Butterfly Skin

by Sergey Kuznetsov

  I guess they missed it at the hair salon

  Or left it gray on purpose, I don’t know

  But when I saw that scattering of ash

  In that fussy light-red hairstyle

  Suddenly I felt a great tenderness

  And I thought that this woman

  Had lived more than forty years, loved and been loved

  Buried her loved ones and perhaps had children

  Had wept and laughed – and now the ash was settling on her head

  And in forty more years would overwhelm it

  Like Pompeii or Herculaneum

  When I thought about that I wanted to run after her

  Beg her forgiveness for my worthless life

  Hug her and press my lips against that strand of ash.

  My penis was still standing hard

  In my tight jeans, causing me pain

  Distracting me from the tears pouring down my cheeks

  For the first time my arousal had saved someone’s life

  28

  ON THE WAY FROM THE CLEAR PONDS SUBWAY TO THE Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie restaurant Ksenia notices a gap between the buildings, as if a tooth has been pulled out. There had been a restaurant in the basement there, she came here with her parents to celebrate Lyova’s wedding. Ksenia was fifteen and Lyova, correspondingly, twenty-one. Ksenia already knew the bride well by then: a tall girl with brown hair and a tendency to put on weight, and a large nose that stood out on her face like a foreign growth. She smoked Marlboro cigarettes, and wore baggy sweaters and tight jeans that looked absurd on her already voluminous backside. It was a mystery what Lyova saw in her, but one Sunday morning as she came into the kitchen, Ksenia saw Mom standing there stroking Lyova’s hair and repeating: “What else can you do?” Ksenia only got her hair stroked when something happened: when she cut her hand, sprained something or simply fell ill. In fact, when she fell ill, her forehead was touched rather than stroked – to see if she had a temperature. So Ksenia thought that Lyova had been expelled from college and she asked spitefully: “Thrown you out, have they?” She was fifteen, and the times when Lyova used to chase her all round the apartment, making her pretend she was Sarah Connor, were long past. “I’m getting married,” Lyova replied. “To Lyusya.” “Well, congratulations,” said Ksenia and turned round and ran to her room. For some reason she wanted to cry, but Ksenia never cried.

  Later, when Lyova went to propose formally, Ksenia asked Mom: “Is she knocked up, then?” Mom nodded and Ksenia said “I see,” and went to phone Marina. She herself was so afraid of getting pregnant that she carried condoms around with her even then. You could never tell, maybe some rapist would suddenly attack her on the way home – she imagined herself running away from him across a dark courtyard, down some steps with used syringes crunching under her feet, through basements full of slapping water, gasping for breath like Sarah Connor and then, when there’s nowhere left to run, she stops, trying to calm her pounding heart, and says calmly: “Put this on.” Of course, Lyusya had got pregnant on purpose, Ksenia didn’t doubt that for a moment, but even so, as she lay there at night in the room that was empty without Lyova, she imagined the cells dividing inside Lyusya’s ungainly body, swelling up in the impenetrable darkness and turning into a baby. As Ksenia fell asleep, she felt as if the blanket pulled right up over her head was that womb, the womb in which there was a basement restaurant where they had celebrated Lyova’s wedding in a modest gathering of fifteen people.

  That summer, while Ksenia was defending Marina’s honor and meeting Nikita, the newlyweds dragged out their honeymoon in the Crimea to a full three months, and when they came back the child that Lyusya was supposedly expecting had disappeared without trace. Ksenia never did ask Lyova straight out what had happened: was it a miscarriage, an abortion, or had there never been any child at all and Lyusya had simply lied? The child disappeared, then Lyusya disappeared, moving out of the apartment that the young couple rented without any great fuss and going back to her mother. Lyova said he would stay in the apartment for the two months that had already been paid for, but four months went by and Ksenia realized he was never going to come back home. A year later he went away to the States and when they parted he said “I’ll be back,” and winked at Ksenia as if to say: don’t be sad. But she had already worked through all her sadness two years earlier, when Lyova got married and Lyusya was pregnant with a child that later disappeared without trace, as if it had never existed – the same way the restaurant where they celebrated the wedding had disappeared now.

