Seven Types of Ambiguity

by Elliot Perlman

  When Alex asked me what books I wanted him to bring me, it was the Turk who reminded me to ask for the selected poetry of Nazim Hikmet, the best poet there is for one who will spend time in prison. It wasn’t anything the Turk said. He thinks Nazim Hikmet is a Turkish friend of mine. I just happened to hear him address one of his children by the name Nazim in the visit center one day just as Alex was asking me for a list of the books I wanted and, of course, I remembered Nazim Hikmet. Don’t forget Nazim Hikmet.

  One could get bored even with boredom here were it not for the fear that grows under every stone and between every brick. The fear reminds you you’re alive. So I read and reread the selected poetry of Nazim Hikmet until I know it by heart. Once in the laundry, before I was put into solitary confinement for my own protection, I tried reciting a poem by him to Nazim the Turk. It is called “Some Advice to Those Who Will Serve Time in Prison.”

  If instead of being hanged by the neck

  you’re thrown inside

  for not giving up hope

  in the world, your country, and people,

  if you do ten or fifteen years

  apart from the time you have left,

  you won’t say,

  “Better I had swung from the end of a rope

  like a flag”—

  you’ll put your foot down and live.

  It may not be a pleasure exactly,

  but it’s your solemn duty

  to live one more day

  to spite the enemy.

  Part of you may live alone inside,

  like a stone at the bottom of a well.

  But the other part

  must be so caught up

  in the flurry of the world

  that you shiver there inside

  when outside, at forty days’ distance, a leaf moves.

  To wait for letters inside,

  to sing sad songs,

  or to lie awake all night staring at the ceiling

  is sweet but dangerous.

  Look at your face from shave to shave,

  forget your age,

  watch out for lice

  and for spring nights,

  and always remember

  to eat every last piece of bread—

  also, don’t forget to laugh heartily.

  And who knows,

  the woman you love may stop loving you.

  Don’t say it’s no big thing:

  it’s like the snapping of a green branch

  to the man inside.

  To think of roses and gardens inside is bad,

  to think of seas and mountains is good.

  Read and write without rest,

  and I also advise weaving

  and making mirrors.

  I mean, it’s not that you can’t pass

  ten or fifteen years inside

  and more—

  you can,

  as long as the jewel

  on the left side of your chest doesn’t lose its luster!

  It’s easier to do if you keep the poem in mind. I’ve repeated it to myself so many times it has come to play the same role for me that prayer plays for others, even others in here. Especially in here. My mother will not come here. Perhaps she knows that the unanswered prayers get caught in the vents and make it hard to breathe. She is busy with the gardening. I can only imagine how ready she is to believe I’ve done even more than they’ve charged me with. She blames the drink, the shrink, and “that whore,” and, no matter how much I protest my innocence, she thinks I took Anna’s son without Anna’s permission. She thinks I am guilty. Of course, about this, she is right.

  My father wants to blame Alex, despite the fact that, apart from me, Alex has taken this harder than anyone. He doesn’t have poetry to fall back on, only psychiatry, which he thinks has failed us. But I know it was I who failed us. Alex is shocked to see how I’ve adapted to solitary. Neither of us realized how well I had been preparing for it. But, alone in my apartment, for years now, I would shiver there inside, when outside, at forty days’ distance, a leaf moved.

  Nazim the Turk didn’t know it was a poem and I’m not sure he understood even one word in four, but he liked me reciting it. He liked that I was getting advice from a Turkish friend of mine. He liked that a lot.

  “I eat every last piece of bread. I’ll eat yours, you Fuck!” He laughed. When he saw me for the last time before they put me in solitary he grabbed my arm with one hand and the back of my neck with the other, using all the strength and recklessness of a truly uninhibited demented man. He laughed a loud staccato laugh for no apparent reason and then suddenly stopped the same way.

  “Say again . . . the Turk words. Say again for me, Fuck. Please say.”

  2. I was not the worst in my class, not the worst behaved, not the slowest, not the bottom or the top, not even consistently, reliably, conspicuously quiet. I am easily forgotten, not remembered by anyone looking back. But as far as I can tell, I am the only one to have made it here. And I did it with one mistake, only one.

  Alex thinks it was more than one. He thinks it was a mistake ever to invest such hope in her, not just now but way back then at university. Was that my first mistake? It was impossible not to have noticed her. I had watched the way she carried herself, the way she would smile. She moved in a manner that suggested she was completely comfortable in her skin, a manner that elevated a natural beauty untouched by artifice to a level none of the other pretty young women could hope to attain, no matter their expertise in front of the mirrors that hid the lotions and cosmetics in the many bathrooms of their fathers. Yet she was without affectation. You saw her and felt some hope. How cruel would it be to be shown her by chance and then be denied her, denied her because not everybody could know her, even a little.

