by Julia Bell
She waves me away with her hand. ‘Don’t be thank you. You don’t know. I am bad persons.’ She gets up and goes over to her bed.
Oksana snorts. ‘You are stupid,’ she says, ‘but not bad. It’s them who is bad.’ She jabs a finger at the door. ‘We are just carrying the badness for them, like a heavy load.’
16
Oksana
‘He’s not coming back,’ I said to Adik one day. He was throwing stones at an empty tin, trying to get it to roll down the street.
Adik scrunched his face up. ‘Yes he is.’
‘How do you know? Dimitri and Kolya don’t think he’s coming back.’
‘Because he said so.’
‘And you believe what he says?’
‘Yes!’ He hit the tin, sending it skittering across the street. ‘He said he wanted to do business here.’
‘Business? What business is there here? No one has any money.’
Adik shrugged. ‘He said there is always money, you just have to know where to look for it.’
‘Where is there always money? Under the rocks and stones? Like treasure?’
‘I don’t know!’ Adik sounded irritated.
Since Tommy and the fight, we hadn’t really been getting on very well. Just because we kissed once, he was always going on about it, like now I was his girlfriend or something. Plus he’d become like an irritating fly, always buzzing on about himself. As if he was special just because Tommy gave him a stupid dollar. Like it was a sign from heaven to him that he was going to get out of here. Every time he talked about it my heart was heavy. It wasn’t fair.
It was a grey, boring kind of day when the noise of an engine buzzed in the distance. Adik pricked up his ears like a guard dog, and even Viktor stopped grizzling as the sound got closer. I could tell it was a new car; the way the engine purred instead of chugging and backfiring.
‘He’s back!’
Adik ran in the direction of the sound, waving his arms. ‘Over here!’
It was a BMW this time, with tinted windows and chrome trim.
‘Hey,’ Tommy said, lowering the window and leaning out. His hair was different, brushed flat and cut neatly behind his ears, and he was wearing a suit and tie. There was someone in the passenger seat. A bald man who was also wearing a suit. He stared at us without saying anything.
‘Which way to the concrete factory?’
Adik pointed the way. ‘They thought you weren’t coming back,’ Adik said, ‘but I told them you were.’ He stuck his chest out proudly.
Tommy laughed and nodded. ‘Spasibo. You are a good boy.’ He held out a note with his fingers. Another dollar bill.
When he was gone Adik held it up to me triumphantly. ‘See?’ he said.
The next day I couldn’t find Adik anywhere. I waited outside the shop nearly all day, my head full of questions. It was getting dark when I gave up on him and started the trudge home with Viktor pulling on my arm and whining about being hungry.
‘Surprise!’
I nearly jumped out of my skin. Adik’s pale face glowed in the dusk. He was giggling and grinning.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ I cuffed him round the head. ‘I waited for you all day.’
He ducked away from me. ‘I was busy,’ he said, puffing his chest out and putting his shoulders back. Even though he was skinny, he was nearly taller than me now. ‘I was working.’ He giggled again and staggered slightly into the wall.
‘Are you drunk?’
‘Maybe a little.’
I grabbed Viktor’s hand. ‘Then I’m going home.’
But he stood in front of me. ‘Don’t go,’ he said. ‘I’ve got presents.’ He pulled a red packet out of his bag. I took them and tried to spell out the writing. Maltesers, European sweets.
‘Where did you get these?’
‘Tommy got them at the airport in Berlin. He said he’s going to get me a job. He says he knows a man in Germany looking for boys like me.’
‘To do what?’
Adik shrugged. ‘Work.’
‘What kind of work?’ I wondered if it was the kind of work I could do too. ‘Do they need anyone else?’
‘Ask Tommy.’ He opened the packet of sweets and gave a handful to Viktor. Viktor shoved them in his mouth all at once, smearing chocolate round his lips.
‘Eat!’ Adik said, trying to give me some too.
‘Get off.’ I pushed his hand impatiently, spilling sweets all over the floor. Viktor pulled away from me and picked them up, even the ones that had fallen in the puddles and in the gutter.
