A village by the sea…

for PS. (too many words…)

Nobody is born a political prisoner, except perhaps in the soviet novel in which everyone is. Actually I think that is the title in Russian. How it got to be a story is hardly interesting and may not even be understandable, and really its nothing to do with the events that are happening now, in the days after the the new-exes, anyway the days when I first became a political prisoner deserve a few words and so this is where they began.

He knew that there was nothing particularly unusual in the place, a small village near the coast, the people lived their everyday lives, perhaps a quarter of the population had migrated to the cities, some locally some further away, some had even crossed continents. Outside the village the land was worked, in one direction the sea was close by. There were hills covered in shades of green, grass, heather, shrubs, trees with some large rocks placed on the hillside. This was the basic landscape of his prison. When the police had placed him in the small two bedroom house, cottage, put the gps tracker on his leg, the smart watch on his arm. It was an inhumane touch when the police had said, “no you cannot go to the sea, you have a 100 metre restriction. You may not more more than 100 metres from this house. The watch will tell you when you reach the 100 metres boundary.” To start with he wandered around within a 100 metres of the house, looking at the evergreen hedges and the stone walls. The brick and stone buildings. He accepted that the invisible walls demarcated the closing down of his horizon. After the months in jail during his arraignment, pre-trial and then trial, he accepted the limited freedom the 200 metres represented as an improvement. As the first few days and weeks passed he began to feel that this village in the north, and the people looking at him with questioning eyes (What did he do ? They asked.) seemed like a guarantee of potential relationships. The fields and the orchards, the country, seemed quite strange and alien to him and reflected his unstable moods. He couldn’t stop looking at them and remembering them, The explicit violence of his arrest, the hospitalization and imprisonment began to be forgotten as this new normality was established.

Eventually it was in the square that he became conscious of a different kind of depression, one that was to haunt him for the months and years to come. The limitations of his new found freedom were exposed, when one day on the way to the cafe or bar on the far side of the square he found a young woman sitting on the bench looking across the square. She was sitting eating a bar of chocolate, breaking small square of chocolate off the bar and eating them slowly piece by piece. “I cannot cross the square to the bar, somewhere between here and there my boundary exists. I cannot cross that boundary. You and I have to stay within our boundaries….” She said looking at him with a wry smile on her face, recognizing a fellow prisoner. She was a pale skinned muscular woman, dressed in a loose fitting grey t-shirt, black leggings, sandals, with a brown bag and a GPS tracker on her left ankle. He liked the soft way she spoke, and found her attractive. Over the months that followed they often met in the convenience store where she worked part time, and a few other places within their 100 metre sphere. “I think the cafe is within my sphere, can I buy you a drink? “ “Please. coffee, a glass of wine ?” He carried them back from the cafe on a tray, and placing it between them. They talked about how long they had been here. Not yet able to speak of their crimes or non-crimes that had placed them here. The cafe and square offered no escape from the sense of imprisonment he was suffering from. There was no sense of solitude within the sphere he lived in, he couldn’t escape from the solid stone and brick houses that lined the streets, the children’s playground was green and grey. The inhabitants who lived their lives here were as trapped on the coastline as he was. The water in the bay was grey or blue. The police were pretending to be civilized, he waited for their violence to surface. He lived in the open fear that they maintained.

The next day he walked around the village within the sphere. looking at the roofs and the clear blue sky whilst the locals looked at him suspiciously from their places of work and their doorways. The houses were two or three floors and mostly required some maintenance work. From the highest point he could look between houses, along streets and see the sea. He wished he could walk down the hill to stand on the beach, or swim. The people seemed reserved and quiet even when he said “good morning” and later “good afternoon” He stopped walking when he reached the square again, and turned inwards to walk back towards his house. To begin with he slept badly. Perhaps because it was only in the pitch dark and the silence that the strangeness of his life caught up with him. A latent existential crisis just waiting for the moment when it could cause him the most damage, was how he thought about it. He tried sleeping with the window open, the sound of the wind, the smell of the sea entered the room. With it closed, the night time countryside threw itself against the side of the house. Only when he woke with the sunlight crossing the bed and warming his bare uncovered leg did the latent crisis vanish.

Sometimes with a book, he would sit in the doorway in the sunlight, waiting for time to pass, to hear his sentence was over. Later he realized that resignation was better than desperation. Sometimes the police would pass in cars, walking or on scooters checking that he was still there. And then the woman would pass, stopping sometimes to ask how he was getting on. “Bored” he told her, “I would like to walk down to the sea…” “I used to feel like that, eventually resignation set in…” The road his house was on rarely had cars on it, he wondered if it went anywhere. He always had a book and a notebook with him. He missed his technologies, the phone, ipad, computer. He wondered what she missed. As the days pass he gained enormous pleasure in greeting people and for them to greet him back. In the convenience store on the corner, with its tables and plastic seats, outside and under the awnings. He noticed when she was taking his coffee order that her smart watch had a red blinking light. She said “good morning, whenever i see you you are always thinking of drinking something. ..” “He shrugged “my world is quite small these days…” “That’s true, so is mine. 100 metres in any direction… The police told me about you, they say that you are a gentle kind of political prisoner. They even let you go into the cafe where you probably shouldn’t be allowed to go…” He wasn’t sure whether she was joking or not. He wondered if she was police as well. “By the way” She asked “Can you go to the library? It’s outside my sphere, it would be nice to …” They talked about what sort of books she wanted to read. He follows her directions to the modernist library building. Two stories, all glasswork and red bricks. Later they meet in front of the convenience store, he and the exiled woman sitting on an outdoor table, him describing the library to her, describing in some detail what the sections were like. No newspapers, no internet, only fashion and do it yourself magazines. Mostly poor quality popular fiction, romance, a few stands of “modern classics”, local history, biographies and a small philosophy section. “Philosophy? are you sure its not theology ? “ And so over the next few weeks, she began asking him to get a few books for her. The librarian asked him about the selections he made on white and blue reservation cards, he explained about getting books for her, they made a note on the system.

