Extradited (21 page)

T
he nights were still freezing and the blanket that I’d been sleeping with was too thin to keep me warm. My dad had bought me a thick, furry blanket, which the guards allowed me to have – so sleeping thereafter was a lot less shivery. When I received it I noticed that they’d ripped off all the edges, just in case there were drugs sewn into the finishing seam. I ended up with two blankets, so I gave Ashmul my old one because he slept with only a bed sheet. Gamma was in ‘detention’ for over a week, but on the fourth day we were allowed a few minutes in the hallway to make phone calls. I thought Ashmul was grateful that I offered him a blanket, but as soon as the cell door was unlocked, he took the blanket to his friend’s cell and swapped it for a packet of cigarettes.

Having to live in a small, cockroach-infested cell without being allowed to leave for more than ten minutes a day was a form of slow torture – especially with Stelios moaning all the time. By the end of the week I’d learned to drown out the sound of his irritating voice and replace it with my own rambling thoughts. His constant jabbering became a mellow frequency of sound in the background. On the other hand, Stelios was entertaining sometimes, especially when he slept. He would still have his Tourette-style outbursts in his sleep; he would be snoring …
then he’d fart, then mumble; ‘
moushmoullo!
’ or sing a short burst of random Greek songs. He was a very odd character, but had a good heart. For example, he owned a lighter case made out of kebab skewers that one of the Chinese inmates had made. It looked professionally finished, but when the lid was taken off you could see that it was really made of thin wooden sticks. The initials ‘A. S.’ were painted on one side, so he gave it to me as a gift. The only problem was that it said ‘ABDUL’ on the other side. So, whoever Abdul was – I still have his lighter case.

During the week’s detention, the guards brought the food to our cells and we couldn’t even go for short walks or a shower. The only positive is that it gave me some more time to read and write. I’d read quite a lot of the Bible and had already finished both of Nelson Mandela’s autobiographies. I’d started to write him a letter, expressing how inspired I was by his story. I told him that the basis of my story was quite simply summarised with a Latin quote that he’d mentioned in his books, which was: ‘
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
– Who will guard the guardians themselves?’ I don’t know what my motivation was behind writing to Nelson Mandela; a response would have been incredible. I felt as though I had a better understanding of the injustice that he faced because we were both wronged by our own governments that should have protected us. I am no Mandela, of course, and my time in prison can’t compare to the twenty-seven years of his life that he spent locked up! Nevertheless, I was certainly inspired by him.

Weng was tall and thin. His fringe was so long that it covered half of his face and I couldn’t see his eyes. One of the first things I asked him was, ‘Can you see?’

‘I can see,’ he said calmly. He told me that he was on remand waiting for a trial regarding a stolen credit card. He briefly explained the story to me – something about coming to Greece, meeting a guy who gave him a copy of a card … but the guy stole all of the money and Weng ended up being blamed. It all sounded pretty dodgy.

I don’t know why, but the majority of the Chinese inmates in Korydallos loved to make things and sell them. Weng didn’t build backgammon boards and lighter cases out of wooden skewers like the inmates in Gamma wing; he would plait together strands of thin nylon thread and tiny plastic beads to make ornaments, Christian crosses and little bracelets. When Weng was out of the cell, Georgios would take one of Weng’s unfinished pieces and floss his teeth with the nylon thread that Weng was yet to plait. Weng had no idea what Georgios was up to. Granted it was a little disrespectful and immature, but I found it kind of funny at the same time. The way Georgios just didn’t give a crap made me laugh a bit. I wasn’t going to open my mouth and tell Weng – it was nothing to do with me. My eyes and ears were always closed in prison, and that code of silence had always served me well.

