Our Game

My cellar was a fitness club with ancient gymnasium apparatus shoved against the wall and a notice on the door saying CLOSED FOR REPAIR. It was situated beneath a monstrous slab apartment block one hour's blindfold drive from metropolitan Moscow, at the end of a bumpy gravel road amid smells of garbage, oil, and rotting trees, and it was the unfittest place on earth or under it. The humid air stank, water dripped and gurgled all night long from pipes that ran along the ceiling and down to the cracking concrete floor—pipes for sewage, pipes for hot water and drinking water, pipes for heating, and pipes that were ducts for electricity and telephone, and small grey rats, mostly on their way to somewhere else. To the best of my arithmetic, I stayed there nine days and ten nights, but time was irrelevant because when you are first imprisoned, years go by without your wristwatch advancing more than a few seconds, and the distance between two meals is a march across the entire desert of your life. In one night you sleep with every woman you've known, and when you wake it's still night and you're still shivering alone.

* * *

My cellar had no windows. The two grilles high in the wall that were supposed to provide ventilation had long been screwed shut. When I clambered onto a rat-eaten vaulting horse and examined them, I found that their iron frames were welded together with rust. For the first day the stench of my cell was unbearable, by the second day it bothered me a little less, and by the third it had disappeared, and I knew I was part of it. But the smells from above me were a constant theatre of the senses, from sunflower oil and garlic and onion and roasting lamb and chicken to the universal fug of large families in tiny crowded rooms.

* * *

"Bashir Haji!"

I woke with a great shudder to the cry uttered in marvel or agony by my guards at dead of night.

First their field telephone had rung. Then this tortured or delighted cry.

Were they celebrating him?

Were they declaring him their creed, shouting his name to the hilltops?

Were they calling down curses on him? Lamenting him?

I lay awake, waiting for the next act. None came. I fell asleep.

* * *

A prisoner of the Ingush may be lonely, but he is never alone.

A childless man, I was inundated with children. They ran over my head, jumped on it, beat it, laughed at it, and screamed at it, and their mothers screamed back at them. Now and then a loud smack was followed by a bitter, breathless silence, and more screaming. I heard dogs howling, but only from outside the building. While I craved to be let out, the dogs demanded to be let in. I heard cats from everywhere. I heard the pompous boom of television sets switched on all day. I heard Mexican soap opera dubbed into Russian, and an urgent announcement interrupting it, reporting the crash of yet another financial company. I heard the slap of washing, the skirmishing of men in anger, men drunk, women in outrage. I heard weeping.

For music I had cheap Russian disco and mindless American rock, punctuated by something altogether deeper and more welcome: a slow, soft-throated rhythmic drumbeat, agitated and insistent, urging me to get up, brave the day, strive, attain. And I knew it was Emma's kind of music, grown in the home valleys and mountains of the exiles who listened to it. And at night, when most of these sounds were asleep, I heard the steady flow, as old as the sea, of gossip round campfires.

Thus I had in every sense the impression of having joined an underlife, for my hosts were themselves far from home and despised, and if I was their prisoner, I was also accorded the privileges of an honoured guest. When my guards led me to my daily wash, fingers to the mouth to command my silence, dark scowls as they spirited me through the entrails of the building to the tiny lavatory with its freshly torn pieces of unintelligible newspaper, I felt as much their accomplice as their ward.

* * *

I am listening to Pettifer on fear. It is not a long dissertation, certainly not a Sunday seminar. Our hotel is in Houston, Texas, and he has just spent ten days in a Cuban gaol on a trumped-up charge of possessing drugs—but in reality, he suspects, to provide the security police with an opportunity to take a closer look at him. First they wouldn't let him sleep. , Then they gave him a night and a day without water. Then they spread-eagled him to four rings on a wall and invited him to admit that he was an American spy.

"Once I got my dander up, it was great," Larry assures me, lounging beside the hotel pool, studying the passing bikinis while he sucks at the straw of his piña colada. "I told them that of all the insults they could heap on an English gentleman, accusing him of being a Yanqui spy was the lowest. I said it was worse than telling me my mother was a whore. Then I told them that their mothers were whores, at which point, more or less, Rogov barges in and tells them to take me down and give me a bath and let me go."