He said he’d been with Tommy all day, helping him to ‘take care of business’.
‘What kind of business? Business where you get drunk?’
But he just shrugged and told me that girls didn’t understand men’s business and, anyway, he was fed up with me asking so many questions.
‘Well I’m fed up with you!’ I said. ‘And all your bullshit about Tommy.’
I didn’t want to hear any more. I yanked Viktor by the arm and walked away from him.
‘Oksana!’ He ran after me. ‘Don’t be mad at me.’
I carried on walking. ‘Why not? You’re very annoying.’
I didn’t look back. I stomped home faster and faster, dragging Viktor by the arm behind me. He started crying, so I had to stop and carry him. When I turned round to pick him up I couldn’t see Adik anywhere and I was disappointed. Really I wanted him to follow me. To tell me it would be OK, that he’d fix it so I could go away with him too. That I could leave Father and Viktor and my shabby life and start somewhere new. After all, if it could happen for him, why not for me?
I promised myself then that I was going to get away. Whatever it took. I wasn’t going to be left behind to shrivel up into a potato lady; all the years of struggle to stay alive leathering my skin, shrinking my bones, turning my eyes into raisins. I wasn’t going to be like Baba Droski or Mrs Borodovna, or even become a furred-up snob like Tetya Svetlana. I wanted a different kind of life. I wanted not to worry every day about whether there was food, not to have Viktor to look after, not to wake up in the morning and feel a great pressure on my head because my mother was dead and now there was no one else to keep our family together.
‘Hey!’
I was so lost in my own thoughts I didn’t even hear the car approaching.
‘You not talking to me?’ Tommy smiled so I could see his white teeth. ‘Want a ride?’ He opened the door, patted the passenger seat with his hand.
For a second I hesitated. Thought that maybe I should just go home, try to find something to cook for Father and Viktor. But then I got in.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked, putting Viktor on my lap, trying to keep his dirty hands off the shiny dashboard. Tommy didn’t seem to notice. When he smiled his eyes crinkled round the edges. I could see the rough stubble on his chin; he looked like a real man.
‘Investing,’ he said, concentrating on the road.
‘In the factory?’
‘Maybe.’
I told him to turn off down the road towards the apartments. He had to steer hard to avoid the potholes and the puddles. ‘You live round here?’
He slowed the car and looked up through the windscreen at the flats, the tall square blocks of windows and crumbling balconies.
A skinny cat darted about in the rubbish. No one ever came to take it away. Mostly it sat at the bottom of the block rotting, or it got scavenged and reused, or burned up in fires.
People were watching, I could tell; curtains twitched, a few people stared at us over their balconies. Not many people had cars, let alone ones that worked. There were only a few empty husks that had been abandoned when they broke down, Ladas that only worked if you pushed them.
I felt ashamed, bringing him here.
‘They should blow them up,’ he said, looking at me. ‘This is no place for anyone to live.’
A part of me wanted to shout at him to go away because I thought I should defend our apartment, where our
mother used to live. We were a proud family, we didn’t like to have people look down their noses at us. But another side of me was relieved.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I hate my life.’
He looked sad then, and brushed a strand of hair from my forehead. ‘You are too young to hate your life.’
‘Adik says you’re getting him a job,’ I started. ‘Can you get me a job too? Please?’
‘How old are you? Really?’
‘Fourteen soon.’
He shook his head. ‘You’re too young. I can’t . . .’ He stopped and bit his lip. ‘Maybe in a while, but we need papers and that kind of thing. You wait until I come back. Maybe I will build a supermarket here; I make jobs, I make money. Maybe you can have a job then.’
‘But Adik—’
‘He is a boy. It is different for boys.’
‘How is it different?’ The comment annoyed me. It seemed like it was always different for boys. If they could go anywhere, do anything, how come I couldn’t?
‘You’ll find out when you’re older,’ he said, leaning across me to open the car door. ‘See you later, little chicken.’
