Irina Bazili had an official version of her past, one that she had constructed with Wilkins’s help and that she used to satisfy other people’s curiosity, if it was impossible to avoid it. Part of it was true, but it wasn’t the whole truth, only the more bearable aspects. When she was fifteen, the courts had assigned her a psychologist, who treated her for several months until she refused to go on talking about what had happened and decided to adopt another name, move to another state, and change addresses as often as necessary to start over. The psychologist had insisted that traumas don’t go away just by ignoring them, that they are an insidious Medusa waiting in the shadows who at the first opportunity attacks with her head of writhing snakes. Rather than face up to this, Irina had run away. Ever since, her existence had been one long flight, until she reached Lark House. She sought refuge in her work and the virtual worlds of video games and fantasy novels, where she no longer was Irina Bazili but a valiant heroine with magic powers. Wilkins’s arrival had shattered this fragile, illusory world yet again. The nightmares of the past were like dust that had settled along the way: the slightest gust sent them billowing up once more. Irina surrendered, realizing that only Catherine Hope and her golden shield could come to her aid.
In 1997, when Irina was ten years old, her grandparents received a letter from Radmila that would change her destiny once and for all. Her mother had seen a television program about sex trafficking, and learned that countries such as Moldova supplied fresh young flesh to the Arab Emirates and the brothels of Europe. With a shudder, she recalled the time she had spent in the hands of brutal Turkish pimps and, determined to prevent her daughter from suffering the same fate, convinced her husband (the American mechanic she had met in Italy and who took her to Texas) to sponsor the girl for immigration to the United States. Her letter promised that Irina would have everything she could dream of: the best possible education, hamburgers with French fries, ice cream, even a trip to Disneyland. Her grandparents ordered Irina not to tell anyone so as to avoid their envy and the evil eye, which has a habit of punishing those who boast, until all the hurdles needed to obtain a visa had been completed. The process dragged on for two years. When at long last the passport and ticket arrived Irina was twelve, with almost white-blond hair and an indomitable spirit, although she resembled a malnourished boy of eight as she was short and very thin. Her incessant dreams of America had made her aware of the poverty and ugliness around her, something she had never noticed before because she had not had anything to compare it with. Her village looked as if it had been hit by a bomb: half the shacks were boarded up or in ruins, packs of starving dogs roamed the unpaved streets, loose hens scratched in the garbage, and old people sat on their doorsteps smoking black tobacco in silence, since by now everything had been said. In the course of those two years Irina bade farewell one by one to the trees, to the hills, and to the land and sky, which, according to her grandparents, were the same under communist rule and would remain unchanged forever. Irina bade a silent good-bye to her neighbors and school friends, to the donkey and the goat, the cats and the dog who had been her childhood companions. Last of all she bade farewell to Costea and Petruta.