Words Will Break Cement

by Masha Gessen

  “Hey, two-oh-eight,” Kat shouted to the cell on the floor above. “How is it going? Any chance you can call out to two-ten?”

  “All right, let’s see. Their windows are closed. Another time, then.”

  But Kat hardly had any time. So a few hours later she knocked on the ceiling first and then opened the window and started screaming. She felt she was so loud the entire jail could hear her. “Two-ten!” she screamed until she was hoarse. “Two-ten!”

  She finally heard Maria’s high-pitched voice.

  “What’s up with the lawyers?” Kat screamed.

  “Same old,” screamed Maria.

  Kat tried screaming something else, or hearing something else, until she finally heard Maria shout: “Wait! I’ll write!”

  Kat waited all night and then all morning. She stopped waiting only when an inspection started in her cell. In this weekly ritual, jail staff went through literally all their belongings, first laying them out as though on display, then examining them, sometimes confiscating them or disposing of them. Maria’s rope with the weighted sock at the end, with a letter inside the sock, made its appearance in the window at the worst possible moment: just as the inspectors appeared in the doorway. Orlova panicked and hissed at Kat—“Idiots”—but the inspectors, miraculously, noticed nothing. As soon as the door closed behind the inspectors, Kat ran for the window.

  The sock dangled about four feet away; the horizontal barrier had pushed the rope out that far. Orlova grumbled but quickly fashioned the tool Kat should have made by now: a broomstick, or something like it, with a hook at the end, made of twisted pages torn from glossy magazines—someone had sent Kat a copy of the Russian edition of National Geographic, which she hated ripping up, but which made the best possible hook. She used the hook to pull the rope into the window and remove the sock. Soon she placed her response back in the same sock, tied it to the rope, gently guided it out the window with the help of the hook, and tugged on it to signal the upstairs cell to pull it up. Kat was terrible at working the hook, so Orlova did it for her.

  Still, the fourth letter in the exchange—Kat’s response to Maria’s second note—broke off from the rope and tumbled down to the ground in its sock. For all their effort, they had barely managed to have a conversation. Maria wrote Kat a note about fund-raising efforts in the United States, but it assumed too much knowledge and Kat did not understand anything. Kat wrote back outlining her new defense and urging Maria to try to get a lawyer who would represent all three of them so they could at least communicate with one another. Maria wrote, “I’m sorry the lawyers have been saying horrible things about you. But don’t worry about that right now. I am worried about you. I don’t like the state you are in.” This hurt Kat’s feelings, but her response never made it upstairs. She had written, “If they’d been like that to you, I would have fired them.”

  And there was no chance of communicating with Nadya at all; she was all the way up on the third floor. Anyway, Kat did not think there was a point to talking to her. Nadya always knew exactly what was going on.

  ———

  THE MOOD IN THE PRISONER transport was all wrong. Kat did not know what to say, and so kept quiet. At one point Maria and Nadya started speaking to each other. But in the cage, when they saw Khrunova, they addressed Kat together, laughing: “So you got yourself a younger, better-looking lawyer!” Khrunova always wore tailored dresses to hearings, with a cardigan sobering up the outfit. She looked as different as a woman could look from the obese Volkova.

  Kat was the first to make a statement. She said the action had been political. “We didn’t want to offend anyone. And if we did, we said we are sorry. But a punk prayer is not a crime.” She then switched from first-person plural to first-person singular and quickly muttered that she had not actually done anything at the cathedral.

  Maria had prepared a long speech, in which she intended to reiterate what she had said during the trial. She had said in the prisoner transport that she would keep repeating her message as long as it took to get through to people. “We are serving time for our political beliefs, and even if we are sent to a prison colony, we are not going to keep quiet, no matter that you want us to,” she said, apparently addressing the court.

  “Stick to the topic at hand,” said the judge.

  “I’d like to address Putin’s statement regarding ‘slapping us with a two-ie.’”

