Butterfly Skin

by Sergey Kuznetsov

  Ksenia is standing up to her knees in water. The pipe has got blocked, that’s what it is, the water isn’t draining away. Sink down into the chlorinated Moscow water, curl up into a ball in a primal ocean of cold morning sweat and uncried tears. But no, she gets out of the shower, wipes the wet mirror with her hand (damp, steamy and warm), looks at her own reflection. Her wet hair has stuck to her cheeks, without makeup her big eyes have a helpless expression. She walks out into the room, comes back with her vanity case and draws on her face: hard mouth, severe eyes. She takes a critical look to see if it’s all right. She steps back a meter, takes a sharp breath in and throws her clenched fist out in front of her, kata-what’s-its-name, the way Lyova showed her. She freezes like that – hair stuck to her neck, hard mouth, clenched teeth, every muscle tense, sinews vibrating, little fist in the foreground.

  A sob behind her as the drain swallows the remains of the water in the bath, the night sweat, the uncried tears.

  * * *

  She’s practically twice my age, thinks Ksenia in the overcrowded subway car, she thinks as she puts her leather purse on her knees, looking at a white feather stubbornly creeping out through the black material of someone’s Chinese down-filled jacket only twenty centimeters away from her face. Twice my age, but if you divide her age between two, for her and the baby that is still inside her, in the airless darkness, you get seventeen, thinks Ksenia, as a wet sheepskin coat covered in damp blotches takes the place of the Chinese down-filled jacket, when I was seventeen, Lyova was the same age as I am now, so today Olya is my younger sister.

  Yesterday Mom phoned, Mom asked how I was getting on, I told her about Olya – listen, my friend’s having an abortion, I’m terribly upset for her. Don’t be such a little girl, said Mom, I had about eight of those abortions and there was no problem.

  Two girls are standing directly in front of Ksenia. Lulled into a doze by the swaying of the train, she doesn’t raise her head, but she listens to their conversation: “No, shit, this city’s just the bloody end in winter, creeps on every bloody side, no matter where you look, the subway’s packed, the streets are all jammed solid, the boss has got her menopause and there’s a psycho lurking in the alley.” – “So what’s your beef, Lex asked you, didn’t he, you should have gone to Thailand, everything’s cheap there – they told me, you know, like wow, it’s a hundred bucks a month, fantastic.” – “Nah, think about it, me and Lex in Thailand? Are you nuts? This guy, last winter he was there, told me the local tarts give it away for nothing, well, maybe a coupla dollars at the most. Sure, that’s a gas for Lex, but what good’s that to me?” – “That’s just great, that’s neat, you don’t even have to let him have it, like just go to the pool, or to the shops, like… shit, that must all be cheap there too.” – “Nah, think what you’re saying… why would I go to Thailand just for that? I don’t even let him have it here.” “Oh shit, now here’s our change, we almost missed it.” And they get out, grazing the metal corner of a briefcase across Ksenia’s knees.

  She raises her head. Through the gap left in the crowd she can clearly see a sticker on the window opposite her: a child’s face chopped to pieces and the words “thou shalt not kill.”

  33

  “LISTEN,” WRITES KSENIA, “I HAD A TERRIBLE DREAM today. I dreamed I was a psychotic killer, can you imagine?”

  “And what did you do in this dream?” asks alien. “Did you kill someone?”

  “ ,” replies Ksenia, “I don’t think I got that far. But it looked like I was going to. A little girl, about twelve years old.”

  “And how were you going to kill her?”

  “I took out handcuffs, a cat-o’-nine-tails, this leather paddle, and all sorts of other stuff.”

  “That’s quite a collection you got together in your dream. A real sadomasochists’ sex shop.”

  “ ,” replies Ksenia, “I’ve got quite a real collection too. I like all that stuff.”

  “And are you top or bottom?” asks alien, using the English words.

  “I’m more sub than dom,” replies Ksenia, surprised at how much he knows about these things, but the phone rings and the security guard downstairs says someone’s here to see her.

