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Just ahead, she saw a woman perched on a windowsill, wearing a white fur coat, fishnet stockings and glossy boots. She wasn’t young. An inch of grey showed at the roots of her copper hair, and her dark eyeshadow seemed to have found its way into the lines at the corners of her eyes. For a moment, Yeva paused, almost to standstill, trying to find words to ask for some sort of direction. The woman looked at Yeva with narrowed eyes and gave a quick, discouraging shake of her head.
Yeva walked on.
Seeing a police car approaching, she turned left onto a narrow side street. A tall, skinny boy, around her own age, in shorts and a vest, with dark hair pulled into a high bun, was pacing between two lampposts. Turning to face her, he smiled at Yeva and, waving a hand up and down his body to indicate the similarity of their outfits, gave her a friendly wolf whistle.
Yeva pulled enough air into her lungs to ask him a question. ‘Où dois-je me tenir?’ Where should she stand?
His eyes blinked momentarily in surprise, then his mouth tightened, and he nodded his head slowly.
‘Reste ici avec moi,’ he said. Stay here with me.
The boy continued his pacing, and Yeva positioned herself at the centre point of his parade. He didn’t speak. He walked with his head down, as though pondering a philosophical dilemma, and each time he passed Yeva, he looked into her face and smiled without showing his teeth – a determined sort of smile.
After a while, he stopped at her side. He pulled the elastic band from his bun, shaking out the shiny waves of his hair.
‘Moi, je m’appelleAdil. Toi?’
‘Yeva.’
Indicating that she should turn around to face away from him, he began to comb through her hair with his fingers.
‘Ukrainienne?’
‘Oui.’
‘’suis Syrien, moi.’
He drew her hair into a ponytail, wrapping the elastic band around it. Then, with both hands on her shoulders, he turned her around so that he could pull a few strands loose around her face. He gave her the same closed-mouthed smile as before and rubbed his hand up and down her upper arm.
‘Tu es belle,’ he said.
A minute or two later, a car pulled up alongside them, and the passenger-side window dropped.
Adil leaned into the car, and the driver said something Yeva couldn’t catch. Her pulse was thumping so hard it deafened her.
Adil stood back from the window and turned to her. ‘Il te veut,’ said Adil. The man wanted her.
Yeva put a hand to each of her front pockets, checking again her keys in one, her phone in the other. She swallowed hard and reached out to the door handle.
‘Attendez!’
Yeva turned at the sound of a hoarse female voice shouting. The fur-coated woman from the windowsill was clip-clapping down the street in her glossy boots. She was out of breath and panting when she reached them.
‘Puis-je vous aider?’ asked Adil, politely offering help.
The woman ignored him.
‘Quel genre de putain de merde .?.?.’ muttered the man in the car, less politely.
Roughly, the woman shoved Yeva so that she stumbled backwards against Adil. ‘Go home,’ she said, in English. ‘You don’t belong here.’
The woman opened the car door and, with an elegant swivel of her legs, got into the passenger seat. Without looking at the driver, she rubbed the pads of her thumb and fingers together. He clucked his tongue in resignation and pulled out a fifty-euro note. She held up two fingers, and he pulled out a second note. The woman whipped the money out of his hand and thrust it out the car window to Yeva.
‘Prends-le,’ she said.
Yeva stood stock still.
‘Prends-le,’ said Adil, nudging her shoulder.
