For some reason she had the feeling it was indeed very important. She didn’t even know which sentence repeated itself more insistently in her head as she awaited her first client under the orange lampshade. However, despite this reassurance, she was trembling so much that her teeth were chattering.
“This won’t do,” said Vova, worried, “you need to have a stiff drink to ease your nerves otherwise you’ll scare the client off. This punter’s very calm and gentle. Don’t worry, he’s so gentle he couldn’t hurt a fly, but if you go scaring him off with all that din then he won’t give us any cash, perhaps ever again – even though he’s a regular client, comes every two weeks…”
“Give her another swig,” said Vova to his wife Ira, “I’ll call when we set off. Get her straight into bed to wait under a thick quilt. If it makes her too hot, well at least her teeth won’t still be chattering… It’ll unnerve him…” And off he drove to the port to pick the customer up.
Ira settled Natalya into the bed under a thick quilt, stroked her hand and comforted her: “Don’t be scared, Jaakko is a good man, calm and gentle… All of ours are calm and gentle… It’s no worse than having an internal at the doctor’s… Just imagine that you’re at the doctor’s. Just relax and everything will be fine… I’d say it’s worse at the doctor’s, sat on a chair with everything on show! At least here it all happens under a quilt…”
That Jaakko – he wasn’t so calm and gentle after all… So were the others even worse? He was small… Or not that small, definitely taller than Vova but slender… Well, not so slender in fact, but he gave the impression of being slight and fair. Although the room was dark, with only a night light, the impression was of a fair complexion and greasiness… And sharpness at the same time… Of course, Natalya had covered herself with a thick layer of vaseline down below so the body that climbed on top of her felt cold and greasy, and everything happened so quickly yet took so long, as if time had stood still, and it felt as if a lizard had climbed on top of her and entered her and she couldn’t believe that it was suddenly over, that escape was possible…
She was so numb from it all that when the client had gone and Vova looked in through the door, slightly worried, and said that another client would be coming today and that perhaps she could cope with another because he was such a good, calm, gentle client, very respectable and also a regular… Natalya could only murmur something in reply.
But when the man began to enter her, stubby and big, she burst into tears. Once again it was as if there were two Natalyas: one that cried and one that tried to quieten her as if explaining that she mustn’t cry, that although the door was shut, the boss and his wife would hear her crying anyway, in the room next door or the kitchen where they were at the moment… But the man did not force himself on her, in fact he drew away a little and, caressing Natalya’s hair and cheeks, he asked quietly, concerned, in good Russian, “What’s up? What’s happened? Did I do something bad?”
“No, no,” whispered Natalya Filippovna in between hiccups, “everything’s fine… You carry on… If you’re not satisfied they can’t take your money…”
“Oh, the money’s not that important,” said the man.
“No, no, it is,” explained Natalya, “the money’s really important, it’s the most important thing. I have braces to pay for, not for me, for my daughter because otherwise she might be handicapped and won’t be able to open her mouth any more, but the factory laid me off because there’s a crisis in electronics but it’s not their fault that they laid people off, electronics is in crisis the world over…” and she talked and talked, rapidly, evenly, in a whisper; she felt she had to make a clean breast of it quickly, before Vova’s suspicions were aroused because she didn’t know how much time Vova allowed for a punter. And now here she was, frittering all the time away jabbering on, and that was definitely something that had not been part of the bargain because the client was becoming the service provider in that he was just stroking Natalya’s head as she talked, perhaps occasionally murmuring something, although what he may have said Natalya did not notice.
Eventually she calmed down, perhaps because of the non-stop gentle stroking or the man’s low, lilting voice almost crooning to her, like a doctor, as if she were at the doctor’s and had to make a clean breast of everything, as if some good may come of it…
She sobbed and finally said, “They won’t be able to take your money off you now because I’ve frittered all the time away rabbiting on…”
“Please don’t worry about that,” said the man, “of course I’ll pay, I must pay, I’ve frittered your time away too just the same. It’s not your fault that I listened to you and did nothing else, your time was ticking away anyway… Just try and dry your eyes – otherwise the squire will think I’ve been too forceful with you…”
That was the expression he used – “the squire” – like in an old-fashioned story…
When the punter had gone and Natalya was finally dressed and stepped into the kitchen, Vova studied her for a long while in astonishment.
“Dima said you’re one shit-hot piece of skirt…” he said, adding falteringly. “Actually, he never talks so… bluntly. ‘What a woman’ is what he said… or perhaps it was something a bit more genteel…”
While driving Natalya home, Vova warned her nevertheless, “But don’t you go overstepping the mark. They’ve only paid for you to spread your legs. Nothing more. To them you’re just a hole that services their needs!”
But Natalya was miraculously calm inside. The moon shone over the bare field in Lasnamäe and its round, gnarled, pale face looked directly through the car window at Natalya, as if tinged with coldness, indifference, as if from a completely different, far-off time – as if everything were suddenly as clear as day to her…
It’s curious how after that first night, after she had tearfully sobbed out her whole story, everything was somehow different, different in nature – clear. It hadn’t got better, it was repulsive. Exceedingly repulsive. Yet somehow within the bounds of bearable. She felt that it was just a job – just like any other job. There was a coldness in her soul, a cold sense of duty – she was doing this for duty’s sake… There’d be at most two, or occasionally three of them a night, from Wednesday evening to Sunday, including Saturday night into Sunday, at 250 a time. But Sunday evening to Monday was free because Vova said that there were no punters or clients on Mondays. On Mondays they were all thinking about work…
“250, 250, 250…” she chanted to herself over and over in time with the movement of the man’s body. The men were different, but in one sense it was always the same – as if pressing on at an ever increasing pace over a mountain, until reaching the summit and then pausing there for a moment before plummeting down – that was her 250 in the bag… As the man’s excitement grew, so did Natalya’s hatred and resistance; she would have liked to let fly, bite, beat, destroy the man on top of her… but then the other Natalya would appear, cold and calculating, like Vova, and chant to her 250… 250 – it’s just a client, it’s just a client… Nothing else mattered to her. Besides, she was always separated from them by a condom… She tried to imagine they were covered in plastic, separated, and somehow she felt the 250 helped separate them too – it helped her not to notice the grunting, the sweaty skin, the fact that her body was being groped and grasped… Also, after the drive home she could have a shower. Now she could afford to use the shower, she didn’t have to think about not wasting water, especially hot water… But there was always something left inside her, a filth and a dread… Perhaps it wasn’t quite dread, but she began to have one particular frequently recurring dream: she would dream of Vova, but the Vova in the dream wasn’t just Vova, it was something or someone much more powerful, an incubus that blew icy cold; he was a tyrant, the boss, forever counting – 250, 250, 250. It was as if the other men, the clients, weren’t the ones using Natalya Filippovna’s body, but Vova himself, while repeating 250 as if he controlled everything, Natalya and the clients, their bodies – it was so strange – as if he’d banged some gargantuan drum that threatened to suck up each of their bodies and bludgeon them to a pulp. Natalya awoke from the incubus and even awake she still had the feeling that this was no mere dream, but a wretched reality…