by Tig Hague
Shortly after we had finished the summer cap job, and the main factory had finished its order for padded camo trousers, Maximovich, hungover and cranky as always, announced one morning that the factory was now to produce 500 camouflage nets for the tanks of the Russian army. This time the raw material for the nets had been delivered, but they were too big to be made on the sewing machines, and Ergin asked him: ‘So how are we going to make them?’
‘Well, I don’t know, do I?’ Maximovich roared. ‘You’re the experts! Come up with a plan!’
Ergin, who was clever, came up with the idea of clearing the factory floor and building some frames from pieces of old timber and metal poles, on which we could hang the tank nets. He took me with him to present the idea to Maximovich, and told him we would need about 100 nails or screws to build the frames and 100 hooks on which to hang the nets, and that we could manage the rest with what we could find.
‘How the hell do I know where you’re going to get 100 nails and 100 hooks from?’ he bellowed, and then, pointing at me, snapped: ‘You, anglichanin. That is your job. Go, find the nails and hooks!’
‘But where? How?’ I replied feebly.
‘Just find them!’ he shouted back, flicking his truncheon at me. ‘Make them if you have to! Go on, get out! OUT!’
For the next three days, while the rest of the factory set to work on preparing the netting material, I searched the Zone from top to bottom, hunting nails and hooks and old pieces of scrap metal from which we might be able to fashion some. I got a couple of dozen from the Uzbek maintenance man in exchange for a whole packet of Marlboro, another dozen or so by persuading prisoners to remove them from their bunks, a handful by removing them from the shelves and walls of the atrads and the rest from the Afghan electrician who ran the workshop next to the boiler room, which I paid for with tea, cigarettes and boiled sweets. For the hooks, Boodoo John gave me some old mangled pieces of metal and, borrowing a hacksaw, a hammer and a vice from the electrician, I made the 100 hooks by bending and bashing them into shape. Maximovich had told me I had until the end of the week to produce the whole lot, and for the last two days I had to work night shifts as well as days to make sure they were ready in time.
The only benefit that came from working in the sewing factory was that from time to time there was a couple of days’ break between orders and, if they could find nothing else for us to do, the guards had little option but to leave us mooching around the atrads. Most of the prisoners were happy doing nothing, but I didn’t like the downtime because time passed so slowly and the guards, who didn’t like to see us not working, were even more irritable and aggressive than normal. When we finally finished the tank nets the materials for the next assignment still hadn’t arrived and we spent half a week hanging around in the atrads waiting for the truck to turn up. On the fourth afternoon, the inactivity was making us fractious and a restless, tense air hung over the Zone. I was out in the exercise yard, bored out of my head, leaning up against the atrad in the warm sunshine, smoking a cigarette and swatting away a cloud of insects. A few feet away, Chan was doing his world’s strongest man impression, the blood vessels in his neck looking as though they were on the verge of rupturing as he strained to lift the largest dumb-bell over his head for the hundredth time. When he dropped it to the ground, the tyres on either end bounced violently towards Ahmed and a group of others smoking around the pagoda shelter.
‘Hey!’ said Ahmed, stepping out of the shadow of the shelter and walking towards Chan aggressively, gesturing at the weights. ‘The weights stay by the wall. Stop throwing them around!’ Chan said nothing, and the pair stared each other down until they were interrupted by the arrival of Maximovich on the other side of the mesh fence, informing Ergin and me that a big delivery had arrived and that we were to assemble a dozen prisoners to go and unload it from the truck.
As soon as we opened up the back of the truck we knew something was wrong. Everyone standing within five yards of the truck recoiled as a fine cloud of foul-smelling dust billowed out into the sunshine, all of us coughing and spluttering and muttering words to the effect of ‘What the fuck?’ The reek of chemicals from the bales of old boiler suits was intense, and we all looked at each other, uncertain about what to do. I went to the storeroom and fetched the packet of builders’ masks that Dad had brought out for me from his work site, but after unloading a couple of the bundles our eyes were streaming and our skin became itchy and sore. We carried on for a few minutes before throwing up our hands in protest and backing away from the truck.
