The Prison Book Club

by Ann Walmsley

  At that point everything changed. Doc arrived, apologizing for missing the early part of the meeting. His wife had been by for a visit. He had a totally different take on the book, saying that it reminded him of Guy Ritchie crime comedy movies like Snatch or Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. “It’s that British farce where you’ve got a whole bunch of different characters that end up being intertwined,” said Doc. Boyd was having us on by tampering with the conventions of thriller writing. And layered on that, said Doc, was the sense of resignation that overtakes those stuck in poverty in Britain.

  Once Doc pointed out that it could all be intentionally comic, some of the more bizarre scenes made sense, including the one that Frank had written about in his journal earlier. It was the scene in which Adam’s homelessness has driven him to kill and eat a seagull, but then he looks at the lights across the Thames and feels “Christmassy.” “Absurd” was how Frank described it. Equally unlikely, in Graham’s view, were the scenes in which Adam begins dating the female police officer who was initially assigned to the murder investigation and who fails to recognize him, and in which Adam takes a nap soon after leaving a murder scene. “Does anyone remember when Adam crawled into the bush and went to sleep?” he asked the others. “Like, you’re on the run here because they think you just murdered a guy and, ‘I think I’m going to take a nap in the bush.’”

  That nap hadn’t computed for anyone in the room. Frank told me later: “I just know from experience, when you’re under that kind of pressure, like, I didn’t sleep for three days after my incident.” In his case, he said, “I was having a good day. Next thing I’m wanted. And then I hear I’m wanted for attempted murder. And I didn’t turn myself in. And I couldn’t sleep. I mean I tried. But I’d wake up and see the thing on the TV. You can’t sleep. There’s no way.” He didn’t leave town because his wife was pregnant, and, like Adam, he evaded arrest for some time. Frank appeared a little depressed that day at the book club meeting. The parole board had denied him day parole and had told him that, upon his release in May, he would have to reside in a halfway house. It wasn’t clear whether the house would be in Toronto, close to his family, or not.

  All it takes is one person with a definitive insight to turn around a book club meeting and that day Doc was that person.

  As Carol and I drove back to Toronto, we noticed two very large bright lights side by side in the western sky soon after darkness fell. They looked like twin headlights or a double star. In fact they were Jupiter and Venus, weirdly close to each other, like two worlds that might collide. Another Venn diagram.

  Three weeks later, the board of Book Clubs for Inmates convened at the law offices of board member Brian Greenspan, one of Canada’s top criminal defence lawyers, to meet with Graham, who was out on an Unescorted Temporary Absence. It was Carol’s idea to recruit Graham as an adviser to the book clubs operation, even as a member of the board, if it was allowed. I happened to be looking out Brian’s boardroom window when Graham came walking toward the building. He looked so much bigger in the city than he did in the prison and it was strange to see him in street clothes, including a crisp polo shirt with a crest. He came with a gift box of fudge from his mother’s confectionery business, for the board members. One person at the table made a point of explaining to Graham that the wires visible at her waist were not a “wire,” but were attached to a Holter monitor for monitoring heart activity. Everyone laughed. For an hour, Graham impressed those present with his command of statistics on the prisons and his insights into the problems that afflict them. He suggested strategies for how to proceed with a new book club at Manitoba’s Stony Mountain prison, drawing on his familiarity with the institution. The only question was, could an inmate serve on a charitable board?

  Graham had come a very long way from that winter morning when he was arrested for drug trafficking and extortion. On that day, he’d been in the basement of his house, which had security cameras at every corner, linked to monitors in his bedroom and basement, giving him wraparound views—“a fortress” in his words. He first noticed a figure in black running across one monitor, then, as the screen split to display views from different cameras, he saw what looked like a municipal truck parked outside. The land line rang and he ignored it. Then his cellphone rang and his wife answered. She called out to Graham that it was the RCMP and they were outside with an arrest warrant. “They said, ‘Are you going to come out?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I’m going to come out, hang on a minute,’” recalled Graham. “I said, ‘What are you arresting me for?’ and the officer said, ‘Well, I can’t really tell you that till you come outside,’” Graham opened the door, put up his hands and was covered with red dots as an RCMP tactical team aimed the laser scopes of their guns at his torso and an officer guided him to the vehicle. “They were all over the place in their little grey-andwhite outfits hiding behind the cars and everything,” he recalled. “But they were nice to me when they took me in, and they were nice to my wife.” He always referred to her as his wife because he was arrested two months before their planned wedding day. Sometime later the RCMP must have told him that the man he’d been extorting was a police agent.

