by Tig Hague
‘I’m sure it’ll happen next time, Julian. It’s got to!’ I said after breakfast, as he sat in the kitchen slumped over the table, with Boodoo John and Eke Jude on either side.
‘That’s what I thought this time, and the time before that! The fuckers are never going to let me out of here.’ He was trying not to cry, and I grimaced at the sound of his voice cracking up.
In 2004 the pressure on the parole system inside Zone 22, and therefore on the competition to get out of there, had become even more intense than normal, for two reasons. First, there had been a sharp fall in the number of new arrivals to the Zone and the guards and governors needed no telling what that meant for them: the fewer prisoners, the fewer the bribes. It also meant a decrease in the funds they received from the government. They didn’t give a shit whether we were released or not at the best of times, but as the prison population dwindled, it became in their own interests to try to stall the release of the prisoners for as long as possible, especially the better-off ones like me. Without us, there would be no more Marlboro, Lindt chocolate bars and Nescafé, no more expensive lighters, pens and watches, and no more televisions, video cameras, double beds, wallpaper and sofas.
When Julian went to see Regime to find out why he was still being held in prison five months after his parole date, he was told that his application – and that of dozens of others – had failed because they didn’t have the original documents from their trials. Most prisoners only had photocopies, and their originals were lodged in the vaults of court archives in Moscow and other major cities across Russia. The prospect of trying to unearth them from deep within the country’s notoriously impenetrable bureaucracy triggered panic throughout the Zone. What made this explanation especially infuriating and depressing was that it was the Zone authorities, not the Russian criminal justice system, that had introduced the new stipulation. It was nothing less than a shameless attempt to slow down the release of prisoners and hang on to the source of their contraband and inside information. Groceries were being put before the freedom of men. And it was sod’s law for those of us aiming for parole in February that we found ourselves also competing with dozens of inmates who should have gone in December and January, and some from even earlier hearings.
I thought I had my original documents, but after the December parole hearing I checked them to be absolutely sure and was immediately thrown into a paddy of anxiety when I discovered half of them were copies. It had been announced at preverka that if parole applicants weren’t in possession of the proper papers by mid-January, to register them with the local court, they’d be ineligible for the next parole hearing and would have to wait until the end of March or early April for their next chance. I knew from the Zone grapevine that it could take up to three months for the bureaucracy to produce the documents they needed, and I went straight to Raisa Petrovna after preverka and unloaded a medium-sized jar of Nescafé Gold and two bars of Lindt before begging her, with my hands held together in prayer, to let me call the Embassy that very evening.
‘Alla, you’ve got to do me a big favour and you’ve got to move fast.’ I was virtually hyperventilating with anxiety as I explained to Alla about the new stipulation, and she listened patiently as I babbled incoherently down the line.
‘Tig, I’ll get your documents for you. I give you my word. Please don’t worry yourself sick about it. Put it from your mind…’
‘But how the hell are the Embassy going to deliver them when they won’t risk driving down in the dead of winter? You can’t put them in the internal post, because the bastards here will just sit on them till it’s too late, and you can’t risk putting them in the normal post either…’
‘Tig, relax. We will find a way…’
‘Relax! How the hell can I relax in Zone 22? How can I relax about spending one more day in this godforsaken misery pit? You’ve got to sort it, Alla, ’cos I’m in danger of losing my head in here, and then I’ll never get out…’
34
Boodoo John walked round the kitchen pouring the strong black tea into metal cups as I emptied a packet of oatmeal biscuits into my eating bowl and handed them out. ‘Happy New Year,’ I said to each person as I made my way round the room, and they replied, ‘Let’s hope,’ or words to that effect – all except Julian, that is. Still gutted by his parole failure, he replied, ‘Well, it can’t be any fucking worse than the last five.’ There were six of us in all – Boodoo John, Julian, Eke Jude, Hulk, Alan and myself – and we stood in silence for a few moments facing each other over the wooden table, all still wearing our hats and outdoor coats to keep out the blood-stopping cold. The boiler had broken down for the third time in four weeks, and Julian and the other boys had only just managed to get it running again after hours of toiling down in the sheds.
‘Well, here’s to 2005!’ said the ever-cheerful Alan, his breath clearly visible as he rolled out a toothy grin and raised his cup of tea in front of him. The rest of us wearily lifted our own cups and muttered, ‘2005!’ and then the silence returned and we stood awkwardly, shuffling our feet, cradling our tea and looking at the splintered wooden floor. I tried to think of something upbeat to say in order to break the silence, but nothing came to me, just as it had failed to do on Christmas Day a week earlier. The passing of another year of our lives was a cause for sad reflection, not celebration; a bitter reminder that while the world beyond danced and set off fireworks, we stood shivering and coughing in a wooden shack in one of the most desolate corners of the globe, thousands of miles from our loved ones, months and years away from the day when we would be allowed to be reunited with them.
