Dragons & Butterflies: Sentenced to Die, Choosing to Live (97 page)

‘
Bi-nai?
’ (Where are you going?) one of the Red Caps said.

I tried to act dumb and began moving away again, but the trustee pulled me back by the arm. I was instructed to drop my pants. Silently I started praying, asking G-d to close their eyes. And can you believe it – when I pulled my underpants open, showing them my cock, they didn’t see the earpiece hidden there. I was told to get dressed and move on, and I allowed myself to breathe one heavy sigh of relief.

The next time we had to entertain the Red Caps was only a few mornings later. This time they raided our cells, taking out our bedding, ripping it apart and rummaging through all our belongings. I was really shitting myself, as Jib’s dog was in its regular hiding place, but luckily they didn’t find it.

These military-style raids continued almost daily, and at first this was extremely frustrating for me. I found it difficult to control myself. I just wanted to lash out all the time. Then, with time, as strange as it seems, even these raids in a sense became normal. On the positive side, though, once the Red Caps had searched through everything, they would leave, and immediately after they’d gone we would take out our dogs and bark them.

On Tuesday 24 May I was called for an embassy visit. I could see that Anna, the consular officer, was kind of shocked by my appearance. I hadn’t shaved for two weeks, and I was going grey on my face. I can’t have looked very happy. Anna asked me to please shave, but I explained that you couldn’t purchase shaving cream in this fucked-up place, and anyway you could pay up to 5 000 Thai baht for a can. It was unbelievable how expensive things were there. She was very sympathetic and promised to follow up with the Department of Corrections, and to ask to have me transferred back to Bangkwang. In the meantime, she said she would at least request to have me taken out of solitary. I wasn’t holding my breath. Nothing seemed to be going my way.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised that coming to prison was not only my destiny but also an opportunity to change. With all the chaos around me, in spite of everything, I felt quite peaceful.

A month later, Eli Gil, the consular representative from the Israeli embassy, the rabbi and the Thai secretary visited me. There was a lot of mumbling, some of it word for word the same stuff Mr Gil had told me six months before, when he had made such a big deal about me being issued an Israeli passport and telling me that all the documentation on their side was ready. The consular officer admitted that, when they had sent my transfer documents to Israel, they had somehow neglected to include my official release date. Now they were waiting for the Thais to give them this last piece of information, but it seemed they were struggling to obtain it from the Department of Corrections. Gil also muttered some incoherent words about having spoken to Sam Goldstein, our lawyer in Israel, but actually it was all crap. The man was lying through his teeth.

At that point I became very emotional and told Gil that unless I was in the next transfer meeting I would refuse to go to Israel. Gil didn’t defend himself against my verbal attack, which only made him look even more guilty. Instead he remained cordial and promised to make it his priority to speed up things.

On the matter of my being transferred back to Bangkwang, however, he had no news for me, only that he had forwarded my request letter to the Director of the Department of Corrections. During my outburst, I was almost on the verge of tears, I was so angry. As prisoners, we really had no control over anything that happened on the outside. I was completely dependent on other people, which I found incredibly frustrating.

I could see that the rabbi genuinely had my best interests at heart, but I was quickly losing faith in Mr Gil. I wasn’t planning to hold him to his promise, because I believed there was no way he was going to keep it. In fact, I was beginning to believe that the Israeli government had concluded that transferring a South African drug dealer to a prison in Israel, not to mention granting him citizenship, would be a bad move politically after all. Well, I would have to wait and see. I had no other choice.

In solitary in Klong Prem, I found I had little desire to draw or paint. Even my attempt at making my own set of cards fell hopelessly short of the standard I had reached before. In my bleaker moments I couldn’t help wondering whether this was another test, or whether the angels had taken back my talent. I wasn’t one for sitting around doing nothing for too long, and the only other way to express myself was through poetry, and so I would let my pen lead the way:

POEM 1 (in Solitary)

Wall, walls and more walls. Adorned in steel, like a platoon of stark imposing monoliths conspiring to escort you beyond the veil.

Blindfolded in an all-encompassing sinister shred of the sun, moon and stars, all rolled up in one.

Strapped in a straitjacket to a runaway train with a one-way ticket to the nearest tow-away zone.

In suspended animation, a portrait of distorted faces reflected in the hall of mirrors, parallel the ebb and flow of the awakening tides.

From a bird’s-eye view, the bridge between madness and sanity is a dark place of 1000 serpents juggling lost souls.

Through men of a pure heart congregating along the Wailing Wall an avalanche of blessings fall down the end of a rainbow.

Self-expression bottled in a jar of Jell-O, high on Ritalin, kids are nothing more than puppets on a string mimicking their parents marking time.

While in the name of global enterprise pharmaceutical giants live the American dream.

Amy Winehouse majestically rode the white horse, straight into rock and rolls legendary club of 27.

In the process of opening our eyes to the ways of the world, Adam and Eve uncovered the very secret that sustains life, Like a mountain of fireworks all going off at once.

