Extradited

by Andrew Symeou

  One night I discovered that Christos was more insane than I initially thought. He woke me up at four o’clock in the morning and was shouting something in Greek that I didn’t understand – waving his hands around. I told him to go back to sleep, but he kept on poking me with a stiff piece of thin wire. I managed to wake myself up and slid off the top bunk.

  ‘Ti thelis esi? – What do you want?’ I asked him. I softly massaged my temples, having no idea what he was yapping on about.

  Fivos, who was lying in his bunk, translated for us. ‘Christos says he wants you to pierce his tongue.’

  I rubbed my eyes, hardly able to see. ‘He wants me to pierce his tongue?’

  ‘Yes,’ Fivos said, sitting up.

  ‘He wants me to pierce his tongue?’

  ‘Yes reh! I told you already, he is an arsehole!’ Fivos said, chuckling.

  ‘With what? This wire?’ I asked.

  Fivos shrugged his shoulders while Christos nodded and opened his mouth, gesturing how he would like me to pierce his tongue.

  ‘You can’t just stick dirty wires through your tongue.’

  Fivos and Christos briefly argued the point that I’d just made between themselves. ‘He said it’s fine, he’s done all of his piercings himself,’ Fivos translated.

  I lit a cigarette. ‘Listen, tell the guy that the tongue’s a muscle; he might hit a nerve end or vein. It’s not the same as an ear lobe, or an eyebrow … or whatever else he’s pierced.’

  Fivos took a deep, irritated breath. They argued for a while, shouting fast in Greek. I saw Yiannis turn around in his bunk to face us, open his eyes and softly close them as if to say, I’m trying to sleep here, guys.

  ‘Christos doesn’t care, he wants to do it,’ Fivos said.

  ‘If he does it wrong he could bleed to death or never be able to talk again. It’s a fucking stupid idea.’

  Fivos smiled. ‘You’re telling me? Of course it’s a stupid idea!’

  I couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity of it all. ‘Tell him it will get infected, man! Where did he even find this wire? On the floor?’

  Fivos let out a subtle snigger that reflected mine. ‘I don’t know. Trelos einai reh! – He’s crazy, man!’

  In spite of my advice, Christos was adamant that he wanted to go ahead with the piercing. I made Fivos tell him not to blame me if he lost the ability to talk.

  Christos held a lighter underneath the wire, moving it up and down and claiming that the flame had killed all of the bacteria. He held his tongue out and pulled the tip with his index finger and thumb to expose the veiny base. I caught a whiff of his smelly breath. There were little bits of food in his mouth, which made me realise that I hadn’t seen him brush his teeth for the whole time I’d been in Avlona. I started to poke the middle of his tongue with the wire, avoiding the most obvious vein that I could see. I jabbed a little bit harder, but it was going to take a lot more force because the wire was quite blunt. I pushed as hard as I could a few times without penetrating – he let out a little moan with each poke. The wire pressed into the bottom of his tongue; I poked even harder. As soon as I saw the metal wire begin to pierce through his tongue, I couldn’t go through with it. I felt like I was going to be sick. Christos casually pulled the wire out of his tongue so that he could smoke a cigarette. He claimed that his mouth now tasted of lemon, but he must have been confusing it with the taste of blood. He poked Yiannis with the wire, waking him up to finish the job.

  ‘You know what’s gonna happen now?’ Fivos asked me, once I’d returned from heaving over the toilet hole.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s gonna do it wrong, man; Christos is gonna punch him.’ Fivos had been locked up with them for quite a few months – he must have seen something similar happen in the past.

  I remember the stifled screams as Yiannis gripped Christos’s tongue with his left hand and rammed the wire into the tongue as hard as he could with his right. Christos let out a screeching moan that sounded like a closed-mouth roar. Almost automatically, his right fist smashed the left side of Yiannis’s face. There was a crunching sound. Yiannis fell to the ground and Christos continuously kicked him. I wrapped my arms around Christos as hard as I could, pulling him away from Yiannis.

  Rather than going upwards, the wire had gone into his tongue horizontally. Almost the entire six-centimetre wire was inside of his tongue, but the tip of the wire had failed to poke out of the top. Instead, it was almost touching the back of his throat. Fivos burst into laughter as Christos sat down and struggled to pull the wire out of his tongue before lighting another cigarette. He was mumbling swear words directed at Yiannis, unable to talk properly. He ended up staying up all night, trying to pierce his own tongue.

  When I woke up a few hours later, I noticed that he’d fallen asleep with the wire successfully threaded through. His lips were faintly covered in blood, as though he was wearing red lipstick. When he woke up he attempted to put the ‘tongue bar’ (the piece of jewellery) into the pierced hole. I have no idea where he’d found it. It didn’t matter; his tongue was probably three times its original size and it all seemed to be a huge waste of time.

  Christos’s tongue seemed to return to a normal size after a few days, despite the hundreds of cigarettes that he’d chain-smoked since ‘the incident’. Yiannis wasn’t happy, though; I was given the impression that he couldn’t handle another night of Christos’s antics. I didn’t blame him; I myself had started to get worried. Who could have known what the guy was capable of? I’d already witnessed him almost strangling Yiannis to death and piercing his own tongue with a dirty wire!

