Prison

The only obvious way to cross over into Pakistan was to walk. I knew the direction and headed off. Before I’d made it to the outskirts of the city—just desert and a few houses that looked as if they had been fashioned by hand from the very earth on which they sat—I was hailed by a policeman. Confident enough about dealing with cops after my sessions with Rasheef in Shiraz, I wandered over for a bit of a chat. The cop wanted to see my passport. I wasn’t sure he was allowed to do that, but I co-operated nonetheless. He glanced at the pages, seemed unable to make much of it and handed it back. But there was clearly something about the look of me that he couldn’t quite enjoy. He called over another cop, who wanted to know, so it seemed, where I thought I was going. ‘Pakistan’, I said. This confirmed their doubts about me; I was heading in the wrong direction. They took me along to a booth in the market where a more senior cop was able to confirm the suspicions of the two junior guys. My visa was way out of date.

By this time, a dozen cops were on my case, mostly being nosey. It was a break in the monotony of these barren backlots of the nation to catch a visa sneak who was so close to making a clean getaway. The senior cop locked up the booth, clapped handcuffs on me and had the juniors form a guard. I was marched through the market with four rifles aimed at the seat of my green trousers. The citizens were full of curiosity and kept stopping the march to ask the senior cop questions, which he seemed only too happy to answer. I tried to look both menacing and harmless.

The drama of the occasion thrilled me and I wanted to look like a vile fugitive—but also like a harmless kid who’d slipped up in some forgiveable and forgettable way. It was difficult for me. The cop who was carrying my suitcase was about my own age in a uniform that was too big for him. He kept glancing down at my pointed shoes with undisguised delight. During one of the pauses we made for the big cop to skite to the locals, I whispered to the boy, ‘Beatles!’ He put down the suitcase, and with a huge grin acted out a Ringo-esque trip on air timpani.

Zahedan was a slow and sleepy old town in every respect, except when it came to the dispensing of justice. I was in front of a magistrate within a half-hour of apprehension. My guess was that I would be fined. And my further guess was that I would be let go, or simply tossed over the border into Pakistan, when it was revealed that I had no money to pay the fine. I was almost certain that barter would not be acceptable, and had no plans to line up my wardrobe for the magistrate.

The big cop made a long-winded presentation to the magistrate, a portly middle-aged, jovial man with a ludicrous toothbrush moustache. The magistrate cheerfully satirised, with raised eyebrows and exaggerated expressions of dismay, the bombast of the big cop. He fined me a very small sum and offered me a little toy salute of farewell. Alas, the next case had to be interrupted when the big cop learned that I had no money to pay the fine. The magistrate, with more sorrow than conviction I think, sentenced me to five months in the slammer—a month for each ten rials I was unable to provide. He gave me a look that said, ‘Kid, my hands are tied.’ I smiled to show that there were no hard feelings.

My fingerprints were taken in a small, busy office down the hall, an office indistinguishable, I imagine, from police offices all over the world: paperwork everywhere, a couple of typewriters, portrait of a big shot on the wall (the Shah, in this case), a half-dozen adipose policeman shuffling about. My arrest had dramatic integrity: the right actors, the right props, the right lines. And this integrity was enhanced by the fingerprinting. Two sets of prints were taken; one for the locals, the other for Interpol. The Interpol set was taken on finer quality paper, with a Paris address printed at the top of the sheet. I was thrilled. Me, Bobby, Frank Hillman’s son from Eildon, Victoria, Australia, Nowheresville, a butcher’s apprentice, now being fingerprinted for Interpol!

The procedural care befitted a sombre induction, a ritual initiation into a braver, broader, more dangerous, much sexier world. The fingerprint cop took each finger and firmly rolled it on the ink pad, then on the alloted squares on each of the sheets. His deftness filled me with admiration. He knew what he was doing. On the Interpol set, he took even greater care, down to spelling my name correctly in the data blanks. The completed Interpol sheet looked like a certificate, something that commended both the print-taker and myself. I was proud of it, and I’m sure the cop was, too.

Approaching the prison at Zahedan was like viewing a walled medieval city revealed by careful excavation. Drifts of fine grey sand climbed the stone walls to about half their height. Squat towers along the walls looked over the flat desert plain. Just one barely defined road ran to the prison, straight to the gates. The place seemed lifeless in the shimmering heat haze, but once the prison bus drew closer the black silhouettes of guards in the towers became distinct. The dozen or so other prisoners in the bus, all chained like me with cuffs and ankle irons, did not bother to study the looming city. It was pride, I suppose. They knew the punishment in store for them and didn’t wish to bestow on the place the bleak compliment of an anxious glance ahead.

