“The Spy Who Was Not”: RT publishes an excerpt from a book by Maria Butina about her stay in American prisons

Behind the curtains of the “slaughterhouse” a couple of guards were waiting for me, a metal detector frame and a huge gray plastic chair, which the guards between themselves, grinning, called the “master's chair”. They turned me against the wall, ordered me to put my palms on the dirty, sticky from human sweat and blood wall, searched and nodded to a terrible gray chair.

- Sit down. Lean against your back, sit still, ”the overseer ordered me. He turned the switch sticking out on one side of the chair, it made a piercing, squealing sound. I flinched in surprise. As I guessed, this ominous device checked the presence of metal inside the body of the prisoner - I still find such an infinite number of chairs along the stages and in the courthouses.

- Everything is OK. She's ours, ”the overseer nodded cheerfully toward the FBI agents, who were pacing in the doorway and trying to cover their noses from the stench of the room.

I was taken to the next room, where a man was sitting on a long wooden bench, or rather something - it was impossible to determine the gender by appearance. Opposite this man, a guard stood at the counter with a computer to register new arrivals. I sat on the very edge of the bench, trying not to lose consciousness from the terrible stench of the room. I did not have to wait long, my fingerprints were taken again. The smiling officer stared at me in bewilderment - in beige summer capri pants, a black top and a thin wrap-jacket that barely covered his shoulders. The crown of all this unsuitable appearance was, of course, the naughty hair of long, almost to the waist, red hair. This procedure was followed by the following - the twilight of the office of a police psychiatrist, dirty and littered with piles of papers, lit only by the whitish light emitted from the blue screen of the old monitor.

“Do you want to kill yourself?”

- Not.

- A cripple?

- Also no.

“Do you want to kill any of the people around you?”

- Not.

- A cripple?

- Not.

The experience of numerous US border crossings has taught me not to make jokes with law enforcement and security officials. The joke will definitely be used against the joker.

- Do you pose a danger to others? - the policeman did not let up.

- Not.

“Have you ever tried to commit suicide?”

- Not.

And so on ad infinitum. To me, in a sinful affair, the thought crept into my head that, for example, if I had said that I had suicidal tendencies, they would have sent me to the hospital, away from the terrible stinking basement. It’s good that I didn’t realize this idea - they confessed to suicidal tendencies in the same conditions, but provided their stay in the basement with a “cherry on a cake”, as the Americans say: wrapped in a straitjacket and put the mummy on an iron shelf "poste restante".

When the police psychotherapist finally ran out of questions, I was offered juice and a sandwich. I didn’t want to eat, but again something told me that it was better to take food. Here I did not lose. The sandwich will have to stretch until midnight. Neither will they eat nor drink anymore. Everything will fall into place - that’s why my lawyer so asked me to keep at least water in a small bottle.

A police officer pushed me into the passage with a small iron staircase, and we went down somewhere. From the bowels of the earth came the terrible sounds of blows against metal, cries of despair, inhuman moans and howling.

“Well shut up,” the overseer accompanying me barked into the twilight of iron hell.

When we walked along the corridor, as if through a system of an endless series of cages, men and women hung on iron nets of doors, asking for water, toilet paper, and at least say what time it is. The men were especially noisy when they saw me, which caused a satisfied smirk on the guard's face.

I was pushed into one of the cells next to the man. The side wall was continuous - this did not allow me to constantly see the “neighbor”, but he clearly liked to hear me. The sound of my movements and the tears approaching my throat was to the taste of the “monkey” client, and all night I listened to the groans of self-satisfaction of the representative of the stronger sex.

To make as few sounds as possible, I hid in the corner of the iron shelf farthest from the neighbor’s wall and firmly and firmly clasped my mouth and nose with my hands to stop the upcoming desire to cry. In the cage opposite, through a hole in the net and a food window, a black moaning woman was visible with hair tangled up with vomit and dirt. For the most part, she lay on an iron shelf and moaned, shouting curses at the guards and demanding the necessary feminine hygiene products. Not getting what she wanted, she just smeared blood on the walls ...

There are no mattresses in the cells, as there are no blankets or pillows. A chamber no larger than half the compartment in a reserved seat wagon. Iron bunks have only holes for drainage of vomit to a neighbor on the lower shelf or directly to the floor. There is an iron toilet bowl and even a sink, but there is no water in the tap, there is no toilet paper, but there are huge, with a thumb, red cockroaches. There was terrible heat in the cells, billions of times, it seemed, reinforcing the stench of prison. The overseers did not like this, they also had to go down to this underworld twice an hour bypass, because from somewhere they locked a huge fan and sent a stream of industrial air directly into our cells. The jet made its way through, and I went up from the cold, curled up in the corner of the iron shelf, pressing my knees to my chin.

Many prisoners began to beg to turn off the "wind", because all of us got into the basement from the summer streets - those who were in shorts and T-shirts were less fortunate. It’s relative to me. I quickly realized that the warmest thing from my wardrobe was my thick red hair, I distributed them along the body to the very heels as I could, and this helped me to warm up a bit and collect my thoughts.

Completely exhausted from the emotions I experienced in the twilight of the basement, I felt an overwhelming desire to disconnect and get some sleep. Not now, I told myself. “Sleeping in the evening is a guarantee of a sleepless night, as my mother taught me, and this is truly scary.” In a dream, the night would have gone faster. ” Then I remembered about a sandwich on the way to the cage from a pair of slices of white bread, dampened from high humidity, with a pair of transparent slices of odorless cheese and the same thin sausage slice, tightly wrapped in several layers of cling film. “You have to eat, otherwise the brain will refuse to think, and in such conditions it is a sure way to death. Maximum concentration is needed to realize what is happening and decide what to do, ”I convinced myself. When the next meal was incomprehensible, so I ate only half of the serving, and the rest was stored “at the black hour” when it was sucked again in the spoon. I drank a sugary drink, which was more like sweet water with a generous dose of vibrant red dye than juice. The glucose that entered the body did its job - the brain turned on and began to intensively evaluate the surrounding unreality.

Time, I thought. “You need to understand what time it is to separate day from night.” There are no windows in the basements, of course. The light burns the same day and night. The task of calculating the time allowed a little distraction from what is happening.

So, the last thing I remembered was that they brought me around half past three. Guards were circumambulated at intervals of about once every 30 minutes, which means that if you count each round and make notes, you could understand what time it is. “Suppose I was issued at five o’clock, there were about a couple of detours. That is now about six, ”I concluded. But how to continue the score? There are no pens, no paper, much less anything sharp to scratch the marks on the wall! "Toilet paper! Right! I’ll make tears, marking every round of the guard, ”I rejoiced. Then I remembered that when I was led along the corridor, the prisoners asked for toilet paper, stretching out their hands a little further than the wrist in the window for eating, palms to each other. In the next round I tried - squatted by the small window in the grate. It worked! I wrapped some cherished toilet paper on my hands! Pleased with my ingenuity and ingenuity, I began to consider the detours as small tears of toilet paper.

According to my calculations, the next round was earlier than the scheduled once every half hour. Something happened, I thought. The overseer brought a small Mexican woman to my cell, opened the grate and shoved it inside.

- Here's a neighbor. Have fun girls! He muttered and slammed the door with a creak.

My first cellmate in my life looked no more than sixteen - a small, slender mulatto with short, tarry black hair and big eyes full of tears, quietly sat in a corner of the lower shelf, pulled sharp knees to her chin and burst into tears.