The Faces of Strangers

by Pia Padukone

  A few hours after she returned from St. Petersburg and met Nico, Mari lay in bed staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep. She could hear her father approaching on the stairs, his heavy footsteps nearing her door, and then pausing just outside. She tensed as the floorboards creaked. He continued down the hall toward the good bathroom. She glanced over to her desk, where the framed certificate leaned against a stack of books. “Highest Honors for Eleventh Year of Studies,” it read. “Mari Sokolov.” Not that it mattered.

  The fact was that Tallinn was over. Estonia was over. Every year, the situation got bleaker and more desperate. There were barely any jobs available, unless you wanted to work in mining or the information technology sector, and Mari didn’t want to do either. Instead of discussing makeup and clothes and boys, Mari and her friends discussed exit strategies. What could they do to get them out of Estonia? What path would they take that might lead them to the opportunity that would escort them out of the country? They spoke of politics, of studying abroad, dreaming up grandiose inventions that might bring them glory and fame outside these borders. A few students from the class above hers had succeeded. Laine Laanemaa’s grandfather had left an inheritance so he could attend university in the United States, and Terje Raud’s family had a printing factory in Riga, so she’d left to work there shortly after graduation. Everyone else had stagnated around the city, applying and reapplying for the same handful of jobs. And the gender gap was widening. Mari had read that Estonia had the highest gender pay gap in Europe; men made twice what women did for the same jobs. With the combination of lack of opportunities and only a fraction of the pay, what was the point in even staying here?

  But Mari would soon join the ranks of Laine and Terje. Last October, she and her friends had been hanging out in Freedom Square when a man had approached them. He had been watching them—her, mostly—and she had a raw feeling in the pit of her stomach as he neared. It’s happening, she thought to herself. All those kidnapping drills and no talking to strangers when I was little and it’s finally happening now that I’m seventeen. The man was immaculately dressed, in a blazer that stretched cleanly across his shoulders and lambskin gloves that looked soft as butter as he peeled them off and reached into an inner pocket to retrieve a card. He extended it to her as he stood there amongst her friends and they giggled and whispered around him.

  “I am Viktor. I own a modeling agency in Moscow. Will you come see me for a test?”

  “What kind of a test?”

  “A screen test,” he said, gingerly putting his gloves back on as though he couldn’t stand to touch any surface with his bare hands. “I want to see how you walk.”

  “Why do I need a test for that? I can walk right here. Watch.” She stood up and grabbed a book from a friend’s lap and balanced it on her head. She took a few unsure steps, but willed herself forward, walking almost the whole way to St. John’s Church, where she regained her confidence, sashaying her hips back and forth and waggling her pert bottom to the hoots and whistles of her friends.

  “It’s a bit ungainly. And you are slightly pigeon-toed,” Viktor said. “But I can train you to fix that.” Mari felt a flush spread across her face, and she looked down at her feet, straightening them like alpine skis.

  “Listen, only call me if you’re serious,” Viktor said. “I don’t have time to play games. I need the next Carmen Kass.” That caught her attention. Mari revered Carmen Kass. She was a Järva girl and had been the face of Dior for years. Mari loved the way Carmen floated upon a golden pond in the ads, her face, hair and skin aglow as though she were made of gold herself. Now that was a girl who had figured things out.

  He left then, and Mari shoved the card into the pocket of her jeans, deflecting the attention away from her by joking around with her friends, mimicking Viktor’s pristine gloves and dainty hands. She’d forgotten about the card for the evening, and it made a trip through the washing machine, emerging wrinkled and worn like an artifact, but the numbers were still legible. That business card was Mari’s ticket out.

  One afternoon, she decided to make history. That was how she thought of the call years later—just as Gavrilo Princip had decided to load his Belgian-made semiautomatic on the morning that he fatally shot the Archduke and set the first great world war spiraling into action. Only this time, there was no motorcade preceding her decision, no pomp and circumstance. The only sound was from the drone of the Cyprus-France football game projecting up the stairs from the den below. She could hear Paavo’s quiet but insistent protests against a poor pass muffled beneath Leo’s more aggressive jeers. She smoothed the card under her palm and dialed the number before she could change her mind. That call spurred the trip to the Mustamäe office, which was nothing more than a few square white rooms with a desk, a video camera and a still one perched on a tripod. This was his makeshift office, Viktor told her. He wasn’t hoping to have to spend much time in Tallinn. It was a tertiary market. Milan, London, Paris and New York were where all the action was. Even Moscow trailed behind. He hoped to find the next Carmen Kass, he reminded her. He hoped it might be her.

