A light shone through the keyhole. Zara awoke on a mattress next to the door. Pus had drained from her inflamed earlobe; she could smell it. She groped for the beer bottle on the floor. The mouth of the bottle was sticky, and the beer made her throat feel the same way, go from dry to sticky and rough. Her feet touched the door frame. Pasha and Lavrenti were sitting on the other side of the door. The nicotine-yellowed tatters in the wallpaper moved in rhythm with Pasha’s cold breath, but there was nothing alarming in that. Or was there? Zara listened. She could hear the men’s voices through the thin wall; they seemed to be having fun. Would they be feeling pleasant enough to let her take a shower today? Their good mood could change to the opposite at any moment, and Zara would just have to do her best with her customers. The first one would be here soon. Otherwise the two of them wouldn’t be at their stations. One more minute where she was, then she would have to get ready, so Pasha wouldn’t have anything to complain about. Lavrenti never complained, he just did his job and let Pasha do the scolding. Zara poked at the wood that peeped out from under the chipped paint of the baseboard. The wood was so soft that her finger sank into it. Was the floor under the mattress wood or cement? There was vinyl flooring, but what was under it? If it was made of the same wood, it could give way at any moment. And Zara would go, too, disappear into the wreckage. It would be wonderful.
She could hear Lavrenti’s knife whittling away chips of wood again. He always whittled when he was keeping watch. He carved all kinds of things, especially exercise equipment for the girls.
She had to get up. She couldn’t lie around, although she would have liked to. The colored lights from the building opposite splashed the room with red. Cars hummed by, and now and then a honk would break the hum. There were so many cars, so many different kinds. She smoked a Prince cigarette, the kind advertised on big placards she had seen through the car window on the way here. She had been handcuffed to the car door at the time. Pasha and Lavrenti turned the car radio up to a shout. She hadn’t known that a car could go so fast. Pasha’s fingers had tapped on the steering wheel whenever he had to stop. His tattooed fingers bounced on the wheel. Pasha decided Zara wasn’t going to tempt anyone in front of the gas station, even though there were as many trucks and men as you could want. She had stood there beside the autobahn half the night in the red leather skirt he’d given her, and no one had wanted her. Pasha and Lavrenti had watched from far away in the car, and then Pasha suddenly came and pulled her hair and wrenched open her lipstick and rubbed it all over her face. Then he pushed her into the car and said to Lavrenti, “Look at this clown,” and Lavrenti laughed, saying, “She’ll learn. They all do.” In the car, Pasha had taken off his shirt and lifted his shoulders like he was adjusting his tattooed epaulets. Lavrenti grinned and saluted him. At the hotel, Pasha had ordered Zara to wash her face, pushed her head in the water as the washbasin filled up, and held it there until she passed out.
Now Pasha was talking to Lavrenti about his big plan again. He had a future. That’s why he thought about life so much. The two men went around and around through the same routine, from one day to the next and one night to the next, from one customer to the next. Pasha was saying that, for the first time, everything he had dreamed of was possible-making the money was child’s play. Soon he would have his own tattoo parlor! And then a tattoo magazine! In the West there were magazines that were just pictures of tattoos, all kinds of colorful tattoos, the kind Pasha was going to make.
Everybody laughed at Pasha’s plans. Who would want a tattoo parlor when you could have hotels, restaurants, oil companies, railroads, entire countries, millions, billions. Anything at all was possible, anything you could imagine. But Pasha didn’t care a fig, he just patted his tattooed epaulets, which were just like his father’s. His father had been in Perm in 1936, and his epaulets had read, “NKVD” – the acronym of the state police. The joke was that it stood for
Pasha practiced for his tattoo parlor on the girls who were out of circulation. Like Katia. He had shouted that she was going to be the best of all, and he was pleased with the tattoo he had put on her chest of a big-busted woman taking a devil in her mouth. He said he wanted lots of practice, though the needle supposedly sat in his hand as comfortably as his gun, so Katia’s arm got another picture of a devil tapped into it-with a big, hairy cock.
“As big as mine!” Pasha had laughed.
Katia disappeared after that.
Zara opened the bottle of poppers and sniffed. If Pasha started practicing on her, she’d know that her time was up. “A tattoo shop would be symbolic to everyone-God, my mother in Russia, the saints, everybody!”
Lavrenti burst out laughing. “Symbolic… Where’d you learn a word like that?”
“Shut your trap,” Pasha said, offended. “You don’t understand anything.”
A third voice materialized along with theirs-a customer. You could always recognize a customer’s voice. Zara could hear a drunk singing in German downstairs. There was an American in the group. She had once asked an American to take a letter to her mother to the post office, but he had given it to Pasha, and Pasha had come and…
She took the red leather skirt and red high-heeled shoes out of the cabinet. Her shirt was a child’s shirt. Pasha thought that only children’s shirts were tight enough to arouse men’s desires. She smoked a Prince. Her hands were only shaking a little. She put a few drops of valerian in her glass. Her hair was stiff from yesterday’s hairspray, and sperm.
Soon the door would open and close, the lock would fall shut, Pasha and Lavrenti’s conversation would continue, the tattoo parlor and the babes in the West and the colorful tattoos. Soon the belt buckle would open, the zipper would rasp, then the colored light, Pasha would make a fuss on the other side of the door, Lavrenti would be laughing at Pasha’s stupidity, and Pasha would be offended, and her customer would groan and her buttocks would be spread open, and she would be ordered to hold them apart, more and more and more, and she would be ordered to put her finger inside her. Two fingers, three fingers, three fingers of each hand, open more! Bigger! She would be ordered to say,
“Natasha’s going to get it now! Natasha’s got to spread her twat open because she’s going to get it!” “What’s she going to get? Say it! Say it!” Zara would say, “
Sometimes somebody would ask what Natasha would like, what made Natasha wet, how did Natasha like it, how did Natasha like to get fucked.
Sometimes somebody would ask what she liked. That was worse, because she didn’t have an answer to that.
If they asked her about Natasha, she had a quick answer ready.
If they asked her about herself, a tiny second would go by before she could think what she would answer if they had asked about Natasha. And that tiny second would tell the customer that she was lying.
They would start to press her.
But that rarely happened, hardly at all.
Usually she would just say that she had never been fucked so good. That was important to the customer. And most of them believed it.
All the sperm, all the hairs, the hairs in her throat- and still a tomato tasted like a tomato, cheese like cheese, tomato and cheese together like tomato and cheese, even with the hairs in her throat. It must mean that she was alive.
The first weeks she had watched videos. Madonna and
She had been alone.
The door was locked.
There was a mirror in the room.
She had tried to dance in front of the mirror, to imitate Madonna’s movements and voice, tried very hard. It
