A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

CHAPTER



20





SHE WAS SOLD to a brothel within bullet range of Kosovo, and from there south through the cinderblock city of Tirana and across the Adriatic, where, rocking on the dull green water, she saw the face of the moon for the first time in five weeks. It, too, was cratered with cigarette burns. Her passport was her deed, her title, and bill of sale, carried by whoever owned her today, traveling within reach of her hand but never in it. Through it all, she could count on a ritual as fixed in the day as sunrise and set. Every morning a shot of heroin inflated her head so it floated a meter above her neck until noon. By afternoon she’s itching. By evening she’ll do whatever they ask to get a shot that night. She’s not the high-priced, high-class call girl she had imagined, borne by limousine to fancy hotels, where she knows the doormen by name and tips them generously when she saunters into the night a free woman. She couldn’t buy a full bag of groceries with what the johns pay for thirty minutes. It feels like autumn, but maybe it’s spring. She can’t tell, fifteen stories above the nearest leaf. She can’t remember the year or the city, the taste of fresh air or the feel of her passport, her sister’s voice or the love and desperation that compelled her to flee, but she stands by the window and remembers the view; in eight months, when it’s all over and she’s taking three-hour showers in a women’s shelter, she will walk to the bathroom mirror and, angle by angle, she will draw it on the steamed glass. The men call her Natasha, but she doesn’t know how they know her name. Finally Katya tells her that’s what every girl from Eastern Europe is called, we’re all Natashas to them. An average day consists of ten men, three cheeseburgers, eight glasses of tap water, and two shots. A toothbrush, no toothpaste. A roll of Certs, one after each man. The repatriated women are right: modern-day slavery, but there’s nothing modern about it. Eight of you sleep on four bunk beds crammed into a bedroom. In the early morning, midafternoon, whenever the clouds part, when the heroin slithers into your blood and you forget your name, you stand at the window and thread the eternity of sky through needle-head retinas. Block after block the city goes on and every last building, right up to the horizon, stands. Sergey, the pimp, whose brother was sent back from Grozny in a zinc can, quit smoking last week or last month and the spent pieces of his nicotine gum, spat out and dried on the floor, look like little gray brains. One Natasha died, seven Natashas left; a new Natasha walked in the room and asked if this was where the au pairs slept. You are all replaceable, all disposable. Sergey reads business books and listens to lectures on free-market capitalism and, sometimes, in the middle of it, you can hear the lectures through the wall, through the grunting flab atop you, and listening to free trade and commodity economy leaves you with a rich nostalgia for the relative generosity of totalitarianism. There is the night, the last night, the next night. The belt around your ankle, the two taps of the syringe, the blood into the barrel, the plunger pushing in. There is the woman named Anzhela but called Natasha. The woman named Nadya but called Natasha. The woman named Natasha, called Natasha.