The Shadow Girls

18

A rubbish truck clattered past outside.

Humlin got up out of the armchair where he had been trying — in vain — to get some sleep. He had forced himself to arrive at a decision. He didn’t know if it was the right thing to do, but at least there seemed to be no better alternative. He went up to the first floor and looked into the room where Tanya and Tea-Bag were sleeping. Tea-Bag had finally removed her coat, Tanya lay curled up with a pillow over her face. Tea-Bag woke with a start when Humlin entered the room. He saw the flash of fear in her eyes.

‘It’s me. It’s time for us to leave.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘I’ll tell you when we’ve assembled downstairs.’

He left the room and knocked on the other bedroom door. Torsten called out something unintelligible in a weak stammer.

‘Come in,’ Leyla’s voice shouted.

They lay with the blanket pulled up to their necks. Torsten looked tiny next to Leyla.

‘Get up and get dressed,’ Humlin said. ‘The girls and I have to go.’

‘I’m coming along too,’ Torsten said.

‘Don’t you have work to go to?’

Torsten started to stutter his reply.

‘He only temps right now,’ Leyla answered. ‘My grandmother already has someone else helping her.’

It was seven o’clock. Humlin walked down the stairs. He already dreaded the phone call he was about to make; there was nothing his mother hated as much as being woken up early in the morning.

He sat down at a desk with a phone. He heard Tea-Bag and Tanya’s voices rising and falling from the upper floor. My family, he thought. All these children Andrea is always pestering me about. He lifted the receiver and dialled the number. His mother picked up after fourteen rings. She sounded as if she were about to die. This is her real voice, Humlin thought bitterly. Not a voice ready to moan for money or a voice ready to commandeer the rest of the world. It is the voice of an old woman who feels the earth calling out to her, trying to claim her.

‘Who is it?’

‘It’s me.’

‘What time is it?’

‘Seven.’

‘Are you trying to kill me?’

‘I have to talk to you.’

‘I’m always asleep at this time, as you know. I had only just managed to get to sleep, in fact. You’ll have to call back tonight.’

‘I can’t. I only need you to stay awake for a few more minutes so you can hear what I have to say.’

‘You never have anything to say.’

‘Today I do. I’m calling from Gothenburg.’

‘Are you still carrying on with those Indian girls?’

‘They’re not Indian. There’s one from Iran, Russia, Nigeria and also a boy named Torsten who stutters and is from Gothenburg.’

‘That sounds like quite a mixed bag. What about the boy — why does he stutter?’

‘I don’t know. When I was younger I used to stutter whenever I was nervous. Or when I talked with someone else who had a stutter.’

‘One can always overcome a stutter. It’s only a matter of willpower.’

‘Tell that to the people who have suffered from it their whole lives. Anyway, I didn’t call you at seven to discuss the issue of stammering.’

‘I’m going back to bed.’

‘Not before you’ve heard me out.’

‘Good night.’

‘If you put that phone down I’m going to cut off all contact with you — I mean it.’

‘Well then, what is it that’s so important, Jesper?’

‘Later on today I’ll be coming by your place with them.’

‘Why would you do that?’

‘They’re going to stay with you, I don’t know for how long exactly. But it’s extremely important that you don’t mention this to anyone. Understood?’

‘Can I go back to bed now?’

‘Sleep well.’

Humlin noticed that his hand was shaking when he put down the phone. But he was convinced his mother had understood the main thing: that she was not to say anything about Humlin making his way to Stockholm with an unorthodox assortment of companions.

They arrived in the early afternoon. During the trip he had made them spread out to various parts of the train. When they were just pulling out of the Södertälje station he asked to borrow one of Tanya’s phones.

‘Whose phone is this?’

‘It works fine.’

‘That’s not what I was asking. Am I still using phones that belong to police officers and prosecutors?’

‘This one belongs to one of the train conductors.’

Humlin was taken aback. Then he locked himself in the toilet and called his mother, who picked up immediately.

‘I’m waiting for you. When will you get here?’

