The Tool & the Butterflies

by Dmitry Lipskerov

  “The same. Senior manager of this branch,” the windbag answered, not without a certain degree of pride.

  “I have no need for you, Grishechkin. I have a need for one million rubles. You are a means to that end. Just approve my withdrawal!”

  “We have a rule about—”

  “I hereby close my account and demand its balance, in full and in cash!” I announced, feeling perfectly relaxed; I had ample free time, and they had no other customers. “And you, Grishechkin, will be held personally responsible for the loss of a large account! You think the stars will favor you after that? Incidentally, what’s your ethnicity?”

  “I’m Russian …”

  “Well, there you go. Your stars can align any way they please! There are no stars for … well, I won’t burden you with that information. Just think about it, Grishechkin. There are a lot of people in this rat’s nest who wouldn’t mind taking your place in that fish tank!”

  I was invited into the thirty-foot glass chamber that the senior manager wanted so desperately to keep. A machine provided me with coffee of dubious quality, the transparent walls closed their blinds, and Grishechkin began our interview.

  “You were saying something about a star …”

  “I’m always talking about the stars, my friend! Astrology is a subtle science, yet very reliable.”

  “So you’re an astrologer?”

  “I know a thing or two.” Grishechkin’s face flared with curiosity at this. He had always been eager to believe in anything and anyone: faith healers, sorcerers, the president, and, of course, astrology. He had a very important question about the future …

  “I am hereby authorizing you to withdraw a million rubles!” the senior manager said decisively. “The girls go too far sometimes. That’s understandable—they don’t have a million rubles to withdraw! But could you give me your professional opinion on something?”

  “Are you a Gemini?”

  “How did you—”

  “All I had to do was look at you. I work proactively. You were born at 8:45 on the ninth—”

  “Oh my God!” Grishechkin threw his hands in the air.

  “No,” I said, crossing myself. “I am not Him. I am an astrologer. You, Grishechkin, have nothing to worry about. Elena Glassova might not love you, but she will marry you. She sees promise in you. That Khabarovsk country lady of yours needs to bring her daughter up somehow, and she’ll need money to do it!” The senior manager listened, mouth agape.

  “What dau—” he eventually gasped.

  “I see that you don’t know about her daughter?”

  “No, of course not! That’s the stars for you …”

  “Well, if they favor you, she may be sent to an orphanage. But anyway, do not weary me with your nickel-and-dime problems, just give me my million rubles for this information!”

  “But … but …” The manager’s expression instantly turned gloomy.

  “Women are all bitches!” I said bracingly. “They have been since time immemorial. Ever since Eve. She was the Ur-bitch! So how about that million?”

  “Just a moment.” The manager put his sprawling signature to the document.

  “Good goin’! As my way of saying thank you, I’ll tell you that Elena Glassova’s daughter suffers from mental retardation, so your beloved’s pedigree is subject to question. Do you really want a mentally retarded child?”

  “It’s all so …” Grishechkin mumbled incomprehensibly in response.

  “Well, the good news is that you will live a long life and die on your birthday.”

  Leaving Grishechkin’s office behind, I went over to the little window and handed the half-asleep teller my signed document. The electronic counter portioned out two hundred five-thousand-ruble bills. The money was separated into two bricks and passed over to me, granting me the right of free pilotage.

  “Don’t lose it, mister!” the girl cautioned.

  “You should have the birthmark on your right breast removed. That’s why your boyfriend doesn’t want you. Not that he can do much for you anyway …” I headed for the door, but Grishechkin wailed after me before I could leave.

  “Hey! How long am I going to live for?”

  “Live as long as ya want!” I replied. Nobody could take those thirty-two years from him. Then he’d drown in the bathtub—that would be Little Ms. Barbiturate’s way to acquire his worldly possessions.

  I went to a nearby café that specialized in crepes. I put away a couple hundred, accompanied by sour cream and honey. I could have had more, but the waitress was looking at me like I was some kind of monster.

