The car rattled over the country road, past the wooden pillar that represented the border, and they were in Estonia. Lavrenti’s hand lay on Zara’s thigh, and suddenly she had a powerful urge to curl up in his arms and go to sleep. Her debt was so great that she had lost the ability to count it. Someday.
The night before, Lavrenti had promised that once Pasha got his casino business going, Zara could work at the casino and earn many times more than what she did now. She could pay it all off. Someday.
1992
Tallinn, Estonia
Why Hasn’t Zara Killed Herself?
It was an accident, really.
She had made a few good videos in Tallinn. Or at least good enough that Lavrenti played them for himself when Pasha was out. Lavrenti said that Zara had eyes just like Verochka’s, just as blue. Pasha suspected that he was sweet on Zara and teased him about it. Lavrenti blushed. Pasha nearly died laughing.
A few of the videos were so good that Pasha showed them to his boss. The boss got excited about Zara. He wanted to meet her.
The boss was wearing two enormous signet rings and Kouros cologne. He apparently hadn’t washed his genitals for several days, because there were white clumps in his pubic hair.
The heels of Zara’s shoes were wrapped in gold and tied with a gold bow on the back. Their sharp pointed tips pinched her toes. Silver butterflies peeked out of her stockings at the ankles.
The boss put on the video and told her to do what was on the screen.
“I suppose you know you’re a slut?”
“I know.”
“Say it.”
“I’m a slut and I’ll never change. I’ve always been a slut and I always will be.”
“And where is this slut’s home?”
“Vladivostok.”
“What?”
“Vladivostok.”
“You said it wrong. This is your home. Here with your master and your master’s cock. A slut has no other home, and she never will. Say it.”
“Because I am a slut, my home is here, with my master’s cock.”
“Good. You almost got it right. Now say the whole thing.”
“I’ll never have any other home.”
“Why is this slut still dressed?”
She heard a snap. Maybe it came from outside. Or inside. The boss didn’t notice anything. A little snap, like the sound of a mouse’s back breaking, or a fish bone. It sounded a bit like the gristly crunch of a pig’s ear between your teeth. She started to undress. Her plucked, goose-bumped thighs shivered. Her German panties dropped to the floor; their delicate elastic lace fell in a heap like an empty balloon.
It was easy. She didn’t even have time to think about it. She didn’t have time to think about anything. The belt was just around his neck all of a sudden, and she was pulling on it with all her strength.
It was the easiest fuck ever.
She wasn’t sure if he was dead, so she picked up a pillow and held it over his face for ten minutes. She watched the familiar heavy ticking of time on the gold face of the clock. They had clocks like that in Vladikki. They must be made in Leningrad. The man didn’t move once. Not bad for a beginner. Very well done. Maybe she had a natural talent. The idea made her laugh. Ten minutes was enough time to think of all kinds of things—she had been slow at learning to read, and she had never been able to keep up during morning calisthenics, never had the posture that the teacher demanded, her Pioneer salute was never as snappy as the others’, and her school uniform was always bedraggled for some reason, even though she was constantly straightening it. She had never been good at anything right from the start, except for now. She looked at her own body reflected in the dark window, her own torso on top of the fat man, pressing the pillow, squashed with sleep, over the man’s face. She had been made to look at her own body so much that it was strange to her. Maybe a strange body worked better than your own body in some situations. Maybe that’s why it had gone so well. Or maybe it was just that she had become one of them, the kind of person that this man was.
She went to the bathroom and washed her hands. She put on her bra and underwear and stockings, tugged her dress back on, checked that the photo was still hidden in her bra and made sure the sedatives were still there, and went to the door to listen. She could hear the boss’s men playing cards, the video still running, nothing to suggest that they had noticed anything. They would see and hear everything before long—the boss had microphones and cameras. But they didn’t have permission to look when he had women with him.
