Beauty and the Dark

by Georgia Le Carre

  Some months ago, late one night, I had become so unbearably lonely and unhappy that I had actually craved the forgiving curves of a woman—any woman. So I went on the dark net, a place where all depravity is catered for and anything one could possibly wish for is in ready supply. I found myself a procurement agency… And signed up. In that brief moment I became everything I had detested in other men.

  The intolerable loneliness of that fateful night no longer possessed me, but ever since then a red envelope had arrived once every two weeks. I’ll admit, I did open the envelopes and look at the photos of those poor girls, modern day sex slaves. But even though each one was exquisitely beautiful, not once had I been even slightly tempted. I skimmed their fresh faces and nubile bodies without interest, sometimes with regret at my lapse in judgment, and other times marveling at the extent of my need. Never in my life had I paid for a woman and certainly not for an unwilling one.

  I didn’t even know why I still looked. Curiosity? Compulsion? But each time I stuffed those photos back into the envelope and threw them away, I became the unforgivable beast who condemned them to a fate worse than death.

  With a sigh I tore the envelope open and slid the photographs out. My eyes widened. What the fuck! I began to shake uncontrollably. The photographs fell from my nerveless hands and landed on my desk with a soft hiss.

  This girl had cast her eyes out and looked back at me.

  In a daze I picked up the photo and stared at her…ravenously. At her enormous translucent gray eyes, the small, perfectly formed nose, the flawlessly pale skin, the long lustrous blonde hair that spilled out and lay in curves around her full lips and slender neck.

  There was something clean and ‘new’ about her, as if she had just come out of tissue paper. I reached for the other photo. Wearing a black bikini and red high heels, her arms at her sides, she stood in a bare room, the same one all the other girls had stood in. Leggy. Shining. Unlucky.

  I turned the photo over.

  Lena Seagull.

  The bitter irony of it did not escape me. The hawk’s prey is the seagull, after all. Her age and vital statistics were displayed in English, French, Arabic and Chinese. I let my eyes skim over them, although they were no longer of any importance. To my shock and horror I couldn’t walk away from this one. No. Not this one.

  Age: 18

  Status: Certified Virgin

  Height: 5’9”

  Dress Size: 6-8-10

  Bust: 34”

  Waist: 24”

  Hips: 35.5”

  Shoe Size: 7

  Hair: Blonde

  Eyes: Dove Gray

  Languages: Russian and English

  My hand shook as my fingers traced the unsmiling outline of her beautiful face. How strange, but I yearned for the smell of her skin, the taste of those plump lips. I had never known such irresistible desire before. I wanted her so bad it hurt. At that moment of longing I felt it, as if the photo was alive; I had an impression of a quiet, but terrible grief.

  I snatched my hand away, as if burnt, and frowned at the photo. I must not fall under her spell. And yet, wasn’t it already too late? The connection was instantaneous, beyond my control. I felt desperate to acquire her, brand her with my body. And make her mine. I turned to my computer screen and tapped in the secret code. The encrypted message was only one word long.

  YES.

  Almost instantly my phone rang. I snatched it and pressed the receiver to my ear.

  ‘The auction will be held at two p.m. Friday,’ a man’s voice said in an Eastern European accent. ‘And,’ he continued, ‘I must warn you. She will not be cheap. I believe there are already two Arab princes who are also interested. What’s your limit?’

  ‘None,’ I said instantly. In my mind she was already mine.

  A pause. Then, ‘Very good.’

  I terminated the call. There, it was done. I had sealed both our fates. My eyes seeking hers fell upon my own disfigured hand. Claw-like and ugly. And I heard again, as if it had happened yesterday, the sickeningly angry screech of metal against metal, the explosion that had strangely brought with it a blissful silence, and then the bitter smell of my own flesh burning, burning, burning: watching my skin bubble, crackle, glow and smoke. I had sizzled and cooked like a piece of steak on a fucking barbecue. I thought of the shimmering waves that rose from my flesh and shuddered.

