by Fiona Neill
“Don’t you think women should sign a nonproliferation of depilation treaty, Ali?” Izzy had said after she told her this story. “Or the boy who wrote it should be given a Brazilian?”
“The latter sounds more practical,” Ali had said, and laughed.
Ali smiled as she recalled this conversation. Now that Izzy was eating more, she was less moody. Although she had confessed to Ali that she still kept a diary in which she recorded everything that she consumed, including the number of times she brushed her teeth each day, because toothpaste contained calories, she said she hadn’t deviated from the target weight set by the counselor. Most important, she had stopped visiting the awful pro-ana websites.
Ali was reassured by her openness because she had read enough on the Internet to know that secrecy was one of the main components of anorexia. And although Bryony didn’t see it this way, Izzy’s imperfect appearance was a good measure of the distance she had put between herself and her eating disorder. It was Bryony who told Ali that anorexia and perfectionism went hand in hand, but she didn’t seem to be able to apply the reverse logic to her own daughter.
“She’s put on weight,” said Sophia, as she led Ali back into the hall and suggested that she go downstairs into the kitchen to find Katya. Ali was about to explain that it was a terrible idea to say something like that within earshot of a girl climbing out of the abyss of an eating disorder. But she stopped herself because she realized Sophia was fishing for information to confirm the diagnosis.
“I’ll just say a quick hello,” said Ali, who had avoided being alone with Katya since the summer.
• • •
Katya was in the basement kitchen, cooking. She was cutting beetroot and cabbage on a chopping board, her precision seemingly uncompromised by the speed of the knife. Her hands were blood red with juice. On the cooker two large, spicy-smelling sausages were slow-frying in a pan.
“Hello, stranger,” she said, coming over to hug Ali. “I’m making borscht. It’s Thomas’s favorite. He must be the only three-year-old in London who chooses beetroot soup over fish fingers. I swear his soul is Ukrainian.”
Ali listened halfheartedly. When it came to Thomas, Katya was worse than the most indulgent mother or obsessed lover.
“Maybe Sophia ate lots of beetroot when she was breast-feeding,” Ali suggested.
“She didn’t breast-feed,” said Katya a little too quickly. “I fed Thomas bottled milk.”
“I just came down to say hello,” said Ali, pointing at the staircase. “I’m going to come back to collect Izzy later. Bryony’s just arrived home.”
“You don’t need to explain,” Katya said in her curious clipped accent. She continued chopping, the knife now gliding expertly backward and forward across an onion. There were no tears. Her hair was tied back off her face, and she was wearing a simple vest top and black miniskirt. The ingredients and saucepans were lined up in orderly fashion beside the cooker as though trying to impress her with their cooperation.
There was no recipe book. Unlike Malea, who had taken to Delia Smith’s How to Cook as if it were a sacred text, and then refused to deviate, Katya cooked from memory and instinct. She tore up parsley, sprinkled it into the stock, leaning over to sniff the aroma, then chopped up a clove of garlic and did the same thing again.
She had a smooth way of moving that reminded Ali of treacle sliding off a spoon.
Ali couldn’t stop watching her. She wondered whether Katya was conscious of the attention she attracted. And even though she meant to leave straightaway, Ali found herself perching on a stool beside the kitchen island, observing her as she cooked and talked about Thomas. Even when she dropped a small spice jar on the floor and bent down to pick it up, it seemed part of a single fluid movement. She was liquid. No wonder Sophia Wilbraham’s husband wanted to slide into her at any opportunity.
Ali had never got beyond the front door of the Wilbrahams’ house before, and she was taken aback to find that the kitchen was almost an exact replica of the one she had just left behind a couple of streets away. The stove was a different color. The worktop was a slightly darker shade of granite. But the layout was so familiar that when she opened the cupboard to the side of the staircase, she knew she would find plates on the bottom shelf and soup bowls on the top.
“She used the same architect and interior decorator,” said Katya, noticing Ali’s expression. “If I had so much money I would try and be more original, but Sophia has big crush on Bryony.” She shrugged.
“I thought they loathed each other,” said Ali.
“Love and hate often sleep in the same bed, don’t you think?” Katya said.
Which bed do you sleep in? Ali wondered. Then she reproached herself. She wanted limited engagement. Low-intensity conversation. A frugality of detail that was totally at odds with Katya’s personality. She knew Bryony would be at home, waiting to discuss the daybook. Ali had written a week’s worth of notes the previous evening. She had used a different-colored pen for each day, and had recklessly embellished incidents involving the twins and details about Izzy’s progress at school, as much for her own entertainment as to assuage Bryony’s curiosity about the life her children led when apart from her. But Katya always posed more questions than she answered, and Ali always found it difficult to resist.
“Isn’t she always being rude about Bryony?” Ali asked.
“Absolutely,” said Katya. “She criticizes Bryony for neglecting her children in favor of her career, for wanting publicity, for the vanity of having a personal trainer, the amount of money she spends on clothes, the twins’ behavior . . . everything. But really she wants to be her. It’s because she is uncertain about the decisions she has made about her own life.”
