The English Prisoner

by Tig Hague

  For the first three days, nobody came to give me treatment or even to inform me of my appointment time, and every time I went to reception to ask what was happening, they just shrugged their shoulders and held out their hands in ignorance. New arrivals came and went, transferred to more permanent accommodation in different buildings, and after forty-eight hours I was the only person left in the dormitory. I spent most of the day lying on my bunk and writing long letters to Lucy and Mum and Dad, because I’d been told there was no censorship of the mail in the hospital as there was back in Zone 22. I had brought with me a bundle of diaries I had written over the previous few weeks, and at the end of the second day I posted the whole lot in the mailbox outside reception.

  My eye was still completely closed over, and every time I felt a throb of pain or a trickle of pus on my cheek my mind instantly filled with dreadful thoughts about what the doctors planned to do with it. I resolved that I wasn’t going to agree to go under general anaesthetic and that if they were going to cut my eye out, they’d have to take me down with a tranquilizer dart.

  I spent much of the day leaning on the windowsill staring out over the camp, watching the prisoners stroll at will around the massive, drearily functional Zone and praying that my eye would start to show signs of improvement. There were at least twenty large red-brick and grey stone buildings in the Zone, all in a state of advanced disrepair, and each with its own parade ground out front, suggesting that the hospital had once been an army headquarters of some kind. Between the roads and the paved squares a few scruffy shrubs filled the untended, litter-strewn flowerbeds. From time to time I nervously ventured outside to have a cigarette and to give my legs a stretch, but I didn’t hang around for long because the place was crawling with all sorts of weirdos and scary-looking bastards, many of them clearly in mental distress. They walked or stood around in a state of obvious agitation, talking to themselves, shouting, pulling their hair or crouched up in a ball with their face buried in their hands. There was one guy from the building next door who used to spend much of the day leaning against the wall with his head, groaning.

  But the most shocking sight was that of the men who had been sentenced to ossoboni regime. Ossoboni is the most severe regime of all, and it is reserved for the most dangerous criminals in Russia: murderers, serial rapists and the worst paedophiles. When I first saw a small group of them being walked through the Zone, I stared in horror as they drew nearer, transfixed by the grotesque posture they’d been made to assume. Crouched forward so that their back was at ninety degrees to their legs, their hands were cuffed behind them and pointing up towards the sky. It looked like a virtually impossible position to hold for more than a few seconds, but each time their arms dropped down towards their backside, one of their special guards gave them a thrash with his stick.

  On the fourth day, an orderly came into the dormitory to tell me that I had an appointment with one of the doctors. (Other than when an orderly came in at mealtimes with my food, it was the first time an official or a medic had come into the dormitory for two days.) My eye was just as bad as it had been a week earlier, and a shudder of dread ran over me as I began to load up with as many bribes as I could fit down my baggy trousers and under my jacket. I had an entire roll of Marlboro, a large jar of Nescafé, two bars of chocolate, a bag of mints, a lighter and a bottle of perfume, which, I figured, was probably about the going rate for an eye in there, or at the very least would buy me a few days’ reprieve and a course of antibiotics. As I set off across the Zone in search of the right building, I was walking like a cowboy after three days in the saddle, trying to stop half of Tesco’s from falling down my legs and praying that the chocolate bars in my pants wouldn’t have melted by the time I got there.

  I found the building more by luck than by design, and sat down under a bright, flickering striplight in an unsupervised corridor of plastic chairs with half a dozen other prisoners in varying degrees of pain and distress. Most of the problems presented by the patients appeared as much mental as physical, and many of them, it seemed, were recovering junkies in withdrawal who were also suffering from related illnesses such as hepatitis and lung disorders. I’d never seen such a fucked-up, grotesque, hopeless collection of human beings as were sat in that corridor, and for an hour I barely moved a muscle so as not to draw attention to myself. I was as frightened as I had been at any time since leaving Moscow, appalled by the condition of the other prisoners and terrified by the more deranged and intimidating ones. With no guards or officials to keep order, half of them walked up and down the dim corridor talking to themselves, demanding cigarettes from the other prisoners, picking arguments with each other or just stopping and staring. Others were crouching forward in their seats or rocking back and forth, moaning in pain and anguish. It was like a scene from a horror movie: a corridor full of freaks and ghouls and the living dead…

  But I would have happily sat there for a week rather than go and see the doctor.

