ANYWHERE - 3 - across the Bering sea

I'm aboard a Russian Cargo Ship moving across the Bering Sea. And so, here I am, watching the Russian men in overalls, the cargo maintainers, the electricians and the heavy mechanics, listening their conversations, observing their theater, and how they get really exalted with their conversations, and after-all, with the help of a translator, I get to know that all this time they have been talking about the Yamal–Europe natural-gas pipeline; the nature of the money involved on it, plus some dirty stories about their friends working on both sides of the line, say, the Yamal peninsula in Western Siberia and on the other extremity, the Germany-Poland border area. And so, as it goes, a lover from Frankfurt is already popping up into the conversation, and also another one from Krakow, the one from Krakow presented as more clownish and plump than the other one, yet, the one from Frankfurt more claimant, that's the remark, and so, as the heavy mechanics and electricians keep scoffing about the character of these women, the translator tells me that now they are actually relating the differences of charisma between these two women with the difference of personality between Chinese and Japanese people, and, as I can see, there are some interrogations, some exclamations, and this is, after the serving of some more coffee mixed with Rum, my mind drifts… that is, I watch the floor going around now, I watch the stars and sunflowers stamped on the carpets. And, I have to say that, at this point, these sunflowers are being watered by some kind of refined petrol slowly dripping on the other corner down there, on the back of the sofas. And so, it is behind this quaint waterfall that the captain’s office is located, and the office door is half open, so, through the gaps on the waterfall we can watch him, surrounded by his informants, navigation specialists, and also a Chinese looking woman, probably the only woman aboard. And so, in the meanwhile, I leave them in their business and move outside, stumbling along the vessel's deck now, leaning against the edge bars, my guts gently wobbling. This is, by now the sea looks strangely calm and shiny, but the sky is dark, as if made of lead, what is normal around here, and so, I keep walking through the gunwale, staring into that greasy waters until that, I’m actually catching glimpses of what looks like skewed stairs shrinking and extending, what may be reflexes of undulating containers, piles of them mounting on the waves. And just now I remember, as I look at these visions, someone said about these containers, that inside, you can fit I don't know how many hundreds of cars and I don't know how many millions of sardine cans, something like that. And, as I go around on the deck, stumbling on some fat ropes, thinking about what am I doing here... at some point, I hear voices coming from upstairs, that is, from that small cabin on the top of the main mast they call “Gnezdo Aista”. And then, I roll my eyes and I see the “plita” and the “nazochik”, this is, the cooker and the janitor. They are actually making me signs now, and so, responding to them, there I go, through a series of winding metal stairs. And it happens that, as I go up, two huge seagulls with a penguin face actually come by almost hitting my head. Even so, I managed to get on the top, and thus, once there, on the top of the world, the first thing I have to do is obviously to explain them what the fuck I’m I doing here, and then, just then they start to speak about themselves. This is, the “plita”, say, the cook, surprisingly, is an American man named Alfred, and the janitor, a Kazak boy with Siberian roots… And so, in the meanwhile, as speak about Siberia and Alaska we smoke that shit, and then, just then, Alfred starts actually to recount about the time he has spent incarcerated in a Chinese prison… this is, “There was always commotions during the night…” he would say, “just imagine, a dozen or so of bodies, with shaved heads, lying in rows on the rough boards, like sardines inside cans with pink lids.... and a ceiling light burning brightly, how could anyone sleep? and suddenly, the new day would come as a shock, say, a low-pitched horn would break the silence would hear it every single day and guess what, I have the impression that I still hear it today… and so, in the morning, we would sit up as warders would pass by in the corridor while banging on the bars saying “Qilai, qilai – Get up!”; thus... breakfast would be gritty rice and the briny smell of pickles would make me retch... but some men had sachets of “cereal” powder that they mixed with boiled water from an urn perched outside the bars and… other men cleared the dishes and would take them to the sink… that is, their actions were chores roistered to each detainee by the warder. Chores like: cleaning the floor; washing the dishes; scrubbing the toilet; stacking the boxes and quilts; emptying the urn twice a day for refilling; washing and folding the clothes... etc. These jobs rotated each week. Plus, the men exercised