  In his temporary office, Mari did in fact perform a series of walks in front of Viktor and his discerning assistant, Eva. “Be nice to Eva,” Viktor warned Mari from the beginning. “She’s rough around the edges, but she’s my booker. You’ll have to bend over backward to make her happy so that she sends you to the right places to make you happy.” Mari was filmed walking in a straight line with a book on her head, holding stacks of them in her arms and again while wearing high heels. She was measured: height, waist, bust.

  “Very good,” Eva said without a trace of satisfaction, scribbling the numbers onto an index card. “A ten-inch difference between waist and hips. Maintain that, and you’re golden in this business.” Eva positioned Mari in front of the open window so that Viktor could scrutinize her face from every angle. He stood so close to her that Mari could smell his tangy breath. It felt as if he’d been staring at her for hours. Was he counting her pores? This is the best light, he told her. Natural light. No lighting designer can replicate it.

  She hadn’t told her parents anything about any of it. Not the fact that she’d been approached or that she’d followed up. She returned from the office triumphant and glowing, wielding a thin stack of stapled papers in her hands. Once she signed on with Viktor and his team, they would coach, shape and polish her facets so that she sparkled like the diamond he knew she could be instead of the one in the rough he had seen in Freedom Square. But since she was underage, the contract had to be cosigned by a parent. It had taken a few days to convince Leo to even look at it, but after some negotiations on Mari’s part, he put on his reading glasses and studied the papers line by line.

  “There’s no way you’re working your first assignment for free,” he thundered. “You have to repay him after you’ve earned the overhead? What kind of business is that? So help me, Mari, if I ever even hear the word nude, I will pull the plug on this whole operation. Do you understand me?” Mari had nodded, but it wasn’t enough. Leo had insisted on accompanying Mari to meet Viktor in Mustamäe so he could show off his breadth and the crushing grip of his handshake. Leo ensured the contract had been amended to his liking, and then Viktor, true to his word, had gotten to work, sending Mari out into the world.

  NICO

  Tallinn

  September 2002

  This wasn’t technically Nico’s first time in the world. He had traveled a fair amount with his parents. When the kids were younger, the Grands had visited all-inclusive resorts in Cancun, Nassau and Negril, with swim-up bars, eat-until-you-burst tropical fruit buffets and camp-like activities for the kids so that Stella and Arthur could snatch a few hours for themselves. Nico could conjure up the plastic scent of his water wings before he learned to swim. He could recall the time that Nora’s nose had turned so bright red—it was the one spot on her entire body she’d forgotten to apply sunscr
een—that Nico called her Rudolph for the rest of their time in Puerto Vallarta. As the kids grew older, the family ventured further, pushing themselves into activities rather than lolling on beaches. They camped in Yellowstone Park, hiked in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco and biked the lavender-scented hills of Provence. But as he’d always taken these adventures with his family, they remained a strong tether to his identity along the way. Whether he was sampling galettes stuffed with mushrooms that the Grands had harvested together from the woods outside their rented bungalow in Nevache Valley, or throwing tomatoes during the La Tomatina festival in Buñol, he was Nicholas Grand from the moment he buckled his seat belt on his way to the time he disembarked from the plane on the way home.

