Butterfly Skin

by Sergey Kuznetsov

  45

  ALEXEI GOES DOWN ON HIS KNEES AND KISSES THE fingers that seem to have almost no nails left. My God, he thinks, feeling for the fastening of the skirt, what’s happening to her? Might as well not bother to ask, she answers my questions, but it’s as if she doesn’t hear them, as if she only knows answers that she’s learned off by heart. Okay, everything’s fine, good, absolutely. And then again: Thanks, I’m grateful to you, sorry, please, oh no. Maybe now at least, thinks Alexei, maybe in bed I’ll be able to get through to her. Let her shout and swear and cry, just as long as she says something! I was so glad, he thinks, when she asked on ICQ what I was doing this evening, I answered: nothing, although Oxana had asked me to come home a bit earlier, well never mind, I’ll tell her some lie or other. And she wrote: “will you call round to my place?” and I answered “yes!”, and now here I am down on my knees in front of her, her skirt’s lying on the floor, I’m carefully pulling the panties down off her thin thighs and pressing my lips against her mound of Venus.

  So how long are we going to keep on doing this? thinks Ksenia, but he’s making an effort, so let him. Maybe I should tell him I don’t enjoy it that way, I don’t like it with the tongue? But then, it seems like I don’t enjoy it any way anymore. It’s hard to make love when you feel like a nail’s been hammered into your neck. You need to unwind somehow, says Marina, have a screw, maybe. Have a screw! Easily said. Ksenia stands there with her legs parted, her hands resting on the head of the man bending the knee before her, and she listens closely to herself. Yes, it seems like sex is no more help than masturbation, something inside has broken, the usual fantasies don’t work, as if someone has switched off the mechanism that makes the body respond to the touch of hands, the touch of a tongue, the images flickering inside your head. Better not start thinking about what’s inside your head. A nail in the throat, a knife in the belly. And there she stands, like a fool, in the middle of the room, with her legs spread wide, so that Alexei can move his tongue about comfortably down there, stroking his bowed head – and feeling absolutely nothing at all.

  My God, Alexei thinks in amazement, she always used to get aroused so easily, what’s happening to her? He tries with his fingers, then his tongue again, running it all over her body, but Ksenia lies on her back, almost completely motionless, small and frail, as if she’s broken. When was the last time I felt so helpless? thinks Alexei. Probably it’s what they call love, he tells himself, the kind when it’s impossible to have sex with the woman you love. Especially if she doesn’t love you. Don’t think about the fact that this is Ksenia, it’s just a woman, just a skinny body, with protruding ribs, with fur below the belly and two breasts that jut out. The usual business: kiss, touch, caress. Try to arouse pleasure in her, don’t think about love. It’s just sex – and Alexei runs his fingers over the cold skin again and again, runs his lips from Ksenia’s toes to her soft, defenseless lips that respond mechanically to the kiss.

  So how long are we going to keep on doing this? thinks Ksenia, but he’s making an effort, so let him. But then, if he waits for me to come, we have an interesting night ahead of us. Why did I invite him, can you tell me that? You can’t treat other people like that, after all, he’s a living human being, not a vibrator, why do I treat him like this… It will be hard for me to find lovers now, thinks Ksenia, well all right, I’ll live alone. The fun and games are over. Who needs sex anyway? Maybe I should tell him to start screwing me properly, thinks Ksenia. I’ve got to work tomorrow, and I’m tired already. She tries to sigh more naturally, breathing out as she exclaims: “Take me!”

  My God, thinks Alexei, moving inside Ksenia, how long have I waited for this evening? I wonder what I’ll say to Oxana, but never mind, I’ll tell her some lie or other. He moves smoothly, varying the rhythm, covers her face with kisses and runs his fingers over her body. What’s happening to her? He tries to remember the way she made love a month earlier – and it’s as if a completely different woman is lying beside him.