It was an unusually charitable analysis of her employer. Perhaps Katya felt more sympathy for Sophia now that she was having an affair with her husband. Ali thought back to Will MacDonald and remembered how at the peak of their relationship, when lack of detection made them ever more bold (she had started regularly visiting him at his office, they had sex in the bed he shared with his wife, and they went to the cinema a couple of times), she was ever more friendly to his wife. At one point she even imagined his wife knew about their relationship and condoned it because it made him happier and therefore easier to live with.
“I know that you saw us,” Katya said suddenly, as she poured the rest of the ingredients into the stock and turned round to face Ali. Ali nodded, acknowledging the truth of her statement but unsure how exactly to respond. So she did what her father did when he found himself in a tight corner, and said nothing because people couldn’t tolerate silence.
“He’s in love with me,” Katya explained. She said it neutrally, so that it was impossible to gauge her feelings about the situation. There was no evidence of joy or unhappiness. Was Katya in love with him? Or was she merely tolerating his love for her? Did she think she might be fired if she turned him down? Ali was still running through these scenarios in her head when Katya came over and sat down on a stool beside her and put her hand on her forearm.
Ali looked nervously toward the staircase, worried that Sophia might be coming downstairs, but she could hear her barking orders at the quartet through the ceiling. “Andante, andante, andante,” she bellowed.
“Ned is going to leave her,” Katya said, her finger pointing up to the sitting room above, “and we are going to move in together.”
“You can’t do that,” said Ali firmly.
“It is what Ned wants.” Katya shrugged. She closed her eyes and nodded sagely, as though she had spoken some inviolable truth.
“Is it what you want?”
“She is looking for a new nanny, Ali. She wants me out of here.”
“But that isn’t something binary, Katya.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that just because Sophia wants to r
eplace you, it doesn’t mean that you should move in with her husband. It’s what we call fucked-up logic.”
“He is in love with me,” Katya repeated.
“Are you in love with him?”
“Yes,” said Katya unconvincingly. Ali tried a new tack.
“What about Thomas? It will make him so unhappy if his parents get divorced.”
“Ned and I will get married. I will become Thomas’s stepmother. I will always be part of his life.” It sounded as though she was in a language class, practicing her use of the future tense.
“He might eventually resent you for breaking up the marriage between his father and mother. Have you thought about that?”
“Thomas and I have a special bond. He loves me.”
“And what about Sophia?”
“She will find someone else. Ned will give her money. He is a very rich man,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone. “Ali, be happy. This is a very good option for me.”
“Are you doing this because you are worried that if you lose your job then you won’t see Thomas anymore?” Ali asked.
“Of course,” said Katya.
“But that isn’t a good reason,” Ali persisted. “Have you told Mira?”
“Of course.”
“What did she say?”
“She understands my struggle because it is also her struggle,” Katya said enigmatically. “You are very nice person, Ali, but you can’t put yourself in my boots.”
“Shoes,” Ali corrected her. “I can’t put myself in your shoes.”
“Do you know the story of how we came here?” Katya asked. She went to the fridge, took out a bottle of wine, and poured Ali a glass. Ali looked down at her watch and saw that it was almost a quarter to nine. She might as well wait for Izzy to finish and then go home.
“I’ve always felt that you and Mira didn’t really want to talk about it,” Ali said. “But I’d love to hear it.”
Katya stared straight ahead at a point located in the middle of the fridge. Ali assumed she was trying to collect her thoughts, struggling to remember an event that took place years earlier. But as Katya began to tell her story, Ali realized that it was as though she was describing something taking place before her right now. It was so vivid that she slipped into the present tense.
“I come from a village in northern Ukraine, southeast of Odessa. My family is very poor. My father leaves us, so I go to Kiev to find a job working in a bar. But I earn less than two hundred dollars a month. One day a man comes to the bar and says he is looking for girls to go and work in Europe as nannies. The man owns a travel agency in the center of Kiev. He tells me that he can get me a fake Czech passport and that I can get a student visa and work for a family in Western Europe because I speak English. He shows me pictures of different families and children, and e-mails they sent with details of the job.”
The soup on the cooker had started to boil. Bubbles of purple liquid erupted on the surface, sending small jets onto the stove that Katya didn’t seem to notice.
“I was seventeen. I was studying English in university during the day and working all night. I was so tired that I couldn’t sleep, my vision was blurred, and I was losing weight. This man wanted to help me. Wouldn’t you have done the same?”
“Yes,” said Ali, who made a point of agreeing with Katya whenever possible. “So is that how you met Mira?”
“I didn’t know Mira then.” Katya paused for a moment and released Ali’s arm. Ali looked down and saw red marks where Katya’s fingers had pressed into her flesh.
