Burak and his buddy Hakon helped me off our plane and into a white van. It was very icky and hot outside, and the van wasn’t any better. We rode for quite a while. Nobody said a word until I asked where we were. Burak chimed in. ” We are in the city of Istanbul which borders the Mediterranean Sea.”
That did not help me very much. Since I had never heard of either of these places. I must admit that my grasp of geography was very limited. As a matter of fact, I could not read or write and I expect that I was quite ignorant when compared to other children my age. This was the case mainly because the last time that I was taught anything wasn’t since I was first kidnapped.
I couldn’t see very much because there were only windows in the front of the van. The driver informed us that we had arrived. Thank goodness, because my bladder had reached a bursting point. If the trip had lasted much longer I would have peed myself.
When the van came to a full stop, I spoke up and told Burak that I had to pee really bad, and he said, “Hush child, you will be able to go in a few minutes.”
He then took my hand and helped me out of the van and led me down a winding alley to this rather shabby looking entrance. The inside was dark and dingy. Burak immediately told a large, mean looking lady standing behind a counter what my name was. I later found out that she was the boss and her name was Dinara. After Burak dropped me off, he simply left without saying a word. I never saw him or his friend Hakon again.
There were four other new girls in the room when I arrived. The mean boss lady informed us that Demir and Kemal would take care of us in the daytime and Baris and Emre would keep an eye on us at night. Dinara instructed Demir to make each one of us to take all of our clothes including our underwear. Once she finished looking us over, we were told to put our clothes back on minus the underwear. Dinara joked that there would be no need for underwear here. I didn’t like the sound of that.
She informed us that if we wanted to get along, all we had to do was follow her instructions no matter what. She finished by saying that she was giving the five of us the rest of the day off so that we could rest up. I had a feeling that it would be the last day off we would get for quite some time. She then pointed to a dark stairway and said, “Your new home is down those stairs. There are extra bunk beds down there. You will each have a small trunk to keep your personal items in. You will get two meals a day as long as you do what you’re told.”
There were ten more girls down in the cellar. Some were my age, and the rest were somewhat older. None of them said a word when we got down there. As if on cue, one of the girls pointed to a door at the end of the alley, so I immediately ran down to it. There was no lock on the door, so I just held it closed and peed like crazy. When I was done, I went back to one of the free beds that I had left my doll on. Since she was my only possession, I put her in my personal trunk for safe keeping.
I was very tired from my plane ride, so I laid down on my bed and fell fast asleep. I woke up to a gentle prodding. When I opened my eyes, a small thin girl about my age stood over me. She said in a hushed voice, “Supper is ready. You need to get up before it is all gone. It is first come, first served. There won’t be anything to eat until breakfast time which is at 8:00 in the morning. You will need all your energy because you will start working tomorrow. “
I thought the food my adopted parents made for me was nasty. The food here was even worse. I knew that in order to keep up my strength I had to eat. As long as I remained strong and survived, there was still hope that my real mom and dad would come and get me. Even after all this time I did not believe that they let me go, and that they were still looking for me. Of course, I was totally oblivious of the true state of my family. My poor father would soon die of cancer and just a few years later my mother would die from an accidental drug overdose. So there was nobody currently looking for me. If I had known this, I probably would have given up fighting to survive.
After I finished eating my supper, I went back to my bed and went to sleep. I woke up in the morning to the smell of breakfast cooking. The other girls were also stirring. The food was soon ready, so we all trekked to the dining area.
After we finished eating, our wards made all of us take our clothes off and put on thin sheer little outfits intead. Once we changed, we were led upstairs to a large room with couches and big soft chairs. We were told to sit down and wait.
We did not have to wait very long before men of all ages came in and started looking us over. When a man found one of us he liked, he simply walked up to her and took her hand. She then got up and followed him into a room down another long hallway. After a little while, an older man walked up to me and took my hand. So began my life in hell. As he took me down the hallway, I started to cry. I couldn’t help myself.
The Old Man didn’t seem to mind my crying. Once we entered our room, he told me to take my clothes off, and I did so very slowly. After I was naked, he looked at me for a while. He seemed to like what he saw because he proceeded to take his clothes off as well. Once he was naked, he put them on a nightstand in the corner of the room. I couldn’t stop looking at him because I had never seen a naked man before. When my mean daddy visited me at night, it was always in the dark. He seemed to understand that I didn’t know what to do, so thankfully, he was gentle with me. He made me lay on my back on the bed and then he got on top of me. Then he slowly stuck his thing into me. He wasn’t as big as my mean daddy, so it didn’t hurt as much. After he was done, he got dressed and left.
Because I was new and didn’t know what to do, Demir came into the room and told me to get dressed and to go back out and sit in the big room and wait for the next man. On my first day, six men chose and brought me into that room. After a while, I stopped crying and it no longer hurt down in my privates, it just felt numb. Finally, our day was done and we were brought downstairs to eat and then go to sleep.
The next day one of the men put his thing in my mouth. He got mad because I didn’t know what to do. He started yelling very loudly, so Dinara came into my room. He told her that I did not know what to do with his thing. She told him, “What do you expect? She’s only six years old. You want a little girl, you are going to get someone who is inexperienced so deal with it.”
Later that night Dinara had one of the older girls. Define show me how to use my mouth. I thought it was yucky, but it wasn’t as bad as when they put their thing in my butt. After Define helped me, she kind of took me under her wing. She gave me pointers in how to handle difficult men. We had to be careful, of course, because Dinara did not want us to talk to each other. I don’t know how she found out when we talked but she did.
So life went on one day after another. Once in a while, a men would hit me. When Dinara found out she had one of her helpers, Demir or Kemai smack the man around some. She told all the men that came in to be with us that she did not tolerate her girls being beaten that is, unless they paid extra for the privilege.
We never got to see the sky or breathe fresh air. This bothered some of the girls, but it didn’t bother me much because I was used to it. I was happy just to have a real bathroom to poop and pee in. One good thing about Dinara she liked her girls to be clean, so she made us take a shower every day, so I at least was clean when I went to bed.
The other new girls thought we were living in hell, I guess they had never met my adopted parents. It is amazing what you can get used to because I didn’t think our lives were that bad. At least we were fed, kept clean, and not beaten too much. Once your body got used to men sticking their thing in you it became tolerable. The worst part was that many of the men didn’t bathe, and a lot of them were fat and ugly to look at.
After a while the days just became a blur. I had no way of knowing how much time had gone by. We all lost track of the days, months, and even years. There just never seemed to be an end of men who wanted to put their thing in us girls. I grew up very quickly and playing with a doll just seemed so childish, so I never played with Amy anymore. As a matter of fact, I never did take her out of my trunk. She just laid there collecting dust. For all intents and purposes, my childhood ended the day I stepped off the plane in Istanbul.