  The judge raised her voice. “Topic at hand!”

  “I’m still going to say it. Unlike Putin, I can say the name of our group out loud. It’s called Pussy Riot. And that sounds and is a lot better than his calls for ‘snuffing the enemy out in the outhouse,’” she said, referring to a speech that first made Putin popular in Russia back in 1999. After this, the judge started shouting and people both inside and outside the courtroom started applauding, and no one could hear anything anymore.

  Most of Nadya’s speech was drowned out by the screaming and the applause. She said the case had proven the repressive nature of the Russian state. “I demand a reversal of the verdict, and I want to warn you that Putin’s continued rule will drive the country to civil war.” She had raised her voice.

  “This is not an election campaign!” screamed the judge, even louder.

  The three old lawyers’ speeches turned into a shouting match between them and the judge, so ultimately only the words president, church, and demand could be distinguished.

  But Khrunova addressed a hushed courtroom.

  She said she did not think Nadya, Maria, and Kat had committed a crime. But, she added, Kat had not even taken part in the actions the court had deemed criminal: “She did not jump, pray, or sing.”

  She spoke for no more than seven minutes, and then, almost immediately, she realized something was wrong. One after another, the so-called victims’ lawyers rose and said something good about her, her speech, and her position, even though they said they disagreed with it. They said she had made a great speech. They said it was a relief to hear legal arguments after a trial dominated by political speechifying. They said they respected her. Khrunova felt like she had stepped into a trap, though she could not figure out who had set it or for what purpose. Her best-case guess would be that everyone, including the other side, was so genuinely tired of the farce they had been witnessing instead of a trial that a plain, clear, decidedly legal speech seemed so refreshing that they were moved to praise her—in unison. Her worst-case guess would be that this was a setup in which Kat was either a willing participant or an unwitting pawn whose role it was to break ranks—and be rewarded for it.

  ———

  THE JUDGE TOOK forty minutes to make a decision. Kat waited in a tiny room with a stranger, a defendant in a different case who could not stop talking. Kat was trying to think, though she was not sure what she was trying to think about; the woman kept interrupting her efforts, and Kat could not figure out what the woman wanted, though for some reason it appeared to be pity.

  The judge read her decision: she left Nadya’s and Maria’s sentences unchanged but changed Kat’s to a suspended two-year sentence. “The defendant is to be released in the courtroom.”

  Maria jumped up and started hugging Kat, squeezing her hard, trying to put into this hug all the joy that had washed over her. Nadya looked stricken and momentarily lost, and then she too stepped over to hug Kat. She seemed to be in a bad mood, but she had seemed to be in a bad mood on the way over to the court as well, and Kat thought this was perfectly understandable on the eve of her being shipped off to a penal colony.

  The marshals opened the cage door. Nadya and Maria were led out in handcuffs, as usual. A marshal uncuffed Kat and told her to come with him. He took to her to a room downstairs and told her to wait for her papers and left her—left her alone in a room with no handcuffs, a window with no grates—and she paced the room like a free woman for half an hour as she waited for her papers. Out in the hallway, Stanislav Samutsevich teared up as he gave interviews and teared up again as he looked at Maria’
s mother.

  Kat finally got her papers and stepped out on the porch. There were many cameras—she had a sense that Orlova had mentioned seeing something like this in her coffee grounds—and many microphones, and Kat just stood on the porch for a few minutes, until two young men came up very close to her. She knew one of them—he had helped with some actions—and he said, “You can trust him” about the other, and they led her away from the courthouse. At one point one of them said, “Let’s run,” and they ran.

