by Shani Krebs
With the date for the King’s amnesty now so very close, no wonder my heart was over-excited.
For some time now I had been rather troubled by something my sister had planted in my mind: for some reason, Joan believed that I would never get out of prison alive. I never discussed this with her, as that would have been like inviting a bad omen to materialise, but now I couldn’t help wondering to myself whether I would actually ever make it out of Klong Prem. Freedom seemed tantalisingly close, but too much hoping always seemed to have a way of turning on me. Then I would pull myself together and decide that there was no way I was fucking going to die, and it didn’t matter what anyone thought. I would make it out of prison alive!
After months of counting down to the crucial news that would affect my life so profoundly, Sunday 4 December arrived – one day before the official announcement of the amnesty. Well, at least I had made it to the amnesty, I thought. So far, so good. The atmosphere in the building was exhilarating, and the news we wanted to hear had already begun filtering through. The documents had apparently arrived at the prison, but the official announcement was only to be made the next day, on the King’s birthday. However, everybody seemed to know that drug cases were going to be given a one-sixth reduction. If this was true, it meant that I would have approximately five months of my sentence left to serve. Although I had been hoping for a one-fifth reduction, I was over the moon with one sixth.
From being sentenced to life imprisonment, and then having to endure years of not knowing, finally I could start counting the months and weeks to my freedom. Let the final countdown begin! This countdown was real.
It’s hard to find the words to describe what I was feeling. It was like a dream. My head felt light and my heart raced (in a good way). I don’t think I had ever before experienced such an emotion. Happiness normally comes in waves, but this feeling had a permanence about it that lifted me so high I could almost fly. I wanted to scream and shout so that all the world would hear me.
I was going home!
When the news filtered through, I managed to call Joan to share it with my family. There were shouts and tears of joy at the other end of the line. I’d never heard my sister so excited. I imagined my mother’s joy, too, when she was told that she would see her only son in just a few months. Our nightmare was finally coming to an end. Suddenly that light at the end of the tunnel was brighter than it had ever been.
My time on the phone was very restricted, but I did manage to phone some of my friends and share the news with them. Joan would put it up on my Facebook page, though, and soon all my friends around the world would know that it wouldn’t be long now before I was a free man. That night, alone in my cell, I recited the Master of the Universe prayer, the one I had been reciting ten times a day. It slowly dawned on me that it had nothing to do with being physically released from prison; it was all about being spiritually free. Of course it was. During my prayers that night, I was far more attentive and aware somehow, and I felt the closest I had ever felt to G-d. I thought about my mother who, for the past 17 and a half years, had gone down on her hands and knees every single night and prayed to G-d that the day would come when she would see her only son again. I always believed that I would be released in G-d’s time, and, over all the years I’d been locked up, I had kept telling Joan that Hashem had the perfect time for each and every one of us. And now here was mine: this was my time. I was going to make it, I knew I was. I couldn’t stop thanking Him.
My excitement was tangible. I could feel it and taste it. I tried to force myself to read, but it was so difficult to concentrate that eventually I gave up and lay staring at the ceiling, thinking about life on the outside. One of the first things I wanted to do was sit at a pavement coffee shop and just watch people walking by. I was going to experience everything as if I was experiencing it for the first time.
Amnesty or not, it was business as usual in Klong Prem. After all, only a handful of us would be going home; the rest, although with reduced sentences, still had to face the harsh reality of doing a long stretch of time. As a distraction, besides having my head in the clouds, I would spend between two to four hours a day playing backgammon.
The next weekend, something happened that dampened our spirits. On the Sunday, one of the Thai inmates in solitary confinement committed suicide. There were six Thais in the same cell; at around 1am one of them went to the toilet and found this guy strung up with the nylon drawstring from his shorts. They shouted for the guards and there was a huge commotion. The guards came in, looked through the door, and told the guys that under no circumstances should they remove the body. They would come and take care of it in the morning.
I couldn’t understand why this guy took his life, as he was one of those who was going to benefit from the amnesty. Perhaps, after being in prison for so many years, the thought of going into the outside world was too frightening for him to contemplate. It made me apprehensive about my impending release. I had become institutionalised, too, but my longing for freedom only intensified with each passing day that brought me closer to my release.
On 21 December I was called for an embassy visit. Normally I would make my way to the visit area by myself, but today a guard came to escort me. And instead of going to a normal embassy room, I was taken to the office where the administration guards worked. There, to my surprise, I was greeted by Douglas Gibson, the South African ambassador himself. He had come to say goodbye to me because his four-year term in Thailand was up. I was glad to see him; something that had been very much on my mind was whether I was still a South African citizen. He confirmed that I was.
Christmas came and went, and then, on Monday 26 December, we had a major check at 5.45am. This time, the guards opened each cell and instructed us to come out and squat, while one or two guards did a thorough search of our cells. Unfortunately for me, the guard checking my cell was an arsehole who for some reason had an intense dislike of farangs. I was nervous because I had two SIM cards hidden away, as well as my stabbing knife. They turned my room upside down and this guard found my knife.
