She shook her head. “Of course not. I hate him. I hate all of them. I meant the black and whites.” Her voice was even smaller than usual, because what we were talking about was so dangerous.
“And by help, you mean escape?”
“Yes.”
“No way. It’s too risky for them. Besides, why would any of them want to do that? Anyone who comes here wants us here. We’re nothing but * to them. We’re nothing but * to anyone.”
She took a long puff. “What if I made one fall in love with me?”
“You’re dreaming. These guys? Never happen.”
“But what if? He could take me with him. We could go and get help.”
“How would he take you with him? Put you in his briefcase?”
“Well, maybe I could ask him to tell someone about us. Tell someone we’re here.”
“Yeah, the police guys care lots about girls like us. I’m sure every week one of us is fucking a police guy.”
She nodded because I was right and she knew it. “They’re just so evil,” she said after a moment, and we both went quiet because the truth was so sad. When she finally spoke again her voice was totally flat. Sometimes we all sounded totally flat. Like zombie people. “So there’s no one to help us,” she said.
I stepped on my cigarette and put my arm around her. “At least we have beds and food and cigarettes—and each other. We even have the Bachelor on TV!” I told her, trying to cheer her up with a silly joke. But now she was in one of the moods that we all got in once in a while, and the only way out was to flatline. It’s why some girls like us do drugs. Sometimes it’s the only way through.
…
How different were all of us? Another afternoon a girl named Elena and I were sitting on the terrace under a beautiful warm sky. The sun was always like drug after so many hours indoors.
“This is kind of a weird fairy tale,” she said. We were wearing the miniskirts they made us wear like uniform. They only let us wear underwear when we were working. Other times, such as during the day, they always made us wear short skirts and no panties. We were sitting on the stones, and they were warm on my bottom. It felt perfect. “We’re like those princesses in castles who are waiting to be rescued.”
“Don’t hold your breath for a prince,” I told her. I closed my eyes and turned my face toward the sun. “I don’t think a prince would come to a joint like this.”
“But I like Inga,” she said. “I really do. And I think I like Catherine. I mean, do we really want to be rescued?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe you do. But this is, in some ways, a lot better than the life I was leading.”
I knew Elena’s history. She was the third of the three girls from Volgograd. While she was there, she was living with her stepfather, who worked in the large brandy factory. She had been brought to the cottage two days before me. Her mother was dead, and her father had run off years ago; her stepfather recently had been laid off. Suddenly his boss offers to buy his stepdaughter to help him make ends meet. Only an idiot would think this was a coincidence. They knew what Elena looked like. They knew her value. And, of course, they knew her stepfather. He was despicable. He’d been a very big jerk to her, even before he sold her like cow at the market.
“I can do this,” she went on. “And if we do our jobs, they take really good care of us. And everyone has to work, yes? Everyone has to do something.”
Two years later when I was working in Moscow—more like courtesan now—I spent two nights as arm candy for a very fat but very nice economist from Saint Petersburg. He would use the expression “Stockholm syndrome.” He used it on our second night together, when we were having a little pillow talk. I would often tell men stories. Capture-bonding, he said. I knew just what he meant. I thought of Elena and that day in the sun back at the mansion.
Of course, not all our life would be Stockholm syndrome.
Look what happened when I got older and they brought me to America. Land of the free and the home of the brave? Nope. Not in my case. For girls like me, it was nothing more than the home of the disgusting. Perverts and sad men. There were confusing exceptions, such as guys like Richard Chapman. Guys like that could haunt you. But you get the point. And nothing was free—just like in Russia.
…
Sonja and Crystal had faith in hatred. They were good at it. They believed the world is filled with evil and people are devils, and you can only fight evil and devils with hatred.
Me? I was never good at hatred. I felt it. I knew it. But it did not live inside me the way it did inside them. Maybe things would have turned out better if it did. If I had been better at hatred.
Chapter Six