‘We looked through your letters. It seems obvious that you were planning to distribute them illegally, bypassing prison censorship. We will not be returning them. Come with me.’
‘Where am I going?’
‘To see the psychologist.’
‘Oh, Jesus. Really?’
He’s led down a corridor to the office of the counsellor. The man is on his feet in full camouflage, fingering his baton. The peak of his military cap is pulled low over his face so it nearly covers the coal-black lenses of his Reactolite glasses. He examines Dima for a moment then lowers himself into his deep leather-backed swivel armchair and points at the seat opposite. Dima sits down and takes a moment to consider what Freud might have said about a psychologist who works in full military fatigues and wields a weapon in the consulting room.
‘How are you, Litvinov?’
‘So so.’
‘Any suicidal thoughts?’
‘Nope.’
‘Feeling depressed?’
‘I’m not very happy about being locked up for something I didn’t do.’
The psychologist nods. ‘Sure, sure.’
‘I was told you wanted to see me.’
‘Mmmm.’ He leans back. ‘It’s about these letters. They’re, ummm…’ He scratches the corner of his mouth. ‘They’re talking about putting you into a punishment cell.’
‘A punishment cell?’
‘Three days in the kartser, because of these letters. They say you were going to send them out illegally. And, well, we can’t have that.’
‘But… but they were just drafts, I never even… the kartser? This is about those FSB guys, isn’t it? The ones who pulled me out of my cell and threatened me. They ordered this.’
‘I don’t know about any of that. All I know is that the governor has asked me to make an evaluation, see if you’re in a fit state for the punishment cell.’
‘And am I?’
‘You’ll be fine.’ He turns to the guards. ‘Yup, he’ll be fine.’
‘That’s it?’
‘That’s it.’
The guard takes Dima back to his cell and orders him to pack his possessions, everything he owns, including his bedding. As he fills his huge pink bag, Vitaly stomps up and down the cell. ‘Whaaaat? They’re putting you in the kartser? You have to have nine marks against you before you’re sent to the kartser. They can’t just do that. Why are they doing this?’ His skin is dark but right now his cheeks are flushed red. He stops and addresses the guard standing in the doorway. ‘Why are you doing this? This is crazy. And why does he have to take all his stuff?’
‘Because he may not be coming back to the same cell afterwards. Orders of the governor.’
Dima is marched through the prison, up flights of stairs and down again, his bag slung over his shoulder. At the end of a long corridor the guard stops him and takes the bag. Dima is left standing in his T-shirt, sweat pants and slippers. Even his bowl and his cup are taken from him. The guard opens a heavy door and holds out his arm, inviting Dima to step inside.
It’s tiny, almost bare. There’s no bed, just a wooden bench on a hinge that’s folded against the wall. High up near the ceiling is a window the size of a shoebox, too small to capture much of the Arctic sun. Dima steps inside, behind him the door swings closed.
It’s quiet, dark, he’s alone. He sits on the floor and stretches his legs, but they reach the other side of the cell before they’re straight. Three days, Dima thinks. That’s seventy-two hours. Minutes pass, then an hour, and another, or maybe it’s been longer. Or maybe not. If he counts to three hundred that’s five minutes, and if he does that twelve times then that’s one hour. He gets to his feet and starts pacing back and forth, counting time. ‘… two-nine-seven, two-nine-eight, two-nine-nine, three hundred, one, two, three, four…’
Hours pass. He’s still pacing when the door opens.
‘Bed time,’ says the guard.
‘What time is it?’
‘Ten o’clock.’
He’s been here fourteen hours.
The guard unclips the bench; it drops down, the door closes. Dima takes off his steel spectacles and lays them on the floor under the bench. He sleeps for a while but wakes in the night, paces some more, lies down again, sits on the edge of the bench, stands up, sits down again. He can feel the early stages of panic coming on. He forces himself to think of Lev, his oldest son. Lev has been travelling the world this past year, sailing the South Pacific as a dive master on a three-mast schooner. Now he’s en route to New Zealand to volunteer on an organic farm, but the last Dima heard he was on the island of Vanuatu.
Now he uses Vanuatu to suppress the fear. He stands back and looks through the window at the black sky, the wind from the Arctic whistling in. And he repeats the word. ‘Vanuatu Vanuatu Vanuatu.’ He’s imagining coral atolls, palm trees and white sand. Lev splashing out to a canoe.
But soon enough his mind is running to a dark place. He can’t make sense of this. Why has he been put here? It’s definitely a bad sign. If they were preparing to release him then they wouldn’t be doing this. His thoughts spiral down and down, down into the darkest place, the place where he’s kept his worst fears locked away. And now, when he tries to climb out, when he tries to imagine those coral atolls and white beaches, they won’t come to him, they might as well be on a different planet, because he’s slipping into a quicksand of panic.
Turma racing.
This is it. This is how it’s going to be now. Years of this shit, locked up in this hellhole of a prison, thrown into the kartser for daring to even look sideways at a guard. Seven years. How do you pace out that kind of time? How many seconds is that anyway? And what about Anitta? Shit, I’m going to have to tell her not to wait. I can’t ask her to put her life on hold while I’m rotting away in this place. No, I’ll tell her she’s not to wait around for me to get out. She has to get on with her life. Fuck. Seven years. Seven fucking years.
His mind races and races, he paces again, sits down, lies down, stands up, looks up at the sky and strains for Vanuatu. He paces and paces until the guards return. It’s 6 a.m. They fold up the bench and leave Dima a bowl of porridge. He ignores the food, paces the cell and counts to three hundred, and again, working through the minutes and the hours. The sun comes up and throws a bleak smudge of grey onto the wall for a few hours before retreating. Later the bench is lowered, another night, he sleeps and paces, lies down, stands up, sits on the bench.
I went to the Arctic to take on Gazprom, I thought it would give us a platform to talk about Arctic oil. I just never thought they’d keep us. But they did, and here I am. But that’s okay. We were challenging Gazprom, and Gazprom is Putin, so of course I’m in a punishment cell in an isolation prison in the Russian Arctic. And maybe this is where I should be. If you really believe in something then you have to show you’ll pay a price. What were we going to do, just hang a banner on that oil platform and say we’d done our job? We should be in jail. This is right. This shows we’re winning. This is where I need to be right now.
The next morning, or maybe it’s the afternoon, the door opens and a guard motions for him to step into the corridor. Dima rubs his eyes and looks up. Standing before him, extracting a piece of food from between his front teeth with the nail of his little finger, is Popov.
‘Dimitri, hello.’
Dima’s eyes narrow into slits. ‘What time is it?’
‘One o’clock.’
He’s been in that cell for twenty-nine hours.
‘Having a good time in there, are you?’
‘What do you think?’