Maria's Story

by Robin Barratt

  “One of the advantages of living on the road,” he chuckled as Maria finished the last apple, nibbling at every last possible morsel.

  She wondered if she would ever think about this old man when she finally got home. She wondered about his story, why did he have no place to live, no family to look after him, why did he search the forest floor for apples when he should be sitting around a table with his sons or daughters, grandsons or granddaughters.

  She heard the rumble of the first engine of the day rolling along the tracks.

  “Thank you,” she said, looking up at him.

  “Good luck,” he said and turned towards the forest. She watched as he slowly made his way over the tracks and disappeared between the trees. “Good luck too,” she whispered as she made her way towards the approaching engine.

  She sat directly in the middle of the open ground so she could see up and down the tracks for approaching engines. There were a few carriages scattered around, some solitary, others in chains of three or four or five. As she looked around she understood that fate was now asking her to seek rescue from the very machines that had originally altered her life. Trains had taken away an ordinary, normal existence and given her a life so very different and difficult. It was because of her accident twelve years ago that she was now clawing her way over the tracks in search of a train to take her back to normality.

  The previous day Maria had noticed two carriages on the set of tracks closest to where everyone grouped. The two carriages sat on their own about fifty metres along the tracks from the fire. They had not moved nor been taken by the flow of engines coming and going throughout the day but seemed unused, dilapidated passenger carriages. She could see the broken windows, shattered glass and graffiti. Intrigued and wondering whether it might be a safer and warmer place to sleep, she decided to take a closer look and slowly made her way across the tracks. She could see a few people still sleeping around the fire, even though it was almost mid-day and noticed two middle aged women standing chatting to each other. They didn’t seem like the others she had met and seen; they wore cotton scarves round their heads and shawls over their shoulders. They looked out of place but Maria didn’t think anything of it, this was a strange place; everyone was out of place in their own odd way.

  As she made her way towards the run-down carriages two men appeared from inside the dilapidated building near to where everyone sat huddled every night, ducking under the half-attached door. They stood and watched Maria as she swung her little body backwards and forwards over the tracks towards the two carriages.

  Maria looked up at the broken windows and mangled metal door-frame in front of her and smelt the acrid stench of urine and excrement. No wonder nobody slept here, she thought. As she turned to leave she was startled by the two men standing behind her. She suddenly became very frightened, but struggled not to show it.

  “What are you doing here?” the taller of the two asked menacingly. The men looked really rough; she had never seen men looking like this before. Both unshaven with greasy, dirty shoulder length hair and dirty clothes. She could smell them too. They didn’t smell like the other homeless, but they smelt unwashed and of stale beer and cigarettes and vodka.

  Even from where she was looking up , she could smell the taller one’s foul breath and could see his stained, dirty teeth through his evil grin. The tall one had a jagged scar that ran from the corner of his right eye to the centre of his cheek and his left eye was permanently half closed. The shorter one stood slightly behind the taller one, and just stared at her.

  “You are a fucking bitch whore, fucking those scumbags for a bit of food.” Maria froze, terrified. “Now you can do it for free.” The tall man grabbed her hair and pulled her onto her back towards the open door of the carriage.

  “Let her be,” she heard the other man say, tugging on the tall mans dirty coat.

  “None of your fucking business,” he snarled back and shrugged him off.

  Maria tried to scream but he punched her hard in the mouth, splitting her lip and sending her into semi-consciousness.

  She came-too to the stench of the man’s breath breathing over her. She was lying on her back on the floor of the carriage, her arms were above her head and she could hear the buckle of the belt being undone. She opened her eyes to see the top of his head as he looked down to where he was trying to force himself onto her. She looked above her head and saw fragments of glass. Grabbing the largest piece she could find, she screamed and, as he looked up, thrust a jagged piece of glass into his face.

  He fell backwards, clutching at his wound as blood spurted through his fingers, over Maria. She turned over and scrabbled desperately along the floor, over the pools of urine, and broken glass and through open connecting carriage doors, falling and wedging herself between the metal connectors of the two carriages.

  She listened as he screamed. She could hear him trying to get up from the floor. She heard the other man’s voice from outside the carriage, probably keeping guard, and could hear him jump up into the carriage. “Find her,” the tall man screamed. She was almost sick with fear as she heard his footsteps approach the connecting doors. She looked up and saw him peering down at her tiny frail body jammed up against the metal supports, at her frightened eyes staring back at him, pleading with him. “Please,” she whispered.

  He stared down at her for a few seconds and then turned and called “She’s not here, she must have disappeared out the other way.”

  “Take me to a fucking hospital,” the tall man screamed.

  She listened as the two men fumbled out of the carriage, one supporting the other. Maria vomited.

  She was stuck. Her arms and shoulders were wedged between the metal supports and, as she tried to wiggle herself free, she slipped down even more, lodging herself tighter. She could hear the sounds of the engines coming and going over the tracks, the metal clunks as freight carriages were joined together and to the engines, and the roar of diesel as they moved off with their new loads, but no voices. She was frightened to call for help, just in case they were still out there waiting for her. She felt sure that, at some point, they would come back to take their revenge. Time passed, minutes, hours. The evening drew in, the engines stopped coming.