As soon as we were inside the walls, my assumption of superior treatment likely to be afforded to a cheerful white boy proved perfectly sound. The other prisoners, all Iranians, were bullied onto a stone square in the blazing sun to await the pleasure of the authorities. My cuffs and leg-irons were removed and I was permitted to sit against a wall in the shade. A naked prisoner, bathing himself at a ancient fountain in the square, called raucously to me and shook his dick. He was immediately slung by his hair to the ground by an incensed guard, then kicked in the backside all the way to a small, sinister-looking hut at the back of the square. While my fellow new arrivals wilted in the sun, rag bundles at their feet, I was served a cup of tea by a guard with a vile-looking length of cane under his arm, its tip frayed into a fringe.

Nothing at all happened for an hour or more, except that I was served a second cup of tea and a glass of chilled water with a diced lemon floating on top. The prison was silent. A long way off, small domed buildings like igloos of mud clustered around two larger, square buildings, similarly made of mud. The heat of the day was so intense that the guards in the towers had cradled their rifles in the crook of an arm, using the free hand to fan themselves with round, wicker paddles. The new arrivals, out in the sun, stared straight ahead or occasionally lifted their hands as far as the chain would allow, then dipped their heads to brush the sweat from their eyes. One man whose chains allowed a little more latitude had managed to get a rag or handkerchief settled on his head, but it was soon snatched away by a guard.

My suitcase had been left against the wall, not far from where I sat. Growing bored, but not sure how much liberty I was to be given, I sauntered over to the case, opened it, and exchanged my shoes and socks for my thongs. I wasn’t reprimanded. I took out a Nero Wolfe detective novel I’d been saving for a rainy day, sauntered back to my spot in the shade and began reading. Content at first, I gradually considered the resentment I might excite in the other new arrivals. I carefully slipped the Nero Wolfe into the back pocket of my trousers, got to my feet and stood erect. This gesture of solidarity was spoiled when a guard brought me a chair. It wasn’t just any chair; it was an upholstered armchair. I demurred politely. The guard, smiling beautifully, insisted. I sat down.

In the middle of the afternoon the guards unlocked the shackles on the new arrivals. Prayer rugs were handed out. The amplified wail of a muezzim echoed about the prison walls. The new arrivals knelt and prayed. In the distance I could see men in their hundreds praying outside the mud igloos. The guards in the towers had disappeared below the parapet. The guards in the square prayed, all clustered together in the shade of the wall. Well aware, after months in Iran, that nothing would be made of my demeanour during prayers so long as I remained respectful, I sat watching silently. At the conclusion of prayers, the guards chained the new arrivals again. The area they occupied had gradually fallen into shade. The guards moved them a few yards so that they were once again in the sun.

Late in the afternoon, I was served a plate of spinach and eggs, together with a fresh round flap of bread, more tea and another glass of cold water and lemon. The spinach and eggs were spiced with paprika. The tea was spiced with cinnamon. I had never eaten anything so delicious, never so relished the taste of tea, the coolness of water.

It was only when I’d finished and my tray had been collected that I gave proper thought to the prisoners who’d arrived with me. They had not been fed, and it was pretty obvious that nothing would be offered to them. Even this late in the afternoon, the heat of the sun was fierce. I decided that I would refuse all further food and drink while my comrades were left baking. I tried to show with compassionate glances what was in my heart, but they didn’t look at me at all.

At evening prayer the unshackling and reshackling procedure was repeated. I noticed that most were taking the opportunity to snatch a bit of rest. The oldest prisoner, a bent and seamed man perhaps in his seventies, took quite a time to get back on his feet. An argument broke out between two of the prisoners and two guards. It looked as if the prisoners were calling for the guards to take it easy on the old guy. No blows were dealt out, and the guards took away his leg-irons and allowed him to wait on his knees. A little later, one of them brought him a glass of water. Later still, all the new arrivals were given a drink from metal ladles held to their lips by the guards. By this time I had given up on my vow of solidarity. I was well into the Nero Wolfe.

A huge white moon had risen in the fading blue sky over the desert. A fat little fellow in a grey civilian suit toddled along with a clipboard under his arm, and in an infinitely weary manner whispered a word now and again to the guards. One prisoner, then another, was led off to what would be his home for a good many years to come. I was the last prisoner to be dealt with. The fat guy (I later came to know him as the brother-in-law of the deputy governor) became positively jaunty when he considered my case. He spoke a bit of English and was keen to make use of it.

‘Mister Eelamuh? Mister Eelamuh, this is sad days for you, I think.’

‘Yep.’

‘Why you not pay this monies and go away in Pakistan?’

‘I haven’t got any money.’

‘No monies? No rials? German marks or excetra?’

‘Nope. Nothing.’

‘Hmm. Sad days for you.’

He must have thought I was stubbornly concealing rials or marks somewhere, because he launched into a warning about the type of people I would meet in prison.

‘These men killing peoples. These men using the drugs. Very very bad, all these men. Maybe killing you! Maybe. Very bad in Zahedan for boys. Very bad. Very bad for English chaps.’

‘I’m Australian,’ I said.

‘Very bad for Australian. Only nice for Irani people in Zahedan. Maybe one of these men kill you! Big knife!’