  When finally he put his head round the door and summoned me to his room, I unloaded all my goods on to his table and then put my hands together in prayer and begged him, in English: ‘Please don’t cut my eye!’

  ‘Neeprizhivay! Neeprizhivay!’ (‘Don’t worry! Don’t worry!’) he said, patting the air over his desk and opening a set of magnifying glasses. A slight figure with grey receding hair, he came round the desk and I could smell his musty breath as he moved his face inches from mine and inspected the infection with one of the glasses. Next he made me look at an old-fashioned eye chart on the wall and, pointing at the large ones, he asked me to tell him the letters. Not knowing the proper words for them, I grunted their sound, like a caveman or an imbecile. He then handed me a card to put over my good eye and started through the chart all over again, but as my bad eye was still completely closed up – and I hoped he might have spotted that with his big magnifying glass – I couldn’t see a bloody thing and so each time I heard him prompt me, I shrugged my shoulders and sighed: ‘Not a fucking clue, my friend. It’s dark.’

  He sat back down at his desk, scrawling something into his notebook, and proceeded, at great length and great speed, to give me his diagnosis of my problem – at least that’s what I thought he was doing, because he might just as well have been reading out the Russian football results as far as I was concerned. As soon as he was finished, he motioned for me to leave but I threw up my hands and cried: ‘Please, please, what did you say? I don’t understand.’

  But he didn’t understand me either, and seeing my anxiety, he sighed loudly, picked up his phone and called in a young female assistant for help. This time it took him no more than ten seconds to explain the situation and, flicking her jet black hair out of her eyes, she turned to me and said: ‘Doctor saying five more days of ugly eyes and you having the operation.’

  ‘No, no, no,’ I said quietly, barely able to speak. ‘Please, no! What about antibiotics, or cream, please don’t cut my eye out, please don’t cut my eye out…’

  For five days I lay on my bunk frozen with worry, staring at the ceiling with my good eye, yearning for my other one to heal. On the morning of the fifth day – the deadline for my eye – the swelling was still as large, tender and infected as it had been, and the mounting panic and dread I’d felt all week started to give way to resignation. I began to feel almost indifferent about losing it. By then a greater fear had emerged, that the infection, having proved so stubborn, was inevitably going to spread to other parts of my body, or even into my blood, and I began to convince myself that, in fact, it was sensible to have the bad eye taken out after all.

  For hour after hour that day I watched the door, waiting for a guard or functionary to stick his head round and beckon me with his finger, but the morning passed and still no one came, then the afternoon and still no one. The sixth day passed in the same way. On the morning of the seventh, I woke to find a pool of pus on my mattress and when I put my hand to my eye, the swelling had reduced by almost 50 per cent. By the end of the day, after
washing away the gunk, I was able to see through the narrowest of slits, and by the next, the eye was half open. It had become frantically itchy, which I took as confirmation that finally, after two weeks, I was on the mend.

  In all I spent ten days in the little dormitory after my one appointment with the doctor, and throughout the entire time not one nurse or official came to visit me. No pills, no cream, no treatment, no appointments and, thank God, no operation. They just forgot about me. My eye was saved by an admin error, a clerical cock-up, a bureaucratic oversight. On the morning of the tenth day I went down to reception and, seeing the improvement in my eye, the man behind the desk, said: ‘The train is today. You want go home Zone 22?’

  ‘Yeah, why not?’ I said. So I caught the train ‘home’.

  I could never have imagined it even a few weeks earlier, but a sensation of relief, bordering on happiness, washed over me and I exhaled loudly as I stepped out on to the platform of Zone 22 and, accompanied by one of the guards, strode across Sniper Alley and towards the office building. The sun was starting its final descent over the horizon and the football teams were filing back towards the atrads. The match was over now and, under the vengeful eyes of the guards, who hated the sight or sound of us having fun, everyone had gone back into prisoner mode and fallen silent. But as we passed by in opposite directions, the African boys and one or two of the others gave me a big grin or a wink, and I smiled back, pointing to both my eyes. Zone 22 was shite, but it was better than having my eye dug out in a lunatic asylum.

