Butterfly Skin

by Sergey Kuznetsov

  Once the subway used to welcome me with open arms, once I used to read the signs. Once time used to stand still at the sound of a woman’s laughter, at a passing glance, the turn of a head. Once I used to know in advance how each one of them would die. Once I used to think every one of them was worth taking trouble over. Once I used to think they were all beautiful. Unbearably beautiful.

  But now I’m telling you goodbye. I won’t be coming down into the subway anymore, suppressing my trembling, standing transfixed on the escalators, standing motionless in the overcrowded cars, following girls to entranceways, trailing them on dark evenings, pushing in the needle of the syringe, barely managing to catch the falling body, carefully putting it in the trunk of the car. This evening you will go home to your loved ones, parents, little children, and you’ll never know what I wanted to tell you.

  There’s only one woman I want. And I’ll wait until she summons me. Summons me herself. She can only come to me voluntarily.

  The tired girl opposite me gets up, picks up her bag and walks to the door. There’s a sticker on the seat, where I couldn’t see it before. An image slightly worn by people’s backs, a child’s face chopped to pieces. The words say: “Thou shalt not kill.”

  47

  THE SAME THING EVERY TIME FOR THIRTY-FIVE YEARS, but every year it still comes as a surprise. In the morning it’s winter, cold, snowy, loathsome. But in the afternoon you glance out the window, go outside, and – whoa! – the sun’s shining, the birds are singing, the snow’s melting, winter’s on the way out. Every winter you think: Oh, if I can just survive until spring! – not, of course, because you’re actually planning to die. It’s just that in February it’s not possible to believe winter will ever end. But every year it’s the same thing: something in the air changes elusively, a half-forgotten smell breaks through the stench of gasoline – and suddenly an invisible wave of happiness floods over you.

  God only knows when the snow will melt (more will fall in May anyway!) There’s still a long time to wait for the first greenery, it will be a while before you hand your fur coat in to the special cold store to protect it from the heat and buy summer dresses, but even so, you suddenly realize that it’s over, finished, you’ve lived through another winter. That evening you go to bed with a man – and you don’t care that he’ll leave you and go straight back to his wife; you go to bed to sleep alone – and you don’t feel lonely; you open a book and you don’t even try to read, you smile over the open pages, you say: I think it turned out fine, but what it is that turned out fine, you don’t even know yourself.

  A believer, thinks Olya, would probably call it “God’s blessing,” but I don’t have any special words for it. As a girl with a philological education, I declare authoritatively that if there are no words, none are needed. It’s enough to know that every year, no matter what, you have a day like this coming to you, a day that justifies the other three hundred and sixty-something days in the calendar year. A day of entirely spontaneous happiness.

  You get up in the morning, go into the shower, look at your reflection in the mirrors – after all, you’re a beautiful woman, aren’t you? Not a sterile model from a glossy magazine cover, not some twenty-year-old chick who has no idea of her own worth; no, a lovely, beautiful thirty-five-year-old woman, open to the world and to new love in the future. Hey, hear this – Olya turns on the shower and even makes the water a little colder – hear this, I, Olga Krushevnitskaya, am standing here in the bathroom, wet and happy, ready for new love. I’m all clear, I’m free, I’m lovely, I love myself, I’m happy, I deserve to be happy.

  It was a tough winter, Olga tells herself, opening a fat-free yoghurt and rolling the word “was” across her tongue, tough, but it brought results! She came out a winner, no matter which way you looked at it. The presentation unfolds in her head, in PowerPoint: Olga Krushevnitskaya, Winter Results.

  In proper sequence, point by point.

  1. The Business – preservation and development.

  Photo: Grisha and Kostya in Thailand. Graph: expansion plans proposed on their return to Moscow. Tables: schedule for receipt of initial tranches of new investment. La Belle Hélène is nowhere in sight: the expert Thai masseuses had probably banished her ghost forever. Ah but no, I beg your pardon, what had young Thai tarts got to do with it? It was her, Olga Krushevnitskaya, thirty-five years old (photo in business suit), successful business-lady, subtle psychologist, maestro of the chessboard bluff – yes, she was the one who had driven out the phantom of the ill-fated Helen. So, the business: expert appraisal – five out of five.

