The Cruelty, page 15
The tires of his car chirp just as I’m about to jump back to my feet, but the car is already speeding down the tunnel, the roaring of its engine vibrating off the walls.
“You okay?” I ask the woman in Russian as I climb to my feet.
“Fine.” She searches the ground for something, then picks up a tiny plastic bag between thumb and forefinger and holds it up in front of her, inspecting it for damage. “Answer me this—how desperate does he think I am? A blow job for ein wenig Gras? Fucking loser.”
I take her hand and help her to her feet.
She shoves the little bag of weed into the pocket of her jacket and looks me over. “So, novichka”—newcomer—“what are you called?”
“I’m called Sofia,” I say.
* * *
The deal Marina and I strike in the underpass outside the Bahnhof Zoo is a straightforward one: twenty euros a night for a place on her couch until I run out of euros or she runs out of patience. We ride together on the subway to her place, far to the east of Berlin center.
It’s dangerous, this arrangement. But it’s also anonymous with no passport required. And I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t some comfort in Marina’s presence. Her age is hard to guess, but she’s definitely older than me by, what, five years? Even though I’ve lived lots of places, I was the coddled child of a diplomat, and the streets of Berlin may as well be another universe. This is Marina’s territory, and she knows the strange physics here, which direction gravity goes, and whether two plus two equals something other than four.
“Novichka,” she says from across the aisle of the empty car as she scrapes at something under her fingernail with a key. “Where you from?”
“Russia,” I say.
She rolls her eyes. “No shit.”
So she thinks I’m for real. Cover identity rule one: Go native when you can. “The south,” I say. “Armavir, it’s called. By the Black Sea.”
“Near Sochi?”
“Six, maybe seven hours by bus,” I say. Cover identity rule two: The believability of your story is in the details.
“Practically in Turkey,” she says. “That explains it, then.”
“What does it explain?”
“When I first saw you, I thought, this Sofia, she’s a Jew. And that’s fine. Jews I don’t mind so much.” Marina leans forward in her seat. “But now I’m thinking, this one’s a Muslim. So don’t bring any of that jihad shit into my house, got it?”
“I’m not Muslim.”
“I’m talking generally. Whatever jihad shit you’re carrying—religion, politics, someone after you—everyone seems to be on some holy war. Just don’t bring it near me.” She stands, grasping the handrail, and comes across the aisle, the better to glare down at me. “Too many refugees lately, which means too many cops. Too many cops means trouble for Marina.”
“Got it,” I say. “No drama, no cops.”
“Just so, novichka,” she says. “A few more months, I’m going to be a bartender. You know what kind of money bartenders make?”
“And—what do you do now?”
“Fuck for money,” she says.
The words shock me, and Marina grins when she sees me flinch.
“You got a problem?” she says.
“No,” I say. “Absolutely not.”
But she hears judgment in my voice. “Marina does with her body what Marina pleases, got it?” she says. “Your Allah or Jesus or whoever the fuck doesn’t get a vote.” She’s quiet for a moment, deciding whether I’m worth the trouble. Then she looks out the window. “Here we are,” she says.
We transfer to a trolley that runs down the center of a wide boulevard. The streetlamps catch the buildings in gray light, showing off their crumbling, communist-era glory. “They don’t look much better even in the daylight,” Marina says, reading my mind. “Gnily zubie.” Rotting teeth.
A few blocks of the same rumble past the window before Marina tugs my sleeve to get off. I follow her through the massive concrete buildings and realize the only way to tell them apart is by the unique face of each one’s decay. Sagging ears here, a listing awning-nose there. Hers is the one with the spray-painted RAUS AUSLÄNDER—Get out, foreigners—next to the entrance.
There’s no lock on the building’s door. You just have to know the trick to turning the lever: push and lift, then turn. The elevator’s broken, Marina says, and has been forever. I follow her up the stairs to where she lives on the sixth floor. There’s a TV on loud in one of her neighbors’ apartments, and the toxic reek of crack or meth or death hangs in the hallway.