  I still had a few provisions left, and when I lifted my bag on to the reception table to be checked, the guard helped himself to two packets of Marlboro and a bar of chocolate, not even looking at me as he slid them into his pocket. Little Alan, the office dogsbody, appeared at the open window and with a big smile and a wave said: ‘Welcome again, English. Hey, you still have many eyes!’

  27

  ‘A friend of yours from Moscow arrived in the Zone while you were in hospital,’ said Boodoo John as he rotated his fork in his bowl of noodles. ‘Tall black guy with a big moustache. Gotta lot to say for himself…’

  ‘Zubi?’ I interrupted, the metal legs of the grey plastic chair scraping along the floor as I pushed away from the table. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘He’s got another week in quarantine before they put him in Atrad 3. He was telling everyone before preverka the other night how he was going to show us a few things about how to deal with the guards. He’s going to have a hard time in here if he carries on playing Mr Big, and not just from the guards either. He wants to see you, anyhow.’

  After washing my bowl under the tap in the washroom I put it back in the food cupboard, took out all but two cigarettes from a packet of Marlboro and dropped in two teaspoons of coffee. I could tell the young, spotty atradnik didn’t like my impatience as I darted into the little office that the duty guards shared with Ahmed and slid the cigarette packet under his weaponry magazine, which was sitting unopened on his desk. The cover of June’s issue showed a missile streaking towards a fighter jet against a brilliant blue sky. Slowly he got to his feet and sidled to the entrance to the atrad, where he signalled to the observation room to let me out.

  I was excited about seeing Zubi, and I’d often thought about all the kindness he’d shown me back in Moscow. Yuri, the guard who had bantered with Dad, was on duty in the guards’ room and he waved me down the corridor as I walked in. Zubi was sitting on his bunk brewing up some noodles in a bowl at his feet. He was whistling to himself and his head bobbed up and down as he swayed from side to side.

  ‘Have you not learnt to cook anything decent yet?’

  Zubi spun round and leapt to his feet. ‘Hey! English boy!’

  We gave each other a bear hug and slapped each other on the back and made whooping noises.

  ‘I was told you were having your little English eyes chopped out! But you look, you look, er, OK… thin but OK, man. You look real thin. You been working out and jogging?’ Zubi moved around restlessly as he spoke, as if he was nervous of me.

  We both laughed. He didn’t look great either. His eyes were baggier and his shoulders were stooped, and in spite of the bravura and the banter there was an air of insecurity about him now. His confidence had gone. He was just front.

  It was clear from the moment we greeted each other that we were two different people from the ones that had met in Piet Central that muggy evening in July. I was the stronger, savvier one now. I was in control. I had been in Zone 22 for five months and it was my turn to offer the advice. Zubi’s appeals had been drawn out over months, but at the end of it his ten-year sentence, with parole in five, remained unchanged. It was hard to see how a rebellious, cocky personality like his was going to survive in a ‘black’ prison like Zone 22, where you need to go equipped with discretion, hard work and humility to get by. The last time I’d seen him in Moscow he’d seemed a broken man, but now all the attitude and mouth was back, though this time it was ringing hollow. My heart sank as I listened to him telling me how he was going to show ‘the pussies in Zone 22 that Zubi don’t take no shit from no one’.