Words were drawn, boundaries were crossed. It’s friendship such as yours that restore our faith in the human spirit.

Swallow a snake, wrestle a crocodile, in the land where the scales of justice sway to the momentum of a rusty pendulum ultimately the righteous will always prevail.

Listen to the pouring rain, listening to it pour …

One day, I think it was Sunday 26 June, I felt really homesick, not that nostalgic feeling that borders on euphoric emotion, but one where your entire perception of the world changes. This feeling turned into something more frightening. The walls and floor, and in fact everything, seemed to come alive and take on a menacing appearance, as if at any moment I’d be swallowed up by them. Scared to close my eyes, I turned up the volume on my TV, which usually had a soothing and calming effect on me, but this time it didn’t work.

I looked at myself in a mirror and saw an old, white-bearded man. Then the old man with the white beard started going psycho on me. He seemed to be mumbling under his breath about how fed-up he was with prison life, and some bullshit about fulfilling his purpose once he was free. Most of it was incoherent, and the rest made little or no sense. At first I ignored my white-bearded other self, but when he produced a blade, I started to become concerned. I proposed a deal with him: either you shave that fucking white beard of yours, which makes you look like some lost vagrant, or else you lose the blade. I hoped he would agree to the former, which thankfully he did. He shaved his beard. After that, everything seemed to get back on track. The blade was put in a safe place and we began to coexist peacefully. I guess solitary confinement has its way of fucking with your mind.

The visit with the Israeli embassy kept playing over and over in my head like a never-ending silent movie, and a deep feeling of bitterness persisted. The problem with society, and with people in general, is a preconceived notion about prisoners: people think that all prisoners are uneducated and rotten to the core. In my 17 years of incarceration I had come to realise that this was far from the truth. Prison changes a man, and the lessons we learn during our confinement behind those high walls a ‘normal’ person in the free world wouldn’t grasp in two lifetimes. Once you have been caught for breaking the law, you can expect to be discriminated against for the rest of your natural life. Convicts are a condemned species. Forget about second chances. Nobody really gives a fuck.

Still, I desperately waited for news from the Israeli embassy, but nothing was forthcoming. It seemed to me that they were deliberately delaying the signing of my documents. I found myself sliding deeper and deeper into a state of depression, not helped by Elisabeth’s departure for Switzerland and her annual holiday. A feeling of hopelessness consumed me. This was compounded by what I could only think might have been hypertension. My spirit felt crushed, physically crushed. One day I almost choked on my own breath, and I could feel my chest closing up. The pain reached as far as my lower back. I know that when I am very stressed I tend to overreact, but this time I thought I was having a stroke. Then, as if an angel had descended from heaven, I remembered something my friend Jenny had written in one of her letters to me. Overcome with a sense of urgency, I scrambled through my things and found an envelope with her familiar handwriting on it. At this point I could sense myself falling over the edge, barely managing to stay afloat. I think I might have been on the border of insanity. Jenny’s words pulled me back to life:

At this point in time, as you read this, ask yourself for a sincere intuitive response to this question: how much energy and focus am I putting into accessing the full range of my inner guidance, my inner knowing, and my commitment to my highest path of unified intent? Who do you truly want to be as a free man, what kind of man? What do you wish to work on when you’re free? Apply this in whatever way, to whatever ways your mind takes you, pray for the real Shani to be set free, to follow his noblest path. Find yourself in yourself alone, in the stillest, humblest, most peaceful place in yourself.

That night I wrote in my diary: ‘I kind of understand now, what it means, or feels like, to be insane. I was there; I crossed over, but fought my way back. Medication, psychologist, is not always the answer.’

Although I gradually began to feel stronger mentally, my chest pains got worse and I started having panic attacks. My mouth would become dry and my arms and my lips would go numb. One night, the discomfort in my chest area was severe. Believing that I was having a heart attack, I banged my hands on the floor and tried sticking my arms out of the bars, gesturing to the guards to come. I could see with my mirror the guard just standing there, watching me, and then simply walking away. Later, one of my friends shouted for the guards, telling them that the
farang
was dying. I knew I wasn’t really dying, but my chest had closed again and I was very pale. When the guards eventually came to my cell and saw me lying there sprawled out on my back, I told them in Thai, ‘
Hoorchai mi-panha
’ (heart trouble), and they said they would call the doctor.

Almost two hours later, the so-called doctor arrived. The guard didn’t even open the cell door. I had to go to the bars and stick my hand through, and place one of my fingers in a small electronic gadget, which I think took my pulse and temperature. Then the doctor stuck his stethoscope through the slit in the steel door and listened to my chest, for no more than two seconds. He turned around and, after saying, ‘You are very strong,’ gave me two sachets of electrolyte beverage powder and an energy drink for sportsmen. I couldn’t believe it. There I was, in serious trouble, and that was the best they could do? Really, they didn’t give a shit.