When someone gives a prisoner a pen and a piece of paper, the first thing she does is draws a calendar. Time doesn’t exist in prison without a calendar.
The first book I read in detention that came to me from outside was And the Wind Returns, by Vladimir Bukovsky.
The first book that robbed me of two days’ sleep, because I read it cover to cover, several times, was Kolyma Tales, by Varlam Shalamov.
enemies of the state
Both books were written by Russian prisoners, so-called enemies of the state. Less than a year later, I would find myself in a penal colony near the one in the books: in the Perm region, in the northern Urals.
Shalamov was declared a ‘socially dangerous element’ and sent to a colony in the Urals almost a hundred years ago. At that time, in 1929, he had already clearly grasped why the government took these kinds of measures. He wrote: ‘From the first moments in prison, it was clear to me that there was no mistake in the arrest, that it was the systematic destruction of a whole “social” group – all those who remembered what they were not supposed to remember from the past, from Russian history.’
wind returns
A story can always repeat itself.
Snowflakes fall. All day long, they either lie down like a starched sheet on the icy ground or whirl inside through the window. Our black cat, all puffed up, sleeps by my feet. In the background, I hear the kettle boil, water pouring; the steam rises towards the snowflakes. They melt in the air, warmed up – and then they’re gone. For a few days, it seemed that nothing was left – nothing existed any more at all. Only the metal rungs under my back, and the changing light.
changing light
The peephole in the door, the bugs in the visitors’ room, the snitch in the next bunk, and the searches, searches, searches. Going to sleep on command, getting up on command, eating on command. Wait! Hands behind your back! Face to the wall!
life-thought schedule
You have a routine; you have a set schedule for life and living. Do you also have a set schedule for thinking? Why don’t you tell them no? Why can’t you even think about telling them no? Why does this thought seem pointless to you? When did it become pointless for you?
snowflakes fall
They led me to an interrogation without handcuffs, but I had to hold my hands behind my back. More than a year passed in prison before I stopped holding my hands behind my back. It’s against regulations. Out of the question. Stopping is a victory. Not to turn my face to the wall, not to put my hands behind my back, not to spread my buttocks at their command – these are my great victories. And they are great. Like winning a chess tournament, if you weren’t locked up. Dinosaurs walk again on the floor of the Caribbean Sea.
anything is possible
Spring came yesterday. Pigeons are cooing under our window. The sky is overcast now, but when there’s sun the rays shining through the bars make patterns on the floor, and in the illuminated squares you can see bright orange spots on the scrubbed floorboards. We suddenly have so many oranges! A huge tubful, plus a bucket! And lots of pears, too. The iron cupboard nailed to the wall is groaning under the weight of a carton of apples, kiwis, cakes and piles of cheese.
oranges
‘Well, I’ve got news for you. A third member of your band has been arrested now,’ the police detective says.
Two weeks after our arrest, Katya was summoned to an interrogation and arrested on the spot, in the interview room.
our third
‘And you made a special trip here just to tell me this?’ I say. Weeks after. At the end of March.
The cheerful grin fades from his face and is replaced by a grim, glowering expression.
‘The best thing for you to do now is to plead guilty,’ he says.
‘Guilty of what?’ I say.
‘Of the crime,’ he says, frowning.
‘I don’t intend to do that.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’m not guilty,’ I say, smiling.
Sitting at the table, the detective leans toward me and says in a quiet voice, ‘There’s more.’
‘What is it?’
‘Recently, we paid a visit to your son’s kindergarten. We had a talk with the teacher.’
interesting news
Pleased by the fact that I had stopped smiling, the detective looks at me expectantly. A piece of white paper lies on the table next to his folded hands; he’s ready to receive my confession of guilt.
‘I understand that it isn’t easy to admit to committing a crime. Let’s begin with a simple admission that you were present at the scene,’ the detective continues, in an intentionally calm voice.
‘We’ll begin and end,’ I answer, as softly as possible, ‘with you pressing the red button.’
red button
In every interrogation room, there is a red emergency button. To call the guard at the end of the proceedings.
The days were like snow – they melted away. They stayed in my memory only as dates, as the sound of boots shuffling through the April slush. I was like the iron bars on the window that trapped our world inside and the wind, damp with drops of water, that lurked in the corners. All else had gone, faded – the bars in the air had nothing to hold on to or to hold back, but they held on anyway, and the air became heavy and grey, indistinguishable from storm clouds.
april shuffle
Ranchenkov, the chief investigator, walks around with a briefcase and looks like a schoolboy. We meet in the interrogation room.
He blushes when I bring up the corporate parties in the church, puts his black briefcase on the table and starts filling out forms.