  ‘Zubi, trust me, my friend. It’s different in here. You’re not going to get on with people if you give it the Mr Bigshot stuff. It just doesn’t work. They’ll slowly grind you down. They’ll keep extending your sentence at the slightest excuse, they’ll throw you in solitary, they’ll give you the shittiest jobs, they’ll turn on you at every opportunity…’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thanks for the advice, English boy, but Zubi knows how to handle himself, wouldn’t you say? Zubi’s smarter than these dumb hillbilly mother-fuckers. Zubi can run rings round ’em. Zubi don’t take shit from no one…’

  ‘Well, good luck, Zubi,’ I said, surprised to hear myself raising my voice. ‘I’m trying to help you, like you helped me. I think you’ve got it wrong. That’s all I’m saying. You say you’re smart, but you’re acting dumb if you ask me. You’re heading for trouble, I’m telling you. Trust me…’

  ‘Fuck you!’ said Zubi, pointing his finger at my face. It was hot in the room and sweat ran down from his temples and clung to his black T-shirt. ‘What do you fucking know anyway, English boy? Zubi’ll do it his way, and you do it yours and we’ll see who gets the best results in here. If you want these fuckers to walk all over you, then that’s fine, you just let them humiliate you. But Zubi’s still got some fucking pride!’

  I was grateful for all Zubi had done for me in Moscow, and that was never going to change, and I’d also go to his help if he was in dire trouble, but what I wasn’t going to do was jeopardize my own chances of getting out of the Zone. If that meant spiking our friendship, then so be it. As I trudged back to the atrad, waving the fucking mosquitoes away from my face, I resolved to distance myself from him over the coming weeks. I didn’t want to associate myself with a troublemaker and undermine the relationship I had been trying to build up with the administration over the previous couple of months. I’d been working hard and keeping out of trouble, I’d paid Zanpolit a visit every three weeks or so, dropping in a jar of coffee, some cigarettes and other luxuries. I’d arranged for Mum and Dad to raise the funds for the TV, video recorder, two computers… Slowly I was prising my way, if not into his affections, then at least on to his radar, so that come the end of the year I’d be in as strong a position as possible before launching my push for freedom. I was just one of dozens, a hundred even, all trying to win Zanpolit’s favour and get themselves promoted up the parole ladder. While I used gifts of cigarettes and chocolates to advance my case, others used information about other prisoners and even about other officials and guards. Whatever the currency, we were all working in the same volatile, highly competitive market.

  From the moment Zubi was transferred to Atrad 3 two days later, he started standing up and challenging the regime. From a distance, I watched him ambling slowly into line at preverka, I heard him talking loudly in the exercise yard to show the guards he wasn’t scared. He puffed his chest out an
d he strutted like a peacock wherever he went. He was put to work in the chesspiece section of the factory, where he immediately fell in with a group of the most intimidating, troublesome Africans in the Zone. He wasn’t leading an uprising exactly, but by his disrespectful, insolent manner towards the guards and his show of contempt for the regime he was storing up trouble for himself. The guards restrained themselves at first, almost willing him on, letting him talk his way into a position where they would feel justified in making his life a living hell. Zubi was an asset in Moscow; now he was a liability and it was dangerous for me to associate with him. Slowly, without making it obvious to him, I backed out of our friendship.

  Zubi’s arrival made me realize that all friendships in prison were either limited, or conditional, or both. They were limited in two respects: first, because there was no more than a handful of people in Zone 22 I’d even consider as friend ‘material’, and second, because the regime in which we lived was so strict and tightly controlled that it was impossible for a relationship to develop naturally with the very small handful of people in the Zone who spoke passable English or French and didn’t fall into the categories of scary bastard, weirdo, cultural alien, religious freak, slippery two-faced informer or crashing bore. And what relationships I did strike up were conditional in that I chose my ‘friends’ because they could improve my life in some way. Some befriended people for their cigarettes and food or because they came from the same country, others because they wanted protection or influence. Prisoners of the same nationality (zemliaki) tended to gravitate towards each other, which made them tighter, but as the only Briton in the camp that wasn’t an option for me. I became something of a loner, loosely affiliated to the Africans. I liked Ergin, I liked the African boys as a group, I felt an elder brother’s affection for Molloi and Mafia, I felt some kind of connection with Sacha and Benny because we were ‘Westerners’, but as spring quickly surrendered to the heat of the summer, it struck me that the only person in Zone 22 I would even consider calling a ‘friend’ was Boodoo John. But, even then… would I ever go for a beer with him on the outside?