  2. Family – stability and harmony.

  Small but loving. Photo: Olga with Vlad beside her, half-smiling. At the bottom of the screen – the outline of the Admiralty building in Petersburg, a little snapshot by Mom. Lines indicating contact by telephone connect it with Vlad and Olga. Next slide, please. Vlad and Andrei beside the ocean. Goa State, India. The house I hope to get to next winter. Another slide: Sheremetyevo-2, to which Vlad will fly back in a month. So, family: expert appraisal – four and a half out of five.

  3. Love – freedom and independence.

  A blank white screen. No: Olga Krushevnitskaya in her best dress, looking like all four lead characters in Sex and the City at the same time. Seductive. Romantic. Sexy. Confident. Next slide: a man’s silhouette with a blinking question mark. A pity she can’t show that he has no wedding ring – to symbolize the fact that the affairs with married men are finished forever. So, love: expert appraisal – five out of five, yes! Refer all questions to the experts.

  She pours the coffee out of the little Turkish pot, smiles contentedly. What do we have left? Ah yes, friendship. Kind of hard to think up a slogan. Make it “closeness and constancy.”

  4. Friendship – closeness and constancy.

  Slide show: Olya and Ksyusha at the Yakitoria, Olya and Ksyusha at Fitness Planet, Olya and Ksyusha on a snow slide, in the Coffee House, at a chessboard table in the Atrium, with two other people at the Coffee Inn. Skip the next slide, please – oh, no, it didn’t work, there it is, nothing to be done about it now: Ksyusha with her eyes empty and her face frozen, a small, disheveled, huddled bird, a broken toy. And the next one, quickly: Ksyusha with a suitcase at Sheremetyevo-2, Olya seeing her off to Prague: she managed to persuade Ksyusha to take a break after all, to travel toward the European spring.

  A sharp flash of memory: Ksyusha’s face nestled between her breasts, black tousled hair, Olya runs her hand over it, whispers in a low voice: “Don’t worry, Ksyusha, everything will be all right, you know.” How’s she getting on? thinks Olya, how’s the nail in her throat, the knife in her solar plexus? Have the spirits of the Prague alchemists managed to draw the cold iron out of the warm flesh? Have they managed to transform despair into hope, grief into fearlessness, ice crystals into pure tears? She spoke cheerfully on the phone, well, never mind, another two days and I’ll go to Sheremetyevo to meet her. Ksyusha flying back and winter already over. That’s happiness, real happiness.

  Olya drops her dressing gown on the divan and walks toward the wardrobe. I forgot to include the increase in salary, she thinks with a smile, the increase in salary and the promised loan for a new car. She dresses in front of the mirror, thinks: That’s good, it’s high time to change the Toyota. It’s almost seven years old, it makes me look bad, I ought to get something new.

  She takes a long time choosing her makeup. After all, what day is it today? You could call it the first day of a new life. Maybe she’ll meet the man of her dreams, why not? Who will he be like? He could even be like Pasha Silverman. We’ll be a lovely couple, two successful business people, almost exactly the same age. Especially since he really helped me in that business with That Man, the Big Investor. And Ksyusha… yes, I think he really loves her. Like a father, I mean. And the two of us will be like Ksyusha’s mom and dad.

  Olya looks herself over in the mirror once again, tells herself: okay, all’s well that ends well. Ksyusha will come back and she
’ll be just fine, everything will be like it was before. Even better. On a day like this it’s impossible not to believe it.

  She picks up her purse and checks – cell phone, apartment key, car keys, license, safe key, what else? – and she walks down the stairs without waiting for the elevator. She parked the Toyota on the other side yesterday, there weren’t any spaces – in winter that’s annoying, but today she actually feels glad of a chance to stretch her legs. The reflection of the sun, shifting from window to window, follows her all the way to the corner. She moves into the shadow – the snow will take a long time to melt there! – walks over to the car, gets into the driving seat, locks the door and turns the ignition in a single movement, and tries to drive out of the parking lot.