  Olya loved The Discreet Charm… maybe because it was close to the salon where her hair was styled and she had her hands manicured twice a week. Two pairs of hands on one table: Olya’s soft, well-groomed hands, freshly anointed with creams and fragrant oils, and Ksenia’s little hands with bitten nails and one little silver ring. A small figurine stands between them, a ceramic or stone idol with square eyes and teeth that take up half its face.

  “Vlad asked me to give you this,” says Olya.

  “How sweet of him,” says Ksenia, although, of course “sweet” is a rather strange word, this is a figure out of a nightmare. “Who is it?”

  “Some Mexican god,” says Olya, drawing on her cigarette through the long holder. “Vlad went there last year and brought back a whole heap of all sorts of junk. But he says this is the real thing, not a fake.”

  Ksenia strokes the fine honeycomb surface of the stone. She wonders if it’s Mayan or Aztec. At school she read that the Aztecs’ prisoners fought with wooden swords against fully armed Aztec warriors and the Maya believed that for the world to continue to exist they had to make liberal gifts of blood to the gods several times a year. During the ritual sacrifices, the blood flowed in streams down the steps of the pyramids. If this really was a Mexican idol, everything he saw in Ksenia’s bedroom would seem like children’s games to him.

  “I got a funny business proposal,” says Olya. “A company that wants to advertise with us. They run historical tours to Tula.”

  “And they think our site is the right targeting?” Ksenia chuckles. “Maybe they’re a bit confused.”

  “Don’t laugh,” says Olya. “You know what kind of tours they run? Torture in the time of Ivan the Terrible! The clients are sort of doing the tour of the local kremlin, and suddenly the streltsy spot a sneak thief trying to pick one of the tourist’s pockets. They take him down into the vaults and…”

  “Oh, come on!” says Ksenia. “You’re putting me on.”

  “Listen, they’ve flooded the Russian internet with their spam, everybody already knows this wonderful story. They promise to show the genuine old Russian tortures – lash, pincers, fire, boiling oil and melted wax on naked flesh…”

  “…and quartering,” Ksenia adds. Olya laughs.

  When the Spanish conquered Mexico, they quartered all the high priests. There’s no way of telling now whether they tortured them in search of gold or they simply went berserk in the wake of the slaughter that was taking place in the streets of the city. But maybe, thinks Ksenia, that was the outcome the priests wanted, because they knew that this last blood spilt on the steps of the sacred pyramid was their final chance to postpone the end of the world.

  Somehow Ksenia had missed out on the standard old Soviet stories about Young Pioneer heroes being tortured to death, and she had never found the image of young Komsomol girls facing the porous chalices of their breasts filled with their own blood very exciting. One of her short-lived dominant lovers had been a fan of the National Bolshevik Party, Nazi memorabilia and the film The Night Porter. Maybe he was good in bed, but the black leather, death’s head and peaked cap with the high crown always gave Ksenia a fit of the giggles and put a rapid end to any erotic arousal.

  Instead of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya lying naked on the bloody snow, ever since she was little Ksenia had always imagined a South American Indian priest with his arms and legs cut off, lying on the stone platform of the sacred pyramid. In his dying ecstasy he
forgets the pain and in his final moment he resurrects in his mind the heyday of his people and its culture, which has now disappeared without trace, in the way that unborn babies disappear when they are spat out of the impenetrable darkness of their mothers’ wombs, in the way Lyova’s wife disappeared, in the way that even the restaurant where they celebrated his wedding had disappeared today.

  “And another thing,” Olya continues, “I’ve been approached by an association for the support of women who are victims of domestic violence. They want us to make a free page on the site for them.”

  “But what have they got to do with us?” asks Ksenia.

  “They say that domestic violence and psychotic killers are two faces of the same male sadism. The humiliation of a woman in the family and a murder somewhere in the forest are links in a single chain. And so on and so forth.”

  Ksenia recalls Vlad shouting: “Olya, bring some ice!” and the Mexican figurine suddenly grows heavy in her hand.

  “We’ll make them a page,” she says, “no problem. We should help our sisters. But I’d advise them to learn karate and wu-shu.”

