So, I became Alexandra. I accepted a life of carrots and sticks. That is not a bad joke; that was just how it was.
For the first year and a half, I lived in the cottage two hours from Moscow by car, but in what direction I couldn’t tell you. There were five other girls who had been abducted, three from Volgograd (where Vasily had that second brandy factory) and two from the countryside—from the total middle of nowhere. Those two children made me look like know-it-all college professor. One had never owned a cell phone. One thought babies came from prayer because her male cousins and her uncle had been having sex with her for years and she had never gotten pregnant. So, in her head, a baby arrives when you ask God for one and pray very, very hard. Of course, this had been going on since she was eight. It’s hard to get pregnant when you’re eight. She was thirteen and was only now getting her period. She was, after a few days, very much like kid sister to me. At fifteen, I was the second oldest. Only Sonja was older—by one year. I would have my sweet-sixteen birthday party in that house. Inga gave me a silver bracelet, which was very pretty, and a dude from Rublyovka with ugly neck scruff pulled my hair while fucking me from behind.
What the six of us had in common was that we were beautiful and our parents were dead or had disappeared. Inga cared for us, as did another mistress or housemother we were told to call Catherine. They were going to teach each of us how to be—Catherine’s words—twenty-first-century paramour. That meant learning, basically, to do whatever some guy wants and is willing to pay for. But it also meant learning about makeup and hair and clothes and what to eat (and what not to eat). We ate lots of healthy fruits and vegetables, and we smoked lots of cigarettes. They watched our weight, and soon enough cigarettes were our rewards for staying away from the bird’s milk cake or the sugary pastila. We tried on different kinds of sexy underwear and were taught that the panty goes underneath the garter belt, even if that means it’s more difficult to go to the bathroom. We played Xbox games. We played Xbox games on a TV set for hours.
The cottage had a minaret and two man-made ponds that we could see from the windows. We never swam in them; they were for show. They went with the gardens. The bathrooms had faucets and bidet handles made of pretend gold. We each had our own bedroom with windows and velvet drapes. This was so we would feel a little pampered when we were not entertaining and so we would have our own space to bring clients when it was time. We ate together in a dining room with a white marble floor and an Oriental carpet with Noah’s ark animals. (My favorite creatures were the rug’s two giraffes.) We used silver. We all spoke different dialects of Russian, and only Sonja and I spoke Armenian. Only I spoke English. But we figured out how to talk to each other. The girls picked up English pretty quick.
So, that was the carrot: a nice house with nice bedrooms and nice food. Glamorous, yes?
Here was the stick: we couldn’t leave the property, we couldn’t talk to anyone beyond the gates, and we had to fuck whatever guys they brought to the house. And we were isolated. Totally isolated. We had no computers and no phones. There was not even an old-fashioned telephone in the house with one of those dials you spin that we saw all the time in old movies. It’s funny how fast you miss the Internet when it’s gone. We had no passports or credit cards or money. We depended on them for all our food and our clothes and our toothbrushes and our makeup and our medicines when we got sick.
And we were locked in our rooms at night—except when we were working. There were men with Makarov pistols in their belts or in shoulder holsters watching us. They had shifts, and they came and went; we were not allowed to become friends with them. Most of the time they spoke to us only when they were yelling at us to return to the terrace when we took our one hour of sunlight outside. Sometimes they’d threaten to lock us away if Inga or Catherine complained about us. Other times they’d make jokes about us to entertain themselves. They called us “little flaps” and “little twats.” But usually they just watched us in silence.