  She wondered if she would die there in that tiny corner, unable to move. Would the old man who had given her bread and apples come looking for her? He would probably think that she had managed to get a carriage back to her village. Just as she started to shiver with the change of temperature as the evening drew in, she suddenly heard the sound of two women talking quietly to themselves. She stopped breathing and listened, the voices, although faint and whisper-like, seemed to be getting closer.

  “Hello!” she shouted. The voices stopped. “Hello, please help me!” she shouted again and the voices started up again, but louder and rushing towards her.

  “Hello, I am in here, help me, I am stuck,” Maria called.

  “Where are you?” one of the women called, walking along the carriage.

  “Here, in between the two carriages.”

  “Oh my goodness,” said one woman peering over the couplings into the gap where Maria was wedged. “Let’s see if we can get you out of here.” One of the women rushed round the carriage to the opposite side behind Maria, leaned over and tried to hook her arms under Maria’s shoulders, while the other pulled Maria from the front. Maria cried out as the metal scraped against her torso.

  “Oh, you poor dear, lets get you cleaned up.” The two ladies placed Maria on the ground and wiped her dried blood and vomit stained mouth with a rag. Maria looked up at the two women fussing over her and recognized them as the two women that were near the fire earlier that day. “We have got to get you into some other clothes,” said the other lady fiddling with Maria’s torn and dirty jacket. She took off her shawl and placed it around Maria’s shoulders. “I want to go home,” Maria whisp
ered, she was too shocked and tired to say anything else.

  “Don’t worry dear, we’ll get you home,” Maria collapsed.

  Maria woke to the rocking of the train.

  “There dear, have some of this,” said the lady offering her a cup of warm team poured from an old tatty looking flask. Maria pulled herself up just enough to take a few sips of the sweet hot tea, and fell back down again. She looked up and saw the two women faces looking over her. She could hardly keep her eyes open.

  “Where are we going?” Maria asked sleepily.

  “To Moscow dear, we are going to Moscow.”

  Chapter Five

  Moscow

  Maria awoke to tugs on her arm. “Come on, we must leave now.”

  “Where are we going?” Maria asked as she followed the women to the sliding doors of the carriage. It had stopped. She heard loud banging on the wooden walls and shouts of “Get off, Get off.”

  The doors slid open and two railway workers shouted inside the carriage for everyone to get off. Maria looked around. Apart from the two women, there were three or four others in the same carriage. She watched as they hastily and silently gathered their meager things and jumped off the train. The two women clambered off and helped Maria down onto the ground below. “Hurry along,” one of the women turned to her and said. Maria struggled to keep up with them as they rushed across the compound of the depot. Maria’s hands were still raw and blistered and she grimaced every time she swung her body backwards and forwards. She glanced back at the train to see handfuls of people coming from almost every carriage.

  “Come on dear,” said one of the women as she slipped easily between a large hole in the wire fence that surrounded the depot. Maria followed and the second woman followed Maria. They crossed a small desolate open area between two dilapidated buildings and out onto a small side street. They walked up the street to a junction and stood on the corner. The three of them waited. An hour passed, and then two. Maria was hungry and thirsty. Finally, after almost three hours of standing silently on that same street corner carefully watching every car that passed, an old Lada approached, slowed down and stopped on the corner in front of the three of them. A disheveled dirty looking man driving the car leaned over and wound down the window.

  “Get in,” he said.

  One of the ladies lifted Maria onto the back seat, closed the door and walked round the car, jumping in beside her while the other woman got into the front seat.

  “Where are we going?” asked Maria.

  “We are going home dear,” the woman in the front replied.

  “But this is not my home,” Maria said “I don’t understand.”

  “We saved you dear, didn’t we? And we looked after you. Well, now you have to work for us for a little while and earn your fare back to your village.”

  Maria silently stared out of the grimy window as they drove along the outer suburbs of Moscow. This was not the beautiful grand city that she had dreamed about and seen on television; this was a deprived, desolate looking Moscow of grubby, dirty high-rise apartments. As she stared out of the grimy window, she watched as small gangs of youths milled around street corners kicking cans and smoking, children searching in waste bins, wild dogs following pedestrians up and down the pavement hoping for a morsel or scrap, and solitary beggars standing, heads bowed, arms outstretched. She looked at the graffiti on the walls and run down decrepit kiosks. Old men and women sat or stood in front of a few packets of cigarettes, or mangy looking fruit and vegetables, or odds and sods from their home, all laid out neatly on dirty handkerchiefs on the ground.

  This was not the Moscow of her dreams, but a city of poverty and deprivation and solitude. This was the capital of her country, a country that once she was led to believe was the best, the most powerful and the most wonderful place to live in the world.