They were sitting on the edge of the square on the bench a few days later. She was reading the first few pages of the philosophy of rightwith a copy of the second volume of de Beauvoir’s Memoirs — he was reading a recent science fiction novel and saying to her that it seemed fun. A police came over the square. “ Close your book man, we don’t have school here any longer. Think of this as a holiday from such things.” The police looked at the woman “ I’m surprised you read at all, given what you did before….” He said to her. She looked at the police with the flat gaze that the political prisoner was beginning to recognize. “There is little for me to do here, getting access to the library, is really nice…” Her tone of voice had a touch of feint aggression. “Though it would be nice to be able to sit by the sea, so close and so far…”

He wasn’t sure what to make of this strange female company. The lack of ordinary women depressed him the most. In the late evenings when his curfew time approached he would sit on the step of his small house and watch people and animals pass by. The dusk and the night was illuminated by lights, in the summer the windows were open. The rest of the year the northern weather refused such openness. In that first summer he enjoyed the brightly dressed women passing the house. Where did they go he wondered. He developed an idea that the young women were in a sense in seclusion, or was it that he, as a political prisoner was incapable of any sense of freedom and escape? That because of the constraints and legal separation he was untouchable, an undesirable object. He was living in a state of exception. He wasn’t supposed to leave his house after nine or ten in the evening, though as the days and weeks passed he found that the police didn’t rigidly enforce this. Sometimes he saw other prisoners that he didn’t recognize walking past, their led’s blinking red, blue or green. He wondered if the colour coding had some meaning. Sitting outside the convenience store looking at the blinking led he asked her what the colour coding meant, if anything.She held his bare ankle between the sock and the GPS tracker, as she explained Red is for criminals, blue for political prisoners, green for activists, yellow for low battery […]. She lifted her ankle and showed him the red flashing light. Oh is that why we are allowed to speak with one another, because we are different categories of criminals. She nodded, i think so. i am not allowed to speak with people who have red leds. Though we are not supposed to speak about why we are here. Or, he said, why we think we are here. When walking back from the convenience store, having bought coffee beans, noodles, tofu and vegetables — he was almost happy. The houses he passed on this route had an aloof look about them. They seemed relaxed on the hillside, looking out and down over his house towards the sea and the village centre. Walking past she was sitting on her windowsill watching him toying with an e-cigarette, blowing steam out over the garden. It was one of the last houses on the street before he should turn left and walk downhill towards his house. He habitually walked past the house looking at it watching out for her tired face. Waiting. The house had grey stone walls around its front garden, and a higher stone and brick walled garden at the back of the house. On the windows she didn’t open to sit on there were window boxes filled with green and brown plants, weeds mostly. When he arrived back home he lay down on the sofa, with the sash window flung open enjoying the remains of the sunlight which was bright enough to cause him to keep his eyes half closed. He was uncertain, wondering what the woman’s hips and thighs were like, smooth and perhaps olive skinned beneath her her her flat stomach. He forced himself awake, alarmed by this sudden flash of desire.

Outside beyond the village and the prison, hidden by the politics of his imprisonment was the bay and eventually the grey and blue ocean. It was never quiet enough so that he could hear the sea, however much he wished that he could hear it, knowing that he would never be allowed to see it, to touch it, imagining that there was a note on his file that “seeing the sea would give him pleasure, consequently it must remain just out of reach” so he hoped in vain. Sometimes when the windows were open and the cool air was passing through the house, he would stretch, or lay down on the floor and exercise his back. It had been like this when he was locked in his cell in prison or walking round the prison yard being scrutinized by guards and other prisoners. The house grew cooler in the late afternoon and early evening, and he’d shut the windows and doors. It was on a day like this that the police came round in the evening to make sure he was in the house. The constable stood in the doorway, said hello, waved at the other constable who stayed in the car. He came into the house and looked around the ground floor. The boxes of books and things piled in the corner, the untidiness, the remnants of the evenings takeaway meal still in its boxes on the table. The police thought of how tidy his home and working environment was and compared it to the uncared for mess the police was looking at here. The police told him that he should tidy up his house as he was going to be here for the foreseeable future. He asked the police about the meaning of the led colours and received the same answers she had given him with some extra details of the speed of the flashing. It’s about the battery charge it sends a message by its frequent flashing and tells us that it needs charging, or there is a fault. Over the weeks and months the police came to his house less and less, eventually restricting themselves to greeting him in the streets, nodding, waving and saying “good morning”. The police station and the punishment cells were outside of the 200 metre sphere of his prison, If he stood on the northern edge of the prison and looked down clavicle street he could see one aspect of the grey walled prison block, with its barred windows , the lower windows had been bricked up so that daylight could not enter the cells. He wondered if the cells and prison was a silent as the grey building suggested. The building seemed to be flat roofed but he couldn’t tell for sure. He imagined that the cells were as uncared for as his house. And yet…

Weeks, months and years pass, No one makes a home of their prison, even a prison cell that is 200 metres in diameter, and he could never forget the virtual walls around him. The principle of relativity affected all aspects of other peoples lives, sitting in the small park, the only park within his prison, on a shiny aluminium chair drinking coffee supplied by a Mobile coffee van & barista that was parked by the playground. She was sitting on the chair across the aluminum table from him. Neither of them felt as alone and precarious as they talked about the books they were reading, he was reading Anselm Keifer’s notebooks and talking about how much he envied the writers ability to travel to India, whilst she smiled sympathetically and told him how boring she was finding Woolf’s The Years. It’s the way the text doesn’t move, it is too static for me and the lack of forward motion. Is that because we are prisoners, immobile in our spheres? That’s true, if I was at home in my house then I would probably love this book, but because this is not my life, that for both you and I, these people that surround us who are after all good natured, are as remote from me, us as the desert or the sea is. I dream of not being a prisoner and finding my way home.

