Butterfly Skin

by Sergey Kuznetsov

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  About the Author

  About the Translator

  Also Available from Titan Books

  Butterfly Skin

  Print edition ISBN: 9781783290246

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781783290253

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: September 2014

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2014 by Sergey Kuznetsov. All rights reserved. Translation copyright © 2014 by Andrew Bromfield. All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  I wanted to dedicate this book to two of my friends. They refused to read it and said they didn’t want their names to be associated with it. So I dedicate the novel to my wife, Katya. She has absolutely nothing at all to do with this story, but her love helps me survive in this beautiful world.

  As Joan was burning, she looked round and said:

  “See, I have taken off my dress and shaved my head.

  See, now I am not hiding anything,

  The second dress I tear off is my skin.

  Pluck at the veins and feel the flesh

  There is only a single moment left.”

  Alexander Anashevich

  1

  YOU ARE TEN YEARS OLD, OR PERHAPS YOUNGER. YOU are riding in the subway with your mother, looking toward the front of the train through the transparent doors of the cars. Suddenly you notice that somewhere up ahead, something has happened: people jump to their feet in a strange state of alarm and run back against the movement of the train, as if they are fleeing from something, until they reach the locked doors between the cars – and they tug and tug at the handles… But then their faces contort as panic sweeps over their normal features like a wind driving ripples across the surface of a pond. Something invisible is approaching, something nameless and formless, more terrible than death, more horrible than a nightmare. Something they have known about and tried to forget all their lives.

  And now the front cars slowly enter the transparent wall of condensed horror, but you can no longer bear to look at the faces flattened against the glass, the mouths opened in mute screams, the eyes bulging out of their sockets – you turn your gaze to the passengers still untouched by the horror, sitting in the nearest cars, and again you see that faint shadow of anxiety change to panic, you see them jump to their feet and run, run and pound on the locked glass doors… and the invisible wall gets closer and closer, advancing implacably, like in a dream. But you don’t leave your seat, you don’t feel for your mother’s hand, you just think with relief that it will all soon be over.

  These are only my fantasies. I was ten years old, or perhaps younger, and I often imagined this scene. As I got older, however, everything changed, it was no longer a wall, but more like a wave, a wave from a distant cold sea that froze the blood, a wave that swept along the train from the front to the final car. But now no one jumps up from his seat, everybody sits there until the shuddering contorts their faces like a hand crumpling a used tissue.

  Yes, as a boy I certainly had a rich imagination. When I grew up a bit, I started telling other people what I used to believe when I was a child: that there was a place in the subway where hell seeped through into the tunnel in a thin layer of horror – and the trains passed through it so quickly that only really sensitive people noticed. I used to give the girls a suggestive look at the words “really sensitive.” Sometimes it worked.

  Now I know it has nothing to do with sensitivity. It is my own personal hell, my personal horror, my concentrated nightmare. The passengers will never have any idea about it, nothing will distort their faces, not a single hair will shift out of place. I am the only one who notices the signs, the only one who senses the approach, the only one who understands the language of the things and objects that warn me in vain of the approach.

  The fine hairs on woolen scarves stand up on end, leather coats are covered with fine cracks, feathers creep out of down-filled jackets as if seeking escape, stockings grip legs even tighter, the colors drain out of the advertising posters, any moment now the glass in the windows of the car will rain down on to the seats, the handrails cringe under my fingers, the doors scream in horror. Everything stops, as if time has been switched off, the clatter of the wheels fades away, and suddenly you can hear what the two girls standing by the closed doors are talking about. One is small and skinny, with tousled black hair, the other is graceful, with long legs and light hair. Just a minute ago they were laughing and nudging each other as they discussed how they were going to spend their first pay cheque, but now their faces have aged ten years, and you hear the light-haired one say: “I can’t believe she’s gone,” and see her wipe her eyes with a handkerchief as contorted as your own face, and the smaller one takes hold of her hand and replies: “And I still can’t even cry.”

  And then the sounds get duller, space curls up round the edges of your vision like old wallpaper on a damp wall and everything goes dark before your eyes, as if the entire world is hiding behind those whirling black spirals: the sudden surge overtakes you, sweeps over you. You can’t breathe, the outlines of your body blur within this black cocoon as despair and hopelessness congeal: reach out your hand and you can touch them.

  The old horror of childhood? No, this is not horror, it is anguish, concentrated anguish, a stifling feeling, a constant ringing in the ears, the flow of your own blood, darkness, darkness – the dark cloud will hang on the folds of your clothes, cling to the contours of your face, to the hairs stuck to your forehead, to the gnawed ends of your fingers.