  “I won this year’s European Crepe Speed-Eating Championship,” I informed the eatery attendant. “I have a medal and everything. Want to see it?”

  “I’d rather see some money.”

  I paid my bill, finished my seventh cup of tea, and peered through the glass window, watching the people plodding through the falling snow. Almost all of them looked despondent, like the majority of the population inhabiting the East European Plain. Conceived without joy, they live in sorrow. How are they to know that the snow falling around them is a blessing? Everything that comes from above is a joy, nothing that comes from below is any good. Let’s say a man goes ass over teakettle, bangs his head on the ice, and dies. If he’s fortunate enough to hit the back of his head, he’ll die facing the sky—but if he should perish with his mug in the dirt, that is a cosmic disaster.

  Lost in thought, I remembered Grishechkin, and the magical coil of that memory led me to another story directly tied to Iratov.

  When Alevtina Vorontsova was killed, when she was already dead and under the scalpel, relinquishing her progeny to the world, when Iratov strode past the neonatal ward and saw the pink heel of an infant sharing his surname, I was right there, in the role of happy father. I don’t mean I had a child, I mean I was losing myself in that dramatic role. As Mr. Iratov walked past me, I looked into his eyes and easily discerned his cruel heart. Vengeance had been taken. He seemed to have triumphed. I am not at all opposed to vengeance, myself. Order could not exist without it, whatever you mighta heard about eyes and cheeks—the old law is truer than the new … Well, Iratov had been avenged without having to get his hands dirty. He celebrated his liberation, his deliverance, in all of Moscow’s finest restaurants, while I held his child in my arms—and this was no Peterson, he was an Iratov, the newborn fruit of Arseny’s loins. One mishap did await the doctors, who would state the next morning that the infant’s brain was 80 percent sabotaged by oxygen deprivation and what have you. A terrible sentence would be passed on the baby; the best he could hope for was to develop to the level of a three-year-old and be sent to a special institution. They did track down Captain Vorontsova’s relatives, but they flatly refused to take on a “future retard.” There you have it, conceived without joy!

  Iratov’s baby boy was very handsome, which helped him to survive his first three years in the reformatory nursery. Very few lived to such a venerable age. The entirely unkind caretakers, who were prone to stealing the food meant for the wretched children, looked into the boy’s deep black eyes and experienced something akin to religious reverence. When he reached three and his black hair grew to his shoulders, the caretakers started to view him as an angel. A little raven angel. They doted on him, to the extent that was possible in such a state institution, fed him amply, and even brought him morsels from home.

  The young Iratov was named Joseph in honor of the Nobel Prize-winning poet who was expelled from the USSR for social parasitism. Yevdokia, a young caretaker, came up with that name. She was very young, no more than sixteen, and had come to the capital from Yakutia. She was half Buryat, and “Joseph” struck her as a classic Russian name. Yevdokia’s own biological father, the second secretary of the regional Communist Party committee, did not acknowledge her, since she was born unofficially, hastily conceived in a reindeer-hide tent. The young woman, who’d already been betrothed to the foremost local herdsman, was taken by force at a
Party conference. The Party man ripped off her furs and thoroughly enjoyed the local color. That was how Yevdokia came into the world with narrow eyes, pale skin, and a lovely figure. She grew up among the reindeer and studied the only book in her tent. It was a manuscript that, according to legend, had been left behind by her biological father when he raped her mother. It turned out that the Party man read samizdat on the side and had a taste for the sublime. That taste was the origin of Dasha, as Yevdokia’s mother called her. The reindeer herder who married her just couldn’t accept another man’s spawn; he drank for a few years and then died along with his herd, which was decimated by some sullen illness. Once Dasha was old enough, she left her hopeless situation for Moscow, where she found a caretaker job at an orphanage for mentally challenged children at sixty rubles a month—barely enough to live on. She tirelessly emptied the potties, washed urine-stained sheets, fed the infants with a spoon—basically, she was always on her feet. What little free time she had was devoted to baby Joseph. She even tried to teach him to talk. It was all in vain, though; despite his angelic appearance, the child was absolutely vacant and emotionless … The rest of the staff consisted of aging women lacking any semblance of education who called their charges “vegetables.” Only Ms. Bella Yurieva, the director of the facility, had been accredited by an institution of higher learning. Her nasty, grubbing subordinates just called her “the college bitch.”

