Strawberry Fields

by Marina Lewycka

  “There’ll be too many people around in the morning. It’s easier to find somewhere now. Let’s go now.”

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “I don’t know. Anywhere. Maybe we could find somewhere a bit nearer to the restaurant.”

  So he gets a bit of brick and hammers off the padlock on the bar gate. It comes off quite easily. In fact, she is right—driving around at night is better. He even gets up into fourth gear once, without going into reverse. He remembers a quiet side street not far from the back of the restaurant where there are sometimes a few cars parked. That will do for now. It is only a temporary place. Soon he will move on.

  After that incident with the children, Andriy got even more moody. I tried to make jokes and cheer him up, but each day that passed he just got more grumpy and kept saying he would be going to Sheffield as soon as we got our first week’s wages.

  I already had about eighty pounds from tips left on the tables. I tried to share them with him, but he shook his head and said, no, keep it, frowning like a belly ache and saying he was tired of this job, and anyway he would soon be going to Sheffield. What was the matter with him? He wasn’t still sulking about that twenty-pound note, was he?

  So I went back to the shop with the sale and I bought a different blouse that wasn’t so low cut. I thought that would make him happy, but it didn’t. He said it was still too low, and my skirt was too short. Why was he being so boring? It’s a nice skirt, only a bit above my knees, good cut, lovely silky lining, and reduced to less than half price just because the button was missing, which I soon fixed. Also it has a deep pocket, which is handy for tips. I saw there was no pleasing him. If he doesn’t like my clothes, that’s his problem. Why doesn’t he just go to Sheffield, instead of hanging around getting on my nerves?

  Next morning, I decided to walk over to the Ukrainian consulate to get a new passport. I still had some money left from tips, so I looked in on that first very expensive clothes shop. Really, the prices on the clothes—they just took your breath away. I spent an hour trying things, trying other things, looking in the mirror. I never made it to the consulate. There was one pair of trousers, thirty pounds, reduced from one hundred and twenty. They were black, low-cut, and tight-tight. Actually, they looked fantastic. I knew Andriy would really hate them.

  I stopped by at the trailer, but Andriy had already left for the restaurant, and that’s when I noticed that there was some kind of yellow and black label stuck on the windshield of the Land Rover. I peeled it off and put it in my pocket to show him. And there seemed to be something fixed onto the front wheel of the Land Rover, and also to the trailer wheel. That was strange. No doubt he would know how to get it off. We were busy that lunchtime so I didn’t get a chance to talk to him. Anyway, he was looking so grumpy I just kept out of his way.

  Then someone else came into the restaurant, and that made things even worse.

  It was just before three o’clock, the end of the lunchtime shift, and some of the staff had already gone. There were only two customers left in the restaurant: a young couple finishing their meal. Then a man came in on his own and sat down at one of the window tables—the same one where Mr. Twenty Pounds had sat. I didn’t recognize him at first, but he recognized me straightaway.

  “Irina?”

  He was young and dark, with very short hair. He was wearing a dark gray business suit, a white-white shirt with a big gold watch peeping out under the cuff, and a blue and pink patterned tie. Quite attractive, in fact.

  “Vitaly?”

  He smiled. “Hello.”

  “Hey, Vitaly! How much you’ve changed.”

  “What you doing here, Irina?”

  “Earning money, of course. How about you?”

  “Earning money too. Good money.” He took a tiny mobile phone out of his pocket and flipped up the lid. “Recruitment consultant, dynamic employment solution cutting edge”—he did a little slicing movement with his hand—“organizational answer for all you flexible staffing need. Better money than strawberry.”

  Okay, I admit I was impressed.

  “Recruitment consultant? What is that?”

  “Oh, it just means finding a job for some person. Or finding some person for a job. I am always on look out for new arrivals to fill exciting vacancies.”

  “You can find a job?”

  He pointed his phone at me and pressed a few buttons.

  “I can find very first-class job for you, Irina. Excellent pay. Good clean work. Luxury accommodation provided. And my friend Andriy. I have a good job for him also. Near Heathrow Airport. Is he here?”