‘We’ve just passed Södertälje.’

‘I thought for a while that I had been dreaming. I take it you are bringing them here because they need a place to hide out?’

‘Yes.’

‘How many are they? Ten, twelve?’

‘Just four.’

‘Are you also staying here?’

‘No.’

‘I’m looking forward to meeting these Indian girls. I’m wearing an Indian shawl your father gave me while we were engaged.’

‘They’re not Indian, Mother. I told you this morning. Take off that shawl and don’t make any strange food. I would also be grateful if you could refrain from moaning on the phone this evening.’

‘I’ve already called the others about it.’

Humlin was horrified.

‘What did you say?’

‘Naturally I said nothing about you coming over with the girls. I just said I didn’t have the energy to work tonight.’

Humlin finished the conversation and then tried to flush the phone down the toilet. It got stuck. He left the toilets and went back to his seat.

Once they got to the Central station he looked for a taxi big enough to hold them all. A police car drove by and Tanya and Tea-Bag waved to it. One of the officers waved back. They think I can guarantee their safety, Humlin thought. They don’t understand that I’m unable to give guarantees of any sort.

The initial meeting between his mother and the girls did nothing to assuage Humlin’s fears. The girls embraced his mother with an outpouring of affection and warmth from the first. He was forced to admit to himself that she could be charming when she wanted. She mixed up their names, insisted that Leyla was Indian, called Tea-Bag ‘the beautiful girl from Sumatra’ and kept referring to Tanya as ‘Elsa’. But it didn’t seem to matter. The girls even appeared to change their attitudes to him now that it turned out that he had such a wonderful mother.

There seemed to be a limitless sense of security in her large apartment, as if it were sealed off from the rest of the world by diplomatic immunity. She had made up all available beds and after only a few minutes they had all been shown to their spot. Tea-Bag and Tanya were still sharing a room, Leyla had her own and Torsten was camped out on a folding camp bed in the hallway.

‘I simply can’t let an unmarried couple share a room.’

‘That’s very old-fashioned of you, Mother.’

‘I am old-fashioned.’

‘What about the Mature Women’s Hotline?’

His mother didn’t reply. She had already turned her back to him.

A little later Humlin left to go shopping. He took Tanya along to help him carry the groceries. He had asked Torsten first but Leyla had looked so unhappy about this that he changed his mind. On the way to the shop Tanya suddenly stopped outside a bar.

‘I’m thirsty.’

She opened the door and walked in. Humlin followed her, just in time to see her order a beer.

‘I’ll get you one too, if you like,’ she said. ‘But you’re paying. I have phones, not cash.’

‘Isn’t it a little early in the day for a beer?’

Tanya muttered something under her breath, then sat down at a table. Humlin joined her with a cup of coffee. He saw how tense she was — her eyes travelled nervously around the room.

‘Do you want to be left alone for a while?’ he asked.

Again she didn’t answer. Humlin waited and she emptied her glass of beer. Then she got up and walked out to the toilets. One of her phones was lying on the table and it started to ring. That’s her, he thought. She’s doing what she did in the Yüksels’ apartment. She calls when she has something important to say. He answered the phone.

‘Associate Judge Hansson at the Administrative Court of Appeals wishes to speak to Prosecutor Westin. May I put him through?’

‘He’s in a meeting,’ Humlin said and hung up.

The phone rang again. Humlin fumbled with the phone to see if there was caller ID, but didn’t find anything. He gave up and answered the phone.

‘I think we were interrupted. I was trying to get through to Prosecutor Westin?’

‘He’s still busy.’

Humlin was starting to sweat. The doors to the toilets remained closed. After a while he got up and walked over to them. He listened for sounds from the women’s toilets but heard nothing. He knocked, but there was no reply. Then he opened the door. There was no one there. He tried to open the window at the far end but the latches were rusty and stuck. She didn’t leave by this way, he thought. Then he went into the men’s toilets.