‘No way!’ said Ergin. ‘I tell Maximovich, it’s too danger.’ He disappeared into the factory and re-emerged two minutes later, pursued by the master guard, barking a mixture of orders and insults and waving his riot stick over his head like a Cossack heading into battle.
As he staggered towards us we shrugged our shoulders and shook our heads, and a couple of guys protested to him in Russian, appealing to him to reconsider, but he was insistent and, positioning himself fifty yards away, upwind and swaying from one foot to the other, he beckoned us back towards the truck with his riot stick. The bales were heavy, and to pick them up we had to get our hands right underneath them and lean them against our chests as we heaved them into the storeroom. An hour later we tramped back to the atrads for preverka in sullen silence, wheezing, scratching and rubbing our smarting eyes. The following morning half the men woke to find their skin covered in a livid red rash and small sores, while the rest of us still had itchy skin and breathing difficulties.
There were roughly 5,000 suits in all, and Maximovich announced at morning preverka that our task was to cut them up and turn them into as many pairs of fingerless mitts as possible. But once we had all been called through Sniper Alley to start work, the entire sewing factory workforce assembled outside the factory, refusing to go in. Faced with the threat of solitary confinement or a black mark – with a good beating thrown in for laughs – prisoners in Zone 22 never downed tools and refused to work. This was a first for Zone 22, and there was great tension in the air as we stood around in the bright sunshine, nervously shuffling our feet in the dirt and waiting in silence to see how the authorities responded. After a while, the Zone’s dozen guard dogs were brought up from their kennels at the bottom of the camp, and all but a handful of the dozen guards on duty made their way into the factory compound, encircling the prisoners, in an uneasy stand-off. The snipers, who could usually be seen leaning against the posts of their towers willing their shift to be over, were now on full alert, training their guns on the mob below.
After a quarter of an hour, Maximovich re-emerged from inside the factory after talks with some of his more senior colleagues. He ordered us all to sit down cross-legged in the dirt so that he could address us, and shouted: ‘Who’s refusing to work?’
There was a long silence, finally broken when one of the African boys stood up and spoke to him in Russian. Ergin translated for me: ‘I’ll do whatever work you want, no matter how hard, but I’m not working with this shit. It’s hazardous!’ Immediately, a dozen others got to their feet to show their solidarity, followed by a dozen more. After five minutes almost half the workforce was standing, but I remained rooted to the earth, paranoid about black marks and thinking: give me a rash and a cough before another six months on my sentence, any day.
Maximovich, who was sober because it was morning, called Ergin out of the crowd to offer a compromise. As it was almost summer, Ergin said, relaying the deal, we could take our benches and do the work outside. The opportunity of a break from the misery of the factory and the chance to work out in the open with the sun on their backs was a temptation the majority of prisoners couldn’t resist, and Ergin accepted the offer. With a half-cheer, we got up and slowly filed towards the factory as the guards and their dogs dispersed towards the gates. I brushed the dust off the seat of my black trousers and joined the back of the queue, still coughing and scratching, and I was just passing through the door when I heard Baska let out a yell from
the stables behind us. Maximovich was already inside and the rest of the guards were back in the main compound of the Zone, so I hurried over to see what was troubling Baska. As I walked through the stable door, he was leaning up against the wall with one hand, shielding his eyes with the other, shaking his head. In front of him, lying on a bed of straw between her mother and Molloi, the colt, was the dead body of Nadezhda the foal.
‘Hope dead, Hope dead,’ said Baska.
