I. The Leash
While the police conducted their inquiries at the scene, I sat on the warm asphalt in a patch of shade, with the dog, waiting for the whole business to conclude so that I might finally get the meat home to the freezer. Fifteen kilos of it. In summer. That, I may as well confess at the outset, was the gravest error I committed all day — not whatever it was they had arrested me for, but my touching faith that the meat would reach the freezer at all.
As I sat there, my thoughts were of the most blameless domestic kind. I am an engineer, and I was, at that moment, quite placidly planning the next working day: which drawings wanted checking, which calculations must be finished, which documents delivered by their deadlines. The ordinary innocence of a Monday that has not yet arrived. That I would in fact spend the following day counting metro trains by the tremor they sent through concrete had not yet occurred to me. Just as well.
I had rehearsed the handcuff scenario in my head for years, so when they were produced I was not especially astonished. I produced, in reply, the leash. The logic seemed to me impeccable: I have a dog on my hands, you have bracelets on yours, and one of us is plainly not ready for this. It failed to move them. The cuffs went on, and I understood one simple thing — a new quest had begun, and it would have to be completed.
Everything that followed I prefer to call a quest. It is the more honest word. “Incarceration” is far too grand for two days; “detention” too dry; but quest fits precisely — obscure rules, hostile NPCs, a severely limited inventory, and no map whatsoever.
There were two of them arresting me. The second, a Latina, had decided in advance that I was a monster and tested the hypothesis at intervals. I had announced early on that I spoke no French — by Belgian law this entitled me to a Dutch-speaking officer, summoned automatically. No such officer was summoned. They managed without. The substance of the charges I never actually heard at the point of arrest; it was explained to me considerably later, by which time it was a formality rather than news.
When I did at last switch to French — such French as I possess — she remarked, with some relish, that I had evidently been lying and could speak it after all. I might have explained the distinction between “I do not speak” and “I decline to give evidence in a language I command badly, in a situation where every word will later be read aloud five times over.” But do not trust, do not fear, do not ask extends quite naturally to do not explain. I said nothing.
Standing for long periods is beyond me — a medical matter, not a temperamental one. So I would sit down on the ground and, when ordered to rise, decline. The Latina took this for a symptom of my general worthlessness and supplied what she believed to be cutting commentary: look at you, so very hard done by. I did not argue. Hard done by, then. Arguing with a person who holds the keys to your handcuffs is not a position; it is a hobby.
II. Processing
You are received and processed by the very people who arrested you. This is an important feature of the architecture: those who process you have already formed their opinion of you as a criminal, and pity does not enter into it. Rather the reverse — the processing is conducted, as it were, against your future sentence, paid in advance.
Over two days I assembled an amateur taxonomy of the custodial staff. Some ten or fifteen percent are outright sadists, or — to put it more charitably — persons who love, and know how, to punish someone who is not yet even a criminal. You spot them at once, by the small things: the posture, the intonation, the set of the shoulders, and that particular gaze which does not look at you so much as hunt — for some small way to make things marginally worse for you while remaining strictly within regulations. The rest are not cruel, merely indifferent, and this, strange to say, comes as an enormous relief: the indifferent man does his job and moves along, whereas the hunter puts his heart into it.
One such artist was fastening my handcuffs. “Does that hurt, meneer?” he inquired. Thank you for asking, I said; it does. “Well, it isn’t supposed to be pleasant, meneer.” And there I understood I was dealing with a master: the question had been posed not out of solicitude but to secure confirmation that it hurt, and to savour the confirmation. Solicitude as a delivery mechanism for one’s own pleasure. Fine work.
With the same master I completed the quest entitled “Telephone Call.” Might I make a call? Certainly, meneer, give me the number and I shall dial it for you. But the number lives in the address book of the smartphone, and the smartphone may not be opened. Impasse. Very well, I said, might I at least switch the telephone off so the battery survives? No, meneer, you may not. Might I send an email? Might I forward a note by email? You already know the answer. By this point I had caught the pattern: he says no to everything to which one can possibly say no, and does so with a quiet contentment. A delinquent urge ripened in me to request something further — expressly to grant him one more no, since it gave him such evident joy. But I decided not to oblige. Merely: fine, thank you. Incidentally, on the matter of justice and meat: while we performed this little sketch, fifteen kilos were ripening in the boot of a car left standing in the heat — the same fifteen kilos I never delivered. But of that, at the very end.