by circling the cell for ten minutes like Tibetan pilgrims at a temple, minus the Buddhist chants. But this was no temple... just a cube with five by three meters. The entrance and toilet added another two square meters, but, what I mean as toilet, was just a hole in the floor with a rusty flushing lever on the wall behind it, and the sink was a heavy, cracked ceramic affair with a cold tap. Then, above it was a piece of shiny plastic, supposedly a mirror, so warped that you couldn’t see a clear image of your face. That is, during fourteen months there, I couldn't see my own face... and so, after the “stroll” would come the toilet rituals. Orange vests would sit on designated spots beside the wall and red vests, the new boys, would face the grille while studying a brown book with the rules... we would go to the toilet in turns, red vests last. This is, squatting over the hole I almost toppled as I reached for the flusher behind me. “To shit, face forward; to piss, face the wall,” barked Li, the cell boss. “That way, it falls the right way without a mess…” he would say, over and over, like a dog yapping at my ankles… and then it would come the day the warder ordered me to gather my things and “You are going home,” he said. The other men echoed his pronouncement and told me to put on proper clothes and dump my red vest… my heart rose. But then, when the warder fetched me there was some turmoil... anyway, they moved me to another cell and gave me an orange vest… and so, my new boss was Chen, holes in the face... a man sentenced to thirteen years for illegally owning guns to shoot rabbits. “Most people here committed crimes for money,” he said, “but I’m only here because of my hobby.” And there were other three Chinese in their late fifties like me, they dressed in green, the kind of vest worn by inmates with chronic illnesses. And so, I got to know, all the three were wealthy businessmen, hostile to the political system, they were accused of fraud, and they were awaiting trial, but, all of them, claimed innocence. So, actually, this cell was nicknamed “sick men’s cell” by the others, but I called it “the billionaires’ cell”. The aim was to crush the spirit, to break the will. Many prisoners crumble quickly. This is, whatever the cell, the rituals were the same. During exercises, which were aired on a closed circuit overhead TV, we imitated jumps and stretches performed by three PE coaches, one male and two female - the closest my cellmates ever got to a woman. Then a white-coated patrol doctor would come by our grille... Inmates raised health issues but they would be lucky to get a dollop of ointment for a sore foot, or an aspirin. Next came “study time”, in this role we would sit cross-legged on red spots on the floor while the TV relayed “lessons” from the Detention Center “propaganda department”. Sometimes they would broadcast the “propaganda director” preaching about good behavior and analyzing recent statistics, such as: how many detainees had quarreled or fought; how many inmates had argued with the guards or broken other rules, and how many had been punished by isolation or prolonged squatting. And at this cinema time, the other inmates would sit quietly, watching. Some would try sneak-reading a book. Others plotted how to handle their case, or dreamed about a possible escape… But nobody would take “study time” seriously, even so sometimes we had to write a commentary on the session. That was our life. A waiting game. No family visits. No letters home. Just brief messages to lawyers. No chance to orchestrate a real defense. But, foreign prisoners could actually receive consular visits, to the envy of Chinese cellmates…so, Usha, the vice-consul who visited me regularly, and her assistant Susie, relayed messages to and from my family, brought books and magazines, and lobbied over my health. They were my angels… I mean, later, in the detention center, I would develop symptoms of prostate cancer, a long hernia, skin rashes, anal infections and constant diarrhea, and endured an injury to my spine inflicted during the raid. None was treated. There were frequent interrogations. For these I was locked in an iron chair inside a steel cage facing a podium where three PSB men questioned me and, once or twice, I had to thumb-print statements in red seal ink, and specimen documents from my project files. The PSB men did not want to hear any mitigating explanations. They tried to make it look as though Ying and I earned millions from trading in data, which we never did... Plus, the “other department” men tried to stitch me up for spying... they tried to accuse me of spying in the restive Muslim region of Xinjiang, and they tried to tie me to a US intelligence entity spying on North Korea… And so, after seven fourmonths, Ying and I were finally allowed to exchange jailbird love letters. That is, they would take a month to travel thirty meters through the concrete and three layers of police censorship… and we were not allowed to discuss our case. Some of our letters were blocked without any notice. But, as