‘What is this?’ he asked as he called me back in.
I explained to him that I used the knife to cut fruit.
He looked at me sceptically. The length and shape of the blade were nothing like a normal fruit-cutting knife and both of us knew it.
After the check we were all taken outside, and made to sit while the second in command of the prison (the 105) gave us a lecture. He asked in a joking manner where we had hidden our mobile phones, as they had found nothing among our belongings (except my knife, which, I noted uneasily, he was holding in his hand). He then called one of the senior commodores from our building and asked who the knife belonged to. The commodore pointed at me and said, ‘Tarnchad’ (foreigner).
Being caught with a dangerous weapon was as bad as being caught with a dog. Shackles and solitary confinement. I had been out in the general population for only a month and a half. I heard the guard ask whether I kept a knife to commit suicide. I laughed and repeated what I’d said earlier, that I used it to cut fruit. All the prisoners had a chuckle at that – the guard, too. I hoped they would just let it go for once. Later I was teased by the guards, who kept asking me why I had to cut my fruit with a sword; some even went so far as to ask me who I wanted to stab. It became quite the joke, but of course everyone understood that the knife was for self-protection. I breathed a huge sigh of relief when it became clear that they weren’t going to take the matter any further.
That night, a group of about 50 of the prisoners who had been evacuated during the floods returned. They seemed really jubilant. It was just my luck that three of them used to occupy the cell that I was in. I had made a deal with the guard that I could stay on my own until they came back, and now one of the guards came and negotiated with me. Would I take two of them into the cell? I didn’t really have a say, but I said that I could only stay with non-smokers. Both prisoners were serving death sentences for murder. One had been in pr
ison for only three months, the other for three years, and I would be going home in five months. I didn’t understand the logic.
These guys had come from Khao Bin. They were tired and hadn’t eaten anything. Fortunately, because of orders that we hadn’t received at the beginning of the floods, I had extra food that had arrived that day, so I shared my supper with them. They seemed okay and I thought we would get on just fine. Neither of them complained about my having the space in front of the TV. I felt really strange sharing the small cell and being in such close proximity with two strangers. The two of them showered after supper, and it wasn’t long before they were sound asleep.
Around midnight I was woken by loud snoring. I started moaning out loud – oh nooo … not snoring! The other guy woke up and we looked at each other disgruntledly. If there is anything I hate, it’s snoring. There was no way I was going to get any sleep. I wasn’t happy at all. Not only had they invaded my space, but now one of them was going to torture me with his fucking snoring. Whenever he snored, I would knock him (which he had given me permission to do), but still I felt uncomfortable. I didn’t really like to wake anybody up, and besides, this had originally been their cell, after all.
On the positive side, I welcomed their company because it might help the time pass more quickly.
A few days later, the Israeli consul came to visit. I could tell that Eli Gil didn’t feel comfortable in my presence, but frankly I wasn’t very happy with the Israelis either. I knew they had deliberately drawn out the procedures to transfer me to Israel, knowing that I would benefit from the amnesty and would be released in the coming months anyway. Now he wanted to know if I still wanted to transfer to a prison in Israel. I asked him when the next prisoner transfer meeting would be held. Usually, these meetings were in either March or April. I estimated that my day of release would be near the end of April 2012. Gil said the next meeting would be in July 2012, which only confirmed for me that they had never intended to take me back to Israel.
I looked him straight in the eyes and said, ‘Where’s the logic in that? I’ll be home by April. Why would I want to wait until July?’ I was thinking, just to fuck him around, that I would still go to Israel. I could just imagine all the excuses he would have to come up with. In the end, though, I told him I would be going home to South Africa to be with my family. But, I couldn’t resist adding, I still wanted my Israeli passport.
Over the past month a tomcat had been patrolling the corridors late at night and howling like a crying baby, so loudly that it woke virtually everybody up. It was driving us crazy. My Eastern European friend and I conspired to kill it. We decided that we would give it the propranolol that had been prescribed for my heart palpitations, mixed in with some tinned fish. One night, the creature’s yowling woke us up as usual, and we sprang up, ready to put our plan into action. My accomplice pushed the fish mixture into the corridor and we went back to sleep. The next morning, we heard that one of the cats had died. Excitedly, we went to see if it was true, and we couldn’t believe our eyes: we had killed a cat all right, but it was the wrong one!
With my freedom imminent, I spent the better part of most days daydreaming, dreaming of the future. While a new chapter in my life might be starting, there was still no escaping the past. My joy was overshadowed by the sadness of knowing that I was leaving my friends behind. Unlike at Bangkwang, where we had a party every year to celebrate New Year, nothing exciting had been planned in Klong Prem for Songkran. I didn’t mind because I knew I’d be celebrating something much more exciting in a few months’ time.
