Butterfly Skin

by Sergey Kuznetsov

  They discuss banners and argue over whether they can use photographs of the victims.

  “I think they’ll be clickable,” says Ksenia, “so what’s the problem?”

  “The other sites might refuse to put them up,” Olga objects, “something like that happened a year ago, during the theater siege. But maybe I’m confusing things.”

  “What have the other sites got to do with it,” you unexpectedly find yourself saying, “they have families. Have a heart, girls.”

  Everybody falls silent for a minute, and then Ksenia says:

  “All right, then we’ll use banners with parts of the map of Moscow: say, the name of a subway station and an arrow with the words ‘Psycho kills here.’”

  “I’ll have that done for the morning,” says Marina, smiling and shaking her light hair.

  You always used to think it was best not to sleep with your colleagues – after all, apart from the female journalists there are the female designers, page makers and photographers. Probably you were wrong, it’s actually really nice to know, as you part this evening in the hallway, that you’ll see each other again in the office, where once again Ksenia will be clad in the benevolent armor of a businesswoman, the armor that slowly peels away under your kisses and embraces and shatters completely with that ear-splitting final shriek. Perhaps for the first time in your life you’re content with yourself both as a man and a professional and Ksenia is the witness to both your triumphs.

  It seems that this evening, as you raise a glass to the start of your project, you don’t feel like a successful failure any longer.

  20

  THEY PLAYED SNOWBALLS, LIKE LITTLE CHILDREN, slid down icy slides, first on their feet, and then on their backsides, on a piece of cardboard: so much for Ksyusha’s sheepskin coat, so much for Olya’s fur. In a cheap eatery they drank vodka out of little plastic glasses and gave the brush off to two teenagers who took them for two girls their own age at first, and then for mother and daughter. They showed their Moscow residency registrations to a flaxen-haired police lieutenant, and he handed back their passports with the words, “Carry on enjoying yourselves, girls.”

  They still had three days left to relax and enjoy themselves. The two grown-up girls, one, let us say, a journalist and the other an IT manager, but both successful professionals, only five minutes away from stardom, the creators of the most popular site of the year just beginning, have made themselves hoarse singing karaoke in the Yakitoria and now they are soothing their throats with hot saké.

  “I think this is the best New Year holiday of my entire life,” says Olya, who has almost managed to forget that Oleg wasn’t able to get to her place either on December 31 or on January 1, and she wasn’t even expecting him after that, because on the morning of the 2nd he and his family had jetted off to Thailand, and so this was the third day Olya and Ksyusha had been doing the rounds of Moscow’s clubs, restaurants and snack bars, chasing after each other and falling backward into the rare snowdrifts with their arms and legs held out, leaving an imprint like a five-pointed star or a snowflake.

  “It definitely is for me,” answers Ksyusha, who has either really got drunk for the third day running, or is simply so happy that the mere memory of this happiness should be enough to last her for the rest of her life. The year ended splendidly, they launched the site, she consigned Sasha to oblivion, released her erotic stress, and now she was moving into the New Year young and free, a girl ready for any changes up ahead.

  On December 31 Alexei had phoned to wish her a happy New Year; she was a bit surprised, she didn’t know whether to put this down to zeal from a subordinate, a confirmation of friendship or an attempt to suggest to her that good things come in threes and their two evenings together should be continued in the New Year. We can sort that out in the New Year, thought Ksyusha and simply put Alexei out of her mind. It was good with him, but he wasn’t her type. He ought to be better at the boogie-woogie than at sex, but she’d get round to that later.

  “I’ve remembered a great joke,” says Olya, pouring out the remains of the saké, “about a teacher in an elementary school. After the holidays she walks into the classroom and starts dictating a math problem: two young, interesting, cultured girls bought six bottles of beer in a shop for thirty kopecks (I don’t actually remember for how much, it’s an old joke, but that’s not important), a bottle of vodka for four rubles twelve kopecks, ‘Seawave’ processed cheese for, let’s say, fourteen kopecks and a bottle of cheap sweet ‘Crimea’ wine… oh my God, why did we drink that wine!?”

