Butterfly Skin

by Sergey Kuznetsov

  Our business? But that wasn’t right. Olya had always thought of the business as hers alone. She had started it and kept it going for all these years, she was the only one who had the vision and understood the development plans, who could anticipate the future. But she had honestly torn chunks off to feed the wolves, trying to forget that wolves were always looking back to the forest. She had held out for three whole years, and now Grisha and Kostya were both bolting from the common field, back into their homeland in the depths of the forest to look for Little Red Riding Hoods – or anyone else they could find to gobble up.

  Olya stops at a traffic light, pulls down the mirror and looks at herself. A well-groomed thirty-five-year-old woman. An elegant arm lying on the steering wheel with a bracelet of dark stones round the wrist. A prosperous businesswoman, the co-owner and general director of a small internet shop. No, she didn’t look a bit like Little Red Riding Hood, it wasn’t so easy to gobble her up. She knew every bush in this forest too – and she wouldn’t go to her granny’s little house, she’d go into the dragon’s cave, then we’d see which of the wolves would risk following her in.

  And there’s the first miracle of this lousy day: a silver BMW pulls away from the curb at just the right moment – and Olya parks her Toyota. She jumps out on to the pavement, trying not to step in the dirty puddle of melt water, slams the black, mud-splattered door shut, presses the button on her remote and, just as she’s walking into the Coffee House, she hears the quiet beep of the security system. That means everything’s all right. Now she’ll try to choose a table by the window and on the way take a moment to check that everything really is all right. When you live on your own for a long time, you get used to things: to the laptop that should have been changed ages ago, to the bracelet that you were given, hanging round your wrist, to the car that you ought to sell, but can’t bring yourself to. You don’t admit it to anyone except yourself, but you feel a kind of inner kinship with it. Six years for a car is like thirty-five for a woman: still running, but with the price tag falling faster every year. And so you look after it as if it were your own body – regular services, fresh oil, BP gasoline, comprehensive insurance. And there’s the result: great condition, not a single scratch, as good as new.

  Her friend Ksenia, who she calls Ksyusha, is already sitting at a table, toying with a cell phone in a kitschy bright-pink fluffy case.

  “Look what I’ve bought,” she says. “Isn’t it just delightful?”

  Olya politely takes the mobile in her manicured hands and buries her fingers in the pink fur.

  “It reminds me of something,” she says.

  “Aha,” Ksyusha agrees, “my rabbit, remember, I showed it to you?”

  Yes, the pink rabbit. Every over-aged Little Red Hiding Hood should have her own pink rabbit: that way there’s something to give the Big Bad Wolf when he comes knocking at the door of the hut. But Olya doesn’t have any fluffy toys, and you can’t put a case on a Sony-Ericsson P800. All she has is an aging Toyota, well-preserved, but already doomed.

  “I was thinking,” says Ksyusha, “if you crossed a cell phone and a rabbit, what would their children be like?”

  “Well, fluffy little mechanical devices,” Olya replies. “Like the rabbits in the Energizer advert.”

  Little rabbit girls hop around in the dark forests of Russian business and shudder at the roaring of the big bad wolves who can’t share the same field, only the same forest. Because in the field there’s no one to eat, but in the forest there are fluffy pink animals and aging Little Red Riding Hoods who aren’t mobile enough to avoid the wolves’ teeth.

  “You’ve got everything mixed up.” says Ksyusha. “A cell phone isn’t a mechanical device, it’s a communications device. They’d probably be telepathic rabbits.”

  “There was some story about telepathic rabbits,” says Olya, “remember?”

  “Na-ah,” says Ksyusha, “I haven’t read very much. I mean, not as much as you.”

  That’s probably a good thing, not to read so much, Olya thinks. She spent almost thirty years stuck in the gingerbread house of their library at home and Petersburg University’s castle in the air. Probably it really is a good thing not to fritter away your time on books, not to know every word of Brodsky’s To Urania and A Part of Speech, smuggled into the country by other lovers of poetry like yourself, but to find yourself out in the dark forest right away, before you got midway through life. To find yourself there without even being able to recognize the hidden quotation (at least one) in that last phrase, but not to feel daunted when you met the wolves, panthers and lions – or whoever it is that Dante and successful IT managers ran into along their way.

