Dragons & Butterflies

by Shani Krebs

  I had no idea that he and Jai were already communicating during the night. In the weeks that followed, I noticed a huge change in Jai. She was glowing, and almost every week she wore a new outfit. I myself was not in a good space at this time, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on her newfound happiness. Then, during one of my visits with her, out of the corner of my eye I saw the death row guy approaching. I didn’t acknowledge his presence, but I knew he was standing behind me. Jai’s eyes moved hesitantly from me to him and back to me. Finally, I turned around and offered him the phone, asking him if he wanted to speak to Jai. He declined and Jai also brushed it off, saying she would see him the following day. I insisted that they speak to each other, but Jai refused. He had an embassy visit that was at the entrance to the visit room, and, when the visit ended, Jai left and so did I.

  By now I definitely suspected something, so I went next door to the Thai visit room, from where I could get a full view of the foreign section. Clearly, Jai had only pretended to leave, because there she was, coming back to meet him. In an instant my blood pressure shot sky high. I went back to the foreign visit room and caught the lovebirds in the act, talking to each other on the phone. When they saw me, they both turned white. I grabbed the phone from my so-called friend and he disappeared very quickly.

  ‘What the hell is going on?’ I screamed at Jai. A heated argument erupted between us. Finally, Jai confessed that she and the death row guy had fallen in love. This was what I had wished for, and even planned for, so it should have been perfect. I wanted to get rid of Jai, but I didn’t anticipate that it would happen so soon, and now that it was happening I broke down in tears. Jai cried, too.

  Our relationship was over.

  The bastard had told Jai what I’d said about him taking over from me when I eventually left prison. I wanted to kill him. Jai was terribly hurt, and she stormed out of the visit room. I discovered that I was devastated. Until that moment I hadn’t fully realised just how emotionally dependent I had become on her. She was my best and closest friend. It was hard for me to come to terms with what had transpired. I couldn’t cope with it. I wanted to take my life. I had been here before so many times; it was the same story, over and over, like the revival of an old movie. I struggled to pull myself together, but found myself slipping into a dark hole. What is it about human nature that in order to appreciate the value of something, we have to experience the loss of it first? I was a victim of my own heartlessness. Things got so bad that I had to see the prison psychologist, who prescribed a 50mg sleeping tablet. Sleep I got, but the tablet also put me into a semi-comatose state for days on end, so in fact it only made me feel worse.

  Jai visited me on two more occasions, but only to clear up some financial matters. During these visits, concealed in my underpants, I carried a small knife, hoping that I would see my former friend. I wanted to cut his face so that every time he looked in the mirror he would remember me. The authorities became aware of the tension between us, and for his own protection he was given permission to have all his visits in a Thai visit room. When I saw Jai, I broke down. I still loved her, but it was too late. She had found somebody better than me. I simply had to accept that.

  I found solace in my art, painting a series of colourful abstracts that helped me to understand and process the pain I felt. Time passed, but my emotional wounds would take much longer to heal.

  Not too long down the road, I got a note via the underground prison postal delivery service, from one prisoner’s hand to another. The note read: ‘Shani, I wanted you to know Jai and I have decided to get married, I’m sorry.’ They got married in a ceremony held in the foreign visit room, in the passage that divided the prisoners from the visitors. My initial pain when Jai left me, which had turned from sadness into anger, was beginning to ease. Now I tried to feel happiness for her. All those years when I had encouraged her to find another man, I did not expect that man to be another prisoner, and my friend at that.

  Anyway, Jai’s new husband’s trial came up, and in the second court he was resentenced to 15 years – strange.

  Still nursing a broken heart, I found myself becoming more and more dependent on alcohol. It relieved my pain. By then I had become quite the connoisseur and had gained a name for making an excellent wine. Yeast was still coming in from friends all over the world. One of these friends was Zelda, who lived in Dubai and regularly sent me parcels. I texted her on my dog, requesting a whole bunch of yeast. Some of the yeast came in tins; some was hidden in with tea bags. She’d also included a 500g container, which she’d emptied of its original contents, filled with yeast, and then resealed and packed with other foodstuffs and items. When I was called to collect the package, yeast was leaking out of the parcel. Watcherine lifted the box, looked at me questioningly and, in Thai, made some comment about me making wine, which was illegal.