  Ksyusha laughs, finishes her saké and walks toward the door.

  “Your place or mine?” asks Ksyusha.

  “Mine,” Olya declares. “It’s closer.”

  “But I’ve got a New Year tree,” Ksyusha parries.

  Two young interesting girls, successful professionals only five minutes away from stardom, stop a car in holiday-time Moscow. They pile into the back seat and both try to explain the way, interrupting each other. The driver, with bristly gray hair and blue eyes that have faded to white, turns down the old Soviet songs on the radio and says:

  “Don’t worry, girls, I’ve been behind the wheel for thirty years. Just tell me the address and I’ll get there.”

  They drive through the Moscow streets, there are festive lights strung across facades without any walls behind them, and the gaping windows of the gutted buildings are full of the black night air.

  “Just look at what Luzhkov’s doing, will you?” says the driver. “Have you heard, there’s a plan to knock down all of Tverskaya Street? Can you imagine it, girls? Thirty years I’ve been in Moscow, and I don’t recognize the city. It’s like after the war, honest it is.”

  “Never mind,” says drunken Olya, “they’ll put up new buildings, better than the old ones. Moscow’s like that… it can take anything.”

  Olya’s from Peter, she has a special attitude to the capital city, but the driver doesn’t know that, he turns the radio down again and carries on abusing Luzhkov. He smells of sweat, but there’s not a whiff of stale alcohol and that surprises Ksyusha, who is still regretting that they don’t sell saké to take out at the Yakitoria. Absorbed in these important thoughts, she misses the moment when the driver moves on to discussing the war in Chechnya.

  “My father and his friends came back from the Second World War, so I knew them, they were good-hearted people. But they come back from Chechnya mean.”

  “The men are like the war they fight,” Ksyusha snarls, already wondering how she can ask the garrulous driver to shut up. Really, why do conversations about politics have to come as a free supplement with every journey across Moscow?

  “And they say there’s a psycho on the loose in the city,” the driver continues, “so you take care now, girls. Of course, he won’t bother two of you, but just as a matter of principle.”

  “I know,” replies Ksyusha, immediately interested, “but where did you hear about it?”

  “They were just talking about it on the radio, I picked up Moscow Echo by mistake, they said there was everything about him in the computer, like, on the web: who he kills, how, when he kills again.”

  The two young interesting girls, successful professionals, only five minutes away from stardom, start hugging each other and laughing loudly on the back seat, and the blue-eyed driver scratches his stubbly gray hair, mutters something to himself and turns the radio back up.

  * * *

  “It’s a success, Olya, it’s a success!” Ksyusha shouts, skipping up and down in front of the computer. She hasn’t taken off her sheepskin coat yet, the snowflakes are turning into little puddles on the parquet floor, and the corner of the kilim by the bed is already getting wet. Olya comes back out of the kitchen, where she was putting the kettle on, her short light-tinted hair stuck to her forehead, a fluffy sweater with a high neck, flared jeans with a flowery pattern stretched tight round her thighs. Yes, you couldn’t turn up for negotiations in the bank dressed like that. My God, how good
it feels to forget about the dress code for a week! She glances over Ksyusha’s shoulder and says in a satisfied voice:

  “Fifth place, congratulations!”

  In her time she has worked on projects that climbed into the top ten on Rambler, and not in the subject listings either. She’s thirty-five years old, and for five of those years she has worked in the Russian internet, she’s not easily surprised. It’s much more fun to slither down icy slides and play snowballs like little children, drink vodka from little plastic glasses and saké from little ceramic jiggers.

  “Attagirls, good for us,” says Ksyusha, skipping up and down and shrugging her sheepskin coat off straight onto the floor. “We did it! Yes!”

  She slaps her little hand with the bitten fingernails against Olya’s well-groomed hand and the phone immediately rings, as if the clap has woken it up.

  “Oh, shit,” says Ksyusha, reaching for the phone. “Hello, it’s me, Happy New Year, who’s there?”

