Read Dragons & Butterflies: Sentenced to Die, Choosing to Live Online
Authors: Shani Krebs
Tags: #Thai, #prison, #Memoir, #South Africa
I couldn’t wait to move into my new house. Once my table was built, I planned to get into some serious painting and also to devote more time to studying the Torah. Having a house was a rare privilege, but it also cost a lot of money. Now that I was back in the general population again, when I looked at my time in solitary I realised what a terrible ordeal it had actually been. Solitary confinement is not a healthy environment, especially for one’s mind. Being confined in such a small space with a bunch of psychopaths and drug addicts had in fact been really tough on me. In solitary, you were a prisoner within a prison’s prison. I didn’t ever want to go back there. I had to learn to control myself, to stop trying to change people. I knew that my anger stemmed mainly from the people with whom I had been forced to coexist. These were the worst criminals imaginable. It wasn’t that I saw myself as better than anyone else; it was more about having morals and principles. It didn’t matter whether you were in prison or outside – there was still a standard one had to keep. I have to say that it wasn’t the Thais so much as the foreigners who always seemed to be the problem.
Initially, after his release, Mohammed wrote me three letters from the Immigration Detention Centre (IDC), although I never really expected to hear from him again, nor that he would keep his promise of helping me with my royal pardon. He had spent eight years in this hellhole, and I was sure that the last place he wanted to think about now was prison or anything or anyone associated with it. He was starting a new life as a free man. I bore him no resentment. I was happy for him.
We were now down to 14 in our cell. Lenny our cook had been moved to another prison, so I was eating with another Chinese guy, who was also from Hong Kong. His name was Lim. Most Hong Kong guys spoke reasonable English and seemed more educated than those from mainland China.
Since getting out of solitary, and in the month leading to the December amnesty, my class had been upgraded from ‘very good’ to ‘excellent’. Rumour had it that there was a 50-50 chance that drug cases would be included in this amnesty. I felt confident that we would get it. The day approached that all of us prisoners were so eagerly awaiting: 5 December 1999, the King’s birthday.
Calamity! Drug cases were
excluded
from the amnesty. We were shattered. I could have kicked myself. Why hadn’t I petitioned the government? One of my reasons, I knew, was that after having been in Building 10, I’d made a private decision to stop fighting the system. It felt like a losing battle anyway. I also had my own house now, and the truth was that I was comfortable and enjoying my privileges and I didn’t want anything to mess that up. I was also waiting for an answer to my royal pardon application. Over and above all this, I had become somewhat complacent in the knowledge that some powerful businessmen in South Africa were among those who were working towards my release. In fact, I was expecting to go home soon. Plans were being made for my arrival at the airport in Johannesburg.
Dreams are what kept our hopes alive. When they are dashed, as ours were on 5 December, you harden your heart just a little bit more.
Over the preceding months I had begun to cut ties with many of my female correspondents. Jai was my girlfriend and we were almost two years into our relationship, which was complicated to say the least.
It was during this time that I connected with another woman. Her name was Robyn. She had so much compassion, not only for me but also for all of the South Africans who were locked away in Thailand. She got her father involved in putting pressure on the government on our behalf. They even visited the women’s prison and provided financial support there.
After meeting Robyn, my feelings for Jai began to change. I no longer envisaged a future with her. Unfortunately, Robyn was married, but I didn’t really have any expectations anyway and so I never felt bad about my relationship with her. I was behind bars and could not be a threat in any real way. People come into our lives for reasons that are sometimes beyond our understanding. Perhaps developing feelings for Robyn was only to make me realise that Jai, a Thai woman, was not for me. If Jai met somebody in the outside world, I thought that I would encourage her to make a life for herself with that person. I did not want her to wait for me. My sentence was 40 years. Heaven only knew when I would get out. In any event I never made Jai any promises. I was indebted to her, there was no doubt about that, but the love I felt for her began to evolve into a strong friendship instead. For me anyway, Jai began to feel more like a sister than a girlfriend.
The parents of one of the South African girls in the women’s prison came to visit her and they brought a parcel for me from Robyn. It was given to Jai to pass on to me and she went and opened it. It contained a backgammon set, a sweatshirt and a letter, which Jai read. This became obvious at our next visit, when she told me that she suspected Robyn and I were more than just friends. I felt terribly guilty because it was true. I couldn’t lie, so I confessed that I did have strong feelings for her. Jai was on the verge of tears. I tried to comfort her by saying that nothing had changed, she was still my best friend. I tried to explain that my needs were great and that one woman could not fulfil them all. In the end, Jai promised to protect our secrets and to continue supporting and visiting me, and Robyn and I continued to correspond, sometimes writing as many as two letters a week to each other. Hers were often 30 pages long.
Not even a month after I had confessed to Jai my feelings for Robyn, I received an aerogram from Robyn in which she very diplomatically told me that she wished to cut ties with me and that she was going to stop writing. From the tone of her letter, I could see that they were not her words, even though it was her handwriting. I was bewildered. I could not understand what had happened, but my sixth sense was telling me that somehow Jai was responsible. After that, my relationship with Jai took strain. She didn’t trust me any more and I didn’t trust her. I knew she was going through my parcels and mail from my family and friends. She became unreliable to the point of lying. In a way, though, I understood. I had hurt her and now she was paying me back. All the same, it was hard to get over Robyn, and I was upset that I had been the cause of her ceasing to support the other prisoners.