  ‘Pom mai loo,’ (I don’t know) I answered blankly.

  He cut the box open and there was yeast everywhere. He became so preoccupied with dusting off every particle from the other items he handed to me that he failed to detect the hidden yeast. He was clearly annoyed, but, because I’d been in Bangkwang so long, he let it go. I had a good laugh with the guys when I shared my story.

  For the next year I made wine every weekend. After playing football on Saturdays and Sundays I would pour the wine into empty plastic water bottles. One cup was strong enough to make you tipsy. As the day progressed, while the music blared, I had friends in and out of my house, coming by for a drink. At lunchtime we would have a braai (barbecue). We would use one of the portable clay stoves you could purchase from the coffee shop. Prisoners who didn’t have electric frying pans made use of these stoves. The coffee shop also stocked charcoal.

  Eventually, I was drinking even during the week, busy drowning my sorrows. I was letting myself go. My break-up with Jai had made me weak. Twelve years into my imprisonment and I had found a new vice. Was there a difference, drugs being one thing, and alcohol another? Surely my prolonged incarceration, in the light of so many other foreigners going home, justified my drinking? I knew I could never go back to drugs, but was what I was doing now any different?

  I was struggling to come to terms with my predicament. I understood that I was not ready to be part of the free world yet, but I longed for nothing else. I was bored with the mundanities of prison life; the same routine every day was suffocating me. I needed to spread my wings. Alcohol dulled the pain and gave me a false sense of confidence. The only problem was, when I woke up the next morning, besides having a heavy head, my reality was no different. In fact, it depressed me even more. There was no getting away from it: they say once an addict, always an addict. I was disappointed in myself. My emotions were playing havoc with my mind. Whether it was to celebrate or to numb the pain, I had so many excuses to justify my drinking. It was far easier to escape than to face my problems. So often in life we become our own worst enemy. I knew this, so what was wrong with me? I had come such a long way and now I had fallen. Love can either make a man or it can break him, that’s for sure.

  There was a stage where I would have more than 24 litres of wine brewing on a given day. One day I got this idea to bottle some for Shabbos: keep it for a month or two and it would be like drinking a vintage, I thought. Using bottles that I purchased from the coffee shop, I cleaned them out and filled them with wine that I’d made from grape juice. Then I stuck them in the back of the locker where I kept a supply of tinned food, among other things. Two days later, when we were let out of our cells in the morning, as I rounded the corner before my house I detected a strong smell of wine. I stepped up my pace. When I entered the house I saw immediately that wine had leaked out of the locker and had dribbled all over the floor. The pressure in the bottles had caused them to explode. Fortunately, the guards were too lazy to walk around at night; a search might have led to unnecessary attention.

  Sometimes I would begin drinking early in the morning, which led to occasions where I got into a physical alterca
tion with another prisoner. Alcohol clouds your judgement, and after a few drinks I would get very aggressive.

  One day I attacked my Chinese neighbour, Lim, the man who had been my cook for ten years. I was in the wrong. Every time we drank, I would turn my music up. I didn’t realise that the volume was driving poor Lim mad. Music was my thing; it not only opened my mind but it also stimulated my creativity. To be honest, I never considered my neighbours. I just presumed that they also enjoyed some rock’n’roll. On this particular day, Lim gave me a dirty look that triggered something inside me. There was this anger festering deep within me waiting to surface and, when it did, it was ugly to the point of being scary. I could kill; I felt it inside me. The anger was like a cancer. Was I losing my mind and becoming a psychopath? Self-rehabilitation in a jungle of criminals was not easy, and I was failing badly.

