Or maybe I should admit to everything? Say there weren’t any killings. I was always a kind boy. I was kind, and I’m still kind. I love people and my pity for them brings a lump to my throat. I faint at the sight of blood. I cry at the thought of someone else’s pain.
So, nothing I’ve told you about ever happened. There never was any basement torture chamber, there were no dismembered corpses, none of the girls that I invented one after another existed. No successful failure Alexei, no business-lady Olga with her well-groomed hands, or her gay brother Vlad, or frivolous Marina with her little Gleb – none of them ever existed. What about Mike? Mike was real, and so was the fox-terrier girl: and I really did pick her up in a club and screw her, but nothing like the way I told it here – we were too drunk, and I don’t even remember if she came.
Oh, all right then. I’ve never managed to pick up a girl I don’t know in a club. I confess: there was never any Mike, or any Alice. And no such club exists, although that’s not important.
There never was all that blood, those severed hands and feet, gouged-out eyes, necklaces of nipples, torn-open ribcages. Nothing. Just the silence in an apartment at night, the darkness in a lonely room, the blankness in open eyes.
Now that really is a happy ending, isn’t it? The delusion has been dispersed, you can walk the streets again without being afraid. The Moscow psycho doesn’t exist anymore, and he never did.
I invented it all.
But that’s not right. There was one incident, just one.
I walked into a kitchen, opened a drawer, took out a knife and stuck it in my thigh.
Only that, nothing else.
Only the black cocoon of anguish, only despair and hopelessness, only fantasies and dreams.
* * *
If a man kills, he’s a psycho, a monster and a murderer, he doesn’t deserve pity and compassion.
But if a man dreams about killing, who is he? Say he has a wife and kids, he goes to work, watches movies, reads books. And only sometimes, in the middle of the day, in the subway, at home, in a café – he suddenly sees the flesh peeling off a living human body, slice by slice, petal by petal. A machete descending on a woman’s breasts. An eye that has been cut out, rolling around in a stomach that has been ripped open.
Imagine these visions pursuing you night and day. While you chat with your colleagues. While you make love. While you play with your children.
You don’t know where these visions came from, all you know is that somehow they’re connected with what’s most important to you, with what makes you human.
You have a job, a wife you love, children and friends, and one fine day you go into the kitchen, take a knife and stick it in your own thigh.
A man standing there with blood flowing down his leg.
And that’s all.
Maybe we ought to regard him as a murderer?
Then we can rush the police in, arrest the criminal and end our story happily.
* * *
This morning I stood at the window and watched two girls swinging to and fro on the swings in the yard. They were about seventeen years old, they took their jackets off and the two bright spots of their summer dresses soared up into the air and back down again. Their long hair fluttered in the wind. When the swings started slowing down, I noticed one of them had red underwear that showed through the white fabric. I could distinguish her eyes, as blue as shards of sky, her slightly swollen lips, her left ear, with either three or four earrings in it. Her friend was standing with her back to me, and all I could see was wave after wave of ginger hair moving up and down with the swing.
I watched them for a long time. They were beautiful.
I didn’t want to kill anyone.
54
A STUPEFYING, SICKLY-SWEET SMELL. SHE FORCES HER eyes to open, the pain feels like something exploded inside her head. A low ceiling, dirty concrete walls covered with brownish-red streaks, light as bright as in an operating theater, a large zinc table in the middle of the space, and lying on it Ksenia’s purse and her raincoat, covered in mud, absolutely ruined. She turns her head, battling against the throbbing pain in the back of it: metal rings in the walls, nooses of rope on the ceiling. Strangely enough, she’s not tied up: she’s sitting on a metal chair, her thin hands with the bitten-down nails are lying on her knees. She hears a voice: “I’m sorry it had to be like that.” She doesn’t remember anything, a sharp pain, the dirty snow of a Moscow sidewalk. So that was the way it was done. She looks straight at him, says: “Well, never mind now.” He stands there, leaning against the dirty wall. She pictured him to herself so many times: as a psychotic killer, as alien, as a man who wrote “I love you,” but he’s not like what she imagined. He stands there, leaning against the dirty wall, smiling faintly. “I’m a bit anxious, I don’t know what to offer you. Maybe you’re hungry? Would you like me to cook dinner?”
The nausea surges up her throat. Ksenia shakes her head. Still smiling the same way, he asks: “Maybe you’d like to make love straight away?” I want it all to be over as quickly as possible, thinks Ksenia, and she doesn’t say a word. “Look what I’ve got here for you, look.” He walks over to the table, moves the raincoat aside, puts a metal box down on the zinc surface, opens it and starts taking out instruments.