Our two prisoners took to greeting one another every morning, either in the convenience store where she worked four days a week, on a rolling rota, four days on, three days off. Each shift was seven hours, either starting at eight in the morning or three in the afternoon. They exchanged knowing glances when they did not speak, when they spoke, they did so as if they had known each other for years. Occasionally the woman who owned the convenience store would be there, sitting at the table and reading her newspaper studiously, the columns, images, information, occasionally making notes. She would receive messages from one of the other businesses she ran, the pharmacy or the town hall. Speaking in a low tone she would issue instructions to the messenger. Nobody understood why she had employed the woman in the store, the police never thought to ask. If they had she might have told them how she had decided to do something when she found her crying, dejected and alone one morning. A year or so after this, she was enjoying the spectacle of them establishing a relationship or something like that, originally she hadn’t noticed the cautious way they were interacting. Eventually though it was so obvious that only the fact that they were prisoners stopped them from throwing themselves at each other. “Why haven’t you done something about that?” she asked her as they watched him walk away. “Am I allowed to ? Will they put one or both of us back in small cells if I touch his body ?” “I didn’t know you felt like that… “ “How can I not, even working here caused them to interrogate me. To be fair, he probably feels the same, we don’t talk about it in case we couldn’t stop ourselves….” The owner looked sympathetically at her. “You should speak, after all they could come for either of you at any time…” Though she she she did not reply to this, she wondered which she would regret the most, speaking and acting or not-speaking and not acting. Once, when the other tables were occupied he took his morning coffee and sat at the table with the owner. He put his book on the table and watched the seagulls. She saw him looking at the newspaper and offered it to him. He looked sad she thought as he said. “ I shouldn’t as that might constitute a political act, which would put me back in the cell….” He added after a while “I think I’m allowed to read books, even sit here, but not newspapers, a phone or social media. My prison has such fuzzy boundaries..”

In the early evening she sat on the wall outside his house and look at his almost ingratiating smile, his white teeth almost glowing in the reflected UV, noticing how soft his voice was. She wondered why she wasn’t sitting down on the bench next to him. Half his body beginning to vanish in the encroaching darkness. The sound of steam hissing from the house. “It’s too hot in the house, I feel as if my prison habits have become so deeply ingrained that I, it’s impossible to get fond of a prison cell. You can’t really have relationships that aren’t based on it…” He stopped speaking, wondering what the words meant, whether he was trying to run away from this woman. “What would you do if we could leave?” “live differently, visit your house, perhaps help you paint it, take you to the seashore…” He made white tea from the now boiled water. In the room she looked at the suitcase on the dresser, still packed. “You should unpack, can I help you unpack? We are going to be here for a long time. “ “Älways ready to leave, I can’t help it…” He said ruefully to her. “I would like to believe it being packed means that they won’t come for me, warding them off… “”We have become scared conservatives,” She said carefully to him. “Scared that if we do some things they will put us back into those unheated concrete cells. Whereas before we were both restless souls, contented as long as we could move..” “ I could like it here. “ Looking at her brown eyes, and wondering if he could continue to look at her.”I will believe that when you let me help you unpack your case.”Neither of them were really aware of the meaning behind the words they were exchanging. Perhaps the meaning was too terrifying for our two prisoners. And so they could not speak of the very thing they both wanted to. Both of them were thinking of how they liked the other, but also perhaps its just because they sympathized with the situation they were both in. Perhaps its was just the situation, but then what isn’t? Would a confession to one another of the crimes that they had carried out have helped maintain the distance between them ? Perhaps but neither of them believed themselves to be good people, so it would have made no difference.

He had an occasional cleaner who he thought she was both cleaner and jailer, she was probably middle aged. She was seriously sweeping and sorting through the rubbish. Sorting it into recyclable and non-recyclable piles. She greeted him warmly as she always did when they accidentally met. He face was pale and almost translucent, she was dressed in grey trousers and a respectable green top. He imagined she was a policewoman employed to validate the contents of his house. Looking to see if he had any forbidden media in the house, in his life. He went into the bedroom to collect his watch. The bed had been changed and was pristine. He thanked her, she stood still in the doorway looking seriously at him. “One day your sentence will end and you will leave. Will you remember us? “ He didn’t know what to reply. Was it safe to speak to her? “I don’t know” He said. Hoping this was a safe reply. She said “We rarely see you, except walking or when your with that woman…” “We talk about books, little else…” “You read so much, perhaps because you are alone” She said, unmoving blocking the door. “Yes that’s probably it…” She came twice a week, he knew that she cleaned and searched Gia’s house up the hill. He tried to not be in his house so she could search in peace. They scarcely spoke, the silence between them reminded him of being with a jailer. “I’m not really alone, I am simply here…” He did not dare speak of being a prisoner to this woman who might be a jailer. He picked up the book from the side table and quickly left the house. He left and walked up the hill to the prisoner’s house, house, house, Gia’s house was higher up the hill and from her flat roof you could look out onto the sea, He went up onto the roof with her, being there enabled him to repress his usual anxiety. As if somehow his life as a political prisoner might become bearable by being with her. I can think of her name, he thought. He said it too her “Gia, Gia”. She gave him a chocolate. “Idiot, you are an idiot.” After dark, with the french windows open and facing out onto the road, she drew the curtains across the open windows, closed the door behind her, She was dressed in grey, as if a shadow in hiding. She embraced him and kissed him, pulled him down onto the bed and told him to be silent. In the halflight neither looked worried, they leaned into each other. Ignoring the risks that these sexual gestures created. The air in the room had the scents of the sea.[…]Perhaps mentioning the name I knew her by in that prison, is wrong since I know that it was a false identity. Part of me wants to remove all references to the name, but then what could I call her? But then I wonder as I type this, write this, did i love her or was it mere desperation ?