As it later transpired, there are decent ones among the cipiers too: such a man will fasten your cuffs in front rather than behind, unasked, for the simple reason that in front is more comfortable. The difference between “in front” and “behind” is, in essence, the entire difference between a man performing his office and an office performing its man.
Then the fingerprinting. The fingers, then the edge of the palm. The scanner works badly and will not read. This irritates the officer. The irritation is transmitted to me: my hand begins to be jerked about more nervously. And I have a tremor. The tremor comes of having one’s hand jerked; the scanner, on account of the tremor, reads still worse; the officer, on account of that, grows angrier still — a beautiful feedback loop, designed by people who have never heard of feedback. I made a mental note that the system wanted damping. I did not make it aloud.
Then they palpate the body. Everywhere. Rather pleasant — provided one forgets the sex of the practitioner. The practitioner was male, which slightly spoiled the effect; I had heard somewhere that the Belgian police are a notably homosexual institution, and reflected that for some this must be the dream posting. For my part I was merely too hot.
Too hot, because the room in which I was processed had no ventilation. This I noticed at once, before I noticed my own discomfort. In such French as I have, I inquired whether they were much troubled by headaches. They asked whether I was. No, I said; whether you were. Why on earth? Because you have no ventilation. And I added — to myself this time — that the door to the reception room stood permanently open, and the corridor beyond it was ventilated. Which is to say they were, all unknowing, airing their little gas chamber through the corridor, by grace of the architecture rather than the design. Gratis and undeserved.
A separate number in the programme: turn the T-shirt inside out. Francophone policemen, as I established empirically, sincerely believe that a command bellowed several times over will thereby become intelligible to a Dutch-speaker. “Turn your T-shirt inside out” I grasped on the fifth attempt, by which point my ears had begun to ring. First I dutifully attempted “about turn.” Then I removed the shirt. Then I rotated it this way and that, demonstrating my readiness to cooperate. Then, when the officer had gone quite crimson, an idea surfaced in my mind out of sheer hopelessness: what if — inside out? I turned it inside out. I had guessed correctly.
The turning-out, I gathered, was to check whether I concealed any further laces. Sound enough logic — laces, belt, anything on which one might in theory hang oneself, all confiscated and inventoried. What is amusing is that they missed the principal lace altogether. I was in sports shorts and remained in them, and had I truly wished to make an end of things, the drawstring was with me the whole time. A system that removes your bootlaces and leaves you the string at your waist is not a security system; it is a ritual. And rituals I rather like, for their honesty: they do not work, but they do look well.
III. The First Cell
The first holding block is six pens. “Cell” would flatter them; “pen” is nearer the mark. The smell hits you at once, and I recognized it — the smell of a Russian third-class railway carriage. All my life I had supposed this to be the smell of burnt coal from the carriage boilers. It is not. It is the smell of stale urine in the lavatories and old sweat in the bunks. One of the few genuine discoveries I carried out of this quest: my childhood had not, after all, smelt of coal.
The first-tier cell: a concrete plinth bearing a bunk of imitation leather. No pillow. A stainless-steel lavatory. The flush is outside, beyond the cell; the water is released once, at the changing of the tenant. Wash your hands — no. Lavatory paper — no. I, a man who eats once a day and can go a good while without the larger sort of visit, was fortunate: I simply happened to fit the design, metabolically speaking. The hungry and the hurried are not provided for.
