Dragons & Butterflies

by Shani Krebs

  While I was being searched, one of the trustees found where I had hidden my money, but the guy was decent and he just slipped it back in its place. After the search, I was placed in what I assumed was death row. I was still suspected of being a big fish. I was hoping to get into a cell with some other guys who might be barking dogs, but instead I was locked up on my own.

  The next day I discovered I was actually locked in solitary confinement. Inmates in solitary are held indoors for 23 hours and allowed out for an hour each morning between 11 and 12. The Building Chief was kind enough to give me a TV to watch, and, even though it had only one channel, just having the TV as background noise made me feel less lonely. I had no bedding whatsoever besides my towel. The concrete floor of the cell was covered in old vinyl, which offered a bit of comfort but not much.

  I asked one of the trustees to call a foreigner to come and see me; any foreigner, I said, it didn’t matter who. I just needed somebody to help me. So along came this guy from Ukraine. He was a strange dude. I asked him if he could arrange drinking water for me, some washing powder and a bed or blanket or anything I could make a bed from, promising to pay back whatever expenses he incurred. He said he would see what he could do, but that was the last I heard from him. Fortunately, some of the Thai inmates were far more compassionate, and they helped me out with drinking water, at least.

  Later on, I managed to bark the dog and called Elisabeth, who had heard through her sources that the reason I’d been moved was because I was connected with the big drug dealers. She sounded as if she doubted me. I explained what I suspected had happened, but not because I needed to defend myself. One of my friends, the Burmese guy Donald, who was in charge of the church in Building 2 at Bangkwang and who spent most of his days reading his Bible and teaching English to other prisoners, had also been moved to Khao Bin.

  I was fervently hoping that the embassy would come and see me after the weekend, so that, with their support, I could try to insist on being moved back to Bankwang. It was imperative that I be able to clear my name. Also, I didn’t think I could survive in Klong Prem, as prisoners there were not allowed to receive parcels. Neither were they allowed foodstuffs from visitors, nor to prepare their own meals. In fact, the system in Klong Prem was completely different to that in Bangkwang.

  I paced the corridor for over three hours. Later on, my new Thai friend, Jib, allowed me to bark the dog for a few minutes. When I heard my sister’s voice, it brought tears to my eyes. Although I knew that in America Jessica would be asleep, I still hoped there was a chance we could speak. I needed to hear her voice, to be assured of her love. She didn’t answer her phone, but I managed to leave her a message, which I hoped would give us both the strength to get through what lay ahead.

  My entire body ached. I had not slept for almost a week. I was kind of at peace knowing that a connection with Jessica had been made, but at the same time my longing for her intensified. I lay on my bed, watching the rotating fans on the ceiling and wondering what was going through her mind. It was going to be almost impossible to contact her regularly, if at all. There were three dog handlers that I knew of, but they were virtually unapproachable. I hoped that I would be moved back to the general population soon. Apparently, there were a lot of foreigners in Building 5. I had to admit, though, that I wasn’t finding it too bad in solitary confinement. The privacy was welcome.

  With no clocks around anywhere, I lost all concept of time. The only means of telling the time was my body clock, which responded to nature’s call at 5am and was as regular as clockwork. Monday came and went, with neither of the two embassies, the South African nor the Israeli, coming to visit. I heard that the South African embassy was closed that day, so I presumed the Israeli one must have been as well. During the hour that I was allowed to leave my cell, I met up with an Italian guy. He was very friendly and later brought me some fruit juice, two litres of drinking water and some washing powder. I was very grateful. One of my Thai neighbours showed me how he rinsed his washing: put your clothes in an ordinary plastic bag, fill it with water and a little fabric softener and shake. I felt as though I was back in the fucking army. Anyway, his method worked pretty well.

  I spent a lot of time writing in my diary. I couldn’t help feeling frustrated and melancholy at the same time. It was hard to accept where I found myself now.

  Tuesday 26 April 2011 marked exactly 17 years, to the day, that I had spent within the corrupt Thai prison system.