  I wondered what the arrest had been like for the two men the London police apprehended after I was mugged. The detective in charge of my file had been reluctant to provide me with many details of their investigation in case they required me to testify. They didn’t want to influence my testimony in any way. However they did talk about arresting one man on a weapons charge later on the day I was attacked.

  Some time later the detective asked me whether I would be willing to try to identify my assailants from a lineup of suspects or, as they said, “a police identity parade.” The very idea was just about the worst thing I could imagine. Not only was I reliving the trauma but I felt an enormous sense of responsibility. The outcome could affect someone else’s life for years to come. However, I wanted to be helpful and so I said yes. And that was how I found myself in a small outbuilding at Southwark Police Station on the south side of the Thames. There were several other people in a waiting room. We all looked at each other curiously. I didn’t know whether they were other witnesses, plainclothes police or lawyers for the accused. I looped my arm through my husband’s. I felt sick. A policewoman advised me that I had a right to ask the men in the parade to stand.

  When they called me, I walked alone into a long chamber and confronted a lineup of black men who all appeared to be staring at me. They couldn’t see me, of course, because the one-way glass concealed me, but from my side of the glass, I still felt like the one on parade. Unlike in the movies, they were sitting, not standing, and there were no height lines. The parade seemed calculated to make the witness focus on the individual’s face, not the build or height. I moved hesitantly along the walkway studying each face. One fellow was wearing what looked like a 1970s shrink top over his sweater. The man next to him appeared to be beset with uncontrollable twitches and facial contortions, though it was impossible to know if these were involuntary Tourette’s-type movements or were designed to distract. I asked two of the men to stand. The moderator asked if I could identify an individual while he was still seated. I replied simply: “I understand it is my right to ask them to stand.” I took a long look, allowing my mind time to reach back into that evening. I returned to the lineup and checked each face a second and third time. I turned and spoke softly to the moderator and then returned to the waiting room. The detective in charge said I could go. I relived the attack in my mind all the way home in the back of a police-driven vehicle, feeling haunted throughout by the eyes of the men in the lineup, and also wondering again about what their mothers were feeling. It was impossible for me to separate the idea of the desperate men from their role in someone’s family.

  I was thinking about the suspect lineup on the drive north to the Beaver Creek Book Club on April 11 because our book that month was all about suspects: Swarup’s novel Six Suspects. And so when I looked around the table at the book clu
b members, I found myself newly aware of minute details in each man’s appearance and conscious of wanting to memorize their features. There was Richard, one of the older men, with his grey close-cropped hair, his moustache and beard, his blue eyes looking out from behind black-framed reading glasses, his intelligent-looking face; Pino, a relatively new member, a hunch-shouldered man with a long thin nose and an angled scar on his chin, who appeared to be in his seventies; tall, slim Byrne with short grey hair and wire-rimmed glasses, and a habit of scratching his head and chewing his nails; Tom with his walrus moustache, dirty-blond hair that hung to his shoulders, brown eyes and long, pointy fingernails; Earl with his grey goatee, blue eyes and Nike ball cap; Raymond with his bored expression, expensive-looking watch, long hair and grey socks with a red stripe at the cuff; Doc with his freckles and colourfully striped knit beanie hat; Frank with his deep dimple, nearly bald head and dark grey sweatshirt; Graham with his great size, eyes that seemed to change from blue to grey and short-cropped blond hair; and Hal with his high-pitched voice, hazel eyes and grey zip sweatshirt.