He made a skewering sound as he acted out a stab in the region of the stomach, delighting the guards. I could see that it would be in my best interests to look spooked, even though I found it impossible to imagine anyone stabbing me. I cowered a little, and gulped. Fatty looked pleased, in fact much more than pleased, and the guards seemed to endorse the good sense I’d shown in quailing so convincingly.

‘Ha ha!’ Fatty laughed. He tousled my hair. ‘Nobody stabbing you! Ha ha! I put you in nice place.’

And he did. He sent me to a large, comfortable cell, more like a bungalow, nestled against the eastern wall. The windows were without bars and the door wasn’t locked. It was occupied by five men. None was in prison dress, and one wore Western clothing; all looked healthy and well fed. I was introduced by the senior guard who’d escorted me. The prisoners listened languidly without rising from their beds. The cell was illuminated by two upright lamps draped with gauzy red scarves that tinged the whole interior a restful pink.

A bed had been made up for me. The sheets looked fresh and clean. I sat on the bed and smiled winningly at my new comrades. They were full of curiosity once the guard had departed, and squatted around me to ask questions. The prisoner in Western clothes soon took over the interview. He introduced himself as Mushtaf, not an Irani but a Pakistani, and he spoke perfect English. He wanted to know (both for himself and on behalf of my other four cellmates, so it seemed) what I had done to get myself arrested. I had overstayed my visa, I explained. My new comrades guffawed or else smiled politely. The gossamer quality of my infraction seemed to them, I guessed, too ludicrous for words.

‘You are very welcome among us,’ Mushtaf said. ‘With your leave, I will introduce my friends.’

Each prisoner bowed just a little as his name and his infringement was mentioned. Ali, about fifteen, had cut his uncle’s throat, his uncle being a very bad man (‘horrid’ was Mushtaf’s term). Older Ali, in middle age, very shrewd about the eyes and wearing a beard more carefully barbered than was usual amongst Iranians, had been shafted by his wife’s family over something to do with heroin. Then came a bald, chuckling little man who was introduced as Peter, with no explanation of the name given. Whatever Peter’s crime, it was evidently too awful to talk about, because Mushtaf moved on with a grimace and a ‘you don’t want to know’ gesture of his hand. Hossein, the fourth of my cell-mates, was the only one who exhibited the proper fuck yez! manner of a genuine bad guy. In Australia, he would have ridden with the Banditos. His face was battered, his nose was a mess, and half his upper lip had been reduced to a thin, taut scar. He relished the opportunity to mime his crimes when Mushtaf spoke of them, lassooing his own ankle with his scarf, drawing it tight, then sticking out his tongue to demonstrate the rigour of strangulation.

Mushtaf didn’t mention what had caused him to be detained with these other desperadoes. He kept himself a little aloof without actually disowning his pals. He looked to me the least candid of the lot. (I was not without some powers of diagnostic insight.) And he seemed to be held in slight contempt by the others. They made faces behind his back, as if he were a fraction too la-de-da for his own good.

Older Ali made breakfast the next morning: cheese, bread, tea. The cell was equipped as a self-contained dwelling, with a stove, a small refrigerator, cooking utensils. An electric fan kept it cool enough. I knew that these conditions would not apply throughout the whole prison, but I kept my questions for later.

I offered to pay my way with books, but was refused. Mushtaf, however, was thrilled to bits with my library. He broke into tears when he found a couple by Evelyn Waugh. ‘Here now, you have made me a very happy fellow, Robert. I have had nothing to read for six months. English novels simply don’t come our way.’ He settled down for the entire morning with Put Out More Flags, ignoring the jibes of Hossein, who showed what he thought of novels by rubbing Eros and Civilization along the crack of his bum.

It was only when Mushtaf had finished the Evelyn Waugh that he became talkative again. ‘I was sure you would ask me that question before long,’ he said, responding to my query about the privileges of our cell. ‘The fact of the matter is that we all have private resources. Otherwise we would suffer the fate of our brethren across the way.’ He gestured, indicating the rest of the prison. ‘But you mustn’t imagine that this spares us every sort of calamity. Hardly. We shall all hang.’

‘What?’

‘Oh yes. You mustn’t look so shocked. We shall all hang, by and by.’

‘But how come?’

‘The law, my dear young friend, the law. What other explanation could there be? The law.’

The others seemed to know what Mushtaf was talking about, and confirmed his prediction with good-natured shrugs.

I didn’t quite believe what Mushtaf had told me. But on the way to the fountain to wash myself later in the morning, Mushtaf keeping me company, I put good manners aside and asked if the sentences were likely to be delayed for a while yet.

‘Yes, for some years. Two years for me, I would hazard. For Hossein, many years yet. He is very wealthy, and his family is very wealthy, too. Ali, two months only, when he comes of age.’

‘How can you bear it?’

