‘He was supposed to get us a contract at another club for the next month,’ Lena jumped in, ‘and also to renew the visas, which had to be done every month. Guess what – this fucker disappeared! We didn’t know what to do. Luckily, we managed to find another agent to sort it out. But still, it was a troubling story for us and for Max, too. After all, he was found dead in his apartment from an overdose. Apparently the guy didn’t have family, because they started looking for him only when the stink of his body reeked through the walls.’
‘That’s another story, Len. Stop interrupting me!’ Natalia exclaimed with childish excitement. She’d won back a turn to speak. ‘When Max pulled up in the middle of the narrow and murky street, right next to the lone, dowdy neon sign – “Platinum Triangle” – I thought we were in the middle of some horror movie!’
‘I promise you Jul,’ Lena broke in again. ‘The letter P was flickering on and off while sending off sparks!’
‘It was nothing like we imagined it would be. You know, we had this Las Vegas-type of place in mind.’ We burst into laughter.
They entered the dark and smoky place, which had a long passage with a bar that stretched along the right and sank into a big square lounge with low couches, red curtains and a small stage in the corner. An old, awfully tall lady with a gloomy face behind the counter looked at them and solemnly nodded at Max, who was pulling their luggage in and missed the ‘mafia move’.
The place looked weird. It had about twenty dressed-up, heavily painted girls: a few of them moved lazily on the stage; the tipsy one at the bar was persistently soft-soaping the only customer, who had a terrorised look on his face; and the rest were sitting on the row of stools all the way along the left side of the corridor, which looked really funny opposite the elevated bar.
When my sisters stepped inside, all the girls (even the drunk one) turned to look at them in the hope of seeing more clients at the door. As soon as they recognised Max and figured that my sisters were the new dancers, the expressions on their faces changed to ‘Fuck! We can’t believe this old, giant bitch is featherbedding, when the club is empty every night!’ Their last hopes of making some money in that shithole evaporated on the arrival of those two.
The giant bitch was Rosy, the owner of the club. She stepped out from behind the counter and, without saying hello to the new arrivals, called one of the girls.
‘Show them around’, said Rosy, levelling a distinct misanthropy at the pretty blonde she’d called, before going back to the bar.
The excessively friendly and energetic girl reached to shake my sisters’ hands. ‘Hi, my name is Angel,’ she said. After a brief pause, she smiled and added in Russian, ‘That’s my stage name. My real name is Olga.’
When Max had eventually settled their suitcases and hotfooted it away, Olga took them on the tour, explaining their duties and club’s utilities. When they went upstairs to see the private rooms, their bleached usher abruptly turned and said, with a knowing smile on her face, ‘You are not allowed to have sex with the customers,’ then kept moving onward.
‘We both sighed with relief,’ Natalia carried on, as Lena nodded.
Suddenly father walked into the kitchen. We fell silent, exchanging glances on our blushing faces: we had never spoken to him about what my sisters did and always tried to keep our voices low to make sure he would not accidently hear us. Clearly, the reality in which Natalia and Lena had being working as pros was ‘slightly’ changed to a version in which they were waitressing.
It was common for working girls to lie to their families. How could one tell her mom that she was nothing but a whore? Of course she would come up with a more palatable interpretation – that she was working as a babysitter or a cleaning lady. And even though the money she earned was freaking huge for such a short period, and for a four-dollar-an-hour job, her mom, of course, would disregard the obvious and swallow the comfy colouring. How could a mother admit that her girl was nothing but a whore?
‘Come on, girls. How many times have I told you not to smoke inside?’ Our father went on, bawling us out: ‘Go onto the balcony! There is so much smoke in here you can hang an axe in the air!’ He pulled his usual disappointed face, opened the window wider, and went back to his beloved.
We cracked up as he left, but decided to move anyway. Natalia grabbed the bottle while Lena and I took the ashtray and the glasses. We parked on the old brown pleather corner seat, which for a typical concrete Soviet-realism-style apartment building was a real luxury. The night was warm and quiet, as it is in the Kherson summer; the shrill chirping of crickets accompanied our straight talk, which we didn’t start until we’d made sure that the door behind us was closed.
‘So yes,’ resumed Natalia, ‘the words – no prostitution – were like balm for our exhausted nerves.’
My sisters wanted to believe this fib so badly that they forgot about their conversation with Irina, who had, after all, confessed about what kind of ‘dancing’ she performed. Moreover, the sign in Russian next to every private room – ‘Throw condoms into the crapper only – NEVER INTO A WASTEBIN. Management.’ – that was aimed at the girls in case of a police raid, didn’t make them think twice.
‘Imagine, Jul, our faces, when in the middle of that first night the rhythmical beat of the couch against the wall in the private room next to our accommodation, accompanied by dull pants and sighs – soprano and baritone in unison – woke us.’ We rolled with laughter again.
Suddenly I fired it off: ‘I am going with you this time.’
They froze for a second and then exclaimed as one, ‘No way!’
I started gabbling something about being mature and capable and responsible and I don’t remember what else.
‘It’s a bad idea!’ exclaimed Natalia
‘It wouldn’t be the right place for you, especially not after what you went through three years ago, Jul…’ Lena shook her head while looking away.
‘What does that have to do with my future plans? I can’t believe you brought it up, Len! So now, because you cannot deal with your guilt issues you are going to seal me in a jar and store me in a cool and dry place so I won’t get hurt again? Is that your plan, Len? To keep me safe, turning me into a pickled gherkin? It’s my life and I will decide what to do with it…’
We argued all night long, until Natalia lost her temper, screamed ‘Over my dead body!’ and stormed out.
7
Guess what… two months later, three of us are flying to Luxembourg.
Natalia could not stop me, but she did make sure we were going to work in the same place, a cabaret called Sexy Girls.
The hot August day is in full swing when we land. We grab a cab and go straight to the club.
Lena asks the driver to pull off next to the four-storey apartment building with the red sign above the entrance. The billboard with pictures of half-naked girls arrests my attention. Despite the girls’ cheesecakes being covered with a glass panel, most of the photos are faded and have curved yellow corners from the merciless sun.
We force our luggage through the doorway and stop in the poky hall. It has a door on the left to the club area, a wall-sized mirror on the right and stairs further down the hall.
While Natalia and Lena are looking for a manager to get the room keys, I avidly peer at the dark bar, taking in every detail. The day shift is rolling. Waves of excitement and fear rage through my body when I think about working here… in just a few hours… tonight!