The English Prisoner

by Tig Hague

  So it was that slowly I grew in confidence that I was going to be one of the fortunate ones and get released at roughly the time that had been scheduled by the court in Moscow. All the fundamentals of Zone life were as severe and unforgiving as ever, and the incredible heat, bringing with it a plague of mosquitoes, made the boredom almost unbearable at times. The heat was every bit as intense as the cold had been in the winter. The other prisoners kept telling me that the summer was the harshest season of all in Mordovia, but I didn’t believe them – until it arrived. When we were shivering and sneezing in the dark depths of the winter, the sunshine and the heat were an appealing prospect, but once the temperature quickly began to climb into the mid-30s, we were soon panting like dogs and willing the rapid return of winter. But as the year headed towards its longest day and the light had barely faded when we retired to the dormitory, I was keenly aware that the day when I’d be a free man again was drawing ever closer. For the first time since my arrival, I was waking up in the morning buoyed by the confidence that I finally enjoyed some control over my destiny again. I was no longer a hapless victim of fate.

  We’d been ordered to spend the evenings after work repainting the inside of the atrads from top to bottom, using paints and brushes that Mum and Dad had been obliged to buy in Moscow and which they’d brought down during their visit. One atrad was to be redecorated at a time, and while the work was going on we had to sleep in the Zone dining area, between the kitchen and the library. In the mornings we stacked up the bedding against the wall, and once the final sitting of the evening meal had taken place we cleared away the tables and benches and laid our mattresses on the floor. The new sleeping arrangements created a stir of excitement in the Zone as we set up our new home, like boy scouts heading out on our first camping trip. Any change from the grinding routine generated a buzz among us, and in what, by some distance, was the greatest act of leniency I’d experienced in Zone 22, the governors agreed to a request from all three atrads that we should be allowed to stay up a couple of hours later in order to be able to watch the European Championship football finals, live from Portugal. With a three-hour time difference, the games didn’t finish until one in the morning, but the whole prison was so crazy about football – even the Afghans were obsessed – that everyone was prepared to sacrifice some sleep to watch the games. Those of us who could afford it donated as many goodies as we could into a bribery pot in order to secure the governors’ approval, and on the strict conditions that there was no noise and that production in the factory didn’t suffer, the authorities consented.

  Every day there was constant banter and arguments over who was going to win the match, and soon prisoners started betting against each other on the outcome. The stakes were no more than a few cigarettes and never greater than a whole packet, but soon half of Atrad 1 was involved and a syndicate developed, run by a Vietnamese guy called Dang. I wasn’t that interested in getting involved, because I already had plenty of cigarettes and I didn’t feel comfortable about taking more off someone else, so I kept out of it for the first couple of nights. But on the first Sunday of the competition England were scheduled to play France in the evening and a few of the guys started taking the mickey that the French were going to stuff us. In order to prove how convinced I was that England were going to win, I said: ‘OK, I’ll bet a whole packet of Marlboro on it!’ There were seventy of us crowded around the little black and white telly with the flickering screen that we had placed on a dining table at the far end of the room, and my bet was looking good when Frank Lampard headed us in front before half-time. We looked in total control until Zinedine Zidane scored two goals in the last two minutes, and then incredibly we’d lost. I didn’t care about losing the fags, but England’s defeat was especially painful to take. All my wider hopes felt as if they were riding on the outcome; to have them so cruelly dashed at the death was a bitter experience, and I lay down to sleep in an almighty stinker of a mood, the laughter of my taunters ringing in my ears.

  Gambling of any sort was strictly prohibited in the Zone on the grounds that it encouraged violence, so we all understood the importance of keeping our private syndicate a secret within the atrad. We didn’t even let on to the other atrads, and for all we knew they might have been running their own book. Dang wrote down all the names of the gamblers and the amount that we’d bet in a small exercise book, which he kept hidden under a floorboard.

