She was playing to the crowd, to the prisoners peering out their cell windows and egging her on with their cheers. She batted me around as a kitten would a mouse, striking me repeatedly on my back, my arms, my legs, my ribs.
I stared at her boots, thick and black and scuffed at the toe, taking the abuse until finally another guard came over and got me to my feet.
“Ne me regardez pas!” the first one shouted, only inches from my face. This time I caught it. Don’t look at her. That much I had figured out.
The guard stood so close to me, her nose was touching my cheek. “Vous êtes en France et vous parlez français,” she said.
“Je…comprends,” I managed through halting, pained breaths. Don’t eyeball the guards, and speak French when you’re in a French prison.
Lessons I wouldn’t forget. And if I did, they’d be quick to remind me.
CHAPTER 63
ONCE INSIDE THE building, I lined up my shoes at a red marker, gave my name to someone behind a window, and was directed into a room. I moved gingerly. My ribs were so sore it hurt to breathe. My lower back was seizing up. But I made it. The room had white walls and a desk. A guard stood with a clipboard and motioned me in.
I gasped when I saw a woman lying prone in the corner. It was the woman asking about her parents, the one they’d beaten until she stopped asking.
“Elliot,” said the guard. “Parlez-vous français?”
“That woman needs medical attention,” I said. “Elle a besoin d’un docteur.”
“Ah, English.” The guard didn’t even look up from her clipboard. “You have…wedding ring?”
“This woman needs to see a doctor!” I repeated.
“She is okay. You have—”
“No, I don’t have a wedding ring.” You’re allowed to bring your ring into prison, but I figured it wouldn’t last long in here, and I wanted Elena to have it one day when she got married.
The woman in the corner stirred. Her head lifted and turned. Blood trickled from her mouth. Her right eye was swollen shut.
“Help this woman!” I demanded, raising my arm and pointing at her—and wincing as I did so, the pain rocketing through my ribs.
“Watch?” the guard continued. “Yes, you have watch. Watch is okay.”
The woman in the corner managed to look in my direction. “Où sont mes parents?” she mumbled.
“Take off…clothing,” the guard said.
“No.” I took a step back. “That woman is mentally ill and she’s been seriously injured. I’m not taking off my clothes until you help her.”
The guard, for the first time, looked up at me. “The clothes,” she repeated.
I stood my ground and shook my head.
The woman reached into her pocket and removed a whistle. She gave it two quick blows. Almost instantly three more guards burst into the room.
“Elle ne se déshabillera pas,” the guard said to the new reinforcements.
They hardly broke stride as they moved toward me.
“No!” I cried, but they were on me before I could even raise my hands. Their batons were still at their waists. They were using their hands. I tried to push them away, to squirm out of their grip, but it didn’t seem like a good idea to start throwing punches or kicking or scratching them, so I never stood a chance. They forced me to the floor and pinned down my arms. One of them tugged at my shirt with both hands until she managed to make a tear in the cotton at the top. Then she ripped my shirt right down the center. The same guard ripped my bra off from the front before tugging on my pants until they came off. It took her a few tries at my panties before she ripped them apart, too, leaving me naked.
When it was over, the guards stood up and moved away from me. I was naked. My clothes were in shreds. And the door to the room was open, so every prisoner who’d been behind me in line was watching everything that happened.
“Là,” said the guard with the clipboard. “Now the clothes are off. Stand up.”
I got to my feet with considerable pain.
“Raise the arms,” she ordered me. After I did so, she continued with her demands, part of the ritual search. “Open the hands. Lift the feet.”
Then she snapped on rubber gloves. “Open the mouth.” With no enthusiasm whatsoever, the guard inserted a tongue depressor in my mouth, probing underneath my tongue and along each cheek. I just about gagged a couple of times.
Then she ran her fingers through my hair. Finding no contraband in my hair or mouth, or under my arms or feet, she had one place left to look.
“Turn and…bend…bend over,” she said.
I took a breath, turned around, and reached for my toes, stark naked as I was. She shone a small flashlight into my anus.
The prisoner in the corner was lying motionless again, her head back down on the floor.
“Cough,” the guard said.
I manufactured a cough. A couple of the guards whispered and laughed. They made me stay in that contorted, vulnerable position, my privates exposed to the guards and the prisoners, for what must have been ten minutes. Unless there was something incredibly interesting about the inside of my anus (and in forty-two years, nobody had ever said so), or unless one of the guards was an aspiring proctologist, it seemed the guards were simply making a point.
They were humiliating me, violating my privacy, and making sure everyone understood they could do it with impunity.
CHAPTER 64
I WAS GIVEN a yellow smock and thin green cotton pants that made me look like a color-blind hospital patient. Next I met with a prison administrator, whom I had to assure that I was not pregnant and not suffering from HIV, hepatitis, or tuberculosis. I requested the infirmary as my work assignment and set up a commissary account.