“This is a scalpel for cutting, this is another one, look how sharp it is, these are tweezers, for pulling out hair, do you know how much time it takes to pull out all the hair on a mons pubis? This is a hacksaw – for sawing through bone, these are pincers – for tearing skin, this is a hammer and nails, a hatchet and a pair of pliers, a chisel and a cutthroat razor. This is a set of gags, all sizes, look, even with spikes on the inside, they go into the tongue, the important thing is not to choke on the blood, these are hooks, these are needles, these are chains, this is an awl, knitting needles, clamps, look, you’ve never seen anything like this, you can’t buy this in a shop, come over here, let me help you up.”
He holds out a firm, strong hand. Ksenia always imagined the psycho as small, skinny, pitiful. Ksenia doesn’t take the hand, she gets up on her own, wincing at the pain in the back of her head, leans on the table and watches as he takes out more and more instruments, lays them out under the bright surgical light, repeating: “Now isn’t that just beautiful?
“And this is a set of lashes, feel them, no – just feel them, these aren’t your leather toys, one blow with these can split the skin to the bone, and this here is an iron rod, if you aim right, you can reach the heart with it, and these are pegs for hammering in between the fingers, this is salt to sprinkle in wounds, this is acid, this is a little bit of gasoline, this is caustic soda, these are syringes for injections, these are forceps for the fingernails, a pity they’re not appropriate for you, these are pincers for pulling out teeth if the mouth is small, well, you know, it helps with fellatio, these are darts, specially sharpened, these are more knives, look, touch them, the genuine article, razor-sharp.”
Ksenia reaches out her hand, touches the nearest knife, a long one with a curved blade, and alien apprehensively takes her by the elbow. He’s afraid of me, Ksenia suddenly realizes, he’s afraid too. And indeed, he takes the knife with a gentle but insistent movement and cautiously pushes it away to the far end of the table.
Suddenly her head feels all right, as if someone switched off the pain. He’s afraid of me. Ksenia still doesn’t know what that means, but she feels the answer is close. What should you do? She asks herself. Think, Ksenia, think. He’s afraid of me. The delusion has been dissipated.
“Well, let’s begin,” he says, still smiling the same way. “To start with, I would hang you on the rack and show you how the whips work. What do you think of that?” Ksenia doesn’t say anything, and he shrugs his broad shoulders and says: “Just imagine, I’m nervous too. After all, it’s the first time a girl has come here voluntarily. Maybe I should ask you what you want to start with, is that right? I don’t know the ritual, give me a hint, why don’t you say something?” Think, Ksenia
, think. “I understand, there’s so much to choose from. I guess you’re already aroused, right? I always dreamed of a woman who would get aroused with me. You can’t imagine how glad I am that we met. And this is all for you, all for you.”
Ksenia is absolutely calm now. She asks:
“So you think I came here voluntarily?”
“Of course, well, practically, yes, voluntarily. You wrote to me yesterday. You’re the first woman who’s come here voluntarily – and you’re the first woman who’s ended up here that I don’t intend to kill.”
“And you intend to live a long and happy life with me?”
“Yes, yes, till death us do part,” he says, smiling very calmly, “yes, they lived happily together and they died on the same day. Just like in the stories, a long and happy life. Like brother and sister, you know.”
“Let’s write a marriage contract,” says Ksenia, “so I never forget I came here voluntarily, and you never forget you took me in voluntarily.”
Still smiling as calmly as ever, he nods:
“Yes, all right, let’s. The adult approach, a stop-word, all the works?”
“Yes and a stop-word too.”
“I once suggested using a stop-word with a girl,” he reminisces. “The stop-word we had was ‘kill me!’ And I warned her that when she said it, I really would kill her.”
“Did she say it?”
“Yes, but I still didn’t kill her straight away. After all, the most interesting part comes after the stop-word, doesn’t it?”
“I guess,” says Ksenia, “then my stop-word can be ‘I love you,’ all right?”
He smiles and nods.
“Yes, very good. Shall I go and get some paper?”
“I have some,” says Ksenia, and she reaches for her purse, “I have some,” she repeats, “I am a journalist, after all.”
