My name is Mila, and this is my journey.
There are so many places where I could begin the story. I could start in the town where I grew up, in Kryvicy, on the banks of the Servac River, in the district of Miadziel. I could begin when I was eight years old, on the day my mother died, or when I was twelve, and my father fell beneath the wheels of the neighbor’s truck. But I think I should begin my story here, in the Mexican desert, so far from my home in Belarus. This is where I lost my innocence. This is where my dreams died.
It is a November day without clouds, and large black birds soar in a sky that is bluer than I have ever seen. I am sitting in a white van driven by two men who do not know my real name, nor do they seem to care. They just laugh and call me Red Sonja, the name they have used since they saw me step off the plane in Mexico City. Anja says it’s because of my hair. Red Sonja is the name of a movie which I have never seen, but Anja has seen it. She whispers to me that it’s about a beautiful warrior woman who cuts down her enemies with a sword. Now I think the men are mocking me with this name because I am not beautiful; I am not a warrior. I am only seventeen, and I am scared because I do not know what happens next.
We are holding hands, Anja and me, as the van carries us, and five other girls, through a barren land of desert and scrub brush. The “Mexican Package Tour” is what the woman in Minsk promised us, but we knew what it really meant: an escape. A chance. You take a plane to Mexico City, she told us, and there will be people to meet you at the airport, to help you across the border to a new life. “What good is your life here?” she told us. “There are no good jobs for girls, no apartments, no decent men. You have no parents to support you. And you, Mila—you speak English so well,” she told me. “In America, you will fit in, just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “Be brave! Take a chance. The employers will pay your way, so what are you both waiting for?”
Not for this, I think, as endless desert rolls past our windows.
As Anja huddles close against me, all the girls on the van are quiet. We are all beginning to wonder the same thing. What have I done?
All morning, we have been driving. The two men in the front say nothing to us, but the man on the passenger side keeps turning to give us looks. His eyes always seek out Anja, and I do not like the way he stares at her. She doesn’t notice it because she is dozing against my shoulder. The mouse, we always called her in school, because she is so shy. One glance from a boy will make her blush. We are the same age, but when I look at Anja’s sleeping face, I see a child. And I think: I should not have let her come with me. I should have told her to stay in Kryvicy.
At last our van leaves the highway and bumps onto a dirt road.
The other girls stir awake and stare out the windows at brown hills, where boulders lie scattered like old bones. In my hometown, the first snow has already fallen, but here, in this winterless land, there is only dust and blue sky and parched shrubs. We roll to a stop, and the two men look back at us.
The driver says in Russian: “It’s time to get out and walk. It’s the only way across the border.”