  What the hell! She gets out, swearing to herself: well now, would you believe it, on a day like this! Someone’s punctured two of the tires. If it was just one, she could have put on the spare and driven to the tire shop, all fine and dandy. But now what? Call a tow-truck? Olya looks at her watch. No, that would take till evening, she’d miss the whole day. She glances into the car again – has she forgotten anything? – turns on the alarm (a lot of good that was last night, when the tires were flattened!), hangs her purse over her shoulder and walks out into the side street.

  The first car stops. Olya gives the address and makes herself comfortable on the front seat. Well all right, she thinks, I’ve hardly lost any time at all, and this evening I can have a drink and come home in a taxi. But I can’t have any drink! I have to get the car sorted out! Ooooh, she sighs, and then immediately smiles: on a day like this it’s not possible to sigh for long. The sun is shining straight into the windscreen, Olya shades her eyes and turns her face to the spring sunlight. They say you can’t get a tan in a car, she thinks, well so what, there’ll be time for a tan later. After all, there’s the whole summer ahead.

  48

  THE PLANE GAINS HEIGHT AND THE AIRPORT terminal building, the meandering ribbon of the Vltava, the gothic spires, the narrow little streets, the statues on the Charles Bridge, the crowds on the Old Town Square, the spring flowers on the slopes of the Castle Hill are left behind down below. March, and everything is green already, no snow, would you believe it. Ksenia smiles.

  Olya was right, a week in Prague was the best medicine. If you thought this thing through, it was no more than a failed virtual love affair, almost like Marina’s. A wonderful lover on ICQ, but a monster in real life. That was almost poetry.

  The ghosts of Prague had scattered the phantoms of Moscow. Dead girls, flayed skin, severed hands… Ksenia jiggles her shoulders. It’s not hard at all to teach yourself not to think about it, shove it into a dusty corner and forget about it forever. I guess that’s what everybody does. There’s too much suffering and pain in the world already, what’s the point of thinking about it all. You have to live without letting the phantoms into your cozy little world. That’s the way everybody lives. There’s Marina, raising her son without thinking about how the boy will live his life, turn into an old man with white hair and then be a handful of dust in a rectangular box with a name on a plaque.

  Thank you, Olya: she bought Ksenia’s ticket, booked the hotel, arranged for friends who lived in Prague to meet her, make her welcome and show her the city. Olya’s friends – a man with the funny surname Karmodi and a girl with the amusing first name Allena – not pronounced “Allyona,” in the Russian fashion, don’t get them mixed up – led Ksenia round the narrow streets, bought her beer, gave her hash, did the rounds of the tourist spots and concerts, and gradually Ksenia thawed out, the nagging pain passed off, as if someone had pulled out the nail stuck in her throat and taken away the knife sticking out of her belly. On the second day she got drunk and told them the latest Moscow jokes, disregarding the fact that her kindly hosts had also read them on the internet at Anecdote.ru. They drank beer in Žižkov – at Plato’s Cave, Amsterdam, and The Seven Wolves, they played table soccer in a beer garden, tried to spit into the Vltava from the giant metronome in Letná Park, bought grass at the Château, smoked it in the basements of the Barrel Wine Bar and went to watch a movie at a multiplex in the Andêl district.

  On Friday they attached themselves to an international group in the Central Lounge – three Americans, one Frenchman, a couple from Germany, two girls from Austria. When it was getting near morning, lanky Jean-Pierre with the flaxen hair tried to hug her and puckered up his lips, and she recoiled so sharply that she even frightened herself: a few moments longer and she would have hit him. “You can just say no,” he said in English, pale-faced.

  “I’m sorry,” said Ksenia, “I have problems with my sex life, Jean-Pierre, I’m really sorry.” How easy it is to say in English, how ludicrous it sounds in Russian – “I have certain problems with my sexual life.” Problems? Why problems? Maybe everything’s perfectly normal, in fact. Look for yourself: you had an affair, you split up, you’re suffering. You’re not ready for a new relationship, and so, hmmm, well… And then, you can’t even masturbate either, and nothing arouses you, and in general, doctor, I think I’m frigid now.

