The English Prisoner

by Tig Hague

  Zanpolit, meanwhile, cleaned up on bribes night after night, with queues of twenty or more lining up outside his door to make inquiries about the new regulations and to try to push their cases up the list of his priorities. My hope was to have my sentence reduced by about three to six months, meaning my parole date would be brought forward by six to twelve weeks. It wasn’t much, but even getting a single day shaved off my time spent in Zone 22 was worth the effort.

  I could live with the mice but it took a while to get used to the rats. There was no getting away from either of them. They were everywhere: under the floorboards, in the roof, behind the walls, in the food cupboards and in our luggage. We saw the mice every day, scurrying along the skirting boards of the atrads and darting between cracks and holes in the floorboards. A whole community of them chewed their way into my black Samsonite suitcase and set up home there for the winter. When I opened the case in spring to take out my warm weather clothing, half of it had been chewed to shreds and turned into a series of nests. As I lifted the lid about a dozen little brown creatures swarmed out and disappeared across the dormitory floor. But I didn’t mind the mice. I even felt a strange affection for them, just as we all had done for Nadezhda the foal, and the other two horses. They never caused us any real bother. But the rats were something else altogether, and no matter how many times I saw one I never felt comfortable about sharing a building with God only knows how many of them.

  The rats tended to come out only once the sun had gone down, and they made a lot more noise than the mice as they scampered along their runs throughout the night. Every now and then, maybe once a week if they were desperate for food, we saw one during the day, racing across the floor of the atrad to safety under a shower of flying boots and shoes. Boodoo John was the best shot, and by the end of the summer he had the most ‘kills’ in the atrad, stretching his tally to six for the year with a superb shot by the food cupboards as we came in from preverka one evening. I was standing in the corridor when a bloody great big brown rat, the size of a small cat, burst out of the food locker area and made a run towards the toilets, where they came up through the holes in the floor. In one fluent motion, Boodoo John hurled his boot at the fleeing creature and knocked it dead from ten yards.

  As always, Boodoo John picked up the rat by the tail and immediately sought out the nearest Vietnamese to sell him his catch for a handful of boiled sweets or a few cigarettes. On this occasion he sold it to Nguen, who promptly bribed the guard to leave the atrad and then hurried down to the boiler room, where he skinned and gutted the rat in the shower area and roasted it in the giant furnaces. The resourcefulness of the Vietnamese was truly astonishing, and the reason why they were the least malnourished group in the Zone was because they supplemented their diet with every non-poisonous living entity they managed to get their hands on. Many of them had been brought up in poor villages in the jungle and were experts at living off the land. There was no creature that they were squeamish about eating. Once, Dang and Mafia caught a long snake during morning break-time up in the factory yard and within minutes they had stripped and gutted it with a knife they used for carving chesspieces. That evening the entire Vietnamese community sat down to eat roast snake steaks for their dinner. On another occasion some of us were having a cigarette under the smoking shelter outside the factory when Fam appeared with a giant caterpillar. He let it crawl through his fingers a few times before throwing it up in the air, catching it on his tongue and swallowing it. Their knowledge of wildlife was incredible, and they often brewed up herbal concoctions for their ailments from plants they found growing around the Zone. For weeks I watched at break-time as Mafia and Molloi went over to the stable block, poured a jug of water over a tree stump and then covered it back up with straw. One day I went over and asked Molloi what they were doing and he pulled back the straw to reveal dozens of mushrooms they were cultivating.

  I rarely heard the Vietnamese complain about their fate or their treatment in prison. Their philosophy in a nutshell seemed to be ‘Life is shit, whichever side of the barbed wire you’re on, so you might as well just get on with it.’ Most of them had virtually nothing they could call their own: no bank accounts, no private food supply, no cigarettes. What they did manage to acquire through some form of divzhenya, such as doing a favour for another prisoner, they put into a kitty from which they shared everything out among themselves. The Vietnamese lived very much as a community and kept their distance from the others.

