Butterfly Skin

by Sergey Kuznetsov

  But they still don’t understand anything, and then everything ends, the thread snaps, and someone else’s life shrivels away under your hands like a butterfly skin, and even if they have understood something, the understanding dies with them. Perhaps it is what kills them. Sometimes I think that no one is strong enough to endure such pain. Sometimes I am astonished that I am still alive.

  These girls, so beautiful, so touching in their defenseless nakedness, don’t understand a thing. And I live in the hope that perhaps one of the readers of the Moscow morning tabloids with the soul-chilling details of the latest victim of the Moscow Psycho, yes, that one of them will understand me. Because, when you read in the newspaper on your way to work that the body of an eighteen-year-old girl has been found with her own intestines wound round her neck and her severed hand stuck in her tattered vagina – when you read that, something has to change in the world around you, surely? You can’t just close the newspaper as if you’ve been reading an article about one more football match, a Duma election, or the details of the local pop-star’s new affair.

  That is precisely why I take what is left of them – so beautiful, so touching in their defenseless nakedness – to places where they can be found by people – mushroom pickers, young mothers with baby buggies, couples seeking solitude.

  I often think about suicidal killers who have selected a good vantage-point and fired off several clips from their automatic weapons before the police shot them dead. I think about the Chechens and the Arabs who have blown themselves up in the middle of festive crowds in Russia or Israel. The Washington sniper, or the two fans of Marilyn Manson who shot half a school before killing themselves in Littleton, Colorado. Whatever it was you wanted to say, your cry went unheard. You were written off to politics, insanity and the influence of pop-culture. We need to resolve the conflict in the Middle East, stop the war in Chechnya, introduce measures to prevent mental illness and ban rock concerts. Then the world will probably be a better place, won’t it?

  And even though the idea of dying at the dense heart of an explosion or being transformed into the happy rapid-fire chatter of a warm gun sometimes seems unbearably tempting to me, I still despise it a little. That is working with the masses. However much I might rely on the newspapers and TV, in the first instance I always address an individual – like the poet who shows his poems to his beloved before printing them in an edition of a thousand.

  When you address an individual, you speak far more sincerely than when you are trying to get through to all the people. I would like to believe that those who will read about me in the newspapers will appreciate my sincerity and perhaps, in the end, understand me.

  Sometimes I am frightened by the thought that everybody already knows all about what I am trying to say. That the people I meet in the street know as well as I do that they live in hell, but they have accustomed themselves to this idea, learned to live with it. That every one of them is surrounded by the same cocoon of despair and anguish. That I am a failure, the one lousy sheep in the flock, an idiot who has brought a revelation from the day before yesterday, the bearer of Bad News that nobody wants to hear, because they all know it already.

  Sometimes I think that everybody lives in hell, but they have accustomed themselves to this idea. But only for a moment, and then I calm down. No, that really can’t be true. It’s not possible to accustom yourself to hell, that’s what makes it hell.

  22

  THEY SAY THE MOSCOW SUBWAY ONCE USED TO BE bright and clean. It probably was too, at some time. But Ksenia never saw those days. Either they were over before she was born, or she doesn’t remember very well what the subway looked like when she traveled in it with her parents, not on her own. Olya now, she can’t stand going down under the ground, but Ksenia likes it.

  Olya says that a while ago she started smelling urine in the underground. That the smell wasn’t there seven years ago, when she’d just arrived in Moscow, but that it’s appeared now. Ksenia tries to remember more clearly – and it seems to her that it has always smelled like that. The smell has always been around – you just had to forget about it. But I try not to forget about it, thinks Ksenia, I don’t know why.

  She sits in a half-empty car, looking at the sticker with a picture of a baby chopped to pieces on the window opposite her. Ksenia knows that below it there is the laconic slogan “Thou shalt not kill,” or a little poem about the evil of abortion: murderers of those unborn/when your fiendish work is done/may your nails be bloody and torn. This child that has fallen to pieces makes Ksenia insanely angry, she thinks how she herself would gladly rearrange the faces of people who paste up things like that. With a razor, in roughly the same way as shown in the picture. But then, nobody else is taking any notice of the sticker; those four passengers facing Ksenia can’t see it, it’s up above their heads.

