I’d been promoted to coordinator early the previous year, and I was searching for something I could use to prove I was worthy of the position. The city of Kryvyi Rih caught my attention on a map one evening when I was marking the places that the most of our girls came from. We’d never had anyone from Kryvyi Rih. Why not? The others had already left the office for the day, so in order to help along the plan forming in my head, I cracked open a bottle of Transcarpathian cognac that one of our donors had brought in and opened the window to the spring evening. As I rolled the silky surface of a thin cigarette in my fingers, I knew I had already made my decision and raised a glass to myself. Like Dnipropetrovsk, Kryvyi Rih was home to a highly educated populace, a remnant of the peak years of Soviet industrial production, and I would find an endless supply of scientists, genuine diplomas, and self-written dissertations waiting for me. I saw the offspring of these great thinkers and chess masters as an opportunity to create something unique in the agency’s service offerings: guaranteed quality at an affordable price. Even though the income level in the Balkans was a far cry from Western Europe, the middle class was growing, and traditional values were respected. For a woman, childlessness was typically seen as a great catastrophe, so the area was full of potential clients, and geographic proximity would be an asset to us and to them.
I made some calculations and read some research, and the more I learned, the more convinced I was of the profitability of my strategy.
In Kryvyi Rih, we could get a donor for a hundred dollars, and I could easily march her whole family out to talk to clients about nuclear physics. Most of the girls who brought us fake diplomas didn’t understand that I couldn’t take a risk like that—a client who was a mathematician would notice immediately if a donor or her relatives didn’t know anything beyond their multiplication tables. Kryvyi Rih girls wouldn’t have problems like that.
I decided to present my idea to Aleksey first and waited for the right moment. One day as we were going to the railway station to meet a new girl, it seemed that my moment had arrived. But the donor was nowhere to be seen. After standing on the platform for a while, we peeked into the empty car, which had its door left open, presumably because of the heat. The conductor looked at us with regret and apologized for the technical issue. Whenever long-distance trains approached the station, the loudspeakers played a welcome hymn in honor of Dnipropetrovsk and the workers, but now the comrade singing was stuck on repeat. I began to suspect that this was going to take longer than we had thought. We asked the conductor about our girl and showed him her picture. He shook his head. Aleksey and I glanced at each other. Either the girl had failed to come or the secretary had given us the wrong time again. Or the wrong train. We returned to the car.
“What do we do?” Aleksey asked as he drummed the steering wheel. “What if she decided she didn’t need the job and went to get some sun?”
“I’ll call the secretary.”
My call went to voice mail. The girl didn’t answer her phone either. Aleksey adjusted the air conditioner and glanced anxiously at the bare stems of the roses spread out on the back seat. He still bought his wife flowers every week and was looking forward to the end of the workday so he could get back to his family. I considered whether I still dared to suggest my plan. We had only worked together for a little while, and I was still shy around him. I was nervous.
“This is the third time. Why hasn’t this secretary been fired yet?” I asked. “Is she related to the boss, or does the boss owe someone a favor?”
“One or the other. You’re right. We need to get rid of that birdbrain.”
I continued trying to get hold of the secretary and worked on my opening salvo to capture Aleksey’s interest. Finally, I reached her. In the background I could hear cackling. Someone’s husband was getting a tongue lashing. It sounded like she was drinking champagne with her girlfriends. Nevertheless, I managed to work out that the right train would arrive an hour and a half later, maybe. We decided to wait in the car, and then I plucked up my courage. Pulling my papers out, I handed them to Aleksey.
“Kryvyi Rih? Seriously?” he said. “Have you ever been there?”
“I know, I know. The pollution is a problem, but…”
“That city hasn’t ever even seen a blue river, let alone white snow.”
“Don’t exaggerate. The situation is much better now.”
“When I’m there, I always feel like I’ve been sniffing glue,” Aleksey said.
“Just listen.”