  But, as it happened, mutual friends, bit-players, introduced us. It was in a tutorial. “This is Anna Traficante,” someone said and I thought, yes, I know. Don’t let me be her friend. Let me upset the rhythm of her breathing just once the way she disrupts mine every time I see her. She was captivating and at the same time intimidating. Alex thinks the person I was seeing was a figment of my imagination. She was just a clever, pretty, middle-class girl enrolled in a B.A. in between school and a job and marriage to someone other than her university boyfriend. Not worth entombment for almost ten years inside a crumbling bayside apartment. And not worth this more formal, tangible incarceration.

  One early evening, acting on a tip from someone who used to say that she was in love with me, the police broke into my apartment and arrested me because I had not given up hope in the world, or, more particularly, because I had not given up hope in Anna or in her son. What I did was wrong on many grounds. It was not only wrong; it was crazy every way you could think to look at it, except the way I looked at it just long enough to do it.

  I have not been home since. I have not been free since. I cannot get the smell of prison out of my nostrils. When people outside are forced in an emergency to use public toilets they try to breathe in as little as possible for fear of gagging on the stench. Their eyes water, and when they’ve finished they escape almost breathless back into the uncontaminated air. Here you are captive even to the smell. It’s not so much the smell of human waste (although it too is here often enough and is never reliably absent), it’s the smell of human misery and the pungent nauseating smell of the institutional detergent that I have come to associate with it. I can’t get it out of my hair or off my skin. It is always all around me and has been ever since I entered the prison system almost a year and a half ago via what is called the mainstream section of Port Phillip Prison, one of the state’s first fully privatized prisons. The detergent they use makes nothing clean. There is nothing here you would want to handle, nothing that feels comfortable to the touch, not the bed linen or the clothes they put you in, not even the food. Everything smells of it but nothing is clean. I am unable to breathe, even here in solitary.

  There are only two things that have kept me going. There is Alex, of course
, and there is the hope of seeing her, seeing Anna. I know I should be ashamed for her to see me here, but shame is a luxury no one in prison can afford. The things you see, the things you do and that are done to you in this place, quickly make shame a distant memory, an archaic word from a language no one here speaks. I should have made use of it when I still had the opportunity. I should have made use of it when I was lying on the couch embalming myself with scotch. And I should have made use of it before I took her son from his school in a fleeting moment of what seemed at the time unparalleled clarity and not of the madness which, of course, it was. That was the moment I lost all hope of any kind of a future with her, or without her. Everything now is really just about trying to stay alive. If she doesn’t tell them I had permission to take him after school I will certainly be convicted, and if that happens I will not be able to keep going. I am not like Nazim the Turk. It will kill me.

  Nazim Hikmet advises prisoners to weave and to make mirrors, but in this prison they don’t let you have the necessary materials for that. It’s hard to imagine how he was permitted to have them. Glass and twine are rightly considered weapons in here. Everything is a weapon, even language, even the tone of a man’s voice. I would not have understood this before I was imprisoned. I could not have imagined all the ways there are to injure a person. Sure, a gun, a knife, or even a club can kill instantly, but the tone of a man’s voice can kill just as surely given enough time for its full effect to sink in, to penetrate the skin and then the mind of its victim until he is so afraid, so cowering, so utterly without hope, that one more bark and he will find a way to stop his own breathing. He will prefer this to hearing that tone in the voice of his tormentor ever again. I can imagine this very well. I know now when a question is a threat.

  You can be looking at a spot on the wall to keep another prisoner from accusing you of making eye contact with him, because eye contact means you’re challenging him to fight or to have sex—when suddenly a prison officer will come upon you. He might speak quietly in a baritone or he might shout, but the question is so often the same one, part of the “call and response” ritual that goes on here that everybody learns within two days.

  “Any problems here, boys?” the officer asks and the prisoners, all of them, answer, “All good boys. All good boys, Mr. Greer,” or Mister whoever it is, and it’s often Mr. Greer.

  “That’s what I like to hear, boys.”

  When you first hear this ritual, it sounds silly, infantile, puerile. You can, if you want to, and you will want to, take it to be evidence of a kind of institutional paternalism that may well one day be of help to you. But you won’t be able to think that any longer after the day Mr. Greer strolls casually upon an excited circle of prisoners who, upon hearing the question, “Any problem here, boys?” break the circle revealing to him two bloodied men, one standing and one on his side on the ground in the shape of a grieving question mark.

  “All good boys. All good boys, Mr. Greer,” everyone says. Then the bloodied man still standing will move back into the throng of men who have formed the circle as Mr. Greer takes this man’s place in the center of the circle.

  “Any problem here, boys?” he asks again, this time more quietly than the first. This time no one answers.

  “Any problem here? Do we have a problem?” he asks still more quietly.

  “All . . . all good boys. All good boys, Mr. Greer,” he hears wheezed through the holes in the question mark at his feet.

  “That’s what I like to hear, boys,” he says, and walks on.

