check on us and I immediately stood to attention when he walked through the door. Unlike the guards before him, who had made me stand until they’d gone, he motioned to me to sit down and then nodded politely to Mum and Dad. I knew all the guards by sight, but I’d had little contact with this character, who looked a bit sinister with the dark lenses of his reactor glasses obscuring his eyes. I’d given him a few cigarettes in bribes to let me go over to the office building, but that was the extent of our contact. He was a little younger than Dad, but they shared the same stocky build.
He pointed to me on the sofa and wagged his finger, looking at Dad at the same time with a half-smile on his face.
‘Correct, sir, he’s a very naughty boy!’ said Dad, entering into the humour, and joining him in wagging his finger at me.
The guard then bent down and made a spanking gesture on an imaginary young boy.
‘You’re right! I should have been a bit firmer with him when he was a lad and he would never have ended up in this mess!’
The banter continued for a minute or two, and when the guard went to leave he walked over and shook Dad and Mum by the hand, and Dad got to his feet to say goodbye. I followed the guard into the corridor and beckoned him into the kitchen, where Mum’s shopping was sitting in half a dozen bags on the small formica table. I took out a bar of chocolate and a packet of Marlboro and handed them to him, but he threw up his hands in protest, exclaiming: ‘Nyet! Nyet!’
‘Spasiba, spasiba,’ I said, genuinely grateful for his show of humanity in front of my folks.
‘They seem really nice, the guards here, compared to the ones in Moscow, Tig,’ said Mum with a big smile as I walked back into the living room. ‘It’s a much better set-up. I’m glad you’re in better hands now, my love.’
‘Yeah, yeah, er, they’re all pretty decent in here,’ I replied, lying through my teeth. I thought of the nice Israeli guy, David, who had died a few weeks after my arrival during an argument with one of the guards. David, a diamond smuggler in his early sixties, had gone to the admin office to ask when he was finally going to be allowed to see his wife in the visitors’ block. She’d flown all the way from Tel Aviv to see him, but on arrival at Zone 22 was told that her paperwork was incorrect and she’d have to return to Moscow to sort it out. He’d talked of little else but her visit for months on end, and when he was told that she was sitting ten yards beyond the wall but he couldn’t see her, he had a heart attack and passed away on the floor of the guards’ room.
‘No, yeah, Mum, they’re much better, the guards here. It’s good. It’s all right. Much better…’
The following morning Raisa Petrovna came down into the kitchen where we were sitting at the table having tea to tell us that the Embassy driver had returned to take Mum and Dad back to Moscow. She did that by mimicking someone turning a steering-wheel, and saying: ‘Broom! Broom! Moskva!’ which made Dad giggle.
We all stood up holding our chipped, stained cups, not quite knowing what to say, then all at once we burst out, ‘Well, it won’t be long now!’ and promptly fell about laughing. Another silence followed, and eventually Mum put her arm around my waist and drew me to her, tight. Her voice was starting to break as she said: ‘You carry on being strong, my boy. I love you so much.’ And she buried her face in my chest to hide her tears. Dad gave me a big bear hug and we filed down the dark corridor into the reception area where, followed by two guards, we stepped straight outside into the murky morning light. Through the barbed-wire gate I saw the black Volvo of the British Embassy parked up across the road with the driver leaning against the bonnet smoking a cigarette. Behind him, a trail of smoke rose from the chimney of a small dilapidated wooden bungalow. A strange-looking brown dog, long and low like a sausage dog but with the big face of an Alsatian, stopped and cocked his leg on the wheel of the car and I heard Dad shout: ‘Oi!’ I didn’t dare look back as the electric gate buzzed open and one of the guards led me back across Sniper Alley towards the atrads.
It must’ve been just before eight o’clock, because as I walked up the side of the atrads the sewing and chess workers were starting to form up in rows in front of the gates ready to be called through to the factory area. A misty haze hung over the trees beyond the Zone walls. Without thinking, I turned round and through a gap in the walls I could see Mum and Dad approaching the car. A horrifying shriek ruptured the still morning air. All the workers spun round and as I turned the corner of the building, I saw a general commotion just outside Atrad 3’s exercise yard. Guards poured out of the office building, pulling their truncheons as they ran; the sniper in the tower opposite was aiming his rifle towards Atrad 3. Two men were scuffling on the ground, rolling in the dirt and yelling, while others tried in vain to pull them apart. The guards arrived and began to thrash the prisoner on top of the other guy, who was screaming in agony. After a minute, the guards stopped beating the man and pulled him up by his collar. It was Cosmos. He was bellowing incoherently and struggling with all his strength as four guards tried to restrain him, while the other guy writhed and wailed on the ground, clutching the side of his head. As Cosmos was put in a half-nelson and led away up towards the offices, Fam, the young Vietnamese, Philip and another guy went to the aid of the man on the ground. As they sat him up against the wall, I saw that he was one of the Tajik guys called Mo, who worked in the chesspiece workshop. His hands were covered in blood and he held them to the side of his head, alternately groaning and shrieking. As the doctor emerged from the offices, escorted by a guard, slowly Mo took his hands away from his ear to show his wound to the others. All of them recoiled in horror at what they saw, and Fam put his hand up against the wall of the building and started retching. I remembered, with a jolt, that Mum and Dad were no more than 100 yards away beyond the wall, easily within earshot of the uproar, as I edged closer along the fence towards the scene. Cosmos, meanwhile, continued to shout protests and wrestle with the guards as they dragged him away towards the solitary confinement block. Philip was leaning with his back against the mesh fencing, staring dumbfounded as the doctor knelt down to treat Mo.
