by Ben Stewart
‘Okay, cool, got it. What’s mine is yours, what’s yours is mine.’
‘Exactly. Okay, what else? You have the morning inspection, and after they’re done they say, “Do you have any complaints or questions?” And you’d better not say yes, because it doesn’t matter what you say. If you say you have a problem, they’ll give you a real problem. So just say nothing.’
There’s a bang on the wall, Vitaly holds up a hand in apology, jumps up and pulls a sock into the cell. He unfolds the note.
‘Aaaah, it’s a kursovaya. It’s a circular, sent from the boss cell. The normal letters are called malyavas’ – ‘deliveries’ – ‘but this one goes to all the new people, you and your friends.’
He hands it to Dima. It’s written in prison slang – an ornate language that is both rough and formal.
The best of day and time to you, all arrestees! Here is hoping this note finds you in good health and strong of mood. Here is the deal. There is us and there is them, there are thieves and there are stars. The stars have stars on their shoulder plates, and these, dear friends, are the guards. Then there is us, we are the arrestees. We are the thieves. Now, the doroga is most important, it keeps us as one, together, in solidarity. It is what keeps us alive. If there is anything you need, you will have it. All you need do is ask. You will not sell or buy things, no, you are expected to give. If you have something, you give it. If you need something, it will be given to you. If you want to be a part of the doroga, you are welcome to join our community of ropes, you will be supported, you will be given what you need. If however you are afraid to be a part of the road, we understand, and you will still be given support. But do not interfere with the doroga. If you interfere with the road then you will be punished, you will no longer be part of us, you will be one of them. You will no longer be a thief. You become a star.
The note sets out other rules. Violence is absolutely not allowed. No arrestee is permitted to commit violence against another arrestee, if they do they will be punished, and they will be punished with violence. Only sanctioned violence is permitted, and it is for the kotlovaya – the boss cell – to determine if, when, how and against whom violent retribution is wrought. And you are not permitted to be rude. Hard cursing is not allowed against another prisoner. One is permitted to say, ‘I hate this fucking shit,’ but you can’t say, ‘Fuck you.’ You will treat other arrestees with respect.
Dima finishes the note, shakes his head with incredulity and hands it back to Vitaly. The Russian consults his list of names and cell numbers, writes an address on the note, folds it then drops the kursovaya into the sock and bangs on the wall. It whips away, heading for another activist. Vitaly turns back to Dima.
‘This is a black zone. There are black zones and red zones. That means there are things here that are not allowed but are still tolerated by the guards. Other prisons are red zones, that means nothing is tolerated. It’s a much harder job for the guards in a red zone. The prisoners in those places are in for their fifth or sixth stretches, they’ve got ten-year terms, they don’t give a shit. But this is a black zone. That’s why the road is tolerated. They know it happens, just don’t get caught.’
‘I don’t want any trouble.’
‘Who does, Dimitri, who does? There are six walls here, three facing into the yard – the ones you saw when you arrived – and three facing out to the street. On each wall there is a boss cell. All the goods, the sugar and the cigarettes, everything, it all flows to and from that cell. The road operates on each wall, and each wall has its own kotlovaya, its own boss cell, its respected prisoner. So we have six bosses, responsible for maintaining order in our community.’
‘The mafia.’
‘No, no, Dimitri, please. We prefer to call them respected prisoners. You should too.’
‘Right.’
‘Now, the boss decides which prisoner goes into which cell. Of course he can’t tell the guard to put this guy into cell three-zero-six, but what he can do is determine what category of cell some prisoners go to. They tell the guards and the guards co-operate with the kotlovaya. And there are basically four categories of cells. There are cells for the normal prisoners who participate in prison life – me, you, your friends – and we call them “people cells”. The prisoners in those cells are the ones who get the respect, they’re the ones who get decent treatment from the system, right.’
‘Right.’
‘Then below that are the sherst’ – it’s the Russian word for ‘wool’ – ‘the informers. If they demote you to sherst they have you put in a certain cell. The guards don’t want any killings, right. They don’t want any trouble. So when the boss says, “This guy, we want him in the sherst cell,” the guards move him there.’
