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Russia. What can they afford? Besides, the pimps think they
are infected with all sorts of diseases like mangy dogs.
But they have some regular clients. Not that they don’t
chance on some bastards now and then, but that happens
rarely. In sum, they earn their daily bread honestly.
Nadezhda thinks that the young girls drink too much.
Some of them even swallow pills and shoot up. Sometimes
she has to save them. Make them vomit in the bushes, go
with them to the hospital if it gets very bad. Nadezhda
encourages them to go to school, to improve their lot in life
and not stand at the roadside. Sometimes she even
succeeds in convincing a girl.
She herself, as she trods her path along the highway,
remembers again and again that fateful day when she came
out of the woods with the baskets full of mushrooms, sat
down at the old bus stop and met the young whores.
She was guided by some invisible power. She waited until
the two young girls had snagged their clients, then she
stood up, shook out her clothes, went a good distance away
from the place she had been sitting to position herself at
the roadside, stretched out her arm to one side thumb out,
exactly like the girls. She did not have to wait long, when an
old car stopped beside her. A middle-aged man was sitting
inside. From his appearance, he looked like a farmer. In his
car could be seen old potato sacks and some sort of boxes.