Butterfly Skin

by Sergey Kuznetsov

  And at bottom I have nothing else to talk about

  I’d like to find a person

  I could talk to in words

  I dream of a girl who would listen to me

  Nod and weep and repeat

  Yes, yes, I know, that’s how it is

  A cocoon of darkness, black spirals

  A huge pencil obliterating the world

  She would say: yes I know

  Then take a razor and slice her own skin

  To let out our pain

  So that somewhere else, outside the cocoon

  We could meet again

  Like brother and sister

  I think, if I met a woman like that

  I could die happy

  25

  TWO DAYS. OR RATHER, FIFTY-TWO HOURS. USUALLY her body works like an ideal chronometer. Twenty-eight days. Nine o’clock in the morning – and you could put the flags out, or whatever it was they used to say. Their gym teacher liked to check in his diary that the senior girls weren’t getting off too often: “I know you,” he growled, “give you half a chance and you’ll be exc. full point every week.” “Exc. full point,” that is, “excused with a full point” was what the girls were supposed to say if gym class coincided with those days – so that it wouldn’t be confused with “simply excused,” when the doctor allowed you not to go to gym for two weeks after the flu or a serious throat infection.

  Olya’s period started late, in ninth grade, but then almost immediately it was twenty-eight days, six hundred and seventy-two hours, nine o’clock in the morning, spot on every time. Not a single miss. She used to sympathize when every month at least one of her college friends feverishly counted the days and then went running off for the “mouse test.” They said that if the girl was knocked up, the mouse died – and Olya used to imagine that up in heaven where the souls of people and animals meet, a little mouse with wings was already waiting for the soul of the unborn child doomed to be aborted.

  She had never had to worry about the mice, or the present-day quick and humane pregnancy test. All her life it had been twenty-eight days, six hundred and seventy-two hours, nine o’clock in the morning: the first day was Tuesday and it was over by the weekend. Only now it is already Thursday, one o’clock in the afternoon. She is fifty-two hours late.

  And still nothing.

  They are having lunch in the Clone, which is door-by-door with the Coffee Inn on Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street. The waitress brings the menu. Vlad gestures round the room:

  “When I get back,” he says, “this will all be gone. This is the end of days. Luzhkov will tear it all down – the Clone and the café next door.”

  “Oh come on!” Olya says incredulously.

  “Yes, redevelopment. They’ve already said so, definitely. So, if you haven’t been here before, take a look: a historic place. You’ve no idea how much time I’ve spent here.”

  Outside the windows snow is falling, and Vlad tips some newly printed photographs out onto the transparent tabletop.

  “Look,” he says, “Andrei sent them from Goa. This is the house he’s rented. And that’s our beach, this is the sunset over the ocean, and this is Andrei himself.”

  Andrei is standing in tight swimming trunks, tanned and smiling. Olya thinks she vaguely remembers him. Tall, thin, awkward, she thinks he’s a DJ, or a VJ, Olya’s not too sure about the difference, and Vlad never introduced them properly.

  “He had a small beard at your birthday party,” she says.

  “Yes, he did,” Vlad says with a nod, “he shaved it off in Thailand.”

  Every Muscovite wants to go to Thailand in winter. It’s warm and sunny there, the level of comfort is almost European and the prices are almost Asian. True, they say there’s AIDS there too – but you can take precautions.

  All her life Olya has hated taking precautions. She has always reassured herself with the thought that effectively she has a steady partner, he wouldn’t give her any infections, there’s no need to be afraid of pregnancy, her body works like a clock, all she needs to do is count the days. And she certainly knows how to count, that’s for sure.

  She glances at the face of the clock to the right of the bar: fifty-two hours fifteen minutes.

  “Just imagine,” says Vlad, “for us this will be, well, like a honeymoon. Because that’s what he wrote to me from there, that he can’t live without me. That I’m the love of his life.”

  Apparently congratulations are in order, thinks Olya, but she doesn’t know how to do it: after eight years of small talk and orders to do housework – Olya, bring some ice! – suddenly to hear Vlad talk about his life! So he’s in love. So he’s having a romance. Of course, how could it be any other way? After all, he’s a boy from a cultured Petersburg family too, a family where they used to say that love is the most important thing. What difference does it make whether it’s for a girl or a boy?