  So how long are we going to keep on doing this? thinks Ksenia, but he’s making an effort, so let him. Poor thing, now he’s stuck in this mess too. But at least I know this kind of amusement isn’t for me right now. Maybe some time later… She lies on her back with her eyes closed, remembers her visit to the police. They didn’t believe me, they decided I was tying to hoax them. They took the disk, of course, but I could tell from their eyes that they thought I was a muddle-headed idiot, a hysterical oversexed girl. What a great erotic fantasy – a visit to the cop-shop. But then her other fantasies were no more help – in the last few days she’d realized it was better not even to try: nausea, a lump in her throat, a nail in her neck, a knife in her belly. She opens her eyes: Alexei is swaying intently to and fro. Poor thing, thinks Ksenia, maybe I should play along a bit, I have to go to work tomorrow, and I’m already tired – and she starts moving her hips to meet him, gradually lengthening the swing, curving her body up and moaning with her head thrown back, clutching at his shoulders with fingers with the nails bitten down to the quick – and feeling absolutely nothing at all.

  My God, thinks Alexei, I was almost ready to give up. I guess I really am a good lover. Moments like this make it worth living, he thinks, living to give pleasure, thrusting your tongue deep into her mouth, swaying toward each other, finding the best rhythm, listening to the vibrations of the other body. Now that’s my Ksenia, he thinks, ah, my God, yes that’s her. Lifting himself up on his hands, he leans down and kisses her on the lips again. “I love you,” he whispers, “I love you.” But all the same – what was wrong with her?

  So how long, thinks Ksenia, how long, how long are we going to keep on doing this? She’s already flailing hard, her body moving of its own accord, as if in response to an electric shock, the shock of a sudden blow. For a second Ksenia seems to be floating above the bed, she sees the broad male back hanging over her, her own closed eyes, the convulsive movements of her own body, her white lips and tipped-back head. She feels neither joy nor pleasure nor pain, there’s just something inside her hammering away at her ribcage, seeking a way out, making her arch up, twitch, shudder. What’s happening to me? Ksenia thinks. Why do I feel so bored? No, it’s not possible to make love with a man who loves you if you don’t love him at all. I guess it’s time to moan and put an end to all this, I have to go to work tomorrow, I’m tired, oh shit, she gives a long, drawn-out moan, twitches one last time and stops moving. Feeling absolutely nothing at all.

  My God, thinks Alexei, that’s all. He rolls the condom off his drooping penis, ties it in a knot, goes to the rubbish bin, then into the bathroom and washes himself wearily under the shower. That was a great screw we had, he tells himself and tries to figure out what he’s going to say to Oxana when he gets home. We took a long time today, he thinks, but it was a great screw. I’m a good lover, after all. He stands there, and the shower slowly washes away his former love and his former delusion. A great screw, Alexei repeats to himself, and he almost believes it already.

  He’s taking a long time in there, thinks Ksenia, but then let him. What is happening to me, after all? A nail in the throat and a knife in the belly. Maybe Olya really is right and I should take a vacation, say somewhere by the sea, take Alexei with me, stay in some cheap hotel. Screw like this in the evenings and in the afternoons lie on the beach… no, it’s not possible to make love with a man who loves you if you don’t love him. Especially if you love someone else and you’ve lost his address from your address book and marked him “ignore” in ICQ because you never want to hear about him again.

  46

  THE PEOPLE WHO INVENTED THE ADVERT SHOWING flowers made of thin slices of meat have absolutely no imagination, and I feel embarrassed for them every time my eye falls on the poster in the subway. Don’t forget that posters of half-naked girls leave me absolutely cold, no matter how provocative they might be. Over there on the wall there’s a girl in red, covering her breasts with hands in leather gloves, advertising the magazine Moulin Rouge. I c
ould imagine that her nipples have already been cut off and her hands are red with blood – but looking at her smug face, that’s hard to believe. Advertising in general leaves me cold, maybe because what it offers is what’s on the market.

  Sitting in the bathroom at the apartment of one of my young girlfriends, I read a thing or two in a left-wing journal. I dislike left-wing types in general: the thesis that the world should be drowned in blood for the sake of some idea or other seems like arrant hypocrisy to me. To drown the world in blood, no ideas are needed: blood is attractive enough in its own right.

