Butterfly Skin (16 page)

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Ksyusha never cries. But now she stands there with her face buried in Olya’s fluffy sweater, right between the two breasts that are size B at best, and Olya strokes her hair and says: “Don’t worry, Ksyushenka, everything will be all right, you know I love you” – and feels that for a brief moment her strange fantasy has become reality and she has acquired a daughter she can be proud of, the daughter she has loved and waited for all her life. Everything will be all right, Ksyushenka, she says, let’s go and have some tea, let’s go and have a wash, and I’ll wipe away your tears and kiss you on the forehead, and put you to bed, just don’t cry.

“I’m not crying,” says Ksyusha, the good editor, the successful professional only five minutes away from stardom – and she lifts up her face with streaks of mascara on her cheeks, and Olya laughs and says: “oh sure, your face is all wet and your mascara’s run.”

“That’s the snow, Olya, the snow,” Ksyusha replies, “you know I never cry, it’s just the weather, it fell off my hair, look how hard it’s snowing outside.”

And now here they are sitting in the kitchen, two young interesting girls who are suddenly sober, as if there never was any vodka in little plastic cups or saké in ceramic jiggers, drinking tea from mugs with the word “Rambler” on one and “Evening.ru” on the other. Without any makeup Ksyusha’s face looks completely defenseless. Yes, thinks Olya, like that I’d say she looks eighteen, certainly not twenty-three. Twenty-three minus eighteen would be five, twelve plus five, yes at seventeen I could easily have had a child, that is, of course, if I hadn’t waited until twenty-two to lose my virginity, and then only because I was madly in love.

“She’s right, of course, she’s right,” says Ksyusha, “now her friends will think I work in some online tabloid like the
MK
newspaper, they won’t even go and look at what we’ve done. Probably they’re right, it is propaganda for violence, maybe we really are provoking the psycho into committing more murders?”

Olya leans down to her and takes her hand. Covers the little palm with her large, well-groomed fingers that manicurist Liza works on twice a week, soaking them, cutting away the cuticles round the half-moons, polishing and varnishing. She takes the hand between her palms, looks into Ksyusha’s deep black eyes and says:

“My little girl, no one provoked Chikatilo, that was in Soviet times, everything was kept quiet, and what happened? Fifty-something dead bodies. We both read it. Nobody provoked Ottis E. Toole and Henry Lucas, and they boasted that they’d killed more than five hundred people. In Gilles de Rais’s time the internet didn’t exist, I don’t think there were even any newspapers – and did that help the poor little children? Don’t upset yourself, Ksyusha, we’re doing everything right. It’s your job, you’re the editor of an online newspaper, you make the news. Remember, every time terrorists take hostages, they blame the press and say that if the journalists didn’t make such a fuss, it wouldn’t happen.”

“Maybe that’s right?” says Ksyusha.

“No,” replies Olya, “I think it’s completely the other way round: if someone wants to be famous, wants to produce a dramatic effect, nothing will stop him. If you don’t write about terrorists, they’ll poison the water supply and explode nuclear bombs. If this psycho really wanted people to know about him, he’d start killing twice as often, three or four times as often, even more brutally. So that the rumors would circulate without any help from the newspapers. So what we’re doing is good, it’s necessary. Don’t upset yourself – a person’s worst enemies are his closest neighbors. My Vlad’s no bundle of joy, you know that. The important thing you must remember is: your parents should be proud of you. They have to be.”

Of course, I could say that I’m proud of you, thinks Olya, but that probably wouldn’t be any help to you. You know very well that I love you and I’m proud of you and happy to be your friend – but, unfortunately I am only your friend, and not your mother, and you’re not my daughter, because how could I possibly have such a grown-up daughter?

The phone rings again, “I’ll say you’re not here,” says Olya.

“No, no, I’ll answer it,” and she runs into the room and comes back, shrugging her pointy little shoulders.

“It was Dad. He said he’d heard about me on the radio and called to say well done.”

“There, you see,” says Olya, and Ksyusha thinks that her dad’s praise doesn’t mean much, he never achieved anything in his life, so he can’t really judge how successful his daughter is. “There, you see,” Olya repeats, and she looks in Ksyusha’s cupboard and finds the bottle of Baileys that she brought the last time and, and there are just two glasses left, “So let’s drink to the New Year, to our success, to all our wishes coming true in the New Year.”

They open out the bed, Olya comes out of the shower, wrapped in the spare sheet instead of a towel, switches on Ksyusha’s hairdryer and her light-tinted hair starts dancing around her head. If you don’t go to work for four days, the wrinkles on your forehead dissolve, the features of your face soften, and even if you look in the big mirror in the bathroom at the other side of Moscow, you’ll see that time has stepped back from you just a tiny little bit, Olga Krushevnitskaya, a thirty-five-year-old woman who should forget at least once a year that she’s a successful IT manager, a genuine professional and a specialist in numbers.

While Olya dries her hair, Ksyusha stands in the bathroom with the door closed, biting her lip. Olya said it was late and she didn’t want to go home, and Ksyusha said “of course,” and now she’s angry with herself, because it’s awkward to turn on the vibrator with Olya there and it’s altogether too awkward to take the nipple clamps out of the box. She goes to the small shelf, picks up her vanity case, unzips it, takes out a little mirror, wraps it in a towel and breaks it against the edge of the bath. Then, sitting on the floor, she selects the very sharpest splinter and jabs it with all her might into the inside of her thigh.

Olya has already dried her hair. She looks at her sweater hanging on a chair and sees a black spot where Ksyusha’s mascara has smudged across it. That’s a strange picture, thinks Olya, like the Turin Shroud or maybe a Rorschach test.

IN A CONCRETE BASEMENT, ON THE SMALL PLOT OF
land round my house, in the forest near Moscow or in an elevator, I try to tell people about myself. If I were a writer, words would be my helpers. But the way things are, my helpers are a knife, a scalpel and a blowtorch.

But these girls, so beautiful, so touching in their defenseless nakedness, still innocent, even though they start having sex at fourteen nowadays – they don’t understand a thing. They ask “why me?” they think at that moment about themselves, about their own inevitable death, they can’t understand that perhaps what is happening to them is more to do with the whole world than it is with them.

Since they were children they have been raised to believe that the world is beautiful and wise. The glossy paper of the magazines, the glitter of the TV screen, the daily lies of the newspapers – all these conceal the truth, but not the truth about terrorism, corruption or theft, no, they conceal the truth that the world is as full of suffering as a freshly carved hole is full of