  Although I continued to produce some amazing pieces of art, the drinking started to affect my mind. I became lazy and eventually stopped painting. For some reason, whether lack of exercise or the excessive drinking, the joints in my ankles could hardly bend. I had the most excruciating pain, and there were days when I struggled to walk. After having a blood test, which was sent to an outside laboratory, I was told that because of a build-up of uric acid in my blood, crystals had formed around my joints. I had developed gout. It was crazy to think that in prison one could become an alcoholic, but it looked like that was the way I was going. I needed to evaluate the situation. Nothing was more important than my health. The only way I could stop drinking was to stop making wine.

  I managed to obtain a homeopathic remedy from home called Urtica urens (stinging nettle), which I took three times a day. Within three weeks the pain in my joints had subsided and I got my life back on track. It seemed that, no matter where I was, there was only one way I was going to learn life’s lessons: the hard way. It was the story of my life.

  On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the King’s accession to the throne, we were granted the amnesty. The death penalty, however, was not abolished.

  Chapter 16

  Touched By Angels

  From the table where I sat and worked every morning, I had a view of the Chinese houses. About 10m away was the communal toilet. Lost in thought one day, I was sitting there staring into space, not really concentrating on anything. The toilet had one occupant at the time, a Thai prisoner who was new in our building. He had spent time in solitary confinement for stabbing another prisoner and he still had his shackles on. I was not paying attention when another Thai came up from behind him and, with a meat cleaver, delivered two swift blows to his shoulder, almost taking off his arm. I believe it was a retaliation attack ordered from another building. Revenge stabbings were common. Every few months we heard about a murder in one of the other buildings. The Thais were dangerous, and one had to be careful. The mere fact of being a farang gave you some degree of respect, so generally Thais didn’t interfere with us foreigners. And if you stayed clear of the underhand dealings that went on all the time, you were reasonably safe. However, if you disrespected one of them, it wouldn’t be long before every single Thai in the building would know that you were bad-mannered, and from then on you would have difficulty getting anything done. One could never become complacent.

  The year 2007, my 13th in prison, was a tough one for me. After losing Jai, I really struggled to get through my days. I promised myself that I would never become emotionally dependent on anybody again. I found myself living more and more in my head.

  Often with the intake of new prisoners came new trends. An Estonian prisoner who had been on death row for seven years had his sentence commuted to life in third court, and was transferred to Building 2. He and Shlomo became good friends. The Estonian was a bodybuilding enthusiast and weighed almost 100kg. At 1.8m tall, he towered over me. He had some interesting ideas on muscle building and would do certain routines on the weights. At the time I weighed about 80kg and it made sense to me to build muscle. Having got bored with playing football and my daily walking programme, I embarked on a vigorous gymming course. I started drinking protein shakes and eating three meals a day. Soon I had lifted my weight to 90kg. I was working out five days a week and had developed really nice arms; I thought I was in great shape.

  For the enterprising prisoner, art was a means of making money. There were several talented Thai artists in Bangkwang who painted portraits for a fee. Whenever I was asked by an inmate to do somebody’s portrait, I would name a ridiculous price, firstly, because I never had the time, and, secondly, because frankly I couldn’t be bothered. Early into my incarceration I did paint a few pictures for some of my closest friends in jail, but after a while I stopped. Every building had guys who were artists or interested in art, but I gained the reputation of being the Number 1 Portrait Artist in Bangkwang.

  That year, the prison introduced a programme called ‘Art for All’. Rather than being part of the rehabilitation process of prisoners, it was yet another scheme devised only to benefit the prison. The prison supplied all the art equipment, but there was a condition: anything you painted belonged to the prison. Art pieces would be exhibited outside and the proceeds would go to expanding the programme. The rest, needless to say, would go into the pockets of the prison authorities.