  The Afghans were the same, although they did mix with the Turks and the other Muslims for their daily prayers. One evening I ended up watching a documentary about the Taleban – or rather I ended up watching the Afghans watching the documentary. All of them in Atrad 1, about a dozen in total, crowded round the little old black and white telly, gleefully pointing out places and Mujahideen fighters that they recognized. The programme highlighted the extreme poverty and violence in their homeland, and it was easy to understand how the Afghans in Zone 22 had left home and turned to crime in order to cobble together some kind of a livelihood. Whatever life they’d led in Moscow, or even in Zone 22, it can’t have been any worse than their existence back home.

  So too with the Vietnamese in the Zone, and there was one incredible episode in particular that highlighted their resourcefulness as well as their community spirit. It was in the evening, late in the summer, and I could feel the first chill of approaching autumn as we headed out to the atrads to watch the football match between Vietnam and Nigeria – a fixture that had been played about a dozen times over the summer. The game was in full flow when the Vietnamese goalkeeper let out a cry of excitement, pointing up towards the main gates, and we all turned round to see a guard striding towards the admin building, carrying a writhing hessian sack under his arm. The Vietnamese let out a great cheer, while a few of the others started booing and grumbling.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked Boodoo John.

  ‘There’s a stray dog in that sack and the Vietnamese are going to eat every last part of it. They’ll even make a stock from the bones,’ he said, with obvious disgust in his voice. ‘They’ve been saving up cigarettes for months. The going rate’s about 400 cigarettes, I think. A dog is a feast to them. They eat cats too, but there’s not much meat on them. It makes me feel sick…’

  An elderly Vietnamese called Baw, a former butcher who worked in the shower area, hurried over to the offices and came out a couple of minutes later holding a very strange-looking beast: a kind of sausage dog, with a disproportionately big head and ears, as if it had been put together by a committee of idiots. I realized after a few moments that it was the dog I’d seen cocking its leg on the Embassy car that had come to drive Mum and Dad home in the spring. And it certainly wasn’t looking too comfortable with its new owner as it wriggled crazily in his arms.

  ‘How’s he going to kill it?’ I asked Boodoo John.

  ‘He’ll take it down to the shower room, slit its throat, skin it, gut it, carve it up into different cuts and wash the blood down the drain. Then after the match, they’ll cook it up in the boiler room fires: meat, eyeballs, tongue, penis, tail… nothing is wasted.’

  As Baw headed down towards the boiler room, skirting the side of the football pitch, the ball was kicked in his direction and an Afghan spectator swung round and bumped straight into him. Baw was startled, and as he rocked back on his heels the dog leapt from his arms and, almost as if it knew its number was up otherwise, made a frantic dash for freedom. Immediately the match erupted in uproar as all the Vietnamese players and spectators threw up their hands in horror and started running after the dog as it bolted back towards the admin offices. They were virtually hysterical, all of them yelping and screaming as they ran this way and that, all over the compound, to try to corner the animal.

  Meanwhile, every other prisoner in the Zone was roaring with laughter and cheering his lungs out for the dog. It was like a Benny Hill scene – even the guards were laughing – and it went on for about ten minutes before the do
g dashed through the front door of the admin office just as Zanpolit was walking out. That, we all thought, was curtains for the dog, but one of the African guys working in the office let it out of the back door and within a minute the chasing and the cheering had started all over again. We screamed ourselves hoarse as the Vietnamese threw themselves on the ground trying to scoop up the weird-looking creature, but it was too quick and agile for them and after a while it escaped into the guard dogs’ kennel area in the bottom corner of the camp, next to the solitary confinement block. As soon as it was inside, the dog dug a hole under the fence and within a minute it was on the other side, bounding away to freedom. As the Vietnamese wailed in despair, the rest of us let out a giant roar, clapping and punching the air in delight. The match was cancelled because the Vietnamese were too upset to carry on, and as they bickered among themselves, and harangued the butcher for dropping it, we all wandered back to the atrads, grinning and chuckling, somehow all deeply touched and inspired by the dog’s bold escape. So it was possible to get out of there after all! was the vibe we were all feeling. That bizarre-looking dog lifted all our spirits, and for the following few days the mood in the atrads was noticeably upbeat.

