by Mari Saat
“This won’t do,” said Vova, worried, “you need to have a stiff drink to ease your nerves otherwise you’ll scare the client off. This punter’s very calm and gentle. Don’t worry, he’s so gentle he couldn’t hurt a fly, but if you go scaring him off with all that din then he won’t give us any cash, perhaps ever again – even though he’s a regular client, comes every two weeks…”
“Give her another swig,” said Vova to his wife Ira, “I’ll call when we set off. Get her straight into bed to wait under a thick quilt. If it makes her too hot, well at least her teeth won’t still be chattering… It’ll unnerve him…” And off he drove to the port to pick the customer up.
Ira settled Natalya into the bed under a thick quilt, stroked her hand and comforted her: “Don’t be scared, Jaakko is a good man, calm and gentle… All of ours are calm and gentle… It’s no worse than having an internal at the doctor’s… Just imagine that you’re at the doctor’s. Just relax and everything will be fine… I’d say it’s worse at the doctor’s, sat on a chair with everything on show! At least here it all happens under a quilt…”
That Jaakko – he wasn’t so calm and gentle after all… So were the others even worse? He was small… Or not that small, definitely taller than Vova but slender… Well, not so slender in fact, but he gave the impression of being slight and fair. Although the room was dark, with only a night light, the impression was of a fair complexion and greasiness… And sharpness at the same time… Of course, Natalya had covered herself with a thick layer of vaseline down below so the body that climbed on top of her felt cold and greasy, and everything happened so quickly yet took so long, as if time had stood still, and it felt as if a lizard had climbed on top of her and entered her and she couldn’t believe that it was suddenly over, that escape was possible…
She was so numb from it all that when the client had gone and Vova looked in through the door, slightly worried, and said that another client would be coming today and that perhaps she could cope with another because he was such a good, calm, gentle client, very respectable and also a regular… Natalya could only murmur something in reply.
But when the man began to enter her, stubby and big, she burst into tears. Once again it was as if there were two Natalyas: one that cried and one that tried to quieten her as if explaining that she mustn’t cry, that although the door was shut, the boss and his wife would hear her crying anyway, in the room next door or the kitchen where they were at the moment… But the man did not force himself on her, in fact he drew away a little and, caressing Natalya’s hair and cheeks, he asked quietly, concerned, in good Russian, “What’s up? What’s happened? Did I do something bad?”
“No, no,” whispered Natalya Filippovna in between hiccups, “everything’s fine… You carry on… If you’re not satisfied they can’t take your money…”
“Oh, the money’s not that important,” said the man.
“No, no, it is,” explained Natalya, “the money’s really important, it’s the most important thing. I have braces to pay for, not for me, for my daughter because otherwise she might be handicapped and won’t be able to open her mouth any more, but the factory laid me off because there’s a crisis in electronics but it’s not their fault that they laid people off, electronics is in crisis the world over…” and she talked and talked, rapidly, evenly, in a whisper; she felt she had to make a clean breast of it quickly, before Vova’s suspicions were aroused because she didn’t know how much time Vova allowed for a punter. And now here she was, frittering all the time away jabbering on, and that was definitely something that had not been part of the bargain because the client was becoming the service provider in that he was just stroking Natalya’s head as she talked, perhaps occasionally murmuring something, although what he may have said Natalya did not notice.
Eventually she calmed down, perhaps because of the non-stop gentle stroking or the man’s low, lilting voice almost crooning to her, like a doctor, as if she were at the doctor’s and had to make a clean breast of everything, as if some good may come of it…
She sobbed and finally said, “They won’t be able to take your money off you now because I’ve frittered all the time away rabbiting on…”
“Please don’t worry about that,” said the man, “of course I’ll pay, I must pay, I’ve frittered your time away too just the same. It’s not your fault that I listened to you and did nothing else, your time was ticking away anyway… Just try and dry your eyes – otherwise the squire will think I’ve been too forceful with you…”
That was the expression he used – “the squire” – like in an old-fashioned story…
When the punter had gone and Natalya was finally dressed and stepped into the kitchen, Vova studied her for a long while in astonishment.