While the hungry and the hurried suffered, I set about doing what I do in any room into which I am led: reading it. Though in the pen itself there was little enough to read — it is deliberately bare, naked concrete, not a pipe, not a duct, not a lamp within reach. All the engineering has been exiled outside, beyond the door: the cable runs, the heating, the water distribution — all of it travels along the corridor down which I was led to the lavatory and to interrogation. And there I read the building in snatches, in passing. Cables, yes. Heating here, and there mere water — they run differently. Where are the fire mains? Two lamps in a row on the corridor ceiling, in place of one: the beam throws a shadow, so the light has had to be doubled. The cell-door hinges are concealed. At the Palace, later, the hinges would be inside, with sharp-cornered stops bolted to them so the door cannot be lifted off from within. The badge-and-airlock system runs thus. From the outside I must have looked like a man working undercover and gathering data for a storming. In fact I simply cannot be inside a structure without taking it apart into its components — it switches itself on, without my permission, and in prison it proved the one thing they had not confiscated and inventoried. As for the bare cell, it was made bare precisely so there should be nothing to read. In that respect the designer had outplayed me.
In the cell, a video camera. It points directly at the spot where you stand to urinate. Which is to say, directly at one’s penis. I do hope the lads at the far end of the cable got some pleasure out of their shift; the work, to judge by the surroundings, is a cheerless one.
Looking at that camera, I fell, for no clear reason, into a memory nearly a quarter of a century old. My wife and I were shooting macro out in the countryside — a lizard, a flower, a beetle. We had only just acquired our first digital camera, a Minolta DiMAGE 7i, with a screen on the back where you could see at once what you had shot. For people raised on film, on developing, and on the incantation “just print the good ones, please,” this was pure sorcery: you shoot, and there it is. We sat on the bank, drunk on the miracle of electronics. Nearby, another couple were arguing about something, and fragments reached us: “a television in the camera,” “why a television in the camera.” We exchanged glances, looked at our Minolta, considered: well, there’s a screen, but that’s hardly a television, and anyway — why would a camera want a television? Until one of the pair delivered the line that set everything in its place: a television in the camera solves nothing, it’s still a camera and you’re the one sitting in it. Ahh. They were not talking about a photographic apparatus at all. Their word “camera” came from another, a custodial, lexicon — and now, a quarter of a century on, I had at last arrived inside their meaning of the word. With a video camera trained on my penis. The circle had closed.
It is never dark. I thought of Orwell — “the place where there is no darkness.” In Orwell it rang ominous and metaphysical; in practice it turned out to be a common fluorescent tube. It hums, naturally, with the fifty-hertz whine of old age. Continuously. A level mains drone, delivered straight into the skull. A mercy, at least, that it did not flicker — flickering, I rather think, I should have begun to count.
After a time you begin to make out nuances in that level hum. Or you begin to fancy you do — there is no way to check. In much the same way, the moment you shut your eyes, you begin to fancy you are lying not on a bunk beneath a concrete ceiling but on grass, beneath trees. You know perfectly well it is a hallucination. But you handle it tenderly, as something fragile: you take care not to startle it, not to let the outer world in. One thing spoils it — the fifty-hertz hum has not gone anywhere; it intrudes on the picture and ruins it. And instead of simply letting it go, you set about, for some reason, finding it a place inside the vision. Very well, you decide, let them be cicadas. Cicadas will serve. Even drifting free of reality, one cannot simply release a sound — it must, without fail, be filed somewhere.
The ventilation I checked first of all. There was an extract duct — but the door had no gaps, no make-up air, and therefore no draught. An extract duct with no incoming air is merely a hole in the wall with a decent view. I noted this with disapproval and, I admit, a certain malice: there is a satisfaction, when one is seated inside a badly designed system, in knowing exactly which component was badly designed.
IV. Water
Water was not given. To the question “might I have some water?” there was but one answer, and it was the favourite line of the entire custodial establishment. It came in two languages. Chiefly in French — “Ceci n’est pas un hôtel, monsieur.” And at that phrase, every time, a picture would surface before my eyes: a framed painting, a smoking-pipe, and beneath it the caption “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” this is not a pipe. The same solemn intonation of denying the self-evident, only with a hotel in place of the pipe. Magritte, the chief artist of Brussels, had not quit Brussels even here, in the lock-up: he lay in wait for me on the wall of my imagination at precisely the moment I was being refused water. When I was lucky, the phrase arrived in Dutch — “Dit is geen hotel, meneer.” In Dutch it was shorter and somehow more honest, without the Parisian lace and without Magritte. The sense, either way, was one: this is not a hotel, meneer. Dutch has a fine separate word for the warder — cipier. And every cipier I dealt with gave the impression of an NPC into whom one or two lines of dialogue had been coded. Might I have water? — This is not a hotel, meneer. Context: stifling heat, past thirty degrees, twelve hours without a single sip.
