The Boy in the Suitcase - Lene Kaaberbol [88]
And another small miracle was taking place before her very eyes.
Marija said something to the boy, and he struggled free of her embrace with a scream of laughter. He splashed her with water, and then replied to her question, feet firmly planted in the wet sand. Instinctively, Nina understood what it was, even before the boy repeated his answer in a louder voice.
“Mikas!”
It was his name.
MARIJA AND THE boy whose name was Mikas stayed in the water until Mikas’s lips were blue from cold and his teeth chattering like little castanets. Marija’s long, dark hair hugged her shoulders wetly, and there was still laughter in her eyes as she let herself drop down onto the towel next to Nina, stretching so that she caught as much as possible of the hot afternoon sun.
Nina wrapped Mikas in the other towel, rubbing dry the narrow white shoulders, his chest and back, his legs. Then she helped him put on the T-shirt and the pants and liberated the spade-andbucket set from their net bag for him. At once, he ran the few feet to the wet part of the beach and set to with an eager enthusiasm that made Marija and Nina smile at each other tolerantly, as if they were a married couple sharing a moment of pride in their offspring. Then Marija crouched forward, looking at Nina with a small sharp worry-wrinkle between her eyebrows.
“I know his name now,” she said, in her heavy English. “He is Mikas, and his mother’s last name is Ramoškienė. He remembered that when I asked him what the daycare staff calls his mama.”
“Preschool?” said Nina, taken aback by the apparent normality of it. She knew precious little about Lithuania, she realized, and her ideas had run along the lines of Soviet concrete ghettos, TB-infected prisons, and a callous mafia. Somehow, preschools had not been part of the picture. “Anything else?”
Marija asked Mikas another question. He answered readily, without pausing or looking up from his work with the spade and bucket even for a second.
“He is from Vilnius. I am sure,” said Marija. “I asked him if he liked riding on the trolley buses, and he does. But not in the winter when the floor is all slushy.”
Marija smiled in triumph at her own invention.
“He said he is sometimes allowed to press the STOP button. But he has to wait until the driver says, ‘Žemynos gatvė.’”
Nina rummaged in her bag and came up with a ballpoint and a scruffy-looking notepad from some company of medical supplies.
“Will you write it out for me?”
Marija willingly took the pen and paper and wrote down both the name of Mikas’s mother and that of the street near which she must live. Nina took it with a feeling of having brought home the gold. Then she realized that knowing his name and roughly where he came from was not actually enough. There was something else she desperately needed to know.
“Ask about his mother,” she said. “Does he live with her? And why isn’t he there now? What happened—does he know?”
Marija frowned, and Nina guessed that she was searching for the right words, comforting and unthreatening enough that she wouldn’t upset the boy too much. A stab of outrage at Marija’s own capsized life went straight through Nina’s chest. She felt such rage at the thought of the Danish, Dutch, and German men who felt it was their perfect right to serially screw a young girl month after month until not the least remnant of the girly sweetness and the coltish awkwardness would remain. What do such men tell each other? That it is quite okay because it is her own choice? That they are offering her a way to make a little money and start a new life? How very grand of them.
With so many men, and such fine generosity, a national collection aimed at young Eastern European and African girls ought to raise millions. Why didn’t Marija’s customers keep their flies zipped and organize a fundraiser instead?
Marija had moved closer to the boy and was helping him turn the sand-filled bucket upside down. She ran her finger