  “He says there’s no homophobia in Thailand. According to the local Buddhism, there are three sexes: male, female and all the rest. All the rest – that’s us. And most importantly, all the sexes can attain liberation.”

  And no need for any excuses, Olya thinks automatically. Three sexes, well, well. For her gays are still men, it’s stupid to separate them off into a separate sex, although politically correct Ksyusha would support the idea. But a third sex is like a third color in chess: as if red or green pieces have suddenly appeared between the white and the black.

  She wonders if schools in Thailand have three changing rooms. With “M,” “F” and, probably, “N” written on the doors? Neuter gender, as in grammar. If they have one in Thai, that is. In their school there were only two changing rooms: for those who knew what “exc. full point” was and those who had no idea it even existed. It was a great girls’ secret, they all knew you mustn’t tell the boys about it on any account. She wondered how the boys did find out about it. Were their fathers supposed to tell them, or did they cover it in some anatomy lessons that she’d forgotten? Or perhaps the secret of female menstruation was part of a man’s initiation, and his first woman was supposed to tell him about it? If that was right, then Vlad still didn’t know what “exc. full point” was.

  “If I was a musician,” he continues, “I’d move there to stay. But as it is, I need the language. I’m a theater director, after all.”

  He pronounces the word “director” with pride. She has seen two shows and understood almost nothing, maybe she just doesn’t like the theater, maybe the gay aesthetic fails to move her. But how strange this is – at the age of thirty-five suddenly to acquire a brother. To learn that as well as going shopping at Auchan with her and sending her to get ice from the kitchen, he loves some Andrei or other and is proud of his profession. I guess Vlad doesn’t know anything about me either, thinks Olya. Should I tell him something about me now? Or is their new relationship still one-way traffic – brother talks, sister listens?

  “Maybe you could come and visit us?” says Vlad. “We could fit you in easily enough, we’ve lived together before.” He laughs. “Remember how we lived in the Preobrazhenka district for two years?” Olya remembers. The jolly times of the mid-decade: either there was no money at all, or suddenly there were incredible amounts of it. The music in the apartment never stopped – acid house and Goa trance – there were pills scattered across the dining table, there was always someone high and someone coming down from a bad trip. They were jolly times. But not for Olya. Every time she came home she was afraid she’d find three or four strange men in her bed with pupils dilated halfway across their faces, enthusiastically making love. True, it never happened – all the inhabitants of the flat fastidiously respected the privacy of the only woman.

  If we’d lived in Thailand then, thinks Olya, I would have had “F” on my door and all the others would have had “N.” That is, if they know how to write Russian in Thailand. Vlad could stay there if they do.

  “I don’t think I could stand that again,” says Olya. “I kept expecting you all to start explai
ning to me in chorus how to give good head.”

  “Well only for the sake of good relations between the sexes,” Vlad replies. “Thank God, we were all decent guys. Nobody laid a finger on you.”

  “That would have been all I needed!” Olya laughs.

  Those were jolly times – but not for her. Olya ran off to Moscow after her second man, a forty-year-old professor of Slavonic studies, who first taught a one-semester course at St Petersburg University, and then carried out some research or other, funded by some foundation or other, in the State Archives in Moscow. Naturally, he had brought his wife and daughter with him from America. They even had lunch all together a few times. Olya was supposedly some kind of assistant and she actually received one hundred and twenty dollars a month. But when Olya’s mother discovered – while Olya was still in Peter – that her daughter was having an affair with a married man, she made a terrible scene: “It’s not enough that my son’s a fag, my daughter’s a slut too.” Olya was surprised to find that she felt more stung by the politically incorrect term “fag” than the predictable “slut,” and when she went to Moscow, she didn’t call home once in two months, thank God, Vlad regularly reported that she was all right. For the first time in her life Olya felt free of her parents’ power – excused without any points.