  Strange people ride the Moscow subway at half past midnight, thinks Ksenia. One man is tall, with hair that is unshorn and uncombed, wearing a long coat and jeans that are wet up to his knees. A bottle of beer is standing between his feet and his face can’t be seen, because he has lowered his head and his shaggy locks hide it. He’s probably sleeping, thinks Ksenia, but it would be really interesting to know, for instance, what color his eyes are, if his nose is long or short, if his expression is fierce or, on the contrary, good-natured. Maybe he looks like the charming fascist in the film Brother 2, or maybe he’s like uncle Yura, Mom’s friend, who disappeared from the scene a long time ago. Sitting beside him is a couple: a peroxide blonde, white jacket and a skirt that barely covers her podgy knees in black tights. She looks about thirty-five or forty, but the way blondes of that kind spend their lives, she could be twenty-five or even twenty-three, the same age as Ksenia. Her companion is an elderly man in a black Chinese down jacket, with the flaps of a gray suit jacket protruding from under it and trousers to match. A briefcase is standing on the floor between his feet. He has one arm round the blonde’s shoulders and is clutching her paw in his other hand. He has a dull wedding ring on his ring finger, but the blonde doesn’t have anything on her hand apart from a little cheap silver snake. A strange couple, who are they? Two people in Moscow on business? Lovers? A cheap whore and her client?

  Ksenia looks at the last passenger, a fat man who reminds her of one of the two hogs that little Chihiro’s parents turn into in the Japanese cartoon film, Spirited Away. He’s wearing a short sheepskin coat, unbuttoned, his shirt is stretched tight across the stomach that sags down over his trouser belt, one button has come off and through the gap she can see a black vest, or maybe hair. He has a dirty crimson scarf draped round his neck, all three of his chins are lying on his chest, his gray eyes are open and their gaze is surprisingly intelligent. Poor man, it’s probably some hormonal thing. God preserve us from such afflictions.

  Ksenia sits opposite them, all alone, a small, slightly built girl, Greek sheepskin coat, high boots, leather purse on her knees. She’s going home after visiting Vlad Krushevnitsky, the well known theater director (she hasn’t seen even one of his shows) and a regular at the Mix Club (she’s never been there even once), Olya’s brother – oh yes, that reason’s quite good enough.

  Despite what Olya had said, Vlad’s place was clean, well, just like any solitary male’s. Maybe even cleaner than solitary straights’ places. Naturally, Vlad didn’t look anything like the stereotype homosexual: he didn’t have bulging muscles, he didn’t wear leather trousers or a feather boa – at least not at home when he was expecting his young sister and her friend. Neither did he dye his hair or wear eyeliner, although in the bathroom Ksenia saw a collection of creams that any girl would have envied, except perhaps Olya, whose collection was even bigger. Vlad really did resemble Olya, with a certain distinctive expression, a strange combination of soft features and a fierce, intent gaze. Although, at those moments when Olya’s face softened, there was nothing left in her eyes but merriment – play snowballs, like little children, down the icy slide on her backside! – so Vlad’s face was m
ade up of Olya’s two halves: the Sunday Olya and the workday Olya.

  “Olya, bring us something from the kitchen to nibble with the drinks,” he said, and went into the sitting room, gallantly allowing Ksenia through first.

  “Something to drink, Ksenia? Don’t mind if I call you by your first name, do you?”

  So, he’s gallant, gentle, charming. He poured Jack Daniel’s and shouted: “Olya, bring some ice!” As if he was calling to a servant, really, just as if she was his housekeeper. Amazing that she allows herself to be treated that way. But why am I getting so uptight about it, after all – it’s their business, I shouldn’t interfere, I’m just a guest.

  Strange people live in Moscow apartments, thought Ksenia, examining the room. One wall was completely taken up by bookshelves, there were a couple of pictures hanging on another. Ksenia thought she recognized one of them: a Dutch artist, wasn’t it, who drew endless biomechanoid creatures? On another wall there was a man hanging upside down with one leg drawn up and his stomach slashed open so that his entrails tumbled out, straight onto his face.