I ran inside with Viktor, jumping over the puddles as quick as I could, my face glowing like a sunset. I couldn’t believe it, he thought I was too young.
Inside I looked at my face in the mirror in the bathroom, my blunt hair that I cut myself with the kitchen scissors, my dirty, scrubby cheeks. In the mirror I didn’t look young, I looked like a shadowy picture of my mother and Baba Droski, with Dad’s thick eyebrows. I looked wrong, I knew I did. I needed grooming, I needed make-up, clothes, perfume, shoes. I needed to look my age.
In the corner of Mother and Father’s bedroom was a painted wooden box. Now chipped and faded grey, it was once black and covered with posies of bright pink and red flowers with green leaves. Mother said it belonged to my great-grandfather, Papa Yudaev. It was Mother’s wedding box. In it she kept her wedding shawl and pressed flowers from her corsage and all her jewellery and make-up. She said that one day, when I got married, the box would be mine. She said it had been in the family so long that Papa Yudaev had carried it when he was running from the Germans. ‘See that chip on the side? That’s from a German bullet.’
Father laughed at her when she told me that story. He said it was far more likely that Papa Yudaev dropped it when he was drunk. She didn’t speak to him for nearly a week after he said that. She said she didn’t mind him disrespecting her, but she did mind him disrespecting her family and all that they had lived through. He said he was only joking but she sulked anyway, until a few days later he came back from work with a bunch of fresh sunflowers and cornflowers that he’d picked himself from the fields and said he was sorry for being a jerk. Mother’s face softened then and she let him grab her round the waist and kiss her, and I ran out of the room making faces because I was only seven years old and didn’t understand anything about the world.
These memories surprised me as I ran my hands across the flaking varnish. After she died Father threw out all her clothes, even though I told him we could use them. He said he didn’t want them hanging in the closet reminding him of what he had lost. But he didn’t throw away her box. I told myself it was because he was saving it for me. That he’d remembered that Mum meant to keep it for my wedding day. So he wouldn’t mind if I borrowed some of her make-up before I got married, especially if I told him about Adik and Tommy and the work in Germany.
Inside the box was a tattered satin clutch bag, the green material frayed and worn from years of her fingers opening and closing the clasp. It still smelt of her, which suddenly brought her back, warm and close, so I could see bobbles in the fabric of her jumper and the way she stretched her lips when she was putting on lipstick. The purse still contained one bright red lipstick, a compact with a small smear of face powder, an eye-pencil, some bright pink blusher and several eyeshadows in different shades of blue.
‘Look at the state of you!’ His mouth was crunched, angry. ‘What do you think you look like?’
I thought I looked quite good. I had spent hours at the mirror, applying and then reapplying the make-up. I had drawn straight lines under my eyes, put a stripe of blue on my eyelids and under my eyebrows and used the lipstick really carefully to fill in my lips without spilling any over the edge.
‘Wipe it off!’ He tore a corner off a newspaper and threw it at me.
‘NO!’
I folded my arms and stared at him. What did he know about being stuck with Viktor all day? About being the only one who ever seemed to worry about where the next meal was coming from?
‘Your mother would be ashamed of you.’
That accusation hurt, but I wasn’t going to give in. ‘I don’t care!’ I shouted back. ‘She’s dead!’
It was like a storm had blown up in my head, angry black clouds of frustration and resentment.
‘I’m going out!’
‘Where?’
‘Out.’
‘No you’re not, you’re staying here!’
But I was on the right side of the kitchen, nearest the door. I turned round and made a run for it, down the steps with him on the landing bellowing and calling my name and telling me how I was a no-good daughter and why didn’t I dress nicely like other girls? Which I thought was really mean, especially as we never had enough money to buy new clothes. I tried not to listen. I could hear Viktor crying from the kitchen. He hated it when people shouted. Father hadn’t even given me a chance to explain, to tell him about Adik and Tommy and the job in Germany, or remind him that soon I would be fourteen.
Adik found me in the alleyway next to the bins for the shop. Because I’d been crying the eye-pencil had leaked down my face in black streaks.