  “He is working in the kitchen. Kitchen hand.”

  “Kitchen hand. Hm.” He shook his head with a little smile. “Irina, you, Andriy…you make possibility?”

  “Vitaly, why you are asking this?” I said. Then he reached up and took my hand and looked at me with his dark-dark eyes in a way that made me shiver. “Irina, all time I am thinking about you.”

  I blushed. It sounded so romantic. Was he serious? I didn’t know what to say. I took my hand away, in case Andriy was watching.

  “Vitaly, tell me about this job. What kind of work is this?”

  “Very first class. Gourmet cuisine. Top-notch international company desperately seeking reliable and motivated replacement staff.” His voice was deep, and the way he pronounced those long words in English sounded incredibly cultured. “Food preparation contract for major airline near Heathrow Airport.”

  Yes, ever since man first lifted his head above the mouth of the cave to gaze upon the heavenly stars, and thought how pleasing it would be to have one such star exclusively for himself, it has been the dream of man to get others to work for him, and to pay them as little as possible. And no man has been pursuing this dream more dynamically than Vitaly himself. He has spent the day trawling through the bars and restaurants of London looking for the right kind of people. The new arrivals, the confused, the desperate, the greedy. You can make good money out of people like that.

  For as that brainy beardy Karl Marx said, no person can ever build up a fortune just by his own labor, but in order to become VIP elite rich you must appropriate the labor of others. In pursuit of this dream, many ingenious human solutions have been applied throughout the millennia, from slavery, forced labor, transportation, indentured labor, debt bondage, and penal colonies, right through to casualization, zero-hours contract, flexible working, no-strike clause, compulsory overtime, compulsory self-employment, agency working, subcontracting, illegal immigration, outsourcing, and many other such maximum-flexibility organizational advances. And spearheading this permanent revolutionization of the work process has been the historic role of the dynamic-edge cutting-employment solution recruitment consultant. Not enough people appreciate this.

  This is why despite the exclusive hand-tailored charcoal gray pure wool suit, the state-of-the-art Nokia N94i nestled in his pocket and the genuine Rolex Explorer II winking boldly from under his cuff, he still feels sadly unappreciated. What you need, he thinks, is a girl to share your good fortune with—a pretty, clean, good-class girl, not a painted-up cheap-rent girl; an innocent girl, whom you can train in the art of love the way you like it; nice looking enough to attract envy from other men, but not so nice looking that she will run off with the next chancer with a Nokia N95ii and a Rolex Daytona. What you need is a girl who can reassure you that, really, you are a good man. A dynamic man. A VIP. Not a criminal. Not a loser. And here she is, the very girl you’ve been dreaming of, smiling sweetly as she pours you a second glass of chilled Sauvignon Blanc. Really, this is a very nice wine—one of the nice little perks of the business. And—here is the real tragedy of it—even as you gaze into the silky hollow between her lovely breasts, a businesslike voice in the back of your head tells you: You could make good money out of this girl.

  For if you have grown up in the faraway Dniester valley in a provincial town nestled on a bend in the river that divides Moldova from the Republic of Transdniest
ria—where the only law is the gun, where your father and two of your brothers were shot down in the main street near your home for refusing to pay protection money, and your third brother was killed in the war of secession, and your mother died of sorrow at the age of forty-two when your house was razed to the ground, and your two younger sisters have been traded by a Kosovan wide-boy to a massage parlor in Peckham—if you grow up in a place like Bendery, it toughens you up a bit.

  Ah, Bendery! Whose desolate Soviet–era concrete blocks conceal a feral heart; whose alleys smell of blocked drains and frying garlic; whose sunsets glow like fire through the burned-out windows of the buildings near the bridge; whose wide river laps in silvery ripples along those sandy banks where from time to time a corpse is washed ashore; in whose forests the ghosts still sigh; whose streets have run with blood. Ah, Bendery! His eyes go misty with bittersweet pain. He gazes at the opening of Irina’s blouse. Once, he had a girl like this in Bendery. Rosa. The school librarian’s daughter. She was fifteen and a virgin. So was he. Her eyes were dark and gleaming with promises. They met after school in a secret glade on the riverbank. Probably she, too, is in Peckham now.

