Butterfly Skin

by Sergey Kuznetsov

  I was fourteen years old, it was my life then, and it was still mine now. I sat on the edge of the bath and my prick seemed huge, and I realized that somehow I had to tell people about the world I had lived in for as long as I could remember. I was a bookish boy, but I could never find the right words. Perhaps because I had seen them too often on paper.

  This is a comfortless world, a world that has no place for hope, where death is inevitable and suffering is routine and unendurable. This is a world in which children’s heads are piled up into pyramids in Rwanda, to make it easier to count them, a world in which a thirty-year-old man sits on the edge of his bath in Moscow and cries because he can’t come, he can’t come even when he imagines how, strip by strip, he tears the skin off a fifteen-year-old girl who is begging for mercy, a girl who has no more tears, because her eyes have been gouged out.

  He cries precisely because this picture is the only thing that arouses him.

  8

  IF ALEXEI ROKOTOV HAD NOT BEEN BORN IN 1975, HE would never have become a journalist. If he had appeared in the world a couple of years earlier, he would have been a computer programmer, and five years later he would have become a financial manager or a lawyer. But at the time when Lyosha was fifteen, there was no better profession in the country than that of journalist: Sixty Seconds on the Petersburg TV channel every Friday, Outlook on Channel One every Saturday, the magazine Spark in the mailbox. Every week the journalists made a small revolution by opening the eyes of the populace to the atrocities of the communists and the wretchedness of Soviet life in general. The indestructible colossus was reeling to cries of “but the king is naked!” and the bold cartoons in the newspapers seemed like a premonition of imminent victory.

  Lyosha remembered one of the cartoons very well. Two ants were standing beside the flattened body of their friend, a huge foot was disappearing up into the sky, and one of the ants was saying: “You know, they’ll come up with some way of getting rid of them soon.” It seemed to Lyosha that the sole hovering above the ants’ heads was the clay foot of a colossus, and the fear of it was only a game fostered by the state’s lies. And there was no profession better than the one that could crush those lies – that was why Lyosha Rokotov began studying to enter the faculty of journalism, hoping that five years of hard toil would raise him up to the heavenly heights inhabited by the bright but distant stars of Liubimov, Nevzorov and Korotich. This was the dream he used to spur himself on for the first two years of study, but then he noticed that somehow his dream had grown tarnished. Either his former idols had changed, or Lyosha himself had begun to suspect that the way the world changed didn’t really have anything to do with what they wrote in the newspapers. During the communist putsch of 1991 he stood in the cordon to protect the rebellious White House and even photocopied several flyers in the office of a friend who had gone into business. Lyosha and his friend must have printed the wrong number of copies or got their timing wrong – by the time they overcame their fear and started handing out the proclamations, the flyers were already out of date and it was time to print new ones. Hundreds of the flyers remained lying in Lyosha’s room for ages, like a prophecy of the times when the main question concerning the press would not be “how can we print?” but “how can we distribute?”

  When Lyosha was in his second year of study, a small civil war took place in Moscow. This time he was among the crowd of idle onlookers who watched as tanks bombarded the building he had defended two years earlier, and he wandered round the streets of Moscow alone, trying to understand what was happening. But when a man only a yard away from him fell to the ground, killed either by a stray bullet or a shot from a sniper, Lyosha realized that the antithesis of the lies was not the words that they wrote in the newspapers, but the fresh frosty smell in the air and the nausea that rose up in his throat at the sight of brains oozing out onto the asphalt.

  He realized that never again could he talk about the danger of communist revanchism or the right policy for economic reforms – just as he had known earlier that he could never write for the newspaper Pravda: in short, by the end of October, Lyosha Rokotov had difficulty even understanding what he could do.