Water I obtained only when I was brought out for interrogation. My first act was to drink six glasses in succession. Not out of any humane impulse — they simply handed me a beaker and pointed at a tap low down, in the plinth of the cell block. Six glasses after twelve hours is, I assure you, an experience of almost indecent intensity.
With food, the same school of thought. Two days, one night. I was fed once, and that already at the Palace of Justice. What does Belgium give a hungry man? Just so: two Belgian waffles in disposable wrapping. The country keeps up appearances even in the basement — it feeds you what it is famous for. And here is what I found: two waffles are quite sufficient for two days. Not because they are ample, but because under such stress one has no appetite at all. The organism goes over to cell-mode and treats food as a superfluous variable. Somewhere around the second waffle I caught myself understanding the animals who, once penned, refuse to eat — understanding them rather better than I should have liked. But among the clientele there were old hands — these demanded food, complained of hunger, stood on their rights. The answer they received was precisely the one you now know by heart. This is not a hotel, meneer.
V. The Object
What truly drives one mad is not the cell but the intercom. There is one in every pen, and its sole function is to remind you that you are an object. The naïve among my neighbours pressed it. The intercom would reply at length with regular beeps — these laid themselves neatly over the hum of the lamp, and a duet resulted. Then the neighbour would press again. And again. And again. Classic perseveration: a man repeats an action that yields no result, in the same undimmed hope. I confess I diagnosed an entire population on this basis: it appears that persons inclined to criminality have some trouble with the orbitofrontal cortex — the very part responsible for this isn’t working, stop. An unscientific observation, an unrepresentative sample, but the intercom beeped persuasively.
Every cinematic cliché about prison is not a cliché but a transcript. Wild cries. Wild hammering on the door with feet and body. Prayers aloud, at a scream, concerning the greatness of Allah — and, to judge by the intonation, the greatness was total. Once, “Bella Ciao” went out over the air, and more than once at that. Now and then you sink into a doze — and are woken by the next howl. And in answer to the howl from another pen comes a furious “Silence!!!” — in French, seelahns, with a drawn-out final syllable. Not from a warder, no. The warders could not care less. From a neighbour. The inmates kept order themselves, since the administration did not include that in its service. This is not a hotel, meneer — only now it was pronounced not by a cipier but by a fellow detainee through the wall.
Among the arrested a group dynamic forms, and within it a jester always emerges. Ours was a lean, cheerful, dark-haired fellow of Afro-Arab extraction, indecently amiable against the background of the rest — and the rest preferred to sit with their eyes shut and converse with no one. The jester spun stories, entertained neighbours and warders alike, demonstrated how best to arrange oneself when handcuffed, offered to shift along when a space came free. He performed an important social service and was, it seemed, the only one of us having a tolerable time.
VI. Time
Perpetual light; the absence of laces and of news; graffiti scratched into the walls and read to tatters — I still cannot work out what they contrived to scratch them with — all this together accomplishes one simple thing: you lose time. Not “grow bored,” but lose the very unit of measurement. No clock, no window, no alternation of day and night, and the lamp hums identically forever.
I had to seek a clock in the structure itself. In the morning I understood that morning had come, because the metro trains began to run: a light, regular tremor in the concrete. One can time the intervals between trains, convert them to a mean, and thereby reconstruct, after a fashion, the passage of the day. The head that only a day before had been planning drawings found itself an object to monitor — a highly specific object, but an object nonetheless.
When you stop hoping to be released at any moment, the head is freed, and it sets about the one available task — to give the day some structure. A prisoner’s day is a meagre thing, but even it can be organized. I, for instance, instituted walks.
