Each cell held a hundred and fifty boys. The conditions were awful. There weren’t enough beds for everyone, so you had to take turns at sleeping. There was only one bathroom, at the end of the cell, and it stank so much that even if you just went near it you felt like vomiting. The ventilation was non-existent; the only source of air was the holes in the sheets of iron covering the two windows.
It was hard to breathe in there, so a lot of weak boys, who had cardiac or respiratory diseases, couldn’t take it for long: they fell ill; often they fainted and sometimes never came to. A few weeks after my arrival, a boy who had a serious lung condition started spitting blood. Poor kid, he asked for something to drink, but the others dumped him in a corner and wouldn’t go near him for fear of catching tuberculosis. After he had spent a night on the ground, lying in the pool of blood that had formed from his continual spitting, we asked the administration to move him to the hospital.
The light was always on, night and day. Three feeble lamps lit the space inside a kind of sarcophagus made of iron and thick glass, screwed to the wall.
The tap was always running; the water came out as white as milk, and hot – almost boiling – in winter and in summer.
The beds were three-level bunks, and very narrow. All that was left of the mattresses was the covering; the filling had been worn down, so you slept on the hard surface, on the wood. Since it was always infernally hot, nobody used the blankets: we put them under our heads, because the pillows were as thin as the mattresses, with nothing inside them. I preferred to sleep without a pillow and instead put the blanket under the mattress, so as not to break my bones on the wood.
There was no timetable to follow; we were left to ourselves for twenty-four hours a day. Three times a day they brought us some food – in the morning a mug of tea which looked like dirty water, with a faint trace of something which might have been tea in a previous existence. On top of the mug they put a piece of bread with a knob of white butter which had been thinned in the kitchen by the cooks, who stole the provisions, as though they were the criminals, not us.
Since the third floor, where I was, was that of the ‘special purpose’ block reserved for the most dangerous juveniles, we didn’t deserve the honour of having spoons or other metal objects at breakfast. We spread the butter on our bread with our fingers. We dipped the buttered bread in the mug of tea and ate it like a dunked biscuit. Afterwards we drank the tea with the grease floating in it; it was very tasty and nourishing.
Three boys would stand by the little window in the door: they would take the food from the guards’ hands and pass it to the others. Taking anything from the cops was considered ‘dishonest’; those who did it were sacrificing themselves for everyone, and in exchange for the favour nobody touched them – they were allowed to live in peace.
For lunch we had a very light soup, with half-cooked vegetables floating in the dishes like starships in space. The luckiest boys found a piece of potato or a fishbone, or the bone of some animal. That was the first course. For the main course they gave us a dish of kasha: that’s the Russian name for cracked wheat boiled and mixed with a little butter. Usually they put in it pieces of something which looked like meat but tasted like the soles of shoes. We also got a piece of bread and the usual knob of butter, and to eat this exquisite fare they even gave us a spoon. To drink we again had tea, identical to that of the morning, but not nearly as warm. The spoons were counted, however, and if at the end – after the quarter of an hour allotted for lunch – there was a single one missing, the squad from the ‘educational’ unit would come into the cell and beat us all up, without bothering to make many inquiries. At that point the spoon would be given back, or rather thrown towards the door by someone who preferred to remain anonymous, because otherwise his cellmates would have tortured him and, as we say in such cases, ‘made even his shadow bleed’.
For supper there was kasha again, a mug of tea with bread and butter, and once again spoons, but this time we were only given ten minutes for eating.
A lot of trouble arose from food. Little groups of bastards, united by their common love of violence and torture, terrorized all the boys who were on their own and didn’t belong to any family. They would systematically beat them up and torture them, and make them pay a kind of ‘tax’, forcing them to give up most of their portions.
If you wanted to survive and have a quiet life in juvenile prison, you had to join the families. A family was made up of a group of people who had some common characteristic, often their nationality. Each family had its internal rules, and boys happily obeyed them in an effort to simplify their lives. In a typical family you would share everything. Anyone who received a parcel from home would give some of his stuff to the others. In this way everyone was constantly getting something from outside, which was very important psychologically: it helped to stop you becoming demoralized.
The members of one family protected each other, and ate and organized all their daily affairs together.
Each family also imposed some particular rules, some obligations that had to be met. For example, in our Siberian family it was forbidden to participate in gambling or any similar activity together with people from other families. And if anyone did anything to a Siberian, the whole family would jump on him, even if he were on his own, beat him up and force him to ‘soap his skis’ – that is, to ask the guards for an immediate transfer to another cell. He also had to justify his request by saying that he feared being killed. It was a gesture which everybody else looked upon as dishonest, and so when he was transferred that poor wretch would be very badly treated and despised by everyone.
*
Once a member of our family, a twelve-year-old boy called Aleksy and nicknamed ‘Canine Tooth’, had some problems with one of the sympathizers of Black Seed, who are known as Vorishki, or ‘Little Thieves’, because in Black Seed Vor, or ‘Thief’, is the name of the highest Authority. In prison the Little Thieves imitated the members of Black Seed in everything they did: they played cards and cheated while doing it, they bet on all kinds of things, and they had homosexual relations, often raping the weaker boys and then terrorizing them, using them as slaves.
