Butterfly Skin

by Sergey Kuznetsov

  Strange people ride the Moscow subway at half past midnight. In his briefcase the Business Trip Man has a gag, chloroform and a rope. As they walk through a dark alley, he will furtively take out the bottle, moisten a piece of cloth and cover the blonde’s mouth with it, just as they are passing a car parked in the shadow. He will tie her up, stick the gag in her mouth and hide her in the trunk. Then he’ll start the car, check by the light of the headlamps that he hasn’t left any clues and drive to the place where he has set up his torture chamber. On the way he will stop at McDonald’s and take his time drinking a strawberry milkshake, picturing the hell the tightly bound girl is going through every minute he spends savoring the pink frothy liquid.

  Ksenia sees this as clearly as in a movie – and at that moment the couple get up and walk to the door, the blonde laughs and hangs her cheap purse over her shoulder, the Business Trip Man grabs his briefcase and in the doorway he looks back at Ksenia with bleary, unseeing eyes. Ksenia watches through the window as they walk along the platform, still arm-in-arm.

  Dear girl, Ksenia wants to cry out, take your little hand out of his arm. Wherever you might have met this man, no matter how long you might have known him, whatever bonds there might be between you – run, run and don’t stop. Set the heels of your cheap boots clattering along the frozen Moscow streets and your short skirt flapping above your podgy knees. Take off that white jacket, it’s too conspicuous in the darkness, run, run quickly. Try to hide as well as you can, and may the silver snake on your finger protect you.

  But the train is already leaving the station, and Ksenia is left alone in the car with the final passenger. Yes, strange people ride the Moscow subway at half past midnight, thinks Ksenia, and at that moment the hog raises his eyes and looks at her intently, keenly, straight in the face.

  “Why are you telling me all this?” she asked Vlad. “It’s not very likely I can help you write this play. Everything I know is on the site, so…”

  Vlad put his glass down on the coffee table.

  “I don’t know why,” he said, “I guess I want to ask if it’s possible. What do you think of the idea? Are these murders like what I’m talking about?”

  “I don’t know,” Ksenia replied, “but what does it matter? In any case, you’re telling your story. About horror, arousal and shame. It doesn’t matter how things really were for this psycho.”

  “Yes, yes, it doesn’t matter,” Vlad repeated after a pause, “thanks, it doesn’t matter. What I really wanted to say was something else, I thought it would be such a stylish, dynamic show, nonconformist, in the style of Gregg Araki and Fight Club, but now I don’t even know if I’m going to stage it. It’s not just that it’s a very personal story, well, about my mother and father, what I told you just now. It’s our job to tell personal stories, I know that. I’m not ashamed of it, not even slightly ashamed. A grown man shouldn’t feel ashamed of his feelings. Ultimately it’s nobody’s business but mine and my parents’. I feel I can’t go on living if I don’t talk about it, if I just say nothing. My silence will turn everything I do – as a director, as a man, as a lover – into a lie.”

  “Yes, you’re right,” said Ksenia, “of course you must stage this play. It’s a powerful story.”

  She felt awkward: she never went to the theater, she avoided theater-lovers and people who worked in the arts. Marina was her model of a creative person – and now this man, who was old enough to be her father, had confessed his intimate vision to her.

  “You know, Ksenia,” Vlad continued, “there’s only one person whose opinion is important to me. And if not for you, Ksenia, I would never have been able to tell Olya about this. Because they’re her parents too, after all. They’re her mom and dad, our mom and dad.”

  Ksenia looked across at Olya, sitting in an armchair with her hands over her face, in a pose of still mourning. All the way through their conversation neither Vlad nor Ksenia had looked in her direction even once.

  “I’m afraid that now she’ll never want to speak to me again,” says Vlad, still not looking at Olga. “In reality, I haven’t had a father or a mother for a long time, and I know I’ll never have children. She’s the only family I have.”

  His voice breaks off. He seems about to burst into tears. The ice has melted in the mortar; the empty glasses are standing on the table. Olya takes her hands away from her face, those well-groomed hands so much like her brother’s hands. She goes over to Vlad and says:

  “Stop it. You’re the eldest. Don’t you dare cry. You’re my brother and I love you. You’re the only family I have too” – and she put her arms round him.

  Ksenia notices that even at this moment they don’t look at each other, but look at her, as if she attract their eyes, or maybe she becomes a living camera who has to preserve this picture forever on her retina: brother and sister embracing in the middle of the room and gazing straight into the lens like in a traditional family photograph.

  Then they sat there for a long time, talking about cinema, which, after all, Ksenia knew more about than the theater, looked at the first Russian gay magazine with the strange title Queer (a new word that had only appeared in Russian recently) and discussed Vlad’s plans for going to Thailand or India. They drank almost half a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, and when Ksenia started getting ready to leave, Vlad said:

  “Olya, clear the table please and wash the dishes” – and then Ksenia left without waiting for her friend, and now here she was in the subway car, face to face with the final passenger. Yes, strange people ride the Moscow subway, she thinks, and at that moment the Hog raises his eyes and looks at her at her intently, keenly, straight in the face, and in that look she reads a story of repeated humiliation, school nicknames, interminable ordeals in diet clinics and the gastroenterological departments of hospitals, she sees the anger and frustration of an intelligent, strong man who has been obliged all his life to feel ashamed of his body. He looks at her without lowering his eyes, but she lowers hers and looks away.

