Room 18 stood at the far end of the second-floor corridor. A single creaking floorboard announced every step. No one had ever bothered to fix it. Katja Petrović had chosen the room for its distance from the bar’s jukebox and the constant traffic on the stairs. The walls were bare white, scrubbed every morning with bleach until they shone like bone. No posters. No postcards from home. No lingering perfume to suggest anything softer. In the top drawer lay a small wooden icon of Saint Petka, face up. Katja was not religious, but some habits refused to die. On the nightstand sat a battered battery radio, tuned permanently to the news: Deutschlandfunk by day, BBC World Service after dark, Voice of America whenever the signal held. She kept the volume low. Only key phrases drifted through clearly: “intermediate-range,” “Pershing II,” “SS-20,” “evil empire,” “mutually assured destruction.”

Each new phrase prompted Katja to raise her rates the following evening. Clients complained, but they paid. In 1983–84 fear spread faster than any illness.

Katja had left Belgrade in the autumn of 1981 with one suitcase, a forged work permit, and the memory of police boots pounding up the stairs of her family’s apartment block. Her older brother Miloš had been arrested for handing out samizdat leaflets criticizing the regime’s crackdown on Albanian protests in Kosovo. The secret police visited twice. Once to search, once to warn. Tito had been dead barely a year. The federation was already fraying. Ethnic tensions simmered beneath the official slogan of “brotherhood and unity.” Inflation swallowed wages overnight. Bread lines stretched longer each week. Her parents begged her to stay, but she had seen the future in Miloš’s bruised face when they finally released him: silence or prison. She chose a third way. West. Alone.

The brothel was never the plan. It was simply the only door that stayed open when every factory gate slammed shut. She learned the work fast. Body as machine: efficient, durable, impersonal. Emotions went into storage, locked away like the icon in the drawer. Clients left satisfied. She remained intact.

At twenty-nine, she was compact and dark, with strong hands shaped by years of market bags and scrubbing floors, and eyes that seldom held anyone else’s gaze for long. Her German was careful, the vowels still rounded by Serbo-Croatian. Clients called her “the quiet one.” She preferred silence. Words invited questions, and questions invited truths she was not prepared to give.

Her only indulgence was the tin.

It began as a joke. A homesick American sergeant brought a large rectangular biscuit tin one Christmas, filled with Scottish shortbread from the Ramstein commissary. Katja ate one piece, then dumped the rest in the kitchen for the other girls. The empty tin she kept. That night, she added her first earnings: marks folded small and tight, stacked in neat rows by denomination. Every night after the last client, she lifted the loose floorboard beneath the bed, placed the new notes inside, weighed the tin in her palms as though it were alive, then returned it to the dark.

The weight became evidence. Evidence she was moving forward. Evidence the past could not follow. Evidence that when the sirens finally sounded, when the miscalculation everyone whispered about finally arrived, she could buy a train ticket south, a bus to Italy, a ferry to anywhere that was not a target. Money travelled light. Money asked no questions. Money did not vanish the way people did.

The radio nourished her fear the way the Rhine nourished the sea. Reagan’s March 1983 speech branding the Soviet Union an “evil empire” pushed her rates up twenty marks overnight. The downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 by Soviet fighters in September drove them higher still. Clients paid because they too lay awake picturing contrails turning into missiles. When NATO’s Able Archer 83 exercise began in November, war games so convincing that Soviet forces reportedly moved to full alert, Katja stopped sleeping. She lay rigid in the dark, listening to the roar of jets from Ramstein rehearsing night sorties, imagining the white flash that would arrive before the sound.

Frau Metzger noticed the increases. “You’ll frighten them away,” the madam warned one grey morning over ersatz coffee in the kitchen.

Katja shrugged, gaze fixed on rain-streaked glass. “The world is ending. Everything costs more.”

The only softness in her guarded life was Herr Albrecht Weber.

He was sixty-three, a retired postman from a small village outside Mannheim, widowed a decade earlier when breast cancer took his wife. He began visiting in early 1983, always on Tuesdays, always arriving at exactly eight with a small paper bag: McIntosh apples from the trees behind his cottage, a bar of Ritter Sport marzipan, a handful of walnuts freshly cracked from their shells. Once, he brought the half-finished scarf his wife had been knitting, soft grey wool, needles still threaded, and left it on the dresser without a word.

He was gentle in a way that felt almost unfamiliar. Never rushed. Never crude. Their routine settled quietly, almost without language. He sat on the edge of the bed while she undressed him with careful attention, shirt buttons released one by one, belt unbuckled slowly, trousers folded neatly over the chair the way he folded them at home. She knelt first, taking him into her mouth with patient focus, feeling him harden gradually, his hand resting lightly on her shoulder, never gripping, never dictating pace. When he was ready, she guided him inside her, always missionary, always face to face. He moved slowly, eyes open, as though memorising her in the low lamplight. His breathing stayed even, almost meditative.