  You carry this cocoon, this cloud, with you as you leave the subway. You will make conversation, discuss work, come to decisions, write business letters. You will flirt with girls, play w
ith your children, smile at people you know, try to live the way you always do. But on days like this, if you reach out your hand, you can touch the boundary of hell: suffering oozes out of doors slightly ajar, flows across the walls of buildings, crunches under your feet like broken glass; every gesture causes pain, every touch makes you shudder convulsively; your skin dissolves, leaving only the naked bleeding flesh, just barely covered by the gray cloud of anguish.

  Days like this are excruciating for me. In order to cope somehow, I start remembering the women I have killed.

  2

  AN ELECTRIC BEEPING. NOT A METALLIC CHIME, NOT the tinkling of a small bell, but the artificial trill of a microchip. The signal of an alarm clock bought in IKEA, a child’s alarm clock covered in bright-colored soft plush, with a big dial and yellow hands. Out from under the blanket comes a hand, a thin hand, with a silver ring on the index finger, an arm with a faint scar just above the elbow. The little palm swats a blue velvet pimple, the ringing stops, the arm disappears.

  You don’t want to open your eyes, you don’t want to wake up. As if through half-closed eyes we see the corner of a pillow, a braid of hair, the edge of a blanket. You want to sleep, with your head hidden under the blanket, swaddled up as tight as you can get, hidden away, as if you were nestling inside a cocoon, sleeping like that forever, ever since you were a child.

  “Good morning!”

  Who did you say “good morning” to in that muffled sleepy voice? There’s no one else in the room. A patch of yellow sunlight – it matches the hands of the clock – on the bright-colored kilim by the bed, an open laptop with its matte screen reflecting nothing, a fluffy pink rabbit lurking between the wall and your body. Good morning, as if you were trying to wake yourself up. Yes indeed, good morning, Ksenia.

  Yes, your name is Ksenia, you live in a rented flat, cheap, found through friends. That’s about a third of your salary, everything’s very Western, the way grown-ups live. You’re completely grown up now, twenty-three years old, you work in the news department of the internet-newspaper Evening.ru. E-v-e-n-i-n-g dot ru, not a very well-known newspaper, second flight – maybe you’ve never heard of it, but our news section is good.

  Outside the window there is rain, outside there is December, gray sky, not a single snowflake. You only imagined the patches of sunlight in your sleep. Slip your feet into the fluffy slippers, pick the white dressing gown up off the armchair, push the “Play” button and turn up the volume. The Gotan Project playing a remix of Gato Barbieri. That’s how the morning starts.

  On the way to the bathroom you can’t resist looking at your email. Five messages, including four pieces of spam, two of them offering to increase the size of your penis and your breasts. You don’t need either – you don’t have a penis and your breasts are just fine.

  What do you look like? Thin, short, with tousled black hair, lips puffy from sleep, big eyes that simply refuse to open in the morning. You look at the fifth message. Aha, from your friend Olya, good that it’s not about work. But then, how could it be about work? You went to bed at three and got up at eight – at that time everyone’s asleep, no one’s writing work emails.

  You walk through into the bathroom, turn on the shower and freeze in front of the mirror, trying to put the day together in your mind. What’s in store for us today? The usual stuff first thing in the morning, then a talk with Pasha about money, lunch at the coffee house, Mom’s birthday, she asked you to be there at seven and not be late. You take off the dressing gown with a sigh and look in the mirror, already dewy with condensation: it’s damp, steamy and warm in here, the way you like it.

  The bruises on your breasts and shoulders are barely visible, but your thighs – oh, that’s quite a different matter. And the welts on your buttocks sting in the scalding water. Yes, you like your body to retain its memories of your assignations for a long time. You like to be hurt. You have a small collection of various amusing gadgets at home, black leather toys, whips, gags, nipple clamps. On good days you don’t see anything unusual about your preferences. The way you think about it is more or less like this: sometimes I want to dance the boogie-woogie in a club in the Kropotkinskaya district, sometimes I ask someone to beat me and hurt me. Sex is like dancing; the important thing is to have a good partner. That’s the way you think on the good days, but on the bad days you remember that sex is not dancing, and it’s not easy for someone with your tastes to find a worthy partner. It’s not easy, but you cope one way or another. More or less.

  But you’re not coping too well, to be honest. You parted company with your last lover a week ago, it’s over between you now – that’s why, instead of the sweet pain of gratification, your skin is smarting with the nagging pain of separation.

  You turn off the shower, rub yourself down with a towel and your raw spots ache. Smiling, you walk through into the kitchen and put the kettle on. The music from the other room is almost inaudible. You look at the clock: you still have enough time for a cup of coffee.