  “A friend of mine painted that,” said Vlad, “he’s not in Moscow now, he’s traveling in South-East Asia. He sent me a letter from Cambodia recently, he says there’s a place where the skulls of all the people killed during all that mess are piled up. A huge mountain, and they had to put it behind glass because the tourists were pilfering them. A pity. Andrei would have brought me one. I’d have had a genuine Cambodian skull in the house.”

  What a nice man, thought Ksenia, God preserve us from brothers like that. A Cambodian skull, for fuck’s sake.

  Olya came back from the kitchen, ice in a big mortar, sliced French cheese, carbonade of beef, sliced tomatoes. Strange, at home Olya never served food like this, she just cut bits off things or broke them with her hands. Ksenia looked at Vlad’s well-groomed hands and thought: I wonder if he goes to the manicurist Liza twice a week too, so she can soak his fingers, trim the cuticles round the half-moons, polish the nails and gradually turn them into little works of art, exactly like his sister’s nails? Listening with half an ear, Ksenia heard that Vlad has been offered the chance to direct a play in a certain very fashionable theater, but there are absolutely no good plays, absolutely none. So he will clearly have to write it himself, and that’s why he invited Ksenia round – Ksenia, shit, not Ksenia and Olya, what a creep – to talk to her about her work. That, is, not actually about her work, but about the special project she’s doing.

  “Yes,” says Ksenia, “I know, Olya told me, of course. What is it that interests you?

  Her voice is gradually assuming an icy tone, a portent of anger. The special project that she is doing. That they are doing! She looks round at Olya – she’s sitting motionless in her chair, the bracelet on her wrist glitters slightly, her black eyes are deeper than usual.

  “I’m sure,” Vlad explains in the meantime, “that this killer is one of us, that he’s gay. Very many serial killers are homosexuals – you must know that, as a specialist. John Wayne Gacy Jr. killed more than thirty teenagers. Jeffrey Dahmer drilled holes in his lovers’ heads and poured acid into them, Joseph Kallinger even killed his own son, and the Fisher from the Moscow region admitted he didn’t have a family because he was afraid that if he had a son, he would kill him too. But he still killed eleven boys in his concrete basement, and he even killed some of them in front of others. And what about one of the first Russian serials, Anatolii Slivko? The legendary young pioneer leader, who tortured more than thirty boys and killed eight – supposedly all as part of an ‘experiment in survival.’ He was one of us too, you know! And just recently in Peter, Igor Irtyshov killed eight boys after raping them first. He ripped his last victim’s anus open with his bare hands and tore his guts out.”

  She looks at Vlad’s well-groomed hands, so much like his sister’s hands: the fingers are trembling slightly. Ksenia has never seen Olya’s fingers tremble, but she knows that trembling very well, the trembling of arousal. She lowers her eyes to look at her own hands: the fingers with the bitten nails are lying motionless on the arm of the chair.

  “But not just the ones who killed boys,” Vlad continues. “The mothers of Charlie Manson, Ottis E. Toole and Henry Lee Lucas sent them to the first year of school dressed as little girls. Robert Joseph Long, who killed nine women in the early eighties, was born with large female breasts, the famous William Hance, one of the first American serial killers, liked to dress up in women’s underclothes. And remember the killers who liked to work in pairs, the famous Roy Norris and Lawrence Bittaker, who adopted the nickname ‘Pliers’ because that was his favourite instrument. They picked up Californian girls on beaches and drove them off to secluded spots, where they tortured and raped them. They were caught when they started acting like this Moscow killer of yours: they dumped the dismembered bodies on the lawns of a suburb of LA. They liked imagining the respectable fathers of families finding that carrion under their windows early in the morning.”

  Look, Ksenia, look, she tells herself, this is what a man who is aroused by thoughts of violence and death looks like. Don’t turn your eyes away, how are you any better than him? What right do you have to condemn him? Maybe you should put your glass down on the table, get up out of your armchair and hug him, the way you hug Olya? Maybe this is your real family, your adopted mother and father? – and incidentally, they live separately too.