‘What was all that about, Philip? What’s going on?’
Philip could barely say it.
‘Cosmos bit his ear off.’
25
After a night in solitary, Cosmos was sedated and
taken away to Zone 3, a high security prison under ‘ossoboni’ regime for the most dangerous criminals, while Mo, the Tajik guy, was put on the train to the hospital Zone where I’d stayed for a week of check-ups before coming to Zone 22. ‘He’ll come back from there with no ears at all,’ was the joke doing the rounds as we lined up on the tarmac to be called through to the factory area the following morning. I winced at the memory of Mo’s shrieking and Cosmos’s demonic howling, and wondered what dreadful thoughts must have been going through Mum and Dad’s minds as they drove away to Moscow.
‘Hague Tig!’ shouted the guard, putting my name card to the back of the pack as I made my way through the quickly diminishing ranks of workers and joined the flow of black uniforms through the gates. For the first time since I had arrived in the Zone, I noticed that not one of us was wearing a hat, but from a distance, and especially from behind, it was still difficult to tell people apart because our shaved heads were no less of a uniform than our hats had been. Ergin was waiting in the gloomy foyer area as I pushed open the heavy door to the factory, and I nodded to him as I immediately veered left and began to head into the long manufacturing room towards my station at the far end, just as I had done almost every day, bar Sundays, for three months.
‘Tig! This way,’ said Ergin, heading into his office.
Molloi was already busy on his sewing machine in the corner and he smiled as I walked in, but Mafia, the lazy bugger, was sitting on the table swinging his legs, looking sulky.
‘Your button work was being excellent,’ said Ergin. ‘You are fastest chalker I’ve seen in Zone 22. One chalk with you is for two weeks. Well done. I want promoting you to working for office. You are my right arm now.’
‘Brilliant, thank you, Ergin,’ I said, shaking his hand, genuinely thrilled to be away from the factory floor.
To say I was proud of my button-chalking work would be an exaggeration, but I did feel a quiet sense of satisfaction at the end of the day if we’d succeeded in meeting our quota of jackets or maybe even exceeded it. I had to feel good about something. I liked hearing the sound of the Zone buzzer at the end of a shift, when I returned to the relative warmth of the atrad to tick off another day, having avoided a black mark or a crack across the shoulders with Maximovich’s riot stick. I was one of only a handful to escape the drunken wrath of his truncheon, although once, when he was even more pissed than normal after returning from lunch outside the prison, he looked at me wildly and raised the stick across his face before staggering away up the aisle, laughing to himself like a madman with a dark secret.
In the unlikely event of my parole application running to schedule, I had worked out I had roughly 450 days to survive in Zone 22, and each one that passed felt like a small footstep closer to home and to Lucy. The passing of a day became an event. Back in London, days, even whole weeks, merged into each other as time slid by almost unnoticed; in Zone 22, I was conscious of every hour of every day. I was focusing on a small point far in the distance that moved that tiny bit closer every day. I may not have been the most skilful worker in the factory, but nobody laboured harder than me, with the possible exceptions of Molloi in the office and Baska before he took over the horses. If I’d worked any slower, my mind would have started to drift and the dreadful monotony and misery of the place would almost certainly have driven me to distraction and to despair. But it wasn’t just for my sanity and for a sense of self-worth that I worked hard, I did it to win promotion to the office, where I would be less exposed to the callous whims of the guards and therefore less likely to get a black mark.
My greatest fear wasn’t the hard work, or the malnutrition, or the boredom, or the illness, or getting beaten up, or thrown in solitary confinement – it was having an extra six months nailed on to the end of my sentence. If I got my head down and made a show of working hard, it was less likely that Maximovich and the other factory guards would pick on me. Some of the guys in the factory just didn’t give a shit because their sentences were so long there was no point playing the parole game and trying to impress the guards. The guards didn’t like the defiant ‘go-fuck-yourself’ attitude of the long-termers because they saw it as an affront to their authority or machismo, or even their Russian pride. (‘Nigger’ was a word I heard every day in Zone 22.) Every other day a guard would give a prisoner a blow across the shoulder-blades with his stick and shout at him to work faster… or to stop smiling… or to stand up when he walked past… or for looking at him funny… At first I didn’t like seeing a fellow prisoner wince or yelp in pain – even if it was one of the scary or devious wankers – but after a few weeks I was secretly pleased to see them take a lashing because there was only a limited amount of thrashings that even a poorly educated, dumb-fuck, prejudiced, backwater prison guard could reasonably hand out in a week. The lazy, cocky guys were effectively drawing the fire away from the rest of us, and that was just fine by me.