‘My dear young friend, it is our common fate. You may die before me, for all I know. Perhaps from cholera when you reach Pakistan. Do not drink water in the villages. In the cities, sit in the lounge of a big hotel and ask a waiter for a glass of water. He will think you are a guest. But wear proper shoes, not these things, what are they called?’

‘Thongs.’

If Younger Ali were to be hanged in two months, I would still be in the prison. I felt uncomfortable—not nearly as uncomfortable as Ali must have been feeling, but uncomfortable all the same. I was incapable of imagining that life for anyone could reach such a dire conclusion as death on the gallows. No matter what I read of the awful ways in which a life might end, and of the despair of people who know that the end is coming, perhaps in a frightful form—still I didn’t believe it. In fact, I barely believed in death at all. The world was made of feathers. When I saw the little haulier crushed in Istanbul, the feathers blew away, but only for a time. Every disaster could be averted, every fall would be cushioned. People who were starving to death would find food before it was too late. Those flailing in the water, unable to reach the shore, would be rescued. It was not that I was absurdly optimistic. I was simply absurdly conceited. A cheerful, well-mannered white boy would not come to a bad end—the world would not allow it. And this vanity went so far as to overrule the lessons I might take by looking about, east and west.

This conceit is a mystery to me, even now. I hadn’t grown up as a pampered princeling. Vicious domestic arguments had raged around me; friends would come to school with black eyes and split lips when their dads were on the warpath; my own father would sometimes go berserk, rearing above me with a war souvenir samurai sword, whispering that he was about to cut off my head. I had seen my mother and then my stepmother sobbing inconsolably over the wretchedness of it all. I had seen children pulled mottled from the lakes and rivers of my home town, dead forever. I had woken in the wreck of a big black Humber with other children, alive a few seconds earlier, now torn apart. But I would not believe any of it. Ali would not hang.

Wives appeared in our cell the next day. They tidied it up, swept the floor, put food on the shelves, presented children to their dads for a kiss and a cuddle, then departed, like shadows. Mushtaf, who had no wife, put Vile Bodies aside and took me out for a tour of the prison. I had seen only a few of the prisoners from ‘across the way’ up close. I didn’t know exactly where they were kept. I didn’t know anything about their conditions. The guards greeted Mushtaf courteously and he responded with a smile and a nod, like a sympathetic noble touring a slum. Beyond a barracks, we came to a village within the prison—round mud huts, a number of larger mudbrick buildings, crude concrete structures that looked like man-made caves. The only apertures in the buildings were the small doors, each fitted with broad, hinged wooden slats, which now swung ajar.

At the sound of our approach, prisoners began to emerge from the huts and caves. All were dressed in raggedy prison calico; most wore a small cap like a kipar on the crown of the head. They ranged from boys in their mid-teens to wrinkled and stooped old men. They squinted in the fierce light, holding a hand above their eyes. There were no fat prisoners, and a few were almost as thin as the emaciated figures I’d seen emerging from death camps in old newsreels. They stared at me with amazement or suspicion, these true prisoners. Some of the boys thrust themselves forward and studied me boldly, aggressively. Others backed away, averting their eyes. A few older men seemed perfectly aware of who I was and what I was doing in the Zahedan lock-up. Mushtaf spoke with them pleasantly, and they salaamed and shook my hand. One of them ushered me towards a mud igloo in the manner of a conscientious host.

I bobbed my head to enter the hut and, after my eyesight had adjusted to the darkness, I saw a dozen men squatting around a large earthenware bowl. They were eating from the bowl, using one hand in that dexterous Middle Eastern way to deftly fold strips of bread and scoop up a mush of watery yoghurt. A space was quickly made for me at the bowl; one man after another appealed to me to accept the best of what was left. I took some bread, made it wet and swallowed it down. To take more seemed disgraceful—the men were so ill-nourished that even the small amount I ate might leave a big gap in their guts—but to refuse them when they so insisted would be even worse, maybe. I took some more bread, then mimed a full tummy.

From hut to hut we went, and at each I accepted bread and mush. In one hut a young man, full of disdain, appalled his comrades by demanding to know what I thought I was doing in Iran.

‘He asks why you are here,’ Mushtaf translated.

‘In jail?’

‘No, unless I am mistaken, his question has to do with your reasons for coming to Iran at all.’

‘Just to see things, tell him.’

‘I rather doubt he would understand that.’

‘Tell him I was working in Shiraz and now I’m going to Pakistan. I mean, when I get out of jail I’m going to Pakistan.’

Mushtaf translated. The young man jerked his head in contempt. He hissed something rapidly, gesturing towards me as he spoke. The other prisoners remonstrated with him, none so angrily as an old, legless man who shouted up at him from the dirt floor. ‘He says you are a fool,’ Mushtaf explained quietly once we had left the hut. ‘He is a man who hates tourists. He is of the opinion that Westerners come here to laugh at the sorry state of the country. They will shoot him soon, I fear. Pay no heed. His manners need mending.’

