Luyda Karpova • “I don’t know where I’m going, but I know where I come from”
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part of you like your second skin, which you physically feel, and you know when you have to turn on the “baby talk.” All the women prisoners liked to pose for photos: they took off the obligatory head kerchiefs and put them on their shoulders, posed in front of the camera. Those who were younger ran to the barracks to put on lipstick. The most sassy ones who knew about the arrival of visitors ahead of time would come in the morning all “dressed up” wearing sports pants with the obligatory skirt (but a chic one with shiny threads or flowers) over their pants and high-heel peep-toe shoes, and stand there waiting in the lokalka22. Make-up would complete the image. I liked to pose for photos too and always asked people to send me a copy. I understood this passion when I was free again: Practically all women, irrespective of their age, cease, on a subconscious level, to feel their womanhood when they are in jail. Perhaps they cut it off unconsciously, as if by cutting off their past they anesthetize their present and future. They adopt the persona of a person on remand and then of a sentenced creature. A woman inside a woman dies as she acquires different identities: “vichevkaspidovka,”23 “chahotochnya,”24 thief, murderer, drug addict, homeless, etc. Therefore this desire is understandable: women want to look at themselves from the outside, through the photo, and through other people’s eyes, especially the eyes of somebody from the free world. There is a desire to see yourself as a woman who did not lose her human appearance, her femininity covered by the gray awkward outfit. Many wanted to look better. Some women went down totally, turning into buggered up souls with dull faces, wearing unattractive overalls, sucking roll-up cigarettes greedily, and having just one gray dream — to smoke a cigarette with a filter and get their hands on some tea.
Plans for the future I don’t know what brought about my breaking point. Perhaps because I came to the edge of my own threshold, which I set for myself to prevent going crazy? I gathered all my letters that I’d kept for three long years in a beautiful candy box, arranging shabby envelopes by date. I took my collection of cactuses outside — which were like my children in that closed space. I pressed the envelopes to my chest and parted with the run of time enclosed in those pages. Then I lit a match and burned my past. I will never again be the person I was before. Filled with experiences and saturated with everyday routine, prison life would haunt me till the end of my term, which was given to me not by God, but by people who took the liberty to judge me for a disease despite the fact that 90 percent of our society consists of addicted people — some are addicted to vodka, some to beer, and some to cigarettes. It fact, these are also drugs but they are “legal drugs.” How would it be if people were sentenced 22 • fenced-in area 23 • HIV/AIDS positive (slang) 24 • to have tuberculosis (slang) Drug Policy in Russia: Drug users’ stories of repression.