  ‘Here I am in another prison all on my own,’ I wrote in my diary. ‘It’s kind of reminiscent of creation. We are born into this world alone, and depart from it on our own. Ironically I have always, or at least for the most part, been a solitary person. I spoke to Elisabeth today, who will be visiting me tomorrow. A part of me does genuinely love her, but it’s different to what I feel for you [Jessica]. I know she would have a major freak out if she heard me say that I loved her as a sister. I can never tell her about us. I’ve managed to separate the two of you from my mind and heart. I love you and can only wonder about our fate. Strangely my cell no is 34, exactly the age I was when I was arrested. Perhaps it’s a sign of a miracle about to happen.’

  I managed to figured out how to tell the time. When I moved the TV out of tune, as the picture jumped around the time was briefly displayed up in the left-hand corner; it wasn’t exactly visible there, but then it dropped down to the side near the centre, and, with the aid of my spectacles, I could make out the time.

  The next day, Wednesday 27 April, I was called for a visit around 9.45am. This prison had some really strict regulations. Whenever you left the building, you were thoroughly searched; then, halfway to the visit room, there was another checkpoint, where you had to remove your shirt and pass through a metal-detecting walkway; and finally you were searched again by the White Shirts.

  Elisabeth arrived around 10am and it was great to see her. If I’d still been at Bangkwang, we would have had our contact visit that day, but that would have to be put on hold for now. It seemed that anybody who got involved with me emotionally had to go through hell. The visit was only 30 minutes, so we had to try and get as much said as possible. I knew in my heart that I loved Elisabeth with a very deep love, but I felt torn between her and Jessica. What the fuck was that about? Did I still hate women, and were they only objects of desire to be done with as I pleased and disposed of when I wanted? My relationships with each of these women were very different. I felt like I was living two lives, and the lines blurred between what I felt for whom. Some days my conscience really troubled me, but then I would convince myself that my circumstances justified my behaviour. My mind was very focused on Jessica at this time, especially when I was alone in my cell and writing in my diary.

  I began to find myself adapting to a different prison lifestyle. I still had not had a visit from either of the embassies. The longer I stayed in solitary, the more used to it I became. I felt almost content there. The dilemma I faced was whether to try to move to Building 5 in Klong Prem or to stay where I was. Each had its own disadvantages. I also knew that I should try to get back to Bangkwang, because all my things were there. If I stayed here, how was I going to get them? I supposed it wasn’t really up to me where I went anyway. Only G-d knew what was in store for me.

  After only a few days there, Klong Prem prison, I decided, was the rear of a donkey’s arse. The place was designed to make your life as difficult as possible – although it was better than Khao Bin. If it hadn’t been for Elisabeth going to the embassy, no doubt I would still have been there. I finally managed to connect with Jessica and it made me so happy. Hearing her voice was amazing. As was becoming my habit now, I wrote to her in my diary:

  ‘… my little sex goddess, you sounded a little sleepy but ever so sexy. Babe, you are also at the forefront of my thoughts. Hearing you declare your undying love for me meant the world, and will give me the strength to endure the days until we speak again. I so much crave to reconnect on a deeper emotional level with you. Unfortuna
tely we are restricted from doing so, because of our limited time. Earlier on I was lying on my back, immersed in thoughts of you and I had all these conversations with you in my head. There is so much I want to say to you …’

  On 29 April, at around midday, I managed to phone Elisabeth again. I had been in solitary confinement for almost a full week. Elisabeth mentioned that the rabbi was planning to come and see me, but she couldn’t tell me when. Then, while I was eating lunch, I was called for a visit. It was the rabbi. According to him, the Department of Corrections had acknowledged that they had made a mistake in moving me out of Bangkwang in the first place and they seemed apologetic. He couldn’t tell me much more than that. I hoped and prayed that I would be transferred back there. Apart from anything else, Bangkwang was a far more relaxed prison, and, after so many years there, it had become my home. Some of my friends there were like family.

  Because it was the weekend, we were not allowed outside for our daily one-hour exercise session, and I was struggling to remain cheerful. I could feel depression threatening at the edge of my mind. When or indeed whether I was actually going to be transferred was also causing me some anxiety. As the days passed I became more and more restless. Not knowing my fate was killing me. I didn’t even feel like writing in my diary any more. Life was starting to take on a dreary monotony.

