One of the groups met in the appropriately large apartment of a top academician, invited there by his daughter. The participants of these meetings were all as one constituted of doughy flesh, and it was for Butonov to teach them that sensitivity to the physical body with which he himself was so endowed. They were scholars, physicists, chemists, mathematicians, and for all of them Butonov felt a quite inexplicable slight contempt. Among them was a tall, somewhat plump girl called Olga, a mathematician with heavy legs and a rather coarse face, which changed in the course of the exercises from its natural delicate pink to an alarming red.
Two months after they met, to the disapproving amazement of friends on both sides, Valerii and Olga got married. The mistress of the apartment, upon learning of the proposed alliance, clicked her tongue and wondered, “What on earth is poor Olga going to do with that magnificent beast?”
But Olga didn’t do anything with him in particular. She was a cold, cerebral person, which may perhaps have been related to her profession: by now she had already defended her doctoral dissertation on topology, an abstruse area of mathematics, and the meticulous mental jewelry making that went on in her large head beneath its covering of long, badly washed hair was the main thing that gave meaning to her life.
Butonov was not particularly awed by the twisted symbols which ran, like birds’ footprints in the snow, over the papers on his wife’s table. He just muttered skeptically to himself when he looked at the little signs, infrequently accompanied by human words on the left hand side of the sheet: “from this it follows, as is evident from the above …” ; “let us consider the definition …”
Olga had an accommodating, slightly sluggish personality. Valerii was amazed by how little she moved about and how generally lethargic she was: too lazy even to do the few yoga exercises which would relieve her constipation.
Valentina Fyodorovna took an immediate dislike to her son’s fiancée, in the first place because she was four years older than Valerii, and in the second place for her lack of thrift. But Olga just smiled unconcernedly and, to Valentina Fyodorovna’s considerable annoyance, failed even to notice her dislike.
Their connubial bliss was exceedingly moderate. Butonov, who from childhood had sought out muscular pleasures, had somehow neglected a small group of muscles controlling quite special delights. Achievements in this area of endeavor didn’t win awards or get you onto teams, and his instincts were faced down by youthful vanity.
There was one more factor contributing to his surprising reserve toward women, and that was that they had been falling in love with him from the moment he wore his first trousers. Their wearisome infatuation pursued him like a rain cloud, and as he got older, he began to feel this relentless interest in him as an intrusion on his body and tried desperately to safeguard his most prized asset, whose value was only emphasized the more by the amazing availability of women’s hungry bodies and the endless propositions he was bombarded with.
His first sexual experiments were neither particularly successful nor particularly significant: a thirty-year-old neighbor; the dinner lady in the Central Sports Club canteen; a swimmer in his class whose face appeared to have been washed off by her sport; and all of them really keen, gasping for it, eager to continue the relationship. For Butonov himself these encounters ranked little higher than an agreeable wet dream climaxing on the boundary of sleep before the image of his temptress was finally dissipated by the banging of doors in the corridor and the sound of the toilet flushing on the other side of the wall.
All was tranquil and well ordered in the Butonovs’ life. They got married three months after Olga defended her doctoral dissertation, and three months after that she became pregnant; and three months before her thirtieth birthday she gave birth to a daughter. While she was carrying, giving birth to, and feeding with her large but nutritionally disappointing breasts the very small baby girl produced by two such large parents, Butonov completed his sports medicine course and sold himself to the tennis players.
His job was to keep an eye on the health of the healthiest people on the planet, treating their injuries and massaging their muscles. In his free time he did exactly the same thing, but on a private basis. He earned good money; he was independent. His patients were referred to him by his teacher, and all doors opened for him, from the restaurant of the All-Russian Theater Society to the Communist Party Central Committee’s ticket office.
A year later, international tennis did finally take him abroad, first to Prague—he finally made it to Prague—and later also to London. What more could anyone aspire to?
