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So, this is not an attempt to find the merits or reveal the evils of this profession, or to justify my choice. It is about my curiosity. I am curious about my ease with what I do.

I don’t think it is my sisters’ fault, although they did set an example. I was okay with this even before I learned what kind of job they did in Luxembourg. The first time I had sex in exchange for the agreed-on-in-advance amount was when I was sixteen.

During the summer holidays, my school friend Sveta and I took jobs as waitresses in one of the resorts on the Black Sea. It was a great opportunity to get tanned, hang out and make a little bit of money. We made friends with all of the staff, including three security guards – who, although a lot of fun, annoyingly hassled us.

Once, the barman, Sergey, called both of us for a little chat. ‘Dolls, would you like to make some extra cash? There are two men from Moscow. They want some fun, but because their wives and kids are here too, the fun must be quiet and decent. They saw you two on the beach and liked you. Tomorrow they are going fishing on the lake and would like you two to join them for few hours – one hundred dollars each,’ he finished, and smiled.

I looked at Sveta. She was stunned. After a pause she threw ‘No way!’ at Sergey with disgust, and left the bar. Sergey confidently followed her leaving with his eyes, and a sarcastic ‘Sure, princess. Go! Eventually you will get fucked by one of those callow guards anyway…’ He turned to me with a questioning look and added, ‘… for free, of course.’

It was a surprise to me, but I didn’t rise in revolt from the proposition. What was even more shattering – I totally agreed with the barman.

‘How safe is it?’

‘They are normal dudes; if they weren’t, I wouldn’t handle the negotiation.’

The next day, at about ten in the morning, one of them picked me up in his latest-model black Mercedes, a few kilometers away from our resort as we had agreed. I had never been taken for a drive in a car that stylish. It took us fifteen minutes to get to the peaceful glade with its small lake, where his friend, it turned out, was already fishing – for real.

‘I will give you another hundred if you do my friend as well,’ my driver announced with ease, as if we were talking about the weather. ‘Your choice; we will not force you to do anything.’

It took me some time to convert two hundred bucks into hryvni. The sound of the anxious pulse in my head slowed my brain down. Nevertheless, the amount was equivalent to four months of my salary as a waitress, with tips. I tried to calm myself down; I made sure that my voice stayed firm and replied, ‘Okay, but one at a time.’ He nodded ‘No problem,’ then asked me to undress and to move to the back seat.

Before we started, my employer quickly took off his shorts and T-shirt, rolled a condom over his cock, and, before climbing into the car, wisely covered the leather seat with a beach towel.

We started with me on top of him. Very soon he got tired of my flat chest and lifted me up, turning me around at the same time. He pushed my head down, squashing my face into the leather that was now stripped of the towel, and bonked me from behind. He was rough but didn’t hurt me; more importantly, it didn’t take him long to come.

As soon as he was done, he mumbled ‘Good girl, stay where you are,’ put his shorts back on, and walked away towards the lake.

When his friend came to the car a few minutes later, I was lying on my back, bashfully covered with the towel. The friend was cool as a cucumber: he smiled, unzipped his shorts, wrapped his swollen member in rubber and climbed on top of me. It was my lucky day: he was even faster than his friend. Ten minutes of rhythmical rocking in the missionary position and I was free to go with two hundred bucks in my pocket.

The barman was right: the ‘dudes’ were ‘normal’, and one of the security guards did screw Sveta after all… for free.

When the summer ended and we went back home, Sveta started to complain about pain in her throat and discomfort when she urinated. The blood test showed the clap and a few other X-rated infections. When I asked her if they had used any protection, Sveta wiped her tears and blubbered in embarrassment that he had told her that he’d put on the condom, but it was dark and she couldn’t see. She was too shy to check with her hand.

That summer story didn’t shape my views about life: the barman’s words were not news to me. So, I look for answers in the earlier stages of my life, but can’t find any clues in my childhood either. We grew up in a friendly, strong and intelligent family; our parents had a healthy relationship. We were raised on Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and steeped in the concepts of integrity and fairness. I think that my I-am-okay-with-being-a-pro attitude is simply a consequence of my observations of everyday life.

For example, my schoolmate Marina liked Anton from our group, but dated 24-year-old Misha who had his own business and decent wheels, and who picked her up after classes once in a while. That made Marina feel cooler than the rest of the girls in our class (including me), and successfully substituted Anton’s great sense of humor.

Another good example was our neighbour, Dasha, from the fifth floor. She was my mother’s kitchen-small-talk friend, and came for coffee and a few cigarettes almost every day. Most of their conversations ended up being about Dmitri, Dasha’s husband, who, according to her, was a rare type of dickhead. He’d been involved with another woman for almost two years. On each visit, Dasha complained that she was tired of the life that was built on the lie, that she didn’t even love ‘the bastard’ any more, and that she would have left him long ago if she had anywhere to go other than her mother’s small apartment. Her mother lived somewhere on the outskirts of Kherson and drove her mad. These were good excuses for Dasha to continue living a life of no self-respect and constant complaints.

I saw many of these examples around me every day: because of social, economic and other circumstances, including low self-esteem, a fear of change, the belief that they didn’t deserve better, or simply to gain any sort of advantage, women often entered into – or stayed in – relationships for reasons other than love or sexual attraction. My curious logic may not have been developed at the time, but I could not see the difference between this type of relationship and one in which women honestly named their monetary price.

I saw so many of these ‘love affairs without love’ that I became used to the concept and formed my okay-with-being-a-pro attitude. As I see it, the only difference between any hooker and our neighbour Dasha is that the former’s ‘labour hour’ is the latter’s lifetime.

16

I go to work in an annoyingly nasty mood. No wonder I am pissed off – besides the hangover from the previous night’s booze-diving routine that doesn’t want to simmer down, and although it’s 5 p.m. and it still feels like my body has been thrown from the fifth floor onto the driveway, five minutes ago I received a text from one of my regulars.

Oh yes, he is one of the first clients whom I can proudly call ‘my customer’.

The chap is in his fifties, in good shape, not bad looking but a repulsively unpleasant and sleazy man. He lives in Paris and, of course, is married. Two or three times a month he comes to Luxembourg for business and pleasure. When we first met in the club, about three months ago, he acted like a real gentleman: asked some neutral questions about my family and my life, trying really hard to show that he was interested in me, and not sex. He kept throwing lines like, ‘Oh, all three of you are beautiful sisters! Your mother must be a gorgeous woman!’ or ‘You are an intelligent woman, Julia, you shouldn’t be working here…’