The Guest Room by Chris Bohjalian

Author:Chris Bohjalian
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-01-04T16:00:00+00:00

Alexandra

How I changed. How much I changed. I could see I was the same girl in the mirror, even if now I looked like courtesan instead of regular girl going to dance class. But inside I was different. So different. It wasn’t just that I knew things about people. I knew things about me.

…

I said I was a better dancer than my friend Nayiri back in Yerevan, which probably makes you think I am a very ambitious person. Maybe once. And maybe Nayiri and I were competitive. But we were also friends. I would say we were as close as sisters, but I was an only child so I don’t know. Once I read an Armenian translation of Little Women, and those girls were very different from Nayiri and her two sisters. Nayiri and her sisters seemed to fight like wolves day after day. Nayiri was always angry with one or the other. They stole each other’s clothes and bangles, they argued over chores. So, I have no idea what having a sister is really like. But Nayiri and me? We never fought. We had played together as little girls, and then we danced together as we grew up. I would watch her in the studio mirror and she would watch me, so there was a little tension. She perfected her adagios before I did, but I got my toe shoes first. I could pirouette the length of the stage before she could, but she mastered her tours en l’air like boy: full rotations. Maybe she has mastered two rotations by now. It’s possible. It’s been a long time.

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.

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