as soon as she saw me come into the room she smiled at me from behind the plate glass then when I got closer her expression changed her eyes narrowed into a stare but she didn’t look me in the face she looked down a bit I realized that she was looking at my sweater that was all bloodstained it was the same sweater I’d been wearing since that night and then I said it’s not my blood but China went on staring staring at the sweater and it dawned on me that she hadn’t heard it dawned on me that she hadn’t even been aware I was speaking it dawned on me because then she spoke she moved her lips but I didn’t hear her voice
I decided there was really no point in even making a fuss I could call the sergeant and the warrant-officer but I knew in advance what would come of it they’d have pretended to follow the rules they’d have said that the intercoms were broken that there was nothing they could do about it but that’s how it was for the time being I could make do or if I preferred I could give up the visit and all this would only have wasted the visiting time which was already very short just then a comrade came in he had both his arms in plaster he had a cut on his head they’d given him a load of stitches and to do the stitches they’d cut off all his hair we only nodded in greeting for we disliked one another I really disliked this guy when his parents came in and saw him in this state they were shocked
he by contrast was quite unsubdued in his usual style and he started shouting right away a grin appeared on his still swollen face and then he shouted things like our fight continues and intensifies the struggle goes on tell everyone don’t worry about me I’m really fine in a few days I’ll be just like new for another struggle his parents were two tired old people and they looked at him in shock and with tears in their eyes China too looked at him with some astonishment I didn’t even listen to what the guy was saying because he always talked like this the parents could make no sense of it they nodded their heads in agreement but they didn’t take their eyes off the cut with the stitches on his shorn head China now turned back to look at me again with a sad expression I signed to her that the blood on my sweater wasn’t mine now she was looking at my nails blackened by the coagulated blood from the truncheon beatings I spoke loudly I’m fine and you and she forced a half smile and shrugged then she asked me what now I shook my head to indicate I didn’t know she started telling me that so-and-so and so-and-so sent their regards I listened to the names all the names and nicknames of the comrades who were sending their regards but it made me feel peculiar it made me feel very distant from them almost as if they were strangers or dead people that I’d never see again and I realized that I really couldn’t care less about their regards more than that it pissed me off but I was sorry that China was aware of this because she’d come a thousand kilometres to get there and I was sorry
I tried to smile but I felt we were squandering the whole of the visiting time which wasn’t much time anyway because the things we were saying were pointless but I didn’t even know what she could have said to me what could have helped me my nerves were getting the better of me I only half heard what she was saying but I didn’t even ask her to repeat what I couldn’t make out then suddenly she stopped talking I stared at the greenish wall behind her soft padded shoulders I didn’t know what to say I was getting more and more nervous about the time passing about the time we were wasting but I had no idea what to say what to do to make use of it we were silent for a bit then China looked at her watch a gesture I’d never seen her make before and I said why don’t you write to me and she said why don’t you write to me
when China left it occurred to me that this business of cutting off the intercoms didn’t make sense for if they really wanted to hear everything that was said during the visiting hour instead of making us shout it was much easier much more productive for them to leave the intercoms on which would allow them more easily to hear everything even without people thinking they were being overheard and if they wanted they could even record everything we said during the visiting hour after this visit I didn’t see China again I only got a letter from her a week or two later that began with her saying she wouldn’t write to me again for a while
41
After this we then tackled the problem of how to get another protest going however just then the immediate problem was our reduced exercise time which had been cut down to just an hour in the morning and also the fact that there were no regular working prisoners in the corridors which kept our opportunities for internal communication to the minimum and therefore our possibilities for agreement on how to take joint action so by then it had become essential to find a way of improving our internal communications so in the cells people got the idea of drilling through the walls from cell to cell so that we could communicate directly I mean not pulling down the whole wall but at least making some holes you could talk through from one cell to another
and people started doing it and in fact holes were made in nearly all the cells and so there was a way for us to communicate directly you made a hole in the wall with the remaining bars that could be dismantled from the windows or from the beds or with iron bars that the working prisoners who just came to bring our food managed to pass on to us though it was really risky but of course it took hours and hours for instance to dismantle the beds that were fixed into the concrete floor to get the bars out of them and get the holes made in the wall clearly the guards knew what was going on we’d be banging away all day and so everything was going on right under their eyes
there was the worry the doubt all the time about them coming in and if they came in there could be another bloodbath however there was no other way though bearing in mind the very fact that the guards could come in we took another precaution and this precaution consisted in barricading the cell at night and taking turns at standing watch so as to avoid the risk of being surprised by them breaking in some time while we were asleep the cell barricade consists in jamming some object perhaps no thicker than a biro or a splinter of wood between the gate and the armoured door because the gap between the gate and the armoured door is just a few millimetres