At the back of the prison compound we came to two huts with their wooden gates still locked. It was possible to make out faces in the gloom within. Mushtaf spoke quietly through the wooden slats. A guard standing nearby gestured for a cigarette. I had a packet that Older Ali had given me. I lit one for him, and handed him two more. A clamour erupted. Hands reached through the slats. I was about to pass the remainder of the packet to the men, but the guard stood in front of me and shook his head. Mushtaf shepherded me away.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

‘The prisoners are not permitted to smoke.’

‘But we smoke.’

‘But not the other prisoners. Especially not those being punished. You cannot flout the rules, Robert.’

‘Are they being punished, those men?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did they do?’

‘They are in jail for smoking opium. They must stay there until they repent. Then they will be sent elsewhere. It is very distressing for them.’

We visited the barracks. Off-duty guards, who were in fact soldiers, sat around long wooden tables, taking it easy. They seemed happy enough to see Mushtaf, whose manner changed to suit the rougher society. He joked with them, nodding toward me as if I were his idiot nephew. The guards laughed with him, sometimes glancing at me satirically. One beefy man, shirtless, strolled over and struck a body-builder pose in front of me. He took my hand and slapped it on the raised muscle of his arm. The other guards laughed loudly, and laughed again when Mushtaf gave them what I took to be an account of my shock and dismay on learning that my cell-mates were to be hanged. The beefy guard, a man of fine comic temperament, circled Mushtaf’s neck with his huge hands, pretending to lift him towards heaven. Mushtaf joined in by sticking his tongue out and rolling his eyes.

The tour next took us to the prison kitchen, which was really a bakery. Two mud-brick ovens were fired up, with flat discs of bread being shoved in and out on long, wooden paddles. So far as I could see, the bread strips and watery yoghurt were all the proper prisoners were likely to be fed. The kitchens seemed to be a haven for cripples, with most of the staff blighted in one way or another—missing limbs, a missing hand, a baker with a large healed-over chunk missing from the back of his head and one shoulder. I was offered pieces of meat—kid—being prepared for the guards. A big, lazy dog, as skeletal as the prisoners, followed me about with his tongue lolling out, and sat on my feet whenever I stood still.

A boy of about nine or ten with his head shaved almost bare scrubbed the concrete floor with a bristled brush, using sand from one bucket and water from another. Whenever he bumped up against one of the other kitchen workers, he would stop work and slump back on his haunches, waiting for the occupied spot to be vacated. He looked exhausted and ill. He didn’t pay any attention to me until he caught sight of my thongs when I pushed the dog away. Then he looked up at my face. His eyelids fluttered, as if he were about to faint.

Back in the rich folks’ cell, I lay on my mattress with my face to the wall. The tour had left me in a state not exactly of shock but of ugly amazement. Looking back at myself, pole-axed by all the unpleasantness around me, I feel like whispering to that trembling form, ‘Poor baby! Did all the hungry people upset you?’ Because it is difficult to avoid irritation with people like me who, despite knowing what winter is like, wander off into the woods with a pocket handkerchief for a pillow and half a packet of Twisties for sustenance. And my annoyance goes further. I want to use the words that my father might have used, without much in the way of variation: ‘Be a man! Who’s getting hanged here, you or them?’ Or maybe just, ‘Ah for fuck’s sake!’

As the days passed, I became steadily more aware of the prison’s régime of contempt for its captives. A man went mad one day, and ran stooped and squawking around the courtyard, like a chicken fleeing the axe. When he was caught, he was kicked and then picked up and thrown through the air by four guards, who then picked him up and threw him again, returning him to his cell in instalments of three or four yards. I saw the boy who cleaned the kitchen floor hauled howling to the fountain, stripped and scrubbed with his own bristled brush. An old man carrying an earthenware bowl of bread and yoghurt fell in a narrow place; the guards made him lie on top of the spillage so that prisoners had to walk on him as if he were the ground.

The prisoners took care to tread lightly, but I could see no sense in such captious cruelty. Later in life, I read of the response of a former SS officer who was asked why Jews leaving trains at death camps were sometimes harried with whips and dogs, when they could have been efficiently hastened to the huts with mere commands. The officer said that brutality from the outset ruled out reflection. No seed of sympathy should be permitted to put down roots. The culture of the Zahedan prison seemed to be guided by a single maxim: Imagine nothing.

My comrades in the rich folks’ cell faced life as you would face a wall. The wall’s features had become deadeningly familiar, but at least you had something to stare at, a limit to vision. Mushtaf read his way through my library; Older Ali sang hymns in a murmurous tenor; Hossein squeezed lemons, scores of them each day, catching the juice in a big, brass jug; Younger Ali slept face down on his bed all day and all night; Peter built little log cabins out of his collection of ball-point pens.

One day as I was reading on my bed with my hands supporting my chin, Younger Ali suddenly awoke from his torpor, bounded across the room and erected his forearm in front of my face. He was grinning ear to ear.

‘He wants to arm wrestle with you,’ said Mushtaf, rousing himself from his reading.

