Butterfly Skin (3 page)

They rented a guesthouse outside Moscow. Some people were thinking of going back to the city, but most were intending to stay overnight. The table was laid in the banqueting hall, the Big Boss proposed a toast in fairly decent Russian, the local DJ turned on the strobe lights, the Euro-pop started playing – and an hour later, as she watched her colleagues hopping about friskily, Ksenia was reminded of the old school dances. She liked to dance and she was good at it, but this mawkish oompah-oompah didn’t inspire her. When she was a bit younger, she used to bring her favourite CDs with her – but this wasn’t the right occasion for that. She shrank back against the wall and exchanged a couple of words with Liza from the marketing department, who was wearing an unusually short skirt and was already slightly drunk, and then she went to the table to pour herself a punch. When she leaned over, someone’s hand gave her buttock a gentle squeeze. Two fingers landed precisely on a fresh mark, a long diagonal bluish-black stripe, but that wasn’t important – before Ksenia even realized what she was doing, she swung round and struck out.

Fifteen years earlier, when karate emerged from the underground, her parents had immediately sent her brother Lyova to a club. Lyova had practiced his blows on his little sister and tried to teach her a couple of
katas
and
mawashis
. Ksenia was a bad student and she thought she’d forgotten everything in the years since then, but her body’s memory proved very retentive: her blow landed with perfect precision.

Something squelched under Ksenia’s fingers and she was amazed to see blood spreading across the white shirt of the deputy director, ruddy-faced thirty-five-year-old Dima. He had started off as a Komsomol businessman, but come off the road on the steep curve of the 1990s and ended up as a common-or-garden executive, or, to use the modern term, a manager. Now he was on his way up: if you didn’t count the Big Boss, Dima was the third most important person in the whole office. Fortune seemed to be smiling on him again, and perhaps that was why he didn’t move aside and pretend nothing had happened, but tried to hit Ksenia back, and she saw her own right hand move in a slow-motion movie sequence to deflect the blow, and her left hand swing and jab once again into that astonished pink-and-red face.

Afterward, as she tried to thumb a lift on the snow-covered highway and rubbed the stinging knuckles of her fingers with the bitten nails, Ksenia blamed herself and wondered:
Did I break his nose or just split it?
Yes, Lyova would have been delighted with her, but Ksenia felt ashamed anyway. Good girls didn’t behave like that, and neither did bad ones. Maybe he had touched her by accident, and she had just struck out without bothering to check? Ksenia felt so upset she could have cried – but she never cried. When she got home, she rang her lover at the time and asked him to come over and be rougher than usual: maybe so that the drops of blood would take the place of her uncried tears.

After the holidays she gave in her notice: not even because of that guilty feeling she’d had, and certainly not because she was afraid of revenge. In a single instant Dima had suddenly ceased to be a boss for her. It wasn’t the harassment, it was just that Ksenia couldn’t respect a man who had let through two of her amateurish blows in a row.

But she’s sure of Pasha. He doesn’t confuse the office with the bedroom, and if anything did happen, he’d catch her hand. Or hit her himself.

And anyway, Pasha avoids direct conflicts. He knows nothing about Ksenia’s sexual preferences, but he understands her very well – far better than many of her lovers.

* * *

It was like this: the two of you were in a large group of people you didn’t know very well, some friends of Sasha’s, at the birthday party of one of the girls from his class at school, someone he used to be in love with. Sasha called to collect you, and before you went to the party you made love, never suspecting that it was the last time. At the party people started talking about sex, and you couldn’t resist saying that you liked rough sex, BDSM, to be exact, also known as “playing”: what do you mean, you don’t know what that is? Well, it has a triple meaning: BD is bondage/discipline; DS is domination/submission; and, well, SM is sadomasochism, that’s obvious. In principle, these are all different things: some people who play like bondage, others like submission, and some just like pain for its own sake, but sometimes someone likes all of them together, although I’m pretty much indifferent to bondage. Everybody stopped talking, as if they were embarrassed, and Sasha said something like “That’s too much for vanilla people like us to understand. I never thought you were such a pervert.” You immediately tensed up. Although, of course, that was his right, if he wanted, he could stay in the closet, as the fraternal fags put it, let him pretend to be a decent,
vanilla
individual, if he felt so ashamed in front of his friends. You got up and walked into the kitchen. Sasha followed you. “Get on your knees and take me in your mouth,” he said, and you flew into a rage. You never promised to submit to him anywhere except in the bedroom, no 24/7, and you had no intention of sucking him off in the kitchen at a birthday party for an old classmate he used to be in love with when he was a delicate little boy and no doubt incapable of beating a girl so hard with a riding crop that the marks on her buttocks took a week to heal. “I don’t want to,” you said and then, remembering your games, he tried to grab you by the hair and force your head down, and then you said it again, feeling yourself getting angrier and angrier: “Don’t,” and he said: “If you don’t do it right now, it’s over.” And then you pushed him away and said: “Then it’s over.”