  * * *

  It’s strange to sit and drink coffee with a woman whose articles she used to read when she was still a little girl. She’s nothing like Ksenia imagined her: tall, thin, not at all like a sex symbol, a face with almost no makeup, hair trimmed short, practically a buzz cut.

  “Maya,” she says, thrusting out a skinny hand. Her grip is firm. Almost like a man’s.

  She takes a dictaphone out of her purse, a large one with an external microphone, no match for the small digital device that Ksenia sometimes uses.

  She’s wearing tight-fitting leather trousers and the boots on her feet have no heels. Ksenia sneaks a glance at her thighs, wondering what it was that quivered in sweet anticipation almost ten years earlier. She asks her questions calmly, looking into Ksenia’s eyes, nodding benevolently. Nothing out of the ordinary: “How did you get this idea?”, “What do you think about this man?”, “Are the security services taking any interest in you?”, “Aren’t you afraid of being accused of this, that and the other?”, “What will you do with the project when they catch the psycho?” She replies almost without thinking, it’s all been said a hundred times before: “My colleague Alexei Rokotov took an interview, and we decided that… Of course, he’s a sick man, he has to be caught as soon as possible. Yes, we cooperate with the police, they’re happy to keep in touch. No, I’m not afraid of anything. I don’t know, I haven’t thought about it yet. Twenty minutes, is that it already?”

  “Maybe we could have a coffee, Maya, if you’re not in a hurry?”

  “Yes, an excellent idea. I expect you’re already tired of all these questions?”

  “No, no, I’ve asked the same kind a hundred times myself. We’re colleagues, after a fashion.”

  Maya takes a metal flask out of a scuffed leather rucksack.

  “Cognac. Like to warm up a bit? But then, you still have to work.”

  Maya pours a shot for herself and just a little bit for Ksenia.

  “You know, I used to read a lot of your articles once. In AIDS-Info, Megalopolis-Express and then somewhere else.”

  “Oh, back in the glorious nineties!” Maya takes out a cigarette and starts puffing on it. “It was a turn-on back then to write for the tabloids. I guess you can’t understand, but for us in the Soviet Union, the tabloids, Cosmo, Newsweek – they were all the same impossible dream. It was really interesting to do all that. We thought our generation was lucky, we were going to create the new Russian journalism. Lay the foundation for democracy and freedom of expression. And now what’s happened – some have gone into politics, some into TV, some are stars, and here I am – the old she-wolf of the yellow press. I won’t even mention democracy and freedom of expression, you can see all that for yourself.”

  “But even so,” says Ksenia, “you really did do something wonderful. My entire generation grew up on AIDS-Info. We used to steal it from our parents and read it. The fact that all my contemporaries are, I don’t know, more sexually liberated, I suppose – that’s your achievement.”

  “A rather dubious achievement, Ksenia, to be quite honest. Last week I saw one of my old school friends, her husband has left her for a twenty-year-old girl. Says he’s found sexual happiness and harmony with her for the first time. So I was responsible for playing that dirty trick on my school friend.”

  “You know, Maya,” says Ksenia, “I’d like to tell you my story, off the record. If you have five minutes. Just so you understand how much you mean to me.”

  “Go ahead,” says Maya, “and I’ll have a bit more cognac, if you don’t mind.”

  As Ksenia tells her story she studies the other woman’s face. Wrinkles round the eyes, dry skin, teeth stained yellow by nicotine. I wonder, she thinks, what this woman was like when she was young? Did she really have all those men she wrot
e about? Somehow I imagined her with big breasts – something about men liking to put their pricks between them – but now she looks as flat as an ironing board.

  “Ye-es,” Maya drawls, puffing out smoke sharply, “so do you still play ‘You go to The Club,’ and all the rest?”

  “No, no,” says Ksenia, “somehow I can’t bring myself to go to the club. And it’s not because I’m shy, or, you know, still in the closet… you can see, I’ve told you everything quite calmly and, believe me, you’re not the first. It’s just that it’s very important to me that the man that, well, that I go to bed with, interests me in some way, that he makes me respect him, I suppose. It’s stupid to go anywhere with the goal of finding a man just like that. And I really don’t want just anyone to beat me or, I don’t know, pour candle wax on me, that’s not a good idea. I can lash out if I don’t like something” – and Ksenia smiles.