  The only thing he liked out of everything he read was the “Art” column in the newspaper Today – and he decided he ought to start writing about books, films and exhibitions. As a trial run, he volunteered to report on the conference “Postmodernism and National Cultures” taking place at the Tretyakov Gallery. The editor of the student newspaper to which Lyosha promised the article said he should try to get an interview with Charles Jencks, the famous architect. Lyova only found out that he existed two hours before the conference started, there was no time to go to the library but, despite his apprehensions, the interview went really well. Jencks put forward his project for the reconstruction of the burnt White House: a blue facade, streaks of red where the burn marks were and a white top as a symbol of reconciliation. Amazed by the visiting star’s cynicism, Lyosha didn’t even bother to ask if he knew that those were the colors of the Russian tricolor. Jencks said: “If the White House is going to be white again, that means a decision has been taken to pretend that nothing happened.” Lyosha remembered those words many times – especially in the company of his colleagues who repeatedly mouthed magic formulas about the market and free competition. Once, in the late eighties, he used to believe in this abracadabra himself, but now it sounded strange, to say the least: it was becoming clearer and clearer that the system emerging in Russia had only the remotest of connections with the theories of Adam Smith and John M. Keynes. For some reason Lyosha recalled the old cartoon with the two ants, and it didn’t seem funny anymore. The White House was painted white again, and the huge foot remained poised in the air, blanking out half the sky. Jencks was right: nothing had happened.

  Lyosha thought more and more often about the fact that most people didn’t want to have their eyes opened. They were prepared to forget about the terrible past for the sake of a quiet life. There was a certain mature wisdom in this, but it was beyond the comprehension of Lyosha’s youth. Now perestroika seemed to him like a brief moment of truth in which the population of one sixth of the world’s land surface suddenly found itself face to face with the wretchedness and horror of human existence. But the moment had been too short: people were only too glad to put the wretchedness and horror down to the bloody Soviet regime and pretend that it was all nothing to do with them. They were too busy: they were learning how to lick the asses of the new authorities – just as their parents had licked the communists’ asses twenty and thirty years earlier.

  Lyosha never did write any more about culture, but at the Tretyakov Gallery conference he met redheaded Oxana, a final-year student at the Russian State University for the Humanities, who was happy to explain everything he didn’t understand in the presentations. A day later she continued his education in the Academy of Sciences apartment on Vavilov Street that had been left at her disposal for two weeks while her parents were lecturing somewhere on the east coast of the US. Of course, Oxana wasn’t his first woman, but it was the first time Lyosha had found himself in bed with a girl who could not only abandon herself to pleasure, but also sweep him away with her to places where what happened to the power of the people and free speech seemed entirely trivial and inconsequential – if only because in those places freedom had no need of speech and all the power belonged to Oxana, since she was the only one who knew how to get there.

  They were married six months later, and Lyosha quickly grew used to thinking of himself as part of “we.” By the time he graduated from university, this “we” already consisted of three parts, like the trinity of colors in the Russian flag. Little Dasha forced him to a fresh look at the question of which publications the young journalist Rokotov would like to see his work in. The 1996 elections were coming up, the Russian oligarchs were spending freely to support Yeltsin, and Alexei realized there wouldn’t be another opportunity as good as this for earning money for a long time. And in addi
tion, no matter what, he still preferred President Yeltsin to the communist leader Zyuganov, and in agreeing to take part in a regional offshoot of the youth program “Vote, or You Lose!” Alexei wasn’t even really sinning against his conscience all that much – and that feeling was so intoxicating that just for a moment Alexei believed he really did have a brilliant future ahead of him.

  Now, almost eight years later, he realized he had been mistaken. All the major events that convulsed the mass-media market had passed him by: during the battles over “Svyazinvest,” the conflict between Primakov and Yeltsin, the election won by Putin and the closure of the opposition TV channels belonging to the same oligarchs who had once supported Yeltsin, he had remained equally distant from big politics and big money. Now he had a modest job as a reporter in an insignificant online newspaper that wasn’t even in the top ten on Rambler. His female boss was five years younger than him – precisely the amount of time that he had wasted on studying at university.

