Sea wanderers serve time for navigational errors in canals and narrows. They imprison illegal Ostarbeiters working under the table, strippers with a soft Little Russian accent, charmers who have found a warm spot in gaststätten, beer gardens, and bouzouki joints. They round up people of Caucasian nationality; the latter are especially disliked in Greece, but despite this, there are many more of them in Hellas than anywhere else. Less often, dealers in stolen cars end up behind bars. After a deal, a buyer may be treated to a drink of kerosene with clonidine to recoup the haggled difference. Also imprisoned are gatherers of bee venom diluted with turpentine, tuner-restorers, and sellers to Israel of pianos revived under the "Becker" brand by the Odessa Musical Instruments Factory.
What is it like to sit there? It varies.
Turkish prisons have a bad reputation. In Libya, a sailor jailed for violating the dry law was put in a zindan, a concrete pit, though with a toilet, and was ransomed... for the same bottle of vodka.
Sitting in Greece is no piece of cake either.
Details of everyday life are, of course, important and interesting, but people are far more interesting—our compatriots. One wants to take a closer look at them, the afflicted, some of whom have spent or are spending part of their lives in foreign prisons and zindans. And it is not about swindlers, not about snotty racketeers fleecing old women at Polish bazaars, but about normal adult men whose worldview was shaped before the collapse of the state and morality, who find it easier to step over the law than over their own principles.
My companion in shared wanderings through Greece and Germany, Valery Denisenko, knows about Greek prison not by hearsay. He is a soft, conscientious man, though completely devoid of a sense of danger. He speaks English decently, and has not yet forgotten Modern Greek. He sailed for a short time, graduated from the faculty of public catering. He worked as a production manager, then as a canteen manager. In his time, he was not afraid to take over a canteen in the port that was deliberately unprofitable by mercantile catering standards. He tried to put things in order, improved the food, fired someone for stealing minced meat... When the state collapse began, canteens and dumpling shops began to close for indefinite renovation, and his brainchild was closed too. He changed profession, installed burglar alarms, earned decent money until orders dried up. He went to Germany, then to Greece, borrowed money for a visa...
On Omonia Square in Athens, where employment agencies are located, he looked for a cook's job in a hotel or boarding house. If not as a cook, he would have gone as a greengrocer, a pastry chef, or a porter, understanding that the main thing is to get a foothold. In May, the tourist season was just beginning.
At a shady agency, he was offered Crete, a position as a second cook at the "Calypso" boarding house for nudists.
Two compatriots worked at "Calypso": a man cleaned the pool and fixed plumbing; a woman cleaned the rooms. They looked cowed, said the owner had not paid them for two months, and refused even to keep an eye on his belongings. The hotel manager demanded a work permit, which, of course, he did not have, and explained that this year there was a downturn in the tourist boom. A second cook would be needed only in July, not before.
He spent the night with Albanians in the back of an old bus; sleeping on the rocks was dangerous—a cliff of about forty meters. In the morning he walked the surrounding villages—all in vain. True, the Albanians advised him to approach the manager again and address him as "kirio," that is, mister. He looked for work in Heraklion; the remaining money barely sufficed for a deck ticket to Piraeus. He again went to the office on Omonia Square to Vasilios, who had sent him there. He pestered Vasilios, demanding either new work or his money back. It came to a head: Valery grabbed a computer and wanted to throw it out the eighth-floor window. They haggled for $60; he sold his wedding ring and some other things, and in the morning he was in Rhodes. From Rhodes, a small ferry went to Symi, a tiny island, twice a day.
The monastery cells were rented out to tourists, but few arrived. This time the owner did not demand a work permit. The little restaurant was small; the owner himself cooked with his nephew. Dishes were washed by a downtrodden, silent woman, I think from Rostov. He got up at six in the morning, washed dishes, the floor, set the tables, then went to the pier to pick up provisions. At three in the afternoon, when the last little steamer cast off, life froze until evening. But in the evening the running around began until late, closing only when the last customer left; he was exhausted brutally. On Sundays, Greeks came to baptize infants, and a crowd of relatives would disembark—some fifty souls at a time. He stood at the stove next to the owner. The owner's wife turned out to be capricious, found fault, reproached him for every crust of bread.