  “So what happened to the telepathic rabbits in the story?” Ksyusha asks.

  “I don’t remember,” Olya replies. “I think they’ve all been eaten before the story even starts. Before anyone has even realized that they are telepaths.”

  “Bang-bang, aye-aye-aye, see my little rabbit die,” says Ksyusha, citing the old children’s song. And she knocks her cell phone over as if it has been hit by a hunter’s bullet.

  Olya smiles, and her lips cramp at the memory of two wolves glaring at each other from behind the trees in the dense forest of their joint business.

  “Listen, Ksyusha,” she says, “I need your help. Will you help me?”

  Ksyusha suddenly turns serious – a businesswoman, IT manager, senior editor in the news department of a popular online newspaper – she sets her thin elbows on the table and leans her head to one side, as if to say: I’m listening, come on Olya, tell me what’s bothering you.

  And Olya tells her.

  Three years ago, at the height of the investment boom, two major internet companies decided to invest in the shop that Olya managed. They bought it from the first owners, gave Olya her twenty-five percent, and divided up the rest between them. Two major companies? Actually just two investors, two men who had known each other since before the internet. Kostya and Grisha, Konstantin and Grigorii. Friends and competitors, rivals and comrades. For three years their furious skirmishes didn’t interfere with the business; it remained a joint interest, until this December when they quarreled big-time over dividing up the funds from the election campaign. And this morning Grigorii slammed the door of Olya’s office and shouted “I wouldn’t even shit in the same field.” The little online shop – a rather trivial business by Kostya’s and Grisha’s standards – turned out to be the little goat from that other children’s song that took it into its head to go wandering into Dante’s dark forest at just the wrong time. The situation was tragic in an entirely literal sense – Olya’s business was about to sing its farewell goat song and become a ritual sacrifice in a squabble between two former friends.

  She can repeat the old familiar move and bring in a big new investor to buy the business from Grisha and Kostya. There isn’t anyone like that in the Russian internet – but Olya knows who she could go to. If, that is, she can really take the risk of going to him – because Olya doesn’t like this man. He’s an outsider, someone from a different and dangerous world, from offline, ordinary business, business that makes Kostya’s and Grisha’s wild, remote forest look like a tidy English park.

  Olya explains all of this to Ksyusha now, explains it carefully, trying to avoid any allusions to Dante, jokes about the little gray goat and goat song – because she’s not sure that Ksyusha knows about scapegoats, Dionysian sacrifices and the birth of tragedy out of the spirit of music. After all, Ksyusha didn’t graduate from the history faculty in Petersburg; immediately after school she set out like an emancipated Little Red Riding Hood along the winding path to a place where there had never been any granny, but there was at least some faint hope of earning your own piece of bread and butter.

  As Olya tells her story, Ksyusha watches the way she waves her hand, and the way the bracelet on her wrist shimmers. Large dark stones, as dark as Olya’s eyes. Olya waves her hand beautifully, she draws beautifully on her long cigarette holder,
she talks beautifully and even sighs beautifully. If Ksyusha could fall in love with a woman, she would definitely fall in love with Olya. You might say she has already fallen in love: at the negotiations three years earlier she said “Wow!” to herself the moment she saw this tall woman with the well-groomed hands, short light-tinted hair and deep, dark eyes. They discussed the terms for yet another advertising campaign, and Ksenia thought she wanted to be like Olya someday. Perhaps she simply liked Olya’s way of inclining her head during a conversation, smiling with just the corners of her mouth and waving her hand fluently when she rejected an unacceptable proposal. Ksenia even liked the not exactly old-fashioned, not exactly provincial Petersburg way she smoked a cigarette, drawing in the smoke through a long cigarette holder. On that first occasion they got through the business quickly and spent another forty minutes talking about all sorts of nonsense, she can’t remember exactly what now. They immediately started calling each other “Olya” and “Ksyusha,” and now they meet a couple of times a week, and Ksyusha is glad her premonition didn’t deceive her: it was friendship at first sight.

  “And so,” says Olya, stubbing her cigarette out in the ashtray, “I want to ask you to make some inquiries about him, about this man. I don’t really know anything about him, but you’re a journalist, so you can manage it, right?”