One of his hobbies is trying to identify a true embodiment of Russia’s national identity. Putin and his ideologues’ favourite current project. While we’re waiting for my lawyer, we chat animatedly. About Ancient Russia and present-day Russia, about politics.
grade-school patriotism
Two months later, he’d stopped mechanically repeating that it was nothing but ‘banal hooliganism’. Once, he jumps up and starts flailing his legs around, as though imitating my movements in the church.
‘Is it really proper to kick your legs around like that?’ he rants.
A chief investigator in a suit. Wearing a shirt with cufflinks. Terrible cufflinks, I told him right away. Do not wear them. Cufflinks generally suck.
legs around like that
Once a week, we prisoners go to a room with a shower and filthy walls that they call the sauna, or banya. While walking us there, the guard always follows behind. It’s forbidden for them to show their backs to us because we’re dangerous. (This outing is called ‘banya day’.)
hello, ussr!
‘I have a little story to tell,’ Aya says, chuckling. ‘I can tell you why the revolution didn’t take off.’
As they were leading Aya back from the sauna, she ran into Nik-Nik, which is the Dadaesque name we gave to one of the staff in the prison. He was known for drinking all the time. Nik-Nik was pushing a box in front of him with his foot.
‘Maybe we can help you with that?’
‘It’s okay, I’ll manage.’
‘What’s in the box?’
‘It’s just a bunch of votes for Prokhorov’s opposition party. They told me to throw them in the garbage.’
democracy in the garbage
Whatever comes from outside – they cut it. Cheese, apples, cakes. They take out any matches. Don’t send bread – they give us their own detention centre bread. We cut off the crusts on all sides and eat them. We wrap the soft insides in newspaper and throw them away. Every day, it’s like we’re burying the bread and we prepare it for the funeral.
burying bread
When you have a question, you have to ‘crush the bedbug’, that is, press an old black button. Then a red light turns on outside the cell. When the guard walks down the corridor, he sees the light, opens the food hatch, and says, ‘Whatchya want?’
crush the bedbug
The door
is solid metal with dents in it. Made by fists. The guard often ‘doesn’t see the light’. That’s how fights start, hearts stop, and women go into premature labour.
the ten-mile route
‘Hi, Masha,’ the detective says.
‘Hi, Igor,’ I answer.
After half a year of regular meetings with the red-haired chief of criminal investigations, we’ve become familiar.
‘Check this out.’ He pulls a phone from his pocket. ‘I rode 10 miles.’
On the screen of his old smartphone, we look at the route from the building where his boss, Ranchenkov, works, to my prison, to which he travelled on his bicycle.
‘Cool,’ I answer.
‘Plus, I’m dieting now,’ he boasts.
spring afternoon
The spring afternoon is fairly hot, and I open the sixth volume of the legal case they’ve drawn up, which Igor has brought me so I can inform myself. I begin to read:
‘The following passage from the song also bears a negative and mocking character: “Virgin Mary, Mother of God, be a feminist!, be a feminist!” insofar as uniting the image of the Holy Virgin with feminism, some elements of which directly contradict the Orthodox faith, and which the Russian Orthodox Church does not hold in high regard, is an affront to devout Christians.’
virgin mary, be a feminist!
Are they for real? I think. I raise my head to discuss the issue with Igor and notice that he is asleep. His head is resting on the wooden table, which looks like a school desk, with his arms wrapped around it. His phone is lying next to it. The screen still shows his 10-mile route.
I read on: ‘The combination of the lexeme “shit”, which has an obscene excremental-anal semantic aura, and the lexeme “holy”, in the phrase “holy shit”, along with the repetition of this line, significantly intensifies its effect.’
‘Holy shit,’ I say out loud.
‘Something wrong?’ the detective says, lifting his head from the desk. There is a trace of his sleeve imprinted on his right cheek.
‘Never mind,’ I answer.
The next moment, he realizes that something irreparable has happened.
I say: ‘Don’t worry. I didn’t call anyone, and I didn’t eat a single page of the criminal report.’
excremental-anal semantics
I’m making soup. So far I’ve done this only once. It’s forbidden, you can get sent to solitary confinement if they catch you, and our cell is small – it’s easy to see what we’re doing through the peephole.
What is a criminal? Is it the people around me, myself included? ‘From the moment of my arrest,’ I write in my diary, ‘so and so many days have passed.’ I write this, but I don’t believe a single word of it. I don’t even believe the words ‘the moment of my arrest’. I don’t believe that ‘arrest’ is really ‘arrest’; that a ‘criminal’ is really a ‘criminal’. What is a criminal? A human being? And that’s all?
