KOSTYA HAS BEEN MISSING now for nearly two weeks. My love, gone. I am all alone in this land. I don’t know if I’ll ever see him again, and I have no idea why he was taken away. I cannot go to the police because I am here in Chicago illegally – both of us were.

Olena locked the front door after the last tipsy customer from the upstairs lounge left. We were in a rush to clean the downstairs spa area because I needed to get into the house and lock my bedroom door before the owner arrived. I cannot stay in the house I’m currently in for another night. The owner will try to violate me again, and the cold room is making me sick. I don’t understand why he doesn’t have heat in the winter. Olena said many people in the neighborhood I live in don’t have heat in the winter. It’s hard to understand how people in Chicago live without heat in February – it’s colder than Ukraine. I didn’t imagine America to be like this.  Facebook, Instagram, VK, and other social media sites make America look so wondrous. So fun. Kostya and I were convinced that America would bring a better life than what our future in Ukraine held for us as young people. Olena said she thought America would be a better place, too, when she moved here. We’re not friends, she and I. We work together, and she came from the east of Ukraine a few years ago. She’s nice, and seems to care for my safety, but she keeps me at a distance.

“Have you figured out what you’re going to do?” she asked, coyly, in a low voice.

“No, I haven’t. Let’s just finish up and get out of here.” We cleaned in silence for a moment, but I could feel my silence causing Olena to bubble up.

“Did you go see the lawyer like I suggested?”

“Not yet, Olena.”

“Why not?! You’re running out of time, you know, Polina. If you don’t do something soon, you’ll get sent back to Ukraine, and then you won’t . . .”

“I’ll go tomorrow.” I could feel her looking at me as we both continued cleaning in silence.

We could hear the heavy, sloppy footsteps of the bath house owner coming down the cedar stairs and into the area we were cleaning, so we halted our Ukrainian dialogue and switched to Russian. Ukrainian language is not accepted kindly by the owner.

“I’ll finish here, and go start on the men’s side if you do the women’s,” Olena said in Russian. I nodded.

We continued wiping down the vinyl chaise lounges as the owner walked past us, looking at our asses without comment as he passed from the stairwell through to the common area, toward the dry sauna in his robe. The robe was not tied around the waist. Flowing free. He waited until the patrons left for the evening to use his facility, sometimes with guests, sometimes alone. We cleaned the sweat and fluids from the seatbacks – the residue left by the bulbous, stumpy Russian and other post-Soviet Russian-speaking men, and their female companions. We wrung moist rags into a shared bucket and turned our heads away as we did it, almost always in unison. This common area of the spa – which separates the luxurious men’s side from the more modest women’s side – has a lingering stench of sour cream, vodka, and onions from the body distillates the men leave behind, mixed with a faint essence of chlorine from the hot and cold pools wafting in from the sauna rooms.  

Sometimes Americans wandered in here. It was easy to pick them out from the crowd. They were more curious and reserved, often lounging in the facilities with their svelte figures puritanically wrapped in towels or up in the lounge drinking vodka for novelty, while the true Slavs freely let it all be; loafing, slumping and spilling all over the place. Freed, lumpy, veiny bodies, pinkish like tenderized veal from birch branch flagellation and the heat of the saunas.

This Russian bathhouse job is only temporary. They allow me to work here and they pay cash. Most employees here are paid in cash. The owner is a powerful man, and many of the workers don’t have papers to work in America.

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Finish this shadowy Chicago tale in SN13 | The Ides of March.

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