Free Purge by Sofi Oksanen Page B

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.

1992
Läänemaa, Estonia

Fear Comes Home for the Evening

    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