The immersion coil is a dangerous object, but I’ve almost stopped being afraid of it. With the immersion coil, you can heat something up to boiling, but you can’t boil something. I still cannot grasp the moment when something being heated transitions to being boiled. So, officially, I guess you could say we are heating vegetables in water, along with oil.
human criminal
They’ll lock us up for a long time. It’s as clear as day, this stuffy, empty day.
I walk around the ping-pong table in the five-square-meter stone box of a prison exercise yard. Only a strip of sky is visible – a grey strip between the iron mesh above my head and the concrete wall.
ping pong
I walk in circles with a book in a grey cover, two fingers planted in the middle, and repeat a verse of Mandelstam:
People who are hungry, who are sick,
Will kill, will suffer cold, will hunger.
And in his famous grave
The unknown soldier will be laid.
little grey book
It is still three years before the war between Russia and Ukraine and I have still not become an official enemy of the people; I retain my modest status of ‘engaging in disorderly conduct’. It’s still early days, as they say. But, later, they will say other things, and for the time being I’m walking around the tiny concrete exercise yard, my thirtieth round, and reciting more verses by heart …
blossoms
Our only kin is what is in excess.
Ahead lies no downfall, but a misstep,
And wrestling for sufficient air
Is not a glory that impresses others.
And overstocking consciousness
With half-waking routine living,
Do I have no choice but to drink this slop,
And eat my own head under fire in battle?
a few minutes
In a few minutes, the iron door to the exercise yard will open, and they will take me back to my cell. I will gather my papers there, and they will take me to a procedural meeting, to the chief investigator, to another building in the same detention centre, to a small office.
The investigator will tick boxes, bent over the desk like a schoolboy. Next to him, proudly arrayed in fancy clothes, are the main plaintiff – the church candle-tender – and her lawyer.
get ready
‘How’s your cell? Spacious?’ the plaintiff, a Christian, asks me.
‘It’s big enough,’ I say, looking to the side at the window, from which the view is completely obscured by paint.
‘How many of you are there?’
‘Four, but we don’t all spend all our time there, of course.’
‘You mean they take you out for walks? How often?’
‘Every day.’
‘My, it sounds just like a health spa!’
‘Want to trade places with me?’
‘Masha!’ Ranchenkov, the investigator, says. He started addressing me by my first name very early on.
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘Let’s start the procedure. Let’s talk about the matter at hand. The case.’
the matter at hand
And we talk about the case. Everything is recorded officially, with signatures, serious expressions on our faces. The case is sizable; it fills seven fat volumes, sewn together with white thread. After sentencing, they will give me a copy, which I will take with me on the convoy to the penal colony in the Urals. There will be no exercise yards for walking there. The colony barracks are surrounded by open land, and in the summer (though it’s against the rules) they let you grow flowers there. The soil is poor, so before planting the seeds it has to be weeded and watered repeatedly. But the flowers grow and everyone is happy to look at a garden by the barracks. The guards no less than the prisoners.
a conversation on record
This May is hot and beautiful. The sky is swollen. Beneath it, black cars crawl along the broad streets like beetles. Their eyes are open and trained on the eyes of the Kremlin gates. Behind them, tanks crawl, and missile-carriers, like the hearses of iron corpses.
putin’s inauguration
He says, ‘We will get up off our knees and rise above the world.’
They say, ‘Yes.’
6 may
Small old buses. Small old veterans holding red bunches of carnations in their dried-up hands. They weep. They are talking about them when they say: ‘Victory’. And then drive them back to their apartments, where the ceiling is falling in.
victory parade
We look at the screen, our hands holding the window bars. The bars were forged five years ago, the floorboards conceal dust, the iron tables cannot be moved or removed.
they laugh while they sin
‘Well, we won. We didn’t plead guilty,’ I say, as I’m leaving the investigator. He’s standing in the doorway, his head drooping wearily, his arms hanging at his sides.
The case file is finalized and sent to the court.
‘You didn’t win,’ he says. And, after a short pause, adds, ‘You just didn’t lose.’
5. Russ
ian Trial
There are people who live their whole lives in constant fear, as though they are guilty of something. But if you are innocent, if you have not committed any crime, what is there to fear?
watch closely: they’re changing history
A convoy escort with a dog leads the way, and we follow, entering the cage one by one. We extend our hands through a small opening. The convoy escort removes the handcuffs and hangs them on his belt. He sits on a chair by the cage. The dog sits next to him.
aquarium
Our cage in the courtroom is called ‘the aquarium’. It’s made of glass, and stands in the middle of the courtroom on the third floor. There is no microphone in the cage. You listen, and speak, through a narrow slit in the bulletproof glass.
Riot Days Page 6