Years later, thousands of miles away, when she has a new name and identity, she would often wonder what happened to him. She remembered the scars on his body, and worse the existential damage that he suffered from. I wasn’t born to be a hostage, nobody is, except perhaps in the Italian novel in which nearly everyone is. That is not the title of the story even in Italian, she thought. She had arrived as a hostage and was placed in her prison in mid winter, they drove her along the coast road, handcuffed to the anchor points in the car. It was a two or three hour drive from the airport. She had fallen asleep after about twenty minutes and woken up as they approached the coast. Cliffs, hills, the greyness of winter, light traffic, coastal villages and occasional fishing ports all with Christmas fairy lights. They arrived at the house, gave her instructions, put on the GPS tracker on her ankle, the smart watch, injected an identity chip into her back. Supplied a few days food. Told her what her basic income allowance was and left her alone in the house. There was a kettle, a basic stove, it seemed clean enough. It was late December, perhaps the 22nd or the 23rd, she only found out for sure a few days later. She made the bed, the linen was clean with a nice smell of lavender. After eating some ramen noodles with egg, she sat at the table and drank green tea. They watched her cry, tears rolling down her face. More miserable than she could imagine she collapsed into bed and imagined dying.

The name they called her was not her real name. She became a prisoner because of her work, carried out for the syndicate which had gone disastrously wrong, with the consequence that the police had searched for her, though by now it was what the media called a cold case and they were no longer searching for her. She had gone into deep hiding waiting for them to forget about her. Partially as a result of this and because the council member’s wife, Gia, was about to be taken as a hostage into the prisoner programme, the syndicate substituted her for Gia so that the council member and his wife could be happy, even criminals becoming capitalists want to be happy in hideous world they have created…

Weeks passed before our hostage began to recover her equilibrium, getting used to the series of betrayals that ended with her becoming a hostage. It was a month or so after this when her bouts of misery had been reduced to occasional moments of tears and dejection that the owner of the convenience store had found her and spoken to her. She had appropriated her, rescued her and put her to work in the convenience store. The convenience store was a world of sound and garish colours. From the sound of the door opening, to the beeps of the microwaves, of the bar code scanners, the sound of the payment systems, the customers placing items in plastic baskets. Her eyes assailed by the primary colours of the packaging. She loads more bottles of drink, aluminium cans, glass and plastic bottles . Watching the few customers to see who would finish collecting their shopping before they leave. Our hostage is paid a living allowance of (35 Hours a week * hourly minimum wage * every four weeks. ) in addition to this she gets paid a minimum wage for working at the convenience store. No digital media of any type is allowed, though nothing has been said, isolation and silence is a requirement of her sentence. She misses shopping, music and bookshops. Only the convenience store plays music. Occasionally in the local bakers the sound of music playing from the backroom can be heard. “I miss music” she said to the sales girl, “Can I have a flat white please” Just so that she could stay longer and sit on a stool in the bakers and listen to the music. Usually as an accompaniment to the music she bought french bread or small multiseed rolls.

It was with the introduction of work that she could begin to be able to live through her alienation of relationlessness, were there any memories of relationships which were not tainted by her being used as a hostage? As the weeks passed occasionally her lips would form themselves into a smile of greeting as customers came into the store, she would often be sitting in quiet moments on the aluminium stool with its red cushioned surface behind the serving counter, she should rise to her feet and whilst her smile expressed disillusionment, perhaps even a philosophical disillusionism. (She was wondering if there was such a philosophical concept). For when she had arrived in this village, a hostage, miserable and scared, and began to explore her two hundred metre in diameter prison cell, she had wanted to believe in the innocence of the place, that the people just lived here and she was imposed on them, but as she recovered she began to notice the smallness of the everyday corruptions, the affects of the micro-fascism of the village, town, and then eventually the entrance to the black-site, she imagined she could hear them screaming… She understood it was a town and that her prison cell was a village. As she greeted her nth customer with a smile she realized that some of these people disgusted her. It was this that stopped her regarding the bodies of others as objects for her desires. The young men with their perfectly muscular bodies which before being a hostage she would have wanted to stroke, perhaps oil…

One day after an evening shift in the convenience store she felt unexpectedly confident with herself. Changing into her pyjamas and for the first time since she arrived slept well. She woke in the middle of the night and went to the bathroom, her hair was hanging loosely, longer than she was used to, she rinsed her mouth and drank a mouthful of hot water from the tap. Noticing traces of makeup on her eyelashes she washed them with warm water and cotton pads. Her arms were pale, not as muscled as she was used to. She slept heavily after this, and only woke in the cold air of the dawn. Before closing the windows she lent out and looked at the town without people. She slept again, around eight or nine in the morning, she drank water, ate something, tied her hair back and went out for her first run. Effectively she thought as she began to run, 100metres x 2Pi … x the number of circuits…. + 200 metres…. She was surprised that she managed 2 circuits that day. During the subsequent days on the late shift she ran every morning, exercised sometimes, and always exercised during the evening […] It was the next morning when she stopped looking at the young bodies as obscure objects of desire. She wondered if this was because they were were free to walk down the tree lined avenue that curved down to the sea, whereas she could only stop and sit at the bench 97 Metres from her house and look down at the bay, The slate grey sea. Once in a while she wanted to run down the hill and dive into the water, to swim to the rocks, or somewhere. Then to run, wet and dripping up the hill and back to the house. She stared down and noticed a few beach huts that were visible from here. After a week or so of running she had begun to recover her stamina, her body was recovering its muscle tone. Her loneliness changed, with the recovery of her body she had rebuilt invisible walls between her and the world. One day after finally managing twenty circuits, when she was drying her body after the shower she was overcome with near-hysterical fits of laughter.