  5

  KSENIA WALKS THROUGH THE PASSAGE FROM ONE subway line to the other in a dense crowd of people, in a vortex of deep human waters, a subterranean reflection of the traffic jams on the Moscow streets. Instead of frosty Tverskaya Street with its smell of petrol, there is the stale air of Pushkinskaya Station; instead of the stench of tobacco in the front seat of a private car acting as a taxi, there is the smell of sweat in the stuffy carriage. Save fifteen, no, twenty minutes and two hundred, no, one hundred and fifty rubles, get there for seven as she promised, not be late at least this once.

  She was never late for business meetings or assignations, but somehow she had never managed to get to her mother’s place on time, ever since she was a child, when it used to take her an hour to get home from school, stopping for a chat with Vika, and then with Marina, who she called Marinka, saying goodbye ten times on every corner, and then deciding to make a detour anyway, walking to the garages first, and then to the bus stop. It took her fifteen minutes to walk to school and an hour to walk back. She had to be at the dance studio by three. Ksenia didn’t really have to hurry, but her mom was nervous anyway, she said she would go crazy, times weren’t what they used to be, now they didn’t even let little children go to school on their own, let alone Ksenia, a beautiful ten-year-old girl, the delight of any pedophile, a future Lolita, the light of her parents’ lives, the fire of God only knew whose appalling loins. Ksenia was stubborn, she forbade her mother to meet her, swore she would come home on time, but she still came late. Her mom made a show of drinking her decoction of one-hundred-percent natural valerian from virgin forests somewhere in Siberia or the Urals, her mom clutched at her heart, her mom said her daughter didn’t love her at all. Ksenia persuaded herself that these reproaches were a proof of love. Not of her love for her mom, of course, but of her mom’s love for her. Because if her mom didn’t love her, why would her mom get so anxious?

  Lyova was already in eleventh grade at school and he was regarded as quite grown up already, he had even applied for a place in college amid a general atmosphere of approving indifference: who could ever doubt it, of course he would get in. Ksenia heard Lyova telling a friend or a girlfriend on the phone that if not for the army he would never have applied for college; who needed an education now? And he probably wouldn’t be a physicist, there was no money in it, unless you went away to America. Afterward, many years later, Ksenia was surprised at how much he knew about everything in advance: he had been right twice over – he didn’t become a physicist and he went away to America.

  She was always home late from school; only once, when half the class, including Vika and Marinka, was off sick with flu, she came on time and ran into Slava in the entrance of the building (he was the one, by the way, who never wanted to be called “uncle” – just Slava, that was all) and he hesitated, as if he was embarrassed about something, mumbled “Hi” and hurried off to the bus stop. She walked in, shouted “Mom, I’m home!” and through the half-open door of her parents’ bedroom she saw the crumpled sheets and didn’t understand at first, then her mom came out of the bathroom wearing a robe over her naked body, with her hair all clumped together. “What are you doing here so early? You could at least have rung the doorbell.” She’d never asked Ksenia to ring the bell before, Ksenia had had her own keys since third grade, and now as she stood there in the corridor Ksenia started blushing uncontrollably, as if she’d done something unforgivable, almost criminal. She whispered, “Sorry, Mom, I didn’t think,” and went to her room, trying not to look round at the grinning door of the bedroom and burning with shame, feeling like a criminal for having found out something she wasn’t supposed to know. The latest number of Mom’s AIDS-Info, the sex education tabloid, was lying on the floor beside her bed, she’d been reading it yesterday before she went to sleep, she was proud that her mom and dad weren’t like other girls’ parents, they didn’t hide anything, on the contrary, to her grannies’ horror, they had explained everything to her at the age of six with a little book translated from French, so that now, at the age of ten, Ksenia knew absolutely everything about that. But today this pride and this joy had disappeared somewhere. Ksenia felt ashamed. She would rather not have known what had been going on only half an hour earlier in her mom’s bedroom. It would have been better if she didn’t read AIDS-Info, but read what all the girls did, something like Alexandra Ripley’s continuation of Gone With the Wind. She wanted to cry, but she’d forbidden herself to do that, big girls didn’t cry. Ksenia never cried, and anyway, what point was there in crying, tears wouldn’t help her grief, her mom was right, it was Ksenia’s own fault, she shouldn’t have come back at the wrong time, if she was so grown-up already and understood everything so well. And so Ksenia sits there in her room, takes the textbooks out of her briefcase and starts doing her homework. Mom always said: if you feel like crying, go and do your lessons. Especially since she has a test tomorrow, and she has to get an A.

