I knew a man there who had tamed a mouse. Mice were commonly found in buildings with inmates who worked in prison factories. They made holes in the bathroom or underneath the floor boards to let them in and out of the cell when it was empty during the day. Another inmate in a solitary cell like me realized there was a mouse visiting his cell and decided to capture it alive. He put margarine on a piece of biscuit, placed it on the floor, and waited. The mouse appeared from an open gap between the floor and a wall, and as the mouse crawled across the room toward the biscuit, he blocked the gap with a strip of sticky tape. When he saw the mouse curled up under the desk, he did not attempt to capture it, he simply made sure he closed all the gaps the mouse could escape through. He acted as if he had no interest in what was underneath the desk, but he saved a little bit of food from every meal, placing it on a piece of torn cardboard he used as a table for the mouse and kept at a fixed spot. He pretended to sleep so that the mouse, who would not move from under the desk while the inmate was awake, crept out and ate. After a few days the mouse was afraid of him no longer. The moment he placed the food down, the mouse came over and sat down and used two front feet to hold onto its food, just like a squirrel. The inmate always talked to the mouse. He named the mouse Popi after a rabbit in a commercial for toilet paper, and it came to its new owner and climbed up on his lap whenever it was called. The owner built a tiny house for his mouse with cardboard, and even lined the inside with a piece of material torn from his own blanket. I watched him many times whispering to the mouse as it climbed up and down, from his knee to his hand to his shoulder to his head to his back. As the new year approached, the little mouse grew to the size of an adult’s hand, and maybe because it had become so friendly with its owner, it looked quite smart, rather than repulsive. The owner gave the mouse a bath from time to time and made a necklace out of red yarn for it. If not for that long tail, it would have looked like a perfect pet.
Before the cells were locked up for the night, there would be a few minutes for me to look over the iron bars into another cell and talk to another human being. One day, when I looked into his cell, the mouse’s owner was looking up into the empty space and crying. Tears were streaming down his face.
“What happened? Why are you crying?”
When I spoke, he wiped away overflowing tears with his knuckle.
“Popi’s gone,” he said.
“Well, he’s big now, it’s about time you let him go.”
“No, they came here for an inspection today. They took him in his house.”
“What are they going to do with a mouse?”
“They took him to the incinerator.”
Popi was cremated just like that.
When we went out near the tall walls of the prison in order to work or exercise, we often found newborn baby tree sparrows. The young ones had come out from their nests on top of the roof or a tree in order to practice flying, following their mother. First, they would sit on the wall, then come down to the ground, and some of them were bound to fail to fly back to the top of the wall. They tried again and fell again, knocking into the slick, tall wall. Noticing their failed attempts, someone would run over and catch the baby tree sparrows with his bare hands, simply by cornering them against the wall. On top of the wall, the mother tree sparrow darted around, worried and impatient. The inmates captured the little birds to raise them.
I saw a number of domesticated tree sparrows in other solitary cells. The birds hopped around the narrow cells or found a place to doze off on top of their owners’ shoulders or heads. During meal times, the birds shared the meals with their owners, picking food right out of the rice bowls with their beaks. When the owners came back from outings, the tree sparrows cried merrily and landed on their owners’ bodies and rubbed their beaks. When I asked one owner why the tree sparrow did not fly away through the bathroom window, he replied simply, “Because I cut his wings.”
He opened his tree sparrow’s wings and showed me. The tips of the fan-shaped wings were neatly trimmed into straight lines.
“If it grows, I just cut it right back.”
I thought the tree sparrow was just like the inmate in solitary confinement. I tried to raise a little bird once when I found one fallen by the wall during my exercise hour. I cupped both my hands just enough to contain it, but I still felt the little one gasping for breath on my palms. I carefully brought it back to the cell and trimmed its wings before I let it go. It was stuck to the floor and constantly flapped its broken wings. No, it was not even flapping, shivering would be a more accurate description. The sound of its shivering wings was really loud, like that of an insect, a cicada, or a fly. I found out later that I was supposed to bind its wings with bandages for a few days. The little bird did not eat one grain of rice or one drop of water, it just made that shivering sound. Even when I was falling asleep, I heard the sound of his broken wings trembling. As soon as I woke up the next morning, I saw the bird lying on its back, feet and beak pointing upward. It was already stiff and cold. I could still clearly remember the warm and pulsating heart beating the night before. It was killed by the irresistible instinct to fly away freely. I held the dead bird in my hand and took it outside to bury it under a little patch of grass. And I was depressed for a while. That sound of shivering wings, like that of the vibrating weather strip around the window, remained in my cell. I kept hearing it and thinking I heard wrong, and as I tried to listen carefully the sound would disappear.
