Butterfly Skin

by Sergey Kuznetsov

  I’m not going to get any boogie-woogie today, thinks Ksenia, no dancing to Indigo Swing and Jump4Joy, no chance to invite Alexei to join me. What is it Pasha wants to say to me, he’s not a stupid man, and the most important thing is that he has flair.

  Pasha puts a folder of printouts on the desk.

  “You asked me to check this man out through my contacts,” he says. “Read it here, I won’t let you take it out.”

  Ksenia reads, and Pasha carries on thinking about the serial killer, about Putin’s politics, about piles of rubble on the streets of cities. Even so, he thinks, the ruins are produced by inanimate machines. A detonator, hexogen, a trigger mechanism, a bomb hatch. The person who presses the button doesn’t see the bloody scraps of bodies go flying through the air. The dust from the ruins doesn’t settle on his clothes. The person who takes the decisions doesn’t see their consequences. He lives in the same unreal world as all of us.

  “Impressive,” says Ksenia, closing the folder, “and a girlfriend of mine was thinking of setting up a business with him.”

  “I wouldn’t advise it, Ksenichka,” replies Pasha.

  “A horrible man.” She carefully lays the folder in the middle of the desk.

  No, thinks Pasha, he’s not horrible, he’s an ordinary man. The one who presses the button, the one who sets the machine working.

  “Not so very horrible,” he says, “it’s just that in his business the rules were different from the very beginning.”

  “Haven’t you ever wanted to change the rules?” asks Ksenia. “For instance, we could behave as if there was no Putin TV and Khodorkovsky wasn’t in jail.”

  Pasha laughs and thinks: she has drive, she’s a beautiful girl. I wonder if she has a boyfriend – or whatever it is they’re called nowadays?

  “You could have said yes to us today,” says Ksenia, “after all, everything you said was just excuses. Explain to me what the problem is. Don’t you believe in this project?”

  “Listen, Ksenia,” he says, “we both know this is an excellent idea. It’s a commercial dead cert. But you know, you said he…” – Pasha nods toward the folder – “…is a horrible man. But then, all he’s done is pay the money, give the orders and, and fly off to Spain or Greece to give himself an alibi. We can understand him. For him the murders – if there really have been any murders – are just a way to redistribute property. Redirect the cash flows. When you get right down to it, he’s been living in a world of abstractions for a long time already. But this man you want to set up the site about – he lives in the same city as we do. Goes to the same shops. Probably eats in the same restaurants. And what he does, he does himself. With his own hands.”

  16

  You got away, the only one, you got away.

  You had little feet and hands

  And shoulder-length brown hair

  A pubis shaved with just a thin line of hair untouched by the razor

  And I thought a cutthroat had never touched your body before

  There are so many things you don’t know in this life

  But we have time

  I undressed you, unconscious, on the table in the concrete basement

  And stood there for a moment, listening

  As a string started quivering somewhere inside me

  Like a tuning fork responding to an old familiar melody

  Like a faded leaf clinging desperately to the branch

  In the gusts of autumn wind

  You had a Walkman, I crushed it under my heel

  You won’t need it now, I’ll teach you a different music

  The faded leaves out on my lot

  Could not cling to the branches

  They lie on the cold ground and wait for you

  I ran my hand over your stomach

  Gently rounded, like a little hill

  Perhaps you thought “I’ve got fat this summer, now I must lose weight”

  Believe me, I have known many women

  Closer than anybody else

  I tell you, as sincerely as the razor

  Slicing through the skin:

  You have a lovely body

  Your body is lovely from its outer coverings

  To its inner depths, to the moist pink depths of the mouth

  The red muscles, the yellow fat, the blue veins

  Visible even now beneath your summer suntan skin

  Two white triangles, front and back,

  Where the swimsuit was

  Now you have nothing to hide

  Something quivers inside me, like music playing in a crushed Walkman

  Wait, and you will hear it too, you will respond

  You said “I must lose weight, slim down”

  Let me tell you that losing weight is very simple

  Like a tree dropping its leaves in autumn

  I’ll teach you how when you wake up

  Her eyes were closed, but I remembered their color

  They were brown with amber-yellow veins

  When I first saw them, I could feel

  The world grow still around me, curling up like a scroll

  Brown eyes with amber-yellow veins

  The plump lips of a teenage girl

  Who kissed all evening in the empty corridors at school

  While dance music thundered downstairs in the hall

  Oh, what a shame to stretch that mouth with a rag or a gag

  But I wanted so much to go outside with you

  Where the faded leaves were lying on the cold ground

  Waiting for you

  I gave you an injection to make you sleep soundly

  And then I took a needle and thread

  My granny taught me to darn things

  She said “No need to throw away what can be darned”

