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 fucked 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.
“Alexandra is rather like Anahit,” she was saying. “That’s why I proposed it.”
I could have told her that Anahit was the name for a beautiful Armenian goddess not some poor woman who was shot with her family by the Bolsheviks. But I was done speaking that day, because every time I opened mouth, all that came out was either a trapped cat hiss or a sad little cry. She tried to rub my neck and my shoulders through my shirt, but I slapped her hands. It was a reflex.
Finally Inga said that she was going to leave me alone. But she gave me a foil disk with little pills on it and said, “Oh, by the way: if you don’t start taking the pill, they will kill your grandmother. It’s really simple. And they’ll know if you aren’t taking the pill, because you’ll get pregnant.” Then she smiled like kind aunt. When she closed the hotel room door behind her, I heard her say something to the guard, but I couldn’t make out the words.
The next day I was a little more communicative. Not much, but a little. And Inga figured out how well I spoke English. She was surprised that no one had told her, and a little miffed. But she was also pleased with the discovery, even though I spoke English better than she did.
Still, it would be a few more days before I would understand something about me that you probably figured out a long time ago: I was a valuable piece of property and they were investing impressive dram in me. I might be just object, but I was fifteen, I spoke English, and I was hot. I had the potential to make them very serious scratch.
Chapter Five