She drank another glass of champagne from a Czech crystal glass and realized as she looked at the crystal flowers —they looked like cornflowers—that there had been glasses all around her all this time, tons of them—she could have swiped one of them quite a few days ago and slit her throat. She could have left much earlier, if she had really wanted to. Had she wanted to stay? Had she actually wanted to whore and sniff poppers? Had Pasha just directed her to the profession that suited her? Had she just been imagining that she wanted to leave, that everything was awful? Had she really liked it? Did she have a whore’s heart, a whore’s nature? Maybe it was a mistake to struggle against her whore’s fate—but it was no use thinking about it now.
She took a few packs of cigarettes and some matches and searched the boss’s pockets, but she didn’t find any money and there wasn’t time to make a more thorough search.
The apartment was on the top floor. She went down the shaky fire escape to the roof and from there to the other stairway to avoid the men with crew cuts who guarded the door. A smell of pee and a dark stairway downward. She stumbled on the chipped stone steps, thudded onto the landing and through the door, which was covered with artificial leather, its stuffing softening the sound. She could hear a child laughing inside and saying, “Babushka, Babushka.” When she reached the bottom she ran into a cat and a row of beat-up mailboxes. The outer door creaked and screeched. There was a well-waxed black car in front of it, shiny even in the darkness. A man sat inside it smoking, his leather coat shone dimly through the glass, and Russian disco music pounded. She didn’t look at the car as she went by, as if that could keep him from noticing her. But maybe it did, because the man just kept bobbing his head, absorbed in the music.
She stopped when she got to the end of the block. She felt clear. She was in tolerable condition if you didn’t count her ripped dress, the runs in her stockings, or the fact that she had no shoes. A woman racing down the street with no shoes might stick in a person’s mind, and she didn’t want to attract any attention. But she had to run. She couldn’t dawdle. A few broken yellow streetlights, a few people on their way home. The darkness hid their faces. The area was completely strange to her—maybe she had been here to see a customer, maybe not. The concrete looked the same everywhere. She ended up next to a main road. There was a bridge going over it. A bus went booming by with its accordion section shimmying, but even its headlights were so dim that no one would have taken note of her—and even if they had noticed, would anyone be interested, before Pasha had even started to ask questions, before fear and money made people remember things that they really didn’t remember? But you could always find somebody who would remember right. There’s no darkness so dark that someone can’t see in it.
The bus was followed by a Moskvitch sedan with one headlight out; then a Zhiguli clattered by, nothing but noise.
A bus stop emerged from the darkness so quickly that she didn’t have time to go around it or change directions, so she careened straight through the crowd waiting there, through the young mothers with their short skirts and white stockings, their delicate aroma a mixture of innocence and abortion, the girls’ red fingernails clawing at the darkness, at the future, in that familiar way. The flock scattered in bewilderment when she rushed in among them, the grannies with their dangling earrings, their withered earlobes swinging, and before the young men had time to put their arms around the girls protectively she was already out of the crowd, past the man drunk on eau de cologne, leaving
behind the rustle of plastic bags, sailboats of happiness docked beside the girls, ready to carry them into their wonderful futures.