To Butonov’s credit it needs to be said that he received his high fees for work well done. He maintained the bodies of the tennis players, ballerinas, and actors entrusted to him in a state of irreproachable fitness, but additionally busied himself with heavy posttraumatic rehabilitation. His vanity had finally found a worthy foundation. It was said that he could work miracles. The legend of his hands grew, but he had no illusions as to what legends were worth and worked now as he had as a gymnast to the fullest extent of his abilities, and these gradually extended further and further.
The achievement he was proudest of was Ivan Muzzetoni, on whom he had been working from the moment Ivanov showed him the first techniques and approaches to the spine. Butonov brought Ivanov to see Muzzetoni more than once. On one occasion Ivanov sent an illustrious Chinaman to singe Ivan’s back with aromatic herbal candles.
The main labor, however, was Butonov’s. For six years in a row, twice a week, almost without fail, he wove his spells over the paralyzed back, and Ivan rose up and could walk around the apartment supporting himself on a special walking frame, and slowly, very slowly, was restored to life.
Anton Ivanovich, his face now even more wrinkled, worshiped Butonov. His granddaughter Nina, who had fallen in love with Butonov at the age of twelve, evaluated men on the basis of only one criterion: the extent to which this or that admirer resembled Butonov. Bad-tempered Lyalya Muzzetoni, who had been planning for ten years to divorce Ivan, was transformed after his accident into a quite different person: admirably controlled and optimistic. She knitted sweaters to order, taking over as the breadwinner and never complaining. She usually presented Butonov with a woolly masterpiece on his birthday.
In the middle of October, Butonov came to see Ivan, looking fed up and generally out of sorts. He worked on Ivan for an hour and a half and was about to leave without his usual cup of tea or coffee. Lyalya waylaid him, brought in the tea, and got him talking.
Butonov grumbled that he was off the next day on an idiotic trip to Kishinev, a town which was of no use to anyone, accompanying a group of athletes making guest appearances.
Lyalya suddenly livened up and said enthusiastically: “Oh, but you must go! It’s absolutely marvelous there at this time of the year, and so that you don’t get bored, I’ll give you an errand. You can take a present to my friend.” She dug about in a cupboard and pulled out a white mohair sweater.
“They live on the outskirts, Chovdar Sysoev’s famous equestrian troupe. Haven’t you heard of them? He’s a scary old Gypsy, and Rosa is his rider.” Lyalya pushed the sweater into a plastic bag and wrote the address.
Butonov took the parcel without a great deal of enthusiasm.
His first half-day in Kishinev was free and, having slept the night in a hotel, he went out into the street early in the morning and headed off into the unfamiliar city as instructed, in the direction of the bazaar. The city had little to recommend it, lacking any hint of architectural interest, at least in the part which revealed itself to Valerii through the morning mist as it dissolved before his eyes. The air was balmy, though, southern, with the smell of sweet fruits rotting on the ground. The smell must have been coming from far away, because there were no trees at all in the streets of the new town. Only crimson asters, which had completely faded and had no scent whatsoever, were growing out of rectangular lawns bordered by concrete slabs. It was warm and the place had a touristy feel to it.
Valerii came to the bazaar. Horse carts and oxcarts and their attendant horses and oxen completely clogged the small square; dumpy men with warm fur hats and drooping mustaches were dragging baskets and crates, while women arranged mountains of tomatoes, grapes, and pears on their counters.
“I should take some home,” Valerii thought fleetingly before spotting right in front of him the battered back of a bus with the number he needed. The bus was empty. Valerii got in, and a few minutes later the driver climbed into the cabin and, without saying a word, drove off.
The road ran for a long time through the suburbs, which became increasingly more attractive, past modest little houses and small vineyards. There were frequent stops. In one stretch of the journey children piled in, then they all got off simultaneously when they reached the school. Finally, almost an hour later, they reached the end of the bus route, a strange, transitional place, neither town nor country.