A month passed, but the owner was in no hurry to settle up. Valery worried for another week, then said he was quitting. To his credit, the owner paid him to the last drachma and asked him not to drink on the day of departure. Then he advised him to think it over; he did not persuade, but hinted that Valery could stay. He flatly refused. The owner gave him the phone number of his brother-in-law on Rhodes and said: "Call him, he has work. If you go back to Athens, you will perish there—in Athens there is the mafia."
The brother-in-law in Heraklion ran a small vegetable depot, but there were no openings. He returned to Athens. There were more "Rusikos" and "Ukrainos" now; he barely escaped a roundup at the Russian exchange.
This time he did not throw a computer out the window; he had money. He paid Vasilios for his third job placement and got a position as a greengrocer at a restaurant in Saronida. Saronida is a seaside resort about eighty kilometers from Athens. In the hotel, new Russians were throwing their weight around, flipping their flip-flops, while the still-old Russian-speaking servants swept the sand after the new ones and treated them to sausages.
The owner turned out to be a drug addict and rarely emerged from depression. The Russian-speaking “Cinderellas” swore, short-poured the drinks, stole whatever came to hand, quarreled among themselves; the Greek headwaiters dealt cuffs to those who got too cheeky. Valery cooked stuffed peppers and tomatoes, standing at the stove for 16 hours, earning much less than on Simi. The head chef, Kostas, a harmless 70-year-old Greek, received him well. The kitchen staff included an Albanian, Filipp, and an Indian with a complicated name. Filipp spoke Greek worse than Valery and understood even more poorly, despite having lived in Greece for about a year and a half.
Soon Valery was appointed second cook in place of the Albanian. The owner mistreated elderly Kostas; Valery stood up for the Greek, but Kostas was hounded anyway, and the poor fellow left for his village, grief-stricken.
Valery was offered the position of chef with a probation period and... retention of his previous salary. It was more profitable for the owner to pay $350 to a rightless “Ukrainos” than two thousand to a Greek. Valery could not stand it and blew up; there were plenty of reasons, and Filipp also snitched. Everything became loathsome, and he left, slamming the door. Dostoevsky also emphasized that Russian people have an acute sense of justice...
He changed several jobs; at his last job he was cheated, not paid a single drachma. He made it to Larissa, a town halfway between Thessaloniki and Athens, and attached himself to Romanian Gypsies. With the Gypsies, three Russians were unraveling cables they had dug up from the ground, burying the polyvinyl chloride sheathing, and chopping the copper cores into pieces that could fit into a crucible for remelting. The work was dangerous but profitable: they paid five “hillariki” (5,000 drachmas - about $20), but there were no vacancies.
The Gypsies also made a living by reselling tomatoes and rented a field. The work was hellish: heat, an unrealistic quota, pitiful pay. They huddled in makeshift shacks - construction rebar with polyethylene stretched over it; the Gypsies gave them torn carpets to avoid lying on the ground. They stocked up on provisions on Fridays, when the supermarket discarded expired products. Dysentery raged in the camp.
The harvest was run by a former convict from Sumy, who surrounded himself with “sixes”. They lived by prison rules: a communal fund, one pot, mutual responsibility. The privileged got the best beds, containers, and first claim to irrigation water. When someone poured Valery's tomatoes out of his crate, he hit the insolent fellow and went looking for work.
He was arrested along with Igor, a “Ukrainos” from Rovno, near the grafia in the center of Larissa. Two plainclothesmen showed their identification. The policeman with a little beard looked like a homeless man - either disguised or just unkempt. They invited them to a blue car with a flashing light and snapped on handcuffs. The most frustrating thing was that Valery already had a job referral in his pocket - he had been offered work caring for a bedridden patient.
