by Tig Hague
‘You have no right to keep me here. You are stealing my freedom, my life. Why am I still here, Zanpolit?’
Now that my papers were on the outside I was less bothered about upsetting him, and I spoke to him as I would to a junior colleague at work who’d screwed up, not rude but blunt. And the plain fact that my parole date had now passed fuelled my indignation and gave me the confidence to talk to him in a way that I wouldn’t have dared just a few weeks back.
Zanpolit wasn’t upset for me, he was just embarrassed that his limited influence over the judge had been exposed. His pathetic charade of power had been blown wide open, revealing him as the backwater, pen-sucking, paper-shuffling, Escort-driving, sadistic, good-for-fuck-all, greasy-haired, shit-fucking little weasel that he was.
‘You are not the only one, Hague Tig. Ergin and Benny Baskin are still here as well, you know…’
I cut him off, in English, snapping: ‘Oh, come off it!’ And I turned on my heel and headed to the door.
‘Hague, Tig. Stop… Hague…’ But I carried on walking and angrily pulled the door shut behind me. In the corridor outside, the queue of prisoners stared at me, wide-eyed.
Before leaving the office I filled in a request form to call the Embassy the next day. It was too late to call there and then, but the following evening I was put through to Alla’s junior colleague Irina.
‘Hello, Tig, nice to hear you, how’s your parole application going?’ she said in a friendly, sing-song voice.
‘How’s it going?’ I seethed down the receiver. ‘How’s it going? I’ll tell you how it’s going: it’s not going! That’s what. People are walking out of here, but I’m still here and I’m going to be here for at least another two months, unless some people start pulling their fingers out and put some pressure on these bastards to get me the hell out… Put me through to Lucy, will you?’
Without replying, she put me on hold and the classical muzak came on. Prisoners were only allowed five minutes on the phone, and as I waited and waited I grew ever more agitated, knowing that my time was rapidly disappearing. I started abusing the muzak: ‘What kind of shit, fucking violin bollocks is that? Call that fucking music? La di da di da di fucking da di da, fucking bollocks, fuck off violinist wanker, get yourself a proper fucking instrument…’ And when Lucy finally picked up I was insane with rage and I let fly at her.
‘It’s me… Your husband… From prison… In Russia… Still! I’m still here! I’m thinking of retiring here I love it so much!… What the hell are you and everyone else doing back in England?… I’m rotting to fucking death in here. I need some bloody support, Lucy… I’m going to end up dying in this dump unless people on the outside start pulling fingers out of arses and get bloody motivated… I’ve got no bribes left, no food, there’s not going to be another fucking parole hearing for two fucking months… What the hell is going on?’
‘Slow down, Babe… listen to me…’
‘Slow down? How can my life slow down any more? It’s at a goddam standstill. I’ve had enough. I’m losing it in here. I’ve hung on for nearly two years now, and I can’t take it any more…’
I was ranting so fast and loud that Lucy couldn’t get a word in before our time was up and the phone went dead. I slammed the receiver down and slid down the wall, digging my fingernails into my face. Another prisoner waiting to use the phone touched me on the shoulder and as I stood up to leave I kicked the wall and punched a fist into my left palm. The Undertaker and another guard stood by the window, laughing.
To the anger, despair and helplessness, I could now add deep shame, which was made all the more painful by my inability to contact Lucy and tell her how sorry I was. I hated myself for the way I’d spoken to her, and as soon as I got back to the atrad I immediately started writing her a letter, page after page of it, pouring out my apologies and my love and my gratitude. She wouldn’t receive it for months, but my urgency to communicate with her was unbearable. I was so upset and paranoid that I convinced myself she was going to leave me, once she’d done the honourable thing and seen me released. She’d stuck by me for two years, and for half of that she’d also been nursing her mum as she slid towards death; she’d given up her job to help me, she’d borrowed thousands of pounds to come and visit me, she’d had to give up her dream of buying our house together… And how did I repay her love and loyalty? By screaming blue murder down the phone at her!