  ELEVEN

  Maria

  Hi, Olya,

  Today is October 30. I am in a pretrial detention center in Perm. I am to be shipped from here to a penal colony sometime very soon. I don’t know which colony it’s going to be, but it’s definitely in the Perm region, and here there are only two of them: one is within city boundaries, the other about 150 km away. All of this probably sounds silly; with access to the Internet, you probably have more knowledge about my whereabouts than I do. It’s been almost a week and a half since I left the pretrial detention facility in Moscow. I feel an acute lack of information. I spent four days in Kirov and no one came—I mean none of the lawyers did.[13] Two weeks without communicating makes me extremely anxious. I feel awkward admitting that. I have six envelopes left, and this is the only thing that gives me a bit of hope: I send out letters without the slightest idea whether they are going to be received. I had the wherewithal to take about 30 kilos of stuff with me when I left Moscow, so I still have some reserves of food, but these will not last me more than 2 weeks (and that only if I am very frugal). Meanwhile, the absurd system for transferring funds from pretrial detention to the penal colony means they will not get there for an entire month after I finally arrive. And there is still no sign of the lawyers. I mentally curse them up and down. The helplessness makes me want to stomp my feet or go on a hunger strike.

  You can’t imagine how much I want to know something, anything, about what’s going on in Moscow. I suspect interest has dropped and will only continue to drop from now on. Of course this matters to me, but it’s not paramount. I still believe in the power of the gesture, the power of taking a stand—and there will always be people who will see it and understand, I am sure of this.

  None of the scary stuff they told me about the transport was true. The transfer process is hugely engaging, albeit physically exhausting. I have put together a list of things that need to be done to make the system at least remotely resemble a humane one. Now I’m wondering who I should give this list to. I’m writing in a journal a bit, reading Mamardashvili[14] a bit, and hoping not to lose my mind—or, if I lose it, to do it publicly. Don’t forget me!

  ———

  Dear Olya,

  I don’t know how to begin this letter. December. You may place any punctuation mark after that word and still it will barely begin to describe what I feel. It is already December, it is only December, it really is December—or is it? Something tells me you’ll get this letter when everyone is frantically getting ready for the New Year while I continue to sit in this “safe place.” I’d wanted to write right away after you came to see me here, but then I couldn’t and now it’s December 2.

  ———

  MARIA ARRIVED at Penal Colony Number 28 in early November. By the time she was out of “quarantine”—solitary confinement that launches the term of incarceration in the colony—snow had covered the grounds and blizzards were a daily occurrence. This was the colony about one hundred and twenty miles from Perm, in the town of Berezniki. One of Russia’s oldest industrial towns, with four large chemical plants dominating its economy and its difficult air, Berezniki had been completely rebuilt in the 1960s. It looked like scores of identical gray-brick five-story buildings had been airlifted and dropped in perfectly indistinguishable parallel and perpendicular rows.

  Penal Colony 28, one of two colonies in the city, sat at the outskirts of Berezniki; a solid concrete fence topped with barbed wire surrounded a grouping of two-story buildings, sloppily assembled of the same gray brick. Each block housed two units, one per floor. The space available would accommodate around seventy people if inmates were housed in accordance with official instructions, but the administration managed to squeeze twice that number into the metal beds that formed a tight grid in the vast, unpartitioned bedroom space. Small wooden cubbies separated the beds, one for every two inmates. Any personal belongings that could not be concealed in this tiny space had to be packed into an enormous black bag stuffed, along with scores of other enormous black bags, into a storage space.

  A unit’s quarters included, in addition to the giant bedroom, a kitchen with two tables, a refrigerator, a microwave oven, and a teakettle, for the minority whose relatives sent them food to store and reheat what could replace the inedible cafeteria fare; a “leisure room” equipped with a television set and a DVD player and benches and chairs for people who never materialized because inmates here were always either working or sleeping, dead tired from the monotonous, endless work; and a bathroom with three toilets and no partitions. Bathing was to be done one day a week, when inmates were marched to the colony bathhouse. At other times the women had to clean themselves using the toilets and the pair of sinks in plain view of the toilets; the process was so humiliating that none of the former inmates whom I interviewed would agree to describe it. Some, but not all, of the units had hot water in those bathrooms.