  Ksenia reaches out for a glass of apple juice: “Can I have some water as well? Thank you.” I guess I should be glad it’s all over now. I guess it’s better to have no fantasies than that kind. Maya told me masochism was something you had to get over in order to start living a normal life. Get married, have children, one boy and one girl, no, better two girls, call them Marina and Olya, live a happy life. Make a good career, then get married and have two girls. Right, now it’s clear how we’re going to live from here on. Very good.

  Or I could become a lesbian, thinks Ksenia. I have no memories connected with women, women have never tied my hands together with a clothesline or dripped wax onto my bare stomach. How repulsive it is, really. She puts her empty glass on the tray and smiles at the air hostess: snub nose, broad cheekbones, bright-painted lips, she gives a well-practiced smile, but Ksenia thinks it seems warm and sincere. Right then, marry a woman, be the wife, she thinks. Or, on the contrary, be the husband. Marry Marina, say. But no, better not Marina, Marina would be unfaithful, screw with their mutual female friends and bring men home. Better marry Olya. Olya’s grownup, independent, experienced. She would be a mother to her, sometimes a daughter, or a sister – for an instant the word “brother” flares up in her brain, triggering a sharp pain in her neck, stop, Ksenia tells herself, no more brothers, enough… right then, instead of a sister, instead of a husband, instead of a wife. She tries to imagine Olya and herself making love. There probably wouldn’t be any point in pretending, you can’t fool a girl. If I don’t feel like it, I’ll simply say: “Sorry, I’m not getting it on,” Olya will understand. Olya’s beautiful, Ksyusha likes the way Olya leans her head sideways in conversation, draws on her cigarette through a long holder, smiles with the corners of her mouth and swings her well-groomed hand smoothly through the air. She drove Ksyusha to Sheremetyevo and kissed her before she checked in. When they said goodbye, Ksyusha stuck her face between her breasts, Olya stroked her hair and whispered in a low voice: Don’t worry, Ksyusha, everything will be all right, you know it will, and it’s come true, everything is all right, thank you for Prague, thank you for Einstürzende Neubauten at the Archa Theater, thank you for this week, for pulling the knife out of my wound, getting rid of the nagging pain in my neck, for the goodbye kiss, for not sleeping that night when I came out of the bathroom, sitting beside me until morning, stroking my hair without saying a word.

  “Yes, MK, please.” The newspaper rustles, she looks through the window at the clouds, as yellowish-gray as the Moscow snow. Thinks: it will be spring at home soon. Just why were we born in such a cold country? We fly into Moscow and tomorrow I go to work, I wonder how they’re getting on there? The site, oh, I don’t even want to think about the site. Olya’s right, we ought to close it down. Or give it to Alexei, not take any money, just take our names off it? But what if they’ve already caught him? thinks Ksenia. Then I could just forget th
e whole business completely. She leafs through the newspaper, looking for the crime section: that would be a real welcome home present. “Moscow Psycho captured.” And not think about the fact that I loved that man, not think about it. That isn’t what I went to Prague for.

  She turns a page – and instantly, as if all the pain that had gone has suddenly come back, as if someone has hit her in the face with a hatchet, chopped off her hands, ripped open her breasts, smashed her ribcage, taken out her heart, she screams, screams, the apple juice gushes out of her throat in pink foam, the startled man next to her recoils, the air hostess comes running, Ksyusha squeezes the sheet of newsprint between her bitten fingers, clutching it as if she’s still hoping to wake up, scream, scream, howl like an animal, anything not to see the small print right down at the bottom: Another victim for the Moscow Psycho? The body of a young woman with indications of sexual violence and torture has been found in the Bitsevo forest park. From the nature of the wounds and the location of the body, experts believe this could be the latest victim of the psychotic killer who has been terrorizing the capital for the last six months. The dead woman has been identified from her documents as thirty-five-year-old Olga K. Scream, scream, choking on your sobs, writhe in the arms of the air hostess, cry, cry.

  But no – Ksenia sits there without moving, reading it over and over again, no longer hoping for anything, not believing it’s just coincidence – there must be plenty of girls in Moscow called Olya, with a surname starting with K, thirty-five, the director of a well-known internet shop! – she sits there without moving, not a single tear, the sky above Europe, clouds as dirty as the Moscow snow.