Butterfly Skin

by Sergey Kuznetsov

  Put the needle away: remember instead how it all started. You had just finished tenth grade, and Mom was just about to go on vacation to Greece, supposedly with aunty Mila, but actually with aunty Mila’s current husband. She’d been complaining for a long time that they didn’t have any money, Ksenia’s father didn’t really pay the alimony properly, she’d have to borrow, and then work for six months without any weekends off – stupid contracts, legal documents, forced labor for a translator.

  “Then stay at home,” Ksenia said in a fit of teenage fury and in reply was accused of being heartless, egotistic and callous.

  “I’ve no place to lay my head in my own house!” Mom shouted. “When I’m dying, no one will give me a glass of water. I do everything for you, and you don’t want to let me go away for two weeks’ holiday! Lena’s daughter’s already earning money, you’re the only millstone, still left hanging round my neck.”

  Lena’s daughter was three years older than Ksenia, but that wasn’t important. Ksenia bit her lip and said she would get a summer job, and Mom wouldn’t have to work all fall without any weekends off. When Ksenia told her father, he tried to protest, and even phoned her mother, but she snapped back: “This is a very good thing, let the girl get used to financial independence. Or she’ll grow up a loser like you.”

  That was the final argument in every row, and it successfully blocked all her dad’s attempts to interfere in his daughter’s upbringing. Ksenia remembered that when she was in fifth grade, just after they got divorced, her mom said she had to work harder at her studies so there was no point in her going to the dance studio three times a week. Ksenia liked dancing; when she danced she felt like she grew up and became as beautiful as her mom – in high-heeled shoes, enveloped in a cloud of perfume and wine – and her dad always came to the performances and admired her and told her “you’re my little beauty,” but in fifth grade it all came to an end. Ksenia sat in her room and did her lessons in order not to cry and in the kitchen Dad, who had come for the weekend to see his daughter, tried to explain something to Mom, but she just kept repeating: “If the girl wastes her time on nonsense like that, she’ll end up a loser, like you.”

  And this time too, her mother said to her father: “It’s a good thing, let her get used to being independent,” but she told Ksenia that she was a fine girl, of course, but really there wasn’t any need, the family had money anyway, “if you’re doing it for me, there’s no need.”

  “Oh no, Mom,” said Ksenia, “it’s just that I think it’s time I started earning some money.”

  During the holidays Ksenia and Marinka found jobs as couriers from an advertisement. There wasn’t a lot to the job: collect correspondence from several firms and deliver it to the addresses shown. True, it took almost all day, but they promised to pay them a hundred dollars a month. Over the summer that would mount up to three hundred, not really a lot, but a decent sum, enough to stop her feeling like a sponger.

  Mom left on June 25, and the next day Marinka phoned and said she wasn’t going to work because she was ill. Ksenia asked what was wrong with her, she said she’d caught a cold and Ksenia started getting ready, although she hadn’t liked the sound of Marinka’s voice. She was already half way out the door when the phone rang again: through her tears Marinka confessed that the evening before the man she handed in her list of jobs to had raped her.

  “I got back in the evening,” Marinka sobbed, “and there was no one in the place apart from him. I followed him into the office, as usual, and he asked if I’d like some tea. And I said yes, because I’d got caught in the rain and I was frozen. He put in a little splash of cognac, and then started making passes at me and, well…”

  “So did you let him, or did he rape you?” Ksenia asked.

  “I don’t know,” Marinka answered, “I kept saying ‘I don’t want to.’ In America it would be rape.”

  “And what are you going to do?” Ksenia asked. “Will you go to the police?”

  “No, of course not! I just won’t go back there anymore, that’s all.”

  “But what about the money? They still haven’t paid you anything. Don’t be stupid, Marinka!”

  “Well, that means there won’t be any money,” Marinka sobbed, “I won’t go back there again. Why don’t you just stop hassling me?” she said and added after a pause: “He said I could call him Dimochka.”