  Until, that is, the guard brought the dog back in.

  This time there was no drama, nor canine heroics, and a gloom fell over the atrads as we stood in the exercise yards and watched the dog being carried down to the boiler room, squirming desperately under the Vietnamese’s arm. As the door shut behind them, it was as if a small part of us died, just as it had when Nadezhda the foal had been found dead.

  Later in the evening, Molloi came back to the atrad kitchen where a small group of us were sitting around in silence eating noodles and drinking tea. He was carrying a little metal pot which he placed on the table in the middle of us; taking off the lid, he lifted a rack of ribs from the steam and asked us, ‘Sabaka?’ (‘Dog?’) Molloi burst out laughing as the rest of us leapt up in disgust or pushed back our chairs, watching him run the dog bones along his lips. The Africans found the eating of dog more offensive than anyone else, and Boodoo John and Julian stomped out of the room in protest. In the night Molloi and Hung, another Vietnamese guy, howled and whimpered in their sleep, just like dogs, spooking the Africans, who moaned and covered their heads with their blankets until Boodoo John got out of bed and shook them awake.

  31

  As the heat of summer began to fade, the days grew shorter and the chill winds of returning winter sent brief warnings of the great freeze to come, the majority of us in Atrad 1 spent our evenings writing out our applications, in Russian, to have our cases reviewed under the new pepravka ruling. Like most of the others, my Russian was not good enough to write it myself, and so for a few evenings over a fortnight I bribed the atradnik with a couple of cigarettes, and made my way to the library to ask Yevgeny, the paedophile, for some help in composing our formal applications and covering letters to the Russian justice department. Each night there were at least a dozen of us crammed along the benches of the wooden table in the middle of the small, book-lined room and, like a schoolmaster, he came to us one by one to help. All our cases were different and needed to be fashioned individually.

  Yevgeny was generous with his time and advice, and he always greeted me with a smile and an enthusiastic welcome. ‘Hey, Tig! Great to see ya! Sit yourself down and I’ll be right with you,’ he drawled in his American accent.

  He couldn’t have been more friendly, or more professional in his execution of the formal documents; and neither, even if he had been a leading Moscow lawyer, could he have been more knowledgeable about the Russian legal and judicial system. But never for a minute did I feel comfortable in his presence. Every time I looked at his kindly face, the words ‘monster’ or ‘kiddy-fiddler’ jumped into my mind and I had to shake my head to rid it of images of vile abuse. Sometimes he stood over me at the bench, breathing down the side of my neck and leaning against my back, and if there was space on the bench he liked to sit down next to us and press his leg up against ours. He was especially fond of the young Vietnamese prisoners, and it made me feel queasy when I watched him stroking their backs or hair by way of supposed encouragement or congratulation when they completed a sentence correctly.

  Yevgeny never asked for payment, but the prison code, the principles of divzhenya, demanded that we all brought him something in return for his time and expertise. I always used to bring him a couple of teaspoons of coffee, a piece of chocolate or a few boiled sweets. What he really wanted was a blowjob or a fumble under the desk, and there was gossip that a handful of other desperate prisoners, with nothing else to offer him, were prepared to indulge him in that respect to get their applications completed. My application and letters were almost done when I made a fourth visit to the library – and vowed never to return after witnessing an incident that will take years to eradicate from my mind. It was getting on for ten o’clock, time to hurry back for bed, and there was only Yevgeny, myself and a Vietnamese boy called Lanh left in the room. I was sitting at one end of the table and Yevgeny was at the other, squeezed up against Lanh as they crouched forward over a mess of papers and files. Yevgeny was sitting side on to me, half-turned to face Lanh, with his right elbow on the table and his fingers pressed into his face, making the knuckles turn white. The room had fallen silent for a couple of minutes when I began packing up my own documents. I was getting to my feet when I dropped my biro and quickly bent down to pick it up from under the table. As I stretched out my arm to reach it, I saw Lanh’s hand slowly pulling up and down on Yevgeny’s erect penis. The shock of the spectacle made me recoil and I cracked my head on the underside of the table, letting out a yelp of pain as I emerged and stood up rubbing my scalp. They were both looking at me, Lanh in terror and Yevgeny with a weirdly serene smile. I stared back, unsure what to say.