She went back in among the apartment houses. She couldn’t get on a lighted bus in her stocking feet. Someone might remember a breathless, shoeless woman. Someone would tell. She ran past the apartments, past the windows barred with beams of Stalin’s sunlight, past the barred balconies, the deserted, potholed streets, the jutting rebar and overflowing trash bins, the dumpling packets thrown on the ground, the shops. She stepped on a half-empty carton of kefir, kept running, ran past an old woman carrying onions in a net bag, past a children’s climbing cage and a sandbox that smelled like cats, past girls nestled like trash against the concrete with their heroin-battered skin and crusted mascara, past little boys and tubes of glue, the snuffle of snot and glue mixed together. She collided with a kiosk that was open and laughing, and stopped. Packs of cigarettes peaked out from the kiosk window, the flock of customers in front of the window were joking with the vendor. She changed direction—they hadn’t seen her yet—turned back, looked for a different route, left the flock of crew cuts behind her, standing with their legs thrust out, their buffalo necks, and ran past the murmur, the damp gasping that came from between the cement apartment blocks, away from the colossal high-rises, away from the cockroach slum, the scrape of needles, till she came to a large road. Where to now? Sweat ran down her neck, she could feel the Seppälä tag in her dress like a wet pillow through the thin fabric, the darkness roared around her, her sweat turned cold. Somewhere in Tallinn was a place called Taksopark, she remembered hearing about it, it was open day and night, that’s where the taxis went—but so what? What good did that do her? The first thing a taxi driver would do is ask questions. And she didn’t know how to drive a car, let alone steal one. Was there something else? A gas station, the kind where trucks stop? They had someplace to go, and she had someplace to go, some way that no one would notice, and quickly. Then suddenly there was a truck parked in front of her beside the road. It was running and there was no one in the cab—a dark green truck that blended into the landscape. She climbed into the truck bed, barely managed it. A moment later the driver came out of the bushes, his belt buckle clinked as he fastened it, and he climbed in and pulled onto the road.
She crawled in between the boxes.
She could barely even see herself in the light from the streetlamps. Then the lamps were gone, too. A fog was beginning to settle in. An empty GAI inspector’s booth flitted by. Little white sticks zipped by on the side of the road. Several BMWs whizzed past in a hail of macadam with their music pounding, but there wasn’t any traffic. The driver stopped once in the middle of desolate-looking countryside and hopped out. Zara peered out at the view. She could dimly make out the word Peoleo in the darkness. The driver came back belching and the trip continued.
Now and then the truck’s headlights brushed over rickety signs, but Zara couldn’t make out what they said. She pulled aside the tarp lining the truck bed far enough to peek out and see that there were no side mirrors, so she ventured to poke her head all the way out. The truck might be on its way anywhere. To Russia, maybe. It would be smartest to jump out if the truck was getting farther from Tallinn. The driver would probably stop somewhere to pee or get something to drink. And then what? She should look for a different ride. She could hitchhike. Cars headed away from Tallinn probably wouldn’t go straight back, and any car leaving Tallinn would at least be out of Pasha’s reach for a little while. Or was she being too optimistic? Pasha had ears everywhere, and Zara would be quite easy to identify. What if she succeeded in finding a car, but it was on its way out of Estonia? . . . But, if it was, it would have to cross the border at some point, and by the time it it did Pasha would have some sharp-eyed henchman there, on the lookout, asking questions. So it would be better to find a car going where she wanted to go, with a driver who was the kind of person that Pasha would never be able to find. What kind of person would that be? And who would give her a ride on a dark road in the middle of the night? No respectable person would even be out at that time of night, only thieves and businessmen like Pasha. Zara felt the secret pocket in her bra. The photo was still there—the photo and the name of the house and the village.
The truck slowed down. The driver stopped, hopped out, and headed for the bushes. Zara climbed down from the back of the truck and dashed across the road into the shelter of the trees. The driver returned and continued on his way. When his headlights had disappeared, the darkness was unbroken. The forest rustled. The grass was alive. An owl hooted. Zara moved closer to the road.
Morning would break soon. The only cars that had passed were a couple of Audis with their stereos blaring. Someone threw a beer bottle out of the window of one of them, and it landed near Zara. She wouldn’t get in a Western car—they all belonged to them. How far was she from Tallinn now? She had lost her sense of time while she was in the back of the truck. The cool damp stiffened her limbs, and she rubbed her arms and legs, wiggled her toes, and circled her ankles one at a time. She got cold sitting down and tired standing up. She had to get inside somewhere before it got light, get away from civilization. It would be best to get to where she was going before morning—to the village, her grandmother’s village. She had to rein in her panic and try to maintain the same calm that had spread over her as she sat among the boxes in the back of the truck, huddled there knowing that even if the truck didn’t go to Grandmother’s village she would still get there.
