The whole time Peter Ludorf kept talking. He told us the lips belonged to a girl called Virginia. She had tried to escape by stabbing one of her clients — an elite member of the French trade delegation — in the chest with a screwdriver. Peter Ludorf sounded almost wistful when he told us that he had cut her lips off himself in order to show all of us what happened to girls who misunderstood their situation and thought that rebellion and escape attempts would be tolerated. The girl who lost her finger — Peter Ludorf had used the kind of tool that blacksmiths use to extract old stitches out of horses’ hooves when they reshoe them — was called Nadia and she had been seventeen. She had also tried to escape, this time by climbing out of a window and stealing a car that she rammed straight into the wall of the house across the street.
Peter Ludorf put the jars back and closed the lid to the box. I don’t think his words had really sunk in yet. We were all too cold and hungry to focus on anything except food. We were taken to the kitchen where an emaciated woman was stirring a pot. She chain-smoked and she had no teeth left, even though she couldn’t have been older than thirty. There was no real restaurant there, just a bar they used as a cover. We were in a real live brothel. Peter Ludorf had betrayed us in the same way that he had betrayed many others before us. He had known exactly what to say to lure a group of slumrats like us.
None of us knew what kind of life was waiting for us. We ate some of the bad-tasting soup that the emaciated woman put in front of us, and then we were locked into our rooms. I could hear Tatyana crying through the wall. I think we were all crying, but you could only hear Tatyana. That night I remember thinking: what am I going to wake up to? Why don’t I try to fall asleep and stay somewhere deep inside myself where I never need to wake up again? At the same time I felt a growing rage inside. Was I really going to let someone like Peter Ludorf win?
