Contrary to my expectations, the juvenile prison where I had been sent bore no resemblance to the serious prisons I had always heard about and which I had been prepared for since childhood. Here there was no criminal law; everything was chaotic and completely unlike any existing model of prison community.
The harsh living conditions and the lack of freedom, at such a delicate stage in the growth of any human being, complicated everything. The boys were very angry, like animals: they were evil, sadistic and deceitful, with a strong desire to sow destruction and raze to the ground anything that reminded them of the free world. Nothing was safe in that place; violence and madness burned like flames in the minds and souls of the inmates.
Each cell held a hundred and fifty boys. The conditions were awful. There weren’t enough beds for everyone, so you had to take turns at sleeping. There was only one bathroom, at the end of the cell, and it stank so much that even if you just went near it you felt like vomiting. The ventilation was non-existent; the only source of air was the holes in the sheets of iron covering the two windows.
It was hard to breathe in there, so a lot of weak boys, who had cardiac or respiratory diseases, couldn’t take it for long: they fell ill; often they fainted and sometimes never came to. A few weeks after my arrival, a boy who had a serious lung condition started spitting blood. Poor kid, he asked for something to drink, but the others dumped him in a corner and wouldn’t go near him for fear of catching tuberculosis. After he had spent a night on the ground, lying in the pool of blood that had formed from his continual spitting, we asked the administration to move him to the hospital.
The light was always on, night and day. Three feeble lamps lit the space inside a kind of sarcophagus made of iron and thick glass, screwed to the wall.
The tap was always running; the water came out as white as milk, and hot – almost boiling – in winter and in summer.
The beds were three-level bunks, and very narrow. All that was left of the mattresses was the covering; the filling had been worn down, so you slept on the hard surface, on the wood. Since it was always infernally hot, nobody used the blankets: we put them under our heads, because the pillows were as thin as the mattresses, with nothing inside them. I preferred to sleep without a pillow and instead put the blanket under the mattress, so as not to break my bones on the wood.
There was no timetable to follow; we were left to ourselves for twenty-four hours a day. Three times a day they brought us some food – in the morning a mug of tea which looked like dirty water, with a faint trace of something which might have been tea in a previous existence. On top of the mug they put a piece of bread with a knob of white butter which had been thinned in the kitchen by the cooks, who stole the provisions, as though they were the criminals, not us.
Since the third floor, where I was, was that of the ‘special purpose’ block reserved for the most dangerous juveniles, we didn’t deserve the honour of having spoons or other metal objects at breakfast. We spread the butter on our bread with our fingers. We dipped the buttered bread in the mug of tea and ate it like a dunked biscuit. Afterwards we drank the tea with the grease floating in it; it was very tasty and nourishing.
Three boys would stand by the little window in the door: they would take the food from the guards’ hands and pass it to the others. Taking anything from the cops was considered ‘dishonest’; those who did it were sacrificing themselves for everyone, and in exchange for the favour nobody touched them – they were allowed to live in peace.
For lunch we had a very light soup, with half-cooked vegetables floating in the dishes like starships in space. The luckiest boys found a piece of potato or a fishbone, or the bone of some animal. That was the first course. For the main course they gave us a dish of kasha: that’s the Russian name for cracked wheat boiled and mixed with a little butter. Usually they put in it pieces of something which looked like meat but tasted like the soles of shoes. We also got a piece of bread and the usual knob of butter, and to eat this exquisite fare they even gave us a spoon. To drink we again had tea, identical to that of the morning, but not nearly as warm. The spoons were counted, however, and if at the end – after the quarter of an hour allotted for lunch – there was a single one missing, the squad from the ‘educational’ unit would come into the cell and beat us all up, without bothering to make many inquiries. At that point the spoon would be given back, or rather thrown towards the door by someone who preferred to remain anonymous, because otherwise his cellmates would have tortured him and, as we say in such cases, ‘made even his shadow bleed’.
For supper there was kasha again, a mug of tea with bread and butter, and once again spoons, but this time we were only given ten minutes for eating.
A lot of trouble arose from food. Little groups of bastards, united by their common love of violence and torture, terrorized all the boys who were on their own and didn’t belong to any family. They would systematically beat them up and torture them, and make them pay a kind of ‘tax’, forcing them to give up most of their portions.
If you wanted to survive and have a quiet life in juvenile prison, you had to join the families. A family was made up of a group of people who had some common characteristic, often their nationality. Each family had its internal rules, and boys happily obeyed them in an effort to simplify their lives. In a typical family you would share everything. Anyone who received a parcel from home would give some of his stuff to the others. In this way everyone was constantly getting something from outside, which was very important psychologically: it helped to stop you becoming demoralized.
The members of one family protected each other, and ate and organized all their daily affairs together.
Each family also imposed some particular rules, some obligations that had to be met. For example, in our Siberian family it was forbidden to participate in gambling or any similar activity together with people from other families. And if anyone did anything to a Siberian, the whole family would jump on him, even if he were on his own, beat him up and force him to ‘soap his skis’ – that is, to ask the guards for an immediate transfer to another cell. He also had to justify his request by saying that he feared being killed. It was a gesture which everybody else looked upon as dishonest, and so when he was transferred that poor wretch would be very badly treated and despised by everyone.
Once a member of our family, a twelve-year-old boy called Aleksy and nicknamed ‘Canine Tooth’, had some problems with one of the sympathizers of Black Seed, who are known as Vorishki, or ‘Little Thieves’, because in Black Seed Vor, or ‘Thief’, is the name of the highest Authority. In prison the Little Thieves imitated the members of Black Seed in everything they did: they played cards and cheated while doing it, they bet on all kinds of things, and they had homosexual relations, often raping the weaker boys and then terrorizing them, using them as slaves.
Anyway, Canine Tooth went to the toilet with another Siberian (in prison people always move about together, so that if anything happens to a brother of yours he is not on his own), and, as the regulations stipulate, he informed everyone in the cell that he was about to go and relieve himself. It is customary to let people know, because many believe that if someone goes to the toilet you mustn’t eat or drink at the same time, otherwise the food and water will become dirty, and any person who touches that food will become zakontacheny, which in criminal slang means contaminated or tainted: a class of despised and maltreated people, who stand on the lowest level of the criminal hierarchy, from where they will never be able to rise again for the rest of their lives.