My new cellmates turned out to be okay. One of them was a taxi driver who was in for murdering a woman and her daughter. Besides snoring, he would also sometimes talk in his sleep, waking me at odd hours. Early on New Year’s morning, while I was on the toilet in the cell, with the curtains drawn, one of my cellmates kept asking me to hurry up.
‘Rew, rew’ (Quickly, quickly), he said urgently.
‘Bab neung’ (One minute), I responded.
What this guy didn’t seem to understand was that I was in the middle of relieving my own bowels; it’s not like you can just switch off. Anyway, I starting flushing and washing my ass, but before I had finished, while I was still squatting over the sunken toilet and before I had a chance to stand up and pull up my pants, this Thai pushed into the toilet, dropped his pants in a single motion and let rip before he’d even squatted. My face was almost up against the wall and some of his shit came spraying onto my bare feet.
What a freak-out! I screamed at him, ‘Khun baa!’ (You’re crazy), holding my nose and breathing desperately through my mouth and flushing my feet with water all at the same time. Then I bolted out of there in a flash, trying not to puke and add to the disgusting chaos. Once safely away, I burst out laughing, whether from shock or the flashes of the scene that were replaying in my mind, I don’t know. After that, whenever I saw this guy, we would look at each other and pack up laughing. That was a New Year I was certainly never going to forget.
My New Year’s resolution that year wasn’t actually to stop swearing (it hadn’t worked too well when I’d tried it before), but to try and limit it to the best of my ability. I didn’t want to go home and still pepper my conversation with ‘motherfucker’ or ‘fuck’ every five seconds, like all foreigners in prison did. I wondered how successful I’d be.
During my last few months in prison, I had learnt from a recently arrested Nigerian that, of the original 300 who had transferred back to Nigeria in 2003, 60 had since returned to Thailand and been caught smuggling ‘ice’ (methamphetamine). Now they were awaiting trial in Bombat prison. This had angered the Thai government and had put a strain on Thailand’s relations with Nigeria.
In February, two months before my release, I was told by a Facebook friend and a correspondent of mine that Joan had got divorced. I was shocked. Joan, not wanting to upset me, had kept it a secret. My brother-in-law Malcolm and I had always been close. It would be strange, after his involvement over all the years, to think of him not being part of the celebration.
With a new year came a new wave of clampdowns in Thailand’s prisons. In early February almost every TV channel carried stories about this. Five hundred prisoners, the Big Legs, were to be moved to Khao Bin, and before long, in a combined operation, the army, the Black Shirts and the Department of Corrections raided several prisons. Bangkwang and Klong Prem were high on their list. Many mobiles and drugs were seized. These crackdowns were all very well, but what the government didn’t realise was that every time such a major move went down, they were handing the guards an opportunity to extort money from the dealers. The dealers could pay anything from 200 000 to 1 million Thai baht not to be part of the move, so that they could continue with their business of selling drugs.
The Minister of Justice announced plans for the building of a new prison called Supermax, intended to house only drug offenders. When I heard this, I couldn’t help thinking about the time in Bangkwang, more than 12 years back, when they had closed down Building 1 and moved all the prisoners into the other buildings. They had demolished the building with a view to constructing a high-security block similar to American prisons. The demolition started with great enthusiasm, but once the building had been reduced to rubble, the whole operation ceased. Weeks and then months passed, and nothing happened. When we enquired why construction had been halted, we were told that the Director of the prison had stolen all the money. And the funny part of it was that, although he lost that job, he got another one straight afterwards, and a promotion, too, to Deputy Director of the Department of Corrections! I could just imagine where the money allocated for this new Supermax would go – straight into the pockets of all those corrupt officials who ran this million-dollar kingdom.
In early February the Thai footballers approached me to ask whether they could draft a petition in my name requesting the prison authorities to reopen the indoor football pitch. If the Thais used their names, there was a chance of their being moved to a
nother building. Foreigners had more chance of getting things done, largely because of the authorities’ fear of pissing off our embassies if they declined a reasonable request. About 30 of the footballers had already signed the petition.
One thing I had to give the prison authorities was that they did encourage sports activities, and sometimes they even participated themselves. Soon after the petition was submitted, our request was granted. We started using the indoor court to play football once more. It was a very happy day for all of us.
One afternoon I received a visit from Renee Aaron from the South African embassy. She told me she was going to start processing my temporary travel documents and would need me to sign some papers, have my fingerprints taken and also a photo. On the same day, the prison confirmed my official release date.
On 22 April 2012 I would be walking out of prison.
What a feeling! I could hardly wait to bark the dog and tell my sister. My Facebook group page, ‘Shani Krebs – Captivated Artist’, was already alive with activity in anticipation of my return. By the time I managed to speak to her, Joan had already heard the news from both the Israeli and the South African embassies. Even though this was only a confirmation of what we already knew, hearing it made official was still music to my ears. Silently, I celebrated and thanked Hashem.