‘Arm wrestle?’

‘Yes. You know?’

‘Oh, arm wrestle. Sure.’

Beside himself with excitement, Younger Ali braced himself beside my mattress, gripped my hand and shouted something that probably meant, ‘Comin’ at yuh!’ We struggled, we strove, I won. Because although Ali was a muscley little guy, I had spent all the years from age nine to sixteen chopping wood back home. We had a wood fire, the only source of heat in winter, and all the fuel came from the hills. The favoured wood was red gum, a true bastard to split. So there was some steel in my skinny frame, mostly in my arms and shoulders.

We wrestled again; I won again. By this time, the interest of the others was roused. They sat around, delightedly puzzled that I should reveal a talent of this sort. In the third round, Ali dug as deep as he could go. His face, a hand’s breadth from mine, glistened with joy. He was completely happy, even in defeat. After losing again, he jumped to his feet and ran around the cell, bouncing off beds and flinging his arms wide in mid-air. Returning to the battle, he grabbed my face and kissed me on the forehead, on the lips, on the chin, wherever he could.

By his sixth straight loss, he was delirious, and the others began to look concerned. They tried to restrain him, but he shrugged them off wildly. I thought that maybe I should simply let him win, but by this time throwing a round would look bad. We wrestled a seventh, eighth, ninth time. The joy in Younger Ali’s face had undergone a change. He was still happy, but some partition of the mind that separates fun and fever was about to give way. By the look of his swelling eyes and his teeth more bared than smiling, I thought he might attack me. But he didn’t attack. He fell onto his knees and bayed, his eyes rolling back into his head. Hossein and Older Ali put their arms around him and comforted him, whispering into his ear, kissing his cheeks. He was put to bed, and he stayed there for the next two days or so, motionless and silent.

Experimentally at first, seeing what I might get away with, I walked about the prison by myself. The guards took little notice. They had seen the favoured treatment I had been given. They probably thought I had someone’s approval. I didn’t dare visit the huts for fear that the prisoners would give me their scarce food. I walked about in order not to forget what the prisoners endured. I didn’t trust myself to remember. Or perhaps it was not that I feared forgetting, but that I feared the return of self-interest; of the normal dreams and desires that seemed obscene beside the suffering of these people.

How little I understood! The human hunger for comfort, for a few little triumphs, will surely exceed the desire for solidarity with the wretched. If I had known then, as I gazed from a little distance at the scrawny prisoners standing motionless in the sun, how soundly my sympathy would sleep; known how many overflowing plates I would sit down to in the years ahead; how often I would treat a minor headache with easily purchased pain-killers, settle an upset tummy with Dexsal; how regularly, neurotically, I would fret over tiny moles that I feared might bloom into monstrous cancers, over tiny twinges that might signal a cardiac arrest; how common it would become for me to travel the aisles of a supermarket lazily choosing a second and a third and a fourth flavour of fruit yoghurt; how unthinkingly I would voice my disdain for the soulless society of my own country that offered most of its citizens nothing but a quality diet, reliable medical care and shelter from the weather—if I had known this, I would have been sickened. But I was sure that I would remember, if I stared hard enough.

I walked all over the prison, repeating softly ‘Don’t forget, don’t forget, don’t forget’ … but even as I spoke those words, I dreaded seeing something bad—a prisoner being beaten or humiliated, the unconcerned gaze of the guards at the plight of some crippled old codger struggling to get up from his prayer mat. And I was well aware of the luxury I enjoyed—the luxury of knowing that I would leave the prison.

It was while I was trapped in this way with my bad conscience that I was compelled to deal with a new dilemma. Older Ali wanted to have sex with me. He asked politely, through Mushtaf. I said no, and Older Ali thanked me graciously for at least having considered the idea. Then he came back with a new proposition. Would I be willing to provide something that stopped short of full-on sex? Again, I said no. But the more I thought about it, the more I questioned my reluctance. The man was going to hang. What would it matter if I used my hand in a mechanical way to introduce into Older Ali’s blood—the blood that ran such a troubled, gallows-haunted course—a little spice? I could do fuck-all else for any of these people who had taken me in and treated me so generously.

But then, what of all the others in the cell? I had months of my sentence left to run. I might emerge into freedom at the end of my stint shagged senseless. Or I might find myself converted willy-nilly to homosexuality. That was something I dreaded. If I became homosexual, I would no longer be able to dream about naked women. A centre-fold would mean nothing to me. The breasts! The breasts, in particular! How would I ever cope if I lost my longing to nuzzle into a warm pair of breasts like a kitten settling on a cushion? To satisfy Older Ali, I would have to bid farewell to a richly agonising fantasy life. And I’d have to put up with moustache kisses, like those that Mister Ali had planted on my cheeks and neck back in Kuwait. Also, it had not escaped my notice that men didn’t always smell all that good.