26
Spring meant warmth and light, but more importantly, it meant football. The melting of the snow had revealed the Zone football pitch, an uneven stretch of patchy grass and weeds next to the low wooden block that housed the eating area and the library. The whole Zone was mad about football, and when it was announced after evening preverka that the first game of the season would take place at the end of the week and would be contested between Nigeria and Vietnam, it triggered chaos in the atrads as the prisoners argued over who was going to play. Most of the matches were ‘internationals’, but other fixtures included Chess section versus Sewing factory, Atrad 1 versus Atrad 3, Statya versus Statya (e.g. drugs pushers against thieves), and even an inter-Zone competition, pitching the foreigners of Zone 22 against teams made up of murderers, sex offenders or fraudsters. The international teams were chosen along loosely regional lines, so Nigeria was made up largely of Africans and Vietnam of south-east Asian guys, but it was the guards who had the final say on who was going to play. Predictably, it was the prisoners prepared to cough up the most cigarettes and other treats who often got the nod, but there were exceptions to this, and some of the poorer guys who were brilliant at football tended to make the starting line-up.
In the days leading up to the game my African friends were keen to recruit my services, because, being English, it was assumed by the other prisoners that I was only a marginally less gifted footballer than David Beckham. At school, rugby had been my game and I’d been good enough to play for the Kent Colts, but my football was no more than average. I was a solid, flat-footed defender whose greatest achievement was turning out a couple of times for the school second eleven, but finally I gave in and agreed to play on the condition that I could come on as a substitute. I was extremely nervous as we ran out of the atrads and started warming up, because it was obvious from the first few kicks that there were some seriously talented footballers in our midst, even though only half the players were wearing training shoes on both feet. The rest wore a mixture of plimsolls, winter boots and prison issue shoes, sometimes with a different type on either foot. My Nikes may have been the flashest trainers in the Zone but I was comfortably the least talented footballer on that pitch.
Dozens of other prisoners had bribed the guards to come and watch the match, and when it got under way half the camp was strung along the touchlines cheering and screaming for their continent of origin as the tackles flew in. Some of the Africans were superb players, and Julian, from the boiler room, was an outstanding goalkeeper, throwing himself about his area with incredible bravery and athleticism. But the best player by some distance was a Vietnamese lad from Atrad 3, who, despite being the smallest player on the pitch and wearing ordinary black leather shoes, ran circles around the Africans, and once dribbled and wove his way from one end of the pitch to the other before he was finally tackled.
The game grew increasingly frenetic and violent as the first half wore on, and I waited with increasing apprehension to be brought on. Each half was thirty minutes long, and shortly into the second I was summoned on to the pitch to try to help Nigeria overturn a 4–2 deficit. I trotted nervously over to the right of the defence. It must have been getting on for a year since the last time I’d run more than about 100 yards and by the time I’d reached the other side of the pitch I was hacking and wheezing and my lower legs felt as if they had been filled with concrete. After a short while, Julian rolled the ball to me from the area and immediately I went to get rid of it to the guy standing ten yards to my left, but I mis-hit it badly and it squirted off the outside of my trainer. The two Vietnamese guys running to tackle me were completely wrong-footed by my error, and when the ball shot past them I raced clear, to the huge cheers of the African supporters who thought I had just produced an outrageous piece of skill with my first touch of the ball. As I ran down the line looking for someone to offload the ball to as quickly as possible (before everyone realized I was shit), I could hear the chants from the other side of the pitch: ‘Beckham! Beckham! Beckham!’
A couple of minutes later, my lungs still burning from my world-class run, their goalkeeper launched a huge kick downfield, curling in my direction, and as I leapt to head it clear, under the challenge of a Vietnamese, I felt something pop in my left eye and immediately put my hands to my face as I hit the ground. I left the field with my eye streaming and, after giving my trainers to one of my team-mates, returned to the atrad.
The following morning the eye was swollen, full of pus and red, and there was a lump on the lid the size of a golfball. Every morning after breakfast there were at least a dozen people lined up to see the doctor, half of them malingerers with minor complaints who bribed her to give them a couple of days’ off work, but that day there were at least thirty people in the queue with genuine complaints, mainly breathing problems, caused by the chemical suits. I was convinced that my problem had also been caused by handling the material, or had at least weakened my eyes and made them susceptible to infection or injury. I had a legitimate complaint, but I wasn’t taking any chances, and as I entered her little cupboard surgery I placed a packet of Rothmans and a KitKat that Mum had brought from England into the open drawer of her desk. All the officials and governors did the same. You never handed a bribe directly to them and they never acknowledged the gifts that were brought. It was a ritual of pretending that nothing underhand was going on, and allowed them to feel that they weren’t corrupt. The doctor signed me off work indefinitely and told me to come back to see her in five days, but she didn’t give me any cream or tablets, saying that with a bit of rest, it would probably heal of its own accord over time. I could tell that there was more wishful thinking than sound medical reasoning behind her claim.