Her life, everything that surrounded her seemed like either a game or an existential crisis, she understood there were rules but was not sure they were predictable or understandable. Though she now spoke to people most days, every day she was at the convenience store.I am a convenience store woman , she said to the owner. And only on her days off was her loneliness a problem, my situation is strange, she said to her, I don’t really have a sentence so I have no end date. This could go on forever. One day whilst she was stacking instant noodles on the shelves of the store, checking the sell by dates. One of the police came in and told her there was mail for her. “Mail? I didn’t know I could receive mail…” “You can collect it at the post office in the town hall…” “I can’t go there, it’s outside of my area…” The police shrugged. “I don’t know….” “After censoring you could forward it here.” The owner suggested to the police. Occasionally this the post would arrive, always already opened envelopes and the occasional already opened package, sometimes there was nothing in the envelopes or packages and she and the owner would wonder what had been taken. “Do you mind ? “ She asked her. “No, seems pretty pointless to mind….” She didn’t explain that even the empty envelopes of censored mail were like windows to a fading actual world she had lived in before. Occasionally when the contents passed the censor, the police would bring the envelopes and packages, books sometimes music. One afternoon she was on her own in the store, sipping yogurt. “Hello police…” she said smiling as usual. “Do you like working here ?” The police asked. “yes, i really like it… It’s funny getting mail. I never imagined I would…” “It’s a shame we cannot extend the diameter for you,, we know you have no intention of escaping…” The police made an expressive shrug and gesture before leaving….

Sometimes when she was running her circuit, left right, left right, sometimes fast, usually at her normal road race speed, she would come across a police or other official walking or driving on her route. If she had the energy she would half wave or salute them. The act of running gave her an excuse to not speak to them, she always felt that the slightest wrong word would create a terrible situation, ending if she was fortunate in a small cold cell somewhere. Silence and obsequiousness were the only ways that she thought she could remain here, running and being a convenience store woman. That afternoon when she was alone in the room, in her house, before going to the convenience store , she threw herself in a graceful arc onto her bed. She was not repressed, not even oppressed. The few books in the room were insufficient to assuage her boredom. She knew that she was missing the smell, the physicality of another’s body. She felt like a reluctant nun…. “öh well that is just who I must be now…” She woke up after an hour and remembered she needed to be at the store, it was quiet outside and conscious of the airflow, ignoring the lack of place. She listened to the outside as she changed her clothes. She could hear women, dogs and children somewhere out there. She shut and locked the windows, put on her shoes and walked towards the convenience store with its familiar certainty. The certainty that it was real, that she was not dreaming because the probability of prison was vanishingly low and far away. “Hey Rugal” she called across the empty store to the morning shift person… “Anything that I need to do? “ hanging her jacket on the door hook. They chatted about the things not done, and the things to be done. Rugal walked off with a “I’ll be leaving first then….” The afternoon passes, three or four hours later she is drinking tea and wondering if they’ll ever let her leave to reclaim her identity.

This was the equilibrium that our hostage had achieved after four or six months. Our hostage no longer thinks about how she ended up sitting in a chair drinking tea watching the public pass by the convenience store. We however need to differentiate who the state thinks she is from who she actually is. This difference explains how she will end up on the other side of the world. She is in the convenience store and hears the sound of a bottle rolling into place as the customer takes one out of the tall glass doored refrigerator. She looks up and sees an unfamiliar customer putting the bottle into the basket. He has put a few instant ramen pots into his basket, some fruit and is looking at the plastic pots of desserts, standing in front of the plastic pots of trifles, cheesecake and yoghurts. As he approaches the desk, she sees that he has a GPS ankle bracelet and a GPS watch on his wrist. He asks for coffee, an americano perhaps, some boiling water for the noodles. He goes and sits by the window looking out onto the street. He exudes the existential dread that all prisoners suffer from. It’s the first time she sees him. He comes back the next day, or is it the day after that ? Still they don’t speak. The CCTV cameras records their not speaking, their lack of recognition. It was a few days after this, on one of her exercise circuits that she sat in the square, 98 or 99 metres from her house, slowly eating a bar of chocolate, piece by piece. Wishing she could walk across the square to the cafe. She recognized the prisoner from the GPS trackers and from selling him ramen noodles in the store. She told him after a few minutes. “I cannot cross the square to the bar, somewhere between here and there my boundary exists. I cannot cross that boundary. You and I have to stay within our boundaries….” He looks at his watch and says. “I think the cafe is within my sphere, can I buy you a drink? “ “Please. coffee, a glass of wine ?” She looked grateful just for the offer. He carried them back from the cafe on a tray, and placing it between them they talked about how long they had been here. She didn’t say anything that might enable him to understand she was a hostage. The cafe and square offered no escape from the sense of imprisonment either of them were suffering from. Gia told him one day on a early autumn afternoon that the building opposite was a black site and sometimes people were escorted into the building in handcuffs and black hoods. He complains about the unfairness of the arbitrary limits, how he wished the limits were fuzzier limits, not so binary, so that I could sit on the beach. In a novel they would be fuzzy limits she said.

