The Guest Room(49)

For a while, Inga made up lies I could e-mail Nayiri, too. But I think Nayiri could see we were growing apart. My pretend life must have seemed too glamorous to her. We stopped e-mailing when I was still at the cottage.

Sometimes I lost track of how I had wound up where I was. Who I was. I would hate myself when, sometimes, the sex would feel good. I would hate myself when, other times, the men were lower than pigs. I would hate myself for being too weak to kill myself. Why, I would wonder, had I not thrown myself out that ninth-floor window those first days in Moscow? I would think of my ancestors who had chosen to die rather than be dishonored. In 1915, after their men had been slaughtered by the Turkish gendarmes and the Kurdish killing parties and they had seen their children die of starvation or terrible diseases, many Armenian women would throw themselves into the Euphrates River to drown. Or they would throw themselves off the mountains on the way to desert killing fields like Der-el-Zor. It was, they knew, better than being raped. Better than being nothing but harem girl or the wife of one of the men who had murdered your husband and your father and your brothers and your children.

But I hadn’t killed myself in Moscow, and I didn’t later at the cottage. I would try and make myself feel better by telling myself I still could.

Anyway, the girls at the cottage were nothing like Nayiri. I probably wouldn’t have been friends with any of them except maybe Sonja and Crystal if we’d been classmates in Yerevan or had lived in the same building. But when you are in the same boat, you make the best of the situation. Just like Nayiri and her two sisters, we fought over clothes—even though Inga picked them out specially for each of us—and we snapped about who was better with the black and whites. We even climbed over each other like kittens to get attention and those sometimes smiles from Inga and Catherine.

This is what I mean about capture-bonding. I know it seems strange that we wanted the approval of people who kept us prisoner. But if you are a person who needs no one’s approval, you are probably crazy and live alone on an island or the top of a mountain somewhere. We all need to be appreciated, even if it’s just because we are taught to spread our legs and smile for a man like this was something we wanted.

And I’ll bet there is no one who needs approval more than teen girl.

…

Most of time, I did feel safe—at least when it came to the black and whites who came to the cottage, and then to the Europeans and Americans who came to Moscow. The two times I was beaten by clients, those men were beaten far worse by my captors. One of the men, they told me, was going to walk with a limp for the rest of his life. The other lost a big handful of teeth.

I was far more scared of our guards and our bosses. Of Inga and Catherine. They were geniuses when it came to torture. They knew just what to give and just what to take, and their moods could change like the sky in December. They knew how to keep us on edge—and, if we ever were disobedient, the things they could do that would hurt us the most.

…

In Moscow, I met two girls from Syria. Refugees of civil war there. Tell me, who’s worse? Someone who sells young girl or someone who buys one?

…

We did not perform for webcams when we were in Moscow. Inga said there was some discussion among the men about what they called the “risks and rewards,” because Daddy thought it was worth exploring. On the one hand, they thought it might be a way to make more money during the day, when most of the time we were killing time in our hotel rooms, smoking and watching TV. She said it was like McDonald’s. They started opening for breakfast years and years ago. They already had the griddles, so it was crazy not to use them to cook eggs instead of hamburgers. Inga said Daddy talked about the time difference between Moscow and Los Angeles. When it is eleven a.m. in Moscow, which is downtime for girls like us, it is eleven p.m. in Los Angeles, which is perfect time for men to sit before their computers with their pants off.

But there were problems.

First of all, it would allow us girls more access to computers. Second, it would allow us to meet customers our bosses didn’t know. Third, it would mean an online money trail. The computers could be traced.

So, Daddy and the men who ran us thought we might find a way to cry out for help. And then it might be possible for the police guys to find us.

Make no mistake: We were not escorts. We were not prostitutes. We were just slaves.

…

But still they would use this word around us: freedom.

They would dangle it before us like rattle before baby. Like piece of yarn before kitten.

It had been so long, I couldn’t imagine. And none of us had been taught to be grown-ups, so freedom was like strange fantasy. We didn’t pay bills or have checking accounts. We didn’t have credit cards. We didn’t know how to do anything but f*ck and please people: the people who paid for us and the people who (and Inga and Catherine hated this word, and told us we would feel better about ourselves if we didn’t use it) pimped us.

If we ever were actually free, what were we supposed to do? Suddenly wake up and be bank tellers? Nurses?

They said if I gave them two or three years in New York City without any problems—no attempts to escape, all my men happy—I would be allowed to keep a few of my regulars and the apartment they would find for me, assuming I could pay the rent. I would be what they called an entrepreneur, my own boss. It was my body, they said, and we would reach a point where I could do with it whatever I wanted. I would be twenty-one or twenty-two years old and I would be on my own.