  Ksenia walks through the passage under the stone vaulting of the Stalinist subway system. There are little wind-up khaki-colored soldiers crawling along the wall, with their machine guns chattering, but the toy guns can barely even be heard above the noise of the crowd. The soldiers crawl along as if they are delirious, with their entire bodies squirming, squirming as if they are dodging blows, as if in erotic ecstasy, crawling as if their legs refuse to carry them, crawling to some unknown destination, invalids continuing a futile war, a war that was over long ago. They will survive and ride through the carriages in the underground in metal wheelchairs, collecting money in paratroopers’ berets, crippled, with no legs, either drunk or stoned. Ksenia will lower her eyes into her book, trying not to look at them, trying not to remember how every time she encounters pain, suffering and physical deformity, people who have lost arms or legs, it is like some kind of prediction that could affect her personally. The same way she used to feel frightened by articles about psychotic killers, sadists and perverts who tortured their partners by hanging them from a hook in the ceiling by their outstretched arms, covering their bodies with the parallel stripes of scars, welts and bruises. It’s still there, that aching pain of separation, now what have you done, where are you going to find another lover like that? But it’s over – don’t you understand that? It’s over.

  Ksenia walks through the passage. Clattering heels, dark business suit, short winter coat. One thin hand lightly holding the purse in place on her shoulder. Walking through the passage. Twenty-three years old, a good job, excellent prospects. Walking through the passage.

  6

  THE ROOM THAT USED TO BE KSENIA’S IS HER MOTHER’S study now. There’s a computer on the desk where she used to do h
er lessons all those years ago. There are dictionaries on the shelf where the pink rabbit used to sit. Every time she comes here, Ksenia gets a bitter feeling. It’s not that she would really like to keep everything just the way it was. But perhaps she would like the flat where her childhood was spent to have remembered her for a little bit longer. It seems to Ksenia that her things have disappeared so easily because she herself was only an accident in her mother’s life, an accident who was easy to forget. Forgotten. She never admits these suspicions even to herself: of course not, after all, she knows how much her mother loves her, didn’t her mother talk about love all the way through her childhood, and specifically about her love for Ksenia? There was never a word spoken about her love for Lyova, that was somehow taken for granted, not a subject for discussion. Almost everything to do with Lyova was taken for granted – but from early in her childhood Ksenia can remember her mom’s voice saying how much she did for her, for Ksenia: she gave up a trip to London when Ksenia was six months old, she didn’t sleep at night when Ksenia was ill, she didn’t divorce Dad for all those years, she put up with his drunken friends and weeks-long work assignments, with his coming home after midnight whenever there was a deadline for delivering another computer program, and all so that her daughter would have a father, at least some kind of father, although it was hard to call him that. “How many times a week do you see your daughter?” She used to hear that from the next room. “You don’t care about anything at all apart from your job, but it’s not as if you even earn decent money. If not for Ksenia, I’d have divorced you ages ago.” She covered her head, trying not to hear, but a pillow was poor protection against her mom’s loud, harsh, piercing voice, that voice she loved so much. Ksenia lay there with her eyes closed and her hands over her ears, she swaddled herself in the blanket, trying not to hear those words – and she lay there in the same way on those other nights, when Dad went away on his assignments and Mom had visitors and they drank wine in the kitchen and laughed in the corridor. Mom would come in to kiss her goodnight, looking beautiful in high-heeled shoes, smelling of perfume and wine, and Ksenia went to sleep surrounded by those smells and the quiet laughter coming through the half-open door. Then she would wake up in the night and cover her head with the pillow, trying not to hear her mom’s heavy sighs suddenly breaking through the silence, sighs that changed into a deep, frightening scream. Once she asked Lyova why their mom screamed in the night and he said she was “too little to be asking questions like that” and Ksenia blushed, because there was nothing in the little French book about sighing and screaming, and Lyova gave her a gentle slap on her bottom and led her off to play at Sarah Connor and the Terminator.