There was no sense of solitude within the sphere she lived in, she couldn’t escape from the solid stone and brick houses that lined the streets, The inhabitants who lived their were as trapped on the coastline as our hostage was. The police were pretending to be civilized, she waited for their violence to surface and the abuse to begin. In other words she lived in the open fear that they maintained. “It’s the evenings that kill me,” She told him. “Most of the time I am stuck indoors with nothing to do. Will I have to be inside as the night falls. The isolation often gets to me. I am never tired enough to sleep. I dread the winter.” “Perhaps you need a fire, or when its bad we could be together. Winter evenings are made for such things. “ He said. They went out for a walk together, it had been raining and the sphere of their prisons shrank in the rain. The houses were wet with the aftermath of the rain that had been blown in from the sea. They walked on until they reached the border which only one of them could pass through. They were on a terrace, it had once been a sanatorium, neither of them could enter the building, only one of them could go to the end of the terrace and touch the building’s red brick wall, it was a tranquil space, below them, beneath the terrace a long glass house with green leaved and pink flowered geraniums. There were some gardeners in the green houses doing something. They turned round to walk back[…] A clear female voice called out from below them, audible through the glass. “Susan, Susan, come here” Was it a child she called or one of the other workers?

His place was was a decrepit looking house on the middle rise of one of the side streets. It was tall and narrow, with three floors he only used the ground and middle floor. They walked up the flights of stairs. There was a strange smell that she couldn’t identify, even stranger was the silence from the vacant house next door. The windows were all shut so you couldn’t hear anything of the street anymore, just the sound of their footsteps on the treads, some of which creaked so loudly that you might imagine they would collapse beneath them. The bedroom was surprisingly warm and pleasant. There was a bottle of water and two glasses on the side table. She didn’t take her coat off and sat on the edge of the bed. Unsure. He looked at her and when he’d finally had enough said. “What now ? is it different being here ? “ In the years that have passed since she changed her name after leaving, she doesn’t quite remember the colour of his hair, or his eyes, his height or even the scent of his body have faded. She wonders if she would recognize him if she saw him walking towards her on the promenade of Busan, or even on New Compton street in Soho. Probably though she would as she remembers the scars that marked his smooth skin. His lack of confidence which mirrored hers. “It is different being here than at my house “ She said, They were lying in his bed. The duvet was thin and she pressed against his body, not so much out of any particular sense of desire and more to do with enjoying the heat of his body. “I don’t usually bring anyone up here you know.” He said and started laughing nervously. “Their have been others? I’m surprised and don’t care.” “Just once I wanted to sleep with someone here. That it’s you is good.” They had drunk some wine sitting outside the convenience store and walked slightly drunkenly down the hill to his house. The alcohol had made him relax, and added an ironic and sardonic touch to his speech. He was slightly more aggressive, perhaps confident and affirmative are better words, in his speech and sexuality. As the alcohol wore off their underlying fear returned and his reserved cautiousness returned. In the morning she said to him that she now had an idea of what he must have been like before prison. In the morning she sat at the table downstairs in the kitchen whilst he made tea and slightly browned some toast which he served with butter and strawberry preserve. “Sorry I don’t really have anything else for breakfast.” She was dressed again, thinking of going home to change her clothes. She waited for the tea and looked at the novel he was reading. “Didn’t he write about prisoners ?” “I think so, they don’t have anything like that in the catalogue. There is an Italian novel I’ve read which is especially strange because the prisoners speak with the guards all the time, as if speech is possible between the jailers and the prisoners.” She read a few lines -Courage, you are innocent. It was the policeman standing behind him laughing at him. “Either things were different for prisoners in those days, or the writer knows nothing about the police as a repressive apparatus…” “That’s true, the prisoner speaks to the police without fear. I don’t even remember what that was like…” She closed the book tossed it onto the chair to one side. “Not something we prisoners should read. Perhaps after this you can write what it was like. Good tea this. “ The hostage starts eating a triangle of toast. He says “I imagine that most of the untagged are secret police or jailers, I know it’s foolish but I can’t escape from the paranoia…” “…and the mafioso woman dressed in black is smoking a cigerette, bored, looking at him as he passes beneath her window…” He said quoting the closing sentences from memory. “Is that me for you?” She asked.

At home she showered, changed and was halfway through getting dressed when the doorbell rang. She pulled on her dressing gown over her clean underwear and stood behind the closed door. “Who is that? “ Then the police face appeared in the side window. She recognized her. “Come on, come along. Open the door. “ She said looking at her through the glass. Inside in the kitchen she held out some pieces of paper. “You must sign this. It is the notification of your sentencing from the open prison commission. They should have sent this notification with you, or at least months ago.” “Is that all?” She asked her, signing the paperwork with a flourish, “Yes that’s all there is. I’ll be going then.” The police said. They looked at one another across the silent table. She waited for the police to speak about the man she had been sleeping with the night before. The police said nothing, standing . “Nothing else unless this is not the first time you have been imprisoned. here. Either way you know this time.” After the police left she went upstairs and got dressed. She made her way to the convenience store, ignoring the cool wind blowing inland from the sea, as she was signing the document she had momentarily hoped it signified her release. It didn’t. She walked across the road and onto the forecourt of the store, she entered the store as if it was a prison cell. She stood by the counter reading some post-it notes that had been left for her. False hopes she thought, so false. All the pleasures, contacts, any unusual feelings should be locked away in her heart, a mirror of the prison she lived within. She needed more control so that the pleasure she had felt last night were invisible to the world. No things nor people should be allowed to close to her. Will I ever be called by my name again ? Even as she thought this she knew it was impossible. She knew she needed to keep a firm hold on the bitterness and resentment expanding with her, after signing the document she thought of herself as being permanently in prison. Her right leg was cramping slightly so she began to stretch her leg. She wished he would come and visit her in the convenience store so that there was at least one body, his body that she could pretend was an everyday practice. So that words and skin could touch.

