Read Online Bitter Remedy by Conor Fitzgerald - Free Book Online Page B

drinks. She did not ask them what they wanted. The barman arrived in a filthy apron and set down warm cans of cola and hot cups of apple tea. Nadia didn’t like the tea, but she was thirsty, and the wait was long, and eventually she had drunk it all. The girls were called up one by one, and they went and stood by a table with five men.
    When Nadia, the second of the group to be called, was standing there, she felt so overwhelmingly tired that it occurred to her the tea might have been drugged. Some sort of docility drug. Or maybe not. For some reason, a thought that should have been inconsequential had lodged itself foremost in her mind: it seemed impossible she had travelled all this way to such a strange place to end up in such a small bar. It was smaller than the bar beneath her apartment in Onesti. For some reason, this one thought dominated, prevailing even over fear and disgust.
    It was hard even to say who the boss at the table was. They all looked like weak men, but that could not be the case. The one man who had impressed her so far had been the barman who brought them the tea, the glasses small beside his huge hands. When he had arrived at their table, she saw he was young, and strong, and she wondered if she could ask him simply to throw Olga and the men at the table out. Maybe if she could speak the language, she would have said something. But half an hour later, two policemen with ‘Polis’ in huge letters written in white on red across their shoulders came in, and the men at the table did not even change the tone, speed, or loudness of their incomprehensible chatter. Nadia looked up and considered, just considered, running over to them. She caught the barman looking right at her, and she knew he was reading her thoughts as clearly as if they were written on the wall behind.
    At a some point, Nadia realized that the young girl was gone. Alina was still there. She had not seen her walk off or be taken away. Olga showed no sign of having noticed anything. Nadia would later learn that the girl, a scrawny little thing in a polyester yellow skirt, had been transferred to a man who wanted no more than a housemaid for his wife. Sitting there in the bar, the fate of the girl had been decided, and she was whisked off to another part of the black market to learn that abuse and exploitation of young women was not always sexual.
    The district in which Nadia found herself was called Aksaray, where one could get by for days without speaking any Turkish. Russian or Romanian were the languages of the pimps and nightclub owners and many of the women. Turkish was useful for some clients, but even more spoke English. She soon learned to identify the actual English and Americans from the Germans, French, Italians, and Spanish who used English. If she couldn’t understand a word of what they were saying, English was their first language.
    Willingness to accept what was happening was not enough. The gang that ran the girls had to teach them a lesson anyhow, and the preferred tactic was sudden, inexplicable violence. Alina stopped speaking that night and did not start again for six months until the randomized beatings finally became rarer, and the violence was concentrated on the newcomers. For the first few days, she had tried to demonstrate to their pimp, Tamer, that she was willing, though her eyes said otherwise, but that was not the point. It was not even beside the point: it was, in fact, almost as bad as direct rebellion. One of the most important lessons Tamer and his crew had to teach them was that they were not allowed to be willing or unwilling, because both were simply two aspects of freedom.
    At the end of that six-month period, Alina and Nadia were still together, in that they were in the same place, but contact was limited to a few passing glances, and Alina by now showed no sign of wanting to know her or anyone. The owners were Russian and two of the bouncers were Romanian, but by now they all knew not to look for