which means all you have to do is fill it in I mean jam something between the gate and the armoured door so that when the guards outside put the key in the lock the door presses against what’s blocking it and they can’t open it when it’s like that they can’t come in and therefore there’s plenty of time to organize some resistance inside of course they have their own means of removing anything that’s in the way for instance taking one of the hydrants that are installed in the corridors of each section and uncoiling the big hose to direct the jet through the spy-hole and then naturally with this powerful jet sweeping the cell you can’t do a thing no resistance because it pushes you back against the wall and at the same time they get rid of the obstacle without you being able to do anything about it
so the business of barricading the cells became a nightly routine and so did taking turns at keeping watch to keep an eye on what was happening in the corridor we also got hold of some fragments of mirrors again through the working prisoners who brought our food and we were able to place these mirror fragments outside the spy-holes and in this way we were able to see the whole corridor as far as the end and to keep a check on the movements of the guards this procedure of barricading the cells at night and taking turns to keep watch was routine for a good while and we’d spend the time playing cards for we’d been allowed to have cards we were in the cells for twenty-three solid hours and things went on like this for a good while in the cells
when the bacteriological warfare protest eased off then through this communication channel through the holes that we’d made between the cells discussions began so as to decide which new form of struggle should be taken up to put pressure on the prison administration about other things and then it was clear that the maximum goal this whole crescendo of protests was moving towards was to destroy the prison literally in the sense of destroying it as a physical structure but in fact this was absurd because the
conditions they’d placed us in meant that we had nothing to destroy nor did we even have anything that could become an implement for our struggle in the meantime because the cell wasn’t furnished it was quite empty and so you couldn’t threaten to smash it up there was nothing there and what could you do if there was nothing to smash up
then the next stage in the offensive was flooding and so from bacteriological warfare we moved on to operation Niagara in all these protests what was implicit and decisive was always the store of memory preserved most of all by the non-politicals the accumulation of knowledge of a science of struggle inside the prison of a science built up over time and what was decisive was most of all were naturally the suggestions of the old prisoners of people who’d been in prison for ten twenty years and who’d gone through all kinds of things in protests so now we’d moved on from bacteriological warfare as a form of struggle to operation Niagara which was our new form of struggle
operation Niagara consisted in flooding the section flooding the section meant that at the previously agreed time all of us together all of us using rags made from tearing up the sheets that we’d finally been allowed to have and the blankets we made wadding and with this wadding we blocked the toilets we blocked the toilet bowls and we blocked the washbasins after this we used strips of foam rubber ripped from the foam rubber mattresses and we wedged them in the space between the bottom of the armoured door and the floor and we even padded out the foam rubber with strips of blanket so as to stop the water from running out of the cell and running into the corridor
after this we turned on all the taps and we fixed the flushing mechanism so that the water flushed out continuously and we did this during the night in the periods when there were fewer guards on duty and when at the same time it would create greater problems for during the night a general state of alarm in the prison causes much more trouble than a state of alarm in the daytime because all the guards have to get out of bed and everything becomes more of a nuisance so during the night maybe around three or four a.m. we’d plug everything up we’d plug up the washbasin we’d plug up the toilet bowl and we’d flood the cells and in every cell there were gallons and gallons of water pouring out until the water reached our knees
the water mounted inside the cell which was completely hermetically sealed just imagine how many gallons of water there were the water kept pouring out and when it got to your knees you removed the wadding from under the door that closed up the gap between the door and the floor and the water gushed out in a flood from every cell gallons and gallons of water came gushing out in floods into the corridor and within minutes the whole section was waterlogged making it a protest that did real damage for being on the ground floor the water built up in the corridors and stayed there and the result was a quagmire and what’s more we did this while we were still going on with bacteriological warfare which made the quagmire well and truly foul indescribably foul
now the guards had to make their way through a quagmire as well as having handkerchiefs over their faces now they had to wear rubber wading boots as the water poured out of the cells we also threw in some detergent making a huge amount of foam and some people also made little paper boats out of newspapers they threw the boats out of the spy-hole and they sailed along the corridors borne by the tide of foaming water it was a genuine flood and this was another form of struggle that we launched and naturally it created a lot of problems for the guards another form of struggle we used was setting off short circuits that made the lights fuse all over the prison this was operation blackout the whole prison went dark
there was one comrade who was an electrician and he knew all about electrical systems which meant he could set off short circuits by disconnecting something or other I’m not sure what I never did it myself he made things short-circuit and when there was a short circuit for a few seconds you’d hear a very loud noise it was the sound of the outside generators going on and putting the lights back on at once there were moments of panic though for when the lights go out in the prison in the middle of the night the guards start running around with torches it was all pretty unnerving for them but naturally it was unnerving for us too for we’d anticipate retaliation at any moment we’d be anticipating some large-scale operation against us