Another day drinking espresso, under the green canvas gazebo of the coffee truck in the park, with small slices of fruit cake and open cans of an italian fizzy orange drink, sitting on unpainted metal chairs around a matching table. She looked seriously at him. “I am a hostage, supposedly a guarantor of the continued good behaviour for my criminal partner and boss amongst others. By now they have probably forgotten all about my existence. I wonder at times if they will ever bring me release orders, or perhaps swap me for another hostage…” He couldn’t help but smile, “a moll, I didn’t know gangsters still had molls…” She smiled with him, pleased that he didn’t know what she actually did in those days before she became a hostage. “ … wonder what the other prisoners in their cells did to get themselves locked up here?” “Just beyond the limits of your sphere there is an old anarchist, not sure if he is a political prisoner or a criminal. It’s his second time I believe…” A gust of wind blows the leaves around and some cherry blossom falls onto the table and them. They both had that precise and definite memory of orders being issued, the banging of metal doors being slammed in their faces. She remembered the blue sky shining through the barred windows. The door opening and being brought here. “Perhaps he is still there and would give anything in the world to be here under the open sky in the park. Perhaps it’s not a cell to him as his alternative was to marry the woman…” Across the park a man could be seen walking towards them, towards the coffee truck. He is swaying in the sunshine, zigzagging across the grass towards the truck where he orders something before collapsing onto the bench by the truck. They can hear him speak with the man making coffee. “Greg is being forced into marrying the roma girl,..”He said before continuing “”He’s in jail for indecent assault. To leave the prison he will have to marry her.” The man leans forward and offers him the coffee and something that looks like a pastry, but may not be. “Perhaps this girl will get him. She knows him after all. He’ll leave the prison married…” Unable to imagine the situation they were listening to they wandered off in no particular direction just for the sake of walking. The pleasure of the cake had worn off after that and as they walked away across the park they could see the unavailable horizon between the houses. It was the bright green hill, remote, rhizomic and lacking any paths along which they could walk to visit it. It would be this hallucinogenic green for months now until the season changed. It was just beyond the walls of their prison cell. Feeling dispirited they separated at the gates of the park. That afternoon she could feel the coldness in her legs from the metal that had been pushed into the backs of her legs. It made her think of his bare feet on the wooden floor. It had been weeks since they first… Was there any sense of well being in this relationship or was it merely sexual exploitation and desperation.

Perhaps it was at this moment, that the political prisoner and the hostage began to realize that a relationship between people in prison was always going to be impossible. Was it then? Perhaps it was later when they were sitting outside the convenience store chatting to the owner about shifts and times that one of the police came over and say with them. “…did you hear that some of the new prisoners have been quarantined up in thew new village?” “Why did he do that ?” he asked. “Didn’t you know that the sergeant has locked up one of your old colleagues up there in the new village?” “What is that for?” She asked. “They sent some more of his type of prisoner here, people from the same groups and places as him. The first thing one of them did was make a speech at him. So he sent them to the new village so that he’d cause no trouble for him or you…” “I had no idea “ The political prisoner said. The police walked away, Their prison cells shrunk. It feels like the whole world is a prison, she says watching the police walk away. They control everything in our society, they are authority. Prison for us is not that man telling us he has authority, but the pieces information that say we must stay in our prison cells. She taps her anklet. Even when they release me from this prison I will still be a prisoner, monitored, surveiled, I will have to work where they tell me too, unless I leave…. Could you leave ? she asks. I don’t know, perhaps. It is at this moment that the temporary nature of their relationship becomes the spoken other, the moment when they realize that they should accept the limits on love that the prison imposes on them. They will talk about the things they have not spoken of over the weeks that follow. The part time love of prisoners she calls it. He thinks of what she tastes of, her saltiness, how much he liked ejaculating in her. Here then we can begin to speak of their separation, carried out by the jailers and the criminals she worked for. Can we say their separation was forced or was it that they were only joined by their imprisonment?

Spring was strange in the north, the land inside their prison cells was desolate. They would walk the circumferences of their prison cells, feeling depressed by the grey and brown desolation. They would stand and look at the sea and shore they were forbidden from standing on. It would come, it must come that moment when they would leave, perhaps on the long slow trains to the south, or in a car that would pick them up from outside their house. A last view of the village through the window, as one of them left the other in jail. He asked her if she had any comrades also in their virtual cell just over there ? He waved his hand in the direction of the new village. No, not here, none that I know of. Perhaps out there beyond the grey patch of the sea in the unknown lands. It’s a dream to imagine I have comrades, I don’t or i wouldn’t be here. I don’t really want to see him or any others I think it would disrupt my everyday existence here.

There was a bench placed half way up the hill, she would walk along the road and sit down to look at the row of pine trees that edged the front garden of the large house on the road. It was too far away for her to read the name of the house. Occasionally she would smoke a cigerette. Once when sitting there with a half smoked cigerette in her fingers a horse drawn funeral cortege passed by on the way to the church that she imagined was further down the road, in the non-road beyond her prison cell. A dozen or so people followed the cortege on foot. She stood up and bowed slightly paying her respects to the dead stranger, some of the people looked at her. She watched their departing backs accompanied by the rhythmic sounds of their feet on the road. She left before any of them returned. When she told him about this later in the day, he recast the clarity of the event to the act of being in jail, we become this moment, this event we must explore because we are in prison, Once we are free perhaps we can forget. All prisoners have such moments, she says whether its us watching and working in our 100 metre spheres or when we were in the cells in concrete jails behind bars. They were sitting at his table in the kitchen, it was his turn to cook, he was making a salmon with a pink gonchu sauce and a rice bowl, the sauce was two thin and as they poured it over the fish it ran into the warm rice. He said he was sorry, his constant anxiety and tension was because of his dependence on an email or letter arriving, how long must he remain imprisoned here ? Do you have a sentence ? she asked him. I don’t know, do you ? No as long as they want me to say here… could be months, years… or life.