  “I want to do a play about this. About the fact that all those people were killed by the hypocrisy of society, killed by homophobia, by the closet that generations of homosexuals were locked into. I imagine the Moscow murderer as a titan, an evil genius, a spirit of the air imprisoned in a human shell. I want to do a play about the power that acts through him, about the power that oppresses all of us. About the power that is called ‘be like everyone else.’ Do you understand me, Ksenia? I’d like to make it a one-person show, just him sitting there on a chair and telling everyone about how he tried to become a real man, how he wanted to treat women the way his father treated his mother, how he was afraid of being a wimp, a weakling, a fag, a pansy, a queer. That’s what I’ll call the show: Fag. No, not because of Burroughs’ book, Queer, but in honor of that old TV program back during perestroika – you probably don’t remember it, Ksenia, you were too young. That’s what it was called, Fag, and it told the story of some poor young guy from Peter, I don’t remember what he did, Article 121 of the Soviet Criminal Code was still in effect, but I hadn’t been hiding who I was for a couple of years already. And I remember when I saw that program what I felt wasn’t fear, although of course there was fear too, but fury. And just at that moment I wanted to kill somebody – so, in memory of that moment I’ll call the play Fag. A play about the fact that anybody could be a serial killer.”

  Ksenia looks at the passengers. Strange people ride the Moscow subway at half past midnight. Any of them could be a serial killer. Now Lanky will throw his greasy hair back off his forehead, and he’ll have colorless eyes, thin bloodless lips, a mouth with no teeth in it. Lying in the pockets of his coat are a scalpel, a knife and surgical forceps. Hanging round his neck, under his T-shirt, a necklace of women’s nipples. Hanging from his ear lobe on hairs pulled out by the roots is a little bag of skin torn off the breast of the eighteen-year-old student Masha F. (the body was found three months ago in Bitsevo Park). Lying in the little bag are eyes gouged out of the faces of twenty-year-old Kristina P., a salesgirl in an all-night kiosk, and twenty-year-old Darya K., a resident of Rostov-on-Don. Analysis will discover his skin tissues under the nails of eight of the eleven victims – if the analysis is ever carried out, because now Lanky gets up, knocks over the bottle, hunches over and goes tumbling out of the open door. Ksenia never does get to see his face. Strange people ride the Moscow subway at half past midnight.

  “And all the time,” Vlad continues, “photos of the victims will be shown on the backdrop. Not photos of them mutilated and chopped to pieces, but ones where they’re young and happy, alive and i
n one piece. We have to make the straights in the audience want these girls, feel lust, get them aroused and make them feel their hard-ons as they listen to the story of how the girls were killed!”

  Vlad slapped his own crotch, slapped it with a well-groomed hand so much like Olya’s hand. Yes, Ksenia noticed, he really does have a hard-on. Not for me, I hope.

  “And then,” says Vlad, “those men in the audience must feel guilty. What’s this, they have to ask themselves, I hear about someone being skinned alive and I feel aroused? What a monster I am really! And if I can manage to convey that mixture of horror, arousal and guilt, if I can infect the audience with it, then I’ll be able to explain what makes a homosexual into a fag. Because this whole story is not about love for men or boys, it’s a story about horror, arousal and guilt. It’s a story about my parents, who spoke aloud about love, but behind closed doors they told me that if I ever laid a hand on a penis, I’d go blind. Later, when I was grown up, I learned that they often frighten boys like that, to stop them masturbating. They mean the boy’s own penis, you know, but for some reason I imagined my father’s huge one, the large penis of a grown man, which I had seen once when we went to the bathhouse. And I imagined myself touching this penis – and my eyes immediately melting out of their sockets. It was only here, in Moscow, that I realized I had relived the myth of Oedipus, who blinded himself after he killed his father. I’d like to kill mine, but I can’t, he died of cancer three years ago. When I was a kid I used to think: I want to kill him because he’s always shouting at Mom, especially in front of guests, but now I know I want to kill him because he couldn’t even tell the simplest of stories for frightening children properly. But he’s already dead, so that’s it.” Vlad takes a sip of whisky and looks at Ksenia with his well-groomed fingers clutching the glass tightly. “So I guess that’s why I want to do this play. To say that where horror, arousal and guilt meet, there’s always a corpse – real or imaginary.”