a form of solitary confinement

The nude prisoner, sound sleeper that she had come to be, was nonetheless awakened by the routine 6:15 a.m. clanking of the old-fashioned key.  She blinked her eyes and turned on the rough wooden bench.

It was the Assistant Warden, as always, with the guard for her wing.  The guards at this women’s prison farm were all female, but the officials were male.  “Good morning, Towelewska,” he said, in a heavily accented attempt at her native Polish.

By habit and by protocol, the tall, tanned, thinly muscled nude got up and stood at attention, and told herself: Day 717.  She cleared her throat, ready for the only words she expected to say today.

“How are you this morning?”

“I sleep on a rough bench, sir.”

“Is there anything you want?” the Assistant Warden said.

“I request clothes and shoes.”

“Request denied.”  The daily ritual conversation.  Then: “Interrogation at 1900 hours.”  He turned and left.  A moment later, the loud morning bell, resounding through the barracks, awakening the 300 other inmates.  Inmates who were allowed clothes and shoes, albeit standard-issue prisoner garb.  And cells that were open on only one side, and a bag for personal belongings.

She had no belongings, just her bare body.  She was a mystery to the other inmates, but she felt their hostility as she ate with them and worked with them.  All had been sentenced to hard labor, which meant digging trenches, building roads, chopping crops, wherever the bus took them.  But she was not allowed to talk to them and they were not allowed to talk to her.  Her beauty and her nudity set her apart.  From what she could hear of their conversations, they were mostly “War on Terror” convicts, possibly falsely charged by this corrupt regime and put up as examples.  As for her, they probably considered her a rich bitch who was somehow getting her comeuppance.

The prison was not a torture camp.  This country was ostensibly an ally, and the Geneva convention was supposedly observed.  The prisoners were adequately fed and not mistreated.  Inspectors came through every week.  But though an ally, the country was permeated by unsavory types and not entirely under the regime’s control.  Intrigues went back and forth under the official surface of diplomatic good relations.  It was in one such intrigue that she had been found out and taken here, without charges and without explanation, and stripped of her clothes and shoes and every thing that she had with her, even her jewelry.

Where was this place?  She could not figure out.  There had been that airplane ride, bound and gagged.  Did they go north or south from the capital?  East or west?  All she knew was that she was near a sea, from the smell of the salt air that wafted here sometimes.

After breakfast they were, as always, marched out to the bus.  They were driven maybe ten miles, to what looked like a series of gravel pits.  She stepped out with the others, under the watchful eye of a heavy-set guard with a machine gun.  They walked up a stony hill.  She felt the warm stones under her toughened bare feet.  It was a warm day.  She would be sweating but she did not mind that.  She slowed down to keep in line with the others as they trudged up in their clothes and heavy boots.  She looked down at the tight abdominals of her concave tummy.  There were no mirrors in her life but she knew that she was in excellent physical condition and the labor was not as hard for her as it was for most of the others.