  Anyway, in this journal I read a phrase from some French lefty. Comfort, he wrote, will never be comfortable enough for those who seek what is not on the market.

  I guess that’s why the only adverts I like are the famous series by Benetton, with soldiers’ shirts soaked in blood, handicapped and wounded people, cripples. It’s a shame it was never displayed in Moscow. If I was really rich, like Abramovich, Berezovsky or at least Patrick Bateman, I’d cover the entire city with images of death and suffering. Then I would never have started communicating with the world in the way I do now. I guess that’s why I’ll never be really rich. The real money is only made by those who help people to forget about death – and give them the joy of lapping up what’s on the market.

  Basically, in my view, there’s only one good thing about Russia: the Orthodox Church still continues to regard abortion as murder – but it’s still common all over the place. With my CV, I like living in a country where one woman in ten knows that she’s a murderer.

  If they asked me how I see the perfect society, I’d reply: it’s a society in which pain and suffering have equal rights with happiness. And more than that, they’re acknowledged as valuable in themselves: not pain and suffering for the sake of something else, but pain and suffering in their own right. In that society I probably wouldn’t feel so lonely.

  I think Ksenia understood me. She had a taste for pain, a sensitivity for suffering. It’s not a matter of masochism: I had a masochist lover once, and I split with her after the very first night. I was sickened by her desire to make pain comfortable and enjoyable. With Ksenia, everything’s different; I loved her for the way she looked at the world. For the stickers she noticed in the subway. For the stories she told me. And for the site she made, too.

  I wrote and told her I really do think of her as a sister: that’s the way it is. She’s my second half, the female hypostasis of the alien who lives in my chest.

  Every morning I look at the little ICQ flower in the corner of the screen and wait for her, repeating: Good morning, dear Ksenia, wake up!

  She didn’t reply to my letter, and she blocked me in ICQ. I guess she was scared – I don’t believe that she rejected me, that she didn’t understand: she and I are one and the same, mirror reflections, different-sex twins, platonic soulmates.

  She wanted my hell to become a hell for the two of us. Words like that are not easy to take back.

  But now that she’s gone silent, my hell has changed. It’s no longer a matter of sudden seizures, black spirals and intense despair – no, it’s a continuous, steady feeling, a nagging pain 24/7, a gray veil in front of my eyes. Last week I didn’t leave home for three days, and today I woke up because I was crying.

  I haven’t killed for two and a half months. That’s a long time for me: as a rule, I’ve never held out for more than five weeks. But I wanted Ksenia so badly that there was no place for other women in my fantasies. I imagined the tortures she wrote about and then in my dreams invented more and more new ones together with her. I saw us in our old age, after living together for many years, somewhere in India or Thailand, a decent climate, nobody interested in murders committed fifty years ago on the other side of the world.

  Sometimes I imagined us killing together. It certainly happens: girls with a submissive nature willingly assist men with these things. I remember that Karla Homolka gave her fourteen-year-old sister to her lover, Paul Bernardo. The Canadian press dubbed them Ken and Barbie, they were young, beautiful and in love. Caril Fugate herself chose the victims for Charlie Starkweather – I don’t remember if they showed that in Natural Born Killers.

  And even if Ksenia didn’t want to kill, she and I could have got a slave girl, kept her in the basement and had fun thinking up various amusing little tricks. Women can live quite a long time in conditions like that: seventeen-year-old Carol Smith lived with the Hooper family for seven years, and she spent three of those in a special trunk under the bed. Cameron and Janice screwed literally right above her head. Janice gave birth in the same bed – and Carol was lying in her trunk at the time.

  There were so many ways for us to be happy together!

  Now my life has been transformed into hell again. Today I thought: maybe it would have been better if I’d never known about Ksenia? Never let my fantasies deceive me?

  The black cocoon wraps itself round me tighter and tighter, I can hardly breathe, the pulsing of the blood in my ears is like the blows of a hammer. I don’t have the strength to take it anymore.

