No one knows about the camp. The fence on one side overlooks a swamp and the soldiers at the gate on the other side of the site, almost a mile away, won’t let the internees anywhere near the sentry posts. So if they’re going to leave, it’s over a huge, gnarly, barbed wire fence six inches thick in most places and into a muddy morass. There have been two escapes in nearly twenty years. We haven’t heard from either of them. Probably rotting somewhere in the forest.
There are gnats here. Midges or mosquitoes, whatever they are. Other ones, black bed bugs. I placed a request for mosquito nets as soon as I was posted here but nobody listens. Nobody listens because nobody knows.
There are different kinds, whatever they are. Some of them just suck. Other varieties, wingless and blue black, they burrow into the skin, locking first their tiny mandibles and then their entire heads into your pores, staying there, thoraces and abdomens still exposed and carefree, growing fat. They’re disgusting things, veritable leeches of hard chitin with no medicinal benefit. I see the flying ones outside my quarters, through the window, in small clouds illuminated by the floodlights. Sometimes I go outside with a can of deodorant and a lighter and destroy entire colonies. A whole swarm just evaporates but another appears the following night to fill the void. Is there a need for them in the food chain? There are fatherless children because of them.
My skin is covered in bites from head to foot. It’s ceaseless, the constant feeding of these tiny things, and the yearn to scratch is great. I have blemishes now, pockmarks caused by my fingernails. An itch on my big toe. A lump on my forearm that is beginning to fester.
There was a child here, Asif, one of the prisoners’ sons, almost a man, who ran around the camp buildings in jogs and then bursts of sprinting. He was an athlete. Due to go to the Junior World Athletics Championships in Italy and it was said that he would have done well, one of the favourites. And he was young, even for that, but he got a dispensation. He was taken two days before he was scheduled to get the bus out of the village. The lad was questioned, his political opinions were found wanting, and they picked his whole family up. There are few whole families here. Some couples, but they are mostly suspected terrorists, most of them male.
The prisoners are mainly Muslim; Chechen and Dagestani separatists and their families. You won’t read about them in the papers or hear about them in the news. No one knows about the camp in this infested marsh. They have their own routines and they stay out of the way of the guards. They’ll drop their prayer mats anywhere, these people. I grew up with Marxist teachings drilled into me. I’m not about to tell these fools that their God keeps them pliable here, that their prayer schedules make them predictable.
The boy followed the routine just like all the others, but he spent a lot of time sprinting around the buildings. He would swat the mosquitoes as he ran, displaying a pathological enthusiasm with which I can identify. Sometimes I would shout my encouragement, telling him to continue killing the vermin. He would laugh.
I stopped him one evening outside my office door and called him over. He was covered in sweat, and the mosquitoes were drawn to him. He swatted them as they landed on him. I asked him why he ran. He told me in his broken Russian about the World Junior Championships. He slapped his forehead then, almost comically, wiping away the remains of a fly.
“They spread disease in Africa, of course,” I told him.
“Oh?” was his response, as he jogged on the spot.
“Malaria. These motivelessly malignant vermin. The Americans got rid of them in South America, but the insecticides that they used were damaging to the environment. So they never turned them on the scum in other regions. The green lobby is too strong in the world if it means that millions perish.”
Asif nodded but I could see that he only half understood. I asked the boy to start coming to my office every evening after his run, that he could make my tea for me and it would put him in good stead. He nodded enthusiastically. I was hoping that he would divulge secrets, but alas, he spoke honestly once, and he wasn’t about to do it again.
Each night, he would smile whenever he saw me watching him prepare the tea. I stood one evening in the office looking at a cloud of the buzzing fleas outside my window under the lamplight. I glanced at Asif’s reflection in the window as he approached me with the tea. His eyes were on the back of my head. I saw hatred.
I looked at his file then, gleaning what I could.
It’s not just the mosquitoes that cause anger. There are crickets that keep us from sleeping, things so big that they strike fear in me if my eye catches one as it lands on a blade of grass. I don’t know if they’ll change colour and aggressively swarm one day, or remain yellow-green and docile. I don’t even know if they have the capacity for plaguing, and part of the fear is not knowing.
Spiders crawl over us while we sleep and I’ve yet to discern if a bite from one could kill. One woman internee fell very ill for a few days, and claimed that an arachnid had pierced her skin. She passed through the worst of it and was discharged from the infirmary. Her sallow complexion has yet to return to its former colour, and it’s been six weeks. She still looks pale. They don’t treat their women well. Her husband makes her work, even though she is a ghostly presence of her former appearance. They have a vegetable patch beside their cabin. I see her working on it every day with a trowel that she shouldn’t have. They claim to honour their women, to idolise them, but in some of their countries women can’t even legally drive. I don’t think subjugating half of the population is a particularly noble ideal.
I imagine that the flora and fauna of the region are unstudied. Botanists and entomologists need political stability, and there’s been little of it here for a long time. It’s unlikely, but there could be a poisonous spider, a species as yet undiscovered living solely in this one swamp. Any arachnids that I find I stamp on. These small things, they all conspire to create a climate of heightened reality, at best a mild annoyance and at worst a paranoia. A fearful aura.
The phone on my desk is an ancient thing with a round dial. This evening it rang. My contact on the other end told me that there would be no need for the mosquito nets.
“There is an exigent need for the mosquito nets,” I responded, my eyes closed tight in anguish. I could feel a tension headache building up like a tight band around my skull. Asif the athlete was making my tea, with a spoonful of jam. I half listened to my colleague in the FSB explain why there was no need for the mosquito nets as I watched my young servant stirring a spoon into the mug at the basin in the corner. I began to think that the caffeine in the tea might induce a migraine and the thought angered me a little. I wanted to tell Asif to leave the tea for tonight as he carried it towards me, careful not to spill it as he crossed the carpet, a smirk on his seventeen year old face, chewing on one of my biscuits, the dark visage of a martyr who would as soon kill himself and any number of innocents in a vicious nail bomb attack as brew a cup for me.
It’s not just the insects and arachnids that are vermin. There are rats here too, and I watched one crawl out of what I wouldn’t have believed to be a hole in the corner of the room big enough for it, slyly making its way towards the kitchenette in its search for food. The temerity of this creature, scuttling through my quarters, spreading its filth and trying to snack on my food. As it edged along the wall, I pulled my pistol out of the desk drawer and opened fire. The boy dropped first to his knees, and then he keeled over, the mug rolling across the carpet, spilling its contents on the way, stopping only the third time the mug handle struck the floor. From the part of his face that remains intact, Asif’s lifeless, glassy eye is now directed at my shoes as blood pours from his open lips.
There are to be exterminations and the camp is to be destroyed, I am told on the phone. Effective immediately. The FSB agent demands to know what the bang was. I tell him it was nothing. The line goes dead and I place the receiver back in its cradle. I blow into the gun’s barrel as I would have blown into the steaming mug. I’ll soon return to a more tolerable existence in Moscow. No one knows about the camp. The mosquitoes will no longer bother me.
— Richard Gibney