  Once, in a different kind of time, Vitaly had been the bright hope of his family, the student, the dreamer of great dreams, the apple of his mother’s eye. He would most likely have grown up to be a lawyer or a politician, had he not lived in Bendery, and had he not come across that life-changing book, locked away in a school cupboard full of out-of-favor texts, some dating back eighty years or more, which the librarian was keeping hidden just in case any of them should ever come back into favor again. Probably they are still there.

  He had just turned sixteen when Transdniestria seceded from Moldova in 1992 over the issue of language. Cyrillic versus Roman. He had joined the patriots, of course, along with his brothers, but his heart wasn’t in it and he managed to keep out of the worst of the fighting, even though Bendery, which lies on the west bank of the Dniester River and is joined to the rest of Transdniestria only by a bridge, had been in the front line of the civil war. Two thousand lives lost, his oldest brother’s among them, hundreds of homes burned out, theirs among them, over how a language should be written. Okay, he was a patriot as much as the next man, but he just didn’t think it was an issue worth getting himself killed for. Some know-it-alls said it was really about politics—about whether it was time to say good-bye to their Russian-dominated past and cozy up with Westward-leaning Romania. And others said that it was just a tribal war between rival gangster families. Probably each person had his own reasons for getting involved, and some had no reason to but still did.

  After the truce, when life got back to an abnormal sort of normal, he tried for a few years to make a go of it in the family construction business. He really tried. He worked all hours, humping bricks and mixing concrete, laying pipes and drains, hammering in doors and windows, and paying protection money all the while. But after his father and his younger brothers were shot dead in the main street of Bendery by a henchman of one of those gangsters for daring to question a hike in the protection fee, he realized that work was for losers, and the wily old grizzle-jaws was right (probably that’s why those dangerous books had to be locked away) and if you want to join the elite, you have to learn to tap into other people’s labor, and let them make you rich. Harvest the efforts of the others—the losers. It is the only way.

  So he got in touch with that Kosovan phony-asylum-seeker wide-boy who had transported his sisters, and offered to get four girls for him in exchange for a passage to England. In the event, he could find only three, the two daughters of his impoverished former English teacher at school, who had been sacked for refusing to teach English in the Cyrillic alphabet, and a deaf-and-dumb girl who sold pickled mushrooms in the market. The Kosovan wide-boy got them all Greek passports, and Vitaly escorted them on the ferry to Dover, where the wide-boy, who was working under the name of Mr. Smith, took the girls off his hands and introduced him to his uncle, Vulk, who had once run a similar business in Slovenia and Germany, who introduced him to farmer Leapish, who made the mistake of introducing him to his wife (ha ha), who introduced him to Jim Nightingale of Nightingale Human Solutions. That’s how it works in the world of business—you need contacts, and if you have the right contacts you can sell anything.

  And now, look, only four months later, here you are, sitting at the best table in this expensive London restaurant, wearing a good-class expensive suit (the shaved head and gold chain with pendant knife belonged to a different phase, which may have given a wrong impression to some Angliski businessmen), with a genuine Rolex Explorer II, not one of those replicas that any fool can see is fake, enjoying a glass of reassuringly expensive super-chilled New Zealand Blind River Sauvignon Blanc while waiting for your client to arrive, taking a picture of this attractive and potentially very expensive girl on your expensive Nokia N94i, and facing the pleasant dilemma of whether to keep her for yourself or sell her on to someone else. You know a couple of guys who might be interested if you send them her picture.

  For in Bendery, girls as pretty and innocent as this used to be two a penny, in fact you yourself deflowered several of them—that was after Rosa, after the war, after all the killings—and you’ve been thinking recently that spending so much money on the visibles, the suits, watches, phones, girls, is all very well, and probably an essential investment for creating the right brand image for the business, but if you want to be seriously wealthy, you can’t just spend it all, you need to accumulate and invest, to build your capital, and property is hellishly expensive here in London. And you could really do with the cash.

