I haven’t asked her before about a partner. I often see her in the cafeteria holding another inmate’s arm, Dolores. Yasmine hangs off her like a lover. I wonder whether she is merely a tactile Mediterranean type, someone who thrives equally on non-verbal communication, or if it’s something more.
I keep my distance, especially in the confines of my cell. Perched on my stool, I watch her sitting on my bed. I’m itching to take my photos away from her.
I’ve become scrupulously neat, colour-coding my clothes, grey and grey and grey. We don’t wear a prison uniform, and it’s ironic that with the freedom of the dress code I have chosen to wear monochrome. As if my need for colour has been wiped from my palette. I keep my T-shirts and trousers neatly on my shelves like the new season’s fashion in a department store, each folded to centimetre precision. I resist the urge to put the photos back in order. I’ll wait until she’s left the cell.
‘You should hang more of your pictures on the wall,’ says Yasmine. ‘I hate all this white everywhere, so impersonal. If we cannot paint, then wallpaper is necessary, and yours will be … picturesque.’
‘It’s a prison, Yasmine; what do you expect, Ritz drapes and shag-pile carpets?’ I laugh. At least I have a few plants to bring a little green into the room.
‘Oh, you know what I am meaning, all that stuff,’ she says pointing to the sketchbook on my shelf. She gets up from my bed, the pile of photos slipping back onto my blanket.
‘Lock-up time soon, I’ll see you later,’ she says, raising a hand as she leaves the cell, the door still ajar.
‘Yeah, let’s do dinner sometime,’ I shout sarcastically after her.
She laughs as she sashays down the corridor back to her cell. Could it be that she actually enjoys being in this place? Her air of purpose is unsettling.
‘What the …?’ I raise my voice, but as I see Müller jump guiltily back from my desk, I clamp my mouth closed. She’s a guard after all. But I still wonder what the hell she’s doing in my cell.
I’m clean. I have nothing to hide, have been the model prisoner. There’s always a worry someone might plant something to get another inmate in trouble, usually to remove suspicion from themselves. We all have single cells, and they’re locked when we’re not there, so Müller has let herself in with her key. But this is one of those tiny borderline infringements, unless she’s been instructed to search for something specific.
I’ve come back early from work because of the bad weather. I take my rain cape off and fling it over the radiator. Running water into the sink, I pick up the nailbrush to clean the loamy soil of the garden from under my fingernails, and wait for her to tell me why she’s here.
‘Be careful, it might melt,’ she says, pointing at the cape, and I shrug.
I don’t care. The head gardener can give me another one. The smell of the steadily warming synthetic material evokes an unidentifiable comfort memory from childhood.
I dry my hands on my towel, walk towards the desk, and see she’s been studying a coloured pencil sketch of an alpine scene I drew from memory.
‘They told me you are an artist. You have talent.’ She nods towards the picture.
Müller is one of the more amenable guards, one of the few who speaks passable English. She even takes part in a Wednesday conversation group, the only time I openly speak to the others. She’s a tough-looking middle-aged woman with broad shoulders, but she has a gentle demeanour. She wears her greying hair in a messy bun, a schoolmarm-gone-wrong look.
‘You like working there?’ she asks, looking through the window.
The rain against the pane has eased. I take a step towards her, still drying my hands, but keep my distance as much as one can in this confined space. We both look down at the garden. It has been flattened by the chill dampness. Half the beds contain overgrown vegetable tops, extended seed-heads and the random mess of items ignored during harvest. They have faded from green to dark grey under this heavy humidity, collapsed with the putridness of gradually rotting foliage.
The other flowerbeds have now been cleared and freshly turned. The evidence of our hard work is strewn across the field on the far side of the courtyard like a freshly knitted quilt. Straight dark rows of rich earth shaped into corduroy furrows are ready for planting. A corrugated canvas prepared for some colour, after the slumbering weight of the winter has passed.
‘Your days of labour outdoors are not so many now. When the clearing is finished, we find you new work,’ she says.
I don’t need to be reminded I will soon be without the distraction of cultivation. Most of us who work in the garden will be assigned alternative jobs for the winter months. Only a few will be kept on to work in the greenhouses. It saddens me to think I will have to work indoors.
‘Do you know yet what your job will be? Or do you let them put you in the laundry?’ she asks as I shrug again. ‘You can choose, you know. You do not need to keep silent. You cannot close yourself off, cannot forever be so angry with everyone. It is not our fault that you are here. You can make your life easier.’
‘You sound like the shrink,’ I say not unkindly, and she’s surprised to hear me speak, always expects silence, unless I have a teacher’s book in front of me. ‘Are you looking for something?’
‘I want to find out whether you will think about working in one of the more creative work stations.’
‘Jobs? I’m not bothered. We all get the same wage. I guess I’ll let you lot decide.’
Müller turns back to my drawings. ‘But you could use your skills, perhaps even enjoy what you do,’ she says, and I snort.
‘May I?’ she asks, and waits for a tilt of my head before sifting through my sketches, devoting time to a few that interest her, while I think about what she has said about the job assignment.
Most of the women here used to fight for work that paid the best rates. Now everyone gets paid the same. It’s not much, but at least there’s less of a dispute.
Fatima and Dolores work in the pottery studio in the west wing. They have turned some beautiful pots. It’s hard to believe that these angry, volatile women create pieces decorated with such delicately fashioned and carefully glazed porcelain petals and leaves. When I first came here, I visited the studio, admiring the rows of pots waiting to be fired in the kiln. But I snapped up the job I was offered in the garden to be outside in the fresh air. The regimental attention to detail of planting seeds, row upon row, helped to settle my mind. Nurturing a new generation of plant life, watching things grow. I forgot that by autumn everything would be dead.
We grow things for the community. Our goods are either used in the prison kitchen, or taken to local markets. And there’s a shop inside the prison gates where locals come from the surrounding villages to buy our organically grown produce.
By Müller’s reckoning I may automatically be assigned a job in the laundry for the winter, but I can see something ticking away in her mind, and I begin to think this is not the first time she has looked at my art. The more creative jobs of weaving and mandala design nevertheless incite a feeling of monotony in my mind. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great that everyone has a job, but I’ll let them decide where to put me.
I look at JP’s picture on the wall. My personal little icon. Something to worship. God, I miss him so much. I wonder if JP has inherited some of my artistic leanings. At this stage in his stick-man art, it’s hard to tell. By his age I was drawing ponies at the kitchen table from morning until night.
Müller puts her hand on top of the pile of sketches.
‘These are really good, Frau Smithers. It is pleasing