Box 21 Read Online Free PDF Page B

She had shakenher head. It was just a flag. She still couldn’t understand. Of course they hadn’t given him back his army job afterwards. Once, she remembered it well, when the vodka was finished and his cheeks were flushed and they were all in the room with the stippled wallpaper, surrounded by weapons that were about to be sold, he had noisily demanded explanations, shouted out: ‘What choice did I have? When my children were screaming with hunger and the state wouldn’t help, what the hell was I supposed to do?’
     
Lydia stayed in the hall. She liked evenings, the silence and deepening darkness that slowly wrapped around you and brought peace. She let her eyes follow the little lines upwards and had to crane her neck; the ceiling was high, as it was an old flat. She remembered times when she had worked alone in much smaller flats, but usually there were two of them, giving the men who knocked on the door a choice of girls to paw.
     
Every day she had to have twelve customers. Sometimes there were more, but never fewer, because then Dimitri would beat her up or rape her from behind, again and again, to make up for the missing gigs. Always up the arse.
     
She had her own ritual. Every evening.
     
She showered. The too-hot water washed away their hands. She took her tablets, four Rohypnol and one Valium, washed down with a little vodka. She put on large, baggy clothes that hung on her body, so she had no curves, no one could see, no one could touch her. Even so, sometimes the aching pain down there couldn’t be silenced.
     
Tonight she felt jabs of pain and knew why. There had been a couple of new customers and they were always a bit too harsh. She rarely complained; she understood now how important it was that they came back.
     
Lydia got bored with the lines on the wall and turned to look at the front door. It was ages since she had been outside. How long was it? She couldn’t say for sure, but she thought maybe four months. She had thought about it, breaking thekitchen window; you couldn’t open it, or any of the others. She had thought about smashing the glass and jumping. The flat was on the fifth floor, though. Looking down scared her too much; she couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to fall through the air towards the ground. She went to the door, touched it, sensing the cold, hard surface of the steel, closed her eyes and stood with her hand over the red light, breathing deeply and cursing herself for not understanding the electronic lock. She had tried to see what Dimitri did, but he knew she was spying and always made a point of standing in the way.
     
She left the hall, walked through the unfurnished room that was inexplicably known as the sitting room, past her own room with the large bed she despised but had to sleep in.
     
She walked to the end of the corridor, to Alena’s room. The door was closed, but Lydia knew that Alena was finished for the day and had showered and that she was alone.
     
She knocked.
     
‘Yes?’
     
‘It’s me.’
     
‘I’m trying to sleep.’
     
‘I know, but . . . can I come in?’
     
Silence, just for a few seconds. Lydia waited and then Alena made up her mind.
     
‘Of course you can. Come in.’
     
Alena was lying naked on the unmade bed. Her skin was darker than Lydia’s and her hair was still wet. If she left it like that it would be hard to brush tomorrow. At the end of the day Alena would often lie like this, staring at the ceiling and thinking about Janoz, that she had never told him she was going, that the years had passed, that she could still feel his arms and longed to be held again; it would only be for a few months, then she would come back to him, to Janoz, then they’d get married, later.
     
Lydia stood still. She looked at Alena’s nakedness andthought about her own body, the one she had to hide in baggy clothing afterwards – she knew that was what she was doing, hiding. She looked and she compared and she wondered how Alena could bear to lie in the