The Guest Room(9)

My mother’s boss was one of those crazy-savvy, post-Soviet players. He went from communist to capitalist like very exotic chameleon. His name was Vasily. Super smooth. He knew all the angles and how to play them. He was a Russian oligarch who came to Armenia from Volgograd and bought a brandy factory on the outskirts of the city for nothing. It might have been a scandal, but it was just one more factory bought by just one more oligarch.

When my mother died, he was there for me. In the long run, of course, this would be earthquake-level bad. Life-changing bad.

But those first days and then first weeks after my mother died? I felt safe. I felt like princess. I felt that in the end—no matter what—everything would be okay.

…

I grew up speaking Armenian and Russian, but I started learning English in school when I was seven. By the time I was fifteen, I was fluent. This increased my value in Vasily’s eyes: I was exotically beautiful, still slender, still slight. With some TV time I’d be able to speak like courtesan after f*cking American bankers when they were in Moscow for business. That was the plan.

My teachers, Inga and Catherine, really used the word courtesan. I think they preferred it to whore.

…

In the years before I was born, my mother told me, Yerevan only had electricity for a few hours a day. Never all day. After the earthquake and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Armenians shut down the nuclear plant on the earthquake fault line. This was a good decision if you didn’t want two Chernobyls in one decade, but it was bad if you are trying to build democracy. Blackouts made people miss the Soviet Union. My parents’ neighbors said they wished that they lived in villages instead of the city, because the villagers at least had cow shit they could burn to stay warm.

Some people said that peasants in the countryside also ate better than we did, but I don’t remember being hungry.

And by the time I was born in 1996, the electricity was back. I could play with my toys all I wanted after dark.

…

Yerevan was a great city, even after the earthquake and the end of the Soviet Union. As little girl, I thought it had to be one of the most beautiful places in the world. The buildings were made of volcanic rock. The opera house was like palace. There were statues and sculptures in our neighborhood wherever we turned.

And it was in Yerevan where I took ballet. Like lots of little girls, I danced all the time. Unlike lots of little girls, I was very good. I was going to be next Victoria Ananyan—next “Velvet Bird.” My dance teacher seemed to think so. I danced every moment when I was not studying or playing, and then I stopped playing and danced even more. I was at the studio six days a week.

Someday, I thought, I was going to lead a glamorous life in Russia and then in America. But first I was going to dance Swan Lake and Gayane at the Spendarian Opera House. First I was going to train with the Moscow State Academy.

But I so loved the idea of going to America. I had met Americans before in Yerevan. By the time I was ten, they were coming all the time. And not just teenagers or young maniacs who believed they were going to rebuild the country. Everyday tourists. I would see them on the Northern Avenue and the Cascades and the Republic Square. They would watch the fountains dance in the square near the government offices for hours. They would have their pictures taken by the opera house or beside the statues of Komitas, Khachaturian, and Saroyan. They were from Los Angeles, which I always associated with the movies. They were from New York City, which would be attacked by terrorists when I was five, but by the time I was ten was simply that city with all the skyscrapers and a harbor with the Statue of Liberty. They were from Massachusetts, which I associated with red socks and only later would learn was the name of their baseball team. But all of these Americans were glamorous. They were like rich Armenians who would visit from Lebanon and Syria and Dubai. Maybe they were even more glamorous.

So, Vasily. A couple years after my abduction, an older girl would tell me that he had probably killed my mother. Or, to be exact, he had had her killed. Vasily wasn’t the type to kill someone himself. He had henchmen. He had bodyguards. They would do the Russian businessman’s dirty work.

I remember correcting this girl. I told her that my mother had died in hospital. I told her how it had not been pretty at the end. Not pretty at all. My grandmother and I were there. My mother died of cancer.

But this girl said that maybe Vasily had poisoned her. Injected cancer into her blood.

This was how naive and how crazy we were that she could believe such thing.

She said I should go to the police to have my mother’s death investigated. But by then I was in Moscow—and I wasn’t dancing. Or, at least, I wasn’t dancing ballet. Occasionally I was dancing naked for (mostly) sweaty men, which usually didn’t even involve a stage and a pole. It involved hotel room ottomans and couches and the laps of the men, and then the bedrooms where I would do whatever they wanted. So who in Moscow was I going to tell? What could people in Moscow do? Answer? No one and nothing. They could and would do nothing. Besides, who would have wanted to help me? Why should someone else get involved? What was the point of rescuing a useless orphan whore?

At the time, that was how I thought.

Anyway, Vasily did not have my mother killed. It was only lung cancer that made it so she couldn’t breathe and was always in agony.

But Vasily certainly swooped in when she died.

And then I was f*cked—and that is an American pun, of course, but it was also my life.