The Shadow Girls (33 page)

Again she didn’t answer. Humlin waited and she emptied her glass of beer. Then she got up and walked out to the toilets. One of her phones was lying on the table and it started to ring. That’s her, he thought. She’s doing what she did in the Yüksels’ apartment. She calls when she has something important to say. He answered the phone.

‘Associate Judge Hansson at the Administrative Court of Appeals wishes to speak to Prosecutor Westin. May I put him through?’

‘He’s in a meeting,’ Humlin said and hung up.

The phone rang again. Humlin fumbled with the phone to
see if there was caller ID, but didn’t find anything. He gave up and answered the phone.

‘I think we were interrupted. I was trying to get through to Prosecutor Westin?’

‘He’s still busy.’

Humlin was starting to sweat. The doors to the toilets remained closed. After a while he got up and walked over to them. He listened for sounds from the women’s toilets but heard nothing. He knocked, but there was no reply. Then he opened the door. There was no one there. He tried to open the window at the far end but the latches were rusty and stuck. She didn’t leave by this way, he thought. Then he went into the men’s toilets.

Tanya was sitting on the floor next to the urinals. She was holding a paper towel up to her face. At first Humlin thought she had had an accident and was trying to stem a nosebleed but then he realised she was sniffing something concealed in the paper towel. He grabbed it out of her hands. It looked like a messy bar of soap but then he saw it was a bar of scented cleaning solution that must have come from a urinal. He had heard about this from somewhere, that the urine released ammonia from these bars, which could then be inhaled. But it was still hard for him to believe his eyes: Tanya’s glassy gaze, the paper towel with the sticky blue bar. He tried to pull her up off the ground but she hit him in the face and screamed something at him in Russian.

A man came in and Humlin ordered him to use the women’s toilets. The man quickly left.

Humlin kept fighting Tanya for the scented bar. They crawled around on the floor. She scratched him in the face with her nails,
which made him furious. He grabbed her around the waist and forced her up against the wall. Both of them were covered in urine. He screamed at her to calm down but when she kept resisting and tried to fish yet another scented block out of the urinal he slapped her. Her nose started to bleed and she became absolutely still.

Humlin heard someone’s steps outside the door and forced her quickly into one of the cubicles. A man came in who coughed and urinated for a long time. Humlin sat down on the toilet with Tanya on his lap. She was breathing heavily and her eyes were closed. He wondered if she was about to pass out. After the man had left, Humlin shook her.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked. ‘Why are you doing this to yourself?’

Tanya shook her head.

‘Let me sleep.’

‘We can’t stay here,’ he said. ‘We have to go pick up some food. The others are waiting for us.’

‘Only for a little while. I haven’t sat on anyone’s lap since I was a little girl and my aunt held me like this on her knee.’

‘We’re sitting on a toilet,’ Humlin said.

Suddenly she got up and leaned against the wall.

‘I’m going to puke.’

Humlin got up and left the cubicle. He heard her throw up, then everything was quiet. He opened the door and handed her a wet paper towel. She wiped her face and followed him out. As they were leaving the toilets they met a man who was pulling down his zip. He looked at Tanya with interest and then winked conspiratorially at Humlin, who came very close to punching him.

They walked out of the bar. Tanya pointed to a small cemetery on the other side of the street.

‘Can’t we go there?’

‘We have to buy some food.’

‘Ten minutes. That’s all.’

Humlin pushed open the rusty gate to the cemetery. An old woman sat propped up against a gravestone that was pushed half on its side. Its inscription was no longer legible. The woman’s clothes were tattered and several plastic bags and packets of newspapers wrapped up in twine lay strewn about her. Tanya stopped and looked at her.

‘Do you think she needs a phone?’ she asked.

‘I doubt she has anyone to call. But I suppose she could always sell it.’

Tanya took out one of her phones and laid it next to the sleeping woman’s cheek. They continued walking through the empty graveyard. Tanya sat down on a bench. Humlin joined her.

‘Maybe I should call the bag lady,’ she said. ‘The phone I gave her plays a lovely, old-fashioned lullaby when the phone rings. It’s a heavenly way to wake up.’