“Dima said you’re one shit-hot piece of skirt…” he said, adding falteringly. “Actually, he never talks so… bluntly. ‘What a woman’ is what he said… or perhaps it was something a bit more genteel…”
While driving Natalya home, Vova warned her nevertheless, “But don’t you go overstepping the mark. They’ve only paid for you to spread your legs. Nothing more. To them you’re just a hole that services their needs!”
But Natalya was miraculously calm inside. The moon shone over the bare field in Lasnamäe and its round, gnarled, pale face looked directly through the car window at Natalya, as if tinged with coldness, indifference, as if from a completely different, far-off time – as if everything were suddenly as clear as day to her…
It’s curious how after that first night, after she had tearfully sobbed out her whole story, everything was somehow different, different in nature – clear. It hadn’t got better, it was repulsive. Exceedingly repulsive. Yet somehow within the bounds of bearable. She felt that it was just a job – just like any other job. There was a coldness in her soul, a cold sense of duty – she was doing this for duty’s sake… There’d be at most two, or occasionally three of them a night, from Wednesday evening to Sunday, including Saturday night into Sunday, at 250 a time. But Sunday evening to Monday was free because Vova said that there were no punters or clients on Mondays. On Mondays they were all thinking about work…
“250, 250, 250…” she chanted to herself over and over in time with the movement of the man’s body. The men were different, but in one sense it was always the same – as if pressing on at an ever increasing pace over a mountain, until reaching the summit and then pausing there for a moment before plummeting down – that was her 250 in the bag… As the man’s excitement grew, so did Natalya’s hatred and resistance; she would have liked to let fly, bite, beat, destroy the man on top of her… but then the other Natalya would appear, cold and calculating, like Vova, and chant to her 250… 250 – it’s just a client, it’s just a client… Nothing else mattered to her. Besides, she was always separated from them by a condom… She tried to imagine they were covered in plastic, separated, and somehow she felt the 250 helped separate them too – it helped her not to notice the grunting, the sweaty skin, the fact that her body was being groped and grasped… Also, after the drive home she could have a shower. Now she could afford to use the shower, she didn’t have to think about not wasting water, especially hot water… But there was always something left inside her, a filth and a dread… Perhaps it wasn’t quite dread, but she began to have one particular frequently recurring dream: she would dream of Vova, but the Vova in the dream wasn’t just Vova, it was something or someone much more powerful, an incubus that blew icy cold; he was a tyrant, the boss, forever counting – 250, 250, 250. It was as if the other men, the clients, weren’t the ones using Natalya Filippovna’s body, but Vova himself, while repeating 250 as if he controlled everything, Natalya and the clients, their bodies – it was so strange – as if he’d banged some gargantuan drum that threatened to suck up each of their bodies and bludgeon them to a pulp. Natalya awoke from the incubus and even awake she still had the feeling that this was no mere dream, but a wretched reality…
Dima – as the boss and
his wife called him – returned two weeks later. He darted under the quilt next to Natalya and lay there, as if dead, his hands crossed on his chest.
“Why aren’t you getting on with it?” asked Natalya, blushing.
She didn’t blush with other men any more – so why was she now? Or hadn’t she had the time to notice?
“I shan’t,” said the man, “I’m in training. You’ve given me the chance to – train myself – else it wouldn’t have struck me… that it’s so important. But don’t you worry about it…”
“But there’s no need…” said Natalya, “you can go ahead. Otherwise what’s in it for you… And anyhow, it’s not right if you pay without getting anything in return… And it doesn’t upset me as much as it did before… I just chant over and over – 250, 250. That’s what I get each time. It makes it easier somehow… or, I don’t know, it somehow makes the coldness… less terrible…”
“That’s not good,” said the man turning to her suddenly, “it’s not good to say that over and over again – there’s no point to it – you’ll get your money anyhow – why spare it another thought, there’s no need to think of the money when you’re going to get it anyhow – why bother thinking about the money?”