A chilly winter gradually phased into a sunny spring and Dimitris was eventually released. Over the previous two months, he and I had had a series of arguments over my snoring, which was loud and deep because of the Xanax I was taking. He couldn’t sleep, so he demanded that I make a request to be moved to a different cell. It was he who had a problem with living in cell four, so it was fair for me to suggest that he request to move to another cell instead. Plus, I’d been in prison for eight months and he’d been in prison for eight weeks. Everyone knew that inmates who’d been in prison the longest always had priority; it was an unwritten rule. I wasn’t prepared to leave cell four, especially upon the request of a relatively new inmate who had no other friends in prison. Dimitris refused; I refused; so every time I fell asleep he would shout ‘
Xypna malaka!
– Wake up, wanker!’ I’d wake up, and start to purposely snore even louder to piss him off. Neither of us slept; we were both too stubborn for our own good. It caused tension in the cell for almost a week and one day I sarcastically asked him, ‘Did you have a good sleep, mate?’ He squared up to me and pushed me. I lost my temper and pushed him back. He clenched his fist – Georgios stopped him before anything happened. Dimitris was a good guy; we usually got along quite well and I’d enticed him to become angry on this occasion. We were under a lot of stress and it was unbearable to live in a cramped cell with no sleep. In the end, he gave up and decided to live with my snoring. When he was eventually released we shook hands and he wished me all the luck in the world. I’d watched him come and go, but I was still there – rotting.

There were silly disagreements between Weng and Georgios too. Weng had made dumbbells out of coffee cans filled with sand from the courtyard and other items that he’d found lying around. Georgios lent them to his friend in another cell and Weng kept on asking him where they were. ‘Could you ask Georgios where my dumbbells are?’ Weng asked of me.

I acted as the translator. ‘
Reh Georgio, pou einai ta pragmata tou
– Georgios, man, where are his things?’ I lifted invisible dumbbells with my right arm because I didn’t know the Greek word for them.

‘Pes tou, oti porei na roufa ta archidia mou
– Tell him, he can suck my balls,’ Georgios replied while walking out of the cell door.

‘I think you’re gonna have to wait a while for them, mate,’ I said. Weng never saw the dumbbells again and had requested to be moved to a different cell.

With two spare bunks in our cell, Georgios asked the guards if they could move his friends into our cell; Zafeiris from Lesbos and Costas from Athens – probably the biggest, heroin-addicted, thieving fiends on earth. Suddenly, the ‘safe’ cell that I’d been put into was no longer safe. On a positive note, the dumbbells were back.

Zafeiris was thin and bald, but he always had a bit of unshaven facial hair. If I had to compare him to an animal – it would be a meerkat. He had a little mouth and a pointy nose, which made him look harmless at times, but possibly conniving. Zafeiris claimed that he’d ‘done many big’ criminal jobs before, but was only in prison for armed robbery. He held up a shop with a gun and forced the girl behind the counter to fill up a bag with money and the boxes of cigarettes on display. He was forty-four years old and had spent six years in Patras Prison before Korydallos. He had no kids, no girlfriend and was addicted to heroin. He told me that he loved to go clubbing and take ecstasy, even at the age of forty-four. As for Costas (who just looked like your average forty-year-old Greek guy), I still have no idea why he was there. I didn’t even ask, but he was getting into fights over drugs on almost a weekly basis.

Zafeiris told me that Patras Prison is a lot more relaxed than Korydallos, but when it kicks off … it kicks off. He advised me that I should tell the guards that I’m Greek and to put me in their Alpha wing. ‘You don’t wanna live in Gamma there; it’s very bad, like Gamma in Korydallos,’ he said. It made me think of the riots and cockroaches that I’d had to put up with for so long. I’d survived it, but I didn’t want to ever have to experience anything like it again. I wasn’t looking forward to the transfer, but I knew that it was something that I had to do to fight for my life back. At least knowing the court date was a massive lift. It was like I’d been running a marathon for months and I could suddenly see the finish line – just another stretch.

Minutes turned into hours, hours turned into days, and days turned into weeks. Months passed slowly and our cell had become a hangout for heroin addicts. I knew that I had to deal with it for only a little while longer. I’d watched Georgios, an ex-heroin addict who was clean for three years, get sucked back into the downward spiral of snorting the stuff on a daily basis. His personality had noticeably changed; he was no longer a quiet, cool guy. He’d even begun to hold himself in a manner that was more sluggish, like he’d stopped caring about anything other than
drugs. He was easily aggravated and was often getting into fights and arguments with other inmates. It was exactly as my friend Vasilis in Gamma forty-nine had said: it starts off as a little thing with your friends, then it starts to be every week … then every few days … then every day. It made me think about how dangerous it could have been if my mistake in Gamma (with Apollo) had turned into a habit, and then an addiction. I’m happy that I was mentally strong enough for that not to have happened.