In the end, I lied. I told Mushtaf to announce that I was forbidden by my religion to engage in sex before marriage, with either men or women. And my church held to a very strict interpretation of sex. Touching, kissing, fondling of any sort were completely out of the question. Before Mushtaf made this announcement, he wanted to know, just out of curiosity, what church I was talking about. Maybe he doubted my sincerity—I didn’t know.

I tried to think of the most abstemious denomination I’d ever heard of. Methodists were fairly severe, so far as I knew. Baptists—they were against a lot of things. Seventh Day Adventists? I knew they were weird, but maybe they had some odd rule that permitted pre-marital sex, like the Mormons. Anglicans I knew about. Churchy Goward in my home town was an Anglican vicar. He was a very tall man whose stoop gave his body the appearance of being hinged in the middle. He would stiffen into an upright posture with an all-but-audible clang at the first sniff of quite ordinary sin. He had once asked a woman wearing red lipstick to leave the church in the middle of a christening, so it was said. But then there were the Catholics, famous for their taboos, very famous for them. I came down on the side of the Catholics. ‘I’m a Catholic,’ I said. ‘Roman Catholic.’ Of course, at that time I didn’t know that if you actually wanted your trousers plundered, the Anglicans and Catholics were the first people you would turn to.

It was settled. As I’d learned, the Muslim attitude to the infidel was essentially one of pity for the benighted. They weren’t about to ask me to risk the wrath of God for the sake of a roll in the hay. Older Ali seemed to approve my piety, patting my head and nodding sympathetically. Mushtaf remained sceptical, but kept it to himself. I felt awful, as I ought. To compensate, I worked up an insane enthusiasm for the hobbies of my pals. I helped Peter erect a skyscraper from his carton of dud ball-points. I put in a two-hour shift with Hossein on the lemons. I taught Younger Ali, who had no hobbies, the craft of paper aeroplane construction, decorating the wings with green crescents, little Iranian flags and tiny depictions of the Shah saluting. But never an hour passed without me squirming over my sexual parsimony.

We saw very little of the prison bosses. Fatty hadn’t shown himself since I arrived. I saw senior guards once in a while, but nobody who looked as if he had any real command. Then one day, without warning, the guards began sprinting all over the prison, rallying the inmates to an open-air address from the chief himself. I tucked in my shirt, put on shoes and socks in place of thongs and lined up with the rich folk, a little to the side of the other inmates in the courtyard. The guards skittled up and down, shouting at the more decrepit prisoners to get to their feet. When every soul in the prison was facing the front, the captain of the guards thudded up the steps to the top platform of a dais that had been set up outside the administration block. His few quiet remarks were amplified by old Beefy, genius of comedy, in a raspy baritone. I didn’t ask Mushtaf for a translation. It seemed likely that Beefy was telling everyone to shut up and stand up straight, and that it would go badly for those who didn’t.

One of the standard features of the abuse of power seems to be the exacerbation of wretchedness. If those under your régime are miserable, take whatever occasion you can find to remind them that the calibrations on the rack allow for a little more misery yet. We waited, most much more uncomfortably than me, hour after hour, for nothing. Calls to prayer went by unobserved. The guards themselves looked exhausted. Fortunately, it was not hot—a whimsical breeze had covered the sky with clouds—or some would have fainted in the first hour. After a couple of hours had passed I asked Mushtaf, out of the side of my mouth, what the hell was going on. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Don’t talk.’

The hour of the midday meal went by without anybody getting fed. I could look over the entire prison population—row after row of men and boys dressed in ragged calico. The men were not suffering in any obvious way. They were not grimacing or swaying on their feet. But their eyes were blank, like those of tired beasts. It was a bad day—that was all. Many murmured prayers. I noticed two who maintained a degree of defiance. They held their chins high, kept their arms rigid at their sides. It was ironical that strict obedience should show up as defiance, but it did. The undefiant simply held themselves up as best they could, with no show of reserve energy. When the guards passed up and down the rows, they would stop in front of each of these rebels and hand out some small, spiteful punishment, such as pinching the nose and clapping a hand over the mouth to cut off breathing, or rapping with their knuckles on the forehead. One of the rebels let out a yelp when his toes were stomped.

The prisoners seemed to me to have developed an intimacy with boredom. They befriended it, I think, but unlovingly; never admiring it, never offering a compliment. Because it wouldn’t go away, they faced it, chatted with it, found a space for it to sit down and grow silent beside them. It was like accepting the company of the village idiot.

To me, boredom was unendurable. I was unpractised. As the hours went by with no appearance by the big chief, I began to seethe with hatred for whoever he was, fashioning reports to be published in important newspapers telling of the stupidity, the incompetence, the ill-will of Zahedan prison’s top man. Later, I calmed down. I stared at fixed points on the walls, attempted to find rhymes for polysyllabic words (onomatopeia / bring it over here). I held maundering conversations with my father and sister, speculated on the origins of certain superstitions (wishing on an eyelash—where did that come from?). I asked myself whether it was fair to add the length of the Missouri River to that of the Mississippi in order to claim the combined Missouri–Mississippi as one of the longest rivers on earth—considering that we in Australia did not attempt to add the length of the Darling River to that of the Murray so as to sneak into the top five.

