The Unseen (24 page)

since there was no way out of it the ministry decided it had to resolve the situation by sending an outside cleaning firm into the prison they took out a contract and they paid the top rate to an outside firm a company that operates in exactly the same way any firm working in the prison operates a construction firm or a firm of fitters an electrical firm when there are repairs to be done and this was a firm of cleaners and when the firm arrived the guards suddenly closed all the spy-holes of the armoured doors and within a couple of hours these contract workers with all their cleaning equipment and disinfectants had cleaned away the whole lot

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And so the outcome was the build-up of these cycles where we would fill up the corridor with shit and they would bring in the cleaning firm to clean it out again and so it went on but in the end they allowed us to have visits as a way of relaxing the tension a bit the prison administrators or rather the ministry because with the way things were it was the ministry that made the direct decisions they allowed us to have one visit a month with the visitors behind a glass screen and so China turned up one visiting hour she turned up without them giving me any notice she was coming they called me and they took me into the visiting room with the glass screens in it it was the first time I'd seen that room they'd rebuilt it completely and China was already there waiting for me she was there sitting behind the screen when I went in

there was an intercom under the screen behind a little square grille I bent down to speak into it but across from me China signalled that she couldn't hear anything she also tried to speak into the intercom on her side but I couldn't hear her either I punched the grille a couple of times but it made no difference it was clear that they'd cut off the intercoms they'd cut them off deliberately so that to make ourselves heard we needed to speak very loudly we almost had to shout and so the guards could hear everything the situation was impossible China had travelled a thousand kilometres to come and see me and she had to travel another thousand to get home and we couldn't even talk to one another we had to shout to make ourselves heard

she looked smaller and thinner she was dressed in smart clothes not as I'd remembered her I'd never seen her like this she was wearing a skirt and a smart jacket with big padded shoulders which must have been the current fashion she'd had her hair cut she'd had it cut short it was over a month since I'd seen her she was wearing little earrings and a little wrist watch she who'd never worn a watch she was sitting there on a block of concrete a concrete cube that was supposed to be a stool the glass was thick it was double thickness and it was dirty it was virtually opaque and had a greenish tinge through it China's face was a bit distorted and I shifted around this way and that to try and get a better view of her in the room there were four visiting positions with screens like the cashier's windows in a bank and the guards were in a room just behind us looking at us through a square opening in the wall

as soon as she saw me come into the room she smiled at me from behind the plate glass then when I got closer her expression changed her eyes narrowed into a stare but she didn't look me in the face she looked down a bit I realized that she was looking at my sweater that was all bloodstained it was the same sweater I'd been wearing since that night and then I said it's not my blood but China went on staring staring at the sweater and it dawned on me that she hadn't heard it dawned on me that she hadn't even been aware I was speaking it dawned on me because then she spoke she moved her lips but I didn't hear her voice

I decided there was really no point in even making a fuss I could call the sergeant and the warrant-officer but I knew in advance what would come of it they'd have pretended to follow the rules they'd have said that the intercoms were broken that there was nothing they could do about it but that's how it was for the time being I could make do or if I preferred I could give up the visit and all this would only have wasted the visiting time which was already very short just then a comrade came in he had both his arms in plaster he had a cut on his head they'd given him a load of stitches and to do the stitches they'd cut off all his hair we only nodded in greeting for we disliked one another I really disliked this guy when his parents came in and saw him in this state they were shocked

he by contrast was quite unsubdued in his usual style and he started shouting right away a grin appeared on his still swollen face and then he shouted things like our fight continues and intensifies the struggle goes on tell everyone don't worry about me I'm really fine in a few days I'll be just like new for another struggle his parents were two tired old people and they looked at him in shock and with tears in their eyes China too looked at him with some astonishment I didn't even listen to what the guy was saying because he always talked like this the parents could make no sense of it they nodded their heads in agreement but they didn't take their eyes off the cut with the stitches on his shorn head China now turned back to look at me again with a sad expression I signed to her that the blood on my sweater wasn't mine now she was looking at my nails blackened by the coagulated blood from the truncheon beatings I spoke loudly I'm fine and you and she forced a half smile and shrugged then she asked me what now I shook my head to indicate I didn't know she started telling me that so-and-so and so-and-so sent their regards I listened to the names all the names and nicknames of the comrades who were sending their regards but it made me feel peculiar it made me feel very distant from them almost as if they were strangers or dead people that I'd never see again and I realized that I really couldn't care less about their regards more than that it pissed me off but I was sorry that China was aware of this because she'd come a thousand kilometres to get there and I was sorry

I tried to smile but I felt we were squandering the whole of the visiting time which wasn't much time anyway because the things we were saying were pointless but I didn't even know what she could have said to me what could have helped me my nerves were getting the better of me I only half heard what she was saying but I didn't even ask her to repeat what I couldn't make out then suddenly she stopped talking I stared at the greenish wall behind her soft padded shoulders I didn't know what to say I was getting more and more nervous about the time passing about the time we were wasting but I had no idea what to say what to do to make use of it we were silent for a bit then China looked at her watch a gesture I'd never seen her make before and I said why don't you write to me and she said why don't you write to me

when China left it occurred to me that this business of cutting off the intercoms didn't make sense for if they really wanted to hear everything that was said during the visiting hour instead of making us shout it was much easier much more productive for them to leave the intercoms on which would allow them more easily to hear everything even without people thinking they were being overheard and if they wanted they could even record everything we said during the visiting hour after this visit I didn't see China again I only got a letter from her a week or two later that began with her saying she wouldn't write to me again for a while