  She hears her mother’s voice and a wave of fright sweeps over her – what’s happened? Mom never phones for no reason. Is everybody all right? What’s wrong? What a hoot, they actually mentioned my name? This is a big deal, Mom, supermegabig. What do you mean, why? Because it’s my job. Because I’m the editor of the online newspaper Evening.ru, a journalist, even a bit of an IT manager, Mom, but in any case, a successful professional, and this is my new project. What do you mean, you took a look at it, and it’s nothing but filth? What do you expect to find on a web page about a psycho who’s killed eleven girls between the ages of fifteen and thirty-eight in just the last eight months? No, Mom, I can’t close down the project, no, I won’t withdraw my name from it.

  * * *

  Ksyusha never cries. But now she stands there with her face buried in Olya’s fluffy sweater, right between the two breasts that are size B at best, and Olya strokes her hair and says: “Don’t worry, Ksyushenka, everything will be all right, you know I love you” – and feels that for a brief moment her strange fantasy has become reality and she has acquired a daughter she can be proud of, the daughter she has loved and waited for all her life. Everything will be all right, Ksyushenka, she says, let’s go and have some tea, let’s go and have a wash, and I’ll wipe away your tears and kiss you on the forehead, and put you to bed, just don’t cry.

  “I’m not crying,” says Ksyusha, the good editor, the successful professional only five minutes away from stardom – and she lifts up her face with streaks of mascara on her cheeks, and Olya laughs and says: “oh sure, your face is all wet and your mascara’s run.”

  “That’s the snow, Olya, the snow,” Ksyusha replies, “you know I never cry, it’s just the weather, it fell off my hair, look how hard it’s snowing outside.”

  And now here they are sitting in the kitchen, two young interesting girls who are suddenly sober, as if there never was any vodka in little plastic cups or saké in ceramic jiggers, drinking tea from mugs with the word “Rambler” on one and “Evening.ru” on the other. Without any makeup Ksyusha’s face looks completely defenseless. Yes, thinks Olya, like that I’d say she looks eighteen, certainly not twenty-three. Twenty-three minus eighteen would be five, twelve plus five, yes at seventeen I could easily have had a child, that is, of course, if I hadn’t waited until twenty-two to lose my virginity, and then only because I was madly in love.

  “She’s right, of course, she’s right,” says Ksyusha, “now her friends will think I work in some online tabloid like the MK newspaper, they won’t even go and look at what we’ve done. Probably they’re right, it is propaganda for violence, maybe we really are provoking the psycho into committing more murders?”

  Olya leans down to her and takes her hand. Covers the little palm with her large, well-groomed fingers that manicurist Liza works on twice a week, soaking them, cutting away the cuticles round the half-moons, polishing and varnishing. She takes the hand between her palms, looks into Ksyusha’s deep black eyes and says:

  “My little girl, no one provoked Chikatilo, that was in Soviet times, everything was kept quiet, and what happened? Fifty-something dead bodies. We both read it. Nobody provoked Ottis E. Toole and Henry Lucas, and they boasted that they’d killed more than five hundred people. In Gilles de Rais’s time the internet didn’t exist, I don’t think there were even any newspapers – and did that help the poor little children? Don’t upset yourself, Ksyusha, we’re doing everything right. It’s your job, you’re the editor of an online newspaper, you make the news. Remember, every time terrorists take hostages, they blame the press and say that if the journalists didn’t make such a fuss, it wouldn’t happen.”

  “Maybe that’s right?” says Ksyusha.

  “No,” replies Olya, “I think it’s completely the other way round: if someone wants to be famous, wants to produce a dramatic effect, nothing will stop him. If you don’t write about terrorists, they’ll poison the water supply and explode nuclear bombs. If this psycho really wanted people to know about him, he’d start killing twice as often, three or four times as often, even more brutally. So that the rumors would circulate without any help from the newspapers. So what we’re doing is good, it’s necessary. Don’t upset yourself – a person’s worst enemies are his closest neighbors. My Vlad’s no bundle of joy, you know that. The important thing you must remember is: your parents should be proud of you. They have to be.”