  In Building 2, the bakery was converted into a studio for the prisoners. Drinking in Building 2 had become a serious problem, and the authorities suspected that the bakery commodore was selling yeast to the prisoners. So they closed the bakery and transferred the supervisor, who was a prisoner, to another prison. I thought it was really funny because they were so off course: it was me who was bringing the yeast in, and had been for a while. Ironic, really, when you think about it – with all the shit the bakery guard used to give us, we screwed him, even if it was indirectly. What can I say? Karma is a bitch.

  Once a week an art teacher from outside would come and give basic art lessons to any prisoner who wanted to learn. All the prison artists knew each other already, and we were friends. Whenever one of us needed supplies, we would help each other out. I taught many of my fellow inmates the finer points of using carbon powder. Usually, when we wanted to send our paintings out with our visitors, all we had to do was make a request. This would be signed by the Building Chief and his subordinate in charge of foreigners – a simple procedure.

  I had painted several nudes for one of my correspondents, who owned the Lisa King Gallery in Cape Town. She was keen to assist me and wanted to show my work to another gallery she thought could be interested in representing me. So I wrote the usual request and handed it to my friend who worked in the office, who translated it into Thai. Not much later, I was called to the office and informed by the new Building Chief that I could no longer send my paintings out and that they were now the property of the prison. This was the same arsehole who had chopped down every tree around Building 2, including the two beautiful ones beside death row that had offered shade to the prisoners. I don’t think he realised who he was fucking with, but first I tried to reason with him, explaining that I had nothing to do with the Art for All programme, and that in fact I personally supplied a lot of the students with paper and other items. He remained steadfast and refused me permission.

  I had visitors arriving from South Africa in two days’ time to whom I was planning to give some of my pieces to take back home for me. I immediately drafted a petition on behalf of all the artists and threatened the prison authorities that we would inform every embassy in Bangkok about their proposed policy to steal our paintings. All the artists signed the petition. I submitted it and waited, knowing that I would have rattled the Building Chief’s cage. I had barely walked away when my name was called over the loudspeaker. I strolled back slowly. I was ushered into the chief’s office, whose whole demeanour had changed. Without wasting any time, he offered me a deal. He would give me, but only me, permission to send out my art, he told me, on condition that I withdrew the petition. I don’t know what he was thinking, but there was no way I
was going to do that. Just on principle I wouldn’t do it. I wasn’t about to sell out my mates. So I told him it was all or nothing. I gave you a chance this morning, motherfucker, I thought to myself. Now you will suffer the consequences.

  So the petition was sent out to the Director. At midday I was once again summoned to the office. All the other artists had gathered around, waiting for me, and from the expression on their faces I could see that we had won. I was really happy, as I knew that a lot of these guys had no support from outside and the only way they could survive was by the portraits they painted and sold to other prisoners.

  There were rumours that the Thai government’s deeply controversial ‘War on Drugs’ programme, which had led to the deaths of more than 2 500 people allegedly involved in the trade, was set to be relaunched by the new government led by Samak Sundaravej, which had come to power in early 2008. According to foreign news reports, during a three-month period in 2003, thousands of Thais on police blacklists had been shot, allegedly on government orders. Some of those killed apparently had no involvement in drugs, according to the government’s Narcotics Control Board. The government had not set a target for the new anti-drug campaign, though the Minister of the Interior, Chalerm Yubamrung, had been reported as suggesting a tough line similar to the previous ‘war’ might be taken.

  Early in 2009 there was a raid by the army, police and Department of Corrections. We had been warned to hand in all our electrical equipment a week before, so I took my dog and hid it in the lid of the water boiler. Then I packed all my other things in a cardboard box and tied it up with string. The authorities locked our stuff in the soy rooms next to the gym. After three days, the Building Chief informed us that all the equipment we had handed in was going to be moved to a safer location outside Building 2. I immediately became suspicious and assumed that our electrical equipment wasn’t going to be returned to us, so I insisted on taking everything back, as did some of the other prisoners. Two days later, soon after lockdown, they raided us. There were more than 100 commodores. They came armed with steel bolt-cutters, broke all the locks on our lockers and proceeded to do their checks.