My parole date was almost a month in the past and I resented every additional day of my freedom, of life – MY LIFE! – that was taken away from me. For days I barely spoke, not even to Ergin, who was submerged in his own world of dark thoughts. If I was asked a question, I just grunted and shrugged or replied with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’. At night I lay awake for hours on end, my head numb with fatigue and self-pity, my body numb with cold, listening to the Arctic winds whistling and screeching round the rickety wooden hut, and the rats and mice scuttling over the ceiling two feet from where I lay. The days passed in a dull, grey haze.
A week after Boodoo John and the others had gone, there was a strange episode when I was called out of the factory and summoned to Regime’s office. I walked in to find two youngish guys, about my age, dressed in short leather jackets and designer casual clothes. One of them had a round, pleasant face and wore a baseball cap. He had his feet up on Regime’s desk, which shocked me. The other guy was rummaging through the drawers of the desk, more out of curiosity, it seemed, than in a deliberate search for anything.
‘Take a seat, Tig,’ smiled the guy in the cap, in English, chucking me a block of Marlboro Reds. ‘You must be getting pretty low on cigarettes by now.’
‘I am, as it happens. Thanks,’ I replied, sitting down a little nervously. He had an air about him that invited me to trust him, and when he asked me how I was bearing up, I let rip about the parole system, the governors, the guards, the mind games, my health… I had trusted the two young plain-clothes cops in Moscow too, and they had stitched me up – but I didn’t give a shit any more. I’d played the system and it had got me nowhere. So what the fuck if I spoke my mind?
‘… I can’t take much more of this. What kind of justice is it to hold a man for almost two years…’
He cut me off in mid-sentence, holding his hand up above his head, and said: ‘We know, we know… If I promised you you’d be out of here by the end of March, would you believe me?’
‘No, I wouldn’t! I don’t believe anything anyone says in here any longer. The wankers in charge are more deceitful and bent than the fucking criminals. Besides, the next parole hearing’s not till end of April or May…’
He let out a half laugh as he got to his feet and walked round to the front of the desk, reaching into his wallet and handing me a piece of paper with a telephone number but no name. ‘Here’s my number. Call me when you’re out. We may be able to work together if you ever come back to Russia. I’ll show you the good side of Russia. You’ll be back in England by the end of March.’
‘Yeah, right, and I’ve got a twelve-inch cock.’
I returned to the factory, shaking my head and trying to make sense of our five-minute exchange. I guessed they must have been FSB operatives, because no one else would have the authority to boot Regime out of his office like that. But why would they come and see me? What possible interest could they have in my case? An absent-minded English banker caught with a fleck of hashish in his jeans on a business trip. It just didn’t add up, and I dismissed it as another round of mind games. The pair, I concluded, must have been in the Zone on other business and decided to kill some time by taking the piss out of the stupid English guy just for laughs. Maybe they were friends of Zanpolit’s, just another pair of bastards playing tricks with our heads and our hopes, just like the rest of them. But I couldn’t dismiss the meeting from my mind. If it was just a practical joke, it was an elaborate and especially cruel one, even by the high standards of Zone 22 guards. However much I tried to put it from my mind, it had sparked a small glimmer of hope that refused
to be put out.
‘Someone is here for you,’ said Ergin, walking back into the office, avoiding eye contact with me. It wasn’t my fault he had failed to get parole, nor his that I had failed too, but a feeling of mutual resentment had developed over the two weeks that had followed.
‘It’s probably the Embassy driver with the food parcel I requested,’ I said almost apologetically as I made my way to the door. ‘About bloody time too.’ Back in the atrad I washed and got dressed into my civvies, but I took my time and ambled slowly over to the accommodation block, figuring that if I dawdled long enough I might avoid having to go back to the factory – the day shift was over in just under an hour.
I strode down the corridor, hands in my pockets, and my face immediately lit up as I saw Alla sitting on the sofa and said: ‘Hey, it’s you!’ I walked into the room and stopped dead in my tracks, speechless with shock.