  Yiannis soon made a complaint to the Archi Fylakas about Christos, which was a complete malakia. I found it strange because they were friends from the outside who had both been caught stealing cars together. The guards moved Yiannis to cell nine with Georgios (the drug-dealing pimp), his friend (also Georgios) and a convicted murderer called Mihalakis. Rather than Christos losing his temper and beating Yiannis senseless, Yiannis was invited back into our cell for an ‘intervention’ where lots of abusive language was hurled at him. Once Yiannis was sent back to his new cell to think about what he’d done, Fivos told me that Christos wanted to celebrate the fact that Yiannis had left. It’d been decided that we would be brewing our own alcohol. I was quite concerned, as being caught with alcohol in Avlona would have resulted in a six-month prison sentence; but at the same time I had no control over what they did. I had to go along with it.

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ve done this many times,’ Fivos reassured me.

  Christos asked me if I was a roufianos – a rat.

  ‘Ti nomizis reh? – What do you think, man?’

  We could buy many things in Avlona from the pakali – grocers, such as coffee, cigarettes, pre-paid telephone cards and necessities like toilet paper. We could even order fruit, vegetables and pasta. I’d never really bought anything other than the necessities, but for my first order, each of my cellmates and I had chipped in for the ingredients to brew alcohol. Fivos ordered lots of sugar, I ordered several cartons of orange juice, Christos ordered lots of cigarettes (not an ingredient, but essential nonetheless) and Makis (our new cellmate who was arrested for stealing a motor scooter) ordered lots of apples. The last ingredient was free: every morning we’d be given two long loaves of bread that looked like huge baguettes.

  I copied Fivos; he’d written his shopping list with his name and inmate number on the top. We walked to the front of the wing, where we posted our shopping list in a little post box. To order groceries like this, inmates would need to be financially supported by people outside of the prison. The guards would accept cash from friends or family of the inmate, which would be deposited in a ‘prison account’ because no cash was allowed. It was all very sloppy, as other inmates ran the accounts. Sometimes they would steal a few euros out of each one to buy whatever they wanted. I regarded this as a kind of unavoidable ‘prison tax’. Once the order had been processed, there would be a specific d
ay when the guards would fill an empty room near their offices with the groceries. We’d go to collect them, which was chaos because there were so many inmates and sometimes we’d have to wait for hours.

  Our groceries had arrived a few days after we’d ordered them inside big, blue plastic bags the size of black bin-liners. It was 9 p.m. As soon as one of the guards shut the cell door behind him and we heard the metallic clonk of the key turning in the lock, we immediately started to mix the concoction that would soon be fermented. The others had borrowed a few utensils that had been circulating Parartima. For example, Christos managed to find a miniature, portable electric hob and a pan big enough for Fivos to boil sugar water. Makis and Christos crushed up all of the apples while I was instructed to rip the crust off the loaves of bread that we’d collected and make a perfect sphere out of the dough-like interior. We lined up four of the big plastic bags, which we would be using to brew our alcohol. We poured in all of the ingredients, plus the orange juice that I’d ordered. Once everything was in the bag and ready to ferment, Christos let out all of the excess air. He made sure that all of the ingredients in the bag were airtight, forming a perfect blue ball that was filled with sugary juice, mushy apples and bread. Fivos knotted the very top of the bags, allowing room for alcoholic fumes to later fill the bag.

  Christos placed the sack of ingredients into his sports bag and we hid it in the small gap between the two bunk beds. We covered it all with sheets and towels, so that the guards wouldn’t see it when they came to lock us in.

  ‘So … now what?’ I asked Fivos, who was looking at me with a big grin on his face.

  ‘Now, my friend – we wait.’

  21

  * * *

  INTO THE WILD

  * * *

  I still had no idea if the bail appeal had happened, or whether the courthouse in Zante had conveniently forgotten about it. Alison Beckett from the British consulate came to visit me, but she had no further news on the matter. The topic of conversation was generally about the Greek justice system and how unbearably slow it is. I remember Alison having a kind smile, which almost made me forget that what she was telling me was awful for my case. When I took a moment to digest what she was saying, my chest quivered. I was given the impression that I was just a random document among thousands of others that would probably get lost!

  ‘Andrew, you’re going to have to be very patient,’ I remember her saying sympathetically.

  I’d started to accept it as true, when all I wanted to do was clear my name and go home. But, to be honest, I’d started to get used to life in Avlona (even though my cellmates were possibly insane). It wasn’t easy to settle there, but it would have been far easier to endure if I’d known how long I was going to be incarcerated for. It was like running a marathon and being absolutely exhausted all the time because I had no clue as to how far away the finish line was. The finish line was my home, and I was determined to do whatever it took to get there.

