My Fellow Prisoners

Kolya

It so happened that I met a young man, Nikolai (Kolya), as he was about to be released. There was nothing particularly remarkable about Nikolai. He was doing time for a fairly straightforward crime, drug possession – like roughly half the rest of the country’s prison population.

It was clear that he would be back. He’d already spent five of his twenty-three years behind barbed wire and showed little intention of changing his ways in the future. Although clearly not stupid, Kolya had grown up feeling rejected and unwanted. His life had been a constant battle with this feeling of rejection while being surrounded by similar outcasts.

Six months later I met Kolya again, now with a grisly scar on his stomach.

‘Kolya, what happened?’

‘Ah well, they got me with some gear again.’

For a moment Kolya hesitated, but then told me the full story, which is later corroborated by others who had witnessed it. Having taken in a repeat offender, the police investigators decided to charge him with an extra crime, for good measure. This kind of bargaining goes on all the time and is usually fairly open: you’ll only get an additional couple of years, they say, if we ask the judge, but you’ll have to carry the can for some robbery – and you’ll get extra visiting rights or choose where you end up. Generally it’s nothing more than a mobile phone robbery or some such. Kolya, after not much thought, agreed. But then for the identity parade they brought in an old woman whose purse, containing about 2,000 roubles, had been snatched by some scum. The pensioner clearly remembered little about it and quickly ‘identified’ the person indicated by the investigators.

At which point Kolya suddenly dug in his heels. ‘I’ve never touched an elderly person in my life, only people my own age. Robbing an old woman of her last rouble – no, I didn’t sign up for that, and I won’t do it. Whatever you do to me!’ The investigators were dumbfounded. ‘Kolya, as far as the law’s concerned there’s no difference. The money is the same, so’s the sentence. Why are you getting so steamed up? We can’t go and turn all of this around just because you’re feeling sensitive about it.’

‘I won’t do it,’ said Kolya.

So they sent him back to his cell, ‘to think it over’ – having first given him a bit of a beating, ‘as is only right and proper’.

After a while he knocked on the cell door from inside; when they opened the food hatch – his guts came flying out. Kolya had ‘opened himself up’, and some. Full-on hara-kiri. The scar is as wide as a finger and stretches halfway across his belly.

While the doctors were rushing across, others in the cell tried to stuff his entrails back in again.

It was a miracle they saved him. Now he’s disabled, but he has no regrets. ‘If they’d gone and pinned that old woman’s purse on me, I’d have died anyway,’ says Kolya – meaning the loss of his self-respect, without which his life is unimaginable.

I look at this man who has been sent down so often and think with a certain bitterness of the number of people on the outside who hold their honour far less dearly than he, who wouldn’t see anything particularly bad about robbing an old man or woman of a couple of thousand roubles. Although their crime would be clothed in clever words. They have no shame.

And, like it or not, I feel proud of Kolya.