  And for some reason, that was the moment when Ksenia’s fury turned everything black in front of her eyes. That “Dimochka” stung her far more than the rape, more than the fact that Marinka was willing to forego the money as long as she never had to go there again. Ksenia knew these fits of fury – because of them the kids in her class thought she was crazy and were afraid to tease her even in elementary school. But just then Ksenia recalled what Lyova’s sensei used to say: you mustn’t allow your negative emotions to take complete control of you, you must direct them, put all their energy into the blow. And so she carried her fury with her all the way, like a glass of water, trying not to spill a drop. She had a picture in front of her eyes all the time: the villainous Dimochka tearing Marinka’s clothes off, her matte skin gleaming dully in the semi-darkness of the office with its cheap “European-style” refurbishment, her light hair billowing out in a halo round her head. The picture was blurred, not because Ksenia couldn’t remember Dimochka’s face properly, but because the mist of her fury prevented her from seeing any details.

  In the office Ksenia took the list of jobs and the correspondence as usual, and only then asked in an icy voice if the managing director was in. Dimochka, a tall, balding middle-aged man, gave her a surprised look through his spectacles and asked why she needed to see the manager. I just do, Ksenia said in a voice that immediately made him take her right across the office to reception.

  “Galochka,” he said to the secretary, “this courier girl here wants to have a word with Arkadii Pavlovich, I don’t know what about.”

  “Arkadii Pavlovich is busy,” said Galochka, without looking up from her computer monitor.

  “I’ll only be a moment,” said Ksenia, opening the door of the manager’s office.

  Five minutes later Dimochka, blushing bright red, was standing in front of the manager. His lips were trembling and the eyes behind his spectacles were swollen with tears.

  “She wanted to…” he babbled.

  “You stupid prick,” Arkadii Pavlovich hissed, “she’s under age! It’s a criminal offence! Even if she did want to!”

  Ksenia had calculated correctly: people of the older generation didn’t know what the age of consent was.

  “We’re prepared to pay compensation,” said Arkadii Pavlovich, “I’ll deduct whatever you think appropriate from his salary.”

  “I’m not sure I want to talk about compensation,” said Ksenia. “When a girl takes money for a man having sex with her, it looks more like prostitution than compensation. I’d just like my colleague to be given what she’s already earned. If possible without coming into the office.”

  Ten minutes later Ksenia left the office with Marinka’s hundred dollars.

  “There, you see,” she told her friend, “you even earned it for three days less than me.”

  But the following day turned out to be Ksenia’s last day at work too. The first client she came to noticed that the package had been opened. There was nothing in it but a letter, and he was supposed to have received a small sum of money as well. Three hundred and fifty dollars, nothing to worry about, we’ll sort it out in a moment, he told the hysterical Ksenia, and dialed the number of the office. Of course, Dimochka swore that when he gave Ksenia the envelope it was sealed and the money was inside. He took his revenge on Ksenia in the manager’s office.

  “They start with blackmail and move on to theft,” he said.

  Even if Arkadii Pavlovich understood what was going on, he didn’t see fit to do anything. They agreed on a compromise: they considered that Ksenia had lost the money, and so they wouldn’t go to the police either (Dimochka
couldn’t hold back his smile at that word “either”), and they wouldn’t ask Ksenia to make good the loss, because they realized she was just a girl and she didn’t have any real money – we’re not some kind of vicious brutes, are we, Ksyusha? But, naturally, it was out of the question for her to carry on working or to be paid for June.

  Ksenia realized she had been set up. The rich grown-ups had put the little girl in her place! Of course they had! They couldn’t have some pint-sized chick throwing her weight around, demanding her rights! There, take your rights, three hundred and fifty conventional units of currency, there’s our divine kindness for you, we won’t go to the police either! Ksenia remembered that lesson for the rest of her life: you must never relax even in the very simplest job. You couldn’t trust anyone but your very closest friends.

