Sofi Oksanen - Purge

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 Ništó Krepše Vorovskoy Druzbyt -“Nothing stronger than friendship among thieves.” Lavrenti smiled at Pasha’s dreams, too-he may have thought that Pasha was a little crazy. Lavrenti said he himself was already an old man. He had twenty-five years in the KGB behind him, and he would have liked his life to continue as it had before all this nonsense with Yeltsin and Gorbachev. He didn’t want anything except that his children got everything they needed, that’s all. Maybe that’s why Lavrenti wanted to work with Pasha-he and Pasha were the only ones who were prepared to content themselves with less than other people. It’s true Pasha wanted a casino, a country, and a billion, but those things didn’t get him worked up the way the tattoo parlor did.

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, “ Natasha will es .”Nobody asked where she was from or what she would do if she weren’t here.

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 Erotica and Erotica and Madonna, twirling.

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 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.

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.