  My good hand moved upwards and stroked the raised scars on my face. The truth yawned like a black mouth: she would never come to love me. I was no longer fit for love. A beauty such as she was stardust. I was destined only for the part of the lovestruck fool clutching vainly for the hem of her skirt as she blazed past. My hand jerked with the sudden pain blooming in my chest. It ate like acid. It was so horrendous that tears filled my eyes and a howl escaped from my mouth. The sound vibrated and echoed around the cavernous room like the cry of a wounded beast.

  The sound shocked and disgusted me. I had never been weak. And I was not about to start now. I hardened my heart.

  And so fucking what if she would never come to know my heart? I would have her, anyway. And think no more of it. She would be my pet. A human pet. To do with as I pleased. I laughed out loud. The sound rang out in the stillness. Unlike the sound of my anguish, which had throbbed with vital life, my laughter was empty and soulless. It disappeared into that deathly quiet castle and went to lie softly on my two secrets as they lay unconscious to the world.

  Chapter 1

  Lena Seagull

  My name is not really Lena Seagull. Seagull is the nickname my father was given by those who knew him. While you were alive he would steal everything from you, and when you were dead he would steal even your eyeballs.

  My first vivid memory is one of violence.

  I was not yet five years old and I had disobeyed my father. I had refused to do something he wanted me to. I cannot remember what it was anymore, but it was something small and insignificant. Definitely unimportant. He did not get angry, he just nodded thoughtfully. He turned toward my mother. ‘Catherine,’ he said calmly. ‘Put a pot of water on to boil.’

  I remember my mother’s white face and her frightened eyes clearly. She knew my father, you see. She hung a pot of water on the open fire of the stove.

  He sat and smoked his pipe quietly. Behind me my sisters and brother huddled. There were seven of us then. I was the youngest. Two more would come after me.

  ‘Has the water boiled yet?’ my father asked every so often.

  ‘No,’ she said, her voice trembling with fear, and he nodded and carried on puffing on his pipe.

  Eventually, she said, ‘Yes. The water is ready.’

  Two of my sisters began to sob quietly. My father carefully put his pipe down on the table and stood.

  ‘Come here,’ he called to my mother. There was no anger. Perhaps he even sighed.

  But by now my mother’s fear had communicated itself to me and I had begun to fidget, fret and hop from foot to foot in abject terror. I sobbed and cried out, ‘I’m sorry. I’m very sorry. I will never again do such a thing.’

  My father ignored me.

  ‘Please, please, Papa,’ I begged.

  ‘Put the child on the chair,’ he instructed.

  My mother, with tears streaming down her cheeks, put me on the chair. Even then I think she already knew exactly what was about to happen because she smiled at me sadly, but with such love that I remember it to this day.

  I stood up and clung desperately to my mother’s legs. My father ordered my older sisters to hold me down. They obeyed him immediately.

  Reluctantly, my mother dragged her feet back to my father.

  With the dizzying speed of a striking snake he grabbed her hand and plunged it into the boiling water. My mother’s eyes bulged and she opened her mouth to scream, but the only sound that came out was the choke that someone makes when they are trying to vomit. While she writhed and twisted like a cut snake in his grip, my father turned his beautiful eyes toward me. My father was an extre
mely handsome man—laughing gray eyes and blond hair.

  The shock of witnessing my father’s savagery toward my beloved mother was so total and so all encompassing that it silenced my screams and weighted me to my chair. I froze. For what seemed like eternity I could not move a single muscle. I could only sit, and stare, and breathe in and out, while the world inside my head spun violently out of control. And then I began to shriek. A single piercing wail of horror. My father pulled my mother’s hand out of the pot and rushing her outside, plunged her blistering, steaming hand into the snow.

  I ran out and stood watching them, icy wind caught in my throat. My father was gently stroking my mother’s hair. Her face was ghostly white and her teeth were chattering uncontrollably. Then she turned to look at me and snapped them shut like a trap. I was never the same after that day.

  I obeyed my father in all things.