Tanya was sitting on the floor next to the urinals. She was holding a paper towel up to her face. At first Humlin thought she had had an accident and was trying to stem a nosebleed but then he realised she was sniffing something concealed in the paper towel. He grabbed it out of her hands. It looked like a messy bar of soap but then he saw it was a bar of scented cleaning solution that must have come from a urinal. He had heard about this from somewhere, that the urine released ammonia from these bars, which could then be inhaled. But it was still hard for him to believe his eyes: Tanya’s glassy gaze, the paper towel with the sticky blue bar. He tried to pull her up off the ground but she hit him in the face and screamed something at him in Russian.

A man came in and Humlin ordered him to use the women’s toilets. The man quickly left.

Humlin kept fighting Tanya for the scented bar. They crawled around on the floor. She scratched him in the face with her nails, which made him furious. He grabbed her around the waist and forced her up against the wall. Both of them were covered in urine. He screamed at her to calm down but when she kept resisting and tried to fish yet another scented block out of the urinal he slapped her. Her nose started to bleed and she became absolutely still.

Humlin heard someone’s steps outside the door and forced her quickly into one of the cubicles. A man came in who coughed and urinated for a long time. Humlin sat down on the toilet with Tanya on his lap. She was breathing heavily and her eyes were closed. He wondered if she was about to pass out. After the man had left, Humlin shook her.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked. ‘Why are you doing this to yourself?’

Tanya shook her head.

‘Let me sleep.’

‘We can’t stay here,’ he said. ‘We have to go pick up some food. The others are waiting for us.’

‘Only for a little while. I haven’t sat on anyone’s lap since I was a little girl and my aunt held me like this on her knee.’

‘We’re sitting on a toilet,’ Humlin said.

Suddenly she got up and leaned against the wall.

‘I’m going to puke.’

Humlin got up and left the cubicle. He heard her throw up, then everything was quiet. He opened the door and handed her a wet paper towel. She wiped her face and followed him out. As they were leaving the toilets they met a man who was pulling down his zip. He looked at Tanya with interest and then winked conspiratorially at Humlin, who came very close to punching him.

They walked out of the bar. Tanya pointed to a small cemetery on the other side of the street.

‘Can’t we go there?’

‘We have to buy some food.’

‘Ten minutes. That’s all.’

Humlin pushed open the rusty gate to the cemetery. An old woman sat propped up against a gravestone that was pushed half on its side. Its inscription was no longer legible. The woman’s clothes were tattered and several plastic bags and packets of newspapers wrapped up in twine lay strewn about her. Tanya stopped and looked at her.

‘Do you think she needs a phone?’ she asked.

‘I doubt she has anyone to call. But I suppose she could always sell it.’

Tanya took out one of her phones and laid it next to the sleeping woman’s cheek. They continued walking through the empty graveyard. Tanya sat down on a bench. Humlin joined her.

‘Maybe I should call the bag lady,’ she said. ‘The phone I gave her plays a lovely, old-fashioned lullaby when the phone rings. It’s a heavenly way to wake up.’

‘I’d let her sleep. What kind of life does she wake up to anyway?’

Tanya whimpered, as if she had been struck by a whip.

‘Don’t say that,’ she said. ‘What kind of life do I wake up to, for that matter? Do you want me to wish I were dead? I have wanted that, I’ve stood on the bridge and almost thrown myself off, I’ve put needles in my arm without knowing or caring what was in the syringe. But deep down inside I’ve still always wanted to wake up again. Do you think I did what I did back there because I wanted to die? You’re wrong. I just wanted to get away for a little while, just to have a moment’s peace. No words, no voices, nothing. I remember when I was growing up that there was a little black pond in the forest nestled in between the high trees. I always went there when I was upset. The water was absolutely still and shiny like a mirror and I used to think that that was what I wanted inside. Peace, nothing else. I still crave that sense of peace.’

Tanya stopped talking and looked around for something in her backpack. Humlin counted the phones that she laid out on the bench: seven. At last she found what she was looking for, which was a crumpled pack of cigarettes. He hadn’t seen her smoke before. She inhaled the smoke as if it were oxygen. But just as suddenly she dropped the cigarette into the gravel and killed it with her heel.

