Again she didn’t answer. Humlin waited and she emptied her glass of beer. Then she got up and walked out to the toilets. One of her phones was lying on the table and it started to ring. That’s her, he thought. She’s doing what she did in the Yüksels’ apartment. She calls when she has something important to say. He answered the phone.
‘Associate Judge Hansson at the Administrative Court of Appeals wishes to speak to Prosecutor Westin. May I put him through?’
‘He’s in a meeting,’ Humlin said and hung up.
The phone rang again. Humlin fumbled with the phone to see if there was caller ID, but didn’t find anything. He gave up and answered the phone.
‘I think we were interrupted. I was trying to get through to Prosecutor Westin?’
‘He’s still busy.’
Humlin was starting to sweat. The doors to the toilets remained closed. After a while he got up and walked over to them. He listened for sounds from the women’s toilets but heard nothing. He knocked, but there was no reply. Then he opened the door. There was no one there. He tried to open the window at the far end but the latches were rusty and stuck. She didn’t leave by this way, he thought. Then he went into the men’s toilets.
Tanya was sitting on the floor next to the urinals. She was holding a paper towel up to her face. At first Humlin thought she had had an accident and was trying to stem a nosebleed but then he realised she was sniffing something concealed in the paper towel. He grabbed it out of her hands. It looked like a messy bar of soap but then he saw it was a bar of scented cleaning solution that must have come from a urinal. He had heard about this from somewhere, that the urine released ammonia from these bars, which could then be inhaled. But it was still hard for him to believe his eyes: Tanya’s glassy gaze, the paper towel with the sticky blue bar. He tried to pull her up off the ground but she hit him in the face and screamed something at him in Russian.
A man came in and Humlin ordered him to use the women’s toilets. The man quickly left.
Humlin kept fighting Tanya for the scented bar. They crawled around on the floor. She scratched him in the face with her nails, which made him furious. He grabbed her around the waist and forced her up against the wall. Both of them were covered in urine. He screamed at her to calm down but when she kept resisting and tried to fish yet another scented block out of the urinal he slapped her. Her nose started to bleed and she became absolutely still.
Humlin heard someone’s steps outside the door and forced her quickly into one of the cubicles. A man came in who coughed and urinated for a long time. Humlin sat down on the toilet with Tanya on his lap. She was breathing heavily and her eyes were closed. He wondered if she was about to pass out. After the man had left, Humlin shook her.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked. ‘Why are you doing this to yourself?’
Tanya shook her head.
‘Let me sleep.’
‘We can’t stay here,’ he said. ‘We have to go pick up some food. The others are waiting for us.’
‘Only for a little while. I haven’t sat on anyone’s lap since I was a little girl and my aunt held me like this on her knee.’
‘We’re sitting on a toilet,’ Humlin said.
Suddenly she got up and leaned against the wall.
‘I’m going to puke.’
Humlin got up and left the cubicle. He heard her throw up, then everything was quiet. He opened the door and handed her a wet paper towel. She wiped her face and followed him out. As they were leaving the toilets they met a man who was pulling down his zip. He looked at Tanya with interest and then winked conspiratorially at Humlin, who came very close to punching him.
They walked out of the bar. Tanya pointed to a small cemetery on the other side of the street.
‘Can’t we go there?’
‘We have to buy some food.’
‘Ten minutes. That’s all.’
Humlin pushed open the rusty gate to the cemetery. An old woman sat propped up against a gravestone that was pushed half on its side. Its inscription was no longer legible. The woman’s clothes were tattered and several plastic bags and packets of newspapers wrapped up in twine lay strewn about her. Tanya stopped and looked at her.
‘Do you think she needs a phone?’ she asked.
‘I doubt she has anyone to call. But I suppose she could always sell it.’
Tanya took out one of her phones and laid it next to the sleeping woman’s cheek. They continued walking through the empty graveyard. Tanya sat down on a bench. Humlin joined her.
‘Maybe I should call the bag lady,’ she said. ‘The phone I gave her plays a lovely, old-fashioned lullaby when the phone rings. It’s a heavenly way to wake up.’
‘I’d let her sleep. What kind of life does she wake up to anyway?’
Tanya whimpered, as if she had been struck by a whip.