“If you don’t do it right now, it’s over.” That was the last straw. Not the vanilla public image, not the demand to suck him off. No, it was those nine pitiful words that decided everything. Sasha could have tried to break your will and force you down on your knees (oh, how glad you would have been to suck him off then!) or retreated smoothly, pretending it was all just a joke. You would both have forgotten about it, and the next time at your place you would have been his submissive slave again, but those words –
if you don’t do it right now
– those words meant he lacked the strength of will to be a genuine master, and he lacked the wisdom to realize it. A pitiful attempt at blackmail, a little boy moaning and telling his mother: “If you don’t buy me that railway engine, it means you don’t love me anymore.” So it means I don’t love him, you thought, and that was the most terrible thing, because the words – the ones he said and your reply – couldn’t be taken back now. You couldn’t pretend they were never spoken. That evening you deleted him from your ICQ and put his telephone number on your Motorola’s blacklist.

Moscow is a small town, you’re bound to meet again – but never again will you lie on the floor in front of him, with your hands tied above your head and your eyes closed so that you can’t see which breast will take the next blow from the double length of telephone wire.

AFTERNOON, AND THE CARS ARE ALREADY BUMPER
to bumper. The creeping afternoon traffic jam. Bolshaya Nikitskaya Street looks like a river covered with drift-ice in spring. Olya, that is, formally, Olga Krushevnitskaya, a successful businesswoman of thirty-five, an IT manager and co-owner of a small online shop, maneuvers in her Toyota, cursing through her teeth. On her way to have coffee with her friend, she repeats to herself: “So, what was it he said?
I wouldn’t even shit in the same field.
Just slammed the door and walked out. And what am I supposed to do now? No point in complaining – they warned me: Olya, you’ll come unstuck with these two, there’ll be hell to pay.”

Three years earlier Olya herself invited Grisha and Kostya (that is, Grigorii and Konstantin) to join her business. Or rather, the business wasn’t hers then: Olya was a hired manager on a salary, and she only managed to grab herself a quarter of the business when the shop was bought from the first owners – who, by the way, got three dollars for every one they had put in. That was the way they set up the shares: money from Grisha and Kostya, and from her – knowledge of the market and experience, three years of hard graft. But at the very beginning of the whole thing, someone at the Internet Business Club told her: those two bears will never get along together in your little den.

They won’t get along together in my den. Won’t shit in the same field. They’ll take their money – then it’s goodbye and farewell to Olya’s business. Wolves. Bears. She’d served them faithfully for three years, fed them with her own flesh and blood, interest on profit, flattery and lies. You know how much I like working with you, Grisha. Believe me Kostya, in our business everything depends on you.

Our business? But that wasn’t right. Olya had always thought of the business as hers alone. She had started it and kept it going for all these years, she was the only one who had the vision and understood the development plans, who could anticipate the future. But she had honestly torn chunks off to feed the wolves, trying to forget that wolves were always looking back to the forest. She had held out for three whole years, and now Grisha and Kostya were both bolting from the common field, back into their homeland in the depths of the forest to look for Little Red Riding Hoods – or anyone else they could find to gobble up.