  While all this is happening, you are breathing in the detergent-proof smell of human misery faster and more deeply than usual. It forces its way in and up your nose and into your head, and it blends with the hot putrid smell of another man’s breath, a man who is taking the opportunity afforded by the tightly packed circle of men to grab at your crotch and rub himself up against you.

  The lawyer that Alex had found for me got me moved into maximum security after I was beaten up in the mainstream section of the prison. My arrest had been the occasion for a spread in one of the Sunday papers, almost a lift-out supplement on all crimes involving children, solved and unsolved, over the previous ten years. There was an article about me taking Sam from school—it purported to be a piece of straight reportage—which also mentioned the disappearance years earlier of Carlo, a little boy I had taught another life ago when I was a schoolteacher. The clear implication was that I was connected to both children in a sinister way. There was a photograph of me that Angelique had taken and below that a photograph of Carlo, the one that had been used to publicize his disappearance at the time. On the next page was a piece by a criminologist or a forensic psychologist on the type of person who commits offenses against children. The offenses covered in the article ranged from kidnapping to indecent assault all the way through to murder. It included photographs of many of the children who have disappeared or else been found dead in the state in the last ten years. By the time I had been processed into the mainstream section I was a rock spider, a child sex offender, the lowest of the low according to prison lore and therefore in a category more deserving of contempt and cruelty and mistreatment than any other. The process by which a prisoner is deemed a rock spider does not require evidence and does not admit of appeal. One day I was told, “You’re gone.” Just the label is enough to damn you. I was gone even from what passes as the civil society of prison.

  3. And so it was that I was placed in the maximum-security section of the prison, not to protect the outside world from me but to protect me from the rest of the prison community. As if not to let this section down, a prisoner here threatened to cripple me unless I paid him $30,000 within the month. I am here with other prisoners who cannot be held in the mainstream units of the prison. These are prisoners who are prosecution witnesses and therefore liable to have contracts out on their lives, prisoners who are the subject of extortion threats, prisoners who have been assaulted more often than usual by other prisoners, convicted child sex offenders, child killers never to be released, prisoners regarded by the prison authorities as a threat to the prisoners in the mainstream, and others known inside as plastic gangsters, who have requested to be placed in protection for fear of retribution for something prisoners in the mainstream believe them to have done. I live here with these men.

  The majority of the cells are single-person cells although there are some double cells. They are all small. My cell is a single. It is exactly six feet by nine feet. It has no natural light and no external air vent. There is a shower, a toilet, and a hand basin. There is a very small single bed, a tiny desk, and a chair. Each cell has a steel door with an inspection trap opened, of course, from the other side of the door. The cells are bugged, but I don’t know who is listening or what they’re listening for. I am the only one here who is still awaiting trial. Everyone else has already been convicted.

  There are double doors separating this unit from the rest of the prison, and these are electrically controlled. The whole area is monitored by security cameras twenty-four hours a day. Each cell has a steel reinforced door which is barred, dead-bolted, and key locked, and it requires two keys to open it after the appropriate switch has been flicked in the security office. The unit comprises twenty cells, which run along the perimeter of a room that constitutes the common area. There are about twenty prisoners in the unit at any one time. With three round tables, a table-tennis table, a pool table, and some fixed weight equipment, twenty odd people quickly fill the common area. You can immediately notice the extra space if someone new has been put in virtual solitary or else has died. I’m in virtual solitary. This means that, at my own request and for my own protection, I’m locked in my cell twenty-two hours a day. Had I not requested this virtual solitary confinement, I would have been beaten insensate when I failed to pay the extortioner.

  For the others, the cell doors are opened at eight-thirty every morning and locked down at seven-thirty each night. Outside the common area is the yard, an e
mpty yard twenty feet by twenty feet, about the size of a few cells put together. The prisoners are permitted to walk there when the cells are unlocked. Beside the yard is what is known as the small workroom, which is where inmates are permitted to undertake paid work if they wish. It’s available on average about once a week and consists, always, of screwing nuts onto bolts one at a time. The nuts and bolts are always counted before and after sessions, to prevent inmates stealing them for use as weapons or in suicide attempts, but that doesn’t stop them trying.

  There is a small library containing a pitiful number of defaced books, some of a religious nature, some that are war stories, a book of Kipling poems, and an Ayn Rand novel. The library is open for an hour and forty-five minutes a week on Fridays between one P.M. and two forty-five. This is also the time at which courses are offered at the prison programs center. There are just a few to pick from, and they are pitched at an extremely basic level. They include grade-seven standard English and mathematics as well as drug and alcohol counseling and anger management. The sessions are frequently canceled, perhaps as a consequence of their Friday-afternoon scheduling. Once every six months a programs officer is sent to the unit. She asks us what sort of programs we would like offered. People give her lists. Nothing happens, and she comes back six months later disputing the items on the lists she got six months earlier and citing funding cuts which, she confides, may soon see her out of a job. In the intervening six months you can sometimes hear her name or else her title come up in prisoners’ conversations as they compete with each other in suggesting the “best” thing to do to her.