  “Well, I don’t really have much experience in this area,” says Maya. “There was that one, my demon, then we split up, and for about six months I used to go to all sorts of dungeons and different games, I even tried it abroad once, in New York, and then I met a man who I guess was one of the best lovers in my life. You know, the kind of man who can guess absolutely every one of your desires. You know, like in that song by Cohen: ‘If you want a lover / I’ll do anything you ask me to / And if you want another kind of love / I’ll wear a mask for you.’ Well, I wanted him to be a cruel master, and he thought up things for me, that I don’t think I really want to tell you about now. Anyway, I’m still thankful to him, but it all finished rather sadly.”

  “How?” asks Ksenia, and thinks that now she’s the one taking the interview, as usual, the way things always are.

  “You see, he was a wonderful lover, but I didn’t love him at all. That is, I really liked him, and I still really like him, but I didn’t love him. It’s hard to explain, you know, you love a man as a friend, he’s wonderful in bed, but you don’t love him as a man. I wouldn’t have understood it at your age, but maybe your generation really is different.”

  “Well, in general terms I can understand it,” says Ksenia. “It sounds to me like an excellent basis for a marriage.”

  “Yes, we would have had a chance, but unfortunately he fell in love with me. Quite seriously. It’s a rather strange story, really – the cruel master falls in love with his submissive slave and… and, basically, nothing. Because if he started giving me flowers and presents, then our relationship would immediately cease to exist. So all he could do was keep on thinking up various different new tortures for me. As presents, you might say. And as I said, he was a wonderful lover, with a good imagination, and so the moment came when he satisfied me completely. My masochistic side, that is. I didn’t exactly wake up one morning and realize I didn’t want to be flogged or hung from the ceiling any longer – I had a special hook, we took down the ceiling lamp and put in little spotlights to leave the hook free, it used to frighten my vanilla visitors a bit – well anyway, not all at once, but gradually I moved farther and farther away from BDSM, and now I’m a perfectly normal woman.”

  “You’re frightening me,” says Ksenia. “I’m terrified to think that one fine day I might lose the taste for playing. It helps with depression too.”

  “What helps with depression,” Maya sighs, “is psychotherapy, or pills, if you need them. I’ve been through that too – so I can give you a phone number if you need one.”

  “Thanks,” Ksenia replies, “but so far I’m managing. Maybe you could give me your friend’s number instead? What happened to him, by the way?”

  “He’s still my friend, but I haven’t slept with him for a long time. I tried once, after about three months – he was tender, considerate, technically adequate and wonderful in every way, but let me tell you, Ksenia, it’s really horrible sleeping with a man’s who’s in love with you when you don’t love him! And three months after that I got married, and my sexual adventures came to an end.”

  “Are you still married?”

  “Yes, I am. I have two children now and I’m perfectly happy. I’ll tell you something, although you won’t believe me. This experiment, you know, playing, of course, it’s tremendously exciting and all the rest of it, but you have to get past that. So you can live a normal life and be happy.”

  “I’m perfectly happy,” says Ksenia. “I’m perfectly happy, insofar as it’s possible to be happy in this world. And you know what, Maya, if you were interviewing me right now, I’d say: I made this site to prove that to myself. That the psycho is also part of the world, an integral part of the world. And the awareness that in this world there is suffering beyond all endurance, the kind these girls went through, and their parents go through, and all of us when we read about it, well, the awareness that that kind of suffering is inevitable can’t stop me being happy. The pain I experience during sex brings me pleasure because that way my sex becomes a model of the world, do you understand, Maya? It’s the only time I know I’m being honest with myself and I can allow myself to be happy. Because it’s not hard being happy in a vanilla world – all you have to do is forget about what you read in the newspapers. Not just forget about the psycho – forget about the war in Chechnya, about the ecological disasters, about poverty, destitution and famine. But that’s a dishonest happiness, Maya, and I won’t accept it.”

