I dust and think Nelly would do a better job. Nelly the sunny one, Nelly the smiler, Nelly the adventurer. Nelly had shown me the brochure six months ago – the employment agency, based out of Bucharest in neighboring Romania, happy women in drab uniforms making military covers on hotel beds, serving food to smiling diners, filing papers behind a spotless desk with a computer resting on it, its plastics unyellowed by age.
‘See, they need secretaries and waitresses and maids and nannies,’ Nelly tells me. ‘You could get a job with a computer that’s new.’
I glanced at the marketing brochure. Moldova is the poorest country in Europe. These places all look better, sunnier, more hopeful. ‘I don’t want to move to Italy or Turkey or Israel. I don’t speak their languages.’
‘But your English is good. They’ll always pay extra for English.’ Nelly bites the eraser on her pencil. ‘At a hotel I might meet a traveling businessmen from the West. Maybe America. A nice guy with a good job. Americans like eastern European girls. The supermodels have done at least that for us.’
‘Americans don’t talk to maids,’ I say. I better spoil her dreams right away, yes? That’s what a good sister does. I hand her back the brochure. A hot beat of fear probes my chest at the thought of Nelly hundreds or thousands of kilometers away, working a job that gives her no time to come home.
‘I could send money back to you and Aunt and Uncle,’ Nelly said.
‘No.’
‘Well, I am not asking for permission.’
‘Why start now?’ I say and do a sister’s roll of the eyes.
‘Natalia went to Turkey and got a good job. There are no jobs here.’
‘School teaching? Remember?’
‘You better teach them well because they’ll have to leave Moldova to get a job,’ Nelly said.
And three weeks later, Nelly is gone. Teary hugs at the train station. She is taking a train to Chisinau, then onto Bucharest. Then a plane to Tel Aviv.
‘I’ll write everyday,’ Nelly says, hugging Aunt and Uncle at once and looking over their heavy shoulders at me.
‘No you won’t,’ I say. Nelly has always been the crier, not me. I am not about to start. But my heart shreds so much it turns into confetti.
‘I will!’ Nelly promises. ‘I’ll be bored. And I’ll have to write to send you money.’
‘Borrow the traveling businessman’s BlackBerry,’ I joke. ‘And send us an email.’ I have seen BlackBerries in movies. No one in Harp owns one.
And then Nelly hugs me, smelling a bit of milk and goodbye cake, and is gone.
*
When I am done dusting the classroom I stop for a moment. The boys are playing football in the scrappy yard. My favorite student is the goalie. I watch the boys and remember playing on the scrubby grass with Nelly when they were young. Nelly complained I kicked the ball too hard, as though Nelly’s legs were fashioned from porcelain. I did kick the ball hard. I was a good athlete, one of the best at our school.
Nelly’s letters arrive regularly but there is no money in them, just brief words that she is well, in jagged handwriting that looks unhappy.
Nelly feels guilty about not sending money, I decide. But Nelly won’t say so.
The classroom door behind me opens. I don’t know the man standing there. He is tall, head shaved bald, a thick lacing of tattoo crawling out of the collar of his shirt. His eyes are brown and hard. He is the sort of man who makes you hold your breath for a moment. Not in a good, fluttering way.
He smiles. I know he is not a parent, not an administrator from the district. His clothes are too good, the suit Italian, the sweater underneath it silk, the watch ostentatious, a slash of steel on his gorilla’s wrist.
He calls my name, like a question. I nod a yes.
‘I’m a friend of Nelly’s,’ he says. ‘You can call me Vadim.’
And my teacher’s brain, used to the carefully built lies of children, notes he didn’t say it was his name. It was what I could call him. What has Nelly gotten herself into, I think. What trouble?
A feeling of dread pierces my stomach. Vadim smiles. He steps inside the classroom. He shuts the door. The click is like a hammer hitting me in the silence.
‘I bring you a message from Nelly,’ he says.
Oh. All right, I think. Maybe he works with her in Israel. Maybe she actually met a traveling businessman, and here he is.
He holds up a DVD. He walks to the old machine and presses the power button, turns on the television. He ejects the DVD that’s in there, a bootlegged PBS video with a bad Moldovan voiceover, a science show about the universe. I have been teaching the children about stars and planets. He glances at the bootleg, as if curious as to what useful lessons I might be teaching today’s children.
He slides his disc into the machine and presses Play.
I stand, pierced, as my sister’s face appears on the screen. Nelly is crying. Shivering. I have not seen Nelly cry this way since our parents died seven years ago. Her hair is different, dyed blonder, and bigger, as though a harsh wind has breathed it into place. A too-bright lipstick smears her mouth. Her eyes look dulled.
Nelly says my name like it’s a foreign word. Then, on the tape, I hear a deep voice. Vadim’s. Saying, ‘tell her what you wanted to say’.
‘I want to come home,’ Nelly says. ‘Help me come home.’
She’s been a problem, Vadim says, in the detached tone of a mechanic discussing a faulty carburetor or a leaking gas line. She’s a bit uglier than we thought she would be. The customers don’t like her, she’s not getting picked enough, she’s just sitting on the couch.
‘The customers?’ I say. It’s not a question, it’s horror, bright in my heart.
Then a man’s hand pushes Nelly back. Onto an unmade bed. The sheets are a bright, eye-burning aqua blue. The camera jars slightly. A man, heavy-shouldered, pale skinned, climbs on top of Nelly and begins after a moment, to thrust his hips. A thin, blonde anemic mohawk tops his head. Nelly doesn’t scream, she doesn’t fight. She simply endures.
The mohawk smiles back over his shoulder at the camera. Then he hits Nelly, a slap, and continues.
Vadim watches me for a reaction. Then he smiles. ‘My boss, you see he likes her fine, but the customers are the ones who matter. I can arrange for Nelly to come home, if you like.’
If you like. If you like. I go hot and cold again. My throat feels broken. The searing feeling in my chest subsides. A fist of ice forms in its place.
My mind goes blank, for all of five seconds. Blank in a way it never has before.
It is all the shock I allow myself. There is no time for dismay or horror.
‘What do you want?’ I ask Vadim. ‘Money?’
‘I want a thousand euros. And I want three more.’
‘Three more what?’ I say. ‘Euros?’
‘Three more girls.’
The silence hurts like a knife sliding between my ribs.
‘Recruit three more girls for me, to take your sister’s place.’
I don’t move, I don’t speak.
‘You’re a schoolteacher. People trust you. You can do this easily. I prefer eighteen-year-olds.’
Sell three innocent girls into… that. To save my sister.
My voice stays steady. How, I don’t know because the shock is quickly fading in favor of another feeling I cannot describe, a heat in the heart that is beyond rage and fury. The heat of a decision, made. I shake. He smiles, like he thinks it is fear makes me tremble.
‘And if I can’t find three girls? Please, could I just pay you more money back to get Nelly?’
‘I don’t need money, schoolteacher. I need product.’
Product.
‘All right,’ I say. Too quickly.
He gives me a scowl. ‘Don’t bother going to the police. We own them. And you can hardly recruit girls if the cops know what you’re doing.’
I believe him. I have no intention of going to the police. Right now I’m wondering if I murder him right here if I can clean up the blood so thoroughly that the children will not notice it tomorrow. Kids notice everything.
