Dima – as the boss and his wife called him – returned two weeks later. He darted under the quilt next to Natalya and lay there, as if dead, his hands crossed on his chest.
“Why aren’t you getting on with it?” asked Natalya, blushing.
She didn’t blush with other men any more – so why was she now? Or hadn’t she had the time to notice?
“I shan’t,” said the man, “I’m in training. You’ve given me the chance to – train myself – else it wouldn’t have struck me… that it’s so important. But don’t you worry about it…”
“But there’s no need…” said Natalya, “you can go ahead. Otherwise what’s in it for you… And anyhow, it’s not right if you pay without getting anything in return… And it doesn’t upset me as much as it did before… I just chant over and over – 250, 250. That’s what I get each time. It makes it easier somehow… or, I don’t know, it somehow makes the coldness… less terrible…”
“That’s not good,” said the man turning to her suddenly, “it’s not good to say that over and over again – there’s no point to it – you’ll get your money anyhow – why spare it another thought, there’s no need to think of the money when you’re going to get it anyhow – why bother thinking about the money?”
“But it makes it more bearable,” argued Natalya, “if you just keep repeating – remembering what it’s for…”
“It’s still not good…” said the man, “your body’s making the money anyhow – why think any more about it… You could think about something better…”
And then he whispered, suddenly fierce but entreating, “Think instead, at least if you can – Lord, forgive them, forgive them their sins, forgive them their sins – then you’d be helping us…
“I shouldn’t have asked you to do that, it’s too much,” he said, and got up quickly.
It had never occurred to Natalya that you could do that – not spare the least thought for what you were doing, what you were actually doing or why, forget about yourself altogether and instead repeat, “Forgive them their sins” – their sins!
It had not occurred to her before that she might care about other people, about someone other than Sofia – because Sofia was why she was doing this, Sofia was why she wouldn’t give it up, wouldn’t drink herself to oblivion, wouldn’t walk blithely into the sea or anything else… And she had to guide Sofia too – sometimes – although she was fairly compliant when it came to what was good and what was bad or what was unacceptable or inadvisable behaviour… But she’d never really thought that she would have the right to brand other people sinners. Now mountainous waves of hate would tower up against the men when they climbed on top of her, but it was an ineffable hatred and repugnance imbued with complete indifference towards them. She did not care about them. Apart from the fact that she earned money because of them. Had she earned her money in any other way, she would not have cared whether they were dead or suffered whatever punishment for their sins – or even if they didn’t: she harboured no persistent hatred towards them, no desire whatever for vengeance… They were merely bodies, sea slugs or an assortment of soft-bodied machines…
Now, though, they started to assume a form: even though she chanted in a purely mechanical fashion, unthinkingly, “forgive them, forgive them their sins, forgive…” the repeated words made them human again and even made her pity them, as if they had urgently had to buy a woman’s body and hand over their money for nothing more than short-lived satisfaction, not something that could by any stretch be called “love”, merely a hole into which they could empty themselves; in doing so they had sinned in some way, debased themselves… Quite why, Natalya could not explain, but that was what she felt.
She’d even once dreamt that all her clients were marching in torpid procession into a dark tunnel somewhere, a cold, lonely place, one after the other, yet each one on his own. It was so odd that she’d woken up and begun to chant, “forgive them, forgive them, their sins, forgive…”
If truth be told, she wasn’t entirely honest in her prayer, and the more she prayed it the more she felt she wasn’t being entirely honest: there was one man in the general crowd gradually flowing into the tunnel who stood out – the man who had asked her to say the prayer, a man whom she knew only by a Russian short name, Dima, but it seemed disrespectful in his case. No, she couldn’t call him that… Dima could be short only for Dmitri… Dmitri… Dmitrievich. As she didn’t know his patronymic that’s what she could call him, after all, why couldn’t a father have the same name as his son? In any case, Natalya felt this was less random than some other name… Dmitri Dmitrievich definitely shouldn’t be among them. That’s how it was from the very first night when Natalya tried to grant his request, and allowed her clients to flow past her eyes while she chanted mechanically to herself, “forgive them their sins… Father, forgive them their sins…” She didn’t bother to recall their faces, their shapes, she merely chanted the words and mused that she didn’t even have to picture them in her mind, because they were all just some among many. Just think how many of them there were in the whole world, one worse than the other… As she somewhat disdainfully and disinterestedly chewed over her prayer, she suddenly spotted Him among them, in the general flow, nodding, walking, as if in chains… Of course, he’d said, “By doing that you’ll be helping us…” us! – by using that word he’d lumped himself among the others. But he shouldn’t be lumped in with them. And the more Natalya said the prayer and tried to pray it as Dmitri-possibly-Dmitrievich had wanted – for all of them – the more she felt she was thinking only of one of them, “You, my love, my sweetheart, my darling, you mustn’t go there, Father, forgive him, please forgive him his sins…” but in herself she didn’t feel it was right because she should really have been praying for all of them.
Sofia had a secret that she’d kept from everyone, all her friends, even her mother. At first she hadn’t talked about it because she simply couldn’t – she must still have been too small. Later though, as she grew up, talking about it or thinking that way began to feel thoroughly unseemly. Since she’d been a little girl, she had had the feeling that there are some things you just can’t talk about to anyone. Some intuition, some inner awareness that although some things in life are a lost cause, you shouldn’t tell anyone about them because they would spoil in the telling… And now she was on the cusp of adulthood, it was completely impossible to mention it to anyone because everybody – Estonians and Russians alike – would think she’d lost it completely if she said that since she was a tiny child she had had this feeling inside that she would become the president of the Estonian Republic.
First it was impossible because she was female. Although actually, the Finns now had a woman president – and didn’t the Latvians have one too? Be that as it may, she couldn’t imagine the Estonians having one. And that was the least of it. Perhaps it wouldn’t be such a big deal that she didn’t have a real family – only a mother who, to cap it all, was an unskilled worker. What did it matter that her mother said that Sofia’s father had been the best, most beautiful person, and would never have abandoned them if he’d known she was expecting his daughter? That was her mother’s story, the one her mother wanted to believe… No, that wasn’t such a biggie; these days half the kids had absent fathers – they’d left or just weren’t around, no one knew how many there were. The killer factor was that she was Russian, and not from a long-established Russian family. Yes, admittedly, Kuperjanov was Russian, but Kuperjanov had won freedom for the Estonians whereas she, Sofia, had come as an occupier from somewhere beyond the Urals, from somewhere in Siberia, the place where Estonians had been sent in exile. Despite the fact that she’d been born here her roots were in Siberia. Even her surname – Tomskaya – was almost a reference to the place where Estonians were deported. No, the Estonians would have to be completely out of their minds to make someone like her their president… The earliest it might happen would be in thirty years’ time – certainly no sooner – but in all likelihood it would be more than forty: you couldn’t be president before you were forty-five because there was an age restriction, or to put it more accurately a youth restriction, but by and large presidents were all of a similar age the world over… What would have to be the matter with the Estonians for them to elect her as their president? Perhaps there’d have to be so few of them left that they would be almost dying out and it would be all the same to them if the president were a woman or black or even Russian. It wouldn’t be like there was a real president any more. Perhaps the Estonians would again get to the point they’d reached when the Russian forces had invaded and made Vares president, the poet with the bird’s name – the one who topped himself or was bumped off. Sofia had no ambition to be that type of president, of course, or to be like any other historical Estonian figure, yet Kuperjanov did retain some attraction for her. Although not a genuine Russian, he was at least a Russian Estonian, but he’d fought for Estonia’s independence and had had the good fortune to die young and no one took exception to his having a Russian name…