  *****

  Once there were eleven of us in my family—my father, my mother, my seven sisters, my beloved twin brother Nikolai and me. We lived in a small log cabin at the edge of a forest in Russia. We had no electricity, no TV, no phones; water had to be fetched from a well; the local village store was miles away; and we had to use the outhouse even during the freezing winter months.

  I didn’t know it while I was growing up but we were a strange family. We never went on holidays and we kept ourselves to ourselves. We hardly saw the other village folk. And when we did see them we were forbidden to talk to them. If ever they spoke to us we had to nod politely and move quickly away.

  Growing up we had no friends. No one ever came around. I do not remember a single instance when even a doctor was called to the house. My mother said that she gave birth to all her children without even the assistance of a midwife. On one occasion when my father was not around she even had to cut the umbilical cord herself.

  I have a very clear memory of when she went into labor with my youngest sister. How she was in agony for hours and how my oldest sister, Anastasia, dared to beg my father to call the doctor, and how he refused with cold anger. Only Anastasia and Sofia, my second oldest sister, were allowed in the room with Mama so the rest of us had to wait outside in abject fear.

  Many horrifying hours later my father came out triumphantly holding a baby wrapped in a blanket. He showed us the baby, red from head to toe. When we were allowed to go into the room to see my mother, I was shocked by the heavy stench of blood and stale sweat. My eyes were drawn to a bundle of blood-soaked sheets pushed hurriedly into the corner of the bedroom. My mother lay on the bed ashen with pain. She was so exhausted she could barely smile at us. Her legs had been tied together roughly with rope.

  ‘Why are your legs bound, Mama?’ I asked in a frightened whisper.

  ‘The baby came out feet first,’ she murmured. Her voice was so faint I had to lean close to her lips to hear it.

  Mother had had a breech birth and she was so torn and damaged internally that my father had tied her legs together to stop her moving and encourage her body to heal faster. Even as a small child I understood that he never called a doctor even though she could have died. It was agonizing to watch her in the following days, but two weeks later the ropes came off and she hobbled back to the endless chores that consumed her life.

  Other than those two scary weeks I can’t remember any other time I saw my mother at rest. Ever. She was always flushed and slaving away over the open fire, cooking, baking, scrubbing, washing, ironing, canning fruit and vegetables for the winter, and in spring, summer and autumn tending to our garden.

  My father did not work. He was a hunter. He often disappeared into the ghostly fir tree forest behind our home and came back with elk, faun, rabbits, chinchillas, beavers, wood grouse, geese and snow partridges. The liver and brains were always reserved for him—they were his favorite—some cheap cuts were kept for the family, and the rest of the meat and fur was sold.

  When my father was at home he demanded absolute silence from us. No one cried, no one talked, no one laughed. We were like little silent robots going about our tasks. Come to think of it I never saw my sisters or brother cry. The first time I saw my oldest sister, Anastasia, cry was when I was seven years old.

  My mother was holding my sister’s hands pressed within her own and whispering something to her and she was sobbing quietly.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I whispered.

  But nobody would tell me.

  Chapter 2

  It was midday and I was outside with my brother, sitting on a pile of wood logs watching him clean my father’s boots when I heard a car pull up outside our house. For a moment neither of us moved. A car was an unheard of thing. Then I skidded off the logs in record time and we ran out front to look. Standing at the side of the house we saw the black Volga. I was instantly afraid. In my mother’s stories black Volgas were always driven by bad men. Why was there a black Volga outside our house?

  I thought of my sister crying in the kitchen.

  Then like a miracle the clouds parted and golden rays of sun hit the metal of the car and gilded it with light. It had the effect of creating a halo. As if the car was a heavenly chariot. The front door of the chariot opened—a man’s shoe emerged, and touched the dusty ground. I had never seen such a shiny shoe in all my life. Made of fine leather it had silver eyeholes and black laces. I can remember that shoe now. The shape of it, the stitching that held it together.