  Lingering over the daily goings-on of a Soviet residential facility is hardly enjoyable and far from necessary. The only thing that can be lingered on here—briefly—is little Joseph’s relationship with his caretaker Dasha. When the time came for the boy to leave the facility as the last survivor from his group, he snuggled up to Dasha’s knees like they belonged to his own mother, and the compassionate girl burst into sobs from the coming loss of her favorite. For the first time, the boy had showed a sign of emotional expression, which stirred her youthful soul. She dried her eyes, appeared before the director, and asked if she could keep Joseph—i.e., adopt him. This question prompted the director to think that it wasn’t just her charges that were idiots—that applied to her staff as well. What else could she expect from an Eskimo, though?

  “But you’re just a kid, too! How old are you anyway?” she asked with faint disdain.

  “I turned eighteen last month.”

  “So what do you want this degenerate for? He was born without a foreskin, for God’s sake—wretched thing!”

  “Now I love him with all my heart!” explained the guileless Dasha. “He’s beautiful and harmless, like a little flower!”

  “And do you realize that this little flower is going to start smacking you around when it grows up? Right now he’s like a wolf pup, meek and sweet, but when he turns fifteen and the hormones hit that brainless head of his, he’ll break your neck and not even remember he did it!”

  “You shouldn’t be like that, Ms. Yurieva!” said Dasha, going pale. “Not everything in life is so bad. There are miracles, too—”

  “What will you live on, you dope?”

  “The Lord will guide me—”

  “Like hell he will! You’ll get tired of him and give him back to the orphanage. You aren’t the first and you won’t be the last! And if you fall in love, it’s a short way to smothering him to get him out of the way. We had this one tenderhearted nurse that took a Down syndrome girl home. Then a gentleman caller came into the picture, and when the question of him or the wretch came up, it was answered promptly. A pillow over her face and it went down on paper as an accident. Then the murderess and her gentleman had a baby, and it was a girl with Down syndrome. Talk about an irony of fate!”

  “People are all different, Ms. Yurieva. I’m not like that at all.”

  Hardened as it was by her profession, Ms. Yurieva’s heart could feel that Dasha really was a good girl, self-sacrificing, like the Russian women in movies from the fifties. Much to her own surprise, she went over to Dasha, patted her on the head, and drew her to her ample breast.

  “Alright, alright! Listen to your heart! You can stay in the dormitory for now, and you’ll work here like before. You can bring Joseph, and we’ll give him a little extra to eat. He’ll get free clothes, too. How does that sound?”

  “Thank you, you’re so sweet!” Dasha grabbed her director’s hand and started kissing it. Ms. Yurieva snatched her hand back and turned away, hiding her own meager tears by studying the portrait of the minister of health.

  That was how Joseph Iratov’s fate was decided—for a time, at least.

  It would be equally pointless to get bogged down in the details of Dasha’s trials and tribulations, how hard the life of a girl trying to raise such an unfortunate child was, what was going on in Joseph’s dark soul. Yeah, it was tough going, but that’s just how it goes …

  I, on the other hand, undertook a series of attempts to compel Arseny, Joseph’s true father, to help raise his offspring, unwanted as he might have been. I sent the young architect and businessman an anonymous letter, in which I tried to persuade him to be involved in the life of his deficient firstborn, even if it was only financially.

  “Go screw yourself!” was the swift and decidedly disgusting response to my general-delivery letter.

  I am a hot-tempered gentleman, most keen and vengeful. In reply to his “Go screw yourself,” I sent Iratov a subsequent missive, in which I insinuated knowledge of several critical details of his criminal deeds and promised to reveal his unlawful activity to the relevant law enforcement agencies. I almost immediately received an invitation to meet by the Gogol statue on a dark November night.

