Ben Stewart - Don't Trust, Don't Fear, Don't Beg

For Denis Sinyakov, the writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn serve as a vital crutch, giving him strength behind bars. The woman in charge of the library has read Solzhenitsyn herself and brings the great man’s books to Denis’s cell. His cellmate turns one of them over in his hands, perplexed.

‘You’re reading books about prison in prison?’

‘Where better to read them?’

Denis saw Solzhenitsyn many times when he was alive, he photographed him, he covered his funeral. For Denis it’s fascinating to read how he survived the gulag, and now Denis is comparing the conditions and the rules across the decades. And he sees that nothing much has changed.

Roman’s first cellmate told him, ‘At first you will count every minute here. Later you will count every hour. In three or four weeks you’ll be counting the days. Then you’ll count the weeks.’ And it’s true. Roman made a calendar and in the beginning he crossed out the days like Robinson Crusoe. At first he waited until the end of each day, and made a great ceremony of crossing it out. But now he finds he forgets.

Phil is in the gulyat box, staring at the sky. He’s had a bad day, turma racing, and he scratches the words fuck them all on the wall. Afterwards he regrets it, he knows he needs to hang on to who he is. The next day he’s back and sees one of his friends has rubbed out the first word and written the word love instead. And Phil thinks, yeah, that’s the right attitude. That’s how to survive this place.

The Greenpeace women, held alone on the second floor, have only their spoons, that pipe and each other. They’re telling themselves it can’t be fifteen years. Surely not. But then they see how they’re being portrayed on TV, and their minds race towards the edge. They take up their spoons and tap to each other, working out how old they’ll be when they’re released if they get the full fifteen years. Alex will be forty-two. She taps on the pipe.

shit that means I can’t have children

Camila taps back, her message reverberating along the pipe.

i’ll be 36

Alex taps out a reply.

maybe we’ll have to have sex with a guard

really?

i’m joking cami

well you do get two hours outside a day if you’re pregnant

but they’re all quite ugly

one of them is okay

which one?

the one who came to my cell today

oh him

yes

really?

no Alex, of course not. i’m not having sex with a guard to get pregnant

okay me too

good

good

Frank’s lawyer reaches into his briefcase and pulls out a letter. ‘It is from your wife,’ he says.

‘From Nina?’

‘Yes.’

Frank’s heart jumps. He snatches the envelope and turns it in his hands. It’s bulging, full of sheets of paper, and Frank Hewetson thinks it may be the most precious thing he’s ever held.

It’s a Thursday morning and he and his lawyer are sat across the table from a senior officer from the Investigative Committee – a man memorable both for a streak of petty authoritarianism, and for an unnaturally enormous forehead that is capped with a surf of receding jet-black dyed hair. Most of the investigators wear cheap acrylic suits and this individual is no different, swathed as he is in a brown affair that creases violently when he makes even the slightest movement. A period of accusatory gesticulating at Frank leaves him looking like a crumpled wreck.

The man has just spent an hour telling Frank that the FSB now has proof of piracy, that many of the other activists have signed statements fingering Frank for responsibility, and that his only hope of avoiding many years in jail now lies with his revealing exactly who did what on the protest. Frank isn’t sure he should believe the man but he won’t incriminate his friends. Eventually the interrogation ends, and now Frank’s lawyer is handing him a letter from his wife.

He never thought he’d feel such joy at being given a simple letter, but this is how it is since being locked up. He hasn’t been sleeping well, the road runs all night and Boris and Yuri are loaded on chifir until 6 a.m. every morning, pulling the ropes, banging on the wall, screaming through the window. Already Frank is savouring the moment he’ll lie on his bunk and run his thumb under the seal and pull out Nina’s note. He’ll read the letter slowly, savouring it, stretching out the time it takes to make it to the end. But just as he’s turning the envelope in his hands, the officer plucks it from his fingers and slips it into the inside pocket of his scratchy brown suit jacket.

‘No, you cannot have this. It must pass through our censors first. And you have not answered my questions.’

‘What?’

‘You can read letter when you answer my questions about criminal invasion of oil platform.’

‘Just… come on, man. Give me back the damn letter.’ He rubs a hand over the fuzz on his scalp. ‘It’s from Nina. I miss her.’

The investigator folds his arms, the suit bristles with static and multiple crease lines break out on its surface. He cocks his head and his eyebrows lift into the lower slopes of his forehead.

‘No.’

‘It’s from my wife. Why can’t I have it?’

‘You are answering questions, not asking them. I am asking the questions.’

‘You have to be kidding me.’

The officer sniffs, swings one leg over the other and narrows his eyes. ‘When you tell me who was in charge of the criminal gang which attacked the platform, you may have the letter.’

Frank stares at him, at the thin mouth now rising at the corners as the man’s face takes on an expression of supreme self-satisfaction, at the sweep of hair that only starts somewhere near the crown, at the saggy neck skin hanging over the collar of his shirt. Frank’s lawyer is sitting next to him, two armed guards are standing behind the officer. And Frank thinks, shit, I’m fucked, I’m going down for fifteen years, it’s happening, there’s no way out, this is it.

He leans forward, eyeing the cop, biting his lip and making angry breathing noises through his nose, fulminating, trying to stop his mind. He’s turma racing. He’s close to the edge, the vortex is opening up. He’s sucking in huge lungfuls of air through his flared nostrils, his knuckles are turning white as his hands grip tighter on the edge of the table. Then suddenly he hears a voice saying, ‘Frank, are you okay?’

Frank looks around. ‘What?’

His lawyer says, ‘Are you okay? You’ve gone white.’

‘No. No, I’m not okay. I’m fucking angry.’

‘You need doctor?’

‘Yeah, I need a fucking doctor.’

‘Really? You need doctor?’

The guards edge closer, the investigator’s smile collapses into an expression of panic, he’s looking nervous, edging back from the desk. The cop clasps the top of his head with his hands and cries out in Russian. Frank doesn’t understand him but it sounds like an expletive. The officer jumps to his feet and throws open the window, then he starts manically fanning the air in front of Frank’s face with a copy of the criminal report into the boarding of the oil platform.

Frank rolls his eyes and makes a heavy gurgling sound in his throat as one of his legs goes into a spasm. The cop drops the report and pulls a lever arch file from a shelf. He opens it and uses it to fan Frank, and the look in his eyes betrays his fear that one of the Arctic 30 could expire on his watch. He drops the file and lifts a telephone receiver. Orders are barked, more windows are opened, Frank’s chest heaves as he pulls a series of rasping laboured breaths. The door flies open and suddenly a doctor is standing in the middle of the room, his head turning from person to person as he searches for the patient. He rushes forward, applies a hand to Frank’s head, sticks his ear against his chest then looks at the cop and shouts, ‘ Skoraya pomosh! ’