the eXile - Other Shite

Issue #22/103, November 9 - 23, 2000

Other Shite

THE WAITING HOUSE

By Vladislav Ossovsky

“Hands behind your back. Face to the wall,” the sergeant with the provincial mug ordered, in an irritated voice, as he fumbled with the ring of keys. Finally locating the needed key, he opened a massive door and shoved me inside. The IVS-the internal detention isolator-is one of the early stops on the long trip to the final destination, the zone. I was not alone in the small room, which was permanently lit by a small dim light bulb. Sitting with crossed legs on the creaking plank-beds was a personage who resembled a woodpecker. Strength gone, I collapsed on the wooden rods, on which boxes for games of craps were carved. The first question any prisoner asks of any other is always the same: “What are you in for? Which article?” The woodpecker wasn’t original in this respect, but he could guess the truth my just by observing my condition.

“Two-two eight? Which part?” he asked.

“First,” I managed to wrestle out of myself. Then I fell silent, for a long time. My body was wailing in pain, my legs trembled with convulsions. In the last two months I’d reduced my dose to a gram a day, and now I was experiencing all the raptures of abstinence. The musori [“trash”, or cops] had given me a prophylactic beating on the way to the cell, and I felt like a piece of meat run through a meat grinder. And now this woodpecker with his questions... Asshole. All the same he continued with his philosophic meanderings.

“They’ll let you out in three days. You’ll see. I’ll give you a tooth (his front ones were missing, incidentally). Kresti is full of people like you. There’s just no place to put them all.”

He was getting on my nerves, but there was nothing I could do about it in my current condition. Like most of the young people in St. Petersburg, he was also a junkie, and he was caught stealing a tape deck from someone’s car. For kicks, they added resisting arrest to his charge. They took him away the next morning. For a while, I was left alone.

I thought to myself: “A funny thing, this propiska [residency registration-ed.]. A lot of people tear their behinds to get one in the capital, and yet all you have to do is go six hundred kilometers away, and that Moscow propiska becomes a reason why I have to sit in the Kresti prison, instead of being released on my own recognizance, with an agreement not to leave the region.” I recalled how stupid I’d been to get caught with that “check” [a packet of about a tenth of a gram of heroin-ed.], which I’d wanted to leave for the morning, and which now appeared to be the reason my world was ending. Ultimately that check turned out to be the end of my free life for three whole months, which I ended up having to spend in an overfilled room in Kresti-the second stop on the way to some hole in Vorkuta, or where ever it is that they send people. My turn to take a ride on the bus came on the third day, along with two guys in tattoos who paid absolutely no attention to me-they took one look at me and understood everything at once, and I was of no interest to them whatsoever. On the other hand, I became a definite object of interest from the minute I entered, carrying a mattress and fresh bedding, the overcrowded cell which stank of cheap cigarettes and unwashed socks. I could feel countless pairs of eyes following me at every step. I started to look for a vacant spot and suddenly noticed an old friend of mine, who pushed his neighbor to the side, freeing a place for me.

“Holy shit! How did you get here?” he asked, apparently genuinely happy to see me. Before, when we’d been together at a drug rehab clinic, he knew me as a reporter for a youth magazine, and now was surprised to see me in the “Kich.” Probably he thought that all journalists get special treatment.

“We all sleep in shifts,” he said, and he started to tell me the story of how he got sent up for extortion. Extorting debts from kommersi had earned him a lot of money at one time, enough so that at one time he was able to change cars every months. He didn’t have any connections in the cell, and like everyone else had to arrange things through the “Margarines”-the bulls, the guys here who had money and cell phones, and who did their business here every day. I was very lucky that I ended up in a cell with Vadik. The “margarines” didn’t touch him. Once he managed to get a check of heroin through them— the price of which in prison was two and a half times what it was on the outside-and he shared it with me, seeing how I was suffering. The heroin was brought by the musori themselves, who were paid well for their services. In general, in jail, if you have money, then you can live quietly in your own cell, with a television and a tape deck. Through the tsiriki, i.e. the guards, you can get almost anything you want in prison. The guards are paid almost nothing and as a result they’re almost all bought off. On his way to work in the morning, he’s met outside the prison by the bratki or the relatives of the prisoner. Usually he delivers either money or drugs... However, I’ve strayed from the point. My reality was a lot more prosaic: in a cell designed for eight people, there were twenty-four. And since I had no hope to be transferred to another cell, I was left to dumbly sit out my sentence, watching how the “devils” were chased after [i.e. the “punks”-ed], and quietly rejoicing in the fact that this didn’t happen to me, in large part because of Vadik. Apparently even the laziest of cons can find the strength to give a “devil” a kick or a box on the ear. Into this category fall those who have a particularly shitty sentence, for instance for rape or for child molestation, snitches, or “rats”-people who steal from their own. They don’t love junkies all that much in jail either, although lately they comprise almost every third prisoner.

The cherti [devils] were something of an entertainment source for prisoners gone half mad from the heat and the stench. Sometimes they drove the cherti to such a state that they would hurl themselves at the door, just to hear the guards’ standard response: “I’m not here to guard your ass, you prick.”

Sometimes they called me away to talk to the detective, in order to sign some kind of paper, or clear up this or that. Long walks through the gloomy corridors of the jail, decent cigarettes in the office of the sledik... In response to the question of when my case would come to court, I always got the same answer: “I don’t know”...Some prisoners stay for two to three years in jail, just so that they can walk out of court as though they’d already served their time.

After a while you get used to everything; apathy takes over, a series of endless days mixed in with erotic dreams. After a while even the nightly attacks on the cherti by the sexually frustrated “margarines” don’t even seem all that uninteresting. Although it was unpleasant nonetheless to listen to the nightly screeching of the pederasts next to you...

The day when I was finally brought to court was the happiest day of my life, after the day I was released from the Soviet army. The door opened one fine morning, not long before my birthday, and I heard the long-awaited words: “To the exit with your things!” By that time I felt myself cured of the physical addiction to heroin, and all that was left was ordinary heavy depression. I was once again thrown into the bus, where, dressed in summer clothes, I froze to my bones. Having received the laces to my Doc Maartens and the belt to the pants which were falling off my hips (during my stay in jail I’d lost seven kilograms), I felt that tears were falling down my cheeks. I stood again on Nevsky Prospekt and heard my voice, reassuring my girlfriend that I would “never again...” Walking up to the Griboyedov canal metro station, I spotted some of the drug dealers who were always there and who I knew by name. Seeing, or rather feeling what was about to happen, my girlfriend pulled me by the elbow toward the entrance of the metro. I stopped.

“Olga, I need 100 rubles. This is the last time...”

She burst into tears and reached into her bag, cursing me to the last. Handing me the money, she sharply turned and walked away. I felt horrible. But a few minutes later I didn’t care about anything. That very evening I fled from my sins to Moscow, to the place of my propsika. “The last time,” I thought, getting off the train. “Never again.”

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