‘Okay.’
‘Then there are the cells for passive homosexuals.’
‘Passive homosexuals?’
‘In some ways we’re more tolerant in here than on the outside. It’s okay to be a fucker, but not a fuckee. It’s not okay to give a blow job to a guy, but it’s okay to get one. You can cum, no problem, but you can’t put out. If you do, you’re petuch. A passive homosexual, and that’s bad. The passive homosexuals are a caste. They’re the ones who clean the toilets, they do the shit work. Sometimes we make them wear dresses.’
‘And they have their own cells?’
‘Yes, that’s right. Petuch cells. Let me see your bowl and spoon.’ Vitaly gestures with his fingers. ‘Come on, give them to me.’
Dima holds them out, the Russian snatches them and examines each in turn. ‘Okay, good. You’re not marked down as a poof. If they have you down as a poof they put the number “2” on your bowl and spoon. If you have a “2” on one of these that means the bosses have got you marked as obizhenny. Then you’re demoted to a petuch cell. Okay, then below that there’s another category. Former employees of law enforcement agencies. Cops. Prosecutors. There are lots of them in prison, there’s a lot of crime that goes on in that sector of society. Bribery, murder, everything. And they end up here. They have their own cells as well. They keep themselves to themselves, otherwise they tend to get killed.’
Dima blows out his cheeks and whistles. Vitaly stands up and pulls an exercise book from the shelf. ‘And this …’ He holds it reverently. ‘This is the domovaya. Every cell has one, this is our house book. This needs to be kept religiously. This is where we keep the list of prisoners’ names and their cell numbers for the doroga. The domovaya is very much a challenge for the regime, because we prisoners are not supposed to know what’s going on beyond the walls of our cells. We’re supposed to be in isolation.’
SIZO means ‘isolator’.
Vitaly tells Dima that the domovaya allows the bosses on the wall to maintain discipline. So if somebody is a sherst, if he’s sold out another prisoner and the bosses want to know where he’s been transferred to, it’s all in the book.
‘And if somebody is abused by the guards, you want to know where they are so you can support them. It’s very important that we maintain our community. As soon as somebody is put in your cell, you send a kursovaya to the whole prison saying there’s been a change in my cell, such and such has moved in. His name is this, his crime is this, his date of birth is this, and that’s all noted in the domovaya in each cell.’
‘So you guys know where all my friends are?’
‘Of course. And if a letter or a package passes through your cell on the way to another cell we will keep track of it, keep a record. Received and sent from this cell to that cell. Each cell is required to do that so you can compare it later. That way, if a package disappears along the way we can tell who lost it, what happened. Although that doesn’t apply to the wet letters. Then we …’
‘I’m sorry, wet letters?’
‘Letters to the women’s zone.’
Vitaly explains that he and his cellmate Alexei have girlfriends in the women’s sector on the second floor. Lots of the prisoners are conducting relationships inside SIZO-1, though they’ve never met
their lovers and they likely never will. ‘Our love is as strong as anything you know. Those letters, our love letters, they have a different status on the road. Not the same status as normal business, where the rules are very strictly enforced.’
Dima flips through the domovaya. He looks up.
‘Holy shit, you guys are pretty well organised in here.’
‘You sound surprised. What else are we going to do? We have many days to fill, my friend.’
‘Right.’
‘Oh, and Dima, one more thing.’
‘Sure.’
‘We have a saying here. Ne Ver’ Ne Boysya Ne Prosi. It is a fine motto. You can live your life by it. It tells you everything you need to know. It will help you survive.’
Ne Ver’ Ne Boysya Ne Prosi. ‘Don’t Trust Don’t Fear Don’t Beg.’
‘Don’t trust anybody in a uniform,’ says Vitaly. ‘The more faith you put in the authorities, the more it hurts when they screw you over. To trust the police is to disrespect yourself. And don’t fear because whatever you’re scared of, you can’t stop it happening. What will be will be. Your fear changes nothing, but it hurts you, so let it go. And don’t beg because it never works. Nobody ever begged their way out of SIZO-1, so don’t sacrifice your dignity on a false promise. There’s no point being nice to the guards, the investigators, the prosecutor or the judge. Your pleading only makes them despise you more.’
