The Second Laugh

Outside Kazan, 1994. Lena is nineteen when she steps off a bus at an unmarked gate and walks into a former tuberculosis sanatorium that has become something else. She was promised a translators' programme. She knew, in the way one knows such things at nineteen, that this was not quite true.

Under the cool, exacting eye of Galina Sergeyevna - sixty, elegant, and thirty-one years into the trade - Lena learns to walk into a room, to dress for what the room requires, to laugh in two different ways. She learns the four mechanisms by which a man becomes dependent on a woman, and the harder thing beneath them: that the techniques work because they are not, in themselves, lies.

Some of the girls break. Some do not. The ones who don't break may be in the greater danger.

A quietly devastating story about craft, intimacy, and the cost of becoming very good at something that takes from you with every use.