Anyway, Canine Tooth went to the toilet with another Siberian (in prison people always move about together, so that if anything happens to a brother of yours he is not on his own), and, as the regulations stipulate, he informed everyone in the cell that he was about to go and relieve himself. It is customary to let people know, because many believe that if someone goes to the toilet you mustn’t eat or drink at the same time, otherwise the food and water will become dirty, and any person who touches that food will become zakontacheny, which in criminal slang means contaminated or tainted: a class of despised and maltreated people, who stand on the lowest level of the criminal hierarchy, from where they will never be able to rise again for the rest of their lives.
When Canine Tooth made his announcement, one of the Little Thieves, a sadistic fool by the name of Pyotr, piped up that Canine Tooth had better repeat what he’d said, because he hadn’t heard it clearly.
This was a clear provocation, to which Canine Tooth retorted equally rudely, suggesting that Pyotr should wash his ears more carefully, if he had trouble in hearing things.
After which Canine Tooth went to the toilet, relieved himself and returned to the area of the Siberian family.
After dinner fifteen Little Thieves came to see us, demanding that we give Canine Tooth up to them, because he was due a punishment for offending an honest criminal. Since our idea of honesty was very different from theirs, none of us would have dreamed of leaving a brother of ours in their hands. Without saying a word in reply, we jumped on them and gave them a sound thrashing. The biggest of us, Kerya, nicknamed ‘Yakut’, who was a pure native Siberian and had Indian features, tore off a piece of one of their ears with his teeth, and chewed and swallowed it in full view of everyone.
We forced eighteen people to ask for a transfer all at once, and from cell to cell, al
l over the prison, people began to tell this story, saying we were cannibals. After a month, a boy who had been transferred from the first floor to our cell told us in terror that it was rumoured downstairs that the Siberians on the third floor had eaten a boy alive, and that nothing had been left of him.
We Siberians had made friends with the Armenian family. We had known the Armenians from way back; there was a good relationship between our communities and we resembled each other in many ways. We had made a pact with them: if there was ever any serious trouble we would support each other. In this way the power of our communities had increased.
We celebrated our birthdays and other special days together; sometimes we even shared our parcels from home. If anyone needed something urgently, such as medicine, or ink for tattoos, we would help each other without hesitation.
We were good friends with the Armenians, and also with the Belarusians, who were good people, and with the boys who came from the Don, from the Cossack community: they were rather militaristic but good-hearted, and all were very brave.
We had problems with the Ukrainians, though: some of them were nationalistic and hated Russians, and for some strange reason even those who didn’t share those sentiments ended up supporting them. And our relationship with the Ukrainians deteriorated markedly after a Siberian from another cell killed one of them. A real hatred grew up between our communities.
We kept well away from the people from Georgia; they were all supporters of Black Seed. Each of them was desperate to become an Authority, invented countless ways of making others respect him, and conducted a kind of criminal electoral campaign to win votes. The Georgians I met in that jail knew nothing about true friendship or brotherhood; they lived together while hating each other and trying to cheat everyone else and make them their slaves, by exploiting the criminal laws and changing them to suit their own purposes. Only by doing this did they have any hope of becoming chiefs, and of gaining the respect of the adult criminals of the Black Seed caste.
The supporters of Black Seed exercised a reign of terror over the mass of inmates whom they called ‘heels’. Heels were ordinary prisoners, boys who had no connection with any criminal community, and who had ended up in jail purely through bad luck; many were the sons of alcoholics and had been convicted of vagrancy, a little respected article of the law. These poor souls were so exhausted and ignorant that everyone pitied them. The supporters of Black Seed, the Little Thieves, exploited them as slaves and mistreated them; they tortured them for sadistic pleasure and sexually abused them.
According to the Siberian tradition, homosexuality is a very serious infectious disease, because it destroys the human soul; so we grew up with a total hatred of homosexuals. This disease, which among our people has no precise name and is simply called ‘the sickness of the flesh’, is transmitted through the gaze, so a Siberian criminal will never look a homosexual in the eye. In the adult prisons, in places where the majority of inmates are of the Orthodox Siberian faith, homosexuals are forced to commit suicide, because they can’t share the same spaces with the others. As the Siberian proverb says: ‘The sick of the flesh do not sleep beneath the icons.’
I never fully understood the question of hatred for homosexuals, but since I was brought up in this way, I followed the herd. Over the years I have had many homosexual friends, people with whom I have worked and done business, and I have had a good relationship with many of them; I found them congenial, I liked them as people. And yet I have never been able to break the habit of calling someone a queer or a pansy if I want to insult them, even though immediately afterwards I regret it and feel ashamed. It’s Siberian education speaking for me.
The Little Thieves despised passive homosexuals, even though most of them were active homosexuals. In the cells where there were no strong families and most of the boys were left completely to themselves, the Little Thieves gang-raped them, forcing them to participate in real orgies. They maltreated, insulted and provoked them continually, calling them all sorts of offensive names and forcing them to live in inhuman conditions.