Afterward he held her, not possessively, but like someone sharing warmth against winter. Sometimes he dozed for ten or fifteen minutes with his head on her breast while she stared at the ceiling and listened to the radio murmur about submarine detections or stalled arms talks. When he woke, he dressed without haste, pressed an extra fifty marks into her palm “for whatever you need,” kissed her forehead once, soft, dry, paternal, and left.

In February 1984 the news darkened further. Reports of new Soviet SS-20 deployments in Eastern Europe, American cruise missiles arriving at Greenham Common despite huge protests, Reagan’s “Star Wars” speech promising a shield no one believed would arrive in time. Katja raised her rates again. Most clients accepted it. Fear made men careless with money and desire.

Herr Weber paid without remark on the last Tuesday he came. He brought a small glass jar of honey from his neighbour’s bees and two perfect apples, red touched with gold. They made love with the same unhurried tenderness, her on her back, legs wrapped loosely around his waist, his hand stroking her hair as he moved inside her. When he finished, he rested his forehead against hers for a long moment, their breathing shared.

As he dressed, he paused at the door. “The world feels heavy lately, Katja.”

She nodded, sheet drawn to her chin. “It is.”

He gave a small, sad smile. “Take care of yourself.”

She thought little of it until three weeks passed without his knock.

At first, she told herself he was occupied, pruning the apple trees perhaps, or visiting grandchildren she had never heard mentioned. Four weeks became six. Tuesdays arrived empty. She began listening for his familiar shuffle in the corridor, the soft creak of his shoes. Nothing.

The radio gave no comfort. Andropov’s death, Chernenko’s rise, new submarine incidents in the Barents Sea. Each report felt like another layer sealing her in. The tin grew heavier, but the reassurance it once offered had soured into dread. She counted the stacks compulsively, mapping escape routes: Switzerland by train, Sweden by ferry, Canada if she could reach Bremerhaven and find a ship. No destination felt distant enough from Ramstein’s runways.

One raw March morning, after a night without sleep and fresh reports of a near-collision between American and Soviet vessels, Katja found Hanno in the narrow hallway outside the kitchen. He was wiping down the banister, sleeves rolled to the elbows, cigarette already burning between his lips. She stopped in front of him.

“Hanno,” she said quietly. “I need a favour.”

He looked up, exhaled smoke sideways so it wouldn’t drift into her face. “Name it.”

She stepped closer until the space between them was small enough to feel the warmth coming off his coat. Without another word, she sank to her knees on the worn runner, the wood cool through her stockings. Her hands moved to his belt, unbuckling it with the same deliberate care she used on every client, though this time there was no performance, only purpose. She tugged the trousers down just enough, freed him, already half-hard from the suddenness of it. Her fingers wrapped around the base, steady, familiar pressure. She looked up once, meeting his eyes for a long second, then lowered her mouth.

She took him in slowly at first, lips sealing around the head, tongue flat and pressing along the underside as she slid forward. The taste was salt and smoke and the faint metallic edge of the day’s work. She worked him deeper in measured strokes, cheeks hollowing on the pull back, then relaxing to let him fill her again. One hand stayed at the root, stroking what her mouth could not reach, while the other rested lightly on his thigh for balance. She kept the rhythm even, unhurried, letting saliva ease the glide until he was fully slick and thick against her tongue. When she felt the first involuntary twitch, she paused, lips locked just below the ridge, and sucked gently, steadily, drawing a low sound from his throat. Then she resumed, faster now, head moving in short, focused bobs, tongue flicking the sensitive frenulum on every upstroke. His breathing grew rougher. His hand hovered near her hair but never touched it. He knew better than to guide her.

She felt him thicken further, the vein along the underside pulsing against her tongue. She took him as deep as she could manage without gagging, held there a moment, throat working around him, then pulled back to concentrate on the head again, swirling, sucking, one hand twisting lightly at the base in counterpoint. His hips jerked once, twice. She did not pull away. When he came, it was sudden and quiet, a muffled groan, hot pulses against the roof of her mouth. She swallowed without hesitation, kept her lips sealed until he finished, then eased off slowly, tongue cleaning him as she went.

She stood, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and met his eyes again.

“I need you to drive me to Weber’s village,” she said. “Today.”

Hanno exhaled, tucked himself away, buckled the belt. “Keys are by the back door,” he said. “I’ll get the car.”