Then six of us followed a guard through three consecutive doors of webbed steel, spaced a good twenty feet apart. A buzzer sounded and the first door popped open. The guard walked through, followed by the six prisoners assigned to cell block D, and then the door closed. The second door buzzed open, we walked through, and it closed. Then the first door opened again and the rear guard in our group walked into the first containment area. No more than one door was ever open at the same time. It prevented anyone from getting a head of steam, from acting aggressively. And the guard at the rear was never in the same containment area as the guard at the front with the prisoners, so if by some chance there was trouble, the guard at the rear was free to take action, or at least call for help. All this had been explained to me before I got here.
The six of us prisoners marched single file, holding our bed linens out in front of us. On top of each stack of linens sat a large clear bag of toiletries. When we finally walked through the third door, we entered an open space and my heart started hammering.
This was cell block D.
On either side, going up four stories, were cells with wooden doors. Guards patrolled narrow aisles lined with high green railings. A series of metal walkways connected the two sides to each other; stairways allowed access from one story to another. A guard tower, large enough to hold two guards, rose from the open middle of the cell block. The whole place was dimly lit, and the last time I smelled this odor, I was with my kids in the ape house at the National Zoo.
The catcalls began in force, the hazing as the prisoners smelled fresh blood entering the system. They came to their doors and yelled through the small openings covered with metal wiring. Even if I had possessed the vocabulary to understand them, I wouldn’t have been able to, as their shouts blurred together in one taunting cacophony.
I steeled myself and moved one foot in front of the other. We climbed stairs. Two of the prisoners were taken, by one of the two guards, to cells on the second floor. Then we climbed another set of metal stairs and repeated the procedure. Finally, I was taken to a cell on the fourth floor.
Maybe this was the penthouse suite. Maybe they wanted me on the top floor so I could have a better view of the countryside. But I wasn’t crossing my fingers.
The
number 413 was stenciled in faded black on the wooden door. I heard chatter on the other side. Through the small hatch, I caught sight of only a couple of prisoners. The guard unhooked the latch.
She opened the door, introducing me to my new home.
“Oh, my God,” I mumbled.
CHAPTER 65
AS THE CELL door opened, the odor that wafted to my nostrils, even over that of stale cigarette smoke, was mold. Decay.
I thought again of my daughter, as the cell was approximately the size of her bedroom in our town house in Bern. There were metal bunk beds to the right and left. A table protruding from the wall, a shelf above that, holding some cans of food and a loaf of bread and some books. A small freestanding closet in one corner, a dingy toilet and basin in the other.
There were six women in here. Two on the top bunk, left side, their legs dangling over the edge. Two on the bottom bunk, opposite side. One sitting on a stool. The sixth sitting on the toilet.
Six plus me, last I checked, equaled seven. I looked again at the sleeping arrangements. Four beds, seven women. I wasn’t a math major, but I had trouble finding an equation in which this arrangement turned out well for me.
The mild chatter I heard outside the door had cut off when I entered. Six pairs of eyes appraised me in silence as the guard led me inside by the arm and closed the door behind me. All the prisoners were white. Five thin—not fashionably thin but malnourished—and one heavy. Five dark-haired and one blond.
The dead bolt latched closed again. I considered a smile but it didn’t make any sense. I made a point of looking around for a place to unload my bed linens and blanket and toiletries. I moved toward the bottom bunk, left side.
One of the women on top, who had a butch haircut, dark eyes, and chiseled arms peeking out of a shirt whose sleeves had been cut off, clucked her tongue and shook her head.
“Où?” I asked.
Nobody wanted to tell me where I could throw my stuff. It seemed as though everybody else in the room was following the lead of the butch haircut.
“L’Américaine,” said one of them on the bottom. “Elle est celle qui riait.”
The one who laughed. She was referring to the photo they had snapped of me after the verdict, which had appeared on the front page of Le Monde the following day. Under the headline MAMANS COUPABLES—Guilty Moms—were a photo of Bryah and Serena hugging their children and one of me, seated in the defense cage, my head reared back as I burst into laughter. A still photograph, void of context—the ice queen who gunned down our beloved leader and thought the whole thing was hilarious.
“Papier.” The woman on the toilet, her pants at her ankles, was curling her fingers at me. “Paper? Papier toilette!”
“Oh.” She wanted toilet paper. I had a roll in my toiletries bag. I managed to get it out while balancing the linens and tossed it to her.
One of the women sitting on the bottom right bunk bed, with sickly pale skin and sunken eyes, popped up and approached me. I steeled myself but couldn’t think fast enough. She reached for my toiletries and produced the toothpaste. She held it up and said something in French I couldn’t catch and returned to her bed, celebrating.
I wasn’t going to sit there all day with all that stuff in my arms, so I placed it carefully in the corner. The floor was concrete. It was scuffed and dirty and cracked. The same was true of the walls, thick with mildew and badly splintered at the intersection with the floor. T-shirts and pieces of paper were stuffed in the crevices.
“We knew…we were getting one of you,” said the woman next to the butch haircut, the blond one of the bunch. English! At least one of them could communicate with me. Butch didn’t seem happy that the blonde was speaking to me, apparently without consent, but the blonde returned the elbow when Butch threw her one.