  They pulled up outside a large metal graffiti covered gate secured by a thick padlock. The gate was set between barbed-wire topped walls in the middle of two run-down boarded-up buildings. The driver got out, unlocked the padlock and swung the double gates open. He jumped back into the car, placing the big chunky padlock in his lap, drove through the opening, jumped back out and closed and padlocked the gate behind them.

  “Home dear.”

  They lifted Maria out of the car. Maria stared at the dilapidated, ramshackle building in front of them. “Tomorrow you will start work, and we will get you something to get around on. Oh, and don’t think about running away dear, you have nowhere to go.” She beckoned Maria to follow them over to the building, Maria following behind, gingerly placing her hands onto the ground, between shards of broken glass, old cans, waste paper, sticks and stones. The driver unlocked the thick heavy door to the building and she followed them inside.

  She looked around at the gloomy room and at the people laying or sitting or chatting. In one corner she noticed a large two ringed stove where soup was being cooked. The walls were bare apart from some old tatty clothes hanging in one corner, perhaps drying, and a couple of torn paper pictures of places Maria didn’t recognize. The room smelt of cabbage and dirty human bodies. As they entered, the room fell silent and everyone looked up at the two women and Maria.

  “This is Maria,” the lady called, “make her feel welcome.”

  “Maria, this is now your home. We will come to collect you tomorrow morning, the others will show you around. There is food and some blankets in the corner over there and we will bring you some new clothing in the morning. You will just have to make do tonight I am afraid dear. Don’t worry, you will be all right. We are not bad people, just work hard for us dear and you can go home.”

  Maria starred at everyone staring silently back at her. The women turned and left, locking the door behind them. Maria covered her face with her hands and burst out crying.

  “There, there, it’ll be all right, come, have some soup, you must be very hungry,” she looked up as a woman similar to her grandmother, with a kind homely face, put her arm around Maria’s shoulder. Someone else put her arm round her other shoulder, a young girl, just a little older than Maria, with a dark wine-red birthmark covering almost all of her face. She wiped the tears from her eyes and looked across the room. An old man sat on a wooden crate with a pair of old crutches leaning up against the wall behind him, she could see an empty trouser leg. He was talking to another man, a tiny deformed man sitting on the floor. Another couple of elderly women sat huddled together on the floor quietly chatting.

  Two days ago Maria was sitting happily on the grass in her village watching as everyone strolled by, now she was being held prisoner in a squalid building with the deformed and the elderly. She couldn’t stop her tears. She cried for her mother and her grandmother, she cried for her sister, for her school and for her room with her posters and books. As she cried the girl and old lady sat quietly either side, with their arms holding her tightly, comforting her, reassuring her. She cried and cried and cried until there were no tears left.

  Later that evening, when Maria had no more tears, and after she had managed to eat a little soup and bread, the old lady - whose name she now knew was Olga - and Svetlana, the girl with the birthmark, explained the rules and described the work Maria would be doing.

  Olga told Maria that every morning they are all taken to a metro station where they worked begging for these people, who they called gypsies. This was all arranged with the local Mafia gangs who ran the streets and the metro throughout Moscow. These small Mafia groups extorted money from street vendors, kiosk owners and beggars within their territory. To operate they had to pay, there was no question of not paying. These were ruthless people in a harsh and hard world and their living was the ‘commission’ they made on the money earned on their territory. Not paying, or failing to pay the correct amount usually resulted in punishment. The gypsies paid the local Mafia a set fee for each beggar that they had under their control.<
br />
  From 7am until 7pm every single day of the week they would have to beg. With no papers or documents they couldn’t go to the police, nor run away, and anyway, the local police are paid by the Mafia.

  “The gypsies pay the mafia every day so, if we are late or don’t turn up, or leave their spot without permission, we are punished” Olga said. The gypsies kept a very close eye on them all and collect the money several times during the day, and at the end of every day.

  “We don’t see the men that often,” Olga said, “only when they come round to collect the money, or pick us up, or drop us off. Generally we are dropped off at the metro up the road and we make our own way to our metro station but if we are late we are beaten. We cannot ever beg on the metro trains ourselves, firstly it is too dangerous as there are police everywhere and the gypsies don’t pay them, and anyway, other mafia groups run the actual metro trains. If we ever get stopped and asked for our papers, which we don’t have, the gypsies then pay the police to get us released, but we have to make up the money by begging harder and longer hours. We are not allowed to talk to anyone for long; if we are caught talking for too long we are warned and then if we continue, again we’re punished. Also, if we are found with any money on us after we have finished for the day we are also punished. The gypsies are suspicious of everyone and everything.”

  “What punishment?” Maria asked

  “We are beaten by one of the men.” Svetlana said. “A light beating at first, as a warning, and a more severe beating should we do the same thing again.”

  “They beat you?” Maria asked, looking at Olga, wondering how anyone could beat an old lady, or a disabled man, but she quickly recalled being punched in the face and almost raped and understood that yes, it was possible, that these people were inhuman.