For the next four days I lay in bed willing the swelling to reduce and the pus to subside, praying before I fell asleep that it would be better in the morning. But each day it grew that little bit larger, and by the time I returned to her surgery on the Monday, the eye had ballooned to the size of a tennis ball and pus was oozing out from all sides and caking around the socket. I could tell by her reaction when I walked through the door that she was genuinely disturbed by what she saw, and I braced myself for the inevitable.
‘Hospital for Hague Tig,’ she said, writing something into her notes.
I knew it was coming, but still my heart sank and a shiver of fear ran over me as memories of that sprawling, decrepit, lawless, forsaken hellhole flashed through my mind. The medical facilities in the Zone were extremely basic, and if a prisoner’s complaint was serious he was shipped off to the hospital prison, where – as I knew from my own experience – the treatment was also almost medieval in its simplicity. Since I had arrived in Mordovia, three guys had come back from there missing a part of their body: one without an eye, one without a finger and one without a thick scoop of his calf where he’d developed a large abscess. The prison system had neither the resources nor the will to give prisoners proper treatment and the prevailing clinical approach was: if in doubt, chop it off or out. The joke in Zone 22 was that they didn’t have doctors in the hospital, but butchers.
The hospital train ran on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so before going to bed I packed my suitcase for the morning, cramming it with as many cigarettes and as much coffee and chocolate as I could to use as bribes for the hospital staff. I could tell by the quiet, sympathetic way that Ahmed and the Africans spoke to me that they understood the seriousness of the situation.
‘I will make sure no one touches your food and cigarettes,’ said Ahmed as I headed for the door the fo
llowing morning, dragging my suitcase behind me.
‘Let Boodoo John have what he wants,’ I replied, handing him sixty Marlboro.
Boodoo John and the other boiler-room boys were in the exercise yard to see me off and he gave me a hug and a pat on the back. The others shook my hand and wished me well. I knew they were all thinking the same thing: Tig was coming back one eye short – with a pirate’s patch on his face, just like everyone else who’d been sent to the hospital prison with a serious eye infection.
Back in late December it had been with a very light spring in my step and a small sensation of optimism running through me that I had walked into that hospital reception area, looking forward to some better food and some proper rest in a proper bed. But now I pushed open the main doors with all the enthusiasm of a man heading to his execution. I had many fears about my return there. First, the hospital was a volk-controlled Zone and there were barely any guards around to protect people from the many deranged and dangerous prisoners wandering the campus as they wished. Secondly, serious illness was rife there, and even though the TB sufferers had a high pen running round their building to stop them getting out, there were plenty of other contagious conditions to be worried about. The hospital facilities and medications available for the patients would have shamed a Crimean field hospital, and I wasn’t confident they had the knowledge or the means to help me recover. I was convinced that they were simply going to cut out my eye. But my biggest fear on arrival was that the infection was going to spread to the other eye and I was going to lose them both.
They put me in a small dormitory of ten bunks on the ground floor of the new arrivals building, with a couple of guys from Atrad 2 in Zone 22 and three from Zone 5, the camp for corrupt police, FSB and lawyers, who were kept separate from the other prisoners for their own safety. The room was as plain and depressing as a room can be: faded wooden floorboards, wooden bunks with coarse grey blankets, strip light, dirty windows. The arrangements were a big improvement on the freak-show dormitory they’d put me in six months ago, but it was slightly discomforting because everyone in the room was a recent arrival, yet to have their disease or condition diagnosed. God only knew what they were suffering from as they lay on their beds, groaning and coughing and holding their heads in their hands.