We lost the first girl before we even got on the boat.

We’d been stuck out on the Argentinean pampas for a week, waiting for the steamer that was going to take us up the river. We spent our days sitting on the hotel porch drinking pisco sours and staring into the vast landscape as the ballerinas smoked cigarettes and told obscene Russian folk tales.

It was Svetlana who bolted, of course. Gloomy, nervous Svetlana, with her pale, wheat-coloured eyes full of the Ukrainian steppe. Maybe something out in all that immensity reminded her of home.

Her note said she’d run away with one of the local capybara herders.

We never saw her again.

She was one of the lucky ones. Continue reading “Ballerinas Across the Andes, or The Great Ecstasy of Werner H.” →