‘I’d let her sleep. What kind of life does she wake up to anyway?’

Tanya whimpered, as if she had been struck by a whip.

‘Don’t say that,’ she said. ‘What kind of life do I wake up to, for that matter? Do you want me to wish I were dead? I have wanted that, I’ve stood on the bridge and almost thrown myself off, I’ve put needles in my arm without knowing or caring what was in the syringe. But deep down inside I’ve still always wanted to wake up again. Do you think I did what I did back there because I wanted to die? You’re wrong. I just wanted to get away for a little while, just to have a moment’s peace. No words, no
voices, nothing. I remember when I was growing up that there was a little black pond in the forest nestled in between the high trees. I always went there when I was upset. The water was absolutely still and shiny like a mirror and I used to think that that was what I wanted inside. Peace, nothing else. I still crave that sense of peace.’

Tanya stopped talking and looked around for something in her backpack. Humlin counted the phones that she laid out on the bench: seven. At last she found what she was looking for, which was a crumpled pack of cigarettes. He hadn’t seen her smoke before. She inhaled the smoke as if it were oxygen. But just as suddenly she dropped the cigarette into the gravel and killed it with her heel.

*

What I don’t understand and what I will keep asking myself all my life and won’t even stop when I die is the question of how it could be possible for me to feel any joy after all the hell that I have been through. Or hasn’t it even been that bad? Yesterday, when Tea-Bag and I were lying on the police chief’s bed, she told me that I haven’t had it any worse than anyone else. Then she fell asleep. Is she right? I don’t know. But I don’t understand how I’m supposed to be able to laugh after all the humiliation I’ve been through. And I’m someone who thinks it’s necessary for people to be able to feel an uncomplicated, simple joy in their lives since we are going to be dead for such a long time. Death is not what is frightening to me, not the fact that the flame goes out, but this fact that we are going to be dead so very long.

I still think about that time four years ago when we stood out by the main road, four girls in skirts that were much too short. We
were the East, nothing more. We knew how Westerners saw us, as those poor Easterners, those wretches. And there we were in our short skirts in the middle of winter, still mired in the poverty and misery that was our life in the vodka-stinking hole that was all that was left after the Communist collapse. Four girls: fourteen, sixteen, seventeen and nineteen. I was the oldest and we were laughing as we stood out there in the cold, wild with joy – can you understand that? We were so close to being free! When that old rusty car came down the road it could just as well have been Jesus or Buddha or Muhammad come down from the clouds. It was the car that was going to carry us to freedom, no matter that it stunk of mould and unwashed feet.

Why do people leave? Why do they pull up their roots and go? I suppose some people are chased away and forced to flee. Maybe it’s war or hunger or fear – it’s always fear. But sometimes you choose to leave because it’s the clever thing to do. A teenage girl might very well ask the same question as a holy patriarch: where can I find a life for myself, a life far away from everything here that I despise?

There was an abandoned barn in a field behind Mischa’s cabin, Mischa who was old, crazy and a little dangerous. We used to hang out there, Inez, Tatyana, Natalia and I. We had all known each other so long we couldn’t even remember how we first met. We staged trials in that barn. Inez had stolen some rope from one of the barges that went up and down the river. She was crazy; she had jumped into the cold water with a knife between her teeth and cut off a few lengths of rope that she tied to her legs and swam back to shore with. We made a few nooses – Natalia had a brother who had been in the KGB so he knew what a real hangman’s noose looked like. Then we proceeded to hang our enemies. We put straw
and stones in the bags, pronounced the sentence and hanged them from one of the beams in the roof, one by one. We hanged our teachers and our parents; Tatyana’s dad was particularly mean and used to beat her once a week. I don’t think we ever thought too closely about what we were doing. There was just life and death, punishment and mercy. But we didn’t show anyone mercy; they didn’t deserve it.

