Andrei Makine - A Hero's Daughter

In this first role at the Center Olya played her part so well that the Englishman did not dare to give her money. When she went with him to Sheremetevo he awkwardly presented her with an extremely costly perfume with the price ticket from Beriozka scratched off.

She remembered him well, this first client, and could recall some features of the next two. As for the rest, they soon became mixed up in her memory.

With her colleague, Svetka Samoilova, Olya had rented two rooms, not far from the Belayevo area. Svetka had already been working at the Center for two years. She was exceptionally greedy for Western currency and lingerie but at the same time extravagant and generous to a fault, in the Russian manner.

She had a beautiful and opulent physique. If she had not succeeded in holding herself in check in Moscow, she would long since have turned into an Arkhangelsk matron, a human mountain, robust and warmblooded. In Moscow, on the other hand, and especially at the Center, she had been obliged to go against all the dictates of her nature. She was constantly on a diet, forced herself to drink tea without sugar and, in particular, exercised with a hula hoop at every free moment. The fashion for this had passed years ago, but it was not a question of fashion. Svetka had pierced a hole in her hula hoop, slipped half a pound of lead into it and sealed it up again with adhesive tape. It had become a weighty contraption. She spun it in the kitchen when stirring clear semolina, on the telephone, in her room in front of the television.

They often spent their free evenings in Svetka's room, chatting or watching the innumerable episodes of some adventure film. Olya occasionally went in there when Svetka was away, sometimes to borrow the iron, sometimes to leave on the bed a letter bearing the crude postmark of a village to the north of Arkhangelsk.

At such moments Svetka's room appeared to her in a completely different, unaccustomed light. Her gaze took in the narrow worktable, the side table piled high with old Western magazines, the arabesques on a thick carpet. And she no longer recognized any of it.

There was the chipped bottom half of a Russian doll, bristling with pencils, a glass saucer glittering with bracelets and earrings, and, open on a pile of magazines, a little book printed on gray paper, Autumn Cicadas.

Olya bent over it. A three-line stanza had a mark in the margin against it made with a fingernail.

Life is a field in which, as darkness falls Close to the footpath, there amid the com, A tiger watches, eagerly alert.

Olya studied everything around her with uneasy curiosity. It was as if the things all took pleasure in the places where they had been put. Among these objects Olya had a presentiment of hope for some alleviation, the possibility of becoming reconciled to all that she lived through each day. To her amazement she seemed to be making a strange excursion into this anticipated future, without knowing if this was encouraging or a cause for despair.

She found herself picking up the heavy hula hoop behind the dressing table and, for amusement, tried to spin it round, imitating Svetka's gyrations. She recalled her friend's joking observation: "Do you remember who coined this gem? Was it Breton? Aragon? 'I saw a woman-waisted wasp pass by.' "

"Absolutely. One with hips like an Arkhangelsk milk delivery woman," Olya had teased her.

"You may laugh! But when you're older you'll understand that real men always appreciate the poetry of contrast!"

And Svetka had made her contraption spin so fast that it hissed with the menacing fury of an aggressive insect…

On Svetka's dressing table, among the bottles and the jars of makeup, there was a piece of paper covered in figures. Every week she measured herself. Sometimes Olya added a few wild zeros to the figures, or altered centimeters to cubic centimeters. Which sent them both into fits of laughter.

Amid the disorder of all the objects accumulated on Svetka's dressing table stood two photos in identical frames. The first showed an elegant sunburned officer with one eyebrow slightly raised. At the bottom of the photo the white lettering stood out clearly: "To my dear Svetka, Volodya. Tashkent 1983." In the other one a man and a woman, not yet old, pressed awkwardly shoulder to shoulder, were looking straight in front of them, without smiling. Their peasant faces were so simple and so open – almost unfashionable in this simplicity – that Olya always felt embarrassed by their silent gaze…

"It's curious," she thought. "What if Svetka's foreign clients should one day ever see this hula hoop, this photo, this ' Tashkent 1983'? And that, too: 'A tiger watches, eagerly alert'?"

Nevertheless from time to time Svetka's diet was put on hold. Noisily, and bringing the smell of snow with them, the guests would start to pile in, the table would be covered with food and wine. There was pale pink meat from the Beriozka store, caviar and fillet of smoked sturgeon brought in from some ministry's private supply. Svetka pounced on the pastries, and cut herself a slice from a tart with baroque decorations, exclaiming with reckless bravado: "What the hell! you only live once!"

The guests thronging around this food were colleagues from the Center, people in business and men from the KGB who saw to the alcohol. On mornings after feasts like this they got up late. They went to the kitchen, brewed up very strong tea and spent a long time drinking it. Sometimes, unable to restrain herself, Svetka opened the refrigerator and took out some wine: "To hell with them, all these pathetic representatives! What kind of a life is this? We can't even drink to get rid of a hangover…" And on this pretext they took out the rest of the cake, and the remains of the elegant tart, whose decorations were now in ruins…

During these vacant Sundays, Hungarian Ninka, a prostitute from the Center, often came to see them. She was called that because her father had been a Hungarian member of the Komintern and it was claimed that he was related to Bela Kun. He had been in prison under Khrushchev and after his release had had time, a year before his death, to marry and have a child, and this was Ninka.

She passed on all the gossip from her world: the caretaker was becoming a real bastard! To let you into the Center he now took fifteen rubles instead of ten! Broad-hipped Lyudka had managed to get herself married to her Spaniard… It was rumored they were going to close the Beriozka stores…

These winter days passed slowly. Outside the windows occasional sleepy flakes fell from a dull sky. Under the window they could hear people from the apartments beating their carpets on the snow. Children shouted on the frozen slide.

Sometimes, by way of a joke, Ninka and Svetka would start arguing: "You've got it made," the Hungarian would say. "You sit there in the warm. Your paycheck arrives once a month. They bring you a client on a silver platter: 'Here you are, Madam. Be so kind as to bid him welcome and take care of him.' While we freeze to death just like those poor wretched whores at railroad stations. The cops take their three rubles from us. And our sisters, the goddamned bitches, are forever ratting on us to cut out the competition…"

"You're breaking my heart! We've heard all that before… The poor little orphan from Kazan," Svetka cut in. "I guess you'd like an extra milk allowance for dangerous work as well, wouldn't you? Meanwhile, you're a bunch of millionaires. You talk about a paycheck… But that hardly keeps us in toilet paper. And you charge a hundred dollars for ten minutes. You said it yourself, you know, that one – what's her name, now? The one with big boobs. She sleeps on a mattress stuffed with hundred ruble notes."

"A mattress?" gasped Olya.