  The competition was a couple of weeks old and had entered the knockout stages when at preverka one morning the FSB koom, a stocky guy in his mid-thirties with a heavily pock-marked face, emerged from the offices holding a piece of paper. The governors only ever made an appearance at preverka when there was trouble, and the moment he stepped through the swing door and walked round to face the columns of men from Atrad 1, we all threw each other anxious glances and started nervously shuffling our boots in the dirt.

  It sounded like a roll-call of the dead and wounded in action as he solemnly and slowly read out a list of thirty names, including mine, ordering us to skip breakfast and start forming an orderly queue outside his office. When none of us moved, he screamed: ‘Idi!’ There was no chance of returning to the atrad to grab some bribes. There were so many of us that the back of the queue started outside the building, and three guards looked over us to make sure we stayed in line and didn’t speak to each other. I was roughly tenth in line and I studied every face that began to emerge from his office, every two minutes or so, for signs of what I could expect. Everyone, to a man, looked worried, and Dang, the Vietnamese bookie, was positively distraught when he came out, rubbing his face with his hands and swearing to himself under his breath. I was cursing myself for the casual stupidity with which I had drifted into the syndicate and put my parole in jeopardy, and I was fidgety as fuck when I knocked on the governor’s door and walked in.

  Immediately, as a matter of routine now, I took off my black baseball cap and gave him the full Oliver Twist treatment – sad, doe-like eyes, turned down mouth, rapid blinking and nervous foot-shuffling. I couldn’t have looked more fucking humble if I’d worn sackcloth and rubbed manure on my face. My Russian was good enough now to understand about half of what he said, and he was speaking quickly, which didn’t help, but as far as I could work out, he was saying that I was in almost as much trouble as the two ‘bookie’ ringleaders, because, whereas most of the others had been betting a few cigs here and there, I’d been betting whole packets.

  At first I went the route of total denial, giving him the ‘What me, ref?’ look, total disbelief etched across my face, but that too was a mistake because from under his desk he pulled out the exercise book and, turning one page at a time, read out my name, the match and the bet placed.

  ‘Hague Tig, England–France, England to win, one packet Marlboro… Hague Tig, England–Croatia, England to win, one packet Marlboro… Hague Tig, Sweden–Denmark, Sweden to win, one packet Marlboro…’

  With each match my heart sank that little bit further, and by the time he’d finished and snapped the book shut I knew he was going to hit me with some form of punishment, perhaps a spell in solitary, or extra duties around the Zone. I’d built up a relationship with Zanpolit, and with Regime to some extent, but I’d barely come across this character. His main job in the Zone was to censor incoming and outgoing mail, and the only time we’d crossed paths was when I went to collect or deliver a letter. I had no influence over him at all, and as he rubbed his chin, mulling what to do with me, I closed my eyes and stared at the dull red linoleum floor, praying. When he spoke he did so quietly and gravely, and I could barely hear what he was saying at the beginning when he was spelling out the gravity of my error, but then he paused and I looked up.

  ‘Hague, Tig… nyet udo.’

  ‘What?’ I blurted at him.

  ‘Hague, Tig… nyet udo.’

  It took several seconds for me to understand that he was giving me a black mark, scrubbing my parole date.

  ‘No! No! No! Please, no!’ I pleade
d, rushing towards his desk. ‘You can’t take six months of my life away for having a bet on a fucking football match. Please… You can’t do this!… Not six more months!’

  The prospect of serving an additional six months in Zone 22 made me physically sick. On the way to the sewing factory from the office building I retched every few yards, my empty stomach offering nothing but yellowy bile, and when I reached the office I slumped into my chair and buried my head in my arms. The others said nothing and Ergin gave me only the lightest of tasks to carry out over the days that followed, as I slouched around the Zone in a dark trance, unable to focus on anything but my own misery. I was stupefied, as if I’d been hit on the head with a mallet, and I withdrew into myself to the extent that I could barely even hold a conversation with Boodoo John. When we ate in the evenings, I pushed my noodles round my bowl in sullen silence. He let me stew, only occasionally trying to draw me out of my despair with a gentle question or a simple observation to which I replied with monosyllabic grunts.