The buoyant mood that had followed the wedding and the reinstatement of my parole date sustained me throughout November, but that surge of joy and confidence had quickly given way, first to a gnawing anxiety and then to a growing despair, with occasional bursts of outright alarm as the days passed and still there was no word from Moscow or Zanpolit about whether my original trial documents had been found and sent down to the Zone. Typically, Zanpolit and the other governors refused to tell us when the cut-off date for parole applications had been set, preferring to let us stew in sleep-thieving anxiety for as long as possible. The arrival of the New Year served only to heighten the passing of time and highlight the deadline for our parole applications. As I raised my glass and added my gloomy voice to the toast, the knot in my stomach squeezed a little tighter.
My physical condition wasn’t great either. The viruses ebbed and flowed up and down the camp throughout the winter months, and there hadn’t been a day since the first snows had arrived when I hadn’t been either hacking my chest to mincemeat and/or running for the hole in the floor to squirt out some more diarrhoea. A couple of days into the New Year I was lining up for the first preverka of the day, feeling no rougher than normal as I jumped from foot to foot to keep warm, when without warning my stomach was seized by cramps and I projected an arc of vomit through the frozen night air. Luckily I was in the front row and my spew landed in the pile of cleared snow about two yards in front of me. The guard doing the head-count was three columns away to my right and he stopped and scowled as I continued to unleash streams of watery yellow puke that burnt through the snow like acid and sent steam rising up into the darkness. My head was swooning and it was a struggle to stay on my feet for the few minutes it took the guard to finish his counting. I was first in line to see the doctor after breakfast and I probably didn’t need to give her the giant bar of Lindt Swiss Premium milk chocolate with raisins and hazelnuts, but I wasn’t taking any chances. She wrote me out a sick note, granting me three days off work, and I immediately took to my bunk, alternately sweating and shuddering with cold and almost delirious with fever.
It was difficult to keep track of time over the hours and days that followed as I lay under my blanket, curled up on my side with my arms wrapped around my cramping stomach, drifting in and out of consciousness. Fuelled by fever, the recurring nightmare about Lucy became even more grotesque and vivid and I h
urled myself from one side of the bunk to the other, over and over, trying to dislodge the stream of horrific images from my mind… Lucy, heavily pregnant, writhing on the ground, crying out for me to come to her aid. Me trying to board some form of transport but it’s too crowded to get on, or the ticket collector or cabbie won’t let me in; me waiting for a ride that never comes or finally getting on the train or bus or into the car but it never arrives at its destination or the plane that never lands, and all the time Lucy is screaming and wailing…
Almost thirty-six hours had passed before I managed to haul myself off the mattress and fetch myself a drink of water. My mouth was so dry I could barely swallow, but when I swilled back a cup of water from the washroom tap I immediately projectile-vomited into the basin, narrowly missing Ahmed, who was washing his face in the neighbouring sink. It wasn’t until the following morning that I was able to hold down any water, but I was still so weak that Boodoo John had to help me across the concourse to see the doctor again. The worst had passed, but she signed me off for two more days and I returned to bed once again. At any given time of the winter there were at least a dozen of us in bed suffering from some form of ailment in Atrad 1, but this bug was proving especially virulent: there were roughly twenty of us laid up, and the room hummed to the hellish sound of groaning and whimpering. For the first three days I felt so rough that I stopped thinking and fretting about the fast-approaching deadline for parole applications, but as I began to recover, the fears slowly returned to torment me. And as always, they were especially powerful and unsettling at night.
By the fifth day, I was well enough for those fears to have transformed themselves into full-blown alarm, and I woke up with a fury of demons screeching around my head. It had been over ninety-six hours since anything solid had passed my lips, and the delirium caused by the fever had been replaced by a wild confusion made up of hunger, weakness and panic. But through the fog, I could clearly see the importance of finding out whether the documents had arrived and I knew that, come what may, I had to get across to the office building at the end of the day.
After missing the shower session that week it was almost eleven days since I had washed properly, and the smell of my own stale body odour was overpowering that evening as I took off the filthy blue fleece and T-shirt in which I’d been sleeping and sweating all week. I covered every inch of skin in soap lather, but no sooner had I rubbed it on than I washed it off with three handfuls of freezing cold water and wrapped myself in my towel, shuddering in the icy air. I could tell by the sight of my breath and the cold of the water that the temperature inside couldn’t be much above freezing, meaning that outside it must have been between 20 and 30 degrees below.
Back in the dormitory I stood transfixed at the sight of my naked torso, reflected in the window darkened by the night that had fallen six hours earlier. Where once, eighteen months earlier, I had had a well-defined, healthy physique – broad shoulders and upper chest, narrowing to a small waist – my sides were now straight lines that ran from my armpits down to my hips. My ribs were starting to protrude and the skin was pulled taut over my cheekbones, making my eyes look way too big for my dark, unshaven face and sheared head of hair. The hazy red glow of the dormitory night-light accentuated the rash of raised, painless lumps that had been slowly spreading out from my chest and sides and across my back over the previous few weeks. I could barely recognize myself as I stood there, so engrossed by the ghoulish vision before me that it was a full ten seconds until the cold persuaded me to put on the first of four layers before I headed across to the admin building to see Zanpolit.
