THE ZONE

ON JUNE 20, 1992, Kolia picked the wrong guy to tangle with. He had spotted a man on the platform wearing a white dress shirt and sporting an expensive wristwatch. He closed his book and followed him. As the man was about to board the train, Kolia employed his standard modus operandi — Oh, I’m sorry. Pardon me — only this time, the instant he had liberated the watch, the man pulled out a pair of handcuffs and arrested him. Kolia did as he was told and accompanied the policeman to a waiting car, his guilt this time indisputable. Sitting in the back seat, the idea that his life had a certain tragic symmetry to it didn’t even occur to him; his mind was too busy replaying what had just taken place on the platform. He needed to know where his technique had gone wrong.

He didn’t spend much time in the detention centre. Kolia’s name ensured that he received legal representation and a quick appearance before a judge. That was welcome news, the conditions in the SIZO were deplorable — fifty men, all awaiting trial, packed into a cell that stank of shit and piss and vomit and other things best left undescribed. Kolia was permitted one shower and no mattress. He slept on the floor, next to a man who had been rotting away in there for nine months, while he waited for his Last Judgement. The man coughed incessantly.

“I finally caved in and signed the paper,” he said. “First they tie your hands behind your back and push you to the ground so you’re lying face down. Then they stick your head in a plastic bag and hold it there until you pass out. They call it the slonik. They did it to me three times, the bastards. I signed. I have to get out of here — prison is like paradise compared to this.”

Kolia wasn’t tortured. He didn’t have to submit to the so-called elephant technique. He was transferred to a prison camp near Rostov. When he argued that stealing from the rich on the platform of a railway station was a more noble pursuit than stealing from a mother of three young children in a grocery store, the judge countered that, notwithstanding, he had been playing the petty thief for quite some time now. They had had him under surveillance. Now he would serve as an example to others, and he wouldn’t be seeing the free world again for at least a year.

When he arrived in the Zone, after a medical exam, he put on his prison uniform: black pants and shirt, with his name pinned below his right shoulder. His head was shaved and he was given a black cap. His bunkmates were real monsters — rapists and murderers who would likely never be released. Their beds were furnished with thin burnt-orange quilts. There was a barred window at each end of the room, which helped to relieve the oppressive decor.

During the day, inmates did maintenance chores. Working in pairs, they washed floors with a rag and a bucket of water between them. Sometimes they would be dispatched to the factory that operated within the walls of the Zone or to a neighbouring worksite with a pickaxe and a wheelbarrow. They ate their meals out of a billy can in the mess hall. By the end of the first month, the hard block of bread that was served every day started to taste like chalk. The older inmates referred to it as “the sledgehammer.” The men washed themselves with cloths, standing on stone benches because the floor of the bathhouse was rotten, or under the grimy spray of showers whose copper fixtures had long since turned a putrid green. A new arrival had to watch his step if he wanted to avoid the sexual advances of a lifer who coveted his ass. Inmates divided their free time between the common yard, and the visiting room, where a plate of glass kept them separated from their loved ones. There was also a private room for couples.

No one escapes from the Zone. Inmates are more or less free to wander in the open space at its centre, as they do in the camps, but the perimeter is guarded like a gold mine and it is unassailable. Those who get out before serving their full sentence do so feet first, victims of AIDS or tuberculosis. The Zone is Russia’s Third World.

Igor would only stop talking long enough to spit on the ground. In spite of his plodding bulk and constant coughing and spitting, he was one inmate that Kolia really liked. His stories went nowhere but somehow they seemed to protect him from going crazy.

One evening, after finishing their grub, Igor asked Kolia a question.

“Do you know why winter is longer in certain parts of Siberia?”

“’Cause it’s winter?”

“Nope. Do you know why bulls and cows don’t have any front teeth, just like you?”

“Because that’s just the way it is.”

Igor, content with Kolia’s ignorance, began to
hold forth, chewing on a green twig between pro-
nouncements.

“There’s a legend told by the Yakut people about a bull and a stallion who had a disagreement over which season was the best.”

He spat on the ground.

“The stallion preferred the summer because his hooves didn’t freeze.”

“Shuddup, Igor!” Sasha piped in. He did business with the outside.

Igor ignored him and carried on with his tale.