  Another shoe appeared and a man I had never seen before unfolded himself out of the shining car. A short, hefty man with dark hair. He was wearing a black shirt, blue jeans and a leather coat. A thick gold chain hung around his neck. As I watched, another man got out of the passenger seat. He was dressed almost identically, down to the thick gold chain. Neither looked like he had descended from heaven. Both had swarthy, closed faces. They did not say anything or call out. They just stood next to the car with an air of expectancy.

  Then our front door opened and my father stood framed in it. He moved aside and Anastasia appeared beside him dressed in her best clothes.

  He turned to her and said, ‘Come along then.’

  She turned to face him. Her lips visibly trembled.

  ‘Neither fur, nor feather,’ my father said. It was the Russian way of saying good luck.

  ‘Go to the devil,’ my sister whispered tearfully. That was the acceptable Russian way of securing good luck.

  ‘Anastasia,’ I called, and my father turned his head and glared at me.

  I froze where I stood, no further sounds passing my lips. Anastasia did not look at me; her lips were pressed firmly together. I knew that look. She was trying not to cry. She picked up a small bag—I found out later my mother had packed it for her while we were all asleep—and walked with my father toward the men. One of the men opened the back door and in the blink of an eye my sister slipped through. I remembered thinking how small and defenseless she looked once inside the car.

  My father and the men exchanged a few words. Then an envelope exchanged hands. The men climbed into their shiny car and drove off with my sister in it. I felt confused and frightened. My brother slipped his hand into mine. His hand was rough with mud from cleaning my father’s boots. My father, my brother and I stood and watched the car as it drove on the empty dirt road in a cloud of dust. While my father was still outside I ran into the kitchen through the back door where my mother was peeling potatoes.

  ‘Where are they taking Anastasia, Mama?’ I cried.

  My mother put the knife and the potato down on the table and gestured for me to come nearer. Her eyes were bright with unshed tears and her cheeks were white, waxy and transparent. Bewildered and anxious I went to her. Immediately, she grabbed me and hugged me so tightly her thin bones jagged into my flesh, and the breath was squeezed out of me. Her hands were freezing cold and the top of my shoulder where her chin was pressed in was becoming wet with her tears.

  Abruptly, as if she had just remembered herself, she sniffed and put me away from her. ‘Go and play with your dolls,’ she said,
wiping her eyes and cheeks on her sleeves.

  ‘But where have they taken Anastasia?’ I insisted. I could not understand where my sister had gone with the men.

  ‘Your sister has a new life now,’ she said, her voice hollow with despair, and picking up the knife and the half-peeled potato, resumed her task of making dinner.

  ‘But where has she gone?’ I persisted. I would never have dared insist with my father, but I knew I could with Mama.

  My mother squeezed her eyes shut, the pupils twitching under their purple veined lids. ‘I don’t know,’ she sobbed suddenly.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  My mother took a deep breath, her nostrils flaring out. With her eyes tightly shut and gripping the knife and potato so hard that her knuckles showed white she said, ‘Anastasia has been sold. She will never be coming back. Best you go play with your dolls now.’

  Her voice was unusually harsh, but that did not deter me. ‘Sold?’ I frowned. My child brain could not comprehend why my sister had to be sold. ‘Why did we sell her, Mama?’

  The knife clattered to the ground, the potato fell with a dull thud and rolled under the table. My mother began to rock. Violently. Like a person who has lost her mind. Her body tipping so far back on the stool I was afraid she would topple backwards. Harsh racking sobs came from her. No one would have believed that a woman that small and shriveled up could have inside her such a river of pain and anguish. It flowed out of her relentlessly, quickly and with shocking intensity.

  ‘My daughter, my daughter,’ she wailed. ‘Oh, Lena, my Lena.’

  I was so shocked to see the state my mother was in I didn’t know what to do. I was used to seeing her cry, and I had come to accept her suffering as the way things were, but I had never seen her in this way, with her eyes unfocused and ugly sounds tearing out of her gaping mouth.

  Sofia came running into the kitchen. Pushing me out of the way she grabbed my mother’s hysterically swaying body and held it close to her body until the sobs were purged and she became as limp as a rag. Trembling, my mother separated from my sister.