Free Purge by Sofi Oksanen Page A

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