  Alison had brought a few newspapers and books for me to read, which was very nice of her. One of the books was called Into the Wild, which was a true story about a young man from Virginia who gave all of his money to charity, changed his name and hitchhiked around America. He travelled to Alaska and attempted to survive in the wilderness, but in the end was found dead inside a derelict bus. I read the book in two days and it was a great form of escape. When incarcerated, there’s nothing more uplifting than the fantasy of being in the great outdoors – it was something that I’d visualise thereafter to get myself through each day. If I closed my eyes and imagined freedom, I could smell air as fresh as a mountain breeze. I didn’t need any kind of drug to escape my reality, or Christos to strangle me and deprive me of oxygen until the point of hallucination. All I had to do was close my eyes and think – really hard.

  As soon as I’d finished the book, I met a new inmate called Arnas Pakrosnis from Lithuania. He was tall, skinny and blond, sticking out in Parartima like a sore thumb. I invited him into cell five to meet Fivos, which I thought he would appreciate because Fivos also spoke English. When Arnas sat down, he noticed the book on the table. He told me that he’d seen the movie adaptation and it had inspired him and his friends to hike into the wilderness just outside of Kaunas (the second-largest city in Lithuania) with a bottle of vodka and ‘a big fucking bag of weed’. They camped out there for days, just to get away from the stresses of everyday life for a short while.

  Arnas explained that he’d been caught trafficking a huge amount of drugs on a boat from Turkey to Rhodes. At first I thought it was a stupid thing to do – was the money really worth the risk of life imprisonment? The more he told me, the more sympathetic I became towards him (and feeling sympathy for an inmate was a rarity in Avlona). He told me that his dad was in debt to a group of crooks, but had died of a heart attack and left his family with the debt. The crooks approached Arnas and demanded their money, but Arnas and his family had no idea where any of it was. When he told them that he was only nineteen and had never seen that much money in his life, they forced him to do a job for them and threatened him with a gun. They said that they would kill his mum and sister if he didn’t. I attempted to put myself into his shoes. Would I have done it?

  ‘Why didn’t you go to the police!?’ I asked him.

  He smiled. ‘I don’t know what the fuck it’s like in England, my friend. But in Kaunas, that would be suicide!’

  It seemed as though he had no choice. Arnas told me that the crooks flew him to Turkey, where he was told of an address to meet someone who would give him a suitcase and boat tickets from Turkey to Rhodes – then from Rhodes to somewhere in Italy. The plan was to transport the drugs to Italy via boat to clear his father’s debt. When he entered Greece, the border security searched random suitcases and his was one of them. He described to us the guilt that was written all over his face, and beat his chest with a closed fist to show how fast his heart was pounding. The security guard found no illegal substances in his suitcase and let him go. Delighted that he’d managed to get away with the first part of the crime, Arnas walked out. Just as he was about to leave the area, something must have dawned on the security guard who had searched his suitcase: the clothes in the suitcase didn’t belong to Arnas – they clearly weren’t his size and some of the items were women’s clothes with the price tags still attached to them. When the security guard called him back, his heart palpitated more and more. They emptied the suitcase and lifted it slowly, realising that it was far too heavy. In front of his eyes, they sliced open the base of the case with a Stanley knife and found six kilos of pure heroin. Now, here he was, an inmate in Avlona, talking to me and Fivos!

  Arnas and I went into the courtyard and walked up and down, chatting and smoking cigarette after cigarette. It turned out that he was a student like me and it was his first day in Avlona. I noticed that he was walking quite stiffly, as though filled with apprehension. As the hours passed, I could sense that he’d relaxed a bit, which I’m glad that I’d helped him do. The sun began to set behind the towering mountain in the distance – it left the Parartima courtyard with a cool, tranquil atmosphere. Arnas and I sat with another inmate called Socrates, who spoke some English and told us that he had been arrested for threatening his wife with a knife after catching her cheating on him.

  ‘They will probably take me to Korydallo. Perrr … that fucking place,’ he said while shaking his head.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked. It was the first time I’d ever heard the word.

  ‘Man, you don’t know about Korydallos? You didn’t hear about Vassilis Paleokostas? The guy who escaped from Korydallos Prison in a helicopter this year!’ he said in broken English.

  I shook my head.

  He continued. ‘Reh, it’s the fucking most crazy jail in all of Greece, maybe even Europe.’ His facial expression said it all; he was trying to hide the droop of his cheeks and subtle headshake with a delicate smile. Socrates was facing a possible transfer there, and he was definitely crapping himself
.

  When I asked him why they would be transferring him, he told me that it was because he’d be turning twenty-one. My heart fell into my stomach when the words reached my ears. I always had faith that I’d be released before my twenty-first birthday, but it was beginning to look unlikely. I only had a month before I would be too old to be in Avlona and I’d still heard nothing about the appeal for bail. Illegal immigrants like Jamal were thirty years old and had no proof of their real ages. They were able to stay in Avlona for years, yet I was facing a possible transfer to one of the worst prisons in Europe for my twenty-first birthday present! I asked Socrates if there was any way we could stay in Avlona after our birthdays. He told me that if we sign up for the prison school, they wouldn’t transfer us because it was for our ‘education’. I was relieved that there was a possible loophole. It was decided that I’d be signing up – and maybe it was a chance to further improve my Greek.