  “I’d advise them to get a good business education,” Olya laughs, “and go to work for a year. That’s an experience more frightening than karate or wu-shu.”

  “What about that man,” asks Ksenia, suddenly remembering, “the one you asked me about, remember? Are you going to work with him?”

  Olya shakes her head.

  “I haven’t decided yet,” she says. “My partners don’t leave me much choice. If things go on as they are, they’ll destroy the business before spring.”

  “I understand,” says Ksenia, but in actual fact, she doesn’t understand, because no matter how much she would like to know her way around in business, she is merely a successful journalist, maybe a decent IT manager and a successful professional in areas where, thank God, you don’t need to know about business.

  They are already choosing their dessert and waiting for the coffee to arrive when Olya finally makes up her mind and says:

  “You know, I think I’m pregnant.”

  Well there’s a surprise, thinks Ksenia, and asks how late Olya is, and then asks the question to which she already knows the answer: Yes, of course it’s Oleg’s, you know it is, and then asks if he knows, and Olya says: Of course not, I haven’t decided what to do yet – because she’s a good girl from a cultured Petersburg family, not some kind of Lyusya in baggy sweaters and tight jeans who’ll drag a man off to the registry office at the slightest excuse, and then to the uterine restaurant, where the new family unit swells up like an embryo in the womb, only for everything to disappear without trace afterward. No, Olya hasn’t decided what to do yet, because she doesn’t want to break up a family, and Ksenia suspects she couldn’t break it up anyway: men don’t leave their wives for mistresses they’ve been seeing for four years, instead of that they take new mistresses and start seeing different girls who manage their contraception better and don’t allow the sperm cells to fuse with the egg cells in the inner darkness, so that they can swell up into the embryo of a new life.

  “No,” says Olya, “I haven’t made my mind up about anything yet, I’m afraid to raise a child alone, I couldn’t handle it, but maybe I’ll keep it, because I’m already thirty-five years old, and I can’t be sure there’ll be another chance, and I love Oleg, and if it’s a boy it will be like him.” And as she talks about it, Ksenia places her hand that has never been manicured on Olya’s fragrant well-groomed hand and strokes it gently, saying: “Whatever you decide, I’ll be with you,” and then she realizes that in her other hand she’s clutching the Mexican figurine with square eyes and a toothy smile that takes up half its face.

  29

  KSENIA, KSENIA, KSENIA, ALEXEI REPEATS TO HIMSELF as he walks up the step of the pedestrian underpass. I love you, I love you, I love you. How strange it is to say that. How many times he has heard it on double beds in hotel rooms, in hallways where the doors slam with a dull thud, in unlocked attics where the cold autumn wind blows, how many times he has looked into eyes that were waiting for that answer, and he has never said it once. But now he repeats it to himself, like a mantra: kseniakseniakseniaIloveyouIloveyouIloveyou. Now he knows you can never tell in advance how love will come, a skinny little girl with her hair always tousled, with the nails bitten down on her frail hands, with a crystalline icy note of authority in her voice. You can see her every day, and your inner voice won’t say to you: “Look, this is your love, your destiny, the blood in your veins, all your yeses and all your nos, it is the most important thing that has happened to you in the last ten years,” and if it does say it, you won’t believe it, and as you switch on the computer, you’ll say what you’ve always said – “hi” – and as you switch off the computer, you’ll say “see you,” and you’ll spend six months sitting in the same room as her like that, still not knowing what this is going to mean to you. And then you’ll seduce her easily and several weeks later you’ll pay the price for that ease when you finally understand. Be honest with yourself, you’ve been a good lover to many women, but you’ve never loved them. You’re probably a good man but a little cool-blooded, no point in trying to deny it, it’s God-given, there’s nothing to be done about it. A body, in order to grow old together, children, in order to raise them together, your gold shimmering hair, with silver graying threads, ten years together, eternity together, dearest Oxana, forgive me, forgive me for what has happened to me. I didn’t want this, if I’d known I wouldn’t have lied to you that evening: No, Oxanochka, I’ll be delayed a bit longer, Pasha wanted to discuss a special project with me. I’ll tell you all about it when I get home. What will I tell you, Oxana, what will I tell you, if even these words that you will never hear are a lie? because even if I had known, I would still have put my arms round her in the taxi, kissed the lips that were offered, taken the elevator up to the apartment and made love there, still thinking that I was having sex. And two weeks later, when we launched the project, I would have looked at her again and again and just like the time before, I would have seen her tousled hair, her skinny shoulders, her strong lips outlined with lipstick, her frail hands with the bitten-down nails – and once again that tender feeling would have smothered me. Dearest Oxana, forgive me for what has happened to me, I hope you will never find out about it.