ELEVEN
At SIZO-1 the policy is to hold prisoners accused of the most serious crimes in the same cells. Because piracy carries ten years minimum, most of the activists are held with Russians accused of killing or maiming their victims.
Frank’s cellmates are Boris and Yuri. Boris is squat and strong with dark skin, maybe central Asian heritage. He’s accused of stabbing two men to death. Frank asks him what happened but Boris won’t talk about it. He’ll only tell Frank that his father had both legs chopped off on a trainline when he was a kid, as if this is somehow a mitigating factor.
Yuri is skinny with an unhealthy pallor, but something in his eyes suggests he’s a smart kid. He’s in for a series of notorious robberies. The prosecutors say his signature weapon was the Taser, used mainly on conscript soldiers. Young men, gullible and new in town. And he went up to them – this is what the investigators claim – and patted them on the back then zapped them in the neck. He zapped them, they went crumpling to the ground like a ragdoll, then he rinsed them. The prosecutors say he targeted troops going back to their barracks, Tasered them on their doorsteps, then dragged them through the door and robbed their rooms.
Dima is in with Vitaly and Alexei. Vitaly is thirty-one and was an alcoholic on the outside. He lived with a woman in her fifties and existed on the fringes of society, without a passport or identity papers. They argued, he hit her. Because his arm was in a cast, he fractured her skull. He was arrested, she didn’t press charges but because he had no ID card he was kept inside. He’s been here five months and doesn’t expect to get out anytime soon. Alexei, meanwhile, is in for armed robbery. He broke into the house of an associate – someone who owed him money – and beat the guy, then threatened him with a knife before scooping up a box of computer equipment.
Colin Russell’s cellmate is a double murderer. He’s a young guy, maybe twenty-one, sprung like a tight coil. He paces up and down the cell, stops, examines his muscles, does press-ups and sit-ups. He gets plastic bags and puts jugs of water in them, and lifts them in front of the mirror. Sometimes he punches the wall.
Colin – the 59-year-old Australian radio operator – asks the kid to sit on his bunk for a moment. The Russian stares quizzically at Colin then sits down. They try to talk. The guy doesn’t speak much English but Colin manages to ask him why he’s here. The guy says his best friend and his girlfriend were found in the front seat of his car, stabbed to death. But it was somebody else who did it.
Andrey Allakhverdov – the ship’s chief press officer – has a TV in his cell, and every evening he watches coverage of his case on the state-controlled broadcast channels. It’s a tsunami of shit being heaped on the heads of him and his friends. ‘Do you see what they’re saying about us?’ he says to his cellmate. ‘Can you believe this?’ The news reports reiterate the claims made on NTV that the activists are agents for a foreign power, possibly employed by Western oil companies to sabotage Gazprom’s drilling programme. And Andrey’s cellmate – who is charged under twelve clauses of the criminal code, including hooliganism – says, ‘What do you expect? They’re all state channels, just don’t pay attention, it’s okay.’
The Welshman Anthony Perrett is in with Sergei and Oleg. The prosecutors say Sergei mugged a stranger, ran away, got caught by a security guard, stabbed the guard and ran away again. He was married soon afterwards but two months later his wife left him, and now he’s depressed. Oleg is from Ukraine. He was a chef on the outside, he makes beautiful salads, prepares them on a chopping board fashioned from an unfolded Tetra Pak and uses spices to season them with beautiful, rich flavour.
Anthony is thirty-two years old, a tree surgeon and director of a renewable energy company. Back home in Newport, he would tell people he was attacking climate change ‘in the same way Wile E. Coyote tries to catch The Road Runner’. Before sailing for the Arctic he was working on developing a wood gasifier to run his forestry truck off a charcoal kiln, and a 3D-printed river turbine to generate remote electricity.
