Dimitri walks just ahead of her, Bengt is behind her. They walk towards the exit and through passport control.
She wants to scream.
She doesn’t dare.
She remembers the blows to her face and the pain when they penetrated her. She begged them to stop, but they didn’t.
It’s a large place, much larger than the terminal in Klaipeda. People meet and hug each other, delighted to be together again.
She feels nothing.
Only shame.
She doesn’t know why.
She hands her passport to the uniformed official. Shut up. He leafs through it, looks at her, nods her through. Or die. She walks away. Alena is next.
Outside the gate, Dimitri turns to Lydia and tells her that he will take the passport. She owes him for it and he wants his money back, so now she has to work.
She doesn’t really hear what he says.
The large hall empties slowly as the people around her leave. They wait at a newsagent’s kiosk, a small distance from passport control.
Then she comes, the woman they are waiting for, who works with Dimitri and Bengt.
She is wearing a grey tracksuit. The top has a hood and she wears it pulled down over her face. She is quite young. The woman smiles at Dimitri, gives him a peck on the cheek, then smiles at Bengt and kisses him on the lips, as if they belong together. She turns to Lydia and Alena, still smiling, and says something they don’t understand, presumably in Swedish.
‘Well, hello there. So you are our two new little Baltic pussies.’
She kisses their cheeks, first Lydia, then Alena. She smiles and they try to smile back at her.
They don’t notice when Bengt Nordwall leans close to the woman and whispers to her, his hand gently pushing back the edge of the hood.
‘Lena, I’ve missed you so.’
But they hear what she says next, still turned towards them and smiling. She has switched to Russian.
‘Welcome to Sweden. I hope you’ll enjoy your stay.’
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Anders Roslund is the founder and former head of Kulturnyheterna (Culture News) on Sveriges Television, and for many years worked as the head of news at Aktuellt (Channel 1) and as a prize-winning investigative reporter at Rapport (Channel 2), the Swedish equivalents of CNN and the BBC.
Börge Hellström is an ex-criminal who helps to rehabilitate young offenders and drug addicts. He is also one of the founders of KRIS (Criminals’ Return into Society) – a nonprofit association that assists released prisoners during their first period of freedom.