  Six months earlier, when Ksenia Ionova became senior editor of the news department, she had informed Alexei and his colleagues that their terms of employment had changed. Now they had to arrive at ten o’clock, submit a strictly specified amount of copy every week and also maintain contact with their readers in online forums. Evgenii had tried to object: “Ksyusha, no one’s IT editorial staff comes to work before twelve, not at Tickertape, or Gazette, so why should we?” Ksenia told him in an icy tone of voice that when they overtook Tickertape and Gazette, they could come to work at twelve too. If Evgenii Andreevich liked sleeping in in the mornings, then he could work for Evening.ru as a freelancer. “I’ll decide for myself,” Evgenii muttered, but he was wrong, because now Ksenia decided everything: a week later he was fired when he arrived in the office at midday yet again.

  “I value what you write,” Ksenia said, “and I’m sorry we weren’t able to work together in the same office. But I’ll be glad to publish your material. We can discuss the matter of fees if you like.”

  Evgenii’s articles really did appear from time to time on the Evening.ru site, and perhaps he hadn’t really lost too much money. Apart from that, history does not judge the victors: three months later the popularity of the news section had doubled, and although Evening.ru was still a second-flight publication, Alexei and his colleagues soon began to respect this skinny young woman with eyes as big as a manga heroine and a voice as icy as the Snow Queen.

  But now as she sits opposite him in the local cafeteria, the ice in her voice has almost melted. She stirs the sugar in her cup and smiles. She reminds him of an ordinary final-year student, almost the same as Oxana ten years earlier.

  “It’s a good interview,” Ksenia says, “it’s just a pity he doesn’t want to be named.”

  “He’s afraid,” Alexei replies, “but if necessary, I have his signature.”

  “It’s not that, it’s just that the readers don’t trust an anonymous source as much.” She drinks a mouthful of coffee from an old cup that goes back to the days of Soviet public catering. “He definitely doesn’t want to be named?”

  “No way,” says Alexei. “It’s a matter of professional etiquette as well. Supposedly he has no right to discuss his colleagues’ actions.”

  “The anonymous investigator from the Moscow Public Prosecutor’s Office speculates to the dictaphone about whether the murders attributed to the Moscow Psycho really all have been committed by the same person.” Ksenia lowers her tousled head to the printout.

  “These murders, which have created such a sensation recently, don’t in fact have all that much in common. The victims are females between the ages of fifteen and forty, who have first been raped, although in a number of cases it’s hard to tell, because their sexual organs have been cut out, burned away, or scalded with boiling water. In almost every case there is evidence of torture lasting several hours – cuts, burns and wounds – but there are virtually no bruises. The common factor in all these cases is that the bodies have deliberately been left in places where they will easily be found. It’s possible the killer wants to be caught, which is often the case. The famous Chicago serial killer William Hance even wrote above the bodies of his victims: ‘For God’s sake, catch me before I kill again!’ However, we can’t be entirely certain of the motivation in each particular case: perhaps the killer is taunting the police or enjoying the sensational reporting in the newspapers. But to get back to…”

  “I wonder why everyone likes to say that when the press writes about these things, it provokes the serial killers?” Ksenia asks testily. “Anyone would think Chikatilo was a media star. And anyway, if I remember rightly, there were plenty of psychotic killers in the Soviet Union, and everyone knew about them, even though there was never anything in the papers.”

  “Aha,” Alexei says with a nod, “my parents told me about Mosgas.”

  “Who?” Ksenia asks, and Alexei is surprised: five years is a big difference. An entirely different generation, they never knew the Soviet regime, they learned about psychotic killers from The Silence of the Lambs. He explains:

  “Well, he pretended to work for the Moscow gas supply, checking for leaks. He used to ring the doorbell and say ‘Mosgas,’ and when people opened the door, he hacked them to death with an axe. There was even a joke about it. The husband comes to the door: ‘Who’s there?’ – ‘Mosgas.’ – ‘Come in, come in. The axe is in the bathroom, my mother-in-law’s in the kitchen.’”

  Ksenia smiles and says:

  “But they caught him when he went to a building where they already had electric cookers.”

  A strange kind of joke, Alexei thinks and then, seeing his baffled expression, Ksenia explains.

  “I’ve never had a gas cooker. Why would I open the door if I heard the word ‘Mosgas’? For me that would be as strange as opening the door to the words ‘Mosmunicanal’ or “Transsib.’”