  Strange people ride the Moscow subway at half past midnight. And not one of them arouses desire, only pity or fear.

  23

  THIS TIME SHE DIDN’T GET TO MARINA’S PLACE UNTIL the evening, when Gleb was already sleeping on the huge mattress in the room with his legs tucked up under him as if he was still crawling in his sleep. Marina puts the kettle on, she’s wearing a Chinese robe embroidered with dragons, her straw-colored hair is twisted into a complicated knot with a chopstick from Yakitoria sticking out of it.

  “Go figure,” she says, “I’m not really sure at all that he’s Chinese. Maybe he’s a Korean or even a Kazakh. A sure-fire move: make out you’re a foreigner, speak English, all Asians look the same to Russian girls, and nobody knows Chinese anyway. And you can ramble on as much as you like about Hong Kong and the reunification of China and then take someone home and screw them on the bed or the floor, because you won’t find any straw mats in Moscow in the middle of the night in any case.”

  Ksenia laughs:

  “Come off it,” she says, “I’ve seen plenty of Kazakhs! Your Gleb’s a typical Chinese, a perfect little baby Mao.”

  “I don’t care if he’s Korean,” says Marina, “he’s still the most beautiful child in the world.”

  She pours the tea – green, of course, what else, if she’s wearing a Chinese robe, with a chopstick in her knot of straw-colored hair? I wonder when Marina will decide to dye her hair black, because there aren’t any light-haired Chinese girls? And then, I wonder, will that be followed by plastic surgery to alter the shape of her eyes, nose and mouth? Maybe I’d better take a good look at this Marina, in five years’ time there might be no more left of her than there is now of the Marina she used to be only nineteen months ago.

  Ksenia takes out an envelope and puts it on the table.

  “What’s that?” asks Marina.

  “Your money,” says Ksenia, “call it your pay or your share of the profits, whichever you like. Olya sold the title sponsorship to the fil
m company ‘West,’ they’re releasing the movie Monster, so now Charlize Theron and Christina Ricci are plastered all over our site.”

  “Ooh, look at all that,” says Marina, glancing into the envelope. “I wasn’t really expecting anything, I thought it was kind of a favor for a friend.” She puts the money in her pocket and a dragon seems to gulp it down. “Will there be more work, or have we already finished?”

  “There’ll be more,” Ksenia replies. “We have to do a section called ‘Conversations with the Psychologist,’ and readers have sent us new material about serial killers. I had no idea so many people were fascinated with this stuff. In the West they even have the concept of ‘serial killer groupies,’ you know, like rock musicians have. There was an appalling case in the eighties when a journalist who was writing a book about a serial killer fell in love with her subject.”

  “And what did he do?”

  “He used to dress up as a policeman, stop women driving in their cars alone, then torture and kill them, the usual thing. Anyway, when they caught him, they proved seven or nine murders, but they suspected there were far more. And when he was already in jail, this writer deliberately killed a woman and left his semen at the scene to confuse the police. But she slipped up somewhere and they put her away too, although afterward she escaped, and I think she’s still on the run.”

  “Just like in the movies,” Marina laughs, “so was he good-looking, this psycho?”

  “Judging from the photos, not very,” says Ksenia, “but how can you tell? We wouldn’t look too lovely in police photos either.”

  “Oh, come on now,” says Marina with a proud jerk of her head, which finally shakes the chopstick out of her hair and the straw-colored splendor across her shoulders again – oops – and she laughs.

  The steam above the kettle is like a Chinese dragon in profile. Ksenia goes over to the window, the white flakes flutter against the glass and Marina hugs her round the shoulders.

  “Tell me, do you get off on this stuff?”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you, you. Don’t act so dimwitted. Which of us is the submissive masochist with a partiality for torture and self-mutilation?”

  Ksenia sits down on a chair.

  “Well, in any event I wouldn’t try to rescue someone from jail,” she says, “but it’s not the same every time I read about it. Sometimes I get aroused, but more often it’s just loathsome. To be quite honest, it makes me afraid to think how many perverts will flock to our site. And they’re not just sadomasochists who get together quietly on the SMLife web site or other places for people who play, but genuine creeps who like to discuss torture and murder.”

  “So we’re doing a good site,” says Marina, pouring cooled water into the baby’s bottle, “because people need to read about all this.”

  “What for?” asks Ksenia. “I understand why I need to. At least I get aroused sometimes. But what would you read it for?”