What I don’t understand and what I will keep asking myself all my life and won’t even stop when I die is the question of how it could be possible for me to feel any joy after all the hell that I have been through. Or hasn’t it even been that bad? Yesterday, when Tea-Bag and I were lying on the police chief’s bed, she told me that I haven’t had it any worse than anyone else. Then she fell asleep. Is she right? I don’t know. But I don’t understand how I’m supposed to be able to laugh after all the humiliation I’ve been through. And I’m someone who thinks it’s necessary for people to be able to feel an uncomplicated, simple joy in their lives since we are going to be dead for such a long time. Death is not what is frightening to me, not the fact that the flame goes out, but this fact that we are going to be dead so very long.

I still think about that time four years ago when we stood out by the main road, four girls in skirts that were much too short. We were the East, nothing more. We knew how Westerners saw us, as those poor Easterners, those wretches. And there we were in our short skirts in the middle of winter, still mired in the poverty and misery that was our life in the vodka-stinking hole that was all that was left after the Communist collapse. Four girls: fourteen, sixteen, seventeen and nineteen. I was the oldest and we were laughing as we stood out there in the cold, wild with joy — can you understand that? We were so close to being free! When that old rusty car came down the road it could just as well have been Jesus or Buddha or Muhammad come down from the clouds. It was the car that was going to carry us to freedom, no matter that it stunk of mould and unwashed feet.

Why do people leave? Why do they pull up their roots and go? I suppose some people are chased away and forced to flee. Maybe it’s war or hunger or fear — it’s always fear. But sometimes you choose to leave because it’s the clever thing to do. A teenage girl might very well ask the same question as a holy patriarch: where can I find a life for myself, a life far away from everything here that I despise?

There was an abandoned barn in a field behind Mischa’s cabin, Mischa who was old, crazy and a little dangerous. We used to hang out there, Inez, Tatyana, Natalia and I. We had all known each other so long we couldn’t even remember how we first met. We staged trials in that barn. Inez had stolen some rope from one of the barges that went up and down the river. She was crazy; she had jumped into the cold water with a knife between her teeth and cut off a few lengths of rope that she tied to her legs and swam back to shore with. We made a few nooses — Natalia had a brother who had been in the KGB so he knew what a real hangman’s noose looked like. Then we proceeded to hang our enemies. We put straw and stones in the bags, pronounced the sentence and hanged them from one of the beams in the roof, one by one. We hanged our teachers and our parents; Tatyana’s dad was particularly mean and used to beat her once a week. I don’t think we ever thought too closely about what we were doing. There was just life and death, punishment and mercy. But we didn’t show anyone mercy; they didn’t deserve it.

There we were, four avenging angels in the little village outside Smolensk. We had given ourselves a name, the ‘Slumrats’. That’s how we saw ourselves. Creatures of the underworld without value, hunted, filled with self-loathing. But we didn’t just conduct trials in that barn, we prayed to gods of our own choosing. Inez had stolen a book from her step-father, a book filled with pictures of big cities in North America and Western Europe. Inez used to steal all the time; she was the one who taught me how, not my dad. When I told you that I was lying. My dad was a worm who couldn’t even have broken a bike lock. But Inez was never afraid. She would break into churches and steal the elaborate frames they use for icons. We would tear pictures out of our books and slip them into these old icon frames, hang them up and then pray to them. We prayed that we would one day get to see these cities. Then — so that no one would find the pictures — we buried them in one corner of the barn underneath the rotting floorboards.

I’m still not sure who gave the Slumrats their order to flee. Maybe it was me; it should have been me since I was the oldest. We were always dreaming of better places because we only saw hopelessness around us. Political borders may have fallen, but the only difference for us was the fact that now we could see what was on the other side. The rich life was out there, waiting for us. But how were we going to get there? How to cross the invisible border that still existed? We hated the feeling of being trapped, we kept executing our enemies and we started taking any kind of drug we could lay our hands on. None of us went to school, none of us worked. Inez taught me how it was done, she let me watch her when she picked people’s pockets or broke into houses. But we never kept the money for long. We bought drugs and clothes and then we had to start all over again. I don’t think I was clear-headed for a single day during that time, I was always high on something.

