The Japanese Lover(27)
“When Nathaniel fell ill, Larry took charge of the Belasco law firm,” Alma went on. “He ran it very well from day one. So when Nathaniel died I could delegate the family finances to him and devote myself to resurrecting the moribund Belasco Foundation. The public parks were drying out and were filled with garbage, needles, and used condoms. Beggars had moved in, with shopping carts crammed full of filthy bags and their cardboard shelters. I know nothing about plants, but I threw myself into gardening out of love for my father-in-law and my husband. To them it was a sacred mission.”
“It seems as if all the men in your family have been kindhearted, Alma. There aren’t many people like them in this world of ours.”
“There are a lot of good people, Irina, but they keep quiet about it. It’s the bad ones who make a lot of noise, and that’s why they get noticed. You don’t know Larry very well, but if you need something at any time and I’m not around, don’t hesitate to turn to him. My son is a good man, he won’t let you down.”
“He seems very serious, I wouldn’t dare disturb him.”
“He’s always been serious. When he was twenty he looked fifty, but he got stuck like that and has stayed the same as he’s aged. Just look, in every photograph he has that same worried expression and drooping shoulders.”
* * *
Hans Voigt had established a simple system for the Lark House residents to judge the performance of each member of staff, and he was intrigued by the fact that Irina always obtained an excellent report. He guessed her secret must be her ability to listen to the same story a thousand times over as if she were hearing it for the first time, all those tales the old folks keep repeating to accommodate the past and create an acceptable self-portrait, erasing remorse and extolling their real or imagined virtues. Nobody wants to end their life with a banal past. However, Irina’s secret was in fact more complicated: to her each one of the Lark House residents was a replica of her grandparents Costea and Petruta, to whom she prayed every night before going to sleep, asking them to accompany her through the darkness, as they had done throughout her childhood. They had raised her, toiling on a thankless patch of ground in their remote Moldovan village, where not even the slightest breeze of progress blew. Most of the locals still lived in the country and continued working the land just as their ancestors had done a century earlier. Irina was two years old in 1989 when the Berlin wall came down, and four when the Soviet Union collapsed and her country became an independent republic. Neither of these events meant anything to her, but her grandparents lamented them, as did their neighbors. They all agreed that under communism they had been just as poor, but at least there was food and security, whereas independence had brought them only ruin and abandonment. Anyone who could leave did so, including Irina’s mother, Radmila, so that the only ones left behind were the old and children whose parents could not take them with them. Irina remembered her grandparents bent double from the effort of growing potatoes, faces lined by the August sun and freezing Januarys, with little strength left and no hope. She concluded that the countryside was fatal to health. She was the reason her grandparents kept on struggling, their one joy—with the exception of homemade red wine, a drink as rough as paint stripper that gave them the chance to escape their loneliness and boredom for a while.
At first light, before she walked to school, Irina used to carry buckets from the well, and in the evening, before soup and bread for supper, she would chop wood for the stove. In California she weighed 110 pounds in her winter clothes and boots but was strong as an ox and could lift Cathy, her favorite client, like a newborn babe to transfer her from her wheelchair to a sofa or the bed. If she owed her muscles to the buckets of water and the ax, she owed the good luck that she was alive to Saint Parascheva, the patron saint of Moldova and the intermediary between the earth and the kindly beings in the heavens. At night as a child she would kneel with her grandparents before the saint’s icon to pray for the potato harvest and the health of their chickens; for protection against evildoers and soldiers; for their fragile republic; and for Radmila. To Irina as a child, the haloed saint in the blue cloak who was holding a cross seemed far more human than the silhouette of her mother in a faded photograph. Irina did not miss her but enjoyed imagining that one day Radmila would return with a bag full of gifts for her. She heard nothing from her mother until she was eight years old, when her grandparents received a little money from their distant daughter. They spent it cautiously so as not to make their neighbors jealous. Irina felt cheated, because her mother did not send anything special for her, not even a note. The envelope contained nothing more than the money and a couple of photographs of a stranger with peroxide-blond hair and a harsh expression who looked very different from the young woman in the photo the old couple kept next to the icon. After that they received money from her two or three times a year, which helped alleviate their poverty.
Radmila’s drama was similar to that of thousands of other young Moldovan women. She had become pregnant at sixteen by a Russian soldier passing through with his regiment and from whom she heard nothing more. She had Irina because her attempts at abortion failed, and she escaped far away as soon as she could. Years later, in order to warn her about the world’s perils, Radmila told her daughter the details of her odyssey, with a glass of vodka in her hand and two more already down the hatch.
One day a woman from the city had come to the village to recruit young girls to work as waitresses in another country. She offered Radmila an amazing once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: passport and ticket, easy work and a good wage. She assured her that just from the tips she would be able to save enough to buy herself a house in less than three years. Ignoring her parents’ desperate pleas, Radmila boarded the train with the procurer, little suspecting she would end up in the claws of Turkish pimps in a brothel in the Aksaray neighborhood of Istanbul. She was kept prisoner there for two years, servicing between thirty and forty men daily to pay off her ticket, although the debt was never reduced because she was charged for her lodging, food, shower, and condoms. Any girls who resisted were beaten up, marked with knives, burned, or even found dead in an alleyway. Without money or documents escape was impossible; they were locked in, did not know the language, the neighborhood, or the wider city. If they did manage to evade the pimps, they came up against the police, who were also their most assiduous clients and whom they had to pleasure for free.