At first light, before she walked to school, Irina used to carry buckets from the well, and in the evening, before soup and bread for supper, she would chop wood for the stove. In California she weighed 110 pounds in her winter clothes and boots but was strong as an ox and could lift Cathy, her favorite client, like a newborn babe to transfer her from her wheelchair to a sofa or the bed. If she owed her muscles to the buckets of water and the ax, she owed the good luck that she was alive to Saint Parascheva, the patron saint of Moldova and the intermediary between the earth and the kindly beings in the heavens. At night as a child she would kneel with her grandparents before the saint’s icon to pray for the potato harvest and the health of their chickens; for protection against evildoers and soldiers; for their fragile republic; and for Radmila. To Irina as a child, the haloed saint in the blue cloak who was holding a cross seemed far more human than the silhouette of her mother in a faded photograph. Irina did not miss her but enjoyed imagining that one day Radmila would return with a bag full of gifts for her. She heard nothing from her mother until she was eight years old, when her grandparents received a little money from their distant daughter. They spent it cautiously so as not to make their neighbors jealous. Irina felt cheated, because her mother did not send anything special for her, not even a note. The envelope contained nothing more than the money and a couple of photographs of a stranger with peroxide-blond hair and a harsh expression who looked very different from the young woman in the photo the old couple kept next to the icon. After that they received money from her two or three times a year, which helped alleviate their poverty.
Radmila’s drama was similar to that of thousands of other young Moldovan women. She had become pregnant at sixteen by a Russian soldier passing through with his regiment and from whom she heard nothing more. She had Irina because her attempts at abortion failed, and she escaped far away as soon as she could. Years later, in order to warn her about the world’s perils, Radmila told her daughter the details of her odyssey, with a glass of vodka in her hand and two more already down the hatch.
One day a woman from the city had come to the village to recruit young girls to work as waitresses in another country. She offered Radmila an amazing once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: passport and ticket, easy work and a good wage. She assured her that just from the tips she would be able to save enough to buy herself a house in less than three years. Ignoring her parents’ desperate pleas, Radmila boarded the train with the procurer, little suspecting she would end up in the claws of Turkish pimps in a brothel in the Aksaray neighborhood of Istanbul. She was kept prisoner there for two years, servicing between thirty and forty men daily to pay off her ticket, although the debt was never reduced because she was charged for her lodging, food, shower, and condoms. Any girls who resisted were beaten up, marked with knives, burned, or even found dead in an alleyway. Without money or documents escape was impossible; they were locked in, did not know the language, the neighborhood, or the wider city. If they did manage to evade the pimps, they came up against the police, who were also their most assiduous clients and whom they had to pleasure for free.