  We make love very rarely and, God knows, I try very hard to keep it that way. Because if I could get to her apartment block every evening or at least a few times a week, the day would come when I couldn’t control myself any longer. I would go down on my knees in front of her and say Ksenia Ksenia Ksenia here I am, your awkward colleague and infrequent lover, this is me, just as I am, the father of two children, the husband of my wife, look at me, take me for your own, make me small, put me in your pocket, write me to the hard disk of your laptop, keep me here. I want to kneel in front of you and kiss your frail hands and caress your thighs where I can see the blood pulsing in your veins through the thin skin, watch your lips part and open like flowers of flesh – kiss, caress and watch and repeat, repeat like a mantra kseniakseniakseniaIloveyouIloveyouIloveyou, like a monk who has lost his faith and no longer expects these words to bring salvation. I realize all this means nothing to you, dearest Ksenia, forgive me for what has happened to me. I hope you will never find out about it.

  Alexei walks into the entrance, calls the elevator and tells himself for the hundredth time: you can analyze it and try to explain it – analysis isn’t important and explanations aren’t important. Yes, I’ve never slept with anyone I work with before, yes, we’ve created the finest journalistic project of my life, yes I’ve always liked girls who are just twenty-something years old. But all these “yeses” and all the unspoken “nos” don’t change a thing, because what comes out in the end is still kseniakseniakseniaIloveyouIloveyouIloveyou.

  Roman Ivanovich opens the door. Roman Ivanovich is wearing a wool tracksuit and the beads of sweat on his bald patch are visible even by the light of the dus
ty ceiling lamp in the hallway. Roman Ivanovich has spectacles with thin frames on his nose, and his big nose is like a foreign growth on his face.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, “I’ve forgotten your name.”

  Alexei introduces himself and Roman Ivanovich nods, asks him to repeat his patronymic and pushes a pair of tattered house slippers over to him with his foot.

  “Put them on, put them on, Alexei Mikhailovich, let’s go into the study, I’ll show you the materials there and answer your questions.”

  Roman Ivanovich lives alone, his study is in the large room, and all three walls are covered with shelves full of files. There is a computer covered with a towel standing on a desk in the corner.

  “Shall I tell you how I became involved in all of this?” he asks, and Alexei nods.

  Roman Ivanovich goes across to a shelf, takes a file, puts it down in front of him and begins.

  “The point is that I come from Rostov-on-Don. And the Don happens to produce a large crop of serials. The famous Chikatilo and Mukhankin, as well as Tsurman and Burstev, and many others as well. They say the environmental conditions are bad, but then, where are they good nowadays, in all honesty? Well, I became interested in the reasons for all of this. I started studying, analyzing, comparing. They say it’s their childhood traumas. Chikatilo’s younger brother was eaten during the famine, and when Mukhankin was born, his mother tossed him out on to the doorstep to his father and shouted: ‘Take him, I don’t want him!’ The Americans also confirm that most serials were humiliated and raped as children. Henry Lee Lucas’s mother made her son watch as she, begging your pardon, copulated with her lovers – and so he killed her when he was seventeen! Joseph Kallinger’s adopted parents flogged him and threatened to castrate him, and when he was eight they simply raped him. They say you can find some terrible childhood memory in every serial killer’s life, but believe me, Alexei Mikhailovich, that is by no means true. I have read a lot, and analyzed a lot. Anatolii Slivko, the famous psychotic killer who was a Young Pioneer leader, for instance, had a perfectly happy childhood.