Peter Ludorf had arranged new identities and passports for us. At first that had freaked us out, that our old identities had been taken away. Tatyana said it was like someone slowly scraping away our old faces. But we trusted Peter Ludorf. He smiled, he gave us clothes and talked to us like grown-ups. What else could we do? We had already put our lives in his hands. He was the one who had come to take us away from our old lives, to give us a chance at freedom — a raft with which we could paddle away from the vodka marsh where slumrats like us had no future.
We arrived in the middle of the night. The truck pulled into a dark yard where there were growling dogs pulling at their leads. I remember that Tatyana grabbed my arm and whispered, ‘It’s not right. Something isn’t right.’ We got out of the truck. It was cold and damp and there were foreign smells all around. Somewhere in the darkness among the growling dogs we heard voices speaking in a language we couldn’t understand. One man smiled and chuckled and I realised he was making comments about us standing there in our short skirts.
We were led into a room where the walls were clad in a red plush fabric. There were large gilt mirrors on the walls and Peter Ludorf sat there on a sofa with his white gloves on, smiling at us. He looked us over, then got up from the couch. At that moment it was as if a light had been turned off in his face. His eyes changed colour and even his voice seemed different. He stood right in front of me and told us that we would be staying in some rooms on the first floor. We were to service all the men who were sent up. We had to give him our passports.
To show us that he was serious, that he wasn’t making idle threats, he instructed us to walk over to the table right next to the sofa. There was a wooden box on the table, about twenty centimetres high and about as wide. He kept on talking the whole time, telling us that other girls had made the same trip that we had just done but that they had not understood that he meant business. He opened the box and took out two glass jars. In one jar was a pair of lips, preserved in some kind of ether. None of us knew what we were looking at. The other jar contained a finger with a ring still on it. The nail was painted red. It was only when we saw that that we realised the first jar had held a pair of lips.
