My Fellow Prisoners

Betrayal

In the camp – as, in fact, on the other side of the barbed wire as well – it’s usually older people who are the readers. The younger ones prefer to watch television – music videos mostly.

That’s what made the young guy, with his head constantly in a book, stand out – that and his good-natured, cheeky grin.

In every other way he was unremarkable. Just another young lag with an alert look and a couple of tattoos (probably a souvenir from the juvenile penal colony; ‘getting inked’ is no longer popular in the adult prisons).

He happened to come up to me one day, asked if I had a book he could read. I learned that Lyosha (as the lad was called) loved fantasy. He’d finished school and was now in prison under Article 158 – for theft. He and some mates had done the rounds of empty dachas, and got caught. And then got caught again. So yes, he had indeed been in the juvenile colony. He’d turned eighteen in there, was transferred here to see out his sentence. Two years in this place already; he was soon due for early release on parole.

One day I noticed that, instead of reading as usual, Lyosha was pacing nervously up and down the barracks, occasionally waving his arms in despair as if engaged in some intractable conversation with someone.

I went up to him.

‘What’s happened?’

‘Problems with the parole.’

‘What kind of problems?’

There are generally two types of issues relating to conditional early release in the camps (if you discount corruption, which is both a problem and a solution). First, early release becomes much more difficult if you’ve tangled with the administration. Secondly, there’s an illegal practice whereby the Federal Penal Enforcement Service assumes the role of the court and sets additional restrictions on early release depending on the crime for which the prisoner has been convicted.

But neither situation applied in this case. Both detainee and case were entirely unexceptional.

‘So what problems are there?’ I asked him.

And at this Lyosha suddenly broke down and the whole story came pouring out.

His father drank. He’d died not long ago. His mother drank. She was ‘deprived of parental rights’. He and his two sisters were taken into temporary care. Then his mother had a cancer operation. She stopped drinking. She took her daughters back but he had to go to an orphanage. For Lyosha it was a stab-wound to the heart.

After the orphanage he ended up in the juvenile colony. His sisters have grown up, they’re now over eighteen. His mother’s still alive. Everything’s okay. Six months ago they promised to come and visit him. He spent a week running round trying to find a room for the visit. By hook or by crook he managed to persuade a fellow inmate to let him have his reserved meeting slot (getting a room in the colony is no easy matter).

Then he waited. And waited. On visiting days, from the moment he wakes a prisoner’s like a cat on hot bricks – the only comparable feeling is the day of release. But they didn’t come to see Lyosha that day. A week later they told him on the phone that for some reason it just hadn’t worked out.

Another stab-wound to the heart.

And now, early release on parole. For that to happen, our bureaucratic police state requires you, the prisoner behind bars, to provide documents (even if they’re completely fictitious) proving that you have somewhere to live and a job on the outside.

Lyosha asked his mother and sisters to help. They said they were too busy.

‘I’ve nowhere to go, and no reason to go anywhere,’ was Lyosha’s summing up of the situation.

I understood what he was going through. The documents weren’t the issue. You can easily get someone to cobble them together – your former cellmates will do it. No, Lyosha had nothing to hold on to in life. No girlfriend, let alone a wife. How could he have? He’d been in prison since he was sixteen or seventeen. He’d lost his father, and now his mother and sisters had rejected him as well.

There was nothing to say, except the usual, ‘Hang on in there, pal.’

And, though I’m ashamed to admit it, I felt a deep sense of joy that I didn’t have to cope with this kind of betrayal. That there were people on the outside who loved me and were waiting for me.

Just think how many abandoned young men are languishing in Russia’s prisons! How many of them there are in here only because they were desperately looking for someone to pay them some attention, craving a place in a world where they seemed like strangers even to those closest to them.

Lyosha wandered around for another day. Then he got into a scrap with another detainee over some minor issue. He had to do a week of ‘additional labour duty’. He then got himself together and wrote a letter to his friends asking them to send the documents he needed.

Everything, it seemed, had resumed its normal course.

Except now Lyosha hardly ever smiles.