  “Well, there wouldn’t be that kind of mess in Goa,” Vlad reassures her, “we’ve all grown up and settled down. Andrei never touches any hard stuff. Nothing but hash now. No speed, no ecstasy, no coke – complete and total chillout.”

  “Did Andrei live with us too?” asks Olya.

  “What do you mean? Of course!” says Vlad, surprised. “We’ve been together ten years, near enough. We can hold the anniversary party soon. For the last year we’ve been quarreling pretty much all the time, but really – he’s my greatest love. It’s for life, together forever, surely you must have noticed?”

  “Well, we don’t really know much about each other at all,” says Olya, glancing at the clock: fifty-two hours, thirty-five minutes. But the minutes aren’t important. Simply fifty-two and a half hours.

  “That’s true,” says Vlad, sticking his nose in his plate, “that’s true. But come and visit us anyway, you’ll like Andrei for sure, he’s wonderful.”

  “No,” says Olya, “first, no money. Second – problems at work.”

  “What do you mean, no money?” Vlad asks in surprise. “Borrow it from somebody, you can pay it back later. And what kind of problems?”

  Olya sighs. There are actually two problems. One is called “Grisha and Kostya” and the other is a delay of fifty-two hours and forty minutes. And where, by the way did, she get the idea that boys have no way to find out about menstruation? They advertise panty-liners everywhere nowadays, everyone’s been in the know for ages. Blue liquid. Just at that moment she would have preferred red liquid, red like the revolutionary banners. She wonders if in Cambodia under the communists the flags were red, or some other color? In Cambodia, where according to Andrei, the skulls were kept behind glass so they wouldn’t be pilfered for souvenirs.

  “There’s actually only one problem,” says Olya, “the two investors are fighting and destroying the business. I was thinking of bringing in a third investor to buy them out, but Ksyusha made enquiries about him for me and, to be quite frank, I’m afraid.”

  “Why so?”

  “Well, you see,” Olya explains, “in our industry so far no one’s been killed. But this man, the external investor, well, it seems that’s the way he’s used to solving his problems.”

  “You’re having me on,” says Vlad, delighted, and calls over the waiter to order coffee, “this isn’t the nineties, they don’t kill people anymore.”

  “I wouldn’t like to try testing that out,” Olya replies. “But why are those two fighting?” Vlad pushes his plate away and looks at Olya as if he really does intend to listen carefully and give her some sensible advice.

  “They fell out over the election money,” Olya says with a shrug. “They’re old rivals anyway.”

  “Wow,” says Vlad, “what a great subject. I wanted to write a play about that: two businessmen, they’ve been together since school, friends and rivals, powerfully attracted to each other – which they’re afraid to admit… I just didn’t know what ending I ought to come up with. For Moscow, I guess they ought to fall in love with each other and go away, say, to Thailand, but if I take them to the West, they can kill each other. Which version do you like best?”

  “The Moscow one,” Olya replies.

  “Well then, arrange it,” laughs Vlad, “let them give free rein to their feelings!”

  And what do I know about their feelings? thinks Olya. Nothing. No more than about the feelings of my own brother. No more than about the feelings of Oleg and the other men I’ve loved. What about Ksyusha? she thinks. Yes, Ksyusha’s a different matter. But all the same, why does she have to have the bruises and the blood?

  And, by the way, about blood. Fifty-two hours and fifty-two minutes.

  “Anyway, sort things out with these two fags of yours and come,” says Vlad. “Maybe we’ll all stay there, damn the theater. I’ll take up mime, say, or ballet – you don’t need language for that. Maybe Andrei and I will adopt a boy – they say that’s no problem in Asia. We’ll live with you – you’ll be the mom and we’ll be the dads. In the mornings we’ll go swimming, and then we’ll sunbathe. Andrei will teach him music, you’ll teach him to read books and I – I’ll teach him to act.” Vlad looks pensively at the smoke from Olya’s cigarette dissolving into the air. “You know, sometimes I think I would have made a good father. I think I understand what children need.”

  “And what’s that?” asks Olya.

  “Just to be loved. For what they are.”