Five kilometres a day I contrived to come by after all. Not uphill and not along a street, but inside the pen: three paces there, three paces back. There is a time-honoured genre of adult admonition — “in my day I walked five kilometres to school, uphill, into the wind, in winter, through a blizzard, and you have the internet.” Well, I report as follows: five kilometres uphill is nothing. The true achievement is to wind those same five kilometres onto a floor plan three paces wide. Not uphill. In a cage. To keep from growing dizzy you walk not in a straight line but in figures of eight; for a modicum of entertainment, you reverse the direction of the eights from time to time.
And on one such figure of eight I remembered the snow leopard. Years ago, at a zoo, I had been struck by a leopard pacing out its cage — evenly, ceaselessly, corner to corner. It seemed to me then that it was very unwell. I said as much to the keeper. The keeper replied that animals do not understand what captivity is. I held my tongue at the time, but now, winding my own figures of eight, I know for certain: they understand. They understand perfectly. It is only that they, unlike the keeper, have nothing with which to lie about it.
Once, on another lap, I approached the door so energetically that I frightened a warder. He had just opened the hatch — to ask whether I needed the lavatory — and we met in it at point-blank range. A little grille and a glass insert divided us (against spitting, one presumes), but momentum had brought me literally nose to nose with his face. “Thank you, no,” I said. We were both embarrassed, as though we had kissed by accident.
At that glass insert I later looked with professional interest — as the finest illustration of their security system. You recall the laces? They confiscated and inventoried my bootlaces and belt, and left me the drawstring of my shorts and this loose pane of glass in the door. The props were removed at the entrance; the load-bearing hazards were left on the stage. A security that frisks the footwear and fails to notice the glass half a metre away is not security; it is a ritual. And rituals, as we have already established, I value for their honesty: they do not work, but they look well.
VII. Abandon Hope
What torments you is not the sitting, nor the waiting as such. What torments you is sitting with a sense of grievance and injustice; sitting in the hope that any moment now it will all be over; sitting with an ear cocked to the footsteps in the corridor — perhaps they are for you. And when the footsteps stop at your door and it is indeed opened — perhaps they will let you out.
Having read my Viktor Frankl in earlier days, I recalled the essential point: in a place like this, hope must be abandoned. Not in the sense of despairing, but in the sense of ceasing to fasten your condition to an external event you do not control. And this, oddly enough, worked. When it was announced to me that we would be spending the night here, I received it calmly.
I only failed at first to grasp the mechanics. First I was told that I must present myself at the magistrate’s by eight the next morning. I asked, businesslike, for the address. It was given. I said: very well, I shall come round. I was told not to trouble myself — I would be given a lift. For perhaps another half-second I was touched by the advanced level of service, and then it dawned on me.
VIII. The Party Van
Morning I identified by the metro — towards evening the tremor in the concrete had died away, and towards morning it resumed. The city had woken, then; soon I would be driven. And this was the “lift”: the morning transfer from the district lock-up to the Palace of Justice. The prison van.
In the Russian-speaking internet, after certain well-known protests, such a van acquired the nickname “party van,” and I supposed at first that this was on account of the light: the blue beacon on the roof does indeed put one in mind of a discotheque. But then, from within, I understood: the beacon was not the whole of it.
Inside, the van is partitioned into individual Perspex booths. You are strapped in, you are handcuffed, you can see almost nothing. And here begins an entertainment that, for sheer intensity of sensation, I should rank somewhere between IMAX and being led out for interrogation: you attempt, from the reflections in the Perspex walls, to reconstruct where the vehicle is going. Here is a turn — by the way the reflection swung. Here is a traffic light — by the way the van froze and rocked back. Sensory deprivation works without fail: when the brain is stripped of nearly all its inputs, it falls with rapture upon whatever remains. The reflection of a street lamp in Perspex becomes an event. A right turn becomes a plot.
The same hunger for contact breeds a wholly unexpected brotherhood. In a little over twenty-four hours I developed warm feelings, verging on sincere friendship, towards everyone with whom I exchanged a glance more than once. The warders mostly held a poker face, but the arrested did not: mutual recognition, nods, as though we had known one another for years. Whereas in fact we had merely ridden in one van and afterwards sat handcuffed on one bench at the Palace. But under conditions of sensory famine that is quite enough to make the man opposite very nearly a blood relation.