If the sewing factory had been a real company, I had become a middle manager, and the perks of my promotion were a break from the maddening monotony of work on the floor and the privilege of being able to talk to someone without the fear of getting a truncheon across the back. It wasn’t quite being made head of the European Derivatives desk at Garban Icap, but it had been a goal worth working towards all the same. I had learned quickly that in prison you took anything, no matter how small, that made your life that little bit more comfortable. If someone offered you a cigarette, you took it, whether you smoked or not. If you were given food you didn’t want or didn’t need, you kept it and traded it, or gave it to someone as a favour because you knew that person would repay you somehow, one day. I remembered Zubi screaming at Pasha in my first week in Piet Central because he rejected the small sardine-like fish the bilander man had handed through the hatch. It was a horrible, crappy little fish and I was looking at Zubi and thinking: What’s the big fucking deal? But a few weeks later, I understood. A small fish was a rare treat, and Pasha could have given it to me or Zubi. Hang on to everything in prison because everything has a value. (Pasha, weirdly, never arrived in Zone 22. No one had heard of him, although one prisoner told me that he knew of a guy fitting his description who’d gone nuts on the train down and was taken away to Zone 19.)
Promotion from the factory floor to the office was a massive step up for me, but it came with its own demanding challenges. Our main job was to organize each project for the factory. We took charge of each delivery of cloth and worked out how to convert a pile of dyed rags into the amount of products that the authorities demanded in the time allotted. The hardest part of working in the office was dealing with Maximovich the master guard, who spent his life in one of two states, drunk or hungover, and it was difficult to say which one made him the more bad-tempered and unreasonable.
He spent most of the day in his dark little office next door smoking cigarettes and drinking vodka, coming out every hour or so to patrol the factory floor and harangue the workers. Other times he’d come into our office, pull up a chair, put his feet up on the table and regale us with what he obviously thought were hilarious tales. I didn’t have a clue what he was saying most of the time, but when Ergin and the Vietnamese boys forced out a laugh, I joined in too. But his moods changed in the bat of an eyelid. On my second day in the office he came and sat down with us, drunk as a lord after a long lunch, and began to tell us about the woman he’d just fucked in the back of his van. Ergin was translating for me as Maximovich slurred and wove his way through the story, and the joke, as far as I was able to work out, was that the special ‘fuck-rug’ Ergin had been forced to make for him was not comfortable enough and that he was going to give it either to his mongrel dog or his ‘fat, ugly, monster’ of a wife, whichever one was nicer to him when he got home.
Maximovich must have been at least fifty years old, but he fancied himself as a bit of a cool dude and a ladies’ man. He wore his greying brown hair swept back like an ageing rock star, and his clothes looked good on him, compared to the other guards, because Moll
oi had altered them so that the length and cut were just right for the contours of his plump body. He earned no more than 200 dollars a month, but that made him one of the more glamorous and eligible catches in an area where most people scratched together a subsistence living, working in the fields or doing menial part-time jobs.
Every other afternoon, he came into our office to regale us with the details of his lunchtime shag in the back of his rusty little van, leaning back in his chair, slurping on a strong cup of cheffir and drawing on his cigarette, like a Wild West sheriff, as we sat and chuckled nervously across the table. We all hoped that the women of the area continued to oblige Maximovich, because when he hadn’t got laid he tended to return to the factory wild and foul-tempered with drink, marching up and down the aisles, shouting and smashing his truncheon on the workers and their stations.
One afternoon he threw open the door to our office, as if he was walking into a saloon for a shoot-out, and stood there swaying and hiccoughing.
‘It will be summer soon! Make 200 summer caps for the prisoners. I want them in a week.’
‘No problem, nachalnik,’ said Ergin. ‘Where are the materials you want us to use?’
‘Materials? I don’t know, use what you can find!’
For the next few days the four of us scoured the Zone for suitable materials, even scavenging through the bins, begging fellow prisoners for old clothes and trading our cigarettes for odd pieces of cardboard and plastic bottles that we could cut up to make stiff peaks for the caps. We gathered up hundreds of pieces of cloth scraps from earlier cuttings, dyed them all black, and handed them to Molloi, who had an amazing talent for turning the most unpromising and unlikely materials into proper, functioning items of clothing, and somehow succeeded in transforming our pile of rubbish into 200 pieces of reasonably presentable headwear.