She heard a car from far off; it approached more slowly than the Western cars. Only one headlight was working, and although Zara couldn’t see the car or the driver, she was in the road before she had time to think and took up a position in the middle of the highway. The dim headlight lit up her grubby legs. Zara didn’t yield; she was sure that the approaching Zhiguli would accelerate past her if she wasn’t standing in front of it. The driver poked his head out of the window. An old man. A cigarette burned at the end of a holder hanging from the side of his mouth.
“Sir, can you give me a ride to town?” Zara asked. The Estonian words were stiff. The man didn’t answer, and Zara became anxious, said that she had had a fight with her husband, and he had thrown her out of the car, and that’s why she was here in the middle of nowhere. Her husband was not a good man, she was sure he wouldn’t come back for her, and she didn’t even want him to come, because he was a bad man.
The car’s driver took his cigarette holder out of his mouth, pulled out the butt, and threw it in the road. He said he was on his way to Risti and reached over to open the passenger door. Zara felt a soaring inside. The man put a new cigarette in his holder. Zara put her arm across her chest and held her legs tight together. The car pulled out. Now and then she was able to read snatches of the words on the signs: Turba, Ellamaa.
“Why are you on your way to Risti?” the man asked. Zara got confused and made something up, said she was on her way to her parents’ house. The man didn’t ask any more questions, but Zara added that her husband wouldn’t come to her parents’ house, and she didn’t want to see him. The man reached with his right hand to pick up a bag sitting next to the gear shift and handed it to Zara. She took it from him. The familiar flavor of Arahiiz chocolate and the crunch of peanuts.
“You might have had to wait all night for a ride there,”
the man said. He had been to his sick daughter’s house for a visit and ended up taking her to the hospital during the night. He had to get home in time for the morning milking. “Whose daughter are you?”
“The Rüütels’.”
“Rüütels? Where from?”
Zara was terrified. How should she answer? The old
man apparently knew everyone around those parts, and if Zara made something up, he would start talking around the village about some tart with a Russian accent who had showed up talking nonsense. Zara sobbed. The man handed her a worn-out handkerchief before the tears had even started, and he didn’t ask any more questions.
r /> “Maybe it would be best if you came to my house first. Your parents will be worried about you if you come home in that state, at this time of night.”
The man drove to his house in Risti. Zara got out of the Zhiguli holding a map she had swiped from the car tightly under her arm. She could have asked the man if he knew Aliide Truu but she was afraid to bring up the subject. The man would remember her questions, which might eventually lead them to Aliide Truu and thus to Zara. When they got inside he poured her a glass of milk, put some bread and children’s sausages on the table, and told her to go to sleep when she had eaten.
“When I’ve finished the morning milking, I’ll drive you home. It’ll only be a few hours.”
He left her some sheepskins and withdrew from the room. When he had begun to snore, Zara got up, groped her way to the refrigerator, and took down a flashlight that she had noticed on top of it as she sliced her sausage. The flashlight worked. She spread the map on the kitchen floor. Risti wasn’t far from where she was going. It was a ways to Koluvere, but it was doable. The clock on the refrigerator showed 3 AM. She found a large pair of men’s rubber boots and a small pair of women’s slippers by the front door. She shoved the slippers on her feet. Was there a coat around? Where did he keep his outside clothes? She heard noises from the inner room—she had to get going. She opened the kitchen window—she didn’t have a key to the front door— and climbed out. She still felt a strange taste in her mouth. Her jaw had frozen for a moment when she took her first bite of the bread, and the man had laughed and said she must be one of those people who doesn’t like cumin. His grandchildren didn’t like it, either. He offered her a different kind of bread, but she wanted the one with the cumin. He would be getting up soon and would see that the tart had stolen his map and his flashlight and, to top it off, the slippers. Zara felt wicked.