  She spent the whole evening watching TV dry-eyed, repeating to herself big girls don’t cry. Her mom said crying meant admitting you were helpless, admitting you’d been defeated, but what you had to do was fight. No, big girls don’t cry, I have to think of something, Ksenia kept repeating to herself, but even so she didn’t tell Marinka she had been sacked without being paid. Not because she was afraid of Marinka’s sympathy, it was just that Marinka would have suggested splitting her money, and Ksenia didn’t want to take anything from her. It was enough that Marinka had been raped. Ksenia didn’t say anything, even when Marinka phoned and admitted that she’d decided to go back to work from July 1, because Dimochka had phoned and apologized, and promised that nothing of the sort would ever happen again. But then, Marinka’s voice had a familiar vibe of excitement to it, and it occurred to Ksenia that something of the sort could very well happen again.

  “Actually,” said Marinka, “it was quite interesting really, I’ve never had any men so much older than me.”

  All right then, Ksenia told herself. So I was a fool. So I should have kept well out of the whole business. They would have sorted it out for themselves. She felt a bit annoyed with Marinka, but her resentment was weak, as if she was feeling it through a thick layer of felt, or rather, through the cocoon that was wrapping itself round her tighter and tighter.

  Stay home alone, don’t think about Marinka, watch TV, read books. Nothing feels right, you’re all fingers and thumbs, everything’s wrong: it’s your own fault, you’re to blame for everything. You wasted an entire month. You didn’t earn any money, and it doesn’t look as if you’re going to earn any. You waded in to save Marinka, who coped perfectly well on her own. You forgot that first of all you have to think about Mom. What are you going to say when Mom comes back from Greece? Leave the curtains closed for days on end, never change your clothes, never go outside, slouch around the apartment in nothing but a T-shirt, smoke the grass you found in Mom’s desk, float in a scalding-hot bath, drink black coffee and feel as if the apartment is full of gray threads of cobweb… they mesh together round your body, weaving into a cocoon, drag across the parquet in pellets, like a convict’s ball. You’ll never achieve anything. You can’t work, not even as a courier. You’re no good for anything.

  You tried masturbating, but that didn’t help for long. At that time you still managed without any additional equipment, your fantasies were enough. Ever since you were little you liked to imagine yourself as a princess abducted by fierce bandits, or a young lady sold into the sultan’s harem. When you got a bit older, the pretentiousness of these scenes began to irritate you slightly, so gradually the settings lost their splendor and everything was reduced to the interaction of two or three bodies, ropes, a gag and a whip. The imaginary torment is better than thinking about what Mom will say when she finally gets back: the pain and the shame were the same as in reality, but your dark subterranean fantasies worked like an alchemical retort, smelting them into pleasure. It swept over you in a warm wave and retreated, leaving behind on the seashore snatches of thoughts, fragments of images, a despair so solid, it felt as if you could touch it with your damp fingers.

  Despair? No, this is not despair, 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 bulges of your face and the hairs stuck to your forehead, the gnawed ends of your fingers.

  One morning you woke up in a puddle of blood. At first you just thought your period had started, but then you realized that when you went to bed, you took a knife with you and covered the insides of your thighs with cuts as you were going to sleep. You couldn’t remember anything, not this time or the others. Fortunately the cuts weren’t deep and the knife hadn’t caught any veins, but you were frightened.

  You had to do something – and you forced yourself to go outside. You bought Megalopolis-Express from a newspaper kiosk and an article found by chance gave you the answer to the question “What should I do?” You phoned Marinka, and a week later you met your first dominant lover. He was called Nikita, and your body still responds to that name, even though eight years have gone by now. Nikita is far away, and none of your other playmates can console you either. You put your toys away in the cupboard and tell yourself that tomorrow after work you’ll definitely go visit someone, just in order not to stay home alone. Go visit someone, get drunk, come back home and fall asleep straight away.

