And it is this that makes them even more frightening. How can I win? Beat them in a spelling bee? As I walk, I notice people on the streets, bums and drunks and guys whose eyes gleam in the streetlamps like blades. But they only watch me warily as I pass, as if I’m the danger, as if I’m the one who’ll pull them into a doorway or alley and cut them open.
Marina and Lyuba are asleep in their beds when I get back. I close the bathroom door gently behind me, so as not to wake them, and hang my head over the toilet. I heave a few times until there are tears running down my cheeks. But my stomach is mostly empty and nothing comes out except a string of spit. With the loofah hanging from the spigot in the tub, I scrub at my hands and forearms, trying desperately to get clean of dirt I can neither see nor smell.
There’s a note on the couch in scrawled Cyrillic handwriting. Wake me when you get back, it says. I slip into Marina’s room, sit on the edge of her bed, and touch her arm. Her head turns and she blinks at me. “You scared me tonight,” she says. “I was worried.”
“Sorry,” I say.
She’s about to say something else but squeezes my hand instead.
Fifteen
I dig through the kitchen to make an improvised breakfast feast for my roommates and myself. There’s black tea and honey and yogurt and a carton of eggs and half a loaf of dense, flavorless rye bread that the label says is essential for achieving “überlegene Darmgesundheit.” Superior bowel health. I do what I can with the ingredients and serve it to Marina and Lyuba at the table.
Lyuba looks at me with narrowed eyes through the smoke of her cigarette and eats only the rye bread. “The tea is very weak,” she says as she gets up to leave. She’s out the door a few minutes later, claiming a piano lesson for some “rich little sissy” in a grand Charlottenburg flat.
Marina takes Lyuba’s plate and finishes it. “I’m surprised you came home.”
I start to clean up. “I wasn’t looking for a hookup.”
“Not a hookup, novichka. I’m surprised you’re still breathing.” Marina brings the plate to the sink and grabs a dishtowel. “You said you were looking for someone. Is it one of them, those gangsters? Is this about some kind of revenge?”
I scrub at a pan with a sponge, then scrape at the burnt egg with my fingernails. “Not revenge.”
Marina lets a pair of dry plates drop to a shelf with a clatter. I jump at the sound. “I told you, don’t bring your shit into Marina’s house. Lyuba doesn’t think you’re even Russian. Did you know that? Says you’re a fake.”
“Armavir is a long way from Moscow.”
“That’s what I said to her. She’s a paranoiac. Listening to too much Putin, thinks spies are everywhere. But, Sofia, after this mafia drama yesterday—if you want to stay here even one more night, you need to tell what game you’re playing at.”
I shut off the water and turn to her. “I’m looking for my father,” I say. “He ran away, and I think he fell in with them. Those men from the club.” It’s the bare minimum I think she’ll accept.
Marina rolls her eyes. “So there it is. The great mystery of Sofia reveals itself as sentimental bullshit.” She hangs the towel over the sink. “Papa ran away for a reason. Better to leave him with his new friends. You’ll both be happier that way.”
I’m about to reply to her, tell her that’s not how it is, but she’s already left the kitchen. A moment later, I hear her bedroom door close.
My phone vibrates in my pocket. It’s a text from Christian: was geht ab baby. I sit on the edge of the kitchen table, staring at the screen, thumbs hovering over the keyboard. What I want to write back is What’s up, baby, is that I want to make you bleed. What I type instead is Nicht viel. Du? Not much. You?
He writes back immediately in slangy, abbreviated German that takes me forever to decipher. But after I do, I find out there’s a party tonight in an area called Neuk?lln, and I’m going as his date.
*
I meet Christian outside the Hermannstrasse U-Bahn stop. It’s already dark out but fluorescently bright beneath the awning of the food stand on the corner. He’s leaning against the wall and eating sausages covered in what looks like ketchup, poking at them with a toothpick and slurping them into his mouth. His jacket is flashy red leather, and his sneakers are gleaming white and brand-new. “You like currywurst?” he says as he chews, holding out the little paper basket. “I can get you a new toothpick. Or you can use mine.”
I shake my head and try to force a smile. I am Sofia tonight, I tell myself, cute and shy, quiet and mysterious.
He looks me up and down. “No dress?”
I’m wearing jeans and my Doc Martens and the leather jacket Yael bought me over a black T-shirt. “I thought maybe tonight was casual.”
“No, of course! I mean, you look great! Really. You’d look great in anything.” This said genuinely, a teenage bashfulness coloring his face. He is, despite the ketchup on his chin, handsome, like he belongs in some boy band I would have listened to when I was twelve. Not the lead, but the quiet one, the object of a million secret crushes.
He tosses the rest of his food in a trash can and wipes his mouth with a napkin. “You been to Neuk?lln before?” he asks. “Used to be rough. Now it’s all faggy. Lots of artists and shit.”
He walks next to me down a street lined with tired apartment buildings on one side, and tall weeds on the other that cover a chain-link fence and railroad tracks just beyond. I can’t tell if it’s a bad neighborhood or just run-down and badly lit.
“Whose party is it?” I say.
A nervous laugh. “It is at my boss’s apartment, but don’t worry. I told him you were cool. It’s like—for my mates who died. A ‘celebration of life’ we say.”
A funeral after-party. At the boss’s apartment. Nervous terror stirs in my stomach. Where did all the confident bravado I felt last night on the train disappear to? “So—a memorial service.”
“Yes. A little fancy. Which is why I thought—maybe a dress for you. But whatever.”
“So tell about your boss,” I say. “Cool guy?”
“Paulus? Supercool. And his apartment—you will see.” He exhales sharply and shakes his head. “Two units, one on top of the other. And he put in a stairway so you can go between them. Mahogany bar. Jacuzzi on the roof. Sweet-ass TV, like, I don’t know, two meters wide.”
“Cool.”
“I think in a few years, maybe I can get such a place.” He claps his hands together in excitement. “Maybe they’ll have a TV three meters wide by then.”
“And what work do you do, Christian?” I say, casually as I can. “You didn’t tell me last night.”
His voice deepens by a half octave all of a sudden as he plays the grown-up. “I’m a wholesaler. We buy things, sell things. Computers. Whisky. Car parts. Whatever. West to east, north to south. All over Europe.”
“And here I thought you did something, I don’t know, dangerous.” I give him a sideways look and a smile. “I like dangerous.”
“Oh, it can be!” he says, eager not to disappoint. “Maybe all the tax papers aren’t there sometimes. Maybe an import stamp is missing.”
“Sounds scary. All those forms. You might get a paper cut.”
His face changes to embarrassment. “There’s more to it than that. These people. My crew. We’re nobody to fuck around with.”