it happened, I always reminded myself that the Chinese men had no such privilege. And thus, after thirteen months without trial, I finally went to court on August eight, Ying and I were charged with “illegally acquiring citizens’ information”, which we denied. And on that day, also happened one of the most deeply distressing moments of the entire ordeal. That was, the police had told me shortly before our trial that Ying had been informed of the recent death of her brother, Bernard, and so, on the morning of our trial, when I saw her on the stairs in the courthouse, I expressed my condolences, but, the way she instantly broke down, told me they had lied, she didn’t know about the death of her brother. I believe they did this on purpose to destabilize us for the trial, and, we were predictably sent down, me for thirty months and Ying for twenty four...this is, from the moon, Qingpu Prison would probably look like a peaceful walled university campus with dorms, gardens, camphor trees, a soccer pitch and a parade ground. That is, on my level, there were a dozen concrete cell blocks with barred windows, a prison theater, an office block, a kitchen, a boiler house and a factory. The perimeter wall bristled with razor wire and was patrolled by armed PAP guards. It could hold five or six thousand prisoners. It also “trained” prisoners for redistribution to other prisons. Cell block eight was for foreign men, the adjacent block for Chinese. A tall iron fence sealed off a yard between the block’s wings. So, as I changed into the new block, a bald middle-aged Malaysian lifer came to the gate and helped me to carry my prison bags. His nickname was MC. He was block eight’s “king rat”. He ran a Malaysian mafia that controlled all the food and job assignments at Qingpu. “What are your thoughts?” a bespectacled senior officer asked me when I arrived. “I don’t know what you mean,” I replied. “What will you do here?” he asked. I did not realize his questions were euphemisms for, “Will you write the acknowledgment of guilt” and the “repentance report” that was required from all prisoners. So, innocently I said “I can teach some English to your staff”. And then I was led to the “training cell” for new prisoners, and given blue-and-white-striped shorts and a white short-sleeved shirt with blue tabs, the summer prison uniform... I became prisoner number forty two thousand eight hundred sixteen... I was locked in an iron chair inside a steel cage and there were frequent interrogations. My cell held twelve prisoners. We slept on iron bunks with wooden planks and a cotton mattress one-and-a-half inches thick, covered with a coarse striped sheet. The barred windows were never closed. Winter was freezing. Next day one young African came by 8 and said “I’m the cell leader,” he was one of many Nigerians there, most of them convicted of drug smuggling and serving life terms. We were joined by two Chinese prisoners who held foreign citizenship: Zhang, an Austrian citizen serving a long term for people-trafficking; and Chen, a Thai citizen who was here for embezzlement. They were snitches recently moved into the cell to monitor me. As both spoke some English, they would follow me everywhere, listen to any conversations I had and report back to the officers. Zhang managed the cell block’s factory production; Chen worked as “social secretary” between prisoners and officers. “How do sentence reductions work? How does the points system work?” I asked. “We don’t know, you must ask the captains,” they lied. “If you want to qualify for reduction, you must confess.” I spoke next to Captain Liu, and “What are your thoughts?” he said in his broken English at a small interview room with bars separating us. My first thought was, “here we go again”. “I'm innocent and I will not admit any crime,” I said. “If I have to stay here, I will use my time to read. I can help teach people English if you want me to, and I want to know about the sentence-reduction system” I would say. “Studying is a privilege, not a right. You should write the confession and repentance reports,” he said. Although, he was more civilized than most5 warders and I think he genuinely hoped to have a good rapport with me, but I disappointed him when I said “I will not write any of that,” and “I demand medical treatment for my ailments, including my prostate…” In the corridors and stairs other prisoners appeared. They smiled and nodded at me. And in our corridor an African inmate tried to chat. “They told us all not to talk to you,” he said. “They said you are an MI6 spy, but none of us believes it. We saw your trial on TV. We have been waiting for you. You are a hero. If you need anything, tell us, we will help you,” he said, ignoring Zhang and Chen, who fluttered and clucked like anxious hens around us. Initially, the officers also banned me from sending letters to family, making phone calls or using the prison shopping system. But I soon found a pile of things on my bunk — tissues, laundry powder, biscuits, coffee sachets, a small towel, two plastic rice bowls, pens and