  It would be good to visit Olya, you think, it would be good to sit in front of the TV with your arms round each other and watch Love Actually or some other romantic movie. Olya likes romantic movies the same way you like Italian horror movies. A good idea, but it won’t work – tomorrow’s Vlad’s birthday. Olya promised to help, cook, clean up, wash the dishes. A grown woman, and she still can’t say no to her brother, But then, you wouldn’t have said no to Lyova, if he asked you to do something for him. A pity, it’s hard to ask from America. Hey, Lyova. Would you like me to come over to New Jersey and wash the dishes?

  Yes, Lyova went away, Nikita went away, Vika went away, so many others disappeared off to God knows where, but Marinka’s still here. Ksenia’s on the point of recalling that old incident, the false rape, the childish sense of grievance. But you can’t stay annoyed with Marinka for long. When you get right down to it, some girls can’t say no to sex, others like to be beaten until they bleed – we all have our own strange tastes, it’s no big deal. So no more sitting here with your arms wrapped round your knees: pick up the phone and dial Marinka’s number. What are old friends for if you can’t go to see them when you feel totally wiped out?

  Hello, hello, says Ksenia, just you try telling me you’re busy tomorrow evening.

  10

  “LOOK, IT’S REALLY LOVELY, ISN’T IT?” – AND MARINA slips the T-shirt off one shoulder.

  Marina has a beautiful T-shirt: her lover brought it from California. It’s handmade, he says, the old ex-hippies make them, that is, simply hippies, because the ex-hippies all became yuppies, they all became VIPs, and CEOs. The T-shirt is covered in bright swirls of color, acid style it’s called. As it happens, Ksenia has never tried acid, she doesn’t use drugs at all, if you don’t count coffee, grass and tea. She hasn’t tried acid, but she knows what the word “acid” means as an adjective, and she knows Marina is very fond of this word, although she thinks Marina hasn’t tried acid either, but then, you can never quite be sure of anything with Marina. There are acid drawings hanging on the wall, the computer monitor on the bar stool is displaying acid patterns that are almost the same as the hand-made T-shirt given to Marina by her Californian lover. “With patterns like that, who needs acid,” says Marina, breathing out the sweet smoke.

  The T-shirt really is beautiful. With a T-shirt like that getting high is easy, with a joint or without one. Only you couldn’t go to the office in a T-shirt like that, that’s for sure. But Marina doesn’t have to go to the office, she doesn’t have any subordinates or any bosses, but she does have a handmade T-shirt that her lover brought from California.

  And now she slips that T-shirt off one shoulder. “Look,” she says, “i
t’s really lovely, isn’t it, look, I can’t see for myself, tell me, how do you like my little darling?” It’s not really all that beautiful, to be honest: there’s a large blurred pink patch on her skin, like a cloud, overlying the tattooed outlines of a dragon.

  “Wow!” says Ksenia, “that’s really super. But you used to have a butterfly there, what did you do with it?”

  Marina hides her shoulder back under the beautiful T-shirt, shakes her straw-yellow hair and knocks off her ash – oh, I haven’t smoked for so long thinks Ksenia – and smiles:

  “I used to have a butterfly, but I covered it over with the dragon. He emerged from the butterfly, like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, get it?”

  Of course, what’s not to get? Dragon emerges from butterfly, butterfly emerges from chrysalis, from the large blurred patch as pink as a Barbie doll box.

  “Remember the pink box Vika’s Barbie doll came in? She had the first one in the class, it cost crazy money, from abroad?”

  “Of course I remember,” says Marina. “You don’t forget your first Barbie, it’s like your first man.”

  Ksenia laughs. “You’ve definitely had more men than dolls.”

  “Go figure, I used to be so stupid,” says Marina, “such a fool, I wanted a girl so much, so that she could have my dolls, but now I understand that a boy’s much better. Just look at him, just look, only nine months old, and you can already see he’s a real man, my little Chinese mandarin, my little orange, my precious little sweetie pie.”