  This morning I parked my car by one of the exits from the subway. I walked hastily down the steps, like a sick man hurrying to get to the pharmacy when it opens. I knew that under the ground I would find my medicine, the woman who would help me forget my pain.

  And now for hours I’ve been changing from train to train, merging into the crowd on the escalators and in the passages, listening closely to myself, trying not to miss a single woman. I know the most insignificant detail can suddenly serve as a sign. It’s not the age that’s important, or the length of the legs, or the size of the breasts, or the prettiness of the face. It’s not the body you choose – it’s the person.

  But today all the girls look to me like goods on the market, goods that I don’t need.

  A few years ago Mike fell in love with a young girl of seventeen. He hid the whole thing from Lyuba, but the girl left him anyway, and he started moping. I advised him to pick up a girl at a club and go to the sea to chill out, but Mike said with tears in his eyes: “When you love someone, you just can’t get it up for other women.” Mike in despair – a ludicrous sight, but that’s exactly the way I feel today.

  There are two girls sitting opposite me, one who looks like a southerner, dressed in black, plump, with big breasts. Every now and then a red bra strap creeps out from under her dress. Her friend is a thin peroxide blonde with coils of hair on her head, as if she’s just got out of the shower, wearing a blouse with red flowers and a black bra that shows through it. There they sit, like positive and negative images, twittering about something – I can’t hear what.

  The brunette reminds me of a girl

  Who once stopped my car

  Near Semyonovskaya subway

  A few hours later I found out

  She had fine black hairs

  Covering all her body

  Legs, stomach, back, even the breasts

  It often happens with southern women

  But Moscow’s a northern city:

  She must have felt really shy

  I left her in the basement,

  Tied up, down on her knees,

  And next day brought a present –

  The very finest shaving cream there is

  I covered her in foam, white as a bridal veil,

  And shaved her smooth, from ankles to armpits

  Legs, stomach, back, even the breasts

  I shaved her with the razor

  I used to skin her later

  Today the brunette sitting opposite me completely fails to arouse me. The combination of red and black is terribly vulgar. And apart from that her sweat would smell sour and sharp. Not even the smell of fresh blood would mask it.

  Positive and negative, positive and negative. The blonde laughs, pulling her white down jacket tight round her. She looks weak and frail, but I know what girls like that are capable of.

  Once a girl who looked like her

  Hung in my basement three weeks<
br />
  I had problems at work,

  Suppliers delaying deliveries,

  I spent almost every day in Moscow

  So I couldn’t give her enough time

  At last she started menstruating,

  A strange sight, the dark uterine blood

  Flowing down her legs,

  Mingling with the fresh blood

  From the cuts I’d just made

  When I cut out her womb

  It was smooth and firm

  Positive and negative, red and black. They carry on twittering, I turn my eyes to the girl beside them. She adjusts her spectacles as she reads a cheap magazine, leafing through the pages with hands in old knitted gloves. A tired-looking face, beautiful plump lips, big brown eyes. Worn boots on her feet and a plastic bag lying beside her. A woolen skirt with neatly darned holes and a long Chinese down jacket, patched in several places. If I look more closely, I can see she could hardly be older than twenty-five. It’s just that she’s very tired.

  She reminds me of my first woman,

  A young girl walking through the forest

  To her dacha,

  Carrying bags of food

  That time too I sat opposite her

  In the commuter train

  And examined her face

  I came at the moment

  When I shattered her head

  With a piece of metal pipe

  I’d found on the road.

  That was a hasty death,

  Like having hasty sex

  The first time, yes

  A few tomatoes rolled out of a bag

  Running off, I stepped on one

  The juice mingled with the fresh blood

  They sat there facing me, as if they were in a shop window. Goods offered on the market. Even now I enjoy remembering the others, the ones who were like them. The ones I have killed. But today they fail to arouse me. I imagine them in my basement, I try the tortures Ksenia invented on them, listening to their breathing as they die – and I feel nothing.