There we were, four avenging angels in the little village outside Smolensk. We had given ourselves a name, the ‘Slumrats’. That’s how we saw ourselves. Creatures of the underworld without value, hunted, filled with self-loathing. But we didn’t just conduct trials in that barn, we prayed to gods of our own choosing. Inez had stolen a book from her step-father, a book filled with pictures of big cities in North America and Western Europe. Inez used to steal all the time; she was the one who taught me how, not my dad. When I told you that I was lying. My dad was a worm who couldn’t even have broken a bike lock. But Inez was never afraid. She would break into churches and steal the elaborate frames they use for icons. We would tear pictures out of our books and slip them into these old icon frames, hang them up and then pray to them. We prayed that we would one day get to see these cities. Then – so that no one would find the pictures – we buried them in one corner of the barn underneath the rotting floorboards.

I’m still not sure who gave the Slumrats their order to flee. Maybe it was me; it should have been me since I was the oldest. We were always dreaming of better places because we only saw hopelessness around us. Political borders may have fallen, but the only difference for us was the fact that now we could see what was on the other side. The rich life was out there, waiting for us. But how were we going to get there? How to cross the invisible border that still existed?
We hated the feeling of being trapped, we kept executing our enemies and we started taking any kind of drug we could lay our hands on. None of us went to school, none of us worked. Inez taught me how it was done, she let me watch her when she picked people’s pockets or broke into houses. But we never kept the money for long. We bought drugs and clothes and then we had to start all over again. I don’t think I was clear-headed for a single day during that time, I was always high on something.

I don’t know who first heard of the Woolglove. I think it was Inez, but I’m not sure. There was a rumour that he could get girls well-paid jobs in the West. They had to be good-looking, independent, ready for anything. He was staying at a hotel in the city and he was only going to be in town for two days. We made up our minds on the spot. We put on our best clothes, made ourselves up, slipped glue tubes into our pockets and jumped on the bus. On the way, we took out the glue and sniffed it. Tatyana had to throw up before we went into the hotel. The man who opened the door – I still remember it was room 345 – was actually wearing white wool gloves. Later he said something about having eczema on his hands and treating them with a special cream. That was why he had to wear those gloves. He promised to get us jobs in a restaurant in Tallinn. We would be waitresses and get good pay, not to mention tips. He told us what girls usually made per day and he made it sound like we would earn all this money for about two hours of work. It was a restaurant that only catered to foreigners, he said. He also told us we would be sharing a big apartment together.

We drank in every word. He was wearing those strange wool gloves, but his suit was expensive and he smiled the whole time. He told us his name was Peter Ludorf, and he threw in a German word now and again to impress us. He wrote down our names on
a small notepad. Then another man suddenly turned up. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone move so quietly. It still gives me the shivers to think about it. He took pictures of us and then left. And that was it.

A few weeks later we stood on the side of the road in our short skirts in the middle of winter, waiting for Peter Ludorf’s car to come and get us. But some unshaven men who smelled of vodka were driving the car. We stopped at various houses on the way and new men of the same sort took over the driving. We got almost nothing to eat, just a little water and enough time to jump out and pee in the snow.

Peter Ludorf had arranged new identities and passports for us. At first that had freaked us out, that our old identities had been taken away. Tatyana said it was like someone slowly scraping away our old faces. But we trusted Peter Ludorf. He smiled, he gave us clothes and talked to us like grown-ups. What else could we do? We had already put our lives in his hands. He was the one who had come to take us away from our old lives, to give us a chance at freedom – a raft with which we could paddle away from the vodka marsh where slumrats like us had no future.

We arrived in the middle of the night. The truck pulled into a dark yard where there were growling dogs pulling at their leads. I remember that Tatyana grabbed my arm and whispered, ‘It’s not right. Something isn’t right.’ We got out of the truck. It was cold and damp and there were foreign smells all around. Somewhere in the darkness among the growling dogs we heard voices speaking in a language we couldn’t understand. One man smiled and chuckled and I realised he was making comments about us standing there in our short skirts.

We were led into a room where the walls were clad in a red plush
fabric. There were large gilt mirrors on the walls and Peter Ludorf sat there on a sofa with his white gloves on, smiling at us. He looked us over, then got up from the couch. At that moment it was as if a light had been turned off in his face. His eyes changed colour and even his voice seemed different. He stood right in front of me and told us that we would be staying in some rooms on the first floor. We were to service all the men who were sent up. We had to give him our passports.