  She puts down her empty cup and reaches for the dessert. Thin, strong hands with the nails bitten down, not so nice, but if she took care of herself, she’d be way sexy. A ring at the door. Mosmunicanal. Ksenia in the doorway, the psycho just outside. Alexei thinks her icy tone and steely composure would probably be of help.

  “…But to get back to the question of whether the same murderer is responsible for all these crimes,” she reads aloud, “then the killer’s ostentatious behavior could be misleading: once the press has written about this, any murderer could fake the psychotic’s signature. I think our press was rather hasty in spreading panic about this.”

  “Interesting logic,” says Ksenia. “We shouldn’t spread panic because there might be several psychos in Moscow and not just one. We certainly have some remarkable people living in this city.”

  “Well, a killer doesn’t have to be a psycho,” says Alexei, taking his interviewee’s side, “it could be a domestic killing that the murderer disguises as one of a series.”

  “A domestic killing with the sexual organs cut out and signs of torture,” says Ksenia, wiping her fingers with a napkin. “Like I said, we certainly have some remarkable people living in this city.”

  Alexei nods, then can’t resist asking:

  “But it’s a good interview, isn’t it?”

  Just look, he thinks, six months ago I’d never have believed anyone who told me this girl’s opinion would matter to me. Maybe it doesn’t even matter now: all I’m doing is asking the boss’s opinion about new material. That’s perfectly normal.

  “Yes, it’s good,” Ksenia replies with a nod, “but this is already the tenth interview on this story. It’s all done right, it’s all good, but what’s going to make the reader, well, I don’t know, remember it, I suppose? Make it different from the other dozen?”

  “Of course,” Alexei says, “it would be better if we caught the murderer. But that only happens in Hollywood movies.”

  “No,” replies Ksenia, getting up. “It’s not our job to catch the murderer. But the thought nagging away at me is how we can come up with something else, make this a ser
ious subject of discussion.”

  Five years’ difference, oh yeah. Make this a serious subject. As if it was still the late eighties and Perestroika, when people really were interested in serious subjects.

  “And another thing,” Ksenia says, “There’s something I wanted to ask you, not to do with work. What do you know about this man?” And she mentions the name.

  “Why do you want to know?” Alexei asks.

  “It’s not for me,” says Ksenia. “It’s for a girlfriend of mine. She’s wondering whether she should go to work for him.”

  Ksenia repeats the man’s name again, and Alexei shakes his head and says:

  “No, I’ve never heard of him before. But I can take a look on Google.”

  “I’ve already looked on Google,” Ksenia replies and hands him the printout of his interview. “You think about how much more you can squeeze out of this psycho.”

  Alexei thinks that there was a time when he would have grabbed at this opportunity. A great beginning for a Hollywood movie. An independent journalistic investigation. But it is some years now since he stopped expecting his work to bring him fame or even satisfaction. Maybe he should never have joined the journalism faculty. He ought to have been a computer programmer, or even a lawyer, if it came to the pinch. Normal human professions.

  9

  THE DARKNESS OF THE MOSCOW WINTER EVENINGS. A bright-colored kilim on the floor. A one-room flat for two hundred and fifty dollars a month. A matte laptop screen. A black TV screen. Ksenia, sitting in the only armchair with her legs pulled up, chewing on her nails. Stay home alone, don’t think about Sasha, watch TV, read books, surf the web. Nothing feels right, she’s all fingers and thumbs, everything’s wrong: the cheap pirate DVDs she bought at the underground station get stuck, the movies are boring and affected, like some kind of Ripley’s Game, tell me, who on Earth watches this stuff, the latest Murakami that came out last week has already been read and brings no more pleasure. Stay home alone, remember Sasha, stand pensively gazing into an open drawer, masturbate, stretching your breasts so far by hanging weights on the nipples that they leave bruises. Come quickly, but still feel the same emptiness inside. Stay home alone, don’t think about Sasha, remember Sasha, stand there holding a long sewing needle, figuring out the best place to jab it in. It’s a bad sign, you know it is, bad: in a little while now you’ll start cutting yourself.