Every now and then she glanced back to see if Tadić was following her, but she didn’t see him. Why should he be? It was nothing, she tried to tell herself. A woman gets up and knocks her glass over by accident. People react to the sound, that’s all. Besides, the last time he had seen Zelda, she had been just seventeen years old. She looked very different now, and her nose hadn’t been broken then. Besides, context is everything. He wouldn’t recognize her, and he certainly wouldn’t expect to bump into her in a London hotel bar. As far as she knew, they had had no contact after the breaking house in Vršac, and he must have broken in hundreds of girls after her.

Not that he had waited until Vršac to begin the process. They had a twelve- or thirteen-hour drive across Romania first, and Goran Tadić had started as soon as they got on the highway, messing with her clothes, groping her breasts in the back of the car. She had tried to resist but whenever she did, he would hit her again. And though he couldn’t take her valuable virginity, it didn’t stop him from anally raping her. As the car sped through the wild and mountainous countryside of Transylvania, she could do nothing but lie there facedown on the car seat and take it. All she could remember now was the pain, the smell of the dreadful cigar his brother was smoking as he drove and the relentless thumping and surging of the American rap music playing in the car. Finally, she had passed out and only came to a while later, when Goran Tadić was in the driver’s seat and his brother Petar in the back with her, ready to take his turn. Again she fought, and again it was to no avail. Even as early as that, she began to learn how they only hurt her more if she fought them, how to find that place outside herself, to watch the actions disinterestedly, as if from a great distance, and to numb all feeling. But she wasn’t quite so skilled at the start as she became later. This was before she learned to live with pain, to float inside it. It hurt. She bled. She cried.

She tried to escape through a cafe’s toilet window when they stopped for burgers somewhere near Brasov, but Goran was waiting, a cruel smile on his face, and she was punished for that. And so they had their way with her all the way from Chişinău to Vršac. They crossed two international borders, first into Romania and from there into Serbia, and in neither case did the border guards take the slightest interest in these two men and the clearly distraught young girl they had in the car with them. No questions were asked; they were simply waved through. Often, she wondered later whether money had changed hands—it wouldn’t have surprised her—but she decided it hadn’t. It was just the way things were.