No, this was no longer just a prompter. A little sadly, I closed my eyes (from the outside it looked like a blissful fluttering of the eyelids from tasting the salami) and plunged headfirst into metamorphosis.
After a good lunch, one needs a rest, observed Kurt. He drew the curtains closed, and the atmosphere in the cab, heated by the summer sun, suddenly became erotically sultry. The curtains were red and turned my little German’s cheeks pink. The remains of lunch had long been carefully cleared away. After rolling them up in the paper tablecloth, this great lover of order had chucked the whole mess out the window and instructed me to do the same with the juice and beer cans. (A guy who had until then been sitting idly nearby in his little Skoda MB had immediately shot out to scoop up this rare prize.) A few last crumbs that had slipped out of the paper were now itching me under my back as this person pulled me over next to him and started sounding the depths with his hot, impatient hands. Actually, he wasn’t doing much sounding. He was quite sure of himself.
I let him fondle my breasts a little – just through my T-shirt – and then I pulled away and got right to the point: “Ich tranche Geld.”
(This time the prompter in my head seemed to have made a small mistake – even though Kurt had probably heard those words a million times, my tone didn’t quite fit the image of the average highway hooker. I said it too significantly with too much urgency: I was going to have to make a lot of money – as much as possible in hard currency – in order to get Patrik that wheelchair.)
Kurt was a little taken aback. Just the tiniest bit. Then he reached into the glove compartment. He opened it a crack, just enough to stick his hand in (I wasn’t supposed to see everything he had in there, I realized), and groped around. He pulled out a large bottle of shampoo. “Willst du das? Willst du?” He turned the fine container around in his hands, like a shopkeeper displaying his merchandise. Look, little girl, how shiny! Now, how ‘bout a feel of those titties? The shampoo really did glimmer beautifully; it was tempting stuff: even from where I was sitting I could smell its sweet apple scent. “You have such beautiful, wonderful hair, Via… This will be a little something just for you… Just a sort of small gift. Out of friendship. Would you like it?”
I shook my head – and I suddenly felt pretty awkward. I couldn’t explain my desire to him at all, why I needed cash. There was no time to go through the whole story about Patrik. He wouldn’t have listened – and if he had, he still wouldn’t have believed it. Any long-distance trucker could tell you that every single Czechoslovakian girl had, as a rule, all kinds of relatives and at least two dozen best friends, all on their deathbeds with terminal diseases.
I didn’t feel like going into that whole story. He simply wasn’t worth it.
(Oh yes, if we had met under different circumstances, I would have run up to your truck… refused your cigarettes… I would have used the formal Sie with you, at least at the beginning… and we might even have talked for real. Actually communicated. But I had already decided that my words were not going to communicate anything; I would use them only to weave a web, in which I had to catch at least a few West German marks. Perhaps we could even have gotten along, Kurt, you don’t look stupid. But you have been chosen, selected for this beginning, and you can’t change a thing about it now. Neither of us can. It’s impossible.)
“Ich Brauche Geld,” I said. With shocking offhandedness (shocking to me), I pulled a Marlboro out of his pack – and without making even the slightest move to light it for myself, I waited for him to lean toward me with the lighter flame.
“Do you understand?” I said through the cloud of smoke. “I don’t need your damn shampoo. If you want it… if you really want it… then I need cash.”
With no less shocking offhandedness, I undid the button of my jeans and the fly unzipped by itself. (The majority of zippers of Czechoslovakian manufacture immediately leaped at such opportunities to unzip themselves – Patrik always claimed that this was one of the methods by which Czechoslovakian manufacturing enterprises contributed to the campaign to encourage population growth.) I undid the jeans sort of casually. They peeled away from my hips a little.
“Wieviel?” he whispered. He was getting to the point.
(It occurred to me later that this must have been monotonous for him, to say the same words to various girls. Veefeel? -this much some of them must have understood. Veefeel? Veefeel?)
He didn’t look as if he wanted to pay very much, even though at the moment, by all appearances, he was longing to make love to me. Christ, why put it so delicately – I mean, he wanted to fuck, it was clear from certain physical signs. Impressively obvious physical signs, I couldn’t help thinking, and the not-for-profit part of my physical instinct had already begun looking forward to it, more or less. The commercial part asked, “How much can you give me?” and it repeated, “I really need cash, get it, I need cash.”
This was a sport, a game, I was gradually realizing. Kurt was definitely not poor, and even though he probably picked up some girl on every trip he made through Czechoslovakia and had to pay for it, I was sure he could afford to hand me a couple of hundred marks. It was a sport: pick up as many girls as possible in the East and then outdo all the other drivers bragging about who nailed what girl for how little. Supposedly, the consensus among Western Intertruckers was that “Czech whores are good whores, the cheapest whores on earth” – and except for a few insignificant cases, the truckers tried not to spoil them… it was a sport. I remember this one Dutchman, a pretty nice guy, who once gave me a lift on the same route I was riding that day, but under different circumstances: he gave Fialinka Number One a lift, while today a newborn second Fialinka rode that highway. He told me how he and his friend once made a bet on who could score a Czech highway girl for the lowest price. I had one for five marks, the Dutchman said modestly. I couldn’t get breakfast for that in the Netherlands. But my friend, he outdid me. He bargained this one girl down to one mark, one mark, can you imagine, howled the Dutchman, and she wasn’t all that bad. True, she gave him the clap…
I’d always laughed at those prices, determined more by location and nationality than by the quality and appearance of the girl. And sometimes I was ashamed for my countrymen – still, it’d simply never occurred to me just how damn personally those highway prices could affect me. “Verstehst du mich?” I repeated. “Ich tranche Geld.”
And poor, dear Kurt (in different circumstances I certainly could have gotten along with him and, God knows, maybe even have made love to him on an entirely different philosophical basis), this Kurt stared at the strip of tummy below my T-shirt, sighed, and said, “Funfzig Marks? Ist das okay?”
I thought it over, then nodded.
The red curtains were made for lovemaking (that is, if this particular act didn’t call for a change of terminology); the conditions were almost brothel-like. The sun, already substantially lower in the sky, shone straight into the cabin and illuminated it perfectly. Redly. Shamefully. Maybe red actually is the only color for this, I said to myself, and I noticed the shadow of the fabric pattern on that other face; maybe only red light will do, because suddenly there was not a trace of shame in that cab.