“The bull thought that winter was the best season. The two of them argued so much that day that the stallion finally kicked the bull right in the kisser, knocking out six of his teeth. The bull saw red and charged the stallion, puncturing the horse’s belly with his horns and ripping out his gallbladder. And guess who shows up then? None other than Toyon, the supreme ruler of Nature, who oversees the whole shebang from his house in the ninth heaven, next to the Lake of Milk.”

Igor spat on the ground again. He liked to mark off his territory. Before continuing his story, he closed a nostril with his index finger and shot the contents of his nose to the ground — a technique referred to by yogis as “the stomach pump.”

“Toyon had to settle the argument. In his opinion, the stallion had come out of the whole thing pretty well and would certainly be less cantankerous, now that he had no gall bladder. But he decided in favour of the bull, saying, ‘From this day forward, summer in Siberia will be shorter than winter.’”

“Kolia, every time you take your dentures out, you make me think of that bull!”

Kolia didn’t mind Igor’s asinine stories; he was probably the nicest guy in the Zone. He was an inept thief, meek enough to find himself repeatedly sodomized, but not at all dangerous.

Kolia commanded respect from the other inmates because he knew how to make them laugh. Some of them had even seen him perform when they were kids and their parents had taken them to the circus. Seeing Kolia in his black prison garb was, to say the least, a surprise. When he spoke, everyone went quiet and listened attentively. When they asked for a magic trick, he always obliged. His biggest hit inside the Zone was the second sketch he had performed as part of his audition for the School of Circus Arts. It comprised all the essential moves in a pickpocket’s arsenal, and Kolia remembered every element of the routine. After serving six months of his sentence, he began to question whether he could ever return to the ring once he left prison. He decided that would never happen.

When someone asked him where he was born, Kolia would answer, “Somewhere farther away than you can imagine.” Anyone who wanted to know the reason for his imprisonment was told that he started stealing at the age when children learn to read. No one pressured him for an answer. He was well liked and he had the distinction of being the inmate with the fewest tattoos — but one of the very few who bore a serial number from the camps on his forearm. That was a tattoo he hadn’t asked for. The only person he spoke to about the camp, his mother, and Iosif was the other Kolia.

He slept in the same dormitory. He was thirty years younger than Kolia and was serving time for having openly expressed his desire to leave the army. In the Zone, he was being raped on a weekly schedule by a fat man in his sixties who hailed from Saint Petersburg. When he had pleaded with the guards to do something, his pleas were met with a deaf ear. It was none of their business. They weren’t paid enough to patrol the sexual antics of every single prisoner.

The young man told Kolia that he reminded him of his father, who was a violin maker. The resemblance was perhaps tenuous, but what was absolutely definitive was the young deserter’s death. In exchange for cigarettes, someone had provided the weapon which allowed him to escape the security perimeter without ever stepping foot outside the Zone.

Masha came to visit Kolia. She brought him dried fruit, nuts, some books, and tobacco for bartering. There was colour in her cheeks, and Kolia was happy to see that.

“I’m eating for you,” she announced with a grin.

Bravo, Kolia thought, she’s eating. He was only half listening to what she had to say. He was no longer in the habit of paying attention to anything. She mentioned that she had found a buyer for the dacha, and Kolia wondered what dacha she was referring to. She said she was going to move to Moscow soon to take up a teaching position. Kolia congratulated her and realized he had no idea what he was going to do once he got out of the Zone. She suggested that he come to Moscow with her.

“I’ll see after the dacha is sold,” he said.

“I’m sure they’ll take you back at the circus. Everything’s moving so fast, now.”

“In Moscow? They’d never take me back. And besides, I wouldn’t go back if they asked me.”

“Well, you’re not growing any new hair,” she said, half smiling.

“No hair, no lice,” Kolia replied.

She passed him the bag of dried fruit.

“Kids are all watching Walt Disney movies now to improve their English. They’re hugely popular. And all the mothers want their husbands to go into beezness.”

“That’s ‘business.’ There are a lot of guys in here who do very good business.”

A guard put his hand on Kolia’s shoulder. Time was up. He was escorted back to the barracks.

Masha boarded the train to Moscow the same day. It departed Rostov and headed due north until it reached its destination, a thousand kilometres away from the colony.