He’s also a talented artist and loses hours sketching the view through the window. Oleg asks Anthony to draw something for him. He wants a giant bumblebee carrying a message. And Anthony says, ‘Yeah, sure, okay.’ He sits down and makes the sketch, and when Oleg sees it his face lights up. He adds a message, and that night he sends it to his girlfriend on the road.
‘Who is she?’ asks Anthony.
‘My girlfriend? She’s a hag, a crack whore, no teeth, but this does not matter because I will never meet her. I send her presents. She sends me little perfumed cigarettes.’
Anthony nods. And he’s thinking, sure, I get that. Aesthetics are a luxury of freedom.
It’s nearly 10 p.m. at SIZO-1, just before the lights go out, and Frank is sitting on the edge of his bunk, watching his cellmates Yuri and Boris construct the road.
Right now they’re making the ropes. There are two different types of rope, but this one, the one they’re making now, is a string made from the plastic bags that the prison bread comes in.
‘Boris, what’s that one called?’
The Russian looks up. ‘This? We call this the kontrolka. This we need to make cells link together. Here, I show you.’
In one hand Boris is holding an empty paracetamol tube, and in the fingers of his other hand he’s holding a broken razor. He slices off the end of the tube. Now it’s a hollow plastic cylinder. He pulls a plastic bag through the tube, draws a pencil from his top pocket and ties the bag around it. He grips the tube in his hand, Yuri pulls the bag and Boris turns the pencil. He turns it and turns it so the bag twists. Yuri pulls the bag, shuffling backwards. It stretches and twists and stretches as Boris turns the pencil, using it as a spindle. Now the bag is a long frayed length of orange plastic, like trash on a beach, but twisting waves are running up the line as Boris turns the pencil, the plastic is thinning, it’s getting darker in colour, getting denser and longer. It takes a few minutes, but forming before Frank’s eyes is a strong deep orange string.
When they’re done, the Russians start ripping strips from a bed sheet. They tie them together then attach the thin rope – the kontrolka – to the sheets.
‘Boris, don’t the guards punish you for ripping the sheets?’
‘Our sheets get smaller. They don’t care.’
‘The big rope, what do you call it?’
Boris lifts the torn strip. ‘This?’
‘Yeah.’
‘This is the kon.’
‘Kon?’
‘It means … what you say? Like a horse. It means … stallion.’
Frank nods and lo
oks down at Yuri. The other Russian is on the floor of the cell, rolling up a sheet of newspaper. Every few days a paper is delivered to the cells but it’s a state organ, absolutely pointless, no real news. Now Yuri is kneeling over a full page, rolling it tightly into a tube. He rolls it on the floor then stands up and rolls it on the wall. He rolls it and rolls it, taps the end and rolls it again until he has a stick about a metre long. Then he pushes a bent nail into the end.
He tears strips from another plastic bag, and he wraps those strips around the newspaper stick and melts the plastic with a match so it’s sealed. It’s as stiff as a truncheon now. Frank thinks you could do some damage with it. Then Yuri takes the thin rope – the string made out of plastic bags – and he attaches it to a bag with a bar of soap inside and hangs that bag off the bent nail.
Yuri hands the contraption to Boris, who walks over to the window. He slides the stick through the bars and leans forward as far as he can go. Frank jumps off his bed and stands behind him, peering over his shoulder.
Boris shouts out and a guy in the cell next door shouts back. That guy puts out his own stick. Frank can just about see the tip with a hook on the end hovering in the dull light. Then Boris flicks his wrist and the bag of soap arches through the air, carrying a trail of string. The guy with the other stick tries to catch it with his hook but misses. Boris pulls in his stick, reattaches the bag and tries again. And on the fourth attempt the guy next door catches it and shouts, ‘Doma doma!’
He pulls the string through until he’s got hold of the thicker rope – the torn sheet. Now their cells are connected.
For twenty minutes Boris does this in every direction, feeding ropes to the left, right, up and down. And everybody’s doing the same across the wall, shouting, ‘Doma doma!’ – ‘It’s home it’s home!’ – when they catch a string with the pole. When the ropes are in position they attach a sock to each line and soon the socks are going back and forth, up and down. An internet made of ropes.