  Of course, I could say that I’m proud of you, thinks Olya, but that probably wouldn’t be any help to you. You know very well that I love you and I’m proud of you and happy to be your friend – but, unfortunately I am only your friend, and not your mother, and you’re not my daughter, because how could I possibly have such a grown-up daughter?

  The phone rings again, “I’ll say you’re not here,” says Olya.

  “No, no, I’ll answer it,” and she runs into the room and comes back, shrugging her pointy little shoulders.

  “It was Dad. He said he’d heard about me on the radio and called to say well done.”

  “There, you see,” says Olya, and Ksyusha thinks that her dad’s praise doesn’t mean much, he never achieved anything in his life, so he can’t really judge how successful his daughter is. “There, you see,” Olya repeats, and she looks in Ksyusha’s cupboard and finds the bottle of Baileys that she brought the last time and, and there are just two glasses left, “So let’s drink to the New Year, to our success, to all our wishes coming true in the New Year.”

  They open out the bed, Olya comes out of the shower, wrapped in the spare sheet instead of a towel, switches on Ksyusha’s hairdryer and her light-tinted hair starts dancing around her head. If you don’t go to work for four days, the wrinkles on your forehead dissolve, the features of your face soften, and even if you look in the big mirror in the bathroom at the other side of Moscow, you’ll see that time has stepped back from you just a tiny little bit, Olga Krushevnitskaya, a thirty-five-year-old woman who should forget at least once a year that she’s a successful IT manager, a genuine professional and a specialist in numbers.

  While Olya dries her hair, Ksyusha stands in the bathroom with the door closed, biting her lip. Olya said it was late and she didn’t want to go home, and Ksyusha said “of course,” and now she’s angry with herself, because it’s awkward to turn on the vibrator with Olya there and it’s altogether too awkward to take the nipple clamps out of the box. She goes to the small shelf, picks up her vanity case, unzips it, takes out a little mirror, wraps it in a towel and breaks it against the edge of the bath. Then, sitting on the floor, she selects the very sharpest splinter and jabs it with all her might into the inside of her thigh.

  Olya has already dried her hair. She looks at her sweater hanging on a chair and sees a black spot where Ksyusha’s mascara has smudged across it. That’s a strange picture, thinks Olya, like the Turin Shroud or maybe a Rorschach test.

  21

  IN A CONCRETE BASEMENT, ON THE SMALL PLOT OF land round my house, in the forest near Moscow or in an elevator, I try to tell people about mysel
f. If I were a writer, words would be my helpers. But the way things are, my helpers are a knife, a scalpel and a blowtorch.

  But these girls, so beautiful, so touching in their defenseless nakedness, still innocent, even though they start having sex at fourteen nowadays – they don’t understand a thing. They ask “why me?” they think at that moment about themselves, about their own inevitable death, they can’t understand that perhaps what is happening to them is more to do with the whole world than it is with them.

  Since they were children they have been raised to believe that the world is beautiful and wise. The glossy paper of the magazines, the glitter of the TV screen, the daily lies of the newspapers – all these conceal the truth, but not the truth about terrorism, corruption or theft, no, they conceal the truth that the world is as full of suffering as a freshly carved hole is full of blood.

  It’s not true that when you kill you forget everything. At every moment of my existence I am aware that what I do is absolutely monstrous. But that does not stop me – and so my very existence proves that there is something wrong with the world. I think it would be easier for me to accept this world if I did not exist.

  And so all I want to do is destroy the lies, to speak out so that people can no longer pretend they don’t hear me. So they can’t carry on living as if they don’t know. I cut off the nipples, rip open the abdomens, melt the fat of bodies that are still alive with a blowtorch – and that is my way of speaking.

  I scream with their voice, I send them to bear witness to my pain and torment, to the world in which I live. I slice through skin as if I am ripping apart the curtain of falsehood and lies. I take out the hot kidneys, the liver, the heart as if I am touching the raw bloody centre of being with my bare hands, the place where there are no lies, where suffering and despair are no longer cloaked by anything. The scream becomes a howl, then a groan. These are the sincerest sounds. Pain knows no falsehood.