Valerii did not yet know what an important day in his life had begun that morning, but for some reason he remembered every detail very clearly. Two small factories stood on either side of the road blowing smoke in each other’s faces, in total defiance of the laws of physics which dictated that the wind should carry their grey smoke in the same direction.
The observant Butonov shrugged. Greenhouses were ranged along the road, and that seemed odd too: what on earth did they need greenhouses for, when it was seventy degrees in late October and everything was ripening splendidly without them?
Farther along the road were some industrial buildings and stables. Butonov headed toward them. Still at a distance, he saw the gates of the stables open, the gap filled with a velvety blackness and out of it, its white teeth gleaming, came a tall black stallion which, because of its unexpectedness, seemed to Butonov to be enormous, like the steed of the Bronze Horseman statue in St. Petersburg. But far from there being a bronze horseman, the stallion was being led by the reins by a small curly-haired boy who, on closer inspection, turned out to be a young woman in a red shirt and dirty white jeans.
Butonov looked first at her boots, which were light, with a thick toe cap and a rough heel, very suitable boots for horse-riding; and then his eyes met hers. Her eyes were mirror-black and crudely extended with black makeup; her gaze was alert and unfriendly. They all stopped. The stallion neighed and she patted its withers with a surprisingly white hand with short red nails.
“Looking for Chovdar?” she asked rather rudely. “Over there.” She pointed in the direction of the nearest shed before putting her foot in a very high stirrup and vaulting up into the saddle, giving Valerii a dose of a sweet, alluring, and wholly unperfumelike smell.
“No, I’m looking for Rosa.” Butonov had already worked out that this was Rosa.
“I have a parcel from Lyalya Muzzetoni.” He pulled the plastic bag out of his carryall and held it up.
Without getting down from her horse, she took the bag and threw it with a sweeping gesture through the open stable door, gave a flash of her teeth suggestive of a snarl rather than a smile, and asked hurriedly, “Where are you staying?”
“The October Hotel.”
“Right, okay. I’m busy at the moment.” She waved her hand and with a cry galloped off.
He looked after her with a feeling of irritation, admiration, and something else he would have to analyze for a long time yet. One way or another this was the last day in his life when he still had absolutely no interest in women.
That night Valerii lay for a long time in the hotel bed with its smell of detergent, remembering the insolent Gypsy girl, her magnificent stallion, and the small yellow horses of some rare breed which he had observed in the paddock behind the stable while waiting for the bus back to town. “Obnoxious little person,” Valerii decided, drifting off into a dream of horses, the smells of the stable, and the lazy pleasure of a warm day doing nothing. A long, quiet tapping at the door brought him back up out of that state. He raised himself slightly from the pillow.
He had evidently forgotten to lock the door. It opened slowly and a woman entered the room. Valerii said nothing, peering. He thought at first it was the maid.
“Ah, so you were expecting me,” the woman said in a slightly hoarse voice, and then he recognized her: it was this morning’s horse-rider.
“I decided that if you asked who was there I’d turn and go away,” she said without a smile, and sat down on the bed.
She took off the same boots he had approved of that morning. First she stepped on the back of the left one and took it off, then pulled the right one off with her hands and with a certain amount of effort threw it over into the corner.
“Well, what are you gawking at?”
She stood up beside the bed and he saw how small she was. He also just had time to reflect that he didn’t like such sharp little women in the slightest.
She pulled off the white sweater she had so recently been presented with, undid the button on her dirty white jeans, and, without taking them off, dived under the blanket, put her arms around him, and said in a tired, serious voice, “I’ve had the hots all day. I wanted you so much.”
Butonov breathed out all the breath in his lungs and forgot for the rest of time what kind of women it was he usually liked.