And presiding over it all, the figure of the jester. That same lean, cheerful, dark-haired man. Even in the van he contrived to spin stories through the Perspex, and it was, perhaps, the most valuable social service in the whole proceeding: someone must, after all, remind us that we are still people, and not merely objects with numbers.
IX. The Palace of Justice
I was delivered. The Palace of Justice in Brussels — the old building has been under restoration for roughly an eternity, so justice has temporarily moved to a new one. The new one has two storeys below ground level, and both are packed with little cells. Nearly all without a lavatory, all without a bunk. I turned this detail over in my mind for a long while and concluded that it is no architectural accident but a precise metaphor: justice quite literally stands upon two subterranean storeys of un-freedom. The foundation is cells. Above come the columns, the marble, and, over the entrance, she. Justitia. A sword in one hand, scales in the other, a blindfold over her eyes.
Officially the blindfold signifies impartiality: the court does not look at faces, all are equal before the law. But from below, from the basement, the construction reads otherwise. The blindfold is not “I do not look at faces.” It is “I do not see, and do not wish to see, anything beyond the system.” And now the crucial point: blindfolded, she physically cannot read the indication of her own scales. She holds a measuring instrument off which she is unable to take a result. An engineer would not have signed off on such a scheme: the sensor is present, the operator is blinded, there is no feedback. And it is upon this construction — a sword that cuts, scales that no one reads — that the whole building rests.
Since Plato, the philosophers have failed to close the question of what justice is. I, having served two days in its foundation, have closed it for myself. Justice is not a universal law of the cosmos but the particular, private emotion of a particular person at a particular moment. It is subjective as taste, and irreproducible as a mood. And the entire system around it — the robes, the rituals, the Latin, the marble, the blindfolded goddess — is a theatre, conscientiously staged so that the requisite emotion should arise in the public. The emotion of justice. A good show, convincingly played, expensive sets. One must simply not confuse theatre with physics. And I did not confuse them — from the orchestra pit, that is to say from the basement, I could see perfectly well where the stage was and where the load-bearing wall. And in the pit itself an orchestra played: feet hammering on doors, wild cries, prayers at the breaking point, and “Bella Ciao” for an encore. An accompaniment to justice.
I was received at the Palace, once again, against an inventory. The clerk, sorting through my papers, was sincerely astonished: I was already his second Fleming that shift. A second Fleming in one shift was, by his expression, a statistical anomaly, on the order of two lightning strikes on one tree. And here is the interesting thing: in a country where it has long been joked that one speaks Flemish about money and French about chômage, about the dole, his astonishment did not look like the relaying of a stereotype. It looked like reliance on live working statistics: the man had simply noted a rare event on his patch. I did not stop to establish whether I ought to rejoice for my native language group or grieve that I was spoiling its noble statistics.
My cell at the Palace I recognized, on returning from the lavatory, by the graffiti. I had managed to learn it in the first couple of hours — the same walls, the same handwriting of despair — and when the warder and I were searching together for which of the pens was mine, I pointed it out to him: this one, I remember it. He remarked, without irony, that I was in luck, there was at least something to read here. He was right. The library was meagre, but its regular readership, to judge by the wear, was ample. As was its authorship — some, no doubt, have by now become classics of the genre. Critics were present too: the walls were strewn with traces of biological fluids — hawked spittle, gobs — and upon the larger reviews black mould flourished luxuriantly.
The ventilation at the Palace, incidentally, worked: the door had gaps, and a draught had appeared. Somewhere, at last, make-up air and extract had met.
The lavatory at the Palace deserves its own account, for it too is a quest. You are taken out in turn: they come, they ask whether you need to go, they take you. Or they may go off to lunch — right in the middle of the queue. Then the familiar music strikes up across the block: knocking at doors, kicking. On my cell door, both at the district lock-up and at the Palace, two clusters of foot-impacts could be distinctly read — one lower and broader, the other higher and tighter. People either pound at random or strike with intent; the distribution of impacts testifies honestly to which.