One day in mid-spring a fast car, a Porsche Toycan stopped in front of the convenience store. The political prisoner and the hostage watched the driver, a man in a dark suit, collect a woman from the black site and cross the road to the car. Would you like coffee Ludmilla he asked her as he unlocked the porsche. You kept the porsche, Yes please. They didn’t sit down at the empty table, she, Ludmilla wanted to leave the village so desperately. In the morning sunlight the car was dusty, beneath the dust it was a pale blue blue colour. The woman looked around for the last time, crouched down and slide into the seat. He drove the car off with a low grumbling sound as the engine began to growl. One day the hostage thought that could be me. The black site scares me, he says to her. What did that woman do to be locked up in there?

He collected books from the library, you see, the librarian said as she checked the philosophical text “Love” out for him, even in these dark times sometimes people take out different books… Through the glass wall he could see the stone garden with its two large boulders touching only at the top. I’m going fishing tonight, nothing like night fishing whilst there is a poetry reading taking place… We will cook the fish on the beach. A pity you cannot come.

She moved the tables off of the veranda of the convenience store. She was singing a korean pop song in english, though she didn’t remember all the words “search…”. The local police sergeant walked up to her and said “I was looking for you Hostage. Look at me. Quickly….” She turned and looked at him.. “They are preparing your release papers, You will be free in two or three days. I have been told that your lawyer will collect you in three days. In effect you will be free from tomorrow. Congratulations.” The hostage wondered if there was a replacement hostage coming but did not dare ask. During the three days that our hostage waited for her paperwork to arrive, announcing her release, her everyday practices continued, the convenience store, him, exercising, him, eating, waiting, him, reading. She told the people who needed to know she was being released immediately Hesitantly. His face froze, she thought he might fall over. I’m sorry she said, knowing how much they had held each other up. No I am sorry, I am glad you are leaving this imprisonment. They strolled down to the cafe, he bought some bottles of beer and they drank them at their usual place on the opposite side of the square. She was saying goodbye to the places she had spent so much time looking at at at, touching, touching, feeling feeling feeling . That night, or was it the next day they had sex for the last time. Perhaps it was for him she thought. She felt strange, it was some time before she understood why. We might say years.

Together they went through the belongings she had accumulated over her years as a hostage. It was only now as she was on the verge of leaving that she became aware of the smallness of the house. Emptying the cupboards, filling recycling sacks with the material to be discarded. They carried the first set of sacks to the recycling centre and walked back. I will miss this, she thinks. They discussed how long her trip was going to be, the hours and distances she would be traveling. Their perspectives had changed. You are leaving our virtual prison after being circumscribed within it for so long. Perhaps the world outside will be better, less oppressed than a prisoner’s life is. Do you know what you’ll do out there? No, my release is a shock, i thought i would wave goodbye to you, instead this. She was taking him to the convenience store. Handing over her job and shifts to him. The owner watched them parting. A prisoner remains, the other leaves. “Who is waiting for you at home?” he asks her. “There is nobody, I have nobody and nothing there. I will be alone.” The about-to-be-ex-hostage said. “Perhaps we three should drink here tonight” He suggested. She did not sleep well that night, listened to cars passing, imagining being in one of them speeding away, anticipating the car driving her south. She would find it disappointing when she was driven south. She slept alone that last night. Neither of them could manage seeing one another. He did not appear at all. (He spent the morning in the cafe drinking coffee and reading yesterday’s newspaper that he found in the corner.) He collected the mail from the station, there was a letter for her and one for him. She was to depart in the late afternoon. He spoke to her for the last time delivering the letter to her at the store. She an ex-hostage, him still a prisoner. She was sitting waiting at the table. She gave him a bag of books including the library copies of Hegel’s logic, right, spirit. A couple of books about Hegel. Keep them they can charge me… He put the books behind the counter and began serving people to distract himself. She went home and sat outside with her suitcase in the sunshine. She walked around the garden, around the block. The police came and removed her tracking anklet and the watch. That feels strange she said to the police. And sat on the bench outside her house waiting, eventually the late afternoon bus passed by the house. The car drew up and the driver bowed to her, ignored the police and put her bag in the boot. He opened the rear door for her. She watched the village passing by slowly, he was standing by one of the tables, wiping it down. Looking at her as she passed and waved at her. “Ïs that someone important? “ The driver asked. “No, not at all…” She said. (Only now do I hurt him, only now) “Could you drive down to the beach, the coast I have never seen the sea whilst here.” She stood on the pavement by the sea. She looked out and the grey sea seemed to fill the emptiness. Looking back up the hill towards the 100 metre prison cell she had spent so much time in, she imagined that he was looking down at her and waving. She closed her eyes and imagined all the people she had seen for the past years watching her. Let’s go, she said, they headed south into the wind… Often and then only occasionally and then infrequently she wondered what happened to him. He was still there she knew, when with a baby on her hip, his baby, a trail of bodies behind her, she ran.

I watched her drive off vanishing through the village, I imagined them driving along the coast road. I went inside the store and collapsed behind the counter and cried. I never saw her again. I remained a prisoner there for a few years. The regime changed, the new government pardoned me and I was allowed to leave in late spring, the cherry blossom was falling . Incapable of relationships, I am an ex-political prisoner, acarefully apolitical teacher of Hegel, dialectics, who knows everything is political

… Eventually i ended up meeting a woman with a child, she attached herself to me after a lecture on Hegel. I stayed with her. It’s all I could hope for. Nobody is born either a hostage or a political prisoner, nor do they even become nomads willingly, the situations we are in demand it and we live in our situation….

[end]