Butterfly Skin (40 page)

But today all the girls look to me like goods on the market, goods that I don’t need.

A few years ago Mike fell in love with a young girl of seventeen. He hid the whole thing from Lyuba, but the girl left him anyway, and he started moping. I advised him to pick up a girl at a club and go to the sea to chill out, but Mike said with tears in his eyes: “When you love someone, you just can’t get it up for other women.” Mike in despair – a ludicrous sight, but that’s exactly the way I feel today.

There are two girls sitting opposite me, one who looks like a southerner, dressed in black, plump, with big breasts. Every now and then a red bra strap creeps out from under her dress. Her friend is a thin peroxide blonde with coils of hair on her head, as if she’s just got out of the shower, wearing a blouse with red flowers and a black bra that shows through it. There they sit, like positive and negative images, twittering about something – I can’t hear what.

The brunette reminds me of a girl

Who once stopped my car

Near Semyonovskaya subway

A few hours later I found out

She had fine black hairs

Covering all her body

Legs, stomach, back, even the breasts

It often happens with southern women

But Moscow’s a northern city:

She must have felt really shy

I left her in the basement,

Tied up, down on her knees,

And next day brought a present –

The very finest shaving cream there is

I covered her in foam, white as a bridal veil,

And shaved her smooth, from ankles to armpits

Legs, stomach, back, even the breasts

I shaved her with the razor

I used to skin her later

Today the brunette sitting opposite me completely fails to arouse me. The combination of red and black is terribly vulgar. And apart from that her sweat would smell sour and sharp. Not even the smell of fresh blood would mask it.

Positive and negative, positive and negative. The blonde laughs, pulling her white down jacket tight round her. She looks weak and frail, but I know what girls like that are capable of.

Once a girl who looked like her

Hung in my basement three weeks

I had problems at work,

Suppliers delaying deliveries,

I spent almost every day in Moscow

So I couldn’t give her enough time

At last she started menstruating,

A strange sight, the dark uterine blood

Flowing down her legs,

Mingling with the fresh blood

From the cuts I’d just made

When I cut out her womb

It was smooth and firm

Positive and negative, red and black. They carry on twittering, I turn my eyes to the girl beside them. She adjusts her spectacles as she reads a cheap magazine, leafing through the pages with hands in old knitted gloves. A tired-looking face, beautiful plump lips, big brown eyes. Worn boots on her feet and a plastic bag lying beside her. A woolen skirt with neatly darned holes and a long Chinese down jacket, patched in several places. If I look more closely, I can see she could hardly be older than twenty-five. It’s just that she’s very tired.

She reminds me of my first woman,

A young girl walking through the forest

To her dacha,

Carrying bags of food

That time too I sat opposite her

In the commuter train

And examined her face

I came at the moment

When I shattered her head

With a piece of metal pipe

I’d found on the road.

That was a hasty death,

Like having hasty sex

The first time, yes

A few tomatoes rolled out of a bag

Running off, I stepped on one

The juice mingled with the fresh blood

They sat there facing me, as if they were in a shop window. Goods offered on the market. Even now I enjoy remembering the others, the ones who were like them. The ones I have killed. But today they fail to arouse me. I imagine them in my basement, I try the tortures Ksenia invented on them, listening to their breathing as they die – and I feel nothing.

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.”

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.