The cats around the prison usually gave birth in early spring. There was one particular cat called Blackie because her fur was jet black except on the belly. She was so healthy and fertile, she had three litters in two years. Ever since she was a kitten, she ate her breakfast with the inmates studying for exams and then received her lunch from the barbershop. Her breakfast usually consisted of one sausage from the snack bar, but her lunch from the barbershop was pretty substantial. There were many old-timers working at the barbershop, and it was close to the kitchen, so they always set a side a piece of fish or dried anchovies to feed her. Of course, the best food was in the kitchen, but that territory belonged to the king of all feral cats, the one named Spot, whose fur was a mix of black and white. A vagabond cat named Viking, the one with brown fur and stripes, lost one eye to Spot when they fought over the kitchen territory.
On a snowy night when Blackie was a kitten, I was told, she sat under a window on the first floor of our building and cried so sadly that she woke up everyone in that section, which was full of people who were selected to study for various equivalency tests. The head of the section took her into his blanket and let her sleep there. Since then, the ones in the exam preparation section took turns taking care of her and named her Blackie. When someone higher up came for an inspection, they hid Blackie deep underneath the desk. When that winter season was over, however, Blackie was suddenly an adult cat. She left the room and came back shortly after with her belly bulging. Each inmate in the exam preparation section had a different response, some disappointed, others content. It was as if a daughter whom they had married off had come back.
“Oh my, we devoted ourselves to raising you, and you get pregnant by some playboy?”
“You whore! How dare you to come back here like that!”
“No, no, it’s fine. I don’t care if they are brown or spotted, I just want them to be healthy!”
They threw her sausages and a cuttlefish leg that they bought from the prison store. When fish was served as a side dish, they collected the pieces in an empty instant noodle cup for Blackie’s breakfast. We knew she lived in an underground bunker below a watchtower, because a lot of people witnessed her going in and out of an opening there. Blackie gave birth in there. Her distended nipples swinging from her belly, she came to the front yard every morning and meowed. Now she did not eat the sausage she got; instead she carried it back to her bunker and then came back. We knew that she was feeding her kittens so we prepared three or four sausages every morning. Blackie slowly ate the last sausage
while sitting in the front yard. And as soon as she heard the staff pushing the lunch cart, she quickly ran across the front yard, climbed over a barrier wall as tall as a man, crossed the path, climbed over another wall, and arrived at the prison barbershop located at a corner of the exercise field. The lunch would already be delivered to the barbershop. They said because the barbershop was first, they got more solid pieces than liquid in their meal. There was a young apprentice designated to prepare lunch for Blackie, so her food was fatty and fishy. She had so many kittens, but she never let them live off of the same people. Once they were grown, she kicked them out of her territory, biting and scratching and yowling.
She died when she was three or four years old. After the cells were locked down, after dinner and the music broadcast were all done, an inmate went to the public bathroom and found Blackie stretched out on the front yard.
“Blackie is dead!”
Within a minute, the news traveled throughout the building and inmates fought over who got to look out the window to see her dead body. The building was soon buzzing and clamoring with people calling Blackie. Surprised, the guards ran around the building blowing whistles.
“Bedtime, bedtime! Get back!”
Some old-timers approached the guards through the iron bars and asked them for a favor.
“Listen, listen, you know what this is all about, right? Blackie is the eldest daughter of this building, but we think she just stopped breathing. Who knows? Maybe if you bring her in and warm her up a little by fire, she’ll come alive again!”
But the guards did not give a damn. If we did not break major rules, they did us a favor by simply pretending they did not notice anything, and they had been tolerant for a while when it came to Blackie. We were finally allowed to go outside the next day during the exercise hour. It snowed through the night after Blackie died, and her body was buried deep below. Only after digging in the snow did we find her body. There was a large wound on her neck and blood everywhere around her. Maybe she got into a fight over her territory, maybe she was attacked by a male cat. An old-timer who worked in the repairs department wanted to cook and eat her, saying it would be good for his arthritis, but the other inmates would not allow it. They wrapped her body in the lining from a winter coat and put her in a cardboard box, and they never stopped berating the old man.
“No wonder no one ever visited all the years you spent rotting in here, you evil man.”
“Hey, did you say something to me?”
“Yeah, I said the old bastard is losing his mind because it’s about time he dropped dead. We raised her, we treated her like a precious child, we even married her off! She’s like a granddaughter to you. And now you wanna eat her to live a few more years? For what? To contribute more to the septic tank?”
It was curious to see men who had committed various crimes outside becoming so attached to unimportant little creatures around the prison. Once a man spent months growing a black beetle-like insect with a horn like a rhinoceros’s, and I even knew a man who diligently caught live flies to feed his frog, whom he kept in a plastic container.
I once got a kitten from the prison assistants on the way back from the public bath. It was a female cat with gray fur and black stripes. They were convinced that it was one of Blackie’s kittens. When I brought her back to my solitary cell, she turned round and round the tiny cell, then cried loudly, scratching the door. I guessed she felt suffocated, locked in a small cell after running around outside. I tried to comfort her by feeding her and putting her in my bed to sleep. I kept her for about a week, but one day, when I came back from the exercise field, I found the string that tied her to the desk broken and the little door on the meal slot open. She was gone. Being an inmate, it was not possible for me to go around the building to search for her, so I went to bed alone, trying to ignore the sudden emptiness in my heart. I did see her a few days later while I was out in my designated exercise area. She was skulking around the wall, the string around her neck still attached. Happy to see her, I called and approached her. But she took one glance at me with cold eyes, and without any acknowledgment, disappeared beyond the fence. The cat’s indifferent reception made me feel to the bone how insignificant my existence was.
