“I never saw this door closed once,” whispered Marko, as we moved into the corridor.
“This cell was made for 16, but
up to 24 were kept here,” said the
official. “They slept in shifts.”
“That’s all true,” said Marko, as a few of us hung behind for a story. The beds were wooden bunks running almost the entire length of the room. There was room to walk only close to the wall and near the hole in the concrete which served as the toilet. Marko felt the surface of the bunk. “When a new
prisoner joined a cell he was asked whether he was a miner or a pilot,” Marko said. “If he answered miner, he slept on the floor under the bottom bunk. If he said pilot, he had to stand on the top bunk and dive head-first into the concrete floor.”
“But that could kill you,” someone said.
“They caught you,” Marko said. “But you had no way of knowing. It was a test.”
“Did you do it?” someone asked.
Marko nodded and smiled. None of us found it funny. But seven years in prison gives you a different perception of things.
We were led to see some eight-man cells. Marko grabbed the bed posts with his hands. “New prisoners in this cell had to hold the bed posts and take ten punches to the sternum from each fellow prisoner. If he let go of a post, the process started all over again.” Marko described test after test that a new prisoner might be put through. “The violence wasn’t for the sake of violence,” he said. “It was to see who could be trusted and who couldn’t. If you couldn’t take the punches and fled to the guards, you couldn’t be trusted.” /Ok – you had really big problems in breathing and yawning next half a year, but you had a place to sleepJ - remark by Marko in Oct 2007/
The official seemed annoyed that we were lagging behind. There were other things still to see. The visitation room. The solitary confinement booths, removed but their marks still on the floor. The execution room, last used in 1991 (the name of the inmate and his crime are still a secret). He took us to the admissions room.
“First a prisoner was fingerprinted,” said the official. “And then something else was printed. Does anyone know what?”
“The palm,” said Marko matter-of-factly.
The official turned his head. “The gentleman is very well informed.”
Indeed. Marko shrugged.
“What was your responsibility in the prison?” I asked the official, running ahead to catch him at the front of the pack.
“Mine?”
“Yes, yours.”
“Well, I never worked here,” he said. “I’m a project manager. I got my information from the guards.”
And so I turned back, looking for Marko.
“How did it feel?” we asked Marko as we stood again outside the prison gates. A cold, windy evening and Marko was surrounded by people full of questions about prison life. There were more questions than answers, but Marko politely did the best. The Patarei was an awful place, he agreed, but some prisoners called it home. “Prisoners would return to their cells saying ‘We’re going home’. And if a prisoner was thinking of his cell in those terms then he was too far gone. Too far gone.” Marko turned and we followed him up the hill. Back toward the city lights of Tallinn.