‘Lucy! What? Oh my God!’ We hadn’t spoken since my tirade at her two weeks earlier, and I hugged her so tight I almost broke her in half as I lifted her off her feet and spun her around.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ I said after a minute.
‘We’ve been to court in Zubova Paliansky to see the judge, Tig,’ said Lucy, her face dropping a little. ‘We waited all day but he never came, and then the clerk came to tell us that he’d had to travel to another town to deal with an urgent case there. The plan was to flutter our eyelids and put a bit of Embassy pressure on him to make sure you were definitely on the list for his next hearing but… Babes, I’m sorry. It’s been a horrible waste of time and money…’
I tried to hide my frustration, but couldn’t stop myself sighing deeply and shaking my head in utter disbelief that yet another twist of fate had worked against me.
‘When the hell is my luck going to turn?’ I said, rubbing my hands up and down my face. ‘It’s like there’s a bloody curse on me!’
‘Tig, don’t worry,’ interrupted Alla. ‘I’m going to keep telephoning from Moscow and I’ll come back down and see him in person if I have to. I promise.’
‘At least I’ve got to see you for a few minutes!’ said Lucy, putting her arms round my neck and covering my face in kisses.
Because they’d wasted so much time waiting for the judge, we only had fifteen minutes together before the Embassy driver put his head round the door and told Alla it was time to go back to Moscow. Alla left us for a few moments to ourselves, and there was no guard this time because the Embassy were in town and they wanted to spin as favourable an impression as possible.
‘I’m so sorry about the way I spoke to you, Babe,’ I said, squeezing her tight. ‘I don’t know what came over me. I just lost it…’
Lucy leant back, flicking her wavy brown hair over her shoulders, and put her finger to my mouth.
‘You don’t have to apologize for a thing,’ she smiled. ‘To be honest, I was amazed you didn’t go off the handle any earlier. You’ve been as strong as an ox. But it won’t be long now… Trust me.’ And she gave me a little wink as she leant towards me and pressed her lips against mine. We’d learned that a short farewell was the least painful way to part, and after a final hug, she swept down the corridor, leaving me standing in the middle of the room with four bags of shopping at my feet.
After two months of living off virtually nothing but plain noodles, my body had started to crave nutritious food, especially fruit and vegetables, and as soon as Lucy had gone I reached down, pulled out an apple and devoured it in three huge bites, core and all. Then I took out another, and that too disappeared in a matter of seconds, but almost immediately I felt sick and I put a third one back in the bag. My stomach was obviously not expecting anything as nutritious as a piece of fruit. My provisions, including cigarettes, had been virtually exhausted, and a few days earlier I’d called Alla to request a food parcel. I was grateful for the shopping the girls had brought, but it was strange that Alla hadn’t thought to add all the requests I’d put in over the phone.
In fact, it was a very weird little episode altogether, and I tried to make sense of it all as the guard escorted me back across Sniper Alley and round the corner to the entrance of the atrad to unload my bags in the communal food lockers. Weird was fast becoming the new ‘normal’ in my life. Nothing made sense any longer. So my wife pops over to Mordovia from London to see me for a quarter of an hour. And?
Is that any weirder than going to a stag party in England and ending up in prison in Russia as a result of it a few days later? So they bang me up for almost two years for carrying a fleck of a substance with the same powers of intoxication as half a bottle of wine or three cappuccinos? So an old work colleague, with a plastered arm out at right angles, pops by in Mordovia to say hello. So my parole date passes and still I rot in prison? So a man eats a dog and then howls in his sleep? I don’t know what weird means any more.
We were lining up outside Atrad 1 for the evening head-count, coughing and snivelling as usual, stamping our feet and blowing into our hands as the thick snow swirled out of the darkness and into the blinding glare of the camp lights. It was a particularly cold night and I was desperate to get back to the warmth of the atrad.