She locks the door behind us, then gives me the grand tour. The tiny kitchen, the tiny bathroom, then the living room where there’s a plaid couch, sagging low in the middle, and an old swiveling recliner. Beyond this is a small bedroom with two single beds, one on either side of a window. The one on the right is sloppily made and has a Hello Kitty throw pillow on it. “That’s Marina’s,” she says. The one on the left is drawn tight and has an Orthodox crucifix hanging over its head. “Lyuba’s,” she says. “My roommate—she’s a cam girl.”
“A cam girl?”
Marina nods. “Also a piano teacher.”
* * *
I crash down hard on the couch, exhausted beyond exhaustion, and although I need a shower, and although I need to brush my teeth—Jesus, has it really been since Paris?—I simply can’t move, not even enough to take off my jacket. I close my eyes, but all I see is a kaleidoscope of colors and shapes and faces and things. I try to shut off my ears, too, try to ignore the noise from the city outside, but Berlin refuses to shut up. It’s just like New York in this way, always there, starved for attention even when you’re trying to sleep, making itself known with distant sirens and rumbling trucks and buzzing sodium lamps.
And just when it’s disappearing. Just when the world’s going silent. The click of a lighter and the rolling fug of marijuana smoke. I open my eyes and see Marina, dressed now in a tattered T-shirt. She’s curled up in a chair, bare legs folded up against her chest, brown ceramic weed pipe held lazily in one hand. She’s looking at me, watching me, like I’m an animal in a zoo.
Probably a minute passes, the two of us just looking at each other. Finally, she lights the pipe again and inhales. “As a rule, I don’t ask,” she says with clenched throat, then exhales. “But you’re not the usual kind of runaway.”
I’m too tired to understand, and as Marina laughs at the confusion on my face, she gestures to the room, but really, to all Berlin.
“How is it you end up on Marina’s couch?” she says. “Daddy hit you? Boyfriend get you pregnant and want to marry? I can help you with that.”
“No,” I say. “I’m just—looking for someone.”
She shrugs. “Lots of someones here.”
“And you?” I say. “How did you end up here?”
Marina taps the pipe over a plastic ashtray. “Marina doesn’t ‘end up’ anywhere, novichka. Marina chooses. Father runs away, mother marries a bus driver who likes little girls, so, pffft.” She flicks her fingers, sending her old life skittering across the floor. “Off I go, nach Berlin. Four years, this July.”
“Congratulations,” I say, the word coming out as a question.
She refills the pipe, carefully pressing the fresh weed into the bowl with the butt of her lighter. “Anyway, Marina needs only Marina. Just as Sofia needs only Sofia.” She thrusts the pipe at me. “Want?”
“No thanks,” I say.
“Suit yourself,” she says, putting the pipe to her mouth. “How old are you anyway?”
I try to remember the age on the Sofia passport. “Twenty-two.”
She laughs, coughing a geyser of smoke at the ceiling. “Twenty-two my ass.”
“How old are you?” I ask.
She wipes spittle from her mouth on her T-shirt. “Seventeen,” she says.
* * *
I close my eyes until Marina thinks I’m asleep and wanders off to bed. For a while, I try to imagine Marina’s life, what it’s like to fuck for money as if that were no big thing, to have no family and not give a shit, as if that were no big thing, either. Life as an endless war of all against all, and ein wenig Gras is what you get if you win.
But as I wonder what it’s like to be Marina, I wonder if maybe she isn’t right. If it’s true that Sofia needs only Sofia, then why am I here at all? Silly to continue an epic, pointless quest to find a father who’s not even my biological father. A father who lies to his not-even-biological daughter for her entire life. A father who killed my mother with a wrong turn because he refused to be an accountant or mailman like all the others.
This connection to him is just imagined. A child’s fantasy. And, like Marina and Sofia, Gwendolyn is too old for fantasy. Grow up, Gwendolyn. Let him go. Children bury their parents. It’s the way things work. You already did it once.
Morning is starting in Berlin. The light—soft blue and yellow fighting it out—finds its way to my eyelids. I turn over, bury my face in the couch cushion, but trucks snort angrily past on the boulevard. Morning deliveries of strudel or whatever Berlin trucks deliver. And somewhere, in some other room, a clock is ticking.