  Yes, the war generation, poverty and hunger

  They weren’t bothered about being overweight at your age

  They were hungry all the time anyway

  I finished and then wiped away the blood

  Licked it off with my tongue but it still wouldn’t stop

  It was like a kiss

  My eyelashes trembled on your cheek

  I tied your hands together

  Little hands like a child’s

  They could easily slip out of the ropes

  I tied them tighter

  I put shackles on your legs so you could walk, but not too fast

  I knew straight off you weren’t one of those girls

  Who give themselves with tears and make no effort

  To get their own way

  We will have plenty of time, I said to you

  We’ll get to know each other better

  I’ll show you things you never thought you’d see

  Your body will reveal its mysteries

  And you will know there was no need to worry

  About how much you weigh

  You’re not really heavy, I can easily carry you in my arms

  I’ll tell you how I’ve lived for all these years

  Without you here beside me

  Tell you about the world where I was born and I grew up

  I’ll lead you into its forbidden groves

  Where flayed skin hangs on branches

  Like faded leaves

  Where a little boy can’t sleep

  Listening to the trembling growing louder

  As if someone is choosing music

  To make the tuning fork respond

  You sat there on the porch

  Faded leaves lying at your feet

  Your lips pressed tightly closed

  The white triangle below your stomach

  Bisected by the thin line of hair

  Glowed in the evening twilight

  It was a peaceful autumn evening

  In the cool air

  Sounds carried well

  Somewhere in the distance a dog barked

  And a train hooted

  You opened your eyes

  You had brown eyes with amber veins


  When I first saw them, I could feel

  The world grow still around me, curling up like a scroll

  Like a fallen leaf on the ground

  You didn’t try to stand, you simply tensed your arms

  As though testing the strength of the ropes

  Red muscles, interwoven tissues

  Little mounds on your forearms

  Under the skin that was still tanned

  And then you suddenly did something with your face

  I didn’t understand what happened

  A fountain of blood spurted out

  Your mouth opened

  And you screamed

  It was a peaceful autumn evening

  In the cool air

  Sounds carried well

  Before I realized what was happening

  I darted to your side but you kept on screaming

  A single note, like some broken mechanical toy

  AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

  I darted to you, and in one swift stroke

  I slit your throat

  Forgive me.

  It was autumn, people closing up their dachas for the winter

  The whole village full of visitors

  Sounds carried well in the cool air

  Now there will be nothing more

  No music and no trembling

  I’ll never know how your skin comes away

  Or peel your breasts, like two halves

  Of a single orange

  The sound broke off as if someone stamped on a Walkman

  You clung to life for one more second

  Like an autumn leaf in a cold wind

  Clinging to the branch

  You lay there in my arms

  Your lips, the plump lips of a teenage girl

  Were torn to shreds

  I didn’t think you had such strength in you

  Maybe my granny taught me darning badly

  Or I was a careless pupil

  While the dance music thundered downstairs in the school hall

  I wanted to kiss you in the empty corridors

  I wanted to walk with you up the dark stairs of a school

  Where every classroom holds new pain and new humiliation

  And the graduation diploma is a gob of spittle in the face

  And a shout of “get lost”

  I was the only pupil in that school

  I’m still amazed that they made such a big building for me

  My dad, mom, granddad and two grannies who survived the war

  But failed to teach me to darn properly

  I took you in my arms and carried you to the basement

  You were really light, believe me

  You didn’t need to worry about your weight

  I put you on the table where a few hours earlier

  I undressed you, and then turned out the light

  Standing on the steps, I turned to look:

  The white triangle below your stomach

  Glowed in the darkness of the cellar

  Bisected by the thin line of hair

  Like a razor

  17

  IT’S EASY TO BE UNFAITHFUL TO YOUR WIFE. ESPECIALLY if you happen to work in one of the liberal professions. You can be delayed at work, you don’t have to sit in the office all day long and, when all’s said and done, you can even work at weekends: the latest issue has to be put to bed, or you need to do an exclusive interview. The important thing is to find a place, because finding a woman is no problem. Women in the liberal professions are liberal-minded when it comes to friendly sex. But it’s better not to sleep with your colleagues – apart from the female journalists there are always the female designers, page makers and photographers.

  Three years ago I even met a girl courier, only sixteen years old. She was as curious as a little squirrel and every time I came up with a new place and new position for her to give herself to me in, teaching her the psychogeography of the city and sexual acrobatics at the same time. We opened the season in a cubicle of the editorial office restroom, where I dragged her after the bottle of wine with which we had celebrated her first pay packet. Then came an attic, the stairway of a Stalinist skyscraper, a basement, where my courier suddenly started feeling dizzy and I had to drag her back out into the fresh air, stumbling over the pipes and tearing my jacket. Then the driver’s cab of a dump truck that had been left unlocked overnight, a building still under construction and – the brilliant crowning moment of our affair – a room in the Rossiya Hotel, where I saw her completely naked for the first time: her navel was pierced and she had a little rose tattooed on her left buttock. The girl used to wear boots with thick soles and she only put on a skirt for her assignations with me – because it was too awkward taking off the trousers with numerous pockets that were her uniform on every other day. That evening in the hotel we completely satisfied our mutual curiosity and when we parted, I think we took away only the very best of memories.

