Me and Adi never talked after shows – one of us was usually busy with a guy. We talked around noon, when we got up. But Adi came to my door later that night. She was wearing a light purple slip. I knew she’d just smoked. She didn’t bring any for me.
Adi lay down on top of the covers, close to me. ‘I’ve never done that before,’ she said.
‘Done what?’
‘You know.’
I’d brushed my teeth but she was still there.
‘I’m not right down there.’
My eye kept steady on a crack on the wall.
‘No … ’
I said no to protest, but I said it wrong. Adi knew. The skin of her lips was swollen and raw. The smell of her body dripped down wrong. I was licking so much, though, I didn’t care. I was an animal trying to help another animal.
‘I didn’t think anything bad was going to happen,’ Adi said slowly. ‘He just told me I was going to dance. I knew what dancing was. He said, “You’ll do well. You are a sexy girl.” People have told you that, too, I know … ’
She was finally speaking about Gio. I tried not to move so she would say more.
‘I knew who he was. He was always around – well, always leaving, always coming back. Doing business deals, bad business, I knew. Everyone loved him in Volgograd even though he was bad – all the parents loved him, all the girls too. But not this time when he came back, talking shit about American cash, American this, Israeli that. We were Christians in Volgograd. Everyone hated America and Israel. Nobody trusted him after he’d been to Israel. We knew that he was going to cross over to the Jews.’
Adi looked at me. She had purple smearing under her eyes. She didn’t know I was Jewish.
‘So me and Gio end up playing pool this one night, I’m seventeen, just a fun little girl, and he tells me I am someone who can go somewhere with my life. He says most of my jack-shit friends won’t ever do anything, they’ll never leave Volgograd.’ Adi started laughing. ‘So I was thinking he thinks I’m going to go to Israel with him. I’m going to pretend to be a Jew, some honorary Jew!’
‘What’s his last name?’ I asked stupidly.
‘Mogilevich. King of the Jews. Israel is a torture chamber, Mira. They treat Russians bad unless they have cash. I don’t know how he’d managed to set up things there. He kept me, seventeen years old, in a room in some Jewish torture fucking chamber!’
Adi started laughing hysterically. I touched her shoulder. But it made her laugh even more.
‘So he takes me to the land of the Jews and he’s some hot-shit pimp man or something over there and he makes all this money and I’ve been fucking for him and now he wants me to be his wife? My mother told me all Jews are corrupt.’
Adi rolled away from me, choking down her laughs. She got up and started pacing at the foot of the bed.
‘Uh, how long were you in Israel for?’
‘Ten fucking years. Two fucking kids!’
‘Wait … ’
Adi’s neck had turned red. ‘You know how bad that motherfucker Jew fucked me? On the way to this city we stopped at some old factory where they used to make paper. I am an old woman by this point, twenty-seven, right? And he just takes me and we leave the kids and it’s all business, right, and his friend meets us there. You know this friend, too, that bitch Nadia’s dad. So Gio and this daddy talk about the visas and then daddy tells me to lie down on my back, spread my legs. He points to the floor, covered with the soggy stuff that they turn into paper, and then he makes Gio watch as he fucks me. It’s a fucking blood sport! No condom, nothing. I just lay there and waited, this pulpy crap under my shirt.’
God, why does every girl have to get fucked?
‘We got here in the middle of the night. Daddy puts me in a room with one other girl, kitchen down the hall. I stayed for two years. Gio came every day at the end to get my money. You know, I thought Canada was not like Israel … ’
‘Why didn’t you run away from him?’
‘Mira, why the hell ask me that?’ Adi stopped pacing. Her voice suddenly went low like a man’s. ‘He is a liar. Gio Mogilevich is a liar.’
Adi held her slip bunched up at her stomach. ‘Now that fucking two-timing Jew comes and looks for other girls to make me jealous. To make me want to die.’
Blotches of sweat spread under her breasts in moon shapes. Adi’s smell was stinging me.
‘Let’s go away, okay, Mira? Let’s just get out of here. Just us. Jamaica.’