notepaper. Inmates dropped these things as anonymous charity donations. Zhang and Chen led me to my first supper in the “workroom”, where about one hundred prisoners occupied rows of tables with backless, immovable seats attached. And so, as I walked in, all eyes were on me, along with those of six officers. The food was warm there, sometimes hot... a standard dinner was a bowl of steamed rice, almost grit-free, stir-fried, one piece of meat, some vegetables sometimes, and a thin soup. The Ritz! MC’s gang served one cell at a time, ladling food from battered trays. After a final roll-call at nine pm, the barred cell door was locked and trusted prisoners from a Chinese block would stand watching the corridor to report nefarious activity or suicide bids. The ceiling light was kept on all night. We awoke at six. One of us cleaned the toilet area before the others rose. A warder unlocked the cell and the men trooped down to the yard with Thermoses to collect boiled water for hot drinks or washing. Two flasks per man. For breakfast we ate plain rice congee or a steamed bun with salty pickles, and, every Sunday, a boiled egg. Also, there was half-an-hour of exercises in the open air before breakfast in a yard the size of a basketball pitch. And so, after a few days, the nice Captain Liu vanished and word flew round that young Captain Wei would manage our cell. Wei was notorious for persecuting inmates and stirring up incidents that led prisoners to get a beating and to be dragged off screaming to solitary, which I witnessed over and over again. “They are sending him here because of you,” I was told. Indeed, Wei summoned me several times a week for a “talk”. He tried to provoke my anger, insulted me, ordered me to write confessions, and threatened me with an extended sentence or solitary if I refused. I never yielded. Every week I cited my medical problems and demanded proper examinations and treatment for my prostate. “But you haven’t confessed,” he would say. He staged searches and threw all my things out of my bunk drawers across the cell. He often removed my private diary, so I played cat and mouse, hiding my notebooks. I agreed to write a separate monthly “record of my progress” for him, but I only listed his abuses. He would write “good” on each page like a teacher. He obviously did not understand my handwritten English. The prison was a business, doing manufacturing jobs for companies. Mornings, afternoons and often during the after-lunch nap, prisoners “labored” in the common room. Our men made packaging parts. I recognized well-known brands like 3M, C&A or H&M. Prisoners from Chinese cell blocks worked in our factory making textiles and components. They marched there like soldiers before our breakfast and returned late in the evening. The foreigners who labored in my cell block were Africans and Asians with no money from family, and no other way to buy toiletries and snacks. It was piece work; a hundred of this, a thousand of that. Full-time, they earned about 120 yen, about fifteen dollars a month. But it was also about points. There was a sentence-reduction system based on points earned through labor - work such as floor cleaning, food serving, teaching and approved study. Snitching also earned favorable treatment. Our life was a waiting game. No family visits. No letters home. Just brief messages to lawyers. Once or twice a year a list of prisoners went up showing who had earned reductions. Those on long terms crowded 9 around, praying their name was on the board. Many were disappointed. Reductions had become rarer since the new president had taken power. Before that, a 10-year term might be cut to seven. I never qualified because I boycotted the thought reports. The officers refused to explain the system to me anyway. Between bouts of persecution by Wei, I read books and newspapers sent by my Rotary Club community, and books from the prison “library” shelves managed by Stern Hu, a China-born Australian. Stern was arrested on murky allegations of espionage and bribery, something connected with the commerce of iron ore between Australia and China. I was his jail-mate. Tall and aristocratic-looking, hair whitened by captivity, he was highly educated and very kind. He provided me with some of his warm clothing in winter and helped me with Chinese letter writing and reading. He was struggling with heart disease, and I worry about his health to this day. Every encounter was an education. And so, I continued to refuse to “confess”, and the captains continued to block my access to prostate treatment and warm clothing. Everybody was supposed to shave once or twice a week. Prisoners had their own razors, which were stored under lock and key. On certain days of the week the razors were handed out to their owners to shave and then handed back in immediately. I applied to have my family buy me a razor, but Wei kept blocking approval. They tried to make me use a shared razor. I refused on hygiene grounds. I grew a long scraggly gray beard. Hair was cut every Saturday morning by prisoners. I let mine grow. Before