I don’t know who first heard of the Woolglove. I think it was Inez, but I’m not sure. There was a rumour that he could get girls well-paid jobs in the West. They had to be good-looking, independent, ready for anything. He was staying at a hotel in the city and he was only going to be in town for two days. We made up our minds on the spot. We put on our best clothes, made ourselves up, slipped glue tubes into our pockets and jumped on the bus. On the way, we took out the glue and sniffed it. Tatyana had to throw up before we went into the hotel. The man who opened the door — I still remember it was room 345 — was actually wearing white wool gloves. Later he said something about having eczema on his hands and treating them with a special cream. That was why he had to wear those gloves. He promised to get us jobs in a restaurant in Tallinn. We would be waitresses and get good pay, not to mention tips. He told us what girls usually made per day and he made it sound like we would earn all this money for about two hours of work. It was a restaurant that only catered to foreigners, he said. He also told us we would be sharing a big apartment together.

We drank in every word. He was wearing those strange wool gloves, but his suit was expensive and he smiled the whole time. He told us his name was Peter Ludorf, and he threw in a German word now and again to impress us. He wrote down our names on a small notepad. Then another man suddenly turned up. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone move so quietly. It still gives me the shivers to think about it. He took pictures of us and then left. And that was it.

A few weeks later we stood on the side of the road in our short skirts in the middle of winter, waiting for Peter Ludorf’s car to come and get us. But some unshaven men who smelled of vodka were driving the car. We stopped at various houses on the way and new men of the same sort took over the driving. We got almost nothing to eat, just a little water and enough time to jump out and pee in the snow.

Peter Ludorf had arranged new identities and passports for us. At first that had freaked us out, that our old identities had been taken away. Tatyana said it was like someone slowly scraping away our old faces. But we trusted Peter Ludorf. He smiled, he gave us clothes and talked to us like grown-ups. What else could we do? We had already put our lives in his hands. He was the one who had come to take us away from our old lives, to give us a chance at freedom — a raft with which we could paddle away from the vodka marsh where slumrats like us had no future.

We arrived in the middle of the night. The truck pulled into a dark yard where there were growling dogs pulling at their leads. I remember that Tatyana grabbed my arm and whispered, ‘It’s not right. Something isn’t right.’ We got out of the truck. It was cold and damp and there were foreign smells all around. Somewhere in the darkness among the growling dogs we heard voices speaking in a language we couldn’t understand. One man smiled and chuckled and I realised he was making comments about us standing there in our short skirts.

We were led into a room where the walls were clad in a red plush fabric. There were large gilt mirrors on the walls and Peter Ludorf sat there on a sofa with his white gloves on, smiling at us. He looked us over, then got up from the couch. At that moment it was as if a light had been turned off in his face. His eyes changed colour and even his voice seemed different. He stood right in front of me and told us that we would be staying in some rooms on the first floor. We were to service all the men who were sent up. We had to give him our passports.

To show us that he was serious, that he wasn’t making idle threats, he instructed us to walk over to the table right next to the sofa. There was a wooden box on the table, about twenty centimetres high and about as wide. He kept on talking the whole time, telling us that other girls had made the same trip that we had just done but that they had not understood that he meant business. He opened the box and took out two glass jars. In one jar was a pair of lips, preserved in some kind of ether. None of us knew what we were looking at. The other jar contained a finger with a ring still on it. The nail was painted red. It was only when we saw that that we realised the first jar had held a pair of lips.