In the cell, on concrete bunks, lay random rags and shabby blankets. They were led out for exercise into a cramped inner courtyard covered with slate; the latrine was also there. The prison was apparently a local holding facility of three floors. The office windows overlooking the courtyard were wide open, and sometimes people being interrogated screamed desperately in an office. Every day they were given a thousand drachmas for food (about $4). The prisoners carefully signed the register and gave the money to the policeman-astynomikos, ordering something: a roll, cigarettes, beer, or wine.
Igor did not have his passport; they took him to the “sotslagery”, as the illegal migrants themselves called the flophouse where they lived. It was impossible to drive through the Gypsy quarter; the Gypsy kids swarmed the car. “The Gypsies recognized us, but they never let the police near the shack and did not give us up,” Valery recounted. He was separated from Igor; they never saw each other again.
Once, while signing the register, Valery saw a gold bracelet, chains with crosses, and brooches on the table. Greeks were brought to the table to identify items. From snatches of conversation - he already understood the language fairly well - the picture of what had happened became clear. A group of Albanians was rampaging through the area, stealing from apartments and from cars in parking lots.
Valery suspected that his detention was perhaps just one of the preventive measures. During exercise, they showed him the captured Albanians, quite young guys. Soon the Albanians were put in his cell. They behaved correctly; the ringleader turned out to be a noble robber, taking all the blame upon himself so that his accomplices would suffer less. They did not put a sack over Valery's head, and generally treated him politely, but still, prison is prison, and when he was put into a green prison bus, he felt relief. The bus's interior was divided by mesh into cages, with a passage in the middle for the guard-astynomikos. They were taken to Thessaloniki for transfer to a huge, spittle-covered holding pen, where people sat or lay on their belongings, some with children. There were even three-generation families from Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania. The Caucasians were not especially downhearted; they drew obscenities on the wall and pestered the girls.
Two days later, with another group, they were brought to the platform of Evxinos station. A Sofia train stood on the narrow-gauge track, several small carriages. The astynomikos unclasped the handcuffs and gave him a ticket to Chop. The same train carried deported strippers. At the first Bulgarian station, Geageli, the undaunted toilers of the sex business got off, surrounded the Bulgarian border guard in a blue uniform, and started negotiating. Crossing into Hellas by goat trails costs from $200 to $600.
...Through Chop Valery did not go; he got to Bucharest and bought a hard-seat ticket to Ungheni, the ticket clerk was rude to him. Odysseus returned to Ithaca with four dollars in his pocket. Could he have avoided deportation for an expired visa? I think he could have, he could even have obtained a Greek passport-diavatirio (a few months ago a law was passed in Greece according to which persons who have lived illegally in the country for more than two years are granted Greek citizenship). After the law was passed, illegal immigrants in Greece live with hope, try not to misbehave, not to get drunk, not to lose their foreign passports. In case of unforeseen complications with the authorities, helpful compatriots share a phone number in Athens: 68-75-885, ask for Sergei Arkadyevich, Neo Psychiko district, Nicolo Patrizia Street, 17-A. Would you believe it, even the district is appropriate: Psychiko! Sergei Arkadyevich, I think, must be sleeping poorly from such troublesome work.
Valery did not call Nicolo Patrizia. Of course, the fact that they were rounding up Albanians was an unfortunate mishap, bad luck. He could have avoided arrest if he had stayed on Symi or in some other godforsaken backwater. But he did not adapt; he rebelled, did not accept humiliation and deceit, did not submit to the dictates of the criminal bosses. After returning he knocked about, endured poverty, and was frightened by debts with interest. He scraped by on odd jobs, even baked pies; he had to step over, but not over himself - over conventions. Over time everything worked out; he even settled his debts, and a steady job appeared.
- Would you go again? - I asked him.
He smiled:
- You see, I was in prison there.