  So it was strange to be remade in a mere few hours, to morph from one person to another. It was as though upon landing in Tallinn, Nicholas had been given an immediate makeover, a lobotomy, or even an entirely new brain in the cavity that had held his old one. The morning that he had left for the airport, he had been a wrestler in Div 1, played flute in Orchestral Band, taken a smattering of Advanced Placement classes and teetered on the precipice of popularity. He had been Nicholas. But now he was Nico, no matter how many times he tried to subtly correct Leo, Vera or Paavo. Even Mari had used the short form in the dead of night, when he had been too surprised by her arrival to correct her. While it was only his name that had changed, unlike Shakespeare, Nicholas felt that names did determine one’s lot in life. There had to be a reason that the preppy kids back home at school had welcomed Charlotte James with open arms into their group as Charlie, while Charlotte Zinkoff had loitered on the periphery of a few social groups before redubbing herself Lottie, coloring her hair shades of pink and settling comfortably within the circle of skateboarders who spent most of their days performing ollies outside the doors to the auditorium.

  Nicholas had to admit that while responding to Nico hadn’t been instinctual, the name wasn’t so bad. After telling the Sokolovs that he preferred Nicholas all morning, he decided to let it go. “Nico” was catchy, a new identity. It was one of those experiences that Barbara had said to wholeheartedly embrace. Nico could be a completely different person. It was pretty exciting to start fresh after sixteen years of living in the same identity. Did Nico make the same decisions as Nicholas? Would he assimilate faster into Estonian culture? Did Nico have a driver’s license? A penchant for cigarettes? A girlfriend? What did Nico like? He asked himself as he brushed his teeth in the small half bath next to his den. Perhaps it might be easier to start with what we don’t like, because pet peeves are harder to shake.

  When it came down to it, there weren’t many things that bothered Nico, or even Nicholas for that matter. One of his few pet peeves included Train Blocking, that most heinous of practices in which one stood directly in the center of the open subway doors that might only slide open for thirty seconds or so at each train station before sliding shut. Nicholas couldn’t stand the selfishness of people who stood just inside the car, not moving to one side or another, not disembarking from the train, just standing there like guppies in a fish bowl, expecting passengers to move around them.

  The other one was Slow Walking. Tourists were one thing—at least they had an excuse with their oversize cameras and their giveaway maps, taking everything in as they walked about the city dumbfounded. At least they were appreciating beauty, parts of the city that Nicholas knew intimately—the arches of the roofs of the buildings on Fifth Avenue, the simultaneous majesty and repugnancy of the gargoyles that perched quietly on promontories over their heads. It was the New Yorkers that he couldn’t understand. Didn’t people get tired walking that slowly? Didn’t they have places to get to? Wasn’t this the city that never slept? What wasn’t the rush? Nicholas had learned how to skip-step around them, ducking quickly into the curb in order to overtake a lovey-dovey couple with entwined fingers, or worse, men in suits who looked too important to be ambling along, chatting brashly to one another in grating, raucous tones, relaying highlights from their weekends in the Hamptons.

  As Nicholas and Paavo stepped out of the house on the first day of school, Nicholas braced himself to pace with his exchange partner. It would set the wrong tone to walk ahead of Paavo, as though he were trying to one-up him, when it was simply how fast he walked. Not to mention, Nicholas didn’t know where he was going. But as they stepped onto the street together, Nicholas found himself smiling as he noted Paavo’s long, loping strides.

  “You walk fast,” Nico said, in admiration.

  “We must be on time,” Paavo said, his eyes fixed and focused. “Especially on our first day. We must even be ahead of the clock if we can.” Paavo led the way, but he appeared skittish, his eyes darting this way and that, searching the streets as if he’d dropped a penny, pointing his chin down alleyways and narrowing his eyes at shadows of trees.

  At the crosswalk, as the light was blinking toward red, Paavo came to such a sudden halt that Nico bumped into him.

  “What happened?” he asked. “I thought we couldn’t be late.”

  “The light is red,” he said.

  Nico stared at him. “But there aren’t any cars,” he said, nodding toward the street. Nico had never met anyone so obsessed with punctuality yet so rigidly adamant about obeying the rules. He wondered if it was a remnant of Soviet times. He squeezed his eyes shut and mentally murmured STD to himself. Perhaps Paavo really just didn’t like to be late. Perhaps there was a strict penalty for jaywalking in Estonia. But as soon as the light changed, Paavo picked the pace right off from where he’d dropped it, pulling Nico forward on an invisible chain just behind him. Nico was slightly short of breath as they neared a small bus shelter at the corner of a sleepy park where a few dog walkers herded their charges around on taut leashes.