  Not enough people appreciate what a struggle it has been—what a lonely struggle—rooting yourself out of that nowhere town on the borders of an unrecognized republic that is really nothing but a strip of countryside with half a dozen little towns sandwiched dangerously between the east bank of the Dniester River and the western border of Ukraine, and establishing yourself as an advanced motivational human solution recruitment consultant here in the bona fide Western world; they don’t understand how dynamic you have to be, and sometimes how ruthless, and how lonely it is not being able to trust anyone, no one at all, because every other chancer will take their opportunity to knock you down and steal your business, and your closest business partners are also your deadliest rivals.

  For in the transition from the old world to the new, as that cunning old bushy-beard wrote, all fixed, fast, frozen relations are swept away, all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and a man has to face up to his real choices in life and his relations with others. For in this new world, there are only rivals and losers. And, of course, women.

  She sidles up to him with that infuriating smile.

  “Andriy. Vitaly’s here. Vitaly from the strawberry field.”

  “Where?”

  This is all he needs. The mobilfonman coming to taunt him as he stands with his hands in the sink.

  “Here. Here in the restaurant. Sitting by the window.”

  “What does he want?”

  “He says he has a job for us. A first-class job. Gourmet cuisine near Heathrow Airport.”

  Andriy feels the anger rising in his face.

  “Irina, if you want to go with Vitaly, that is up to you. I have no interest in that job.”

  He gropes in the hot caustic water and grabs at a couple of slippery plates, noticing how red and raw his hands have become.

  “He says the pay is good. And the work is clean. Maybe it will be better for you, Andriy. Better than kitchen hand.”

  “He knows I am kitchen hand?”

  “I told him we were working to earn some money. At least go and talk to him.”

  “What else did you tell him?”

  Really, it’s not her fault, this girl. She doesn’t understand anything.

  “I don’t know. What’s the matter with you, Andriy? He is trying to help us.”

  “He is trying to help only himself.”
He dries his hands on a damp cloth. “Did you pour his drink for him, Irina? Did you let him look inside your blouse?”

  “Stop it, Andriy. Why are you like this?”

  “Did he show you his mobilfon?”

  “Just go and say hello. He’s your friend, isn’t he?”

  “I’ll say what I want to say.”

  He stacks the slimy plates on the rack and kicks open the swinging door to the dining room. He looks around. Vitaly is sitting at one of the tables in the window. He is sipping wine and fiddling ostentatiously with his mobilfon. Where did he get that fancy suit? Suddenly the street door of the restaurant bursts open and another man strides in—a tall man with a shaved head and an ugly scar across his cheek and lip. Poised by the kitchen door, Andriy watches, rapt, as the scar-cheek man spots Vitaly, moves across the room, and positions himself in front of Vitaly’s table. Andriy is sure he’s seen him before, but he can’t remember where. Irina is in the kitchen, hiding out of the way. Now here comes Zita, looking around for Irina, who should be out there offering the new customer a drink.

  The scar-face man says—his voice is so loud that everybody can hear—“Where is she?”

  “She is somewhere here,” Vitaly says. “Please sit down.”

  “You owe me one girl, dead-boy. You promise four, and you only bring three.”

  “Please, Smitya, sit,” says Vitaly in a quiet voice. “We can discuss everything. Have a drink.” He beckons to Zita.

  “Those Chinese bitches you sell me. Neither one was virgin. I got burned.”

  Now Andriy remembers where he has seen him before. Vitaly holds his hands out in a gesture of placation. “Okay. We can make deal, my friend. I have proposition for you.”

  “Just show me the girl.”

  “In a minute. She is here. Sit down. I will fetch her.”

  Andriy has broken into a sweat. His body is taut with rage. If he had his gun in his hand he would just shoot Vitaly dead right now, he thinks. But he steps back quietly behind the half-open kitchen door where Vitaly can’t see him. Irina has melted away somewhere.