The Guest Room(27)

And so while I did go to Moscow with them when they asked, they did not suck me in slowly. Nope. They made sure I knew right away what I was in for—and what would happen if I did not cooperate.

…

When I discovered that my phone and my rollie had disappeared, I opened the hotel room door. I nearly screamed because there was a tall guy in the hallway watching it—watching my room. He was just sitting there in the plush chair that was near the elevator, looking at different things on his phone. (Knowing what I know now, he was looking at soccer scores or porn, and probably porn.) When he saw me, he just smiled and motioned me back inside with his fingertips like I was little bug in front of his face. He was bald, too, just like Andrei. To this day, I will never understand why Russian mobsters feel the need to shave themselves so they look like cue-ball-head babies. No girl really likes that look. It’s big mystery to me.

It would be hours before they would send up Inga, so I went back inside my room and that’s when I saw the blood on the sheet. I didn’t remember Andrei pulling the bedspread down. Then it dawned on me: I was still bleeding. Not a lot, but a little. It was pooling in my underwear and dribbling down my leg like raindrops on a windowpane. And suddenly I just went crazy like wild animal. I was pounding on the walls with my fists. Then I was slapping the back of the door with the palms of my hands, and I didn’t stop even when my skin felt like it was burning. I’m not sure what I expected. Did I think the corridor thug would set me free? Or did I think he would order me to stop? Did I care? The point was, I was trapped. I was a prisoner. In the end, he didn’t set me free or yell at me. He just ignored me. I pounded on the walls and the door until I was so tired I just slid to the floor. I looked at the velvet drapes in front of the window. I was on the ninth floor, but maybe there was a fire escape. There wasn’t.

I crawled my way to the bed and fell back onto the mattress, where I cried till I was hyperventilating. I was exhausted. It was like evening a few years earlier when I was babysitting an infant on another floor in my apartment building in Yerevan. I just couldn’t stop this poor little girl—she was just over a year old—from crying. I held her, I rocked her, I sang to her. I tried to burp her. I changed her diaper—and changed it again. And then she started to hiccup. Not once, not twice. Not for a couple of minutes. For hours. She didn’t stop hiccupping and crying till her mother returned. I was convinced she was going to hiccup herself to death. I would have brought her to my mother or my grandmother, but neither was home. And that night in a Moscow hotel room, abducted and humiliated and alone, I was like that.

And I was so tired now. I was so tired.

Eventually I remembered the bloody sheet. I was lying on it. I was lying in my own blood—and then I felt not only violated, I felt ashamed. As angry as I was and as scared as I was, there was still that part of me that wanted to be a good girl. That needed a grown-up’s approval. That feared making a bad first impression. I was in a hotel nicer than any hotel I had ever been in before. (In truth, I had never really been to a hotel before. I had been to motels and cabin courts on Lake Sevan, but never anything as luxurious as this.) It seemed to me that I could not allow the maid to see the sheet. I couldn’t bear what she would think. I rolled the sheet into the tiniest ball I could and I placed it inside that plastic trash bag. Then I put the plastic trash bag under the bed—at least for now. I told myself that later I would find a way to throw it out.

When I curled up on the bed after that, all I could think of was my mother and my grandmother. I had finally stopped hiccupping, but I was still whimpering. I was crying because my mother was dead and I was crying because my grandmother was far away and I was crying because I had been raped. I was crying because I was terrified. You have no idea what terror is like until you are a teenage girl in bloody panties trapped in a hotel room. It didn’t matter that it was an elegant Moscow hotel with a little refrigerator in the room and wineglasses and an ice bucket. It didn’t matter that maybe the other rooms on the other floors were filled with oligarchs and tourists.

But what, looking back, seems weirdest to me is this: I remember feeling guilty. I understood this was not my fault: What girl would not want to be ballerina? What girl would not have trusted her dead mother’s boss and, with her grandmother’s blessing, left with his assistant on an airplane? But all reason was gone with that bloody sheet. All reason was gone when, a few seconds later, I pulled off my panties and put them in the bag with that sheet.

…

The woman said her name was Inga and she was from Latvia, but I had a feeling she was lying. She went on and on about my name, and how I needed a new one. Anahit would not do. Not European enough. Not glamorous enough. Not seductive enough. She wanted me to become—not kidding—Alexandra. In the last twenty-four hours, I had been f*cked for the first time and then filmed with some bastard bodyguard’s penis deep in my mouth, and now this strange woman is talking to me about why my new name should sound like imperial Russian tsarina. I was in shock. I remember sitting on the bedspread of the bed where the night before I had been raped, and then turning away from this pretend Inga and wrapping my arms around my ribs. I was cold, even though the hotel room thermostat was set high for hotel sex. She kept talking to me in a very sweet, very calm voice—I guess she was the good cop to Andrei’s bad cop—about how things would get better, and how this was a glamorous life I had been given, and the sooner I accepted that the better off we’d all be. Her Armenian was very good, but she had an accent I did not recognize. It might have been Polish, but I was just guessing. I had met many tourists in Yerevan, but none from Poland.