  Maya says nothing, releasing cigarette smoke through her reddened nostrils, then she finishes the rest of her cognac straight from the flask and says:

  “This is a strange sort of conversation we’ve had, Ksenia. It’s a pity I turned off the dictaphone. But I can tell you that even your happiness is a dishonest happiness, because you pretend that a few lashes from a whip or jabs from a cigarette – I don’t know what you prefer – can serve as a model for the pain and suffering that other people experience. But that’s dishonest, Ksenia, because other people die from torture, and all you do is come. Because if you tell a mother who has lost her daughter: ‘I understand your pain, I was flogged by my lover last night too’ – she’ll spit in your face and, I’m sorry, but she’ll be right. If your idea is taken to its logical conclusion, in order to remain honest in your pleasure, in the end you have to die under torture. But I’d still recommend therapy.”

  “Thank you,” Ksenia says rather coldly and pauses for a moment. “In any case, if not for you, I would probably have killed myself eight years ago.”

  “I’m sorry,” says Maya, shaking the last cigarette out of the pack, “I have no right to pry into your life, you’re right. But I’ll tell you anyway, well, just so that you know. There are other ways to stay happy and honest. You understand, we live in a world where there is a war going on every day. It’s the war between life and death. And suffering is on the side of death, and happiness is on the side of life. Pleasure is located at the point where they meet, but that doesn’t mean we should play on both sides. Look at me. I’m forty-five years old, I had breast cancer, I lost thirty-five pounds on chemotherapy, and then they took off both my breasts anyway. My death lived inside me for a very long time, maybe it’s still alive in there even now. But my two little babies, Max and Ilya, were there inside me once too, and they’ll live in this world when I die. And so, by playing on the side of life, I’ve won. I won’t have anymore children, but every time I make love with my husband, it’s as if we’re repeating those two times. And every act of love we perform contains the whole future life of our children until they die – including the pain and the suffering. You know, Ksenia, we make children – and absolutely nothing else is needed for us to regard every sexual act we perform as a miniature model of the universe and to come without any pangs of conscience and without any help from a whip or an electric shock baton.”

  Maya reaches into her rucksack, takes out a Kleenex tissue, wipes her eyes and gets up. Ksenia feels a little awkward, successful women shouldn’t cry, although, of course, she understands everything. She catches up with Maya at the door of the cafeteria.

  “I’m sorry
,” she says, “I don’t know what to say to you, you know, I just wanted… anyway, thank you for talking to me today, thank you for everything that you said.”

  Maya puts her skinny hand on Ksenia’s frail shoulder.

  “Everything’s all right,” she says, “I’ll send you the interview to read. And the therapist’s number, just in case.”

  Ksenia watches her go and tries to imagine herself in many years’ time as a famous journalist to whom a young woman says: “Oh, I grew up on your articles. Me and my friends in fifth grade watched your site about the psycho, really great!” – and then her imagination stalls, because even in this imaginary future, there’s no way she can picture herself as a grown woman with a husband and two children.

  34

  “VERY GOOD,” SAYS THE ANSWER FLASHING ON THE flat screen. What’s good? wonders Ksenia, trying to remember, ah yes, “more sub than dom.”

  “Sorry, I went away for a while,” she writes, and a minute later alien replies: “I was afraid I’d offended you somehow”, she taps out her reply: “No, no, I’m not easily offended. It’s just that I’m at work.”

  He already knows that she’s a journalist, that she works with the news, that she has a friend Olya, who is having an abortion today, and a friend Marina, who stays at home with her little boy. He knows that this morning in the subway Ksenia saw a child’s face chopped to pieces and thought about Olya. Now he knows that Ksenia is into playing, but even so he doesn’t know that she has a lover and that she’s the producer and senior editor of the scandalous site Moscow Psycho.

  Ksenia knows that he has his own business, that he’s not married, or rather, he’s divorced, she knows that he lives in Moscow and in his free time he watches his favourite DVDs in his home movie theater, that he doesn’t like The Matrix but he likes the films of Dario Argento, the Italian director who always filmed his own hands when he needed to show the hands of a killer. Now she knows he understands what BDSM is. And she still doesn’t know his name or how old he is.