Butterfly Skin (27 page)

“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 wrote 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: