Oleander Chapter Two

This had been mildly edited and mostly spell checked. It is up right now for those who can't wait and for those who would like to help me out. Thank you!1

The end of July was hot and sweaty. Business slowed down considerably at the bordello, which was both good and bad for the girls.
Good, for the obvious reasons.
Bad, because every day that their customers stayed away was a day when they saw their debts increase. Food, air conditioning, supplies; all things that they handed their money over to Madame Tirani for. The more money into her pockets, the less into their debt accounts. 2

And Madame charged interest per year.3

Madame Tirani was a harsh, large woman, almost ugly. Her hair was black, possibly dyed, and her skin tan. She often drew a little khol around her eyes, more with the intention to intimidate than to impress. The girls often wondered out loud where she came from, and why she was in the prostitution business. She didn't flirt with men, she rarely interacted with the girls, and unless a rule was broken, she wasn't too keen on enforcing discipline. They didn't see her much at all, other than when money was involved. She got the majority of the money that the men paid, plus a small sum from the girls for the upkeep. Not particulary scary or strong, she wasn't too fearsome to look at.4

The main reason the girls obeyed Madame without question was because of what happened to Rawii.5

Rawii was a thin girl, a rape child, abandoned by her AIDS infected mother when Madame caught sight of Rawii and offered up a pretty penny on the spot. Rawii was a beautiful thirteen. She never forgot her mother's betrayal, and bitterly hated Madame.
When she arrived at the whore-house, she spoke very little of any language the girls knew. She didn't understand where she was, what she was. The first day, she tried to clean, thinking she was a maid. She tried to break out of the locked room Madame put her into the first night, thinking she had been punished for something. 6

When the first man came in, she understood.
Her screams echoed through the second floor, driving away customers.
Later, Oleander tried to give her a giraffe, but Rawii couldn't stop shaking enough to hold it. Zelda, who had just arrived two months earlier, took care of Rawii and became her 'big sister.' Zelda helped Rawii learn English, a little Hindi, and even a bit of Italian. Rawii ate it up, memorizing all the words for "help," "escape," "leave," "please," and even "I am here against my will."
She never found anyone who cared.7

After Rawii had been at the brothel for about eight months, she saw Madame handing over money to a crooked government official. Rawii cornered her that evening, threatening to turn over the whole operation to the local authorities if she didn't give her her freedom. Rawii might have been freed that very night, but she got a little too brave.
She told Mandy her plans that day while they rested in their shared room.
"She was going to demand money from Madame, enough to buy her and her mother a house, or a grave for her mother, if she was dead," Candy told the girls later.
Upon hearing the demand, Madame threw the girl into the "virgin closet," the room that locked from the outside, windowless.
The whole next day, the girls heard screaming, thumping, and bestial male animal sounds, never words in any language the girls understood. They heard Rawii's begging, screams for help, cries of pain and moans, while over all the unearthly, inhuman animal sounds. Oleander had tried to open the locked door. She struggled and fought and kicked it and threw her body against it until Heras pulled her off and upstairs, where she threw up all over someone's bed.
That night before they went to work, the door to the virgin closet was unlocked. Only a few girls looked inside. Rawii was lying face down on a bed, her knees on the floor. There was blood all over her thin dress, front and back. She had hand marks encircling her neck, visible even on her dark skin . Her lip was busted, her right arm broken and useless. There was vomit on the floor, and more blood on the bed. She looked dead, except for her shallow, shuddering breaths. 8

When they came back upstairs from work, Rawii had swallowed rat poison.9

Since then, no girl ever said 'no' to a man or Madame.10


*11

Some girls tried to appeal to Madame, giving her a little extra than they had to each week, buying her a box of candy on holidays, thanking her for taking such good care of them. These were usually the girls that had come of their own free will, or who had been purchased from a worse place, like Collette, who had been bought to match Candy, like china dolls.
Some girls had nothing but disdain, staying away from Madame as much as possible. These were the girls who were tricked or kidnapped, some of whom had families back at home, still believing that their daughters were working in the city.
A few treated Madame Tirani like a business woman, which in essence, is what she truly was. Oleander met with Madame every other week to discuss what she needed, how much she still had to pay to get rid of her debt, and to ask permission to run an errand.12

Running errands was the golden dream, something to hope for every week. The poor delivery boy who worked for Madame was cursed quite a lot, each girl secretly praying in her own religion that he would get sick that week. Running an errand for Madame meant temporary freedom, a chance to go out, to see the world, to smell the air, to pretend, to hope. On the rare chance that a girl did win permission to do something for Mamdame, the others mobbed her, demanding details, or shunned her out of jealousy. Every girl had different motives on an errand-run.13

