‘He’s a bastard,’ my mother would tell me as we lay in the bedroom we shared. Vitalik had the other while my father slept in the living room. ‘I’m going to leave him. You can come with me, Oxana, and we’ll be happy together.’
I wanted us all to be happy but I wished that we could stay together too. I loved my papa, even though he was so angry all the time with my mother. I was also frightened of my mother because she had drunken rages of her own and could turn against me in an instant. Sometimes she would scream at me after one of Papa’s beatings that I hadn’t protected her, and she would hit me. Once she beat me with a bunch of roses; I was covered in scratches and had to stay off school for a week.
Maybe it was because of all this that my brother Vitalik changed. We’d always been friends when we were young but he lost interest in me as he became a teenager and soon the arguments between my parents often included him. He started smoking, stopped going to school and hung around with a bad crowd which worried my father. Then when I was nine, my parents’ wedding rings and a gold necklace disappeared. Papa was furious; he was convinced that Vitalik had stolen them and it was the first time I realised that it wasn’t just my mother he could hit.
‘Why are you doing this?’ my father screamed. ‘I’m working hard to make a better future for you and your sister and you do this to me.’
Then one day, the police arrived at our home. A car had been stolen and there had been an accident. After that Vitalik disappeared. He was just fifteen.
After my brother had left, I felt almost invisible. I was a good girl who never caused my parents any trouble but I was also a very sensitive child. Every day I would write in my diary how many bad things my mother or teachers had said to me and it made me sad that nobody liked me because I was the clever girl at school. Things got worse when Vitalik went away.
‘There’s the thief’s sister,’ my classmates would snigger as I walked by.
People would turn their backs as I walked into the playground and teachers would mark my homework down for no reason. At that time, Ukraine was a Soviet country where many things weren’t accepted. Religion was one. Lenin was our god and people who believed otherwise could get into trouble. I remember one day when a girl came into school wearing a cross. We didn’t see her for a whole year after that. There were some churches of course and I was baptised into the Greek faith but my family never practised their religion openly. We celebrated Christian festivals but there was no Bible at home or trips to church.
In Ukraine, difference wasn’t trusted. Children were taught to hate homosexuality, black skin and anything foreign. Everybody had to be the same. There was just one big supermarket where everyone shopped and it didn’t sell any luxury goods or foreign foods—things like tampons and disposable nappies were unheard of. Instead we ate simple meat and vegetables, women used pads of gauze every month to stop their blood and children drank milk. When Coca-Cola arrived in Ukraine there were a lot of people who believed it would make them sick and I didn’t have my first sip until I was thirteen—the same day I tried chewing gum.
My country was hard in other ways too—it wasn’t wealthy and everyone had to work. Just a dollar a day could mean the difference between eating and starving, and I always knew that some people had a lot less than my family.
What I loved more than anything else was Bollywood films. The singing, the dancing, the colour, the costumes—everything about them was beautiful and I was convinced that India must be heaven on earth. My favourite one was called Disco Dancer and starred Mithun Chakrabarti. He was so tall and handsome that I saw it twenty-three times and couldn’t stop crying when it finally stopped being shown. I loved the way that Bollywood films always had a happy ending full of love. They made me believe that one day my prince would find me and we would live together happily ever after. I just had to wait patiently for that day to come.
Then something happened that turned all the colour in my dreams to grey.
It was the summer of 1990,I was fourteen and on a secret day out at the beach with two friends, Natasha and Alina. I knew I’d be in trouble if Papa found out, but I had had a wonderful time sunbathing and chatting with my girlfriends. Now we were going to buy some food before walking to the station ready for the hour’s train journey home.
As we stood in the queue for pastries, a handsome boy waited behind. He looked about eighteen and was wearing shorts, no shirt and good sunglasses.
‘Excuse me, could you tell us what time it is, please?’ Natasha asked as she turned towards him.
He looked at his watch. ‘Nearly six o’clock,’ he replied.
I was worried. It was much later than I’d thought. ‘We have to go,’ I said urgently. ‘We’ll miss the train and we’ll never be home in time. I have to get back before Mama comes home from work.’
‘Don’t worry, Oxana,’ said Natasha breezily. ‘There’s plenty of time.’
She didn’t seem at all worried as she started chatting and laughing with the older boy. I didn’t like it—she seemed so open and free with him, and it wasn’t how I’d been taught to behave.
‘Why don’t you come and meet my friends?’ he asked, when we’d bought our pastries.
‘Sure,’ replied Natasha, and she began walking off with our new friend.
‘But we’ve got to get home,’ I cut in, looking at Alina.
‘Not yet,’ she said as she turned to follow Natasha and the boy. ‘We can always catch the next train. Don’t be a scaredy cat, Oxana.’
I stood for a moment. What should I do? I could go on my own to the station or for once try to fit in with my friends. I didn’t want to be left alone. I turned to follow as the boy led us behind the shops to the edge of a small wood.
‘My friends are in there,’ he said, gesturing at the trees.
Twigs cracked under our feet as we walked into the sudden darkness. I saw a group of about seven boys a little way ahead. They looked between sixteen and eighteen, and were sitting on blankets with food and bottles of homemade wine surrounding them, smoking. We went over and sat down with them. Natasha accepted a bottle immediately but I felt more and more nervous. We were going to be so late.
Then I heard two boys muttering behind me.
‘What are we going to do?’ one asked in a low voice.
I strained to hear and made out a few other words.
‘…and you can take her,’ the other said as he looked at me.
Fear filled me. Something was wrong.
‘Come on, let’s leave,’ I whispered to Alina. I turned to the boy next to me and said with a smile, ‘We need to go to the toilet.’
‘Over there.’ He gestured at some bushes. Alina and I got up and started to walk casually away.
‘We need to get away from here,’ I told her in a low voice.
‘What do you mean?’ she replied.
‘Trust me. There’s something wrong. I’ll count to five, then we’ll run.’
‘Okay,’ Alina said and my heart beat as I waited to count down.
‘Five, four, three, two, ONE,’ I shouted and started running through the shadowy wood. I couldn’t hear Alina behind