Sofi Oksanen - Purge

“Yes he does.”

“A lot?”

“A lot.”

“Why was such a rich man’s wife working as a waitress?”

Zara plucked at her earlobe. There was no earring there, just a faintly flushed hole. How should she answer Aliide’s question? She was stupid, slow to come up with anything, but if she didn’t say something Aliide would think she was hiding something very bad. Could she keep claiming to have worked as a waitress and still be convincing? Aliide was sizing her up and she was starting to get nervous again. There was no way she was going to handle this thing well. Maybe Pasha was right, she needed a good whipping. Maybe he was right when he said she was the kind of person who just didn’t know how to behave unless you took a stick to them. Maybe there really was something wrong with her-an inherent flaw. Maybe she really was good for nothing. And while she was thinking about how unsuccessful she’d been at behaving correctly, words started to fly out of her mouth before she could think clearly about what they meant. OK, she wasn’t a waitress! She pressed against the empty hole in her earlobe, her other hand going up to rub the pit at the base of her collarbone. Her head and mouth and she herself were separate; there was suddenly nothing connecting the three of them. The story just streamed out and she couldn’t order it back in. She told Aliide that they had been on vacation in Canada, at a five-star hotel, driving around all day in a black car. And she had her own fur for every day of the week, and separate evening furs and daytime furs, inside furs and outside furs.

“Oooh! That must have been thrilling.”

Zara wiped the edge of her mouth. She was ashamed, her face was burning. And she did what she always did when she was overcome with shame: She focused her gaze and her thoughts on something else. Aliide, the kitchen, and the pot of pigs’ ears disappeared. She stared at her hands. The froth left on her finger from where she had wiped her mouth looked like snake’s spit on a raspberry leaf. A spit bug. She focused on that, a little animal was always best when you had to move your mind away from your body. A spit bug larva hiding in a ball of spit, and the ball protects it from enemies and from drying out. Where had she heard that? In school? She remembered the soothing rustle of her school book. The smell of paper and glue. She listened to the rustling in her head for a moment, willing her thoughts toward a dry page from her schoolbook, and composed herself, left the spit bug behind and let the Vikerraadio program back into her ears, her mind back into Aliide’s kitchen, with its cracked floor, oilcloth, and aluminum spoons. A jar of vitamin C sitting on a corner of the table, safe Cyrillic letters and words, sugarcoated tablets, vitamin C, the government’s GOST category numbers, the familiar brown glass. She reached toward it and repeated in her mind the calming Russian words on the label, clicked open the lid- a familiar sound. As a child she had often secretly eaten the whole bottle, the tart, bright orange flavor rushing through her mouth, the smell of the pharmacy. They used to get them from the pharmacy. Her pulse was already normal when she turned to Aliide and apologized for getting excited and told her she wanted just to sound normal and ordinary. She didn’t want Aliide to think she was putting on airs.

Aliide laughed.

“The young lady doesn’t want to sound like a thief.”

“Maybe.”

“Or a Mafia man’s wife.”

“Maybe.”

Aliide didn’t say anything more about it or ask why Zara couldn’t go back to Russia or go home.

The clock ticked. The fire hummed in the stove. Zara’s tongue felt stiff. The cracks in the cement floor looked hazy, as if they were moving all the time, ever so slightly.

“So that’s it,” Aliide said finally, getting up from the table and swinging a flyswatter at the lamp, around which several two-winged creatures circled. Then she went to boil some jars in the kettle. “Come and help me. The liquor socks must have helped-you don’t look like you caught a chill, anyway. I’ll find a scarf for you in a minute, so you can cover that head.”

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.