“You are the one…who laughs,” she said. “We were…hope—hoping?…for you.”
“Why?” I asked.
“You are…” She leveled her hand horizontally in the air. “More short?”
“Shorter than the others.” Easier to fit into this thimble of a room.
“Vous allez pouvoir dormir sur le plancher,” said the leader, the butch haircut.
She was telling me I would be using the floor for my bed. The concrete floor was decorated with numerous stains. While I pondered the origin of these stains, a gigantic gray rat with a long black tail, which looked more like a small dog than a rodent, scurried out from under one of the bunk beds and into one of the crevices at the base of the wall. I jumped back, evoking laughter from my cell mates.
Even the sympathetic blond woman couldn’t contain her amusement.
“That’s Iggy,” she said.
Great. The rat had a name.
“Elle s’habitue à eux,” said the heavyset woman.
I’d get used to the rats, she was saying. She was probably right. And that was the worst part of all.
This would now be normal. This was now the only life I would ever know.
CHAPTER 66
MY CELL MATES regarded me as part celebrity and part pariah. They barely acknowledged my presence, which I thought might be some kind of ritual for a newbie. Only the blond woman was willing to speak with me. I suspected she was the only one who spoke English.
Her name was Linette. She was a car thief. She had been convicted of a third offense more than three years ago and was serving a five-year sentence. She had soft blue eyes and a youthful face, though her skin was blemished and her nose crooked.
I sat on the bottom bunk with her, after she threw the two extra mattresses off and gave me a seat. She opened a large plastic box that had a long number on it and offered me biscuits from a can. I ate a few. They were dry and stale but it was food. I hadn’t eaten dinner. Or lunch. My stomach was howling at me.
“Do not tell them I gave you food,” said Linette.
“Why not?”
She didn’t speak for a while. She seemed to be struggling with what she could say to me.
“Do not tell them,” she said.
Linette was the only person who had treated me like a human being here, so I decided not to push it.
She checked out my fashionable wardrobe, the smock and thin pants. “Those clothes are for…les pauvres.”
The poor, she meant. The indigent prisoners who couldn’t afford their own clothes. I didn’t qualify as poor. Stubborn and naive. But not poor.
“Ah, you…argued? With the guards? You should not do that.”
“Dix minutes pour les lumières!” The guard’s voice, calling for lights out in ten minutes, crackled through the intercom speaker by the door of the cell. I looked at my watch. It was ten minutes to eight.
I considered the sleeping arrangements again. Seven of us. Four beds. Two extra mattresses for the floor. I assumed I was the odd person out.
Linette got up and pulled her blanket off her bed on the top bunk. She laid the blanket out in the small space on the floor that hadn’t been taken up by the two extra mattresses. She then put my bedsheet over the blanket. I would use my own blanket, apparently, to cover myself.
“Do not…argue with the guards,” she repeated.
“Tomorrow’s another day.”
With that, the lights went out. Everything was dark.
“I am not…speaking of tomorrow,” Linette whispered. “I am speaking of tonight.”
CHAPTER 67
I DON’T KNOW what time it happened. Maybe two in the morning, maybe three. I hadn’t slept, fighting off the mounting fear and revulsion as I heard the scurrying of rodents in the dark near me, as I swatted away buzzing flies, as I slapped something that bit my leg.
It happened quickly. A loud rapping at the door. The lock unlatching. Two guards entering, yelling “Elliot!” and lifting me off my feet.
They walked me down the stairs, back through the doors where I had entered cell block D, and then we turned right down another long corridor, and then finally went down two more flights of stairs, narrower and winding. The air gr
ew warmer with each step I descended, until it became downright steamy. It was dark and my sleep-deprived eyes weren’t working so well to begin with. My body, especially my ribs and legs and back, was sore from the beating I’d taken earlier.
A series of pipes hung down from a low ceiling. Hot water dripped on me as I was led into a dimly lit basement room. Finally, the guard behind me told me to stop. She took my right hand and slapped a handcuff on it. Then she raised my arms and drew the other end of the cuffs around the top of a thick overhead pipe running the length of the room. Then she cuffed my left hand. The pipe was about six or seven feet off the floor—high enough to force me to stand on the balls of my feet, my arms stretched to their limit over my head. My wrist touched the hot pipe and I recoiled.
The guard left me to the hissing steam, to the hot drips on my neck and face and in my hair. Time slowly ground forward. My calves were burning and my back, already suffering from the beatings, was soon in agony. Every time my calves relaxed a bit, I had to choose between burning my wrists or cutting them on the handcuffs, which bore into my flesh when the force of gravity on my arms took over.
I gritted my teeth and refused to speak, to make any noise at all. That’s what they wanted. They wanted to hear my pain.
After what felt like a century, my calves on fire, my back and neck and shoulders locking up fiercely, I heard footsteps approaching, the hard knock of boots on concrete, the occasional splash from the accumulated pools of warm water on the floor.
The guard who came into my view was the one who had beaten me in the courtyard. I made a point of avoiding eye contact, but in the dim lighting the scar near her eye seemed more prominent, almost fluorescent.