  It was Ben who had recommended Six Suspects the previous August during the book club meeting at Collins Bay when we’d reviewed the books we’d each read individually over the summer. I had bought it back then based on Ben’s recommendation and now I was finally having an opportunity to discuss it with men who had also been suspects. Swarup is best known as the author of Q&A, which Danny Boyle made into the hit film Slumdog Millionaire. Six Suspects, a whodunit bristling with social satire, explores themes of poverty, wealth and corruption in India. Playboy Vicky Rai has just been acquitted of killing a barmaid who refused to serve him a drink. But at a party to celebrate his victory in court, he is murdered. There are six suspects in the case: a Bollywood actress, a mobile-phone thief, an American tourist, a bureaucrat, a politician and an indigenous man from the Onge tribe of India’s Andaman Islands. All six were at the party, all six hated Vicky Rai and all six were carrying guns. Swarup had manufactured an interesting premise but, in the end, none of the book club members was very happy with how he resolved the mystery. Frank and Graham in particular said they felt cheated of the opportunity to at least string together some clues.

  For Indian readers, the book’s premise would certainly bring to mind the high-profile 1999 murder in New Delhi of a model and sometime barmaid, Jessica Lall, who was shot at a party, allegedly when she refused to serve a drink to the son of an Indian MP. At one point in the Lall case, there were twelve suspects, though all were acquitted at trial. It was only upon appeal that three suspects were convicted, including Manu Sharma, the son of an Indian National Congress MP. Swarup intentionally based his plot on the Lall case, capitalizing on the perception in India during the attenuated legal process that high-society individuals appeared to be above the law—a different kind of untouchable.

  It was Swarup’s experiments with multiple narrators that the men wanted to discuss first. The Bollywood actress’s thoughts are conveyed through her diary entries, the politician’s section is a series of telephone calls, the tourist and the thief speak in the first person, while the remaining suspects are described in the third person. To all those voices, Swarup adds a framing narrative by an investigative journalist who is phone tapping—a possible reference to the phone-hacking scandal in Britain, which at that time was in its early stages. Frank and Tom both said they liked the literary technique and Phoebe said it reminded her of The Cellist of Sarajevo, although she thought the device worked better there. For Richard, the formula reminded him of the Paul Haggis film Crash, where very different lives converge because of a traffic accident. Or Six Degrees of Separation, said Raymond.

  Then Phoebe, who had taken a back-seat role as facilitator that meeting, pointed out an interesting theme that she had come across in a reading guide for the book. It was the theme of dual identities or identity confusion. She listed examples: a poor girl, who is a doppelgänger for the Bollywood actress, begins usurping the actress’s career; the corrupt bureaucrat Mohan Kumar puts on Gandhi-like wire-rimmed glasses and comes to be known as Gandhi Baba, then comes to believe Gandhi’s spirit has possessed him.

  “I always find these academic revelations mundane,” said Raymond, somewhat rudely.

  But several of the others were intrigued by the idea of duality in the novel. “The really poor guy finds the briefcase and becomes really rich,” said Earl, twigging to the theme. “The sexy starlet finds the girl from the dirt-poor village and brings her along. A big part of their culture is about balance too.” And, as Richard observed, the starlet was simply exploiting her double without sharing any of the benefits with her.

  “The underlying theme is corruption at every single level,” agreed Doc. “Everybody does anything for money.”

  And, in Graham’s view, the author was most pessimistic for the few innocents in society, like Eketi, the indigenous man. “Look what happens to that guy at the end,” said Graham. “Tortured, beaten, enslaved.”

  Pino, the new guy, argued that the book’s main theme appears close to the end of the novel. He waited while the men thumbed through to the book’s last chapter, then read aloud a section from the investigative reporter’s narration about how the middle class must be the conscience for the other classes. The irony is what the reporter does to right that wrong by taking the law into his own hands.

  “So let’s go round the table and rank the book on a one-to-ten scale,” suggested Raymond.

  “Oh no,” groaned Graham. “Not the one-to-ten.”

