apartment building. Flat-faced, four floors. It stood out on a street of Habsburg homes. Above double doors, a blue sign told visitors in flat, unadorned letters: MILITIA, DISTRICT III.
The old desk veteran who took me to the basement cells muttered about all the young men who had called in sick. “Forty-three years, and not a day missed. What’s this? They don’t fool me. Not one minute. Lazy. ”
I wondered if he really believed that. “What about this girl?”
“She wasn’t even hooking for money,” he said as he turned on the corridor light.
“What?”
“Ticket. She was selling her goods for a train ticket. Can you believe it?”
“Where to?”
“Does it matter?”
Svetla Woznica was behind a steel door with a barred view-window. She was curled up on the cot in the back corner, and though I didn’t look close, her bedpan smelled of fresh vomit. From the ceiling, a fluorescent light buzzed.
When she rolled over to look at us, at first I didn’t recognize her. Her upturned nose was ringed by a purple bruise where someone had hit her, and above her thin cheeks her eyes bulged out.
“Svetla Woznica?”
She used an arm to help sit up. Her hair was chopped strangely, as if with gardening shears. “You’ve come.” Her voice cracked.
“You going to take the whore?” asked the veteran.
I squatted beside the cot. Her skin, where it wasn’t bruised, was as white as a corpse’s. “Can you leave us alone?”
The veteran hesitated. “You’re not-” he began, then shrugged and walked out, closing the door behind him.
Svetla’s smile exposed a few missing teeth. “Want a good time, mister?” The Russian accent was more apparent now. “You’re very big, aren’t you?”
“How long has it been?” I pointed at her bruised forearm.
She looked at it too, and shrugged. “Yesterday morning. You got some?”
I tried to lay out the questions in my head, but the stink was distracting me. “Svetla, tell me why you left your husband.”
Her mouth opened behind her closed lips, as if she was going to be sick again. But she found her voice. “That prole bastard.” She rubbed her face. “Do you know? Did you get it out of him? Of course you didn’t.” She trembled in a way that reminded me of him. “He had the drug. It was for him. Then when Papa went back to Moscow Malik said, Svetla, you want a try? It’s very nice.” She closed her eyes. “It was nice, just like he said. But he didn’t say how you need it. Because that,” she said, tapping her temple, “ that was his plan. First a little, it’s for both of us. Svetla, we share. Then all of it, all the medicine for my little Svetla.” She was remembering with her expressions, half-crying, half-laughing. “You know how it is? At first it’s very good. And then it’s better.”
I watched her bruised nose, her squinting eyes, understanding slowly. “The morphine?”
“First morphine, yes. Then pills and needles with no names-names I don’t know. I’m a whore, not a doctor. Not like Malik.”
I swallowed.
“At first, you know, it was not bad. Then he said, You need rest, my Svetla. I know a spa in Southern Bohemia.”
“Trebon.”
She shook her head. “But we didn’t go to Trebon. I knew, I could tell he was driving to the mountains. To that dacha.” She covered her mouth with a hand, eyes big. “That was,” she said. “That was when it was very bad. He wanted to know what he could do to his little Svetla when no one could hear. He found a lot of things. He’s imaginative.” She uncovered her mouth. “And when he wasn’t doing his things, he moved me around. That prole’s so smart. He said Svetla, we exercise you so you don’t have bedsores, we make sure you don’t die. Like a very smart doctor.”
I started to say Why? but I didn’t know what that meant, or what the answer could be.
Her smile was wide and thin, and flattened out her emaciated face as she read my mind. “I wanted to go home. I want to go home.” She glanced at the steel door. “Malik, he wanted a quiet wife. He said, a good wife. He made me a good wife. You stay here, Svetla, with me. In that room with the lock. And no windows. He showed his love with a needle and his prick. You know what I mean? He dressed me up, put all that makeup on my face, and gave me this lovely hairstyle.” She touched her chopped bangs. “Needle and the prick.” She looked very tired. “And now. Now you take me back, I know. I know this. I’m a crazy whore, but I’m not stupid.”
12
I signed the forms and took her and her small bag of clothes into my custody. We drove along the Tisa as I tried to make up my mind. It was his word against a morphine addict’s. He’d gotten rid of the lock on the bedroom door, and she had taken the rest of the morphine and the other drugs he’d used to keep her incapacitated. There were no witnesses. Malik knew all of this, and that was why he had felt secure enough to face the People’s Militia when regulations required our entry-and, ultimately, to use us to retrieve her.
“How did you get away?”
She lifted her forehead from the door window. “Svetla’s not stupid. I told you this, now listen. I even have control, a little.” She smiled crookedly. “I just didn’t take it-the pills, no pills. Simple. Very hard, da, but simple. The medicine under the bed and Svetla playacted. After a week, just a week, I was stronger. Maybe Svetla shouldn’t have brought the medicine with her, but I did. Now here I am, back on the medicine.”
“But the lock. You were locked in.”
She considered it, then spoke slowly, “God unlocked the door for me.” She looked at a passing bus. “It was a miracle, you know? But not so strange. God wanted Svetla to get away, so she did. But first I looked for a knife, you know, to kill him. Malik is a clever prole. So clever. He took away all the knives. The whole kitchen, no knives! Such a clever prole.”
Malik forgets to lock her door, or maybe he’s decided there’s no longer any need, then she tears the kitchen apart in her desire to kill him.
I stopped at the central bank, and while she waited in the car, humming to herself, I stood in line and withdrew a quarter of the money from my account, more than half of it in rubles. Then, at the train station, I bought a sleeper cabin to Moscow, both beds so she would be alone.
I found the conductor and pulled him aside. Using both my Militia certificate and a stack of koronas, I commanded him to keep a close watch on her. “She’s not to leave the cabin, you follow? You bring her meals. She’s to stay on the train until Moscow, where someone from the Soviet Militia will pick her up. You are also to hold this,” I said, handing over an envelope heavy with rubles. “You will give it to the Moscow militiaman. He knows how much to expect. This one,” I added, handing over another, “is for the border guards. She does not have papers. You’re still with me?”
He started to protest, but I leaned over him to make it clear that we both knew what was and was not possible at the frontier.
I gave Svetla a third envelope of rubles, in case something went wrong once she was on the other side. That was when she finally understood what was happening. She started to cry, fell on her knees, and pressed her bruised, wet face to my hand. Some old women in the ticket line looked at me with scorn, and a few men smiled.
13
It took a while, and the operator had to call me back, but finally I was speaking, in very poor Russian, to the