The quiet rage that had festered inside me from the time of my detention in Moscow, arising out of an inability to accept that my punishment was in any way proportionate to the misdemeanour I had committed, had been growing steadily in intensity. Now it was threatening to boil over, and that was not something I could afford to let happen when – in theory at least – I was so close to regaining my freedom. The last thing I needed at this stage was to let an outburst of temper land me in trouble. Still smarting from the humiliation of having to rescind my black mark, Zanpolit would jump at the slightest opportunity of slapping another six months on my sentence, pre-empting any intervention by the British Embassy by bulwarking his case against me with phony testimony by the guards about my general behaviour and attitude. I clenched my fists in my pockets as the dark thoughts ran through my mind, and made my way across the concourse to see the man himself, head down and huddled against the driving blizzard that swept through the barbed wire to the north of the Zone. As I walked up the three wooden steps to the office door, I was talking myself into a conciliatory, patient frame of mind. ‘Just keep your cool, Tig… keep your head… be polite… it will all be over soon…’
Zanpolit grunted in answer to my gentle rap on his door, but he didn’t look up as my rubber-soled boots squeaked across his floor and I dropped three packets of Marlboro and a jar of Nescafé into the open drawer of his desk. As I pulled the coffee out of my pants I saw that the notepad on which he was scribbling was littered with doodles, including dozens of mini-Swastika shapes, a large love heart which he had filled in with blue biro, and a sports car, complete with exhaust fumes coming out of the back and a few streaks behind the vehicle to indicate the great speed at which it was travelling.
I stood facing his desk, biting my fingers, waiting for him to talk. He said nothing for over a minute, until finally he looked up and raised his eyebrows as if to say, ‘I can’t be arsed to open my mouth to talk to scum like you. What the hell do you want anyway?’
‘Have my trial papers come from Moscow?’ I asked in Russian.
‘Do I look like a postman?’ he replied, looking down at his pad.
The anger rose up in me like bile, sudden and uncontrollable, and I had to swallow hard to stop myself snapping at him.
‘Well, how can I find out?’ I said, holding my arms out at my sides and shrugging my shoulders.
‘I don’t know. Why don’t you call your friends at the British Embassy?’
‘OK, I will, but when is the final date for parole applications? It must be close now.’
‘Soon.’
‘How soon?’
Zanpolit jumped to his feet, sending his chair crashing against the wall behind him. His face was screwed up in purple rage as he pointed at the door and screamed, ‘Out! Out! Out!’
Whether it was because I was too weak and dazed or because I was no longer frightened of him, it was difficult to say, but I didn’t flinch as he bellowed at me. Instead, I held his gaze and then turned and slowly walked from the room, not letting him see any of the anger and contempt that seethed within me. But as soon as I was out in the open I kicked the air wildly, spinning around in the snow that was now blowing almost horizontally through the camp. Inside the atrad, I leant my arms and head against the food lockers in the little room to the right of the entrance and looked down at my boots, muttering ‘Bastards! Bastards! Fucking bastards!’ It was generally the only space in the building where we could escape contact with other people, but looking back under my right arm I could see two pairs of feet standing behind me. Immediately, I spun round and turned on the two young Chinese guys who had arrived in the atrad two weeks earlier.
‘Go on, fuck off, will you! Get your own fucking cigarettes and food… Leave me alone, you scrounging wankers… Piss off back to Peking!…’ I shouted, waving them away as I advanced towards them. I stomped across the corridor into the kitchen area, where Ahmed was sitting at the table with two of his North African friends drinking tea, and I could tell he had clocked my rage as soon as I walked into the room and turned to see Chan to the left of the door using my tea towel to dry his bowl and mug. Ahmed’s eyes darted between the two of us and he put down his tea. Instinctively, I snatched the towel from Chan’s hand, making his bowl fall to the floor with a metallic clang. ‘Who the fuck said you could use that, Chan?’ I snapped.
The table fell quiet as I turned on my hee
l to leave, but almost instantly I felt Chan’s fist connect with the back of my neck. The next thing I knew I was bent over in the corner by the door, shielding my head as he came at me with flying feet and fists. Each withering blow into my right side sent pain shooting up my body, and I knew I had to move fast and start fighting back before he inflicted some serious damage. The last thing I needed at this stage of my sentence was a return to the hell of the hospital Zone, because that meant an almost certain end to my chances of getting parole at the next hearing. My fear of that was even greater than my fear of Chan’s powerful fists and wild rage, and in one massive effort of will I sprang out of the crouching position and hurled myself at him, screaming like a banshee. The shock, more than the physical force, made him recoil and crash against the far wall. I pulled back my right arm, ready to drive a fist into his face, but as I swung my body round to deliver the blow, Ahmed waded into Chan from the right, knocking him sideways with a bone-shuddering blow to the jaw. It was a massive punch, and it stunned Chan for long enough to allow Ahmed to follow up with two further punches to the head and a violent karate-style kick to his ribcage.