On the podium, the speakers changed, showers of applause came and went, and cameras flashed. One of the photographers crammed into the room had pulled a curtain over the windows that shone light onto the rostrum. Mentally I thanked him for making the light more flattering despite it being midday. Tomorrow the main picture in the newspaper would show some minister of parliament cutting the ribbon like always, but readers’ eyes would stick to the shot of me like flypaper.
I stood against the wall of the hall. The seats had filled up quickly, and I was annoyed that I had lingered outside; the air still had the foul odor of the factories, and the crowd would only increase the temperature. I didn’t want to ruin my elegance by sweating. However, I didn’t regret my dawdling for long. I had a good vantage point, and there was time before my speech, which I used to my advantage to size up the ripening harvest of the orphanage. The choir waiting with bows in their hair brought to mind a bed of peonies. These girls, who had ended up here because of their parents’ history of prison or hard living, would be perfect for my budget-conscious clients. All that concerned them were beauty and passable health. The girls whose pasts were too difficult to be donors would be surrogates, happily accepting a roof over their heads and food on the table in payment. My best finds would come from the girls who had ended up here after their parents left the country in search of work. All of them needed pocket money, so there would be no lack of motivation. We just had to reach them first and snatch up the ones we wanted before someone else decided to come wait for them to turn eighteen and walk out the door of the orphanage. Since the Orange Revolution, competition had accelerated in all areas of business, and I had no intention of being trampled.
The choir conductor began to bustle performers toward the stage, which was decorated in the party colors as expected. I picked out Viktor’s profile in the front row. As his head turned back, I stood on my toes and he recognized me, smiling and whispering something to his companion, who left her place and began to make her way back; she was coming to fetch me. I was surprised that Viktor Kravets wanted to make our acquaintance so public. Then I realized why. The family’s foundation and our agency’s common interests provided a good excuse for our meetings.
Even though the choir was already singing, one by one the audience’s eyes snapped to me, and the crowd parted with some clattering of chairs. The girls I passed simpered at me. They assumed that I was someone who mattered and hoped that I would notice them, buy them, and pluck them out of this place. In some of their eyes I saw expressions that were too adult, in their gestures a languid seduction learned in the saunas and a willingness to do anything to get high, but there were also unsullied buds among these wilting flowers. I would pay the director to keep my buds as buds and not let them run away or allow some petty thug to start them shooting up and ruin them before they were of age. On my way to the platform, I thought about our country’s underage orphans. Sixty-five thousand of them lived in institutions.
The applause for the choir could just as easily have been for me, since I was taking the podium at the same time. The jovial conversation I’d had with the director of the orphanage in the morning gave me confidence, and the hungry gazes of these sycophants gave my figure an extra heel’s worth of height. All of the orphanages supported by the foundation would soon be mine. As I waited for silence to fall, I heard the rasping of the ribbons in a girl’s hair who was standing a little farther off when she rubbed their ends together. I began by smiling at the cameras in that way I knew, and I said in my mind the same words I always said when the demanding eye of a camera lens turned toward my face: love me. It worked without exception, including this time on you. I didn’t know you were there. Later you said that I had looked like the goddess of victory and that you had wanted me from that second on.
My speech at the orphanage was the first of my successes. I went from one industry event to another, accepting every invitation related to child welfare that I received, flitting to conferences and parties where prominent philanthropists gathered. The international guests liked me. UNICEF liked me. Everyone liked me because I specialized in speaking in a way that used appeals for sympathy to loosen purse strings.