* * *
When I wake, Marina is gone, replaced by someone I assume to be Lyuba. She’s a wispy blond, curled up in the same chair Marina had sat in, smoking a cigarette and reading a Bible. She is doing so languidly, beautifully, leg draped just so over an arm of the chair, hand with cigarette just so, draped over the other arm.
I check my phone: three in the afternoon.
“Where’s Marina?” I say.
“Don’t know,” she says.
“I’m Sofia,” I say.
“Did I ask?” she says.
“Mind if I take a shower?” I say.
“Do. I can smell you from here,” she says.
In the bathroom, I have to duck under improvised clotheslines crisscrossing the room, heavy with drying panties and bras hanging by paper clips. But the sink and shower are surprisingly and spectacularly clean. I steal a little toothpaste and brush with my finger. Then I take a shower, letting the water scour the terror and exhaustion and fear down the drain in tan swirls.
When I’m finished, I dress and tell Lyuba I’m going out. If she hears me, she doesn’t acknowledge it.
Outside, the rain is gone, and there’s even a weak little sun in the sky. Somehow, the neighborhood in daytime is less ominous than the neighborhood in nighttime, and the concrete apartment blocks have an orderly symmetry about them even in their decaying state. An old woman in a striped smock hoses the sidewalk in front of a pharmacy and glowers at me as I pass, as if irritated by having to share her world with the young. I find a café tucked into a corner and spend a euro on coffee and a day-old sausage roll. The roll is tepid and greasy and terrible, but it’s cheap calories and that’s all that matters.
For a long while, I nurse the coffee and think, staring down at the Formica tabletop as if the facts and inferences and suppositions were spread out across it. But there’s no librarian to ask for help, no textbook telling me how to do this. So how do I even start?
Start with the reason you’re in Berlin, a voice tells me, start with the two men who killed Hamid. It seems logical you don’t send a novice to Paris for a job like that. You use someone who has done this before.
I open the iPhone and thumb through the pictures once more. There they are: Gunther punching Lukas in the groin. Lukas bent over a line of coke as Gunther downs a stein of beer. Lukas punching Gunther in the groin. The world of men having fun: coke and beer and ball punching. They are not totally alike, though. Gunther is leaner than Lukas, and fairer. And their wardrobes are different, too. Lukas preferred, at least on this night, a form-fitted undershirt, while Gunther preferred a baggy striped oxford rolled up at the sleeves, thug-prep.
Then I see it, the thing they have in common. The tattoo. On the inside forearm of each. It’s a crude outline of the European continent, the Spanish snout nuzzling an unseen Mediterranean, balancing on Italy’s stiletto-heeled leg and the Balkan-Greek haunch. And around Europe, a coiled, equally-crude cobra, it’s head about where Norway and Sweden and Finland should be.
Two teenage girls enter the café noisily, distracting me from my thoughts. One is a prissy-looking redhead with good shoes—Germany’s answer to Astrid Foogle. The other is a blond with short hair who wears pink sneakers. They order coffee and chocolate croissants, then take a table in the middle of the room. The redhead discloses some heretofore-secret news that causes the blond to gasp, “Doch!”
Astrid Foogle. Wonder if she’s found a new enemy yet? And Mr. Lawrence. Ask me about the benign indifference of the world now, fucker. I have a better answer.
I rise to leave just as the woman working the counter clears out the display case, removing a tray of cakes and rolls to make room for fresh inventory.
“How much?” I ask, nodding to the old ones.
“I was going to throw them out,” she says.
“I’ll give you three euros for them all.”
She puts her hands on her hips and sucks at something in her teeth. “Five,” she says.
* * *
I clear away an ashtray and a spread of magazines and a skyline of liquor bottles from the kitchen table in the apartment and set the bakery box down in the center. Lyuba approaches like a suspicious cat and carefully picks out a pastry, eyeing me the whole time. I ask if Marina is back, and she gives me a silent nod. I lift a fragile, crumbling fruit tart with what looks like raspberry filling from the box and wrap it in a napkin.