Later, when I was moved to a cell at the end of an empty row for stricter solitary confinement, I found something else to grow attached to. There were almost one hundred pigeons living within the prison wall. They traveled in groups, moving freely in and out of the prison to find leftover food or gleanings on the furrows. I sprinkled bird food on the ground right below my window as other inmates did, and pigeons began to gather regularly there, even sitting on my window sill. In order to prepare their food, I bought a few bags of peanuts from the prison store. I peeled the skin from every nut and pounded them with a wooden block to break each into four or five little crumbs. Cooked barley could be dried under the sun by spreading it out on the bathroom window sill. After a couple of days, they dried up and became hard, and I mixed them with the peanuts. Of course the pigeons preferred peanuts, but it was too expensive to use them alone. For the first few days, the pigeons did not know what my day was like, but the smarter ones soon realized I had a very regular schedule and started to appear right before I spread out their food. The first shift was the thirty-minute period between breakfast and exercise hour, and the second shift was around dusk after dinner, when the prison was filled with piped-in music. But as soon as I felt attached to a handful of pigeons, they forced me to change my schedule. The new shift was right after I woke up, before breakfast arrived, and in the late afternoon, before dinner came. They actually lived in a cage as a unit, just like us, built on the exercise field by the prison factory. There were other coops and a small pond where fancy carps were farmed. Two long-term inmates were designated to take care of them. They woke up early to open their cages, and at night they fed the pigeons and collected them back in there. The pigeons also had a schedule to follow.
The pigeons came in many different colors, and if you looked closely, every one looked distinctive. The more common pigeon had gray feathers mottled with a whole variety of colors, from different shades of gray to brown to purple to black. There were pigeons of one color too, gray ones and black ones, and also black ones with white spots, brown ones with white spots, and pure white ones. Before they got to know me, they came to the front yard and stayed to find bread and cracker crumbs, usually thrown by the prisoners still under trial who were housed right below my cell. After they got used to my peanuts, they waited for me on the tin roof of the storage facility across from my building, then flew at once to my window when I appeared. I poured their food on the window sill. The pigeons trusted me, and some of them would even sit on my palm.
There were a few pigeons I was particularly fond of, and I named them. The first one I called Captain. He was a male pigeon with pure white feathers. It was easy to distinguish male and female birds by their size, physical appearance, and behavior. The male pigeon’s breast was wider than the female’s, and his belly slimmer. When he drew his neck in and out and swaggered, he looked like a weight lifter showing off his muscles. The male pigeons always fought over territory with rival males; they pecked and pushed and smacked each other with their wings. In front of a female, however, the male walked around in a circle, puffed up his body, and coo-cooed. The second pigeon I named was a female one, also pure white. I called her Sooni. She was smaller and more slender than Captain. At first, I did not notice her among the group of birds. When she came to the window, she was pushed away by the others. I studied her carefully one day as she sat facing the window, and I noticed that one of her feet was lame. There were quite a lot of pigeons who were crippled because some inmates would try to catch the birds. Some caught them to keep as pets, but many used to catch various creatures to eat. Mice and tree sparrows were also targets, but many caught pigeons just to kill time. During the weekends or on national holidays, there was no exercise hour, and that made the day unbearably long. On a day lik
e that, the inmates spent time hunting for pigeons and other little animals. First they made a tool, using a peanut as bait. A piece of peeled peanut was firmly tied to the end of a long string. Some used it just like that, and some attached another string to it and held it from inside. At one time the inmates would unweave a sock or a glove and use the cotton thread from it, but most of my fellow inmates could now afford synthetic thread, which did not break. Years ago, when the inmates were always hungry, they grilled or boiled the pigeons. They tore off about half an arm’s length of toilet paper and twisted it between two palms to make kindling; it was possible to cook a bowl of ramen noodles with one roll of toilet paper. A pigeon could be plucked, salted, and grilled in the bathroom with that fire, and there would be no smoke. During winter, I was told, they boiled them at the prison factory on top of a heater. But no one killed the pigeons to eat anymore—now they did it for sport.
It was a game, cruel revenge against the pigeons who led a life of leisure and freedom right outside our windows. There was no need to hold onto the string and wait; all they had to was throw the trap with peanuts and watch the unsuspecting pigeon flounder. The pigeon pecks at the peanuts, attached to a strong, thin length of synthetic fiber, and as it does so the string dangles in the air from its beak. The pigeon tries to get rid of it by tugging with one foot. As it repeats this motion several times, the string entangles the pigeon’s beak and feet, and it forces the bird’s body to curl up. Now the pigeon struggles to escape, trying to break the string or to fly away, with both feet stumbling. It flies a little, then crashes, and keeps trying until its foot gets severed or broken.
The Old Garden Page 29