Matryoshka

A childish whim, a dream lived in email and clumsy telephone call, every arriving payment, more than a months salary, made the event more real: a husband and life in England.

Occasionally, she'd panic; life lived under distant curfew. I've sold my future in return for my youth, she thought. My husband to-be sits sipping tea, counting the months, measuring distance in rouble cheques.

Finally, at the airport, a sad old man, chocolates and flowers clutched in shaking hands. An English Sugar Daddy.

At last, he said.

On the first night, showing her to bed, she naively asked where her room was, the words rattling like pebbles in her mouth.

Not a daddy.

In bed he pushed into her so hard that she thought he must be trying to crack something inside of her open, to get at something she might hide from him.

In Russia, it was a disaster, as if a black cloud at night had stolen all of the men away.

Is having a man so important?

In the shopping precinct of her new home, weighed down with plastic bags, older, she couldn't help looking around, wondering if the young men here would disappear one day too.