  Vlad stops, musing wistfully, and Olya realizes he has already set out the stage: Andrei sitting with a tin-whistle in his hand and one foot resting on a big drum, a dark-skinned little boy playing in the sand with Vlad, and Olya, the communal mother, standing there holding a book – from the distance you can’t make out what it is. The boy raises his head and speaks in international language – “mama.” And this scene is so impossible, so unreal, that Olya stops counting the hours and minutes and realizes it’s time to accept the facts, go to the pharmacy, buy a pregnancy test and get the answer that she already knows.

  The mouse would never have survived the news.

  26

  EIGHT DIFFERENT FOLDERS OF DOCUMENTS, TWO with newspaper clippings. A metal mesh tube with two pens and three pencils sticking out of it like aerials, the sharply pointed leads make her heart skip a beat. Keeping pencils like that on your desk is like carrying a razor around in your vanity case, but you can’t explain that to Taniusha, who is responsible for Pasha’s office housekeeping. An ergonomic keyboard that supposedly doesn’t make Ksenia’s exhausted, bitten-down fingers so tired. An optical mouse with a red laser eye on its flat sole. A Samsung liquid crystal display monitor. This is what the desk of a young professional, a journalist and IT manager, looks like, the desk of the rising star of the Russian internet, Ksenia Ionova. “We met the blogger and the producer of the Moscow Psycho project in her office to ask…” Oh, shit, I have to make it a rule to insist that they show me the text before they publish, I’ll just phone Pasha, to apologize. “In her office!”

  Ksenia knows now what fame looks like. Modest fame, low-key, but even so, fame. Thankfully people don’t recognize her in the street yet, but when she was at her dancing class one girl came up to her and said she’d heard her on the radio, she realized straight away the voice was familiar. Yes, three recordings for radio, ten interviews for the online press, a few articles in the major newspapers – that’s fame, isn’t it? It’s a different matter that so far fame is no reason for giving up work. So it turns out that very little has changed in Ksenia’s life. Every morning she looks through the breaking news, gives the girl translators a roasting, sends Alexei to report on something and tries to get commentaries from Moscow new
smakers on the latest event of the day. For other people she may be a newsmaker herself, but in her own editorial office she’s a journalist, the senior editor of the news section. Her personal project – all right, hers, Olya and Alexei’s – is their own personal business, it has nothing to with her job, Ksenia doesn’t even need to be reminded of that.

  It’s time to sort out those papers. It’s funny to recall that her elementary school teacher once told them computers would save the forests from being cut down: paper wouldn’t be needed anymore. She should see the offices of internet companies. But then, Ksenia doesn’t have a very clear idea of what offices looked like before the appearance of computers. She wonders if they had typewriters on every desk. Or did people write the draft versions of contracts by hand?

  Last year’s report from the Public Opinion Foundation is dispatched into the waste paper basket as outdated. A print-out of the movie theater programs for December 15 – an attempt to catch the film Underworld on the big screen, she missed it last time – goes into the basket too, all twelve pages of it. The rough draft of the business plan with Olya’s remarks – into the basket. A list of people for Alexei to interview, printed out before the meeting in the café and left on her desk two weeks ago, goes the same way. A print-out of the news on Evening.ru for January 8, with glaring errors, corrected on the web, but preserved as a caution to the guilty parties – into the basket. What’s a folder of contracts doing on my desk? Into the accounts department! An envelope with photographs of New Year celebrations – into my purse. A folder of newspaper cuttings about my beloved self – into my purse too.

  Ksenia has a special album and a large cardboard box from IKEA at home for photographs. The newspaper clippings will be confined to the bottom drawer of the desk, which contains her entire personal archive: a few letters, the check for her last dinner with Nikita, for a satanic six hundred and sixty-six rubles, a sentimental dried rose (Ksenia remembers who it was from), the cover of a Dario Argento video cassette with his autograph, Vika’s hairclip, which was forgotten at Ksenia’s place and not returned before Vika left for Germany, an incomplete list of Marina’s men covering three pages, drawn up three years ago when Marina stayed the night at Ksenia’s place, a clipping from the Megalopolis-Express newspaper from 1995.