  ‘You won’t tell anyone about this, will you, Tig?’ said Yevgeny in his strong American accent. ‘You’ll only get Lanh into serious trouble.’

  I don’t know why we didn’t guess straight away that pepravka, the reconsideration of our sentences, was going to be one more triumph of grim, attritional disappointment over wild hope, just like everything else in Zone 22. We knew from repeated experience that there was no such thing as a free lunch in there, but we never stopped believing otherwise. The system stamped on our hopes and ground them into the dirt at every possible turn, but a few weeks later those hopes would spring back with as much vigour as ever. It was physically impossible to stop hoping, almost as if it was a survival mechanism passed on in our genes.

  When one or two of the prisoners found that their sentences were actually increased on review, the stampede of applicants quickly turned into an orderly, slightly anxious queue which, after weeks of bureaucratic delays ran into months, became a mere trickle. A handful of the long-term prisoners in Atrad 3 saw their sentences slashed in half under the new rules, but for the rest of us, all pepravka did was clog up an already congested parole system still further while creating tension, rivalry and chaos among the prisoners scrambling and elbowing to get to the top of the udo list. It was not a single, sudden dashing of hope, but a drawn-out disappointment, a creeping realization that nothing was going to come of reviews except a long wait and, eventually, a negative reply. By the time the cool northerly winds began to sprinkle the Zone with the yellowing leaves of the surrounding birch trees, the subject of pepravka, such a hot topic of conversation just a month or so earlier, was no longer even mentioned. Such was the speed with which hope was born and died in Zone 22.

  I leant my head and shoulder against the wall in the corridor as I waited my turn in the queue to use one of the two basins in the wash area, depressed at the thought of another day’s mindless toil, chalking out the outlines of jacket designs until my body ached with the repetition of it. There was about ten minutes to go before we had to be lined up outside the factory gates, and I was starting to grow impatient, when Alan rushed through the door from the exercise yard, a toothy grin w
reathed across his face. The weather had turned dramatically in the previous few days as the winds blew in from the Arctic north, bringing occasional flurries of snow, and Alan brushed off the flakes from his woolly hat as he strode towards me.

  Alan was always rushing into the atrad bursting with rumours and gossip he’d picked up in the office building, about the delivery of a food parcel, or news that the shop was going to open that night. He liked the thrill of conveying good news to others, but more often than not the rumour proved to be exactly that – a rumour – and the excitement he generated faded away and left a sense of anti-climax hanging in the air. The week before he had sparked a bushfire of feverish anticipation when he had come flying into the atrad to say he was convinced that a parole hearing in the local court was going to be held the following day and that there were twenty names on Zanpolit’s list. We believed him every time because we enjoyed the revival of hope that his conjecture stirred up in us.

  ‘I think she’s here, English!’ he said, his eyes wide open. ‘Your girlfriend!’

  ‘What makes you think that then, Alan?’ I said, standing upright and looking through the window of Ahmed’s office towards the offices, half-expecting, stupidly, to see Lucy standing outside waiting for me under the gently falling snow.

  ‘I saw Raisa Petrovna with a pink passport, and heard her talking about a girl who stayed in the village last night! I think it’s your Lucy.’