The whole time Peter Ludorf kept talking. He told us the lips belonged to a girl called Virginia. She had tried to escape by stabbing one of her clients — an elite member of the French trade delegation — in the chest with a screwdriver. Peter Ludorf sounded almost wistful when he told us that he had cut her lips off himself in order to show all of us what happened to girls who misunderstood their situation and thought that rebellion and escape attempts would be tolerated. The girl who lost her finger — Peter Ludorf had used the kind of tool that blacksmiths use to extract old stitches out of horses’ hooves when they reshoe them — was called Nadia and she had been seventeen. She had also tried to escape, this time by climbing out of a window and stealing a car that she rammed straight into the wall of the house across the street.

Peter Ludorf put the jars back and closed the lid to the box. I don’t think his words had really sunk in yet. We were all too cold and hungry to focus on anything except food. We were taken to the kitchen where an emaciated woman was stirring a pot. She chain-smoked and she had no teeth left, even though she couldn’t have been older than thirty. There was no real restaurant there, just a bar they used as a cover. We were in a real live brothel. Peter Ludorf had betrayed us in the same way that he had betrayed many others before us. He had known exactly what to say to lure a group of slumrats like us.

None of us knew what kind of life was waiting for us. We ate some of the bad-tasting soup that the emaciated woman put in front of us, and then we were locked into our rooms. I could hear Tatyana crying through the wall. I think we were all crying, but you could only hear Tatyana. That night I remember thinking: what am I going to wake up to? Why don’t I try to fall asleep and stay somewhere deep inside myself where I never need to wake up again? At the same time I felt a growing rage inside. Was I really going to let someone like Peter Ludorf win?

The rest of the night I just waited for dawn to come. I had no other thought than escape. We were not going to allow ourselves to be humiliated in this brothel. None of us were virgins exactly, but no one would ever have thought of selling herself either. I know Tea-Bag had to do it; she had no other choice. But I wanted us to break out, not turn into a couple of chopped-off body parts in a wooden box in a room where the walls were the same colour as blood. But when I heard a noise at the door the next morning I was paralysed.

I don’t need to tell you about what we had to go through. For half a year I stood at that door each morning prepared to attack whoever came through the door. But I never did. I didn’t have the guts. It took me six months for that, six months of unending, unimaginable hell.

One night a deep rage that I hadn’t even known was in me, came over me and I unscrewed two of the legs of the bed. They were made of steel. I tied them together with the help of a pillowcase and then I had my weapon. The next morning I finally struck back.

I had never seen the man who came into the room that day. I hit him as hard as I could so that blood spurted from his head. He died immediately. Then I grabbed the keys from him and unlocked the door next to mine. It was like opening the door to a chamber of horror. Tatyana just sat curled up on the floor staring at me. I screamed at her to get up, that we were leaving, but she didn’t move. I pulled at her, but nothing helped. I opened the door to Inez’s room but it was empty. I finally realised that she had hidden behind the bed. I tried to pull her out, I pleaded with her, but she was so frightened she didn’t dare crawl out. I opened the door to Natalia’s room and she was the only one who was willing to come with me.

The two of us tried to get the others to come along. We screamed at them and pulled their arms but with no success. Then we had to get going: we heard voices in the stairwell. We jumped out of the window and onto the roof of a garage. I ran and thought Natalia was right behind me. It was only when I had no more energy to run that I realised she wasn’t there. Maybe she had hurt herself when she landed on the roof. I don’t know.

I can normally keep the pain at a distance, controlling it like you control an unruly horse with the reins. But sometimes it doesn’t work. Then I sniff scent blocks in men’s urinals and wish that Peter Ludorf were dead and all my friends set free. I don’t know anything about what happened to them after I left. In my dreams I see us standing there on that road outside Smolensk, waiting in our short skirts, waiting for a car to bring us to freedom but that will actually plunge us into endless darkness. A darkness I am still waiting to find my way out of.

Tanya stopped.

I should ask about Irina, Humlin thought. But now is hardly the time.

Tanya took a phone out of her pocket and dialled a number. Humlin thought he heard a lullaby start playing nearby, in a place he couldn’t see from where he was sitting, but where he imagined the bag lady was still sleeping with her head resting against the old gravestone.

A gravestone where the inscription had long since crumbled away.