And I talked for an hour. I described the customer segment. The couples would travel straight to Kyiv or Dnipro without ever catching a glimpse of the smog in Kryvyi Rih. Or we could send them to Cyprus. We had a clinic on the island, travel there was easy, and expenses would remain low. There was no need to worry about the health problems the girls and their relatives might have, because we could blame the strain on their kidneys and lungs on where they lived, not hereditary factors. And besides, the client group I was targeting would be more interested in price, beauty, and easily documented intellectual background. They wouldn’t be like Americans.
“These girls deserve a chance.”
Aleksey browsed through the photos of my candidates. I had already instructed my little birds to staple advertisements to the electric poles in Kryvyi Rih and on the bulletin boards at the universities and dance schools. The number of responses had surprised me, as had their quality. No one complained about the one-hundred-dollar commission, and everyone was overjoyed at the possibility of a free trip to a lovely Mediterranean island. I saw that Aleksey was beginning to warm to the idea, and he finally nodded that yes, this made sense, and yes, the boss might be interested.
And so she was.
But the Tatar girl who died in Cyprus ruined everything, and my boss decided we had to sell the island clinic that had tarnished our reputation. I didn’t find a new Tatar girl fast enough to replace the donor who had died, and the client decided to switch agencies. I was punished, losing control of the office we’d established for handling the Balkan area, which was given to one of my former subordinates, who made the situation even worse. She accepted payments from girls to put them in the donor catalog without any care for background checks. Some of them were minors, which became apparent when one girl’s grandmother began calling, wanting to know who had been giving her fifteen-year-old grandchild money and who was offering her free vacations. Then the news media caught the scent, so we shut down the entire Balkan program. My little birds collected all of our ads from Kryvyi Rih.
The girls on the list who knew me called. Their mothers called. Their fathers called. I stopped answering. I threw the flowers they sent in the trash. The bottles of cognac and boxes of chocolates left at the reception desk in my name I distributed to the old ladies who swept the streets or sold flowers on the side of the road.
My boss noticed my downcast mood and told me to forget about the Kryvyi Rih girls. They would find miners who earned good money in their own city, fall in love, and have children who would follow in their fathers’ footsteps. They would be content with their lives because they wouldn’t know anything else. And because of that, they wouldn’t know to miss the things that I might, my boss reasoned, casting me an unnerving glance. It was like she was wondering whether she’d made a mistake in trusting me.
The new owner of the Cyprus clinic kept the old staff and even hired the coordinator we had fired, the one who handled the Balkan strategy after me. Soon, rumors began to circulate about their methods. Some customers paid cash for fresh embryo transfers, undergoing the same procedure multiple times before beginning to wonder if any transfers had even been done. One case later went all the way to court: tests showed that a child born using in vitro fertilization wasn’t the client’s, even though there had been no discussion of using donors. My boss sent me a news article about the scam, as a reminder of my lack of judgment. She included a calculation of when the child in the lawsuit had been conceived: the clinic had only just changed ownership. She thought we were lucky that the Tatar girl had died when she did, since it woke us up to how the place was being managed. Otherwise the mess in the news would have come crashing down on us.
My setbacks didn’t end there. The opportunist who became my boss’s right hand in Kyiv after my misfortune came to audit the Dnipro office and have a look at the books. She brought her own men with her and sat in my office as if it were her own while everyone else did the work. I couldn’t complain, because the Balkan program was my brainchild and the people who had managed it had been recruited by me. I had been duped as much as anyone. However, responsibility for launching operations in the area was undeniably mine, and it had dropped me from pet to pariah. I suspected someone was already dreaming about how to redecorate my apartment. My home was located in one of Dnipro’s dazzling twin towers, and anyone would have killed for the view. When I watched the sunset through those windows, it felt as if the whole city was mine. I never wanted to lose that view or that feeling.
I met Viktor Kravets at just the right time, because he was such a significant client for my boss. With his help, I could recover the status I’d lost in her eyes. I never would have raised a hand against Viktor.