42
All this built up and built up these small everyday protests built up all the time until naturally the prison administration was faced with the question of some decisive major operation to put a stop to it once and for all but among the guards there were two camps whereas over and above our political distinctions and different opinions on the outcome of the revolt we were now struggling over basic issues issues affecting our survival which meant that now it was clear that unity was the sole requirement for achieving this survival we were struggling for
for the guards however the problem was posed differently and the result was that they were divided into two different camps there was the interventionists’ camp in other words those who maintained the need for immediate intervention by force and on the other hand those who maintained that there was no need for intervention by force and inevitably this disagreement touched the hierarchies too there were interventionist sergeants and warrant-officers and non-interventionist sergeants and warrant-officers but the interventionists had deliberately stirred things up what had happened for instance was that guards had burst into one of the cells one day because a comrade had insulted a sergeant by throwing a cigarette-end in his face
what had happened was that while the majority of the comrades were having exercise time one afternoon a group of guards turned up with shields and helmets and truncheons and burst into the cell and they seized this comrade and took him away to the isolation cells that’s when tension rose to boiling point and naturally the comrades made all kinds of threats they’d carry out if this comrade wasn’t brought back to this section at once then the guards thought it over and they gave permission for some other comrades to go and visit the comrade however the prison administration said that since a charge had been made by this sergeant who’d had the cigarette-end flung in his face there would be a hearing which meant that they couldn’t remove him from isolation until the day of the hearing
however the date of the hearing was fixed for just two or three days later and so this comrade went to the hearing where of course he was found guilty and straight away went home again that’s to say to his section what’s more he made the most of the opportunity at the hearing to make a public denunciation of the conditions we were still being held in after more than a month and our situation of daily struggle for survival then the Ministry of Justice formulated its plan for solving the problem which like all plans for solving problems when what’s involved are unified and solid struggles there’s always just one solution to the problem splitting up prisoners and breaking up this solid unity
in other words what they always do in these circumstances is to try and pick out the ones they think are the ringleaders in the protests and separate them from the others and also to create distinctions as a basis for different kinds of treatment and so one day while we were all at exercise a great throng of guards turned up they’d brought christ knows how many hundreds of guards from other prisons too it was terrifying and our first thought was that they’d come to sort things out again just the same way as before and all the comrades there were still suffering from the after effects of the bloodbath that followed the revolt an unbelievable number of guards came but right away they told us what they planned to do we have to split you up and take some people to the first floor we’re only going to split you up
they told us what they planned to do there in the exercise yard then they took out their list and said either you come out or we’ll go in and there’ll be trouble there were really so many guards with so many shields truncheons water hoses and so on so we thought it was better to concede and all those destined for the first floor went upstairs they let themselves be taken to the first floor t
here was no violence but the first thing the comrades did as soon as they got up there was to test the strength of the new plate-glass windows that they’d put there and with the stools they found up there they smashed one or two of them just to test the resistance of the new plate-glass windows they’d put in
they left the other comrades downstairs on the ground floor their plan was to break the internal circuit of communication again by putting people on two different floors because with people on two different floors they could break the flow of communication that we’d achieved so far but people found a way round this too for the comrades upstairs tore up their sheets into strips and dropped messages down from the first floor windows to the ground floor the torn sheets with the messages would be weighted with a lemon and they’d dangle the lemon and the messages in front of the first floor window
however this division also coincided with the start of the first mass transfers in record time the Ministry of Justice had carried out the complete reconstruction of that other special prison that had been totally destroyed a few months earlier they’d re-established this prison and so on the basis of their lists of those they regarded as the ringleaders of the revolt the mass transfers began people were transferred in batches of ten they began first and foremost with those they’d put on the floor upstairs then the transfers went on until a score or so of us altogether were left in the prison after all these transfers
a few days before the transfers the administration had given everyone permission to go up to the first floor that had been wrecked by the guards one at a time escorted by guards they took us up there to collect our things from the cells that we’d occupied before the revolt when I went up I saw the holes made by the grenades in the floor of the rotunda and the metal gate blown out and propped against the wall it was almost pitch dark in the corridor I could feel water underfoot where there must have been big puddles and there was also water dripping from the broken pipes in the corridors there were radiators lying up-ended broken tables cupboards that had caved in stools strewn all over the place all broken and in pieces
The Unseen Page 21