The lavatory itself is a triumph of economy. The tap does not work; in its place, from a lavatory-cum-washbasin, protrudes a stainless spout that issues a trickle at the press of a button. The trickle is so feeble it does not detach from the wall — it runs down the surface without reaching one’s hands. Washing beneath it is physically impossible. But by that point I had grown accustomed to scarcity. When I was taken for the larger sort of visit, I brought along the little water bottle issued to me, which this time they had forgotten to confiscate. I filled it from the spout — slowly, drop by drop, but I filled it — all the while answering the warder-ess stationed at the unclosed door that I was very nearly finished. “Very nearly finished” — and the brain, the parasite, at once helpfully produced from its depths “that’s what she said,” selecting for the joke, naturally, the ideal setting: a prison privy, an escort at the door, a water bottle in hand. And I managed, first, to wash myself, and second, to wash my hands afterwards. Without soap, of course; soap is already hotel standard, and here, as we have established, is not one. And afterwards that little bottle served me for a good while as at least some sort of pillow on the cold concrete of the bunk. An empty half-litre of plastic beneath the cheek is not eiderdown, but when the alternative is bare plinth, one comes to value even it.
X. Testimony
The story has to be told many times over. To the lawyer at the lock-up. To the policeman. To the lawyer at the Palace. To the policeman again. At the magistrate’s. By the fifth telling you know your text by heart and deliver it with the intonation of a tour guide.
Everyone you speak to has been beautifully trained in empathy for the criminal. “Yes, yes, you had no choice. Yes, yes, we understand.” I did not fall for it for a second — do not trust, do not fear, do not ask I had assimilated well before any Palace. But, to their credit, there were no sadists among them. On the contrary: those who questioned me helped me, with light nudges in the conversation, to frame my testimony in such a way that I might be released. They had photographic evidence in hand, yet they understood that the story of how those images came to be might differ considerably from the first obvious version. And they gave me the chance to tell that story. For which sincere thanks — because what was being decided, in essence, was a simple matter: prison or home.
Of the people of the Palace I remember several. A warder with a magnificent moustache — I should have liked to befriend him, but he was taciturn and, above all, perpetually establishing with himself whether anything was permitted. A man in the queue moved to another bench around the corner — and the moustache at once checked with himself: not allowed. He was not unkind, merely composed entirely of standing orders, with the orders serving him for a spine.
There was a warder-ess — a wiry lady of forty-five or fifty, in full war paint, with limpidly blue eyes and peroxide hair drawn into a ponytail — who found occasion to shout at me for the better part of a minute. The gist of the shouting was that if I once more (insert as appropriate), she would never open my door again at all. What precisely to “insert as appropriate,” I never did learn — she shouted in French, and French shouting I cannot parse. And so I remained punished for something I had not understood: pure Kafka, only with peroxide. And when I was already being discharged with my effects, she passed by, and I smiled at her automatically, as at an acquaintance — the brain, over a day, had entered her into my circle. She looked at me with that very look with which men look at half-dressed women, smiled invitingly, and gave a slight toss of the head: as if to say, I’m just over there. I thought: she could take herself and her curling iron elsewhere. Group dynamics are a powerful thing, but not that powerful.
XI. The Lift with the Empty Pistol
Once I was stuck in a lift with two warders. I could not resist quoting the classic: it isn’t me who’s been locked in with you, it’s you who’ve been locked in with me. The woman remained aloof. The man proved thoroughly amiable — with a cultured little beard, slightly acquainted with my case, and it was pleasant that to him, for some reason, I was not an object. While we stood there, I explained to them that the dispatcher can force the car up to the nearest floor, one need only get through on the telephone. Getting through was hindered by something wrong with the woman’s badge. Her I did not remember — only the badge.
The pistol, however, I remembered. I asked the bearded man why they carry a firearm with an empty magazine. It turned out to be a classic Belgian solution. A warder may not be without a weapon, but neither may the weapon be permitted — wittingly or otherwise — to fire inside the prison. The way out is elegant: the pistol is present, the magazine absent. A symbol of authority at nil firepower. Whether there was a round in the chamber I did not stop to establish — there are questions one finds it more interesting to leave unresolved.