  Before Maria was transferred from quarantine, Unit 11 underwent renovations. Some of the inmates were transferred out and distributed among other units, so the population of Unit 11 went down to the roughly seventy people its physical quarters could legally accommodate. Some of the walls got a paint job and hot water was piped into the bathroom. Later, when a high-profile human rights activist interviewed Maria in the colony, partitions went up between the toilets.

  Maria had been readying herself for the transfer as well. She continued reading the Criminal Procedure Code and the Criminal Executive Code, which she had begun studying in pretrial detention. At first she felt her humanities-steeped brain might shatter under the weight of the dense language, but in court hearings she began to see that she knew more about what was going on from a legal standpoint than her codefendants, her lawyers, and, she suspected, the judge. Now, after a month in transit and two weeks of quarantine, Maria was more than conversant with the penal code: she felt it was her job to ensure that law as she had learned it was observed.

  Maria talked to everyone, or tried to, as she always did. Most women were here on drug-related charges. Some were honest-to-goodness dealers, most were users who had unsuccessfully ventured into dealing, and some had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. They had sentences averaging seven years, the vast majority were under thirty, and few of them had contact with their families. The killers were different, older and with strong family ties, though most were serving roughly the same sentences as the drug offenders. A few women were in for fraud. Russian prosecutors often charged people with fraud—it was a wastebasket crime, and the best charge for extorting money or settling scores between business partners (one of whom would often pay off the prosecutor). Fraudsters were considered the intellectual and economic elite of the Russian prison population, and most of them were men; many managed to secure accommodations in city jails, so one did not encounter many inmates serving time for fraud in the penal colonies.

  Lena Tkachenko was an exception. As a staff member at a real estate agency in Perm, she would rent an apartment for two days and then flip it ten times in twenty-four hours, conducting ten showings, signing ten contracts, handing out ten sets of keys, and collecting ten first month’s, last month’s, and security deposits. The new renters would then show up when the unsuspecting apartment owner returned, and it would be up to him to deal with the rage and the police. Lena had rules: she never fake-rented to people who looked to her like they could not stand to lose the equivalent of a few months’ rent or who looked like they needed the money more than she did. On the other hand, she needed the
money a lot. Lena and her colleagues at the real estate agency got away with this scam for a year, until she got caught. At twenty, she was sentenced to seven years, and five of them had passed.

  Lena liked to talk about music, and she was impressed when she heard that Maria had been in a band. She had heard of Pussy Riot and the trial, and though television news portrayed them as witches—or, rather, because of this—she figured they deserved her sympathy. Lena also liked to talk about a particular guard, a woman in her forties whom she had been courting for months, bringing her a flower every day in the summer and some other token of her affection in winter. The guard accepted the gifts, but, Lena complained, treated her like a child. For her part, she saw Maria as a bit of a child, a child who needed to be protected because she was too smart and too stubborn to be liked by others. Lena made sure she told Maria in detail how the place worked—she was good at systematizing, she was going to be a lawyer when she got out of here—and soon she was fielding questions she thought no one would ever ask.

  Was it not against the rules, Maria was asking, to make inmates work twelve-hour shifts? The colony’s sewing factory worked around the clock, with half the inmates working the 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. shift and sleeping from nine thirty to five thirty while the other half worked evening to morning and were awakened at two in the afternoon. Yes, it was illegal to make them work twelve-hour shifts. Plus, local work such as lugging bricks for perennial construction projects was often added between the end of the work shift and lights-out. What was worse, said Lena, was that the penal colony secured huge sewing orders by undercutting regular manufacturers’ prices for everything from bedsheets to uniforms and then pocketed half or more of the supposed labor costs, so that inmates received only a few kopecks for every ruble to which they were entitled. This was slave labor—there was no other name for it—and Lena had been documenting violations for years, though she’d had no one to show this documentation to. But human rights activists and officials, inspectors, journalists—everyone—would be coming to see Maria at the colony, Lena thought, and this would allow her finally to expose these violations to the world.