Well into the afternoon, when I could no longer ignore all the aches that gather from standing still, I began to yearn for the arrival of the big chief in quite a new way. I wanted him to exist. I wanted him to become a body with a face on top. I wanted him to become a reality. I almost loved the big chief, and if he had appeared I would have wept for the wonder of his being there. It became extremely important to me that there was a big chief, a supreme prison authority. I could no longer comprehend the person I’d been a few hours earlier—the person who hated the big chief. I wanted to kiss his hand and thank him for being so considerate and kind as to truly be a person at all. ‘Oh big chief,’ I prayed softly, ‘big chief please, please come!’

Now and again, with a sound like an armful of kindling dropping to the ground, a prisoner collapsed. No attention was paid. They remained motionless where they fell. Mushtaf began to cry, but very quietly. The two defiant prisoners stood out in relief against the surrounding undifferentiated crowd of faces grown dumb with tiredness.

Finally, with the arrival of evening, the captain of the guard mounted the dais once more. He spoke, and what he said was again bullhorned by Beefy. The prisoners sighed, crooned, and began to move away. The big chief was not coming. Those prisoners who lay on the ground were encouraged by their comrades to rouse themselves. Of the half-dozen or so who’d fainted, all but two were able to make it back onto their feet. Those two were fanned and massaged by their friends, but to no avail. I wasn’t able to remain for long enough to find out if they were living or dead.

I think a man becomes a captive only with the passage of time. At first you are a free man detained by idiots, but not a true captive, not a true prisoner. Your vital life is still a savoury complement to the blood that flows around your body. You belong to the true world, not to a sequestered acre of shadows. Your familiar appetites still prod you, still urge you to head north or south for gratification, east or west for a taste of what you crave. But you whack your head on the wall at each imaginative sortie, and you cannot deny the density of the wall you keep hitting. It stands a little inside the other wall, the one you can see.

I was never a captive, of course. My sentence was a joke; the conditions of my imprisonment were a marked improvement on the conditions of my more recent liberty. And I wasn’t slated for the gallows. All the same, I could see what would happen in my head if my sentence suddenly became twenty years, or forever. Most of the people around me were likely to die in this miniature world with its double wall that I would leave soon enough. I could see captivity in their eyes and in the way they walked.

I felt drawn to them. Just the barest welcome into their family had fluffed the hair behind my ears, like a strange, unheralded breeze on a still day. The first smiles that meant anything to me were the smiles offered by these captives. The first kindness that I’d ever appreciated came from these crippled and wearied people offering a share of their bread—or Older Ali gently accepting my refusal to sleep with him. Zahedan prison gave me my first experience of inclusion.

It wasn’t to last. One fine day, a visitor arrived at the prison in a Land Rover, and paid my fine. I was called to the office of another prison bigshot. His visitor was a skinny guy with a Kelly Gang beard and more teeth on display than you would have thought the human jaw could accommodate. Once the visitor had been introduced to me as ‘also Orzdrea’, he greeted me with great cordiality, saying he’d been stocking up in the bazaar when he heard about an Aussie in the clink. He’d come to check me out; thought I might like to see a friendly face. He found out I owed the sheriff here sixpence or something, and paid it. Steve’s the name, by the way.

‘Thank you very much’ I said, miserably, too shocked and disappointed to smile.

‘Mister What’s-he here says they’ve been keeping an eye on you, keeping you away from the rough stuff.’

‘I’ve been very comfortable,’ I said.

‘That right? Reckon you could get a doctor to take a peek at you when you get a chance. Look a bit light-on to me.’

‘I have a naturally light build,’ I said, offended.

‘Well, yeah. But there’s light and light, isn’t there?’

The prison officer left us to ourselves, perhaps under the impression that we two fellow countryman might like to embrace and kiss and sing a song. Steve told me all about his business in this neck of the woods. He was an anthropologist from Sydney University, out this way to research a book he was writing on primitive agricultural systems. He went so far as to pick up a piece of paper and a biro from the desk to sketch a shadoof. The warmth of enthusiasm for his subject was like heat from a bar radiator. He was heading up from Pakistan on his way to Tehran, taking the long way round. Hardly anywhere like it in the world, this region, for a proper look-see at the way people used to farm, so he claimed.

An hour after Steve left in his Land Rover, I was standing outside the prison gates with my suitcase in my hand and the pain of a broken heart bruising my ribcage. I’d cried when I’d said goodbye to the rich folks. The rich folks had cried, too. I’d given Mushtaf half a dozen books, including For Whom the Bell Tolls, so hard to part with. Older Ali had kissed me on the mouth and crushed my head into his chest. Younger Ali had shyly put my two hands together and enclosed them in his. Hossein had tugged my earlobes.