  Somehow, leaving the house had helped calm Nico’s nerves. After he’d fallen asleep once Mari had gone upstairs, he had dreamed fitfully, waking every hour until the light began to glow from behind the curtains and the house had begun to awaken. He heard the slow, lumbering footfalls that had to be Leo, as he made his way to the kitchen in the morning. Half an hour later, Vera pattered past Nico’s makeshift door. Their conversation traveled down the hallway, Leo’s low ambling drawl paired with Vera’s gentle supportive lilt. Toward the end of dinner the previous night, he thought he was just beginning to understand the difference between Leo’s vehement Russian speech and the rest of the family’s in Estonian. The Russian was hard with consonants, striking against the roof of Leo’s mouth, while the lingering resonance of the doubled and tripled vowels in Estonian resounded like marbles to Nico’s untrained ear.

  Perhaps Nico felt on edge because he had to share a space with Mari, who had made him feel self-conscious and uncomfortable. Or perhaps it was that he really knew nothing in this city, in this country. He didn’t even know how to get to school.

  A bus turned the corner and the boys boarded it in the middle. Paavo handed Nico a ticket and showed him how to punch it in a machine mounted on a pole. Nico looked around at the rest of the riders. The bus wasn’t crowded, but it was full of students and professionals who swayed as the bus made its way up a wide boulevard, flanked on either side by large buildings. Most of the riders were reading books or newspapers while a few others spoke softly to one another. The ride was short—too short for Nico to gather his thoughts and prepare for this first day. When Paavo nodded and moved toward the door, Nico was disappointed.

  The bus left them at Freedom Square, a wide rectangular plaza with a rather hideous glass structure at its west end. Nico turned toward it, but Paavo tut-tutted.

  “We can do the tour later. You have Estonian class.”

  Nico nodded. He arched his neck up to take in the bulb-like domes of the Aleksandr Nevsky Cathedral, an imposing white-and-black building that didn’t appear to fit in with the rest of the decor in Old Town. Rust-colored steeples rose up as though planted centuries ago, beckoning visi
tors to walk the twisted streets dotted with cobblestones to discover the medieval treasures located within their clutches. Nico couldn’t wait to explore, but he trotted obediently behind Paavo as he led the way into the labyrinthine streets. They made a number of turns and switchbacks, and just as Nico was about to say that he would have no idea how to return to the bus station without Paavo’s guidance, they stopped in front of a small, nondescript building with a red door carved into it.

  “Eesti High School,” Paavo said, holding his arms out. The building took up only two stories; Nico marveled at how diminutive it was compared with the Manhattan School of Science and felt a bit saddened by Paavo’s pride. “Come. We go in.”

  * * *

  Nico always felt wrung out by the first day back to school; he’d felt that way since kindergarten. The summer made him anxious—so much could change in those two whole months. The early days of the school year were grace periods for new allegiances to be formed, old ones broken and truces forgotten. Last year, as a sophomore, he’d watched his best friend Toby get edged out from the group of kids he’d called friends since the first day of school. Nico didn’t know what the big deal about those kids was anyway. They wore hiking backpacks ironically and they all had the same floppy dog haircut, even the girls. But over the summer, Nico had invited Toby to hang out with him and his wrestling teammates, who accepted him into their posse as seamlessly as he’d been let go from the first one.

  Nico himself had a patchwork of friends—his wrestling pals, bandmates, arbitrary students in different classes. But he knew that in the early days, he could easily be traded in for a better model, that classmates easily crossed the great chasm from one clique to another. While Nico wasn’t in the golden crew—so called not only because of their flaxen tresses, but also because of where they lived and their families’ statures in society—he wasn’t particularly unpopular, either. He’d had a few innocuous trysts with girls, mostly after downing a few tepid, watery beers at uninspired parties that a few acquaintances had felt they’d had to throw when parents went out of town. And while his virginity was still intact and he’d never really felt any peer pressure to lose it, he continued to feel a cool, somewhat reassuring trepidation when a girl flirted with him, something that seemed to be happening more and more often the longer he spent on the wrestling team.