[later…] Just got taken to the phone room and allowed to call home. Feckin cards only last 3 minutes and the system failed 80% of times but I got to talk to Nina and then Nell. Everybody cried a bit. She’s really really missed me and must have been hit quite hard by the whole thing. So so good to have got just those few brilliant moments though. My darling daughter. Nina was so lovely to talk to. She has been the best wife possible during these 2 months.
The campaigners are hoping the first of the activists will be freed soon. They expect it to be one of the Russians – Denis or Andrey. But at SIZO-5 a lawyer is clutching a receipt slip for the payment of a two-million-rouble bond, and she’s refusing to leave without her client. ‘This is nonsense,’ Ana Paula’s lawyer tells the governor. ‘Just release her. This procedure is crap. The judge gave her bail, we’ve paid the money. I won’t leave without her.’
And suddenly, unexpectedly, Ana Paula Maciel from Porto Alegre in Brazil is told by a guard that she’s being freed. Half an hour later, from a grey door down the side of SIZO-5, she emerges into a Russian winter’s evening, surrounded by journalists, blinking into flashbulbs, grinning with a combination of delight and shock, holding in her hands a sheet of paper on which she’s written the words ‘SAVE THE ARCTIC’.
21st November
I got bail. I am still in prison but expect to be out tomorrow or Saturday or Monday at the latest. Ana Paula’s hearing was Monday and she was out yesterday afternoon.
I was up and down all day. Finally about 3.30 (?) I came back to hear the judge (young blonde woman – mid 30s?). The judge started talking and after a bit the translator tries to keep up. Well the judge lists all the reasons why I should not get bail. It goes on for 5 minutes, but by the middle I am completely trashed. I tried to figure out why I am not being bailed, and the only reason I can think of is that as captain, they want to make an example out of me… I start to get myself mentally prepared for more prison. Then the judge starts saying all the reasons why I should be bailed. And it finally dawned on me that she had just outlined the prosecutor’s case. So my hope sprang up again. After a few minutes, my lawyers both started giving thumbs up. And then the judge says it real plain… bail is granted. I sighed, closed my eyes and looked down to the right, and an absolute blast of motor-drives went off. I was too drained for even a smile.
But now Pete is worried. He’s back in the cell and his mind is racing. He’s convinced that the others are blaming him for all this. He’s been questioning his judgement as a captain since commandos seized his ship. Shouldn’t he have got out of there as soon as the coastguard started firing warning shots? Some of the crew were kids, they never signed up to years in jail. Pete imagines them lying in their cells, waiting for release and working out how they ended up in this mess in the first place, and deciding it was his fault. They’ll be out soon and they’re going to have their say. They’re going to want to unload, and it’s all coming his way. And maybe they’re right, he thinks. Maybe they’re right.
At 2 p.m. Camila is told her time has come. She’s taken to the meeting room. She waits alone for five minutes, then the door opens and Sini appears with 26-year-old Danish sailor Anne Mie Jensen. They’re taken to the main door of the prison. They’re standing before it now. Then it swings open, and another door opens in front of it, and beyond that is a bank of cameras below a broad sky. Camila walks out. Then Anne Mie. Sini takes a step forward but she doesn’t realise the last door is so heavy. It swings back, Sini leans into it but she can’t hold it back and she’s momentarily squeezed between the prison doors in front of the cameras. She pushes again, steps into the open air, holds her arms aloft and shouts, ‘I’m free!’
It feels like being born again. She wants to run somewhere, anywhere. And she wants to hug anything with a heartbeat. A minute later they’re in the lawyer’s car, speeding down a St Petersburg street.
‘Is it okay if I open the window?’ asks Sini.
‘Yes, sure. Open it.’
So she opens the window and sticks her head through it and shouts, ‘I’m free! I’m free!’ Drivers in passing cars turn their heads, people walking on the pavement look up, they see blonde hair flapping and a woman screaming into the wind.
‘I’m free!’
The women are taken to the Peterville hotel in central St Petersburg and given keys to their rooms. In a third floor corridor Camila is fiddling with a key in the lock while Sini is next to her, jumping up and down on her heels. Behind them Anne Mie is hugging Ana Paula.
Camila turns the key in the hotel door and cries, ‘I can open the door! I can open the door! And I can sleep with the door unlocked!’ She pushes through the door into the hotel room, Sini bounces after her and the two of them punch the air and whoop. They run to the window and disappear behind the curtains. The fabric jerks and bulges as they wrestle with the window fixture, then the window opens and Sini shouts out into the street.
‘Freedom!’
And Camila cries, ‘We are free!’
Then Camila’s head pops out from behind the curtains and she says, ‘Hey, maybe we should do a banner hang here.’
And a voice from the corridor says, ‘You can’t do a banner hang, you only just got out of jail!’
Sini jumps onto one of the beds and Camila joins her. They’re bouncing from bed to bed, whooping and screaming until Sini is laughing so much she falls off and rolls onto the floor and Camila collapses onto her back and shouts, ‘I feel like a three-year-old child!’
More people are piling into the room. A bottle of champagne is produced. Sini says she hasn’t drunk alcohol in five years. ‘But this is the day to break it.’ She takes the bottle, pops the cork and everybody’s arms go into the air in celebration, and just at that moment the Italian activist Cristian D’Alessandro waltzes into the room sporting a grin the width of a dinner plate.
‘I just took a shower,’ he says, ‘and I’m a free man!’
TWENTY-NINE
22nd November (Friday)
THAT’S IT – JUST GOT GIVEN 5 MIN WARNING – I’M BEING RELEASED…
Turma racing over.
Frank feels joy surging through his body, to the tips of his fingers and toes. It washes over him like a cleansing shower. He takes a deep breath, smiles and starts packing his bag, but as he glances at Anton his cellmate looks back at him and Frank can see he’s wishing it was him. Outside his cell the governor of Kresty is standing in the corridor, watching him through a gap in the open door. The man says something in Russian to the guard, and the guard turns to Frank and says, ‘You put in a request to see the cathedral?’
Frank looks up.
‘What?’
‘You asked to see the cathedral.’
‘Yeah. Yeah I did.’