Some of the guards often raped the boys, too; this usually happened in the showers. You were allowed to take a shower once a week if you were in the ordinary regime, whereas in the special regime, where I was, you could only do so once a month. We used to improvise with plastic bottles, rigging up a shower over the toilet, since we always had plenty of hot water. When we went to the shower block it was like a military operation: we all walked close together; if there were any weak or sick boys among us we put them in the middle and always kept an eye on them; we moved like a platoon of soldiers.
The reason for this was that there were often violent brawls in the showers, sometimes for no special reason, and just because someone was feeling irritable. It only took someone stealing your place under the water for all hell to break loose. The guards never intervened; they let the youngsters work off their anger and stood there watching; sometimes they bet on the boys, as if they were fighting dogs.
One day, after a fight in the showers between us and the Georgians, I was running after a guy who had just snatched from me a towel embroidered by my mother. Suddenly my enemy stopped, and motioned to me not to make a noise. His attitude made me curious; I suspected a trap. I stopped running and approached him slowly, fists clenched, ready to hit him, but he pointed towards a cubicle from which a strange noise was coming, as if someone was slowly rubbing some iron object against the tiled wall. We guessed something nasty was happening. I felt uneasy; I wasn’t sure I wanted to see what was going on behind that partition.
Together with that boy, whom only a moment earlier I had wanted to beat to a pulp, I moved from one cubicle to another, hiding, drawing ever closer to the place the noise was coming from. I felt sick at the scene that appeared before our eyes: a large middle-aged warder with his trousers down, his head up and his eyes closed, was buggering a small thin boy, who was crying softly and not even attempting to escape the grip of his rapist, who was holding him still, with one hand on his neck and the other on his side.
The noise we had heard was that of the bunch of keys that hung from the belt of the paedophile’s lowered trousers: the keys scraped against the floor with every movement he made.
We were there for no more than a second, because as soon as we realized what was going on we fled in silence. As we approached the running showers where our friends were already washing, I signed to the Georgian to keep quiet and he replied with a nod.
*
The guards weren’t all alike. Some had a bit of humanity in them and didn’t treat us badly – that is, by not beating us up, not humiliating us and not abusing us, they were already helping us a lot. Others, however, forced some boys to prostitute themselves.
There was one disgusting old screw: he had been a guard in an adult prison all his life, and after studying child psychology had asked for a transfer to a juvenile institution. He wielded a lot of power in our prison. Although he was only a warder, he rivalled the director, because he had links with people who organized a new activity which had arrived from abroad along with democracy, as a form of free life. These people made paedophile films and forced the boys to prostitute themselves, having sex with foreigners, people who arrived from Europe and the USA, people who had pots of money and hence, in the new democratic system, immense power.
Many boys were picked up at a particular time of day from the cells and came back the next day with bags full of food and all kinds of stuff, such as glossy magazines, colouring pencils and other things which nobody in jail could dream of possessing. Their cellmates were forbidden to touch them or mistreat them; they were untouchable, nobody dared to raise a finger against them, because everyone knew those boys were the old warder’s whores. They called him ‘Crocodile Zhena’, after a character in a Soviet cartoon. The whores they called by women’s names. Their bunk was usually down at the end, near the door, and they stayed there all the time.
Nobody talked to them, they were completely isol
ated, we all pretended they didn’t exist. We Siberians, in particular, thought they were infectious, so we avoided even more than the others any form of contact even with their possessions, or with anyone who had come into contact with them or their possessions.
Once a sixteen-year-old boy called ‘Fish’, one of the Little Thieves, decided he wanted to rape a whore, a fourteen-year-old boy whom everyone called ‘Marina’. Marina was regularly picked up from his cell, but one morning he had come back with whip-marks on his arms, and with his neck red as if someone had been throttling him. But he didn’t seem upset; he was happy: he ate fruit and read comic books. To cut a long story short, Fish went over to him and asked him for a piece of fruit. Marina gave him a piece, Fish sat down with him on the bunk, they got talking and eventually he persuaded him to give him a blow-job in front of the whole cell.
We Siberians were in a precarious situation at the time: we had just been in a fight and we had to keep quiet for a while, otherwise – from what the disciplinary unit guys had said – they would split us up and send us to different cells, where we had a serious chance of ending up in the shit. So, while Fish was plunging his genitals into Marina’s mouth in front of his whole escort and other idiots who had gone to enjoy the show, we sat on our bunks fuming with rage because we couldn’t even afford to give him a thrashing.
We could hear the Little Thieves’ shouts of encouragement:
‘Go on, pansy, eat it all!’
‘That’s the way, Fish, make him swallow the fish!’
‘Open that mouth wider and I’ll stick mine in too!’
We soon realized that a lot of people wanted the same treatment from Marina. Marina’s weak voice could be heard whispering in an obviously feminine tone which was disgusting to hear:
‘No, boys, I did it to him because I like him, but that’s enough…’
Siberian Education Page 23