  I knew all the places where I passed the time with my little courier very well. With my practiced eye I could tell immediately which entrance would be best for our next brief encounter. I prefer the ones where the elevator and the stairs are separate and you can feel safe on the landing of the top floor. As I grew older, however, I started preferring girls who had their own apartments. Fortunately, there were more and more of those, nowadays even students try to rent a place to avoid being crammed in with the old folks, never mind Ksenia, who’s my boss, after all, and not even the memory of her lips clasped round my prick can change that fact. But even if we forget about that, it really would be embarrassing for a respectable grown-up man to carry his young companion off to a basement, like some spotty teenager. There were still hotels, but they have been getting more expensive with every year that passes, and I can’t bring myself to pay a fifth of my monthly salary for two hours in my lover’s arms. I’m a family man after all, the father of two children, the husband of my wife.

  It’s easy to be unfaithful to your wife. Especially if your wife also happens to work in the liberal professions and has a liberal outlook on life, if you have an open marriage and she is willing to close her eyes to your infidelities. She sits on top of you, closes her eyes and starts swaying smoothly to and fro until she suddenly explodes into a long, drawn-out sigh and collapses, pressing down on you with her heavy breasts and scattering her red hair that is starting to turn gray. Holding her carefully by the buttocks, you make two or three thrusts into her and shoot your load too. And that’s it, finito, you can open your eyes. In our sexual duet Oxana assigns the passive role to me, and even that doesn’t happen very often. It’s a long time since I last managed to persuade her to vary our games – the times when the young student of the Russian University for the Humanities demonstrated the fundamentals of sexual acrobatics to me on the carpet in her parents’ parlor were consigned to oblivion long ago. She likes to be on top, and I don’t know what’s more important here – subtle points of physiology or the desire to dominate. In our family life the missionary position has been an exotic exception. The last time we tried it was probably on the day when Oxana refused to let me go to Chechnya.

  It’s easy to be unfaithful to your wife. Especially if you know why you do it. If you wake up one morning with the feeling that your life is passing by pointlessly, squeezed between the routine of work and the routine of family. I love my job and I love my family, but I resent being an ordinary correspondent who does an occasional interview for a second-flight online newspaper. In professional terms, I’m a successful failure. Successful – because I do actually earn the kind of money I can bring home without feeling ashamed. A failure – because after a year even I can’t recognize my own articles. Everything would have been different if I’d had the talent to become a columnist like the ones who write for Gazette – then my friends would quote my columns to each other when they met. Or if I could have gone to Chechnya.

  I don’t regret the choice I made. I chose my family, but even in my family I still feel like a successfu
l failure. My children love me, my wife supports me at difficult moments. In the final analysis, we drag this cart along together – my interviews in Evening.ru and Oxana’s articles in Harper’s Bazaar or Elle, added together, provide our breakfast, lunch and dinner, which is what five billion of the six billion inhabitants of the Earth toil for. I’m a very successful failure, I love my wife and my children. But I feel cramped in our life, just as the four of us are cramped in the two-room flat left to us by Oxana’s parents.

  Sexual acrobatics with women I hardly even know – that was the only war I could set out for. Basements where water slops under your feet, stairways where the glass from broken bottles crunches under the soles of your shoes, abandoned buildings scheduled for demolition, a hoarse cry, a palm covering a mouth – for me these are Gudermes, Mozdok and Grozny, which I never visited. I never made it as a journalist, but at least as a man I don’t feel like a loser. I remember all of them, from the young girl courier with the pierced navel to the forty-year-old American journalist with whom I celebrated Yeltsin’s victory with oral sex in the sumptuous luxury of the Radisson-Slavyanskaya Hotel. All of them from the first-year student Natasha, who seduced me six months after my wedding, to Ksenia, whose ear-splitting shriek I only heard for the first time last week. These memories are my invisible trophies, photographs brought back from places where I didn’t have to feel like a failure.

  It’s easy to be unfaithful to your wife. You just have to know the boundary that you must not cross. You just have to remember all the time that these women are doomed to become memories, invisible trophies, and your wife will be with you unto death. It’s very easy to respect your wife, especially if you’ve lived with her for ten years and you have two children. Sexual acrobatics is impossible with a body you know as well as you do your own; it’s like trying to kiss yourself on the heel. Your bodies have been ground to fit each other, they have no need of superfluous movements as they sway in synchronized motion on the waters of Oblivion in the most erotic rhythm a man and a woman can know. This rhythm is called “we shall grow old together,” and it is measured out by the water boiling in the kettle in the morning, the New Year chimes on TV and the rare long, drawn-out sighs in the air of the bedroom at night. Every morning you wake up together and every night you go to sleep together, every day you watch the gray hairs growing through the red tresses, every month you breathe in the smell of unborn children leaving her womb when their time comes. And when Oxana is sleeping beside you, you put your arms round her and as you fall asleep you wonder what invisible trophies her memory holds. Sexual acrobatics is impossible with a body you know as well as you do your own; and so is infidelity.