  “Number! Number!” insisted Raymond, who hadn’t liked the book and gave it a three.

  Frank gave it an eight, Graham a six and a half and Doc, who said that he enjoyed the realism of its portrayal of India, gave it an eight as well. “Just because,” he said, “Raymond would hate that.” He had started to tire of Raymond’s strong opinions.

  It was after the meeting that Frank and Graham added one more intriguing layer to the book analysis, though it was in jest. The deaths in the novel are less troublesome to Indians, Frank told me, because Hindus believe in reincarnation. “So they don’t care!” he observed.

  “You’ve always got such a positive outlook,” said Graham laughing.

  “Well, I believe in karma,” said Frank. “I don’t think you can do bad deeds without eventually it will come back to you. I don’t mean going to jail or anything. I mean it comes back to you in life. When you feel guilty about something, it’s already gotten you.”

  “You carry it all around with you,” said Graham.

  “Yeah, and that’s the biggest weight.”

  18

  GOOD IS MORE CONTAGIOUS THAN EVIL

  IF IT WEREN’T for what I came to call “the Plexiglas lockdown,” Parvat said he wouldn’t have finished the March book for the Collins Bay Book Club, The Zookeeper’s Wife, by Diane Ackerman. A piece of Plexiglas from the CORCAN workshop had gone missing in early March. Plexiglas, which was not detectable by a metal detector, could be fractured into equally undetectable and lethal shanks. Over on Unit 7, Peter used the time to read too. He was always well equipped for lockdowns with an emergency pack of supplies to deal with the lack of access to the showers or the canteen. The pack contained a sponge for hand-washing in his cell sink and snacks to bridge between mealtimes because of his high metabolism: oatmeal, sugar, apples, peanut butter packets, cream cheese packets and crackers.

  Even during a lockdown, though, inmates still could be released from prison. On March 7, Ben wrote his last diary entry at Collins Bay: “I’m out tomorrow. My aunt is picking me up. I’m not sure where I will be going yet.”

  When we gathered for the Collins Bay Book Club meeting later in the month, I was expecting the discussion to be gripping. The Zookeeper’s Wife tells the heroic true story of Warsaw zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski, who audaciously hid more than three hundred Jews in their empty animal cages and the closets and basement of their house on the zoo grounds during the German occupation of Poland in World War II.<
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  The zoo’s animals disappeared in three phases: German bombing destroyed some of the zoo enclosures, sending some of the animals scurrying and galloping through the streets of Warsaw; soldiers then killed the big cats and other more dangerous animals in case they might escape too; and finally the director of the Berlin Zoo looted some animals for his own collection, then sponsored a shooting party to kill the remaining creatures on the zoo grounds while they were still penned up.

  Jews found their way from the Warsaw Ghetto to the zoo because of Jan’s position in the Polish Underground, but it was Antonina’s bravery and ingenuity at deception that kept them safe. Complicating the matter was the risk that their eight-year-old son, Rys, might accidentally blurt out their secret to the German officials who regularly came onto the grounds. Such a blunder would have led to the execution of everyone involved. Recognizing that risk, the family gave the stowaways animal names, so that even if Rys slipped up, the Germans would think he was talking about animals.

  Only ten thousand of the more than three hundred and fifty thousand Jews who lived in Warsaw in 1939 survived there by the end of the war. The actions of the Zabinskis to save three hundred of them has been recognized formally by Israel, which includes them on the list of “The Righteous Among the Nations”—those who showed extraordinary courage to rescue other human beings from the Holocaust in the face of widespread indifference by their countrymen.

  The Zabinskis’ story was a little-known episode in the resistance and I had recommended The Zookeeper’s Wife with hopes that the men might empathize with the courage of the zookeepers. But I also hoped that the author’s rapturous descriptions of the zoo gardens would transport them briefly out of the prison’s enclosed world. Her evocations of the scent of lilacs and lindens transported me, as though being a naturalist gave her an animal-like heightened sense of smell and a poetic language for conveying it.