Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

A jail is not like other places because you look around and there is a thief, there is a killer. All these predators, convicted and confessed, four steps from your heart. Criminals and counterrevolutionaries, every one of us a zek, locked in a single cell.

It was not the same as the cell where I first stayed. Here there were rules. There was society — a wrecked world with law and order. The senior zeks slept by the window. I was a new zek: I slept by the fetid latrine. Whereas the simple criminals, the rapists and murderers, were considered allies of the Revolution, and assigned bunks, I was a political prisoner, a class enemy. I came into a brick room and faces turned to examine me. I slept on the floor. None of the zeks had mattresses, pillows, room to breathe. We slept shoulder to shoulder. The blue light stayed on. We were not permitted to sleep when it was day but we were permitted to sleep when it was night. After my torture, all of this was a reprieve. A domain of rules is a system, and I had spent my life taking systems apart, turning them over, intuiting their function. Finally , I thought, a problem I may attempt to solve . Here was a machine; I would try to figure it out.

So I learned. I learned to find stray threads, to make needles out of matchsticks, to mend my shredded clothes. I learned to rise quickly in the morning to queue for the shower. I learned to use the prisoners’ library, Butyrka’s sole consolation.

I worried about my aunt Eva.

I made no friends but two enemies.

Their names were Fyodor and Ears. They were criminals, not politicals. They sat on plywood bunks and spat at me. Fyodor was large, with an elongated frame and enormous fists. His face was round, almost cherubic, with shockingly green eyes. Ears was long and skinny, with a cruel look; his namesake parts faced out like cupped hands.

My very first morning in the cell, after we had received our bread, our rotting cabbage, Fyodor demanded my portion. He was crouching beside me, eating his own, chewing. He asked with a gentle, light tone, as if he were asking me to pass the wine. Ears, beside him, stared at me. His stare had a sort of edged curiosity. With his eyes he was inquiring, What are you going to do? Fyodor chewed, cleaned his teeth with his tongue. For a moment I felt like a kindly uncle sitting with his nephews. But then the silence stretched on and I understood that this conversation was as cold and unfamiliar as the prison brick. I saw that others were watching us, the newcomer with the teenage thugs. I was sitting a few inches from the toilet. I took a short breath and held out my bowl. Fyodor took it with a bow of the head, a sweet grin. He smirked at Ears. “There’s a good friend,” he said. “What’s your name?”

“Joseph,” I said after a moment.

“You’re lying.”

“No I’m not.”

“I heard them say your name when you came in. Lev.”

I looked at the palms of my hands. “Yes, it’s Lev,” I said.

“I am Fyodor. This is Ears. Welcome to Butyrskaya.”

“How long have you been here?” I asked.

“Why the fuck should I tell you?” said Fyodor.

They got to their feet. Ears put his hands in his torn pockets and said, “Thanks for the breakfast, old man.”

IT WENT ON LIKE THIS. Fyodor and Ears did not claim all of my meals, only some of them. Alive, I was a renewable resource. They crouched beside me, chewing slowly, and I had nowhere to go. Although I was not the only person they picked on, they targeted me with a particular enthusiasm, as if I reminded them of a hated schoolteacher. The other cellmates moved around us in private orbits, each in a different struggle. Even as this life became familiar, waking and queuing and lingering in the prison library, every day brought new terrors. Just after lunch, a guard appears; he calls a name; the prisoner shuffles outside. Minutes later we hear his thin screams. Strong, thin screams, like sheets of glass. Sometimes the prisoner does not return. In a way this was easier than when he did come back, stooped and hobbling, to lie on the planks. This reminder that we were all peers, growing hollower every morning.

In one of our early interactions, I tried denying Fyodor’s request for food. Suddenly Ears was showing me a knife. It was an unusual weapon, long and bevelled; it was the kind of object that belongs in a particular workshop, fulfilling a particular function, the tool of a tanner or a woodworker or a bookbinder. In this place it was a blade in a young man’s hand. He drew it along my arm, tearing the fabric of my sleeve, nothing more. Fyodor reached for my bowl. “Thanks, Lev,” he said. He patted me on the cheek.

Our cell had at least four or five musicians, a doctor, an official I recognized vaguely from the newspaper. There was an acrobat. There was a fortune-teller, an old man who would close his lids and touch the space between your eyes and tell you that you were going to die. Besides Ears and Fyodor, the cell also had other young criminals; they had more or less divided up the prey. Order was maintained by the Rebbe, a Jew and former wrestler, jailed for the murder of his wife’s lover. He was a huge, serious man, a little older than me. Through violence or consensus he had become the authority. Whenever Fyodor and Ears claimed their tithe, I saw them glance back through the crowd to where the Rebbe sat watching, near the bright, barred window.

MARKEVICH WAS SMALL AND QUIET; he kept to himself. Like me he was a political prisoner — a former accountant who had done too much work in imports. One day, Fyodor decided that Markevich was an informer. Something had happened to one of Fyodor’s friends, a lunkhead with the habit of tearing pages out of library books; he was taken away and didn’t come back. The criminals had friends among the guards; they said the paper ripper had been transferred to another prison. Fyodor was furious. He was certain someone had squealed about tattered dictionaries, shredded Pushkin. He blamed Markevich, from whom the goon had once snatched a book. It was arbitrary and petty. I know now that it also betrayed Fyodor’s naiveté: we might all be transferred to other prisons, before long. But Fyodor raged, hissing at Markevich, threatening him, stealing his shoes at the showers. “Leave off,” I said finally, at once regretting it.

Fyodor pivoted toward me, eyebrows raised. “Oh yes, Lev? What’s that? Have some advice? Some helpful advice?”

I shrugged and turned away, but it was too late: now Markevich and I were united in Fyodor’s eyes. I went to a corner, slid down with my back to the wall. Then Fyodor was standing at my toes. He was angry, jumpy. Ears hovered behind him.

“So you’re a rat too, friend?”

“No,” I said patiently. Fyodor reached down and slammed the back of my head into the brick. I heard a clunk and the room skewed. For one white moment I wanted to vomit. Then I was swallowing and breathing slowly and looking into Fyodor’s pupils. He was smiling. He ruffled my hair. He sauntered away. My vision fogged with tears but across the cell I saw the Rebbe, watching.

So now Fyodor and Ears sat on their bunks and spat at me, spat at Markevich. Someone threw a piece of shit at me in the night. Every morning they crouched beside me, claimed my food. It was even worse for Markevich; they regularly shoved him around, bloodied his face. Gradually everything outside our little drama seemed to disappear. It was as if the cell had become smaller, closer, like a tunnel. I saw Fyodor, Ears, Markevich; I imagined and anticipated them. I held a book in my hands, reading and rereading the same page, distracted by a shrill fear like a ringing in my ears. I did not believe that these boys would do something horrific to me, just that they would do something small and terrible. I dreamed of soldiers, burying me alive.