Pig: A Thriller (5 page)

What does a fallen
Physics professor
do
to survive?

Whatever
she has to, using w
hatever
hard-earned experience she’d gained in the
gulag
. Deciding to do what she knew best,
Magda opened up her own beauty shop, not such an oxymoron even in a town as prosaic as Noyabrsk.
God lends a touch of beauty even to the ugly. Perhaps it was even more important to be touched by beauty in such a drab atmosphere.
And so the local ladies flocked in. And h
ad
their hair done, their cuticles clipped, their bushes trimmed.
Who could have ever guessed that Brazilian wax jobs would become so well-known in the
taiga
.

Using another skill she’d learned at the gulag, Magda
combined this service with a
"deficit e
xchange club
.
"
Besides good men, Noyabrsk was short of just about everything. Good products were hard to find except on the black market, s
o Magda acted as a go-between for people who worked in industries that
had access to
desirable
goods
.
Her job was not vital, noble or important -- but, then, not everything had to be. And she knew that.
Those with access to cosmetics,
push up bras
,
I-pods, Nintendo, Swiss
chocolate:
they all brought the surplus to Magda's
shop
and exchanged them for
something else just as desirable that they happened not to have. Magda did not sell things here, she just set the barter rates. So many tubes of lipstick were worth one Victoria’s
Secret
promise
. And so on. She did char
ge m
embership
dues however and the privilege
was steep.
How did she get away with it?
She’d fooled herself into thinking it was because of how clever she had set it up, c
ustomers
came in with full bags to have their nails done and left with the same bags just as full. Who was to know the contents had been swapped?
In truth, in the New Russia, what she was doing was no longer forbidden. What it was, was just the new way of doing business.

Finally, Magda advertised herself as a psychic who could read people’s pasts.
“
P
sychic” and “P
hysics
” and
were almost spelled the same way, anyway. She put on an old tiara that had once belonged to Catherine the Great and charged a fee for telling people
to do what they wanted to do anyway but needed an excuse to justify it
. The tiara was so tacky no one even checked to see if it was real or not. Which it was
, unknown even to Magda
.

Had she not been
Slavic, Magda Timofeyeva Perskan
s
ki might even have thought she was happy
in
Noyabr
s
k,
her new home
.

Magda’s other
business in Noyabrsk was running
a
brothel.
That was why Pig called her “skank,” or “slut.”
It had little to do with her last name.

Young,
good-looking
, naive
and fresh
as
a peach, Magda
Timofeyeva Perskanki
hadn’t been in the
gulag
long before she was plucked.
Cleaning up in the beauty shop after shutting down for the day, a guard knocks on the locked door. Magda pantomimes that the shop is closed for the day. He knocks again. Harder this time. She puts aside the broom for a moment and
reluctantly
cracks open the door. “It is
my
birthday,” the
guard says
. He wants to look good for his party. Reluctantly – she is tired – Magda lets him in, trims his hair, lathers and shaves his beard, pomades him with some scent.

Before she is done, the rest of them come. More guards. Grinning, smiling and nervous as long-tailed rats in a room full of rocking chairs. There for the party, they say. Magda tries to wish them well and rush them along. That’s when one of them grabs her and plants a rough kiss on her mouth. She struggles, protests she has never been with a man before. It only spurs them on. Her shirt is ripped open, her flesh roughly grabbed. More hands than she can count. She is pushed back on the chair and it is reclined. The Birthday Boy is first. Then, he nominates who’s next.
Points a
gain. And again. It seems to take forever. The chair will never be the same again,
the gears in its
reclining mechanism stripped.
When they are spent, the
boys
decide to have more fun with her, using the shop’s cosmetics to make her up. Pouring their drinks on her. Sticking ice cubes and shop implements up
inside
. A curling iron burns her, inside and out. Someone covers her in shaving cream, then sticks a maraschino
cherry
inside. “There,” he says. “We were never here. You’re good as new.”

When it became a regular routine – every
guard in camp has to have
a birthday, after all – Magda decides to stop fighting it and g
o pro. At least that way she c
an
dictate the terms.

Magda looks at Snow’s palms.
She’s been sitting there holding his hands. Waiting. They are covered with
blisters filled with clear pus. During the long, cold hours
Snow was outside
, the
tissue froze and ice crystals formed in the tiny spaces between his cells, sucking water from them, blocking the blood supply.
His hands and fingers will eventually turn black, the color of bloodless, dead tissue. Some of the
digits
may
recover;
others
may have to be amputated. The lifelines are erased, unable to be seen through the swelling and discolo
u
ring.
He couldn’t die, she knew.  He’d had to have lived first and he hadn’t. How could you call what he’d endured up to now a life? He’
d
had it far worse in his sheltered life back in Canada than she’d ever had
it
in the
gulag.

"T
hey'll be fine," a voice
breaks through her tears.
Doctor Bandar.
"
His hands.
The damage looks superficial.
T
he blisters will break in a week or so, and the tissue should revive after that."

"These men knew nothing," Magda thought. How many of them had woken up in the middle of the night to find a warm spot where their loved one was supposed to be? Gone padding through the hallway to find him sitting in an overstuffed chair staring at the gas flare
in the oil refinery
burning off impurities in the distance? Or if he got tired of that, the picture of Lenin arriving at Finland station on the wall?

Snow never said anything – he didn’t have to -- but Magda knew. She'd been there herself. In camp after depressing camp dotted across the tundra. The deep, dark February of the soul where nothing was enjoyed, but only survived. A crushing inner darkness so pulverizing it couldn't be fought, only endured. A texture of pain so dense it was impossible to break through.