The Naming of the Beasts

The expression on his face made the comparison seem like a valid one: he looked like a man who’d eaten a big lunch very quickly, and was now finding to his dismay that it didn’t want to sit still where it had been put. I’ve got enough guilt of my own without going looking for extra helpings, but I felt sorry for Anastasiadis. The law is a poor fit for a man with a tender conscience.

The sound of keys turning in locks and of bolts slamming back brought us both to our feet. Our escort had arrived, in the form of two prison guards as heavily armoured as riot police. They talked to Dragan, ignoring me. Their language was quick-fire, full of Greek-sounding liquid labials. Dragan answered in the same language. He pointed to me, and one of the men nodded. Then they led the way back through the door by which they’d just entered, locking it again behind us, across a small bare cinder yard where a solitary ghost loitered, almost invisible in the sun of noonday, and into a concrete bunker only two storeys high.

The yard was pleasantly warm, but a wall of heat hit us as we entered the maximum-security wing. The guards must have felt it even more than we did inside their elaborate body armour, but they gave no sign of discomfort. Anastasiadis fanned himself gently with the back of his hand. The air smelled of sweat, urine, disinfectant and something greasy and insinuating that might have been pomade.

The space inside was open-plan: ground floor and first-floor gallery all of a piece, both with cells leading off a bare, bleak central space. The cells we passed were open-plan too, with bars for walls. Each held two men: two pallets, side by side rather than bunked one above the other, two chairs, a table, a slop bucket. Men played cards in monastic silence or lay on their pallets and read. A uniformed guard sat at one end of the structure on a plastic chair, lethargic and disengaged. He looked as though he wouldn’t have stirred himself for anything less than a full-scale riot.

We went up to the first floor via a circular staircase, blocked off at the bottom by a lockable grille. There was a second grille at the top, which another guard had to open before we could step out onto the landing. Up here, close to the ceiling of the low building, the smell of piss was pervasive, hanging heavy in the still, overheated air. The prisoners in these second-storey cells lay to a man on their pallet beds, as still as the dead, arguably more so. A suicide net was slung over the open space in the centre of the gallery; more bizarrely, so were a few clothes lines on which socks and T-shirts in subtly varied shades of institutional grey hung limply.

Anastasiadis led the way to the furthest cell on the right, then waited while one of the two guards unlocked the door. Both guards remained in place while we entered, locking us in and then standing to either side of the door like unlovely bookends.

Jovan Ditko was sitting on the floor of the cell, dressed only in vest and pants. His head was bowed, the slop bucket cradled between his spread legs. He’d vomited into it, and he looked as though he might be about to do so again. Anastasiadis looked back through the bars at the guards, pointed to the bucket and spoke to them again. They shook their heads, only very slightly out of synch. Anastasiadis shouted, his face flushing suddenly red. One of the guards shouted back, while the other turned his face aside as though the controversy embarrassed or upset him.

‘They will not empty the bucket,’ the lawyer said to me apologetically. ‘I reminded them that this is Jovan Ditko’s last night on Earth, but they say the buckets are only emptied on the morning shift.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, although the stench in the room was close to stomach-churning. I tuned it out with an effort of will. My preferred sense is hearing, so I focused on the sounds of the place: the sounds and the meta-sounds - the spirit music that plays in the background for me wherever I happen to be. Irdrizovo was a symphony in a minor key, bleak and formless and unresolved.

‘Jovan,’ I said gently.

He looked up at me and nodded, then ducked over the bucket again. It wasn’t really a greeting, just an acknowledgement that I was there. He had Rafi’s face but harder and heavier, a lot less handsome. A three-day growth of stubble darkened his chin, and his face glistened with sweat.

‘Do you speak English?’ I asked him.

He muttered something that I didn’t catch. Mister Anastasiadis translated at once. ‘He understands English, but he doesn’t speak it very well. He’ll answer you in Macedonian.’

‘Okay.’ I turned back to Jovan. ‘Thank you for seeing me. I know it’s the worst possible time, in a lot of ways, but I thought you might like some news of your brother, Rafael.’ I thought of my cover story and decided it might be useful to have something to show for this trip besides one less notch on my conscience. ‘And I’d like to talk to you about your memories of him,’ I added.