was hard, even though her hair was bleached and curled like Madonna’s. The movements had been hard because her muscles were sore, but she tried. And she tried to line her eyes like Madonna’s. Her hands shook. She tried again. She had a week to get it right. The German makeup was good. If she did the makeup as well as Madonna, it wouldn’t matter if she didn’t dance as well.
When Pasha thought the time was ripe, she was taken to a drinking party. There were a lot of other girls there and a lot of Pasha’s men, and customers, too, and one of them had to be catered to-they weren’t told why, but all the girls were ordered to please him. The customer had a big belly, a glass of Jim Beam swinging in his hand, the ice tinkling, the music playing, the cold smell of German cleaning products and vodka floating through the apartment. At first voices had been raised and Zara was supposed to calm the customer down, but then Pasha started to tap his fingers on the leather sofa the way he always did. After he had done that for a while he leaped up and shouted, “Who did that old man think he was!” And then he yelled some other things. The girls started to look for someplace to hide. Zara noticed that one of Pasha’s men had moved his hand to where he kept his gun, and several of them had gone to stand in the doorway, and Zara realized that they did that so no one could get out. She tried to get farther away from the customer, tried her best not to be noticed, moving first to a corner of the sofa, then next to the sofa, then behind the backrest. The customer paid no more attention to her breasts, instead he argued loudly with Pasha and Pasha argued with him, and behind Zara, Lavrenti looked silently out the window- although you couldn’t see anything, it was dark-and swished his glass, the ice rattling in a clump. Then he turned around, went over to the customer, laid a hand on his shoulder, and asked if that was his last word. The customer roared yes and slammed his glass on the table. Lavrenti nodded, and then, suddenly, he broke his neck. In one movement. The silence lasted only a moment. Then Pasha burst out laughing, and the others cackled, too.
1992
Aliide heard a familiar thud through the window, but it was as if she hadn’t noticed anything; she continued drinking her coffee like nothing was wrong, swished the contents of the cup as was her habit, examined the cream on its surface, bent her head toward the radio as if there were something important playing. But of course the girl gave a start as soon as she heard the sound. Her body jerked and her eyes shot toward where the sound came from, her eyelids opened like wings as a tic started in the corner of her left eye, and her voice was almost inaudible when she asked what that was. Aliide blew into her cup, moved her lips in time with the news, looking past the girl as she searched Aliide’s face for a sign of what the thud could have meant. Aliide kept her expression steady. Hopefully the boys would leave it at that one rock for tonight.
The girl couldn’t stay focused on anything else, not when she was imagining her husband lurking in the yard, stalking her. She had to be alert like that, keep her eyes and ears open at all times. Aliide put down her coffee cup and placed her fingers on either side of it. She fell to examining the soil-darkened cracks in her hands, much deeper than the old knife cuts that striped the oilcloth, made more visible by the bread crumbs and salt that had spilled on the table.
“What’s that noise?”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
The girl didn’t pay any attention to Aliide’s answer.
Instead she tiptoed up to the window. She had pulled the scarf down onto her neck so that she could hear better. Her back was stiff and her shoulders raised.
Aliide’s cup had no handle, just a rough stump where the handle had been. She started to tap on it with her thumb. The threads of soil in her cracked skin bounced against the porcelain. Those boys sure knew how to choose their timing. On the other hand, the girl surely couldn’t be thinking that it was anyone but her own businessman, or whatever you want to call him, up to something out there. Aliide became annoyed again. The Russians liked their fine clothes and handsome hotels, but when it came time to pay, they started bellyaching. Everybody has a price. Protection isn’t cheap. She felt the urge again to give the girl a good swat. If you’re going to tremble, tremble in private, where no one will see you.
“There are a lot of animals around here. Wild boars. If you leave the gate open, they even come right into the yard.”
The girl turned to look at Aliide with disbelief. “But I told you about my husband!”
Another rock hit the window. A little shower of rocks.
The girl opened the kitchen door and crept to the foyer to listen. Just as she put her ear to the chink in the outer door, something hit it so that it shook. She jumped backward and went back into the kitchen.
The girl ought to focus on something else. When she was younger, Aliide always had a bag of tricks for one situation or another, but now her mind refused to come up with anything better than wild boars.
She washed her hands thoroughly and started to change the milk in the kefir, tried to act natural, picked up the can from the floor, opened the lid, strained the liquid into a cup, and rinsed off the culture, trying again with wild boars, stray dogs and cats, although even she thought her explanations sounded stupid. The girl paid no attention; she just whispered that she had to leave now, her husband had found what belonged to him, lured his prey into his trap. Aliide could see how she curled up in a ball like an old dog, the corners of her mouth stiffened, the little hairs laid flat against her skin, crossing her right foot over her left as if she were cold. Aliide quietly poured more milk over the culture and offered a glass of kefir to the girl.
“Drink it, it’ll do you good.”
She stared at the glass without taking it. A fly was crawling on its rim. The corner of her eye twitched, and the movement of her ears, sticking out toward the window, could be easily distinguished against her hairless head.
“I have to go,” she breathed. “So they won’t do anything bad to you.”
Aliide lifted the glass to her lips slowly and took a long drink of it, tried to drink the whole glassful but couldn’t. Her throat wasn’t working. She put the glass down on the table. A spider crawled under the table and disappeared between the floorboards. Aliide was fairly certain that the girl was wrong, but how could she explain that the boys from the village were there to make a ruckus in her yard. She would want to know why and how and when and who knows what, and Aliide had no intention of explaining anything about it to a stranger. She didn’t even talk about it with people she knew.
But the girl was so clearly terrified that suddenly Aliide was, too. Good God, how her body remembered that feeling, remembered it so well that she caught the feeling as soon as she saw it in a stranger’s eyes. And what if the girl was right? What if there was good reason to fear what she feared? What if that was her husband? Aliide’s ability to fear was something that should have belonged to the past. She had left it behind her and hadn’t built it up again from the rock throwers at all. But now, when an unknown girl was in her kitchen spreading the fear from her bare skin onto Aliide’s oilcloth, she couldn’t brush it away like she ought to have done. Instead it seeped in between the wallpaper and the old wallpaper paste, into the gaps left behind by the photographs that she had hidden there and later destroyed. The fear settled in as though it felt at home. As though it would never go away. As though it had just been out somewhere for a while and had come home for the evening.
The girl rubbed her stubble, tied the scarf tightly around her head, ladled a mugful of water from the pail, and rinsed out her mouth, spit the water into the lard bucket, glanced at her reflection in the glass door of the cupboard, and went to the door. She had pulled her shoulders back and lifted her head as if she were on her way to a battle or were standing in a row of Young Pioneers. The corner of her eye twitched. Ready. She was ready. She pushed the door open and stepped onto the porch.
Silence spread dark around her. The night was thickening. She took a few steps and stopped to stand in the yellow light of the lamp in the yard. Crickets were chirping, the neighbors’ dogs barked. The air was fragrant with autumn. The white trunks of the birches shone dimly through the dark. The gates were closed. She could see the peaceful fields through the chain-link fence, its mesh like tired eyes.