“But it makes it more bearable,” argued Natalya, “if you just keep repeating – remembering what it’s for…”
“It’s still not good…” said the man, “your body’s making the money anyhow – why think any more about it… You could think about something better…”
And then he whispered, suddenly fierce but entreating, “Think instead, at least if you can – Lord, forgive them, forgive them their sins, forgive them their sins – then you’d be helping us…
“I shouldn’t have asked you to do that, it’s too much,” he said, and got up quickly.
It had never occurred to Natalya that you could do that – not spare the least thought for what you were doing, what you were actually doing or why, forget about yourself altogether and instead repeat, “Forgive them their sins” – their sins!
It had not occurred to her before that she might care about other people, about someone other than Sofia – because Sofia was why she was doing this, Sofia was why she wouldn’t give it up, wouldn’t drink herself to oblivion, wouldn’t walk blithely into the sea or anything else… And she had to guide Sofia too – sometimes – although she was fairly compliant when it came to what was good and what was bad or what was unacceptable or inadvisable behaviour… But she’d never really thought that she would have the right to brand other people sinners. Now mountainous waves of hate would tower up against the men when they climbed on top of her, but it was an ineffable hatred and repugnance imbued with complete indifference towards them. She did not care about them. Apart from the fact that she earned money because of them. Had she earned her money in any other way, she would not have cared whether they were dead or suffered whatever punishment for their sins – or even if they didn’t: she harboured no persistent hatred towards them, no desire whatever for vengeance… They were merely bodies, sea slugs or an assortment of soft-bodied machines…
Now, though, they started to assume a form: even though she chanted in a purely mechanical fashion, unthinkingly, “forgive them, forgive them their sins, forgive…” the repeated words made them human again and even made her pity them, as if they had urgently had to buy a woman’s body and hand over their money for nothing more than short-lived satisfaction, not something that could by any stretch be called “love”, merely a hole into which they could empty themselves; in doing so they had sinned in some way, debased themselves… Quite why, Natalya could not explain, but that was what she felt.
She’d even once dreamt that all her clients were marching in torpid procession into a dark tunnel somewhere, a cold, lonely place, one after the other, yet each one on his own. It was so odd that she’d woken up and begun to chant, “forgive them, forgive them, their sins, forgive…”
If truth be told, she wasn’t entirely honest in her prayer, and the more she prayed it the more she felt she wasn’t being entirely honest: there was one man in the general crowd gradually flowing into the tunnel who stood out – the man who had asked her to say the prayer, a man whom she knew only by a Russian short name, Dima, but it seemed disrespectful in his case. No, she couldn’t call him that… Dima could be short only for Dmitri… Dmitri… Dmitrievich. As she didn’t know his patronymic that’s what she could call him, after all, why couldn’t a father have the same name as his son? In any case, Natalya felt this was less random than some other name… Dmitri Dmitrievich definitely shouldn’t be among them. That’s how it was from the very first night when Natalya tried to grant his request, and allowed her clients to flow past her eyes while she chanted mechanically to herself, “forgive them their sins… Father, forgive them their sins…” She didn’t bother to recall their faces, their shapes, she merely chanted the words and mused that she didn’t even have to picture them in her mind, because they were all just some among many. Just think how many of them there were in the whole world, one worse than the other… As she somewhat disdainfully and disinterestedly chewed over her prayer, she suddenly spotted Him among them, in the general flow, nodding, walking, as if in chains… Of course, he’d said, “By doing that you’ll be helping us…” us! – by using that word he’d lumped himself among the others. But he shouldn’t be lumped in with them. And the more Natalya said the prayer and tried to pray it as Dmitri-possibly-Dmitrievich had wanted – for all of them – the more she felt she was thinking only of one of them, “You, my love, my sweetheart, my darling, you mustn’t go there, Father, forgive him, please forgive him his sins…” but in herself she didn’t feel it was right because she should really have been praying for all of them.