  April turned into May and I was beginning to feel emotionally and physically detached from the rest of the world, which I guess is the purpose of being held in solitary confinement. Once again I was a prisoner within a prison. My body ached all over and I found it virtually impossible to grow accustomed to sleeping on the concrete. My mind was not functioning normally. So many thoughts raced erratically through my brain, with a part of me wondering whether this whole move from one prison to another might even be part of a conspiracy orchestrated by the Israeli embassy.

  At midday on 2 May I was told that Osama bin Laden had been killed. The news was all in Thai, so, frustratingly, I couldn’t really follow it or get all the details.

  At around 3pm we were raided by almost 100 guards, who did a thorough check of the entire building. Fortunately, the guys in solitary had been warned a few hours in advance and they all managed to hide their dogs and chargers, whereas the guys outside were not so fortunate. Over 100 mobiles were seized.

  On two different occasions I was woken up in the early hours of the morning by noises that sounded like somebody rattling their shackles, the way the chains sound when you’re cleaning them. I thought it was strange, but even stranger was that the noise seemed to be coming from the corner of my room, sort of from the ceiling. Half-asleep, I didn’t give it much thought, and just assumed it was coming from the cell next door. The second time I heard the noise something about it was different. There was the noise of the chains again, but this time I felt what I can only describe as a presence. I laughed to myself – maybe there was a ghost around. But fuck, it was weird all the same.

  Then, on 11 May, I was moved from cell 34 to a newly painted one, number 38. When I was chatting to my Thai friend Jib, he casually asked me whether I’d heard the ghost in my old cell. He told me that, about three years before, a guy who came from northern Thailand, one of the mountain people, had been sentenced to death and was put in cell 34. He had hanged himself from the bars. From time to time prisoners who occupied that cell thought they heard his ghost …

  At the end of May, I was still in solitary in Klong Prem. I wrote to the Director of the Department of Corrections, Mr Sudhiklom Chartchi, requesting that I be transferred back to Bangkwang. At the same time I put in a request to the Israeli embassy, asking to be allowed to receive the following items: two blankets, one bedsheet, one normal pillow and one round long pillow (known as a sausage). I really needed a bed. We could order blankets through the coffee shop, but as we were allowed to spend only 200 Thai baht a day and a blanket cost 100 Thai baht, that left only 100 Thai baht for food. And the blankets they sold were so thin anyway I’d have had to buy at least 20 just to be comfortable.

  Just to get out of the building and to break the boredom, I found a reason to visit the hospital. In Klong Prem you couldn’t order fresh vegetables, and I was obliged to eat the oily food they sold us in plastic bags. I was afraid this would lead to my having heart problems again, and I was beginning to experience discomfort similar to what I’d experienced just before my first episode, which was now about three years back. I wanted to ask a doctor if I could go back on aspirin. Since being in solitary, I had lost 5kg.

  At the hospital I met two foreigners, an Australian and a Canadian, who were serving short sentences. They seemed stressed and in fact rather overwhelmed by my friendliness – not surprisingly, as I learnt later on that they were both paedophiles!

  While I was at the hospital, a group of women prisoners was marched in. Among them was a Western woman wearing a surgical mask. For some reason I thought she might be the South African-Russian girl named Nina Chetchkov. Male prisoners and women prisoners are forbidden to talk to each other, and anyway she didn’t notice me. I doubted that she would recognise me. While we were waiting for the doctors to return from lunch, I saw the girls sitting a short distance from me. I walked part of the way across to them and called out to the woman, asking if her name was Nina. She didn’t respond, only gave me a glance as if she thought I might be crazy. I walked away, not wanting to attract the attention of the woman guard. A little later, a few of the women prisoners, ‘Nina’ included, walked past where I was sitting on their way to the toilet. When they came back, she couldn’t have been more than a couple of metres away from me.

  ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘I’m South African. It’s me, Alexander.’

  ‘I’m Nina,’ she smiled, her eyes lighting up as she removed her mask.

  It was quite an emotional moment. Nina and I had corresponded maybe some 15 years back and here we both were – still a long way from home.