Olya stops at a traffic light, pulls down the mirror and looks at herself. A well-groomed thirty-five-year-old woman. An elegant arm lying on the steering wheel with a bracelet of dark stones round the wrist. A prosperous businesswoman, the co-owner and general director of a small internet shop. No, she didn’t look a bit like Little Red Riding Hood, it wasn’t so easy to gobble her up. She knew every bush in this forest too – and she wouldn’t go to her granny’s little house, she’d go into the dragon’s cave, then we’d see which of the wolves would risk following her in.

And there’s the first miracle of this lousy day: a silver BMW pulls away from the curb at just the right moment – and Olya parks her Toyota. She jumps out on to the pavement, trying not to step in the dirty puddle of melt water, slams the black, mud-splattered door shut, presses the button on her remote and, just as she’s walking into the Coffee House, she hears the quiet beep of the security system. That means everything’s all right. Now she’ll try to choose a table by the window and on the way take a moment to check that everything really is all right. When you live on your own for a long time, you get used to things: to the laptop that should have been changed ages ago, to the bracelet that you were given, hanging round your wrist, to the car that you ought to sell, but can’t bring yourself to. You don’t admit it to anyone except yourself, but you feel a kind of inner kinship with it. Six years for a car is like thirty-five for a woman: still running, but with the price tag falling faster every year. And so you look after it as if it were your own body – regular services, fresh oil, BP gasoline, comprehensive insurance. And there’s the result: great condition, not a single scratch, as good as new.

Her friend Ksenia, who she calls Ksyusha, is already sitting at a table, toying with a cell phone in a kitschy bright-pink fluffy case.

“Look what I’ve bought,” she says. “Isn’t it just delightful?”

Olya politely takes the mobile in her manicured hands and buries her fingers in the pink fur.

“It reminds me of something,” she says.

“Aha,” Ksyusha agrees, “my rabbit, remember, I showed it to you?”

Yes, the pink rabbit. Every over-aged Little Red Hiding Hood should have her own pink rabbit: that way there’s something to give the Big Bad Wolf when he comes knocking at the door of the hut. But Olya doesn’t have any fluffy toys, and you can’t put a case on a Sony-Ericsson P800. All she has is an aging Toyota, well-preserved, but already doomed.

“I was thinking,” says Ksyusha, “if you crossed a cell phone and a rabbit, what would their children be like?”

“Well, fluffy little mechanical devices,” Olya replies. “Like the rabbits in the Energizer advert.”

Little rabbit girls hop around in the dark forests of Russian business and shudder at the roaring of the big bad wolves who can’t share the same field, only the same forest. Because in the field there’s no one to eat, but in the forest there are fluffy pink animals and aging Little Red Riding Hoods who aren’t mobile enough to avoid the wolves’ teeth.

“You’ve got everything mixed up.” says Ksyusha. “A cell phone isn’t a mechanical device, it’s a communications device. They’d probably be telepathic rabbits.”

“There was some story about telepathic rabbits,” says Olya, “remember?”

“Na-ah,” says Ksyusha, “I haven’t read very much. I mean, not as much as you.”

That’s probably a good thing, not to read so much, Olya thinks. She spent almost thirty years stuck in the gingerbread house of their library at home and Petersburg University’s castle in the air. Probably it really is a good thing not to fritter away your time on books, not to know every word of Brodsky’s
To Urania
and
A Part of Speech
, smuggled into the country by other lovers of poetry like yourself, but to find yourself out in the dark forest right away, before you got midway through life. To find yourself there without even being able to recognize the hidden quotation (at least one) in that last phrase, but not to feel daunted when you met the wolves, panthers and lions – or whoever it is that Dante and successful IT managers ran into along their way.

“So what happened to the telepathic rabbits in the story?” Ksyusha asks.

“I don’t remember,” Olya replies. “I think they’ve all been eaten before the story even starts. Before anyone has even realized that they are telepaths.”

“Bang-bang, aye-aye-aye, see my little rabbit die,” says Ksyusha, citing the old children’s song. And she knocks her cell phone over as if it has been hit by a hunter’s bullet.

Olya smiles, and her lips cramp at the memory of two wolves glaring at each other from behind the trees in the dense forest of their joint business.

“Listen, Ksyusha,” she says, “I need your help. Will you help me?”