face was spotted with blood and crusty with drying sweat. Some kind of smell hung around him.
At the Central Station he took the up-escalator. It was hardly raining at all when he emerged from the underground. Maybe it hadn’t rained all morning. He looked around; he was still sweating inside his buttoned raincoat, his back soaking. He crossed Klaraberg Street and the pavement on the other side, then slipped in between the houses near the Ferlin statue and through the gate to St Klara Cemetery.
Empty, just as empty as he had hoped.
On the grass, a bit away, some guy who was off his head, but nobody else.
He walked past the large Bellman statue, to the bench behind it, under a tree he thought might be an elm.
He took the weight off his legs, humming to himself. Felt with his hand inside the right coat pocket. There it was. Bag full of washing powder. He sifted it between his fingers.
He put his other hand in the left pocket and pulled out the pack of twenty-five small plastic stamp envelopes, eight by six centimetres, each containing a little amphetamine, which was barely enough to cover the bottom. Hilding topped up all the bags with washing powder.
He needed cash and would have it soon.
It was evening. Her working day was at an end. No more customers.
Lydia walked slowly through the flat, which was pleasantly dark, lit only by a few table lamps. It was quite big, with four rooms. Probably the largest she’d been in since she came here.
She stopped in the hall.
She had no idea why she kept looking for something hidden in the wallpaper pattern, somewhere behind the fine stippling of lines filling the barren surfaces between floor and ceiling. She often stood there, forgetting everything else; she realised that the wallpaper reminded her of something she had seen on another wall, in another room, long ago.
Lydia remembered that wall and that room very well.
The security police had stormed in and her dad and the other men in the room were pushed up against the wall, and voices were shouting things like
She had known that her dad had been in prison once before. He had put up a Lithuanian flag on the wall at home and was sentenced to five years in Kaunas prison for it. At the time she was too little to understand. She had shaken her head. It was just a flag. She still couldn’t understand. Of course they hadn’t given him back his army job afterwards. Once, she remembered it well, when the vodka was finished and his cheeks were flushed and they were all in the room with the stippled wallpaper, surrounded by weapons that were about to be sold, he had noisily demanded explanations, shouted out: ‘What choice did I have? When my children were screaming with hunger and the state wouldn’t help, what the hell was I supposed to do?’
Lydia stayed in the hall. She liked evenings, the silence and deepening darkness that slowly wrapped around you and brought peace. She let her eyes follow the little lines upwards and had to crane her neck; the ceiling was high, as it was an old flat. She remembered times when she had worked alone in much smaller flats, but usually there were two of them, giving the men who knocked on the door a choice of girls to paw.
Every day she had to have twelve customers. Sometimes there were more, but never fewer, because then Dimitri would beat her up or rape her from behind, again and again, to make up for the missing gigs. Always up the arse.
She had her own ritual. Every evening.
She showered. The too-hot water washed away their hands. She took her tablets, four Rohypnol and one Valium, washed down with a little vodka. She put on large, baggy clothes that hung on her body, so she had no curves, no one could see, no one could touch her. Even so, sometimes the aching pain down there couldn’t be silenced.
Tonight she felt jabs of pain and knew why. There had been a couple of new customers and they were always a bit too harsh. She rarely complained; she understood now how important it was that they came back.
Lydia got bored with the lines on the wall and turned to look at the front door. It was ages since she had been outside. How long was it? She couldn’t say for sure, but she thought maybe four months. She had thought about it, breaking the kitchen window; you couldn’t open it, or any of the others. She had thought about smashing the glass and jumping. The flat was on the fifth floor, though. Looking down scared her too much; she couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to fall through the air towards the ground. She went to the door, touched it, sensing the cold, hard surface of the steel, closed her eyes and stood with her hand over the red light, breathing deeply and cursing herself for not understanding the electronic lock. She had tried to see what Dimitri did, but he knew she was spying and always made a point of standing in the way.
She left the hall, walked through the unfurnished room that was inexplicably known as the sitting room, past her own room with the large bed she despised but had to sleep in.
She walked to the end of the corridor, to Alena’s room. The door was closed, but Lydia knew that Alena was finished for the day and had showered and that she was alone.
She knocked.
‘Yes?’
‘It’s me.’
‘I’m trying to sleep.’
‘I know, but… can I come in?’
Silence, just for a few seconds. Lydia waited and then Alena made up her mind.
‘Of course you can. Come in.’
Alena was lying naked on the unmade bed. Her skin was darker than Lydia’s and her hair was still wet. If she left it like that it would be hard to brush tomorrow. At the end of the day Alena would often lie like this, staring at the ceiling and thinking about Janoz, that she had never told him she was going, that the years had passed, that she could still feel his arms and longed to be held again; it would only be for a few months, then she would come back to him, to Janoz, then they’d get married, later.
Lydia stood still. She looked at Alena’s nakedness and thought about her own body, the one she had to hide in baggy clothing afterwards – she knew that was what she was doing, hiding. She looked and she compared and she wondered how Alena could bear to lie in the same bed without clothes on, and she realised she was looking at her opposite, someone who somehow let things linger, who didn’t hide it, who almost clung to it.
Alena pointed at the bed, the side that was empty.
‘Sit down.’
The room was just like hers – same bed, same set of shelves and nothing else. She sat down on the rumpled sheets. Where someone else had just been. For a while Lydia stayed inside the red wallpaper, watching its swirling little velvety flowers. Then she reached out for Alena’s hand, squeezed it and spoke in a near whisper.
‘How are you?’
‘You know… as usual.’
‘Just the same?’
‘Yes.’
They had met on the boat, so they had known each other for more than three years. Back then, they had laughed together. They were on their way. The frothing white water in their wake. Neither of them had ever been at sea before.
Lydia pulled her friend’s hand closer, still holding it tight, caressing it, interlocking her own fingers with her friend’s.
‘I know. I know.’
Alena lay very still. Her eyes were closed.
Her body wasn’t bruised, not like Lydia’s, at least not in the same way.
Lydia lay down beside her, and in the shared silence their minds wandered, Alena’s thoughts drifting back to Janoz, and Lydia’s back to Lukuskele prison, to the shaven-headed men who coughed their lives away in the shabby prison hospital.
Then suddenly Alena sat up, pushed a pillow between the small of her back and the wall and pointed at the evening paper on the floor.
‘Look at that, Lydia.’
