Lena snivelled, ‘Are you sure we can trust Irina? I don’t want to get into one of those scary stories about girls being enslaved. They talk about them on TV all the time!’
The voice in the receiver quivered, ‘Fuck Irina and your scary stories! I called the embassy and checked – it’s all legitimate, so the risks are considerably low.’
‘Well, I don’t know…’ Lena moaned after a pause.
‘Come on, sister!’ Natalia almost squealed. ‘I know it’s scary, but trust me, it will be fine. You know I need you on this one! I swear that if you say no, I’ll kill myself and leave a note: For everything I blame my indecisive sister Lena.’
We burst into extended belly laughter, ending up with tears in our eyes.
The decision was made!
5
Before my sisters took off, Lena had an abortion and Natalia quit her job in Istanbul. During the trip, they called almost every week and reported that they were fine. In the meantime, I was in my last year of school, trying my best to combine my soaked in booze and weed nightlife with school and my damn homework. I still managed to get fairish marks and – more importantly – not to get pregnant.
One evening, a few weeks before my sisters were due to return, my father and I were having dinner at home. It was a typical supper of borsch, a traditional Ukrainian beetroot soup, and potatoes fried in lard with chopped onions. As always, our conversation hardly went further than, ‘How was school?’ or ‘Have you done your homework?’
Then, out of the blue, my father turned his attentive look to me, narrowed his eyes and said, ‘Don’t even think about it!’
Hmm… all I had in mind was how to sponge a few hryvni[1] for tomorrow’s night out, so I just raised my eyebrows in return.
‘Don’t even think about going with your sisters!’ he snarled. ‘Jul, you are too smart for this. Remember, when you were a little girl, you always wanted to be a doctor?’
Unintentionally I rolled my eyes.
‘Don’t pull your faces here, in front of me!’ he raised his voice.
‘Pa, please…’ I begged wearily.
Un-fucking-fortunately, the supper had gone from casual to seriously annoying.
‘Don’t “pa” at me! You need to have a degree to become something in this life or to find a good job.’
I flew into a rage. ‘Where is your diploma, Pa, huh? How is your degree helping you now? It’s been almost six months since they laid you off and you are still jobless!’ I uttered and ran out of the kitchen.
The saddest part was that not only my father was canned; the whole post-Soviet belt was in the same jam, too.
Let’s take the Kherson shipbuilding yard, where my father worked for almost twenty years. In 1991 it closed down and thousands of people, like him, lost their jobs. What’s more, the teachers, doctors, policemen, soldiers, pensioners – anyone who depended on government – didn’t get their salaries for months, even years. So, the educators’ hunger strikes or medics’ refusal to come to work, ignoring the Hippocratic oath in a desperate fight for their shamefully low salaries, were normal, everyday events.
The mere idea of going to the university for at least five years and becoming, let’s say, a doctor, and then getting a place in a local hospital with a salary of $120 per month made me nauseous.
The only people who had a halfway decent life those days (except for the greedy, corrupt politicians, other officials, gang members, or the blessed ones who were lucky in some way to be close to the trough) were the ones who didn’t look back, left behind their ideas of a cloyingly planned and secure Soviet past, and adapted to a new life full of risks and surprises. Among them were suitcase traders who knocked about in Poland and Turkey; sailors who managed to find jobs on foreign ships; men who did rock-fall reconstructions in Portugal or harvested crops in Spain; older women who usually looked after the elderly in Europe, Canada or the United States; and the younger ones, like me and my sisters, who took care of more-capable-of-action clients in the ‘entertainment’ business.
The memories of a three-litre glass jar full of evenly cut squares of pork fat, preserved in thick layers of coarse salt, with skin that was impossible to chew, will stay with me forever. This was often the only item in our fridge for months. The image of our mother’s constantly worried eyes, the shame on our father’s face each time he came back home with the same nothing as the day before, will never be erased from my head.
Even when they found a few hryvni to buy 500 grams of rice and some bread for that day, or the rare occasion when one of our mom’s friends who worked at the kindergarten helped by bringing some scraps that even the not-so-picky staff would not take home, the misery wouldn’t disappear – the question of what to feed to their three children tomorrow still hung densely in the air.
Eventually, our mother didn’t have a choice but to go abroad to work. Thanks to her fearless and adventurous character, and later to Natalia’s great desire to swim out of that hopeless and depressing puddle called life in post-Soviet Ukraine, my unemployed father and I could afford borsch and some fruit for dessert that evening.
In addition to finding a job and making some money to help us to avoid complete deprivation, our mom also taught us to be brave and always to look for a way out – even if you could not see one.
So yes, instead of discouraging me, my father unwillingly nudged me to the realization that no matter what, I had to leave Kherson. There was no other way for me. The only thing I had to do was to announce it to my sisters. Something was telling me that it could be a bump in the road.
6
Lena and Natalia had been back in Kherson for four months when I decided, finally, to take action and talk to them. It was my birthday, too, which was a part of my strategy for persuading them to take me on their next trip.
Oh yes, of course there was going to be another trip.
They’d spent half the year in Luxembourg and managed to earn an astronomical amount: about $20,000 each! But because their income was the only source of finance for our family, and my sisters were, to some extent, hooked on shopping and partying, the liquid assets evaporated pretty quickly.
They decided to go back.
Unfortunately, they had to wait another two months. According to Luxembourgish immigration law, entertainers were not allowed to work and stay in the country for more than six consecutive months. They also had to have a break between trips, out of Luxembourg, that had to be as long as the time they’d spent there. Fortunately for me, this meant that I still had time to finish my school exams.
I knew there was going to be a problem. Both sisters had always been overprotective of me. They wanted to make sure that I had the best opportunities – me becoming a hooker was obviously not one of them.
Natalia, as the eldest sister, had a persistent urge to stick up for me. Lena was driven by the guilt I mentioned earlier. I could get whatever I wanted from my kin by manipulating their feelings – I know I am a spoilt bitch – but this time my advantage actually played against me.
We had finished the cake, and our father had left the three of us in the kitchen for his quiet moment with the TV and the beloved ten-year-old couch.
It was a really special night – Baileys and cigars. Natalia had generously forked out to celebrate my eighteenth birthday. The sweet liquor made us pretty tipsy, and our chat more upfront and revealing. The girls went on about the memories of their trip.
‘We were scared shitless when the airplane touched down at Luxembourg International. It was night-time too…’ Natalia sipped from her glass and continued, ‘Max, our talent agent, picked us up. He was suspiciously quiet and uneasy. The five kilometre drive to the club felt like the longest trip ever. No wonder he gave us goose bumps: a few weeks later we found out that he was a total junkie.’