‘You look like a bear,’ he said. He was wearing a new pair of trousers; clean, dark blue jeans, trainers that were white as fresh snow and a navy sports jacket made out of this new material that was soft and still a hundred per cent waterproof. He said it was the kind of coat football managers wore on the touchline.
‘Where did you get those?’
‘Tommy bought them for me.’
‘Bought them for you? Why did he do that?’ I wiped my eyes with my sweater, and smeared a streak of eyeshadow all over my sleeve.
He frowned like he wasn’t sure how to answer this question. ‘Look!’ He pulled something out of his pocket, a little purple book, and he flipped it open.
GUNTHER HAAS it said next to a photo of him and it gave his age as eighteen.
‘That’s not your name.’
‘Duh. Tommy knows this guy who’s got a computer. He made it for me.’
He put it in one of the pockets in his trousers. ‘I’m leaving tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow?!’ That was too soon. I got the same feeling I had when Father told me that Mother had died, like the ground underneath me had shifted and turned to water and that nothing would ever be safe any more.
Adik shrugged. ‘He wants me to start straight away. The sooner I make money, the sooner I come back.’
He puffed himself up, trying to make himself big, like he was really eighteen. But to me he still looked like Adik, the skinny rat who had lousy hair and worn-out shoes and dirty hands. He told me that Tommy was coming to get him to drive him to the border.
‘Cool,’ I managed. I could feel my lip starting to wobble, my face getting tight and hot, all the words that I wanted to say to him caught in my throat. But I didn’t want him to pity me like I was just some little kid. ‘Take care.’
‘Hey! Don’t be sad. It’s not like I’m dead. I’m coming back.’
‘I’m not sad!’ I stood up and blinked away the tears. A familiar knot of resentment tightened in my belly. ‘I’m glad you’re going! Now I don’t have to listen to your bullshit any more!’
‘Oksana!’
But I turned away from him and shrugged like I didn’t care.
‘Don’t you want to say goodbye?’ he called after me.
‘No!’ I shouted back. I k
ept on walking down the road, one foot after the other. I don’t know why, but I felt like I was in some crazy fight with him in my head, that at all costs I didn’t want him to win.
Mikki and Kolya watched him go, running up the road after the car. They said Tommy let Adik drive, at least until they reached the edge of town, where the tin road signs told you how many hundreds of kilometres it was to get to Moscow and there was the sign to the factory that Adik and Kolya had put on back to front so that anyone who tried to find it would drive for ages in the wrong direction.
‘Man he was so slow!’
Kolya giggled. ‘I mean he drove like he was on a donkey!’
‘I could have walked faster!’
‘Maybe he didn’t want to crash it,’ I said, imagining him sitting up in the driving seat as tall as he could, arms locked in front of him, inching the car carefully forward.
Mikki and Kolya scoffed at this idea. They said that any fool could drive and what was the point of a performance engine if you didn’t go fast? ‘Are you stupid or what?’ Kolya said, turning up his nose and sneering at me. He and Dimitri had recently got into sniffing glue and they had turned nasty and spotty, their eyes dead and glassy. I didn’t trust them any more. I huddled into my jacket and ignored them. I knew then for sure that as soon as Viktor was at school I was out of here. Even if it meant I had to walk all the way.
17
Hope
In the morning they bring us breakfast. Bacon rolls and lukewarm cups of tea in cheap foam cups. I’ve hardly eaten anything since they brought me here. I’ve been so scared and confused it’s like my stomach has got stuck together and even though I know I should be really hungry, I can only take two bites out of the stale, crumbly roll and greasy bacon. I give it to Oksana who takes it straight away and eats it in nearly two bites, her cheeks puffing out like a hamster.
Mad Staring Boy is lurking in the corridor with his hands in his pockets while Fat Burger Man and his gold jewellery mate bring in our breakfasts, all smiles like we should be happy to see them, like they’re being good guys, looking after us.
‘What time is it?’ I ask.