Mandy would always stop by the bazaar and check to make sure her favorite butcher still didn't have a ring on his left hand.
Collette would check the newstand to see if her mother was looking for her. (The other girls always rolled thier eyes at this.)
Zelda would try to plan her trip to run by the bookstore, and fish around in the paperback freebie basket for anything unusual.
Heras would go by the harbor, and would dip her feet in the cool, salty sea water. Sometimes she would feed the seagulls with old bread crusts.
Oleander always stopped by the toy store, the tiny, run down shop owned by an Indian family at the end of the street.14

The other girls usually weren't trusted enough to go, whether they were new or because they had run away before, but they asked Tirani anyway. Madame Tirani had a time limit on all the errands she needed running, and if you were more than ten minutes over, she slapped you in front of the others and took your week's salary. One girl, named Rosa, had tried to visit her sister at another brothel. Madame knew where she had been before she even got back, and she got back twenty minutes late. Madame made her cut herself on her fingertips, and then made her hold her hands in something acidic. She took two weeks worth of money from Rosa, and wouldn't let her see her boyfriend, who gave up on Rosa after two months. This blow was the worst for the girl. Rosa stopped laughing. Eventually, she even lost her smile.15

From Rosa, the girls learned the importance of being prompt. From Rawii, they learned the importance of respect to your elders. They learned about submission, about weakness. They learned about hope and despair. They learned how to keep your eyes closed even when your lids were open. They all learned the difference between passion and lust. Very few of them learned the difference between dreams and reality, but who is to say that they could have, when each twilight started a nightmare, and the only things they had from the outside world were books and television, dream-givers? Their lives were unreal, but they lived them. Their dreams were impossible, but they dreamed them. 16

*17

The day after July's first full moon, 9:00am, marked the one year anniversary of Rawii's death. Zelda said a prayer she had memorized off a Catholic channel, and Clarissa, the newest, was allowed to offer a lock of her hair as sympathy to Rawii, and silently asked for Rawii's strength and protection. It didn't matter that Rawii had died at thirteen or fourteen and that Clarissa was fifteen. Age didn't matter in the bordello, and barely existed. They all told the men that they were three years younger than they were anyway.
Oleander stood in in the corner of the room. Some were surprised to see her, and for a few, it was the first time they had seen her in daylight.
"Rawii was strong," Oleander started, leaning her head towards Clarissa. She said this in a serious voice, but her body looked awkward, as if she was uncomfortable speaking.
Several girls nodded, tears streaking thier heavy make-up.
Oleander moved almost shyly around the rim of the room until she was standing by Clarissa at an open window. Clarissa's hair clipping fluttered near the sill.
Oleander started again, in a low voice meant for Clarissa alone. "Whether or not Rawii's death was because she couldn't handle the evil or because she was brave enough to face the other side, you need to remember something. You have a choice." Oleander whispered ferverently, her face close to Clarrisa's, a sweet smell rolling off her skin. "Ok?
"None of us here want to make her choice, and we don't want our friends to make that the choice, either, but we can make a lot of other choices. You're new. You can choose to open up and heal, or you can choose to not get attached. You can choose to spend your money or to save it. You can try to run away, or you can try to pay off debts. Some choices are easy, but most aren't." Her hands rested on Clarissa's shoulders now, her eyes trying to tell her more than her lips could. "Maybe you had nowhere else to turn, and maybe you were tricked, but you didn't come here willingly, so you must never believe we are the things the men tell us we all are."
Oleander glanced up, and saw that half the room was watching her.
Oleander's throat clenched. "It's true," she mumbled. "I, I sort of love all of you."
Clarissa and some other girls, who had been quietly crying for some time, started sobbing loudly. Zelda stood up to hug Oleander, who left quickly, almost running, morbidly embarassed, for the door. Heras, who was holding hands with Mandy, spat out the window and drew a shape in the air with her finger, uttering a guttural word. The crying annoyed the family of stray dogs in the gutter, who started barking violently. Madame came to the bottom of the stairs and shouted at everybody for "making so much damned racket."
Unnoticed by the sobbing girls, Clarissa's lock of hair flew out into the alley, where a bird later picked it up and added it to her nest.
That morning after the ceremony, the youngest and newest girls agreed to sleep together in Mandy's room, pulling mattresses in next to Rawii's old bunk. They slept curled up together, like kittens in a basket. One hadn't had time to switch from her work clothes, and her black silks contrasted sharply with the other girls' oversized old t-shirts. Oleander spent the sleep-time locked in her room. Candy and Collette slept together in the same bunk, and Zelda spent all the daylight hours staring out the window.18

Madame, who did not sleep during the day when the girls did, marked the day by giving a roll of cash to a pinched-face man in the alley.19