The aloofness of the warders, incidentally, I came in the end to understand, and even to respect. Those of them who are not sadists seek no contact with you, not even the perverse kind — for two reasons. First, they do not know who is before them. Second, they know that with a probability of some ninety-nine percent the person before them is capable of manipulation, of sociopathic turns, and that to treat him as “ordinary” is the straight road to being used. To keep one’s distance is not callousness but occupational safety. The amiable bearded man could permit himself amiability only because he had already glanced into my file and hazarded the guess that I was a not-quite-standard client. The rest had no such luxury, and were right.
XII. Freedom by Default
I was released. I stepped out, and the first thing I saw was the sky. It was blue. I even paused over a purely terminological question: why, precisely, blue? If blue is a colour of the rainbow, it lies nearer turquoise, and turquoise carries a green note the sky has not. Which means the sky is not blue but pale cyan. Having stood a day beneath a whining lamp, the brain’s first order of business was not gratitude to creation but colour correction. Well — each rejoices in freedom as best he can.
First order of business — to a bar: to drink something, charge the telephone, and put the laces back in. To judge by the fact that the barman saw the bootlaces in my hand and did not so much as raise a brow, the source of the establishment’s prosperity was self-evident. I ordered an alcohol-free beer and asked for a charger. And I caught myself on a rhyme: half an hour before the arrest I had walked into a fast-food place in exactly the same way, taken a zero-cola, and asked for a cup — to give the dog a drink. The same man, the same modest sequence of acts, walk in, order, ask. Between the two drinks there fit a bare twenty-four hours and an entire universe. The telephone, by the way, declined to charge — the bar’s charger was feeble. I had to travel not by car-share but by metro. And here an awkward thing came to light: six years in Brussels, and I had never properly used public transport. I, the man who had just been computing the metro timetable from the tremor in the concrete, up above, at liberty, could not for the life of me make sense of that same metro’s navigation. From below I knew it better than from above.
Freedom is felt most keenly through the small things that ordinarily come by default and go unnoticed. To brush one’s teeth. To wash one’s hands with soap. To close a door behind oneself, oneself. To telephone whomever one likes without dictating the number aloud to a stranger. All of it had been confiscated and inventoried a day before, and now it had quietly returned — and it was precisely the quietness of the return that struck one most.
I telephoned my mother first — by the same logic under which, from the magistrate’s, one’s first act is to inform one’s family that one is alive and on the way. I said: Mum, I’m coming to you. Instead of “hello, how are you,” my mother answered: “have they let you out already?” It was, as you see, no news to her: the address of my residence had been agreed with her in advance and confirmed as my official place of abode for the coming three months — one of the conditions of release. Thus the court, all unwilling, handed down a separate verdict on a family question: a grown man is sent back to live with his mother, having failed to cope. With seal and signature. My mother had my daughter with her at that moment — the very one who, the day before, seeing the geolocation of my telephone jammed immovably at the police building, had driven there in utter terror to find out what had become of me. She was told this was confidential information. The confidential information was at that time located inside a camera and beneath a camera at once — in a cell and under a lens — in shorts with a drawstring, but of this, naturally, my daughter was not informed.
My mother met me with a song. “And on the black bench, the bench of the accused…” — from the threshold, in place of “hello.” Humour in our family is hereditary and, as you see, functions even under stress. The particulars I did not relate to her — I promised to forward the ruling with its reasoning, where it is all set out in detail, in the dry language proper to such things. And the particulars of the stay — here they are, this very account. A thing not to be lost.
An experience? Undoubtedly. To be repeated? Not for anything.
The meat, if it interests you, I did not in the end save. Fifteen kilos lay a full day and more in the boot in the summer heat, and by the time I reached the car at last, it was no longer a question of the freezer. “Okay Google, how to remove the smell of a corpse from a car. No — not what you were thinking.” At that point the quest could be reckoned finally complete: freedom restored, case closed, reputation intact. Only the meat was not saved. But, hand on heart, of all the parties to this history it was the meat that suffered the most honestly of all.