He asked no questions. He simply took the keys to the old Opel Kadett parked behind the brothel, opened the passenger door for her, and drove in silence through dripping forest roads toward the village Weber had once named. Katja sat with gloved hands knotted in her lap, the ghost weight of the tin pressing against her ribs.

The cottage was small, neatly painted pale green, bare apple trees lining the path. Mail spilled from the box. The windows were shuttered. A neighbour, an old woman in a headscarf feeding chickens in the muddy yard, told them Herr Weber had collapsed in his kitchen in mid-February. A mild heart attack. He was alive, recovering slowly in a Catholic nursing home in Mannheim, but the doctors said he could no longer live alone or drive.

Katja stood in the yard long after the woman returned to her chores. Rain fell from the apple branches onto her hair. She felt something crack open inside her chest, slow and final, until whatever it held spilled out and sank into the mud.

Back at the brothel, she lifted the floorboard in daylight for the first time in months. The tin gleamed dully, heavier than memory. She opened it and stared at the neat bricks of marks, years of fear turned solid, years of nights spent on her back or knees. The money looked suddenly obscene: cold paper that could not buy back one Tuesday, could not stop missiles or heart attacks or the slow wearing-away of every gentle thing.

She tried to picture spending it. A train ticket south, a small flat in Freiburg, anything that resembled movement. The idea froze her. The tin had become its own prison: too precious to spend, too heavy to carry, too bound to the terror that had built it.

That night a young American airman arrived, nineteen or twenty, skin still boy-soft under the flush of payday liquor, hair cropped so short the scalp showed pink. He reeked of jet fuel, cheap schnapps, and the nervous sweat of someone who had stared too long at radar screens. His eyes were bright and unsteady. He slapped three hundred extra marks onto the dresser before she could even close the door.

“Back door tonight,” he said, voice thick. “I want it rough. You do anal?”

Katja nodded once. She named the price again, higher than he had already paid. He counted out the bills without looking, then pushed her toward the bed.

She knelt on the mattress, palms flat, knees apart. He did not wait for her to settle. He spat into his palm, smeared it hastily, and pushed in hard enough that her breath caught sharp against her teeth. The stretch burned. He gave no pause. His hands clamped her hips, fingers digging into flesh, yanking her back onto him with each thrust. The rhythm was frantic, uneven, more desperate than practiced. The iron frame rattled against the wall. Once he drove deep and held, grinding, and the pressure forced a low, involuntary sound from her throat. She felt the edge of real pain bloom, the kind that could tear if he kept going this way. Her hand moved instinctively toward the nightstand drawer where the small brass bell waited, the one that would bring Hanno in seconds.

She hesitated. She had taken worse. She always took worse. But the next thrust slammed her forward, cheek brushing the sheet, and the bell was suddenly close enough to touch. Her fingers closed around the handle. She did not ring it. Not yet. She breathed through her mouth, slow and controlled, letting her body adjust, forcing the muscles to yield. He grunted above her, pace stuttering, then erratic. When he finished, it was abrupt, a choked curse, hips jerking hard one last time before he collapsed across her back, heavy and spent.

He rolled off after a minute, breathing loud. She stayed still until he sat up, wiped himself on the corner of the sheet, and dressed. He left the extra money where it lay, no tip beyond what he had already paid. The door clicked shut behind him.

Katja remained on her knees a moment longer, feeling the ache settle, the slow throb that would linger into morning. Then she straightened, wiped herself with a cloth from the basin, and sat on the cold floor beside the open tin. She cried for the first time since leaving Yugoslavia. The tears came dry, almost courteous, as though even grief had to be rationed.

Frau Metzger found her at dawn, still on the floor, tin open like a small coffin.

“He’s alive,” the madam said plainly, lighting a cigarette. “I rang the home yesterday. Mild attack. He’s weak but awake. He asked after ‘the quiet girl with dark hair from the east.’ Said to tell her he’s sorry he couldn’t bring the spring apples this year.”

Katja nodded. She closed the tin with careful hands and slid it back beneath the board. Heavier than ever.

Outside, the first faint green appeared on the trees along the road to Ramstein. Jets continued their endless practice loops, roaring low over the rooftops, reminding everyone that balance remained fragile and safety was never more than temporary.

Inside Room 18, Katja turned the radio up, searching for the next bulletin, the next reason to raise her rates, the next sheet of paper armour against a world that offered no true shelter.

The tin waited beneath the floor, growing heavier with every silent Tuesday, every unspoken farewell, every fragile kindness that arrived only to prove how easily it could vanish. And in the deepening quiet of her room, Katja finally understood that some weights could never be lightened. They could only be carried, alone, to the end.