Free Purge by Sofi Oksanen

find a scarf for you in a minute, so you can cover that head.”

1991
Berlin, Germany

Zara Puts on a Red Leather Skirt and Learns Some Manners

    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.

    Everybody