  Dang and I were the only ones to be given black marks because he was the bookmaker and I was his biggest punter in terms of the size of the bets I laid. The rest had just bet a handful of cigarettes at a time, and were either handed a warning or given extra duties to perform around the Zone. Previously, when something had gone wrong in my life, I’d been able to take some kind of action to address the problem. If, for instance, I made a mistake at work, I took the criticism from my superiors on the chin and then went away and worked harder to atone for the error. But in Zone 22, there was nothing I could do but plead for mercy and forgiveness. I went to see Zanpolit, but he just shrugged and said it wasn’t his decision. I went to see Regime, but he got angry and said I’d broken prison regulations, abused the generosity of the governors and had only myself to blame. I called the British Embassy, but they said they were powerless to intervene in, let alone overrule, prison policy.

  It had taken over eight months to rebuild my confidence following the shock of my conviction, and in two words – ‘nyet udo’ – my fragile new-found optimism had been pulverized and scattered to the hot summer winds sweeping the plains. A few days earlier I could almost have reached out and touched my freedom, but now it had disappeared over the horizon again and I was back to where I’d started when I’d arrived in the Zone. And what was to stop them handing me another six months, and another after that? The desolation played tricks with my mind, accentuating the difficulties of life in the Zone: the heat became more intense than ever, the work more monotonous, the guards more vindictive, the food more tasteless, the dormitory smellier and stuffier and noisier… But it was the mosquitoes that drove me to the brink of full meltdown. They’d been growing steadily worse as the summer wore on, rising up from the surrounding swamps and descending upon us in black clouds. They emerged in the late afternoon, getting more numerous and insistent as the sun began its descent, and by the time night fell, they hovered across the Zone in swarms, driving us wild with irritation as we cursed and flailed our hands around our faces and slapped our skin like lunatics. I did up the top button of my shirt and pulled the cuffs of my sleeves as far over my hands as possible, and I started smoking more heavily than ever in the belief that the fumes brought me some protection against the bastards. But there was no getting away from them, and for the entire summer my face, neck and shaven scalp, and various patches of my body, were covered in swollen, itchy red lumps. At the same time my head swarmed with dark fears of what diseases or viruses the insects were carrying, especially when I stood outside smoking furiously and looking through the mesh of the exercise yard at the sick inmates of Atrad 2.

  The worst place in the entire Zone during the summer was the dormitories, where the heat, the smells, the noises and the mosquitoes joined forces with the dark, fretful fears that haunted me every night to torment me and push my powers of endurance to breaking point. Towards the end of July there was an especially hot night and I was lying under my sheet, sodden with sweat from head to foot, scratching and slapping and flailing and tossing from side to side. The mosquitoes were out in greater numbers than ever, mocking me as they buzzed in my ears and helped themselves to my blood at will. It was about three or four in the morning, but all but a handful of us were still wide awake, moaning, sobbing and cursing, and the last remnants of my resistance began to dissolve. Not since the days following my conviction had I cried as I did that night, and I didn’t care who heard. I hadn’t quite lost my head, but my heart was gone.

  I didn’t sleep for even a minute, and in the morning I tramped up to the factory with a thick head, puffy eyes and a lumpy face, scratching and wheezing and coughing. I used to find the spitting of other prisoners disgusting, but now I joined them in gobbing my phlegm into the dust as we filed through the gates and up to the main door. I didn’t give a fuck any longer.

  Ergin had been growing increasingly fed up with my black mood and most days were spent working in tense silence, broken only by the occasional burst of the needle from Molloi’s sewing machine in the corner. At the end of the day, Ergin held me back and said: ‘Stop the sadness. You must being positive. Do something. Call Lucy or your mother. Remind why you fight to get out, why you must keep hope.’

  Like the robot I’d become, I followed Ergin’s instruction and after preverka I went to see Raisa Petrovna in the office and wrote out a zevlanya, written request, to make a phone call to the Embassy. I dropped a bar of Lindt into her drawer and said: ‘Tomorrow.’ The next night, as the rest of the Zone headed for the football pitch, Petrovna led me through to the phone and dialled the number herself. Yuri, the guard who was nice to me, was the only other person in the room – the rest had either gone home or were patrolling around the football match – and he gave me a nod as I waited for her to hand me the receiver.

