On top of everything, the cancer wing was Number 13.

Only a prisoner in his first years of sentence believes, every time he is summoned from his cell and told to collect his belongings, that he is being called to freedom. To him every whisper of an amnesty sounds like the trumpets of archangels. But they call him out of his cell, read his some loathsome documents and shove him in another cell on the floor below, even darker than the previous one but with the same stale, used-up air.