Senka felt something in his bottom and he started to fight again and cry out, but it was over quickly, and soon he was back in the first room and in his pyjamas and dressing gown again. Another room: a greasy-haired old man beside a camera told him to sit in the chair but he was too small so the photographer placed a cushion on it, before disappearing under a black blanket: ‘Look at the camera’ and boom: there was a flash and a fizzing sound. ‘Well done, son.’ The photographer ruffled his hair.
Senka saw an opportunity.
‘Please can I call my mama? I so miss my mama!’
‘You’re young to be in here,’ the photographer whispered quickly. ‘You’ll get out, son, unlike me. But my advice is to let the current take you. Don’t fight it.’ Then he cleared his throat and called out: ‘Prisoner for transfer.’
Senka was given back to the warders in their brown coats, who handed him over to two uniformed guards. Each held one of his arms. Keyrings holding many keys jingled from belts next to their pistols. ‘No talking. Eyes forward. Let’s go.’ Steel stairways, down, up again, through locked doors. Senka felt tiny in this enormous hidden world. Every time one door closed and another opened he was in yet another towering hall filled with metal landings, each of which held row upon row of enforced steel doors.
The place stank of wee, poo, sweat, detergent, dampness. Repulsive. Repellent. Revolting. Rebarbative. Nauseating. Egregious. Emetic. The thesaurus of words comforted him but his heart was beating like a train travelling at speed.
When he heard some more footsteps getting closer, his heart raced. ‘Is it Minka?’ he said, his voice quivering. But they pushed him into a box like an upright coffin, and locked the door. Senka thought he might suffocate and his tummy cramp returned but he heard the steps go past and then they took him out and finally they opened a cell number 235 and pushed him inside.
‘Someone’s weed in my bed,’ Senka called when he saw the thin mattress on the metal bed: it bore a yellow stain in the shape of the Crimea. He wanted to go himself but there was no lavatory. He did not know what to do. Then the Judas port opened and closed, the locks turned and a warder looked in.
‘I’m hungry and I need to go to the lavatory,’ he said.
‘You’ve missed that time,’ said the warder. ‘Use that slops bucket.’
‘I don’t think I can use a bucket.’
‘Save it up till morning then, your majesty. Rations soon.’
‘Please call my mama,’ said Senka, bursting into tears. Soon he was crying in spasms, the tears running down into his mouth and even down his neck. ‘Please!’
The door slammed again, and the eyehole was opened and closed repeatedly, but no one came, so Senka spread the blanket over the mattress. The pillow had a red-brown mark the shape of Africa, he noticed.
Finally, he had to use the repugnant slops bucket; afterwards exhaustion forced him to lie down and he started to cry again. The door opened and this time it was a lady with a trolley. She gave him a bowl of soup (which was really just grey water with two chunks of straggly yellow fat floating in it), a square of black bread and a tiny rectangle of butter. He was so hungry but the soup stank and the fat was horrid so he just ate the bread.
‘May I have an extra piece of bread?’
‘Against the rules. That’s your allowance.’
She gave him a cup of tea with a tiny piece of sugar; then the door was shut again and he lay on his bed, terrified by the sounds of the vastness of the Inner Prison of Lubianka. The symphony of prisons, he decided, is more percussion than strings: slamming doors, tinkling keys, grinding locks, coughing, spluttering, spasming, howling, sobbing, shouting, the clank of boots on metal landings and stairs. All was harsh and all he had known until this moment had been gentle.
Who were all these heaving, grunting, hacking strangers in the cells nearby? Was there anyone his age? Were the other children from the school close to him? Where was Minka? He closed his eyes and dreamed of his mama, of his home, of his brothers and sister. Mama, I’m here.
He cried and cried but even when the tears ran out, the fear remained. How had this terrible mistake been made? Surely they didn’t know he was ten. If only he had told them that, they’d have realized they had the wrong person. He could not believe they didn’t know who his mama and papa were.
He replayed the night of the shooting on the bridge in his head: he was in the prison because of those deaths; he knew that. But had George and Andrei been arrested in