Marina is on her bed, legs crossed beneath her, a stack of notecards on her lap. “Don’t bother me. I’m studying.”
I set the tart on the bed before her like an offering. “What are you studying?”
“Cocktail recipes.” She picks up the pastry and scrunches her nose. “What’s this?”
“I thought you might be hungry,” I say.
“You brought some for Lyuba?”
“Of course.”
“You shouldn’t do that. Now she’ll expect it every day, and when you don’t, she’ll hate you for it.” She peels back the napkin and starts eating.
“She hates me already.”
“Lyuba’s from Moscow. They breed them to be bitches there.”
I notice a homemade bandage of cotton and masking tape over Marina’s right earlobe. Blood has soaked through and stained the cotton brown.
“What happened to your ear?” I say.
“Leo,” she says, and wipes her mouth on her sleeve.
“Leo?”
“Leo is our sutenyer. He tore out my earring.”
I struggle with the word. “Sutenyer?”
She squints at me. “Marina fucks for money, Lyuba does cams, the sutenyer takes a cut. What kind of Russian are you not to know this?”
Pimp, she means. I smile defensively. “They call it something else in Armavir.”
“Anyway, mostly Leo’s a teddy bear. Handles the bad clients.”
“If he’s such a teddy bear, why do you let him do that?”
“It’s not about ‘let,’ novichka. If not him, someone worse.” She shrugs in resignation. “The world belongs to men. It is theirs. We are theirs. Trees, rocks, sky—theirs.”
“So what you told me, about how all Marina needs is Marina. That was just an act?”
“A wish. For someday.” She sets the stack of notecards on the bed.
I climb onto the bed next to her and pull out the iPhone, scrolling through the photos until I come to one where the tattooed arms of both Gunther and Lukas are visible. “I need a favor, Marina. I want you to look at something.”
She takes the phone and studies the picture. “VIP room at Rau Klub. You can tell from the orange couch they’re on.”
“The tattoo both of them have. What does it mean?”
She shrugs casually. “Criminals. Mafia.”
“You’re sure it was taken at Rau Klub?”
“Of course. I work it sometimes. Marina’s dream, Marina’s absolute dream, is to be a bartender there. A thousand euros on a good night.”
“Can you work it tonight?” I ask. “I want a look.”
“Take you, you mean. Who doesn’t even know what a pimp is.” She studies me carefully with squinted eyes. “You run from mafia like these guys, country mouse. Not toward them.”
“Just for a look. Please.”
A shake of her head, a sigh, then a long pause. “You can look, but anything more and Marina is gone, understand?”
Fourteen
You hear Rau Klub before you see it, the thump of house music drumming the air like distant cannon fire. To get there you get off the U-Bahn at the last stop in a nasty-looking wasteland and walk maybe a kilometer down a road lined with closed-up factories.
It’s a dark path but well traveled, filled with club kids all heading the same direction like we’re all on some sort of pilgrimage. It’s mostly German being spoken, of course, and a little Russian and Turkish, but no English. Either the tourists haven’t heard of Rau Klub or it’s too rough for them to dare. Once in a while, a Benz or BMW or rented limo crawls past, the driver tapping the horn for the road to clear, the kids squinting at the windows to see who’s inside.
Marina walks barefoot, holding her shoes in one hand. “Stay sober,” she says. “This place—dogs and devils. You will see.” She steps delicately around a puddle of some evil-looking brown liquid.
Rau Klub’s zombie carcass of a building is a massive old factory made of brick, the holes where its windows used to be pulsing pink and blue, pink and blue. We pick our way across a weedy yard toward the entrance, stepping over bottles and crumbling chunks of masonry. “Careful of needles,” Marina calls out.
I’m freezing in the short dress she loaned me, which comes complete with a cutout for almost my entire back, and it’s hard to walk in the cheap shoes she made me buy, tacky heels made of plastic. But Marina says I look hot, and so she’s not surprised at all when the bouncer spots us in a line of maybe two hundred freezing club kids and motions for us to come to the front.
