Justine

Justine is both a worker at La Maison and the remembering voice through which its vanished rooms and everyday life remain visible. Her trajectory from newcomer to someone who feels at home there is expressed in concrete details: a named locker, a first shower in the clients’ bathroom, and the freedom to miss work without elaborate explanations.

Arrival and Work

Justine’s account places La Maison in an ordinary neighborhood, reached by walking from the metro past a park, a beer garden, a nursery, shops, and a bakery. The entrance at number 36 is nearly concealed among trimmed box hedges; an old copper buzzer opens onto a tiled hall and a worn inner door leading to the courtyard. The route makes the brothel a hidden workplace nested inside familiar streets rather than a destination visible from outside.

Inside, the threshold between public and private life is marked by a purple theater curtain. The girls’ shared world lies beyond it, while clients are directed toward the main room and a white leather chair. Justine’s account attends to the rooms, the waiting areas, and the workers’ lookout points, presenting the building as a space shaped by movement, visibility, and daily routine.

The work is organized but not governed by one universal rulebook. Justine describes a house manager responsible for greeting clients, arranging introductions, recording which worker and room were selected, handling payment, and keeping appointments to their allotted time. At the same time, she stresses that brothels differ in how management treats workers: rules and degrees of independence vary from place to place. Her perspective therefore records both the administrative structure of the job and the latitude workers may or may not have within it.

Working Conditions and Authority

Justine contrasts La Maison’s flexibility with the harsher arrangements she hears about elsewhere. At Le Manège, she identifies the central strain not as constant supervision alone but as the long, abrasive wait for scarce clients. With no fixed salary, workers compete for the few appointments; frustration travels upward from the girls to the house managers and then to the proprietor, while the managers’ moods shape the atmosphere of the house. Justine observes how Jana’s restless rounds, carrying bottles between the bar and the rooms, make the other women lower their heads, and how Jana sometimes settles in room 6 with a tablet and several phones while keeping the workers in view.

That account also complicates the distinction between workers and management. Justine questions whether the discomfort surrounding conversation about clients comes from the girls themselves or from house managers who combine concern for earnings with a distancing refusal to know what happens in the rooms. A colleague’s blunt reminder—that the girls generate the money, while managers clean and collect payment—gives Justine a way to name the imbalance. Yet she does not mistake that economic fact for freedom from managerial power: Jana still assigns favorites and scapegoats according to her changing moods, and the workers learn to avoid provoking her.

Justine’s understanding of La Maison’s more permissive rules deepens through her own absences. She once sent elaborate explanations when she could not come in, imagining that Inge or Sonja would have to cancel her appointments and notify clients. Instead, she received a brief message saying that she need only say she could not work. The response first stung like a teacher’s weary resignation, but Justine later recognized its kindness: the house did not demand excuses or treat an absence as a breach requiring punishment.

The policy is unusual in the world Justine describes. Workers can choose their days, cancel at short notice, or fail to appear without being locked in or automatically dismissed; they may leave and later return. She contrasts this with other establishments where a worker can be fired for illness or a week away, where refusal of a client or of a particular service can bring penalties, and where management may dictate appearance and the end of a shift. Désirée explains the apparent leniency as practical judgment rather than benevolence: forcing a woman to work when she does not want to can leave her in a state that is not worth the lost income, while clients and earnings can be redistributed among the other workers. Justine’s account makes autonomy a material feature of working conditions, not simply a matter of tone.

Loss, Memory, and Belonging

The freedom to come and go acquires a different meaning once La Maison itself is gone. After accidentally finding the former bus stop while cycling, Justine recognizes the bakery and hardware store, but the brothel has been replaced by a building used for offices and private residences. The church beside it still casts its shadow over the café where the workers once gathered after their shifts; what has vanished is the place that joined those ordinary surroundings to their shared working life. Justine’s return makes urban change personal: a familiar street corner survives, but its everyday landmarks no longer lead to the world she remembers.

Her account preserves that world by tracing its geography in detail. Coming from the metro, workers and clients passed a park, a beer garden, a nursery, shops, and a bakery before reaching the inconspicuous entrance at number 36. Inside, the worn door opened onto a courtyard and a garden enclosed from neighbors’ view. A balcony and four pale stone steps led down to a patch of ground that was more moss than lawn, screened by climbing plants and plastic greenery. Cheap folding chairs, a creaking swing, and an old beach basket turned the garden into a workers’ refuge rather than a polished amenity for clients. The modest objects matter because they show how the women made the space their own.