He twirls a short, narrow knife with a light-blue handle in his hands, the table is between them, his eyes are calm and thoughtful, he carries on smiling, he’s still smiling when Ksenia shoots him twice in the chest without taking the gun out of her purse. As he falls, the knife in his hand catches his right thigh, but he doesn’t feel pain anymore, he falls, falls, falls through the time that is standing still, tearing through the black cocoon, through the dark cloud of anguish and despair, falls as space curls up like tattered wallpaper, windowpanes melt and flow, doors scream in horror, falls, falls, falls, and in the final bright flash he sees a female figure of unbearable beauty and royal bearing, a white radiance, a grinning mouth, dripping saliva, the flesh shreds apart, the jaws gape wide, jewelry made of skulls, clear light, a corpse under each foot, a wrathful deity, the Snow Queen, he falls, falls, falls, feeling something crunching and breaking inside his chest, something leaving his body, forcing its way out toward the radiant light, he falls, falls.
Ksenia comes to when she hears the dry click of the empty pistol. She doesn’t remember coming round the table to be beside the dying man, doesn’t remember emptying the clip at almost point-blank range. He fell, the knife in his hand caught his right hip, the blood is still oozing from the wound. His ribcage is ripped apart as if someone had smashed it with a single blow. Ksenia looks into the dead face: forty years old, plump lips, wide-open eyes, receding hairline, touches of gray.
“You didn’t understand anything,” Ksenia tells him, “you didn’t understand anything. You didn’t read what I wrote to you carefully enough. Even for my most powerful orgasm, I wouldn’t pay with somebody else’s life. I’d give up any pleasure not to have you living in the same world as me.”
Ksenia is still holding the pistol in her hand, she tosses the knife further away from the hooked fingers with the toe of her boot and goes back to the table. She looks at the tattered remains of her purse, the items of makeup scattered among the knives, forceps and clamps. She touches the cold metal with a cautious finger. Something’s wrong, not the way it ought to be. Something almost forgotten rises up from within her, moving through her body in a warm wave, clumping together into a heaviness below her belly. Ksenia automatically picks up a scalpel, yes, alien was right. She is aroused. For the first time in weeks she feels the itch, so strong that she can hardly move. As if the arousal locked away inside has finally broken out and filled Ksenia’s body, trying to burst it open, demanding release.
Ksenia goes back to the metal chair, sits down, lifts up her skirt, slips her hand under the elastic of her panties – and encounters the dead gaze of open eyes staring at her in reproachful surprise. She gets up and walks over to the corpse, still holding the scalpel in her hand. There’s a hole in the chest, on the left side, into which Ksenia emptied the entire clip, and it occurs to Ksenia that the alien who used to live in this body must finally have escaped. I don’t even know his name, she thinks, and brushes the palm of her hand over the dead eyelids.
As she gets up, Ksenia notices something glittering in the shadow beside a leg of the table. Gathering up her skirt, she steps across the dead body – and picks up Olya’s bracelet with the dark-red stones.
Playing at snowballs, like little children, riding down slides and laughing in taxis, side by side jogging on running machines, four of you at the Coffee Inn; the baby on the rug, saying “mama,” behind you “I’ll be back” getting closer, what should you do? The boy hears the trembling sound getting louder, out of the bathroom comes Mom in her robe, puts her hand on your forehead and asks: “Are you hot?”; “No more dancing for you, you’ve got to study”; “I love you so much, and I sacrifice everything”; “What will people say, it’s pure filth, you’re my daughter!”; “No point in crying, you just have to fight”; what should you do? A wet face against a warm fluffy sweater. “Your mascara’s run.” – “That’s the snow, Olya, it’s only snow.”
Ksenia, Ksenia, lost little girl, beauty who killed the beast, you’re twenty-three years old, squat down in the dirty, blood-soaked basement and cry, don’t stop, please, please cry, cry.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SERGEY KUZNETSOV was born in Moscow in 1966. In the 1990s he achieved a high profile as one of the pioneers of the internet in Russia, and has written for The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Playboy, Vogue and L’Officiel. His groundbreaking thriller Butterfly Skin has been translated into six languages, and in 2001 he became the first Russian journalist to receive a Knight Fellow scholarship from Stanford University. Besides being an entrepreneur and writer, he is editor-in-chief of Booknik, an internet publication on Jewish literature and culture. He lives in Paris.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
ANDREW BROMFIELD has been a full-time translator from Russian for more than twenty years. He was a co-founder and original editor of Glas, a journal of modern Russian literature in English translation. His numerous translations include Mikhail Shishkin’s Letter-Book (The Light and the Dark), works by the Strugatsky brothers, Vladimir Voinovich, Pavel Pepperstein, Olga Slavnikova and Andrey Kurkov, as well as most books by Victor Pelevin and Boris Akunin, Mikhail Bulgakov’s A Dead Man’s Memoirs (A Theatrical Novel) and A Dog’s Heart (An Appalling Story), Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace – the Original Version and the two-volume Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia.
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