  ‘Hello Tig, how’s it going?’ said Alla, as sunny and upbeat as ever. For once the sound of her cheerful voice failed to lift my spirits.

  ‘Sorry, Alla, but I need to talk to Mum and Dad or Lucy,’ I said, rubbing my face with my other hand. ‘Going crazy in here. Put me through to someone, can you? Don’t care who it is. Just need to talk to someone before doing something stupid. You’ve got to help get me the hell out of here. Can’t do another six months, Alla, can’t do it, can’t do it…’

  ‘I’m doing that for you now, Tig,’ she said. ‘Try not to worry, we’ll do everything we can from here. Try to be strong.’

  I could hear the phone ringing in London and it was Mum who picked up.

  ‘Mrs Hague, I’ve got Tig for you!’ said Alla. ‘I’ll put the receiver down my end. Go ahead and talk, you two.’

  ‘Oh, Tig my love. Wonderful, I’ve been dying for you to call. You’ll never guess what?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re getting married, my love!’

  ‘Am I?’ I replied, eventually.

  30

  I should have been used to the wild yo-yoing of my emotions by then, but this swing from utter misery to crazy happiness was almost violent in its change of direction and it took several days for me to calm down, clear my head and enjoy the wonder of the news. No date had been fixed, Mum said, because Lucy, with Alla’s help from the Embassy, was still battling with the bureaucracy of the Russian prison and legal system to arrange one. But the fact that it was going to take place at all, and that Lucy was going to be able to visit me at least another three times before I was released, expelled the most furious demons from my mind once again, and lifted me out of my gloom with a sharp yank. I’d thought Lucy was joking, or just trying to keep my spirits up, when she’d talked of getting married in the Zone, and I didn’t believe the system or the governors would permit it anyhow. But she’d meant it, and now it was going to become a reality. Almost as quickly as it had deserted me, my strength and optimism returned. ‘Good to have you back with us,’ smiled Boodoo John one evening over our noodles. ‘You been away so long, I was wondering if you were ever coming back.’

  I was given further cause to cele
brate when the news filtered out from the office building at the end of that week that following a shake-up of the Russian criminal code, all current cases were eligible for review under the new sentencing guidelines. Rumours about the new code, known as pepravka, had been circulating for weeks, fuelled by prisoners coming back from the hospital Zone with stories of Russians leaving other Zones in their droves after their sentences had been slashed, but no official pronouncement to that effect had ever been made in Zone 22 and most of us dismissed them as the wild fantasies of desperate men. It was only when Ahmed and Sacha went to see Regime after preverka one evening that the truth of the speculation was confirmed, sparking a mood of excitement across the camp. It was as if a dormant forest fire that had been smouldering beneath the surface had suddenly erupted into flame again. Out in the exercise yard, there was a buzz of chatter that I’d never previously heard in the Zone. It was the unmistakable sound of hope.

  Only those for whom life was worse on the outside – or whose sentences were so long they had no reason to rush – opted not to join in the mad scramble at the end of the summer to have our cases re-considered over the days and weeks that followed. The rest of us started filling in forms, making phone calls and writing letters to lawyers, embassies and our families, to push our cases forward for re-evaluation. Yevgeny, the librarian, suddenly became the most popular paedophile on the planet, as we all flocked to him for legal advice and help with writing our applications in Russian. Yevgeny was an elderly American of Russian origin who had once enjoyed a highly successful career as a translator, and could even boast the Vatican among his impressive list of former employers before he’d been sentenced to twenty years for a catalogue of disgusting crimes. The guards called him the ‘monster’, but it was difficult to imagine this tall, greying, heavy-set man in glasses committing hideous acts of child abuse because he was always gentle, courteous and extremely generous in helping other prisoners with their legal papers or teaching them Russian. Besides, he was the only man with the knowledge, the ability and the will to help us, and we were more than happy to set aside our feelings of revulsion if the old pervert was able to advance our attempts to secure a reduced sentence.