Adam McPhee's Reviews > The Zone: A Prison Camp Guard's Story

The names, events and dates given here are all real. I invented only those details that were not essential.

Therefore, any resemblance between the characters in this book and living people is intentional and malicious. And all the fictionalizing was unexpected and accidental.
- The Author

One of the prisoners is a model prisoner, a pilot caught smuggling caviar and stealing parachutes. He subscribes to a prison magazine called 'Towards an Early Release'. His old colleagues fly a route near the prison, and so they decide to land a helicopter in the prison courtyard to visit him. Not to help him escape or anything, just to say hello and talk about their old job.

There's some other good bits too.

Security Officer Bortashevich said to me, “Of course, anything can happen. People are nervous, egocentric to the limit. For example? Once in the logging sector they wanted to saw off my head with a “Friendship”-brand power saw.”

And also:

“Gud ivning,” Bortashevich said, “good thing you showed up. I’m wrestling with a philosophical question – why do people drink? Let’s suppose, as they said earlier, it’s a vestige of capitalism in the mind of the people, a shadow of the past… And, mainly – the influence of the West. Even though we really let ourselves go in the East. But that’s all well and good. Just explain this to me. Once I lived in the country. My neighbour had a goat, a lush the likes of which I’ve never seen before. Be it red wine, be it white – just pour it. And the West here had absolutely no influence. And a goat has no past, you would think. It’s not like he was an old Bolshevik… So I thought, maybe some mysterious power is locked in alcohol, something like the one that appears when the nucleus of the atom breaks up. So couldn’t we harness that power for peaceful aims? For example, to get me demobilized before my term is up.”