“In September 1998, I meet this man at his office. There are six other girls. One of them I know from university. He points at posters of the Acropolis, Big Ben, and Florence on the wall and tells us that within a week we will be in Europe. We set off together in the middle of the night, heading for Poland. There are two Czech drivers. They teach us how to say our name in Czech and how to say hello so that we don’t have problems crossing into Poland. We drive through the night. I worry about the passport they have given me because the ink is smudged.
“We eat some of the food we have brought with us, and we hide any money we have in our shoes because they say it will be taken from us at the border. I have one hundred dollars. When we get to the border they give us our Czech passports and we cross to the other side, and then they take them away from us again.”
Katya stopped and picked up her handbag from the floor. She drew out a small leather purse and pulled out two fifty-dollar bills from the side.
“This is the money. I keep it to remind me where I come from and what I had to do to get to where I am.” Then she took the bills, ironed them flat with her hand before carefully folding them into four and putting them back inside the wallet again. This had obviously been repeated so many times that Ulysses Grant’s features were completely impressionistic.
“Once we cross the border we go in a different vehicle with different drivers. Two more girls join us. There are other men with us. I don’t talk to anyone. Not even the girl from university. We are so afraid people might hear us. We travel at night. Sometimes we stop in a wood to sleep. When we reach the Czech border we are divided into small groups so we don’t draw attention to ourselves. I am lucky because the passport they have given me has two German stamps in it. One of the girls is refused entry, and they just leave her. I wish it is me, because I don’t trust the people we are with.”
“So where were you now?” Ali asked, wishing she had paid more notice to the geography of central Europe when she was at school.
“Czech Republic,” said Katya patiently. “More cars pick us up. I am back with the original group of girls. This time the drivers speak Russian. We leave the border, and we drive for maybe two days. My food has run out. We stop once at a garage and I manage to fill my water bottle. Then that afternoon the car turns off the road and we go down a track through a forest.”
Ali noticed that Katya’s hands had begun to shake. Upstairs she could hear raised voices. Someone shouted. Footsteps stamped across the floor. A door slammed. Then there was silence. She should go up, but nothing seemed more important than listening to Katya, who was oblivious to the commotion above.
“I think they are going to kill us. One of the girls starts crying. The men just laugh and offer us vodka, but all of us refuse. I have paid one thousand dollars for the passport in Kiev, and they start saying that I owe them more money for organizing the journey. They tell me that I will have to work for them until I have paid them back. I tell them I have a job as a nanny in England, and they laugh in my face.”
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?” Ali asked.
“Because I look forward, not backward,” said Katya, “and sometimes if I talk about it I have nightmares.”
“Would you rather stop now, then?” Ali asked. Katya shook her head, closed her eyes, and began talking again.
“We reach a river. It is so wide you can’t see the other side, and we wait there until it is dark. They get drunk and forget to take back the passports. Then they put the car on a raft and we get inside and the raft sets off across the water. It is so bumpy that some of us are sick. I put my passport in a plastic bag and hide it down my trousers. We have almost reached the other side when the raft hits something in the water and turns over. Two of the girls drown. They can’t swim, and it is so cold. They scream for me to help them, but there is nothing I can do. I see them go underwater, and then they are quiet. I hear people calling us, and I try to swim toward their voices. The current is strong, but I manage to get to the riverbank. When I get out I find another group of Ukrainians. One of them is Mira.
“The man from the car comes over and says that I belong to him and they should hand me over. Mira argues with him in Russian. In the end she gives him two hundred dollars to let me go with her group. The other two girls stay with him. Mira’s guide te
lls me the man I escaped from was working for a group of Ukrainians who traffic women to work in the sex industry. There were no jobs as nannies. It is all lies. My friend from university was never seen again. Her parents have never heard from her. They think she was maybe taken to Athens and forced to work as a prostitute. Or maybe Israel. Or England.”
“That is so awful, Katya,” Ali said.
“It is the way of the world. Since the fall of communism women have just become another commodity. Like oil and gas.”
“Does Ned know all this?”
“Ned wants a woman who will look after him and make him feel good about himself. Anyway, my experience is worse than some but better than most. I am free.”
“What happened to the man who trafficked you?” Ali asked. “Was he caught?”
“The man who owned the travel agency?” Katya asked. Ali nodded. “He is now one of the richest men in Ukraine. He’s one of Bryony’s clients, actually.”
“How do you know that?” Ali asked.
“Ned told me.”
“How does he know about Bryony’s clients?”
“From Nick.”
“But they hardly ever see each other.”
“They talk on the phone,” said Katya. She paused for emphasis. “A lot, a lot.”
15
On her way back to number ninety-seven, Ali’s phone rang. Izzy was in the middle of a tirade about Sophia Wilbraham, which Ali was diplomatically ignoring, although she sympathized completely with its sentiment. She could easily have derailed the diatribe with a couple of questions, but she was too intrigued to hear about what had occurred upstairs. Besides, it provided a useful counterpoint to distract her from what Katya had just told her. Ali looked down at the screen, saw it was her mother, and decided to let it go on to voice mail, where it joined the other drifts of messages her parents had left over the past couple of months.