  I prepared for the rendezvous exactingly, not wishing to reveal my true appearance to Iratov. As previously mentioned, I have experience as a makeup artist. I attached a goatee and whiskers, aged up my face—the bags under my eyes were especially well-executed, if I do say so myself—and put on a wig with a little bald spot. I arrived shortly before the designated time and surveyed the area. My watch showed two minutes past eleven when a human shadow appeared near the bronze figure of the great Russian writer, and then the entity itself emerged from behind the pedestal. I peered into the darkness, trying to discern Iratov, straining my eyes to the breaking point. Was it him or not? When the tension was at its peak, someone who had come up from behind whispered right in my ear.

  “Are you here to meet Arseny Iratov?”

  “Yes,” I replied, without even turning around.

  “Mr. Iratov has a message for you.”

  “Well?”

  “Here!” Instead of a written message, I received a powerful blow to the back of the head with some kind of metallic object and collapsed into the wet snow like a tree that had outlived its Christmas. Out of the corner of my eye, I managed to spot a dark figure peeling itself away from the monument and darting in my direction.

  They weren’t beating me up. They were killing me. First the blows rained down on the back of my head, then homemade lead knuckles were smashing my teeth, breaking my jaw and eyebrow ridges. One of the villains gouged my eye out, whispering, “Die, bitch!” Then they both started kicking me with their sharp, heavy boots. Back then, it was fashionable to stick pieces of lead in your footwear to make your lower extremities the ideal tools for smashing ribs and internal organs.

  “To hell with this,” I thought. “I should just die already.” I stopped breathing. They kept beating me for a while, until they were convinced that my body was dead and, therefore, my personhood had perished. Then they let up.

  “Gone?” one of them asked.

  “Oh yeah,” the second man replied. The criminals took a polaroid of my corpse and left to file their report. Just to be safe, I lay there a while longer, unmoving, all ears. You never know, those malefactors might have had a guy hang back to finish me off, if necessary. The coast was clear, though, so I started getting up—slowly, so as not to misplace my bashed-out teeth—and peered around with my one eye. Rising to my knees, I suddenly saw a three-ruble bill, goaded along by the wind,
catching the dim glow of the streetlights, twisting faintly as it flew past me, as if it had a specific target in mind. Snatching the money, I was unutterably pleased that I would now be able to hail a taxi and return home in comfort, without the risk of being detained by a police patrol.

  I caught a cab with surprising speed and bade the driver make for Dorogomilovskaya Street, where I resided at the time. The older driver did not even glance at me in his rearview mirror; he simply nodded and stepped on the gas. My journey lasted a mere six minutes. We pulled up to my apartment building, and I extended the three-ruble bill to the driver, muttering with my maimed mouth for him to keep the change. I had opened the door and was halfway out of the car when the driver yelled.

  “Stop!” I did, without turning around.

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “What’s this you gave me?” The driver switched on the light and turned around, waving my three-ruble bill.

  “It’s three rubles,” I explained, revealing my destroyed face to the driver in the process, but he seemed to think it was no business of his that I was almost a corpse: bashed-out teeth, missing eye, blood everywhere. He continued shaking the bill, and what he had to say was most curious.

  “This is from before the reform! It was taken out of circulation in ’61! You want another punch in that bloody mug of yours? Give me some real money!”

  Well, how do you like that? An optical illusion! A kink of fate! A pre-reform bill—that’s just the damnedest thing. How did it show up in our time, just blowing down the street at night?

  “How about an exchange?” I offered. “You brought me home, so I will reveal a piece of information that will be worth three rubles to you.”

  “What? What information?” The taxi driver was getting more and more agitated. “I have a quota to make!”

  “Your little daughter, Svetlana, who lives with you and your spouse, has an abscess on her lower third tooth. I assure you, no mouthwash will do her any good. Furthermore, you must take the girl to the hospital immediately so it can be lanced, otherwise the rot will make its way to her brain before morning!”