My Fellow Prisoners

The Rat

Small and balding, with dark, almost jet-black eyes, agile but somehow always on edge, N. N. found a permanent berth in the detachment’s kitchen, officially called the ‘mess room’.

It’s here that you can come after work to have some tea and heat up a simple sandwich in the microwave – if there’s anything to make one with. Though, in fact, a piece of bread from the canteen, slightly heated up, isn’t bad on its own.

Then there are those who have it rather better: regular parcels, the chance to purchase more than the usual pitiful amount allowed from the shop. Anything is possible if you have a profession, if you work, if your family hasn’t forgotten about you.

And of course, although it’s officially forbidden, ‘resources’ get shared around. Things are shared with a friend, or the person sitting next to you at the table or sleeping in the adjacent bunk; or else you get your laundry done or something mended in exchange for food.

Working in the kitchen isn’t the most prestigious job but it pays. You wipe the tables, fetch the boiling water, wash the dishes, cut the sausage. And the many other things people don’t want to do after a trying day. And in return people will always ask you to share a cup of tea, give you some sweets or sugar, or cut you a piece of the sausage they’ve received from home.

In fact most of the food is kept right here under the control of N. N., whose job it is to remember what belongs to whom, where it is, and whose stuff is kept with whose, so that no one can make off with somebody else’s by mistake. So when I find myself being treated to my own coffee, which I immediately recognize by its taste, I’m a little surprised.

‘Where did you get this?’

‘N. N. gave it to me, or to be precise swapped it for some fags. Why?’

‘It’s my coffee, and I haven’t shared it with anyone yet.’

‘I smell a rat…’

Accusing someone of stealing from fellow inmates is, according to prison tradition, one of the most serious accusations you can make. Being labelled a ‘rat’ is not a situation you ever want to find yourself in. And the reason is clear: this is an enclosed group of men, there’s a lot of pent-up aggression around. Mutual suspicion quickly leads to bitter conflict. The enquiry is swift and exhaustive.

The suspect’s locker is broken open. The container found in the locker is carefully compared with the one I bring out of my bag. There can be no doubt. All his personal stuff gets checked out. There’s a pile – literally a pile – of food in there. It all gets laid out for people to see and recover what belongs to them – this doesn’t take long.

A lot of terse remarks.

‘I was wondering where that had got to.’

‘There, you see, you shouldn’t have picked on me after all…’

The only item that’s not found is a very conspicuous box of ‘Moscow’ sweets given to someone by his wife and now, as a result of this ‘inspection’, found to be missing from his bag. Yet another rat?!

A couple of hours later N. N. is summoned, with his ‘belongings’. He’s getting transferred to another detachment. The administration has its own informers and its own understanding of the risks of leaving a rat among an irate ‘community’. A pretty acute understanding, in fact.

There’s one final search before he’s transferred. Lo and behold – the Moscow sweets. Sewn into the sleeve of his jacket!

When did he manage to do that? We just keep silent and exchange a few looks.

That evening we get into a heated discussion: why did he need all that stuff? He couldn’t have eaten it. It was obviously going to be discovered sooner or later. And it’s not as if he was hungry – everyone was always sharing things with him. No one refused when he asked. Was he a klepto? Didn’t seem to be. It was a mystery…

On the other hand, when you think about the way things are in our country now, you come across this type of mystery all the time. The pilfering just keeps on going. People buy islands and vast impersonal villas, they build dozens of palaces and fleets of yachts, they stuff their garages full of expensive cars they can’t drive anywhere, and their coffers with jewellery they’re probably too ashamed to wear. It’s as if they intend to live for ever. As if they don’t understand that you can’t hide all this stuff or justify it on any salary.

Kleptomania then?

Or do they get a bogus sense of stability from accumulating such a vast quantity of things?

Perhaps they’re simply fools? More foolish still is the idea that ‘this lot have already stolen just about everything, so better to keep the devil we know!’

You wouldn’t hear this said in the camp barracks. Here people know for sure that a rat won’t stop, you have to deal with him, humanely or not.

It’s very strange to expect anything positive to come from ‘stability’, when the entire political regime is gradually turning into a nest of greedy, vile rats.