Well, yesterday they did fix the window pane after all! I couldn't get over that, that was beyond of the range of things I expected in jail. When the chief was coming, Make was with him, the local police investigator, such a smiley fox. Kamil the previous chief, who was a cop "from horns to hoofs," got him to look after me and Sapargali in person. Even the keys to our cells were held by he rather than by the guard.
Later, those unidentified ones took over everything, put me in the hotbox, in quarantine, in isolation, in a solitary cell. Make vanished. And now that he came, he said with a smile: "You're doing good round here, you even have your own security." That's how it is! Detective Sergey, the major, doesn't show his face at all - that's good, even the searches (two or three) were done without him.
This is his domain, he even "gets a bang" out of the trial, where he can show what he's made of, jeer, maliciously make fun of the arrestee, who should keep silent. We met head-on, me and him, not exactly in a childish way; then on and on again. He found his match.
As they were framing the window pane, they broke the glass twice and had to cut a new one out. It's not exactly smart to make people squeeze though the bars of the "TV", as we call the inside bars of the cell window round here. First you have to sqeeze the glass itself into the slot between the "TV" and the wall, then put it in the right place and fix it. A young housekeeping prisoner working as a warehouse keeper took on this job, but owing to this I can quite bear it in the morning.
Yesterday evening, after the cell checkup, roll was called in the jail corridor. The far end of the corridor (solitary confinement cells which are in full isolation, in a dead end) can only talk to the jailhouse; obviously, there are self-made devices for sending messages and goods between cells here and such goods get sent. There was no controller in the corridor, and the unidentified, quiet guard, doesn't interfere; he remains unnoticed. The corridor made its own roll call: who is in which cell, based on which article, where they came from. I can hear: "Who's in 113 - Kozlov?" - "Yeah, Kozlov". And on they went. The jail knows it all.
Well this roll call procedure determines it all up to the minutest detail about everyone. First: who, where from, which article? Then about everyone: who knows what, what information they want... Some had done time together, some had known each other at large, and this roll call is not even about one prison, it's about all of them. Some guys pick it up all over the jailhouse and, as they get transferred, they spread word about it across in different prisons. There it becomes more detailed, something gets added. In most cases, by the moment you get to the colony they know everything about you: who you are, what for, what sort of person you are...
From time to time they announce who has been sentenced and who's not. It's a life of its own, but the principles of this life are more understandable than those notions which apply when you're free. The local laws apply to everyone, whereas there...
It's the fourth month in the solitary cell, in quarantine, in isolation. It's easier for Sapargali: he has a renovated cell, with new sanitary fittings, with three large windows, the size of his cell is four times that of mine, the bars are only on the outside, without a "TV". And most importantly, he can talk to his neighbours on the top bunk, or beside him... He can stand next to his window and talk. And he doesn't have personal security.
Meanwhile- the guard has gone, one could hear the barred doors being opened one after another, and his steps getting further and further... Someone is in his cell opposite mine, a bit to the side. He sighs and smites flies with a flyswatter. He just came closer, looked in the peephole and he's killing the flies again. One thing is certain - those autumn flies are sure annoying.
I'm sitting in my cell and I can hear them peering into my parcel - the guard together with the civvy. They're whispering to each other. The audibility is good here. The doors are made of iron, the corridor is resonant, my parcel's rustling exactly the way my parcels rustle: Alya brings my parcels in the same thick plastic packages. Now, before I managed to write it, they brought me the parcel, just like I heard.
I decided to go for a walk - it's been a long time. Well, I walked and walked, accompanied by "my" guard and the civvy. He didn't even try to hide it (that's the most aggressive one of them, my lawyer Venera once talked to him), he sat in the controller's post, went for a walk with me (that was on the roof of the jailhouse) and there he stuck around all the time.
Today is a lovely day, somehow. Our lady-captain came, Olesya is her name. She is in charge of the housekeeping section of the jail. She's smiling. She smells of some "free" perfume. She's come to find out if I'm happy, if the window pane has been fixed. And I start to feel awkward. Before, I told them several times there was no pane, and the DPNSI said: "There is no window pane in many of the cells, you'll have to wait." And here, as I told the chief, it's ready, I managed to get it "jumping the queue," and even with the "captain's supervision," with smiles and stuff.
… As far as newspapers go, you can get Lada TV in jail (of Akatau, controlled by the Akimat; I'm ashamed to have been among those who started it up from scratch, to have been one of its owners, I'm ashamed for Svetlana the editor-in-chief, I'm ashamed for Gena the owner, I'm ashamed for the outright stinkers of those journalists who know they are stinkers and can still live with that), Kazpravda (Russian: "Kazakh truth") and Svoboda Slova (Russian: "freedom of speech"). That's a nice company for a paper which is still trying to mimic opposition.
Ms. Ergalyeva and Mr Abilov did a very bad job when they subjected the newspaper with such a name to the authorities, to the AP. You guys betrayed the idea, and for so many years now AP have been using the brand developed by the opposition to make fools out of people.
We've seen survey results - the opposition brand of the Azat (Nationwide Social Democratic Party) developed in 2003-2004 still worked among the society in 2010, although by then the Azat had only been an empty word. The same inertia is now being used for SS, and if Ms. Ergalyeva and Mr Abilov the oppositionists did not understand it when they sold SS to be controlled by the AP, then they are very slow-witted people, and if they did, well, that means they're very clever. Neither of the two bring them much glory.
Naturally, you can show a naked ass to make a new website popular; however, this will only attract those who like naked asses; the opposition's bottom - that's even symbolic, especially if you mention at the time that the opposition resource was developed with the use of an ass, has gone exactly up the place it was developed with, and at a very opportune moment, too. Especially if you combine it with the chronology of movements in the governmental rows. If you get cooked in all that stuff, it's easy to get lost in the whole mixture; whereas from here, from the side, where hardly anything is going on, a lot is becoming clearly understandable.
