Moonlight in Odessa Read Online Free

approvingly. He was finally thinking like an Odessan. ‘We’d have to pay at least three people at the electric company, which would cost roughly four hundred dollars per month.’
    ‘Extortion!’
    ‘The price of doing business in Odessa,’ I corrected.
    ‘Same thing,’ he muttered. ‘Maybe I could bring in a generator.’
    He drank the last of his coffee and we sat in companionable silence for a moment.
    ‘I never go out in the evening,’ he said.
    ‘Not even to the opera or philharmonia ?’
    ‘No.’
    I couldn’t believe it. Most people come to Odessa for the entertainment – the ballet, the beaches, the concerts, the cafés, the casinos, the discos . . . ‘Don’t you have a good compania ?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘This is how we say a ‘‘circle of friends’’ in Russian. Many Odessans would love to be friends with you. The girls in the office have certainly been . . . friendly.’ Odessans don’t always speak directly. We have a certain code. Distracted means crazy. Direct means abrasive. Friendly means slutty.
    ‘True,’ he said. ‘But when they crowd around me, I know what they’re after.’ He rubbed his fingers together to indicate money.
    I shrugged, the Odessan way of saying nothing and everything. I hoped I looked sympathetic, but inside I wondered why he didn’t take one up on their very obvious offer.
    Unable to trust anyone, he said, he sat alone in his flat, a foreigner far from friends and family. When he invited me to the ballet, of course I went. I felt sorry for him. And I loved going to our opera house, the third most beautiful in the world after Rome and Prague’s. We sat in a private box. He inched his gilded chair closer to mine, telling me he couldn’t see. I moved closer and closer to the edge of the box. Leave-left-left . His forehead shone with perspiration. He stared at me, not the stage. I knew what he was thinking and I knew what he wanted, but I sat, ankles crossed, knees firmly together; spine straight, exactly two inches from the red velvet backrest; chin slightly lifted, lips fixed in a slight smile; eyes never leaving the stage. Teeth grinding, heart pounding, stomach heaving, brain berating, ‘Fool! Never let your guard down! Everything in Odessa has a price.’ After the performance, people around us talked and laughed, but we were silent. In a hoarse voice, Mr. Harmon said, ‘Come home with me.’ I pretended not to hear. I thanked him and said goodbye, then slipped through the crowd in front of the opera house, down the 192 granite steps of the Potemkin Staircase to the bus stop at the port.
    I couldn’t afford to be indignant. I couldn’t afford to offend him. I couldn’t afford to lose my job. I remembered those six months of searching – two interviews a day and lines like, ‘Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but in these hard times, when conditions are so tough, I need to give the job to a man with a family, to a breadwinner.’ Boba’s pension barely covered her heart medicine let alone our food and bills. We couldn’t afford candles, so when they cut the electricity in the early evening, we sat in the dark in the kitchen because it was a little warmer than the rest of the flat. At bedtime, we felt our way to the bathroom to wash our faces, then back to the living room/bedroom to change into our pajamas and convert the sofa to our bed.
    I had to do everything in my power to keep my job and that meant keeping Mr. Harmon content. I found a young professor with big hair and bigger breasts to try to teach him something of our language. When he showed no interest in her, I took it upon myself to hire a curvaceous charwoman, telling her to linger in his office and that if she played her cards right, she’d have a flush bank account. But Mr. Harmon had no interest in poker. To keep him at bay, I used a careful mixture of geography, denial, and guilt. I always made sure that there was something between us. When he started coming too close and had that look in his