Justine also remembers the building through its thresholds. A purple theater curtain separated the outside from the women’s shared interior, and a narrow passage offered workers a place to observe what was happening beyond it. Rooms, waiting areas, the garden, and the curtain formed a working environment organized around who could see whom, where people waited, and who controlled movement through the house. In retrospect, their arrangement is part of what she is trying to save: not merely the rooms’ appearance, but the daily practices that gave them meaning.

A Workplace Becomes Home

The change in Justine’s sense of belonging is registered in small, accumulated freedoms rather than a single decisive turning point. Looking back, she wonders when the rooms and their familiar smells and coworkers stopped intimidating her and began to feel like home. Her questions gather around ordinary moments: taking her first shower in the clients’ bathroom, singing without noticing while making a bed, and refusing to come in for work for the first time. The gradual shift makes belonging less an announced identity than a set of actions she eventually performs without needing to ask permission.

The shared locker room gives that change a visible form. Workers’ lockers carry names, decorations, and traces of their individual lives: vacation postcards, small personal ornaments, and messages reflecting different attitudes and boundaries. Justine’s own locker bears her name with a heart replacing the dot over the i, alongside two drawings made by her sisters. The heart marks a happiness and pride that she only recognizes in retrospect; the drawings bring her family into a place that has become another kind of community. These details do not erase the workplace’s conditions. They show how personal attachment can take shape within them.

After a week of severe depression, Justine sees herself in the corridor mirror after showering, with the towel embroidered with her name around her waist. Inge has switched off the ground-floor lights and music and is quietly going over the remaining tasks. The closed house, emptied of its working bustle, feels to Justine like a resting amusement park. In that stillness she realizes that La Maison has become a gentle home for her, and the recognition unsettles her: she cannot identify the exact moment when familiarity replaced intimidation. The scene brings together the ordinary labor that sustains the house and the emotional attachment that has grown around it.

Justine’s reflections on family extend that attachment without claiming that the workers’ community is identical to conventional kinship. She considers whether women sharing a fate can constitute a family, and describes family as a place or moment where people speak, laugh, confide, and share troubles, victories, and defeats. Her formulation makes solidarity an achievement of proximity and common circumstance, not proof that the women are alike or that their workplace is free of strain. The lockers, the sisters’ drawings, and Inge’s quiet end-of-day routine supply the concrete ties behind the question.

Remembering La Maison

After the house has disappeared, Justine’s return to its former corner becomes an encounter with loss. Cycling off course, she recognizes the bakery and hardware store near the stop where her bus had dropped her less than a year earlier. The church still stands beside the café where the workers once gathered after shifts, but La Maison has given way to offices and private residences. Justine imagines the old garden replaced by a designed terrace and an open-plan office. The contrast is not simply between an old building and a new one: the place that held the women’s routines has been converted into a setting whose ordinary corporate uses seem to her almost impossible to reconcile with what came before.

She had previously managed her attachment by avoiding that side of the metro map. The detour on her bicycle defeats that strategy: the street remains recognizable, while the place that made it emotionally charged is gone. Her grief is at once private and ordinary in the city’s life, where familiar places vanish and are mourned with little public notice. What remains to her is the force of a location discovered by chance, whose meaning cannot be transferred to those who did not know it.

The act of remembering becomes part of Justine’s work as a narrator. She wants to describe the arrangement of the rooms and the colors of the curtains, but is more concerned with conveying the house’s elusive spirit: the tenderness that made its bad taste seem splendid. She admits that two hundred pages have not brought her close to the thing she considers essential. The difficulty gives the account its purpose and its limit: precise details can restore the route, rooms, and objects, but cannot make the vanished community present again.

That tension culminates in the image of the building after closing, a shell emptied of its daily activity. Justine’s account keeps both realities in view: La Maison was a workplace with rules, waiting, and uneven authority, and it became a place of familiarity and shared life. Its disappearance does not settle what that community meant. Instead, the street, the named locker, and the remembered end-of-day quiet become the surviving evidence through which she tries to make its particular world visible.