Sofia had a secret that she’d kept from everyone, all her friends, even her mother. At first she hadn’t talked about it because she simply couldn’t – she must still have been too small. Later though, as she grew up, talking about it or thinking that way began to feel thoroughly unseemly. Since she’d been a little girl, she had had the feeling that there are some things you just can’t talk about to anyone. Some intuition, some inner awareness that although some things in life are a lost cause, you shouldn’t tell anyone about them because they would spoil in the telling… And now she was on the cusp of adulthood, it was completely impossible to mention it to anyone because everybody – Estonians and Russians alike – would think she’d lost it completely if she said that since she was a tiny child she had had this feeling inside that she would become the president of the Estonian Republic.
First it was impossible because she was female. Although actually, the Finns now had a woman president – and didn’t the Latvians have one too? Be that as it may, she couldn’t imagine the Estonians having one. And that was the least of it. Perhaps it wouldn’t be such a big deal that she didn’t have a real family – only a mother who, to cap it all, was an unskilled worker. What did it matter that her mother said that Sofia’s father had been the best, most beautiful person, and would never have abandoned them if he’d known she was expecting his daughter? That was her mother’s story, the one her mother wanted to believe… No, that wasn’t such a biggie; these days half the kids had absent fathers – they’d left or just weren’t around, no one knew how many there were. The killer factor was that she was Russian, and not from a long-established Russian family. Yes, admittedly, Kuperjanov was Russian, but Kuperjanov had won freedom for the Estonians whereas she, Sofia, had come as an occupier from somewhere beyond the Urals, from somewhere in Siberia, the place where Estonians had been sent in exile. Despite the fact that she’d been born here her roots were in Siberia. Even her surname – Tomskaya – was almost a reference to the place where Estonians were deported. No, the Estonians would have to be completely out of their minds to make someone like her their president… The earliest it might happen would be in thirty years’ time – certainly no sooner – but in all likelihood it would be more than forty: you couldn’t
be president before you were forty-five because there was an age restriction, or to put it more accurately a youth restriction, but by and large presidents were all of a similar age the world over… What would have to be the matter with the Estonians for them to elect her as their president? Perhaps there’d have to be so few of them left that they would be almost dying out and it would be all the same to them if the president were a woman or black or even Russian. It wouldn’t be like there was a real president any more. Perhaps the Estonians would again get to the point they’d reached when the Russian forces had invaded and made Vares president, the poet with the bird’s name – the one who topped himself or was bumped off. Sofia had no ambition to be that type of president, of course, or to be like any other historical Estonian figure, yet Kuperjanov did retain some attraction for her. Although not a genuine Russian, he was at least a Russian Estonian, but he’d fought for Estonia’s independence and had had the good fortune to die young and no one took exception to his having a Russian name…
Nonetheless the fact remained that when the next Independence Day came along and the TV showed the military parade followed later in the evening by the president’s speech from a national venue, Sofia was left with two worries and convinced herself that she wouldn’t be up to it – she was bound to stumble when inspecting the troops or trip up over her words, and she couldn’t make that kind of speech and what was more, she didn’t want to. She didn’t like standing up in front of her class, let alone wanting to be on the TV. There would be loads of people picking up on every little slip and gloating over them all. Besides, who could force her if she really didn’t want to?
Independence Day, with its snow or cold and the military parade, always brought four words to her mind – the Battle of Paju – words that seemed to embody all the elements of the Estonia’s independence: a cold, snowy, bare field… and blood… There was no way that she, as a woman living her life now, would want to be anyone like Kuperjanov – because she’d turn out like Joan of Arc – as a woman she definitely did not want to be a heroic figure in that mould. On the other hand she would definitely want to be someone who could be relied on… And there’d been that dream of hers that had worried her: a dream she’d had when she was still very small, before she could read or write, or even really knew anything very much about either the Estonians or their presidents.