Free You Changed My Life by Abdel Sellou Page A

sympathetic cop monitoring their break, they might get through one or two, but they’re still far from their usual daily dose. We spot the new guys easily: they’re wearing the uniform that they got when they arrived; they still haven’t had the time or the opportunity to send for their personal clothes. They stand in the secondhand-smoke clouds exhaled by older detainees and dive for the butts they toss with disdain. The negotiation can now begin.
    â€œHey, I’m Abdel. You want some smokes?”
    â€œOusmane. Yeah, I want some! What do you want in exchange?”
    â€œYour jacket there—that a real Levi’s?”
    â€œIt won’t fit you, it’s too big.”
    â€œDon’t you worry, I know what to do with it . . . four packs for your jacket.”
    â€œFour! Abdel, my brother, you must take me for a jerk, man! It’s worth at least thirty.”
    â€œI can go up to six. Take it or leave it.”
    â€œSix . . . I can make it for three days with six packs.”

    â€œTake it or leave it.”
    â€œOK, I’ll take it . . .”
    The transaction can’t happen during the walk: against the rules. It’ll be finalized later in the day by a tried-and-true system we call yoyo that’s tolerated by the guards. Even detainees who aren’t involved play along: for one thing, because it’s a way to pass the time, and also because everyone needs something at some time—I mean that not playing along means being excluded definitively from our little community. I knot a rag around the cigarettes, attach the bundle to a sheet, slip it through the window, and start to swing it from right to left. When it gains enough momentum, my neighbor can snag the bundle. Then he passes it to his cellmate,who does the same thing, and so on and so forth until the package makes it to the buyer. Then he attaches his jean jacket to the sheet and sends it back to me the same way. Sometimes the sheet gets torn or a clumsy prisoner drops it. If it lands in the barbed wire on the ground, it’s lost forever and ever . . . To avoid this kind of thing, we always make sure we don’t “room” too far away from our business partners.

    Now it’s lunchtime. Soon it’ll be nap time. Tomorrow, visiting hours. My parents come to see me once a month. We don’t say anything to each other.
    â€œAre you okay, son? Are you getting by?”
    â€œGreat!”
    â€œAnd the others, in your cell, they leave you alone?”
    â€œI have a single. It’s better for everybody . . . everything’s fine, I swear, it’s all good!”

    We don’t say anything to each other, but I’m not hiding anything from them: I lead a nice life at Fleury-Mérogis. We’re all the same here. We begged, we stole, knocked people around a little, we dealt, we ran, we tripped, we got caught. Nothing big.
    Some brag that they’re in for holdups. We don’t believe them. The real bad guys live at Fresnes. A guy named Barthélémy boasts about stealing diamonds from the Place Vendôme. Everybody laughs: we know he’s in the slammer for swiping a sausage-and-fries sandwich out of the hands of some suit at La Défense. He was sentenced for “moral prejudice.”

    In the afternoon, at exactly two o’clock, I turn up the volume on the radio to listen to the news. I hear that police who were on a raid got trapped by a crazed gunman in Ris-Orangis. Thinking their colleagues had managed to blow down the door of the apartment where the guy was holed up, several heavily armed officers went in through the window. The nut was waiting for them. Being a former security agent, he was heavily armed, too. He shot first. That makes two fewer pigs in the pen. I’m not happy about it, but I’m not crying, either. I don’t care. This world is messed up, it’s full of crazies, and everything leads me to think I’m not the worst, far from