Requiem for the Silent, part I

On that occasion there was a woman standing behind me,
her lips blue with cold, who, of course, had never in
her life heard my name. Jolted out of the torpor
characteristic of all of us, she said into my ear
(everyone whispered there) - 'Could one ever describe
this?' And I answered - 'I can.' It was then that
something like a smile slid across what had previously
been just a face. -- Anna Akhmatova, “Requiem” (translated by Sasha Mayakovsky)

When they leave the hospital, they won’t speak of it again. It’s more than embarrassing – it’s shameful. No one wants to admit that when they were fifteen they tried to kill themselves, or that they used to hear voices in their head, or that they tried to stab their mother because they went psychotic and thought she was trying to kill them.

They won’t want to talk about being crazy. About being children or little more, and being locked away in a state-run psychiatric hospital much like a prison. They won’t want to be the butt of the next loony-bin joke.

Mostly they don’t speak of it because they don’t want to remember it.

So the hospital stays silent: a concrete facility keeping a few dozen kids at a time, mostly aged six to eighteen, kept behind barbed wire and barred windows. Kids are sent here – crazy kids, troublesome kids, the ones raped and beaten and thrown out into the street until something in them breaks and someone sends them away from polite society.

They come here and they learn to be silent again, to tell all the right lies so they can have their freedom again. Freedom’s one of those things you don’t really appreciate till it’s gone.

Even if they did speak, how could they find the words? How could they describe such a place to people who’ve only heard about it in jokes, seen it glamorized in movies? How could they find the unique moments that describe their experience, and somehow freeze them, capture them to show to others?

Maybe one could never describe it.

But maybe one could, and in doing so, transform those names, those half-forgotten faces, into people. Maybe I can find the words. Maybe I can.

Everything has become muddled forever –
I can no longer distinguish
who is an animal, who a person, and how long
the wait can be for an execution.
There are only dusty flowers,
the chinking of the thurible,
tracks from somewhere into nowhere. -- Anna Akhmatova, “Requiem” (translated by Sasha Mayakovsky)

The wait in the crazy house is forever. We wait for freedom and for death, but most often those two come hand in hand.

Uri though – he’s trying for freedom, real freedom. He’s trying for a job. The hospital lets him out three times a week to work at a factory. He’s trying to get a full-time job for when he leaves the hospital – he has a future, maybe.

Uri tells me stories and most of them are true. He tells me how he sees girls my age on the streets, fourteen years old and selling their bodies for coke or heroin. He tells me how the pimps and dealers get them hooked and use them till there’s nothing left.

He’s been homeless a lot. At thirteen he was a drunk vandal, and then it was gangs. Dealing. And heroin, a lot of heroin. He lived on the streets and sometimes in hostels. He doesn’t speak of his parents. I don’t know if they threw him out or if he left on his own. If they hurt him.

I can’t imagine anyone hurting Uri. He’s a big guy, probably twice my weight. His body is covered in scars, his face with pockmarks. He’s big and he’s ugly and looks like a dangerous thug. Maybe he is. He’s always kind to me, though.

Uri’s drug of choice isn’t pot or heroin, despite his tales. Now it’s the razor. Specifically the single-edged blades, sharp and fresh from their packaging. His arms are a mass of scar tissue and newer cuts. He’s the only one strong enough to hurt himself – big, ugly, kind-hearted thug, bringing the blade down again against his skin.

Fresh winds softly blow for someone,
gentle sunsets warm them through; we don't know this,
we are everywhere the same, listening
to the scrape and turn of hateful keys
and the heavy tread of marching soldiers.
Waking early, as if for early mass,
walking through the capital run wild, gone to seed,
we'd meet - the dead, lifeless; the sun,
lower every day; the Neva, mistier:
but hope still sings forever in the distance. -- Anna Akhmatova, “Requiem” (translated by Sasha Mayakovsky)

We do not call it the hospital. We call it the loony bin, the prison, the crazy house. We live in the crazy house and this is a source of much amusement to us. Yissasskhar is seventeen and he treats me like a kid sister – a lot of people here do. He usually seems really happy and unbeat, seeming to view his time here as a grand adventure, something to talk about when he’s high.

He’s high a lot of the time – he even manages to get high here. He shows me the little cannabis plant he’s growing in the ward’s makeshift kitchen, nestled in with the sorry, dead bits of mint in a cracked pot. I diligently water it and even feel rather sad when my roommate Odel drowns the plant in a moment of schizophrenic confusion.

Yissasskhar cracks up when he discovers I’ve never even smoked a cigarette. He’s been smoking since he was eleven. He sells pot and sniffs glue and seems, to my naivity, to be a hard-core drug addict. Despite that, I always follow him out to the porch, where he smokes hand-rolled cigarettes and talks endlessly about his friends and family back home.

He’s really only here because of the drugs – he’s pretty sane, but he got caught dealing weed and the courts decided he was too unstable and sent him here until his trial. That happens sometimes – people come here before going to court and then juvie, prison, or in a few cases, back to the loony bin.

Most of them say they’d rather be in jail than with us – us thin, pale crazies wrapped in blankets and lying in the hallway, glaring at them with alien eyes. Some of them are nice to us because they are close enough to being us – depressed enough or strung out on enough drugs that they might just end up back here. Yissasskhar’s one of those. Or maybe he’s just nice to everyone, no matter what.

I know though he’d rather be in jail though than endlessly pacing the hallways here, endlessly taking different connotations of anti-depressants and anti-psychotics and tranquilizers. One day he says he’s so sick of this place he’s going to make the police take him to jail instead. I hide around the corner from the single phone where he rants at the police, who hang up on him. Later he tries to kill one of Staff by trying to smash the man over the head with a guitar. For the next two days he’s tied down in isolation. He doesn’t go to jail.

Another boy, Matan, is also here for drugs. His court date is soon – he’s only going to be here a few days. Privately he tells me that he wouldn’t let Staff draw blood from him because he’s scared of needles – that the only reason he hasn’t done heroin is because of that fear.

On the fifth day a policeman comes to get him. Matan had spent the whole day crying silently, huddled in a corner chainsmoking, but when the policeman puts the cuffs on his wrists and ankles, Matan is dry-eyed. I watch from the barred window until the police van drives away.

I never see him again.

I wonder how long it took for him to start using heroin.

No one at the hospital really needs drugs. We have drugs – legal ones. Xanax, Valium, more sleeping pills than I can name, tranquilizers, anti-psychotics, anti-depressants, and so on. Staff give us these and watches us pretend to swallow, but we secretly hoard them in case of emergency – though what emergency would require eight sleeping pills, sixteen anti-depressants, five painkillers, and four diuretics, no one really knows.

Sometimes, perhaps mistaking the colorful pills for candy, people swallow their entire stash. Then Staff gives them more pills, and they scream from the pain in their stomach all through the night.

The second part will be posted soon. If you liked this post, please give it a high rating!