long, I looked like a cross between Santa Claus and the Count of Monte Cristo. This drove Wei nuts. He tried to force me to shave, and I filed complaints to the prison and my consulate. Other prisoners started winking at me as I walked along the corridor and I noticed they had started to grow beards too. My consular saviors — Roslyn, who took over from Usha, and Susie — brought letters and books from relatives and friends each month, and relayed my complaints to the prison and the authorities. One day, they brought me a copy of the United Nations treaties on imprisonment and torture that I had requested. These confirmed to me that China failed to comply with most of the standards of treatment on nutrition, sleep, labor, health, and contact with family, etc., required by international laws that China had signed, and I urged my consul to complain. I shared the treaties among the inmates. Handwritten copies proliferated. Some of the men started citing the treaties in complaints to the governor. The officers began to grow uneasy and Wei continued to threaten me with solitary and made efforts to ban me from sitting down anywhere. In the meanwhile, something shifted. Consular lobbying and my relentless complaints forced the prison to send me for a PSA blood test and an MRI at a local hospital. Wei used the moment to parade me in front of the public at the hospital in handcuffs and prison uniform. But the MRI result was a milestone. Within weeks, they had to admit that I had a tumor in my prostate, although they concealed the result of the blood test. The next step should have been a biopsy. Instead, they began to fake the paperwork for a sentence reduction for good behavior. It emerged from this that the real commander of cell block eight was one Captain Shang. He, and eventually the prison governor, spent long sessions pleading with me to sign an admission of guilt so that I could leave prison with Ying, my partner, whose sentence would expire in July that year... “Even your wife could get a small reduction too,” said Shang. He and I argued over the wording of a compromise statement that I would sign to satisfy the paperwork. And so, he went back and forth to his superiors with my preposition. And so, me, tired of all this, I ended up signing a statement expressing qualified, conditional remorse, but not admitting that I had done anything wrong at all. Anyway, they fudged it and some weeks I was smuggled to the Shanghai Prison Hospital where I never saw a doctor but they pretended I was getting medical attention for five days... The vice-governor came to me with a Gillette Turbo razor and begged me to use it. In my final act before leaving Qingpu, I shaved, and some days after, they released Ying and me into house arrest in the Magnotel, a small hotel that sources said belonged to the security apparatus, but then, once in this hotel, another kinds of issues between me and Ying have raised, and so, once released I had problems at the airport and was put in jail again... from the jail I was passed to the hospital, and so, meanwhile, I managed to escape from that hospital, found refuge on that port, and actually, it was these Russian sailors that rescued me…” he would say, and then, after a period of silence we all staring at the freezng horizons, the Kazak boy would eventually continue like this, “Nuliajuk lives on the bottom of the sea and controls all marine mammals... this is, whenever humans neglect to observe ritual prohibitions, she imprisons the sea-mammals within the drip-basin under her lamp, so shamans must conjure her, in order that other sea-mammals can be released… plus, when Nuliajuk was just a girl, she refused to marry, I mean, she accepted no man as a husband… so, it would be a cruel world the world in which their folks would live, a world with no animals to hunt, no caribou, or seals, whales, walruses, fish, nothing... and for this reason her family actually would load their boat with the few things they processed and prepared to head off to another hunting place, hoping for better luck, but well… as they did it, they actually had to leave Nuliajuk behind coz… they couldn’t keep feeding a woman that refused to marry… even so, on that exact moment they were really leaving, she eventually would swam out to the boat, would grab the gunwales and try to climb aboard, but…watching that, her father would just pick an ax and chop her fingers off to keep her from climbing in. And so, in this manner she would eventually slip down into the depths of the sea… and actually, they say, it is there that she dwells from then on, until these days... and because she have no fingers to comb her enormous hair, it eventually gets all tangled up, and some of these under-seas creatures actually may get caught on it and so they tickle and tickle her head and it makes her angry… that is, in the meanwhile there she may be, shaking her head and body around, screaming and flailing her arms about… and then the water will boil and a big waves will arise, and so, here we are, waiting for that explosion to come…!”