The day before, Raisa Petrovna had given me a fresh parole application form and, after all the delaying tactics the last time round, I wanted to make sure my papers were in order long before Zanpolit added it to the existing bundle and resubmitted them to the court. Then the guard quickly read out the names of prisoners wanted by Zanpolit: ‘Baskin, Benjamin… Ergin, Eritoglu… Hague, Tig…’
My heart sank. What the fuck had we done wrong now? The others melted away towards the atrads, and the three of us gravitated to each other and headed towards the office door, our necks and hands buried deep inside our jackets to keep out the cold. ‘Don’t worry, he only wants to give us the official court explanation as to why we failed to get parole,’ said Benny. ‘That way, he can feel better about himself and pretend he did everything he could for us.’
The three of us stood in silence outside Zanpolit’s door, trying to avoid eye contact with the two guards in the corridor. Benny went in first, and when he came out a minute later he gave me a wink as he brushed past, as if to say, ‘What did I tell you?’ I was in next, and when I took off my hat and looked up to greet Zanpolit, he looked at me sternly.
‘Siol! Ti da moi,’ he said.
I stared at him in astonishment, unable to talk for a few moments. Eventually I said: ‘Me?… Why?… What?… But…’ Then in English: ‘You’re fucking kidding! Why?’
‘Vseo! Ti da moi,’ he said.
‘I can go?’
‘The British Embassy will be here in the morning.’
‘That’s it?’
‘That’s it.’
‘It’s over?’
‘It’s over.’
38
It was an unofficial rule of the Zone that prisoners who’d won parole didn’t vaunt their good fortune in case they stirred up or provoked those left behind who had old scores to settle, or whose own applications had ended in failure and who were consumed with envy and bitterness. But the reality was that it was physically impossible for a man to contain the glee he felt on being told he had regained his freedom. When I walked back into the reception area, the Undertaker was on duty behind the desk. I tossed him a virtually full packet of Marlboro Red and stopped to give him an extravagant bow, sweeping my black woolly hat under my body as I leant forward. With a broad smile, I said in English: ‘You will die in this shithole, you fat, evil bastard. Goodbye.’ He stared at me, not knowing how to react. I walked out of the office building and, as the door swung shut behind me, I jumped off the top step and swallow-dived to my left, into a giant heap of freshly cleared snow.
A small crowd of wellwishers and beggars gathered around me as Ahmed opened up the food locker, and I started spraying noodles, coffee and cigarettes around the entrance area like confetti. Dozens of black-clad arms reached forward to try to grab the flying produce until everything had
gone except for one roll of cigarettes. Next, I opened my suitcase and started throwing out all my clothes, causing another unseemly scramble as I sang in a mock-operatic voice: ‘And you can have my shirt… who wants some pants?… everything must go… who’ll take these fine socks off me?…’ All I kept was my loafers, jeans, black roll-neck, fresh underwear and a packet of letters I’d received from home. At the first buzzer to assemble for work, the group quickly dispersed and people began frantically pulling on their boots, coats and hats and streaming out through the door. Eke Jude and Hulk, who could barely speak English, high-fived me as they filed outside. Ergin and Benny, who had to wait until Monday for the prison minibus to take them to Moscow because their embassies wouldn’t come to collect them, stopped and we gave each other a quick back-slapping bear-hug.
‘Go on, hurry up!’ I said. ‘You don’t want to get a black mark now!’
‘Just one more day at the office,’ said Ergin, looking pleased with his little joke.
Within two minutes of the buzzer sounding, the stampede had passed and the atrad fell silent. I went to the office Ahmed shared with the atradnik and looked out of the window at the three blocks of prisoners falling into line outside their respective atrads, the black of the uniforms forming a striking contrast with the snow that carpeted the Zone. The first shafts of morning sun found a gap in the gathering clouds and suddenly streamed through the distant tree-tops and the barbed wire on top of the far wall as the Undertaker stepped out of the office, holding the prisoner name cards, with his grey-blue trooper hat perched at an awkward angle on his fat head. Ahmed was cradling a metal mug of tea, and he stood up from his desk to join me at the window, where the sun made his deep scar look all the more gruesome.
‘Ahmed, I’m sorry I didn’t trust you.’
‘Don’t worry, I wouldn’t trust a man with this.’ And he reached up to touch the scar.