Even in prison my relationships with women were complicated.
The Battle Continues
By early 2000, I was painting in different media and developing a diversity of styles, both abstract and realistic. My subject matter varied from nudes to portraits. This was more than likely a reflection of my state of mind, which was all over the place. My family had increased my allowance and my good friend Edna in England was still sending me £100 a month, so I was never short of anything. Most importantly, I was blessed with good health. However, I still felt restless. It was the
not knowing
that ate away at me, the not knowing of when I would be released. It was constantly on my mind. My art was my only salvation. On either side of my new house I had rowdy neighbours. In order to escape the noise and to focus on what I was doing, I would transcend the monotony of a prisoner’s dreary existence and enter the spiritual realm where silence became a symphony of calm and peace. There I was among the angels. From above, I watched myself drawing at the table the carpenter had made for me, oblivious to my surroundings. In my mind, only I existed. I imagined that, when we die, we go to a place just like that, where there is no sound. We listen with our eyes, and our hearts are our voices. No words need to be spoken.
One morning I was sitting around at the gym, which was situated near the top end of the building next to a small section cordoned off with barbed wire that was known as the
soy
(punishment cells). There were four of these cells. They had no toilets, electricity or running water. Being locked inside must have been sheer hell. The cells were used to punish prisoners for insubordination or to house those who had committed murder inside the prison or who had attempted to escape. Over the years, it was mainly Thai inmates who were kept there, in what I can only describe as the most inhumane conditions possible.
There were also four houses close to where I was sitting. Everything was open, and you could see from one house into another. One of them, in fact, was the second chief’s office. Only a low wall separated them from one another. There was a new guy who had arrived in our building about three weeks before, and I’d heard he was a brilliant artist. I hadn’t met or even seen him yet. So anyway, there I was, sitting around not doing anything, and I saw this guy walking towards me. In his hand was a rolled-up piece of paper. I greeted him and asked if I could see what he had drawn. He was very polite. He unrolled the paper and showed me his picture. Well, I was totally amazed. It was a portrait of an old Thai man, half-finished. I had seen some of the other Thai artists use the same medium, but I had never seen anything as perfect or as beautiful as this painting. It looked like a photo. I introduced myself as ‘Aleksander’. The new guy’s name was Chai Long. Apparently he was in for murder and had got a life sentence. He mentioned that he had heard of me and said he’d like to see my work. I was excited. The medium that he used was carbon powder – fine granules of crushed charcoal. He used a variety of Chinese brushes prepared for different applications.
Before prison I had never heard of this medium. I discovered that Chai Long had a degree in Fine Art and that he had taught art as a profession. He had mastered this ancient Chinese technique from the great grand master of Thailand, who was now in his late eighties. Chai Long was a master himself. I wasted no time in inviting him to come and stay in my house. In return, he agreed to teach me to use carbon powder. I arranged with the carpenter to measure out the space next to my work area and I ordered another table, this one for my new friend.
Chai Long came from a poor family in southern Thailand. He was married and had a son. Through painting for prisoners, he was able to support his family on the outside. I took an instant liking to the guy. We were the same age and were both Librans. He was humble and well-mannered and never said a bad word about anybody. Once the table was ready, he moved in. I watched him work and he tutored me. One advantage I had over Chai Long was that I could draw very well. In my first attempt, I mixed media, using Bic ballpoint pen and charcoal. I was a stickler for detail and quite fancied the picture I had done, but Chai Long was not impressed. To him it was sacrilege. I had violated the sacrosanctity of carbon powder. As a rule, one never mixed carbon powder with another medium – not even pencil, he emphasised. The powder had a life of its own.
It was fascinating to watch him work. I absorbed every action and detail. My next step was to buy my own supplies. My second picture was of an African baby, which I thought came out pretty okay. In appreciation for him teaching me, I had organised that my Chinese chef would cook Chai Long one meal a day, which I paid for. My house became his home. He could help himself to whatever he wanted. Like sport, art broke down any cultural barriers that may have existed between foreigners and Thais. Chai Long became one of my best friends – even murderers have a gentle side to them.
In the meantime, Kjell, the Norwegian, and I also became buddies. Like me, he was an avid backgammon player and he also worked out every day. We had a lot of fun together. Every night he ate a can of tuna straight out of the tin, with a couple of slices of bread, something I couldn’t stomach without a topping of mayonnaise or ketchup. Our gym, which consisted of two wooden benches and two concrete weights, was not enough for Kjell to bench, so, between the two of us, we paid the handyman to make us up to 130kg of concrete weights.
The handyman was a Thai-Pakistani Muslim by the name of Pramud. He had been in prison for over ten years, and my heart went out to him. During the 1996 amnesty, his sentence had been reduced to 40 years, like mine. I had been in prison for only two years and had the same sentence as him. From what I heard, he had been found guilty by association and was initially given the death penalty. Whenever a new Building Chief was appointed, he would go to great lengths to upgrade and improve the conditions of the building, and for this Pramud was the man. He constructed buildings, built an office and toilet for the guards, installed concrete lockers for the prisoners and fixed any plumbing problems we had.