Everything he discovered about her, he learned later. She was not a Gypsy at all, but a Jewess from the family of a professor in St. Petersburg. She had run off with Sysoev seven years ago. Her parents were bringing up the daughter from her first marriage and didn’t trust her. But the most important and surprising thing was that by morning he had discovered that in his not quite twenty-nine years there was a whole continent he hadn’t discovered, and it was wholly incomprehensible how this slight girl, so hot outside and inside, had managed to immerse him in herself so completely that he seemed to himself to be a pink sweet dissolving in a thick sweet liquid while all his skin groaned and melted with tenderness and joy, and every touch, every slipping and sliding of skin pierced him through to the heart, and all that was surface seemed to end up inside, in the very deepest part of him. He felt himself turned inside out and accepted that if she had not plugged his ears with her slender little fingers, his soul would undoubtedly have flown out and away.
At six o’clock in the morning the weird little watch she had not taken off all night tweeted feebly. She was sitting on the windowsill with her legs wrapped around his loins. He was standing in front of her and could see a mound bulging beneath her belly button, indicating his presence.
“That’s it,” she said, and stroked the bulge through the thin membrane of her stomach.
“Don’t go,” he begged.
“I’ve gone already,” she laughed, and he noticed the vampire-like way her little upper fangs protruded.
He ran his fingers over her teeth.
“No,” she laughed, “I’m not a vampire. I’m a common little whore. Do you like it?”
“Very much,” he replied honestly, and she jumped off, leaving his arrow unloosed.
She went into the shower. Her legs were slightly bowed and not joined very attractively to her body, but this only fanned the flames of his desire for her. He picked out of the devastated bed the broken golden chains which had slipped from her neck during the night.
The water was beating down in the shower. He fingered the chains and looked out of the window. There was the same shining mist as yesterday, and you could tell the sun was hiding beyond its disappearing radiance.
She came into the room covered in large drops of water. He held out the chains to her. She took them, let them fall to their full length, and tossed them onto the table. “You can give them back when you’ve had them mended. Is today Wednesday?”
She shook the last of the water from her little breasts and pulled the jeans onto her slender wet body with difficulty. There were still large drops of water in her springy black hairstyle which nobody was yet calling “Afro” and which belonged solely to her. A few small scars, already arousing and loved, which you didn’t need to to
uch to feel their hardness, marked her body beneath her breasts, to the left of her belly, and on her right forearm. She did not seem feminine in the least, but by comparison, all the women he had known before now seemed like semolina pudding or boiled cabbage.
“Do you know what, Valerii? We’ll meet in exactly one week’s time at the Central Post Office in St. Petersburg. Between eleven and twelve.”
“How about today?” Butonov asked.
“No, impossible. Sysoev will kill you. Or maybe me.” She laughed. “I’m not sure exactly who, but definitely someone.”
They met up three times more in the course of a year, and then she disappeared. Not just from Valerii, but altogether. Neither her parents nor Sysoev knew who she had gone off with or where to.
From then on, Butonov never refused a woman. He knew that miracles don’t happen, but if you kept on the edge of the possible, at the limit of your concentration, then here too, in the physical depths themselves, lightning strikes and everything is lit up, and that same feeling flares within you of a knife hurled at a target, which shudders and dies right there in its heart.
CHAPTER 8
Getting back home from the coves after nine at night, the grown-ups put the sleeping small children to bed before settling down in Medea’s kitchen for a cup of tea. Although they were all tired, they did not want to part: something was in the air, a vague sense of “to be continued.” Even Nora, the conscientious mother, agreed to put her daughter to bed in a strange place in order to sit here and enjoy the tea.
The only person not in the kitchen was Masha. When they were halfway back, she had a disgusting sensation like an itching in her blood, and knew one of her rare and inexplicable attacks was coming on. Her husband Alik, a doctor who thought through every illness as if it were a puzzle in its own right, believed Masha must have a rare form of arterial allergy. She had suffered one of these attacks right in front of him one time when they had gone to celebrate the New Year holiday in the country. Masha had touched the cold nozzle of the water dispenser, and it left a mark on her arm like a burn. Within two hours her temperature went up, and by evening she was completely covered in an allergic rash.
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