“You’re laughing now?” I said to the interpreter. Olena didn’t seem any more pleased about that than was I.
“Sorry. I wasn’t expecting that. She says his name is Dragon. In Ukraine, Zmey is a dragon who is green, with three heads, and spitting fire all the time.”
“You said you met Zmey when you got ‘there,’ Olena. Where, exactly?”
“Why is important this, she wants to know? Was two years ago.”
“I think it will help explain to me why you are here today. It lets me know the kind of care we need to give you.” It might also let me understand the level of desperation that had fueled this tragic voyage she undertook at such a tender age.
Olena’s back hunched over as she went on with her story. “They took us to Macedonia. To a town called Velesta.”
My heart sank. Trafficking was the only industry in that small town, which international police agencies had long considered one of the most dangerous places for young women introduced to the sex trades.
“I know Velesta,” I told her. “I know what goes on there. Did you have papers of any kind? A passport?”
Olena looked at me as though I was stupid to ask the question. “What for would need papers? Karyn and me, we traveled in the trunk of a car, of a boy from Kotovs’k. Don’t need papers in car trunk.”
From Ukraine, she had been smuggled through Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria-across the Danube at some point-stopping occasionally at night at the homes of men friendly to smugglers. Border guards were bribed to look the other way, I knew from my experience with other cases.
“What happened when you reached Velesta?”
It was a long, slow process to get the story from Olena. I couldn’t push her, for fear she would stop altogether.
“What do you think happened? The Dragon put me to work in the kafane.”
I needed to hear her words, her description, though I knew what it would be.
“As a waitress?”
Simchuk translated my words and Olena just glared at me.
“What kind of work?”
“You know what kind of work. You stupid if you don’t,” Simchuk said. “I’m sorry, Ms. Alex. Is her word-stupid-not mine.”
“That’s fine. Tell her I know the questions seem silly to her, but I have to ask them. Otherwise I’d just be guessing. I’d be thinking of someone else’s story that I heard another time.”
Olena listened to my reason, took a drink of water, and slumped down in her chair to continue.
“You and Karyn, where did you live?”
“No Karyn. Karyn didn’t stay with me. Dragon said she wasn’t pretty enough. Was lucky thing for Karyn.”
“And you?”
“In the basement of the kafane. Three other girls and me. For days I just cried. The door was locked and someone threw in the food and bottles of water. But the Dragon said I couldn’t come out until I stopped crying. Till I put on the lingerie like the other girls and didn’t show no tears.”
And so Olena was welcomed to her new life, her fantasies of freedom and opportunity shattered before she had been driven very far from her home in Kotovs’k-shattered in the trunk of a smuggler’s car and the dingy basement of a demon pimp.
She told us the story of how she started to work for the Dragon’s men, who owned the bar and the brothel. She told us how her youth and beauty-masked now by her abuse and the long confinement-had made her so popular among the clientele. She told us that she believed that being forced to sell her body for sexual favors was enabling her to pay off her debt to her captors, and that after a period of time they would keep their promise to let her go.
“How long were you held there, Olena?”
“I know exactly how long. Fourteen months and five days. I could tell you almost to the minute.”
The next question was one of the hardest to ask. It would imply that I expected the action I asked about. “Did you-did the other girls-ever try to escape? To run away, the way you tried to run away from your home?”
Olena swallowed hard and looked up at the light fixture on the ceiling.
“Would you like to take a break, Olena?”
“No, Ms. Alex. Not if I have to come back and you ask me again. I thought you knew this story from other girls. What is it you don’t understand?” Simchuk was trying to translate as rapidly as Olena was now talking, looking everywhere in the room except at me. “I was living in a basement with no windows, no light. I was kept there under lock and key, by men who are monsters. If I disobeyed orders-small orders to do things, when I sick or when I was exhausted-I was made to be on my hands and knees and to clean the floor with my tongue.”
Olena’s voice was flat. She made her case without any emotion built into it, a form of self-protection that had probably allowed her to survive the experience.
“I was raped over and over again. I was beaten for nothing, for no reasons at all. Passport, you ask. I’m in Macedonia then. Where can I run without papers?”
“Please, Ms. Alex,” Simchuk said after Olena stopped for a few seconds. “Is too hard on her to do this more. Please stop.”
“She’s asking you that, is she?”
“No, no. Is me who is unhappy,” Simchuk said.
“Ask her how she feels, okay? That will decide when we stop.”
Olena started to talk again. “I thought you know so much about this.”
I sat back and waited for her to look at me. “I thought I did too. Each one of you is different, Olena. I’ll never understand how you endured so much pain.”
“You want to know how I got out, yes?”
“Please.”
“I got pregnant, Ms. Alex. Was near the end of one year. Pregnant and sick all the time with it,” Olena said, tilting her head as if it would help her remember. “Was nothing sick compared to the boat ride, but was bad. When my belly got big, I was no use to the Dragon anymore. He didn’t want me. No men wanted me. Lots of younger girls to take my place.”
“Then they let you go?”
“Someone pay again,” Simchuk said, leaning in to hear the soft voice of Olena. “Everybody make money excepting me. A man whose wife and two children died in car accident, he bought me. Lived on a farm outside town.”
“Was he-?”
“Kind? You will want to know if he was kind, of course. He was good to me until I lost the baby. Miscarried, how you call it? The baby came very early. I was by myself at the house. Was already dead.”
Olena had delivered a stillborn child at the age of fifteen, without any medical care, alone at the home of a stranger in the cruel countryside of Macedonia.
“So I left. Hitchhiking to home. Hundreds and hundreds of miles.”
I must have looked incredulous. I could tell immediately that I had spooked her.
“You don’t believe possible, right? You’re thinking passport,” Simchuk picked up speed again and Olena’s staccato dialogue poured out. “My best customers, Ms. Alex, is border guards. My best customers is police who actually-first time-give money to me. Fed me and let me sleep.”