  All the doctors took lunch from 12 to 2pm. While I was waiting, I asked one of the medical orderlies to fit me in early, as I had not eaten. He rudely replied that if I could not wait, I should return to the building. The rest of the group that had come with me from Building 2 had long since gone back, but one of the White Shirts had been instructed to remain behind with me. Out of spite, he left my name for last, so I saw the doctor only around 5pm. I’d been there since 9 in the morning.

  We normally got locked up at 3pm, so while I was still patiently waiting to see the doctor, two guards came rushing into the hospital reception area, searching for me, thinking that I might have escaped. They were not impressed with the hospital when they saw me still sitting waiting to be attended to, and in fact asked me to report the incident to the embassy.

  I still didn’t have proper bedding and so I arranged with Elisabeth, on her Wednesday visit, to buy me five new towels which I would use to make a bed. She could buy these at the prison shop, and they would be delivered to the building at about 1pm. That night, tossing and turning on the concrete, I actually dreamt about the towels. Even my dreams were becoming boring.

  On Friday 27 May I finally had a visit from the Israeli embassy. The rabbi came along too, with his sidekick Chai. It was a good visit, but a sobering one. The rabbi informed me that I might not be able to go back to Bangkwang. I had been moved, he said, because I had been categorised as dangerous, and the suspicion that I had been dealing drugs in prison was sticking to me. I was also suspected of having a mobile phone. That I had a dog was true, but the rest was all hogwash and I told the rabbi.

  When I first arrived at Klong Prem, there were five of us in my section of solitary confinement, two of whom were on death row and had shackles permanently welded onto their legs. We were locked up for 23 hours a day. I had arrived there fairly late in the afternoon, when all the other prisoners were already locked up. Although it was a punishment section, the rooms also had guys in them from the general population, which meant that we would be let out around 6.30am and then they would get locked up at the same time as
us in the afternoon, around 3pm.

  My first morning when I had a cell to myself, when we were woken, after the other guys had been let out, we were required to take our personal possessions – beds, plates, cutlery, books, whatever you wanted – into the corridor. Our cells were locked and the electricity was switched off. One of the cells would be left open so that we could use the toilets during the day. Just outside the solitary section, in the passage, were two or three tables where the guards would lounge around.

  It was a Saturday morning, so there was only one commodore on duty. Between the five of us, three of the guys had dogs. They would use them quite freely, and the guards paid no attention. Jib also had a dog, but, because he had ordered several executions from within the prison, some of the outside guards would pay him regular visits hoping to catch him with his dog and extort money from him.

  In that first week, I built a hiding place in my cell and I agreed to keep Jib’s dog for him in the early hours of the evening, when it was customary for the guards to raid our cells. Naturally, I was taking a huge risk, but my hiding place was an excellent one and I felt reasonably confident. That evening, while watching Thailand’s Got Talent on TV, Jib, who slept diagonally across the corridor from me, gave a whistle, signalling that he wanted his dog. Using a mirror, we would watch to see what the guards were doing. They were approximately 40m away but couldn’t access our section without opening the security gate. This became our routine: Jib would signal to me that he was ready, then I would take the dog out of its hiding place and put it in a plastic bag with the charger. Then I would lie flat on my stomach close up to my steel-cage door, at the bottom of which were bars, so I could actually reach out into the corridor. Jib would then shoot a long length of string across to me, with a little metal ring attached to an elastic, a distance of about 7m. I would stretch my arm out and, still lying on my stomach, retrieve the metal ring with the string, and quickly tie it around the plastic bag with the dog inside it. Using my mirror, I would look again to make sure the coast was clear. (The first time I went through this rigmarole, I can tell you it was quite a nerve-racking operation.) Then I’d release the plastic bag and Jib would haul it in as quickly as possible. I would peek in the mirror one more time to see if the coast was still clear, but, even if it wasn’t, it would have been too late because Jib by then was already hauling it in. Jib would bark the dog till morning, and I would go back to do whatever it was I was doing – either reading or watching TV. In exchange for keeping the dog for Jib, he would allow me an hour on Saturdays and Sundays to call my family. The risk was definitely worth it. Because of the time difference between Thailand and North America, and Jessica’s own personal circumstances at home, this wasn’t always easy for us, but we set a time on a Saturday when I would call her. These conversations were intense and passionate.