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After this we then tackled the problem of how to get another protest going however just then the immediate problem was our reduced exercise time which had been cut down to just an hour in the morning and also the fact that there were no regular working prisoners in the corridors which kept our opportunities for internal communication to the minimum and therefore our possibilities for agreement on how to take joint action so by then it had become essential to find a way of improving our internal communications so in the cells people got the idea of drilling through the walls from cell to cell so that we could communicate directly I mean not pulling down the whole wall but at least making some holes you could talk through from one cell to another

and people started doing it and in fact holes were made in nearly all the cells and so there was a way for us to communicate directly you made a hole in the wall with the remaining bars that could be dismantled from the windows or from the beds or with iron bars that the working prisoners who just came to bring our food managed to pass on to us though it was really risky but of course it took hours and hours for instance to dismantle the beds that were fixed into the concrete floor to get the bars out of them and get the holes made in the wall clearly the guards knew what was going on we'd be banging away all day and so everything was going on right under their eyes

there was the worry the doubt all the time about them coming in and if they came in there could be another bloodbath however there was no other way though bearing in mind the very fact that the guards could come in we took another precaution and this precaution consisted in barricading the cell at night and taking turns at standing watch so as to avoid the risk of being surprised by them breaking in some time while we were asleep the cell barricade consists in jamming some object perhaps no thicker than a biro or a splinter of wood between the gate and the armoured door because the gap between the gate and the armoured door is just a few millimetres

which means all you have to do is fill it in I mean jam something between the gate and the armoured door so that when the guards outside put the key in the lock the door presses against what's blocking it and they can't open it when it's like that they can't come in and therefore there's plenty of time to organize some resistance inside of course they have their own means of removing anything that's in the way for instance taking one of the hydrants that are installed in the corridors of each section and uncoiling the big hose to direct the jet through the spy-hole and then naturally with this powerful jet sweeping the cell you can't do a thing no resistance because it pushes you back against the wall and at the same time they get rid of the obstacle without you being able to do anything about it

so the business of barricading the cells became a nightly routine and so did taking turns at keeping watch to keep an eye on what was happening in the corridor we also got hold of some fragments of mirrors again through the working prisoners who brought our food and we were able to place these mirror fragments outside the spy-holes and in this way we were able to see the whole corridor as far as the end and to keep a check on the movements of the guards this procedure of barricading the cells at night and taking turns to keep watch was routine for a good while and we'd spend the time playing cards for we'd been allowed to have cards we were in the cells for twenty-three solid hours and things went on like this for a good while in the cells

when the bacteriological warfare protest eased off then through this communication channel through the holes that we'd made between the cells discussions began so as to decide which new form of struggle should be taken up to put pressure on the prison administration about other things and then it was clear that the maximum goal this whole crescendo of protests was moving towards was to destroy the prison literally in the sense of destroying it as a physical structure but in fact this was absurd because the conditions they'd placed us in meant that we had nothing to destroy nor did we even have anything that could become an implement for our struggle in the meantime because the cell wasn't furnished it was quite empty and so you couldn't threaten to smash it up there was nothing there and what could you do if there was nothing to smash up

then the next stage in the offensive was flooding and so from bacteriological warfare we moved on to operation Niagara in all these protests what was implicit and decisive was always the store of memory preserved most of all by the non-politicals the accumulation of knowledge of a science of struggle inside the prison of a science built up over time and what was decisive was most of all were naturally the suggestions of the old prisoners of people who'd been in prison for ten twenty years and who'd gone through all kinds of things in protests so now we'd moved on from bacteriological warfare as a form of struggle to operation Niagara which was our new form of struggle

operation Niagara consisted in flooding the section flooding the section meant that at the previously agreed time all of us together all of us using rags made from tearing up the sheets that we'd finally been allowed to have and the blankets we made wadding and with this wadding we blocked the toilets we blocked the toilet bowls and we blocked the washbasins after this we used strips of foam rubber ripped from the foam rubber mattresses and we wedged them in the space between the bottom of the armoured door and the floor and we even padded out the foam rubber with strips of blanket so as to stop the water from running out of the cell and running into the corridor

after this we turned on all the taps and we fixed the flushing mechanism so that the water flushed out continuously and we did this during the night in the periods when there were fewer guards on duty and when at the same time it would create greater problems for during the night a general state of alarm in the prison causes much more trouble than a state of alarm in the daytime because all the guards have to get out of bed and everything becomes more of a nuisance so during the night maybe around three or four a.m. we'd plug everything up we'd plug up the washbasin we'd plug up the toilet bowl and we'd flood the cells and in every cell there were gallons and gallons of water pouring out until the water reached our knees

the water mounted inside the cell which was completely hermetically sealed just imagine how many gallons of water there were the water kept pouring out and when it got to your knees you removed the wadding from under the door that closed up the gap between the door and the floor and the water gushed out in a flood from every cell gallons and gallons of water came gushing out in floods into the corridor and within minutes the whole section was waterlogged making it a protest that did real damage for being on the ground floor the water built up in the corridors and stayed there and the result was a quagmire and what's more we did this while we were still going on with bacteriological warfare which made the quagmire well and truly foul indescribably foul