  “Maybe I don’t have any need to,” Marina replies, measuring out infant formula from a can with a spoon. “But one of my lovers told me about this theory. Go figure, all our deepest problems come from the way we were born. There’s, like, four stages: while he’s lying inside and hasn’t got a care; when it gets cramped and he starts getting uptight; when he slips down and he gets really uptight and, finally, when he’s born. So if he starts slowing down at any stage – say, he took too long getting through the birth canal, or else he got stuck in the womb for a while – then that’s the stage they have to go through at the symbolic level, so to speak. And supposedly it turns out that all the sadists or SS types in the concentration camps – they got stuck at the third stage. Go figure, blood and shit all around you, you’re twitching away like grim death, crawling toward that pure, clean light. So, to make everything hunky-dory you have to get it together and work right through this stage to the end.”

  “Meaning – kill someone?”

  “No, killing doesn’t help at all. Because you have to solve the problem at the symbolic level. Go figure – read a book, look at photographs, go to the movies – or to our site. So you could say we’re helping these people.”

  “What about masochists?” Ksenia asks.

  “I don’t remember,” replies Marina, “either the second or the third stage. Don’t get in a sweat over it. The main thing is to know that you’re okay.”

  “I know that,” says Ksenia, “I’m okay, sure. But it’s a pity I don’t know how I was born, and it’s too embarrassing to ask Mom.”

  “I’d ask mine,” says Marina, “if I wanted to know.”

  “I guess that’s because you have a child,” Ksenia replies and Marina laughs in a way that makes Ksenia ask: “Admit it, you just made all that up, didn’t you?”

  “Oh no,” replies Marina, screwing the teat onto the bottle, “I started thinking about it straight away. You don’t think I’d help you with a site I thought was harmful, do you?”

  “I don’t know,” Ksenia laughs, “maybe out of friendship?”

  “Not even out of friendship. I’ve got a growing child, I have to understand what’s good and what’s bad.”

  24

  It’s hard to explain how it happens

  Simply at some moment I realize

  There she is, a girl I can tell the story of my life to

  Richard Trenton Chase, Vampire of Sacramento

  Explained to Robert Ressler, agent of the FBI:

  “I never chose anyone

  I walked along the street and tried the doors

  If a door is locked

  It means you’re not welcome.”

  That’s what I do too

  Sometimes the door is open, sometimes not

  You have to go up and touch her hand

  She was sitting opposite me in the subway

  She was wearing a simple dress,

  Straps on her shoulders and beside them

  More straps from her bra

  Everyone wears them that way in Moscow now

  It’s rather vulgar

  And it doesn’t arouse me at all

  But she had very beautiful arms,

  The shoulders, the forearms, and especially the hands

  With long, agile fingers

  And well-groomed nails

  I guess a couple of times a week

  The manicurist Liza, Galya or Masha

  Soaks her fingers, trims the cuticle round the half-moons

  Polishes and varnishes

  Gradually transforming the nails

  Into small gleaming pearly shells

  When I looked at those hands

  The train seemed to stop

  I got up and approached her

  Although my body was still

  Sitting there without moving

  I approached her and looked into her eyes

  The eyes are the most important part of any woman

  Even lying on my open hand

  They still retain a particle of her soul

  Rolling between the hills of her breasts

  Tumbling into the deep hollows

  As if they are saying farewell

  As if the soul before it departs

  Is making its final inspection

  Of the body already abandoned

  She had wonderful eyes

  Dark eyes, as dark as the darkness of a basement

  Where the light has been turned off

  And the door has been locked

  As a child I was afraid of the dark

  My parents used to laugh at me

  And ask what I could see there

  I couldn’t answer them then

  But now I know the answer:

  What I saw there was this darkness

  The darkness that suddenly condenses out of the brightest day

  Enveloping me in a cocoon

  As if a huge pencil

  Is obliterating the whole world

  With its sweeping black spirals

  Those were the kind of eyes she had


  And I knew straight away

  That I could talk to her

  And she could answer me.

  For all I want to do is talk

  When I read in the newspapers

  That I hate women

  And I hate people, I know it isn’t true

  I love people

  I wish I could make love to the whole world

  But I don’t belong to the Earth

  The deep darkness speaks through me

  And I must be heard

  And when they scream – it is me calling for help

  Alone in the wilderness of the big city

  Oh Lord, I call out to Thee,

  Hear me

  But the scream breaks off, there is no answer

  I sat back down and the train moved off

  No one noticed anything

  No one notices when for a few moments

  They fall out of time and belong to eternity

  The girl in the summer dress

  With two pairs of straps on her shoulders

  Turned to her friend and raised

  A beautiful hand with long, well-groomed fingers,

  She started making gestures

  And her friend answered in the same way

  They were deaf and dumb

  I got out at the next station and walked home alone

  I couldn’t talk to that girl, not to her

  Even if she could read my lips

  She would have shut her eyes tight

  Even if I cut off her eyelids

  She could still not look at me

  She can’t talk to me

  Nobody can

  Nobody will hear

  Sometimes I remember her

  I think we understand each other anyway

  I talk with my hands too

  With my arms soaked to the elbows with blood

  And the darkness condenses in our pupils

  They say love is when you understand each other without words

  But in reality

  Explaining yourself without words is very easy

  A scalpel, a cigarette lighter, fishhooks and boiling oil

  Are more eloquent than all the poetry in the world

  When the subject at hand is pain