  This is how the day begins. Outside the window, a colorless sun in a gap between December clouds. Good morning to you, darling Ksenia. Don’t forget to dress warmly, there’s a strong wind today. Don’t forget to take the present for Mom, your cell phone, money, ID, travel pass. Don’t forget – you have a lot to do today, darling Ksenia, take good care of yourself. Ah yes, and the keys too. Don’t forget them, please.

  3

  AND SO… ONCE UPON A TIME A LITTLE GIRL LIVED with her mommy and daddy, went to the kindergarten, then to school, danced and laughed and never cried. Mommy and Daddy got divorced, school came to an end, the little girl went to work and now, six years later, here she is sitting in a tiny office cubicle with her strong fingers pounding away at a keyboard, her tousled hair more or less held in place by a hair slide, her painted lips pursed in concentration and not a trace of the morning’s relaxed mood left in her voice.

  “Ksenia, are we putting the news about Berezovsky at the top or is everybody already pissed off with him?”

  “He’s the one who’s pissed off. What else have we got, apart from Berezovsky?”

  “I’ll just take a look.”

  This is an ordinary day. The Little Lady of the Big House. It’s just a title – Senior Editor of the News Department – a pitiful staff of three, plus the freelancers. True, they’re all a few years older than you, and some even have formal qualifications in journalism. Think of themselves as professionals, shit! Sharks of the pen, jackals of the keyboard, freebooters of the computer mouse. There was a time when you had to have sharp words with them, it’s true, but now you have them all in line, working at full stretch.

  Alexei from the next desk asks on ICQ Internet Messenger:

  “how are you doing?”

  She answers: “ok” and then asks: “when will I have the interview?”

  “I’m just typing it up.” Yes, he’s sitting there in his earphones, deciphering it.

  Daily work inevitably becomes routine: making sure they choose the right news, correcting mistakes, telling off the young girl translators, deciding who to take commentaries from today. A couple of times a week you end up with good material, something you can really take pride in, not feel ashamed of. But then, you don’t feel ashamed of what you put out every day either, although there’s really not that much to feel proud of, except maybe the successful start to your career: after all, at twenty-three you’re already the department’s senior editor. The boss. It’s funny.

  Ksenia likes her job. She enjoys rummaging through the news and she enjoys coordinating, managing and controlling even more. In a few years’ time she’ll be a good manager, although it’s not yet clear where. Maybe she’ll become a genuine senior editor, get into paper journalism, if Putin doesn’t grab all the newspapers the way he’s already grabbed the TV channels. Or perhaps she’ll go into pure IT business. “IT” stands for information technology, and it’s part of everything to do with the internet. In America they like to add the letter “e,” from the word �
�electronic,” but in Russian it’s not always convenient to add that letter. You definitely can’t add it to the word “business,” for instance. “You know,” Ksenia explained to one of her foreign friends, “the combination ‘eb’ in Russian is the same as ‘fuck’ in English. So you get ‘fuck-business.’ I can’t even say that to one of my friends, let alone my mom.”

  Ksenia likes her job. She enjoys feeling confident, successful and prosperous. She likes being able to do everything at once: edit an interview, instant message, look through the news. By twelve they’ll put the first section of material out on the web, and then she can go to the cafeteria with Alexei, read the latest jokes at Anecdote.ru, call in to see Pasha and have a word about money.

  * * *

  Pasha Silverman, Ksenia’s immediate boss, the editor-in-chief and founder of the newspaper Evening.ru, had no interest at all in journalism until the age of thirty-seven.

  He moved from the Chechen capital, Grozny, to Moscow in the late eighties – just in time: first there were no more Russians left in the city, then there were no Chechens, and then the city itself disappeared. By the mid-nineties Pasha was heavily involved in advertising, but during one of the repeated market carve-ups, he got squeezed out of TV and billboards, and by the beginning of the next decade all that remained of his former glory was an internet agency, which was lifted up on the rising wave of the investment boom of 2000.

  When Pasha first came to the internet, the major form of advertising was banners – little rectangular pictures at the top, bottom or side of the internet page. If the picture caught someone’s attention, he clicked on the banner with the mouse and found himself on the advertised site. Basically, that was all there was to it. You could take money for the number of people who would see the banner (that was called “pay-for-views”) and for the number of people who clicked on the banner (“pay-for-clicks”). Since then variations had appeared – square banners, pop-up window banners, flash banners and lots of other wonderful technical innovations – but the general principle hadn’t changed. The technology made it possible to show the advert to the right audience on the right site – that was called “targeting” – but basically Pasha made money out of people looking at little pictures on their computer screens and occasionally clicking on them for some reason or other.