The next morning, Yasheeda called Sharon at the hostel again, saying that she was going to stay with me another night. This time, Sharon was even more worried. She thought that maybe I had kidnapped Yasheeda and was holding her hostage. I didn’t understand the whole conversation, because most of it was in Hebrew, but Yasheeda switched into English a few times for my benefit.
‘Look, I’m fine. Honestly. It’s perfectly safe. There are women and children here … I can leave whenever I want … No, but I don’t want to leave right now … I know, I know … but we can do the Salar of Uyuni tour in a few days … Seriously, I’m fine …’
I could hear Sharon yelling on the other end of the telephone. I couldn’t really blame her; she was only acting as a good friend should and it must have been hard to believe that Yasheeda was perfectly happy and safe in prison with me.
‘Why don’t you go outside today and show her that you’re fine,’ I said. ‘You can come back later. Or invite her to come in and see for herself.’
She did both. She went back to El Lobo and returned in the afternoon with Sharon and a bag of supplies, including fresh clothes. When the pair arrived at the gate, they sent a taxista to call me. Officially, we were only allowed visits from family and friends on Thursdays and Sundays between 9 am and 5 pm. Unofficially, you could receive visitors whenever you wanted, provided you paid. Even on non-visiting days, there was always a constant flow of people through the main gate: lawyers coming to see their clients, wives and girlfriends bringing food, and the San Pedro children travelling to and from school. All visitors had to leave their carnet – the national ID card – at the gate, and the head taxista made a note of their names and who they were visiting and they had to pay before leaving. The cost was only seven bolivianos, but with visitors for over a thousand inmates, the money from the gate added up to big business for the police.
At that stage, foreigner visitors without this national ID were rarely allowed to enter the prison. I explained to the lieutenant that my wife needed to come back in and her friend also wanted to visit me. They had come all the way from Israel. I was expecting him to argue, but luckily the Israeli girls’ dark features meant they didn’t stand out too much from the other wives and girlfriends. The lieutenant agreed to let them in, provided we went straight to my room and stayed there. We came to an arrangement that Yasheeda would pay twenty-five bolivianos to spend another night and her friend would pay the standard seven bolivianos to enter.
Sharon was still very suspicious of me, even though I tried my hardest to be polite and charming. I can usually make people laugh with some of my stories, but she didn’t want to listen to me at all. I bought her a soft drink and tried to start up a conversation about where she had been travelling, but nothing seemed to work. I have never had so much trouble getting along with anyone in my whole life. Her face had that same sour expression as on the other night at Forum, so I made myself busy in the kitchen while the girls talked in Hebrew. They started having another argument. I wondered how the two of them had ever become friends. Yasheeda was so open and warm in everything she did, but her friend was the complete opposite – angry and cold, and she hardly ever said a word.
Yasheeda later explained that Sharon was angry with her for disrupting their travel plans. They had originally planned to catch a bus south with some other Israeli friends to see Potosí, the highest town in the world. The main attraction there is the ancient mines where workers still slave under the same conditions they suffered hundreds of years ago – breaking the hard rock using hammers and chisels with nothing more than a candle on their helmets for light, then carrying the sacks of broken rocks on their backs up to the surface through the dangerous mine shafts that are filled with toxic gases.
Afterwards, the group had planned to make a tour of the Salar of Uyuni, which is a salt lake that evaporated completely, leaving thousands of square miles of salt crystal. Although I had never been there, I had seen photos of this incredible place. It is flat and white as far as the eye can see and many people have become lost out there, because there are no roads and it is completely empty except for the pure white of hard-packed salt.
Yasheeda didn’t want to leave right then; she wanted to spend a few more days in La Paz. The Potosí mines and the salt plains of Uyuni would still be there next month, but it wasn’t every day you could live in a prison. It was the experience of a lifetime. Sharon started yelling, saying that she and the others weren’t prepared to wait. She left the prison, even angrier than when she had arrived. We waved goodbye to her from inside the gates, but she didn’t look back. I felt a little sorry for her, but I was also glad that Yasheeda was going to stay. I was really starting to like her – a lot. Besides, they could meet up in a week or so and go travelling together again then.
Yasheeda stayed that night and the next, and then all the following week. Sometimes she left during the day to check her email and visit friends staying at El Lobo, but she would always return with provisions and small gifts for me. After ten days, she was friends with all the guards and had moved her belongings out of the hostel and into my room. We started living together in prison, sharing my single bed and eventually negotiated a weekly rate with the major, which worked out to be only slightly more expensive than the hostel she had been staying in.
Yasheeda’s friends came back from the Salar of Uyuni tour two weeks after she had moved in with me. Their next adventure was going to be a downhill bike ride to a town called Coroico. Yasheeda had to go with them because they had planned this trip together back in Israel and she felt she couldn’t let them down. She kept apologising and saying that she wanted to stay with me, but I could tell that, deep down, she was quite excited about going. I didn’t want her to leave, but I also knew that I had no right to ask her to stay. She was young and beautiful and free, and she was in Bolivia for a holiday, not to live in prison.
‘OK, then. Goodbye. Have fun,’ I tried not to sound sad.
‘Don’t say that, Tommy.’
‘Don’t say what?’
‘Goodbye. Never say “goodbye”, Tommy. I don’t believe in goodbyes. Goodbye is too permanent. You should always say “Hasta luego”, like the Bolivians do. That way you will always meet up again sometime. Even if it’s a long time in the future, you’ll always meet again. One day, at least.’
‘OK, then. Hasta luego.’
Yasheeda was away for exactly six-and-a-half days that first trip. I almost went out of my mind worrying about her. The bike ride was only supposed to take half a day, then the group had planned to spend the night in a hotel, wander around the town in the morning and come back to La Paz the following afternoon. However, she didn’t arrive at the prison and she didn’t call my mobile phone. I left it on the whole time and I must have checked the dial tone a hundred times to make sure the phone was working.
The road down to Coroico was officially the most dangerous road in the world; it twisted and turned along sheer cliff faces that dropped thousands of feet into the valleys below. In most parts, the dirt track was barely wide enough for one vehicle, but since it was the only road linking the town to La Paz, vehicles travelled in both directions. There was a fatal accident every single week. In fact, deaths on the road were so common that the media often didn’t bother reporting them.
Nevertheless, I watched the news closely for accidents. On the fourth morning, I found a small article saying that a minibus had gone over the edge in the fog, killing eight people. The paper didn’t mention if there were any foreigners involved, or even which direction the minibus was travelling. I rang the newspaper and television stations to try to find out. No one knew anything.
Eventually, Yasheeda turned up at the prison, tanned and smiling, like nothing had happened. I was so happy to see her and so relieved that she was alive, but I was angry with her. I was also angry with myself for letting myself think about her so much.
‘Did you miss me?’ she asked.
‘A little bit,’ I answered, not wanting to let on just how much she had put me through.
‘Ohhh.’ She appeared to be disappointed. ‘Only a little bit?’
‘No. A lot. I missed you a lot.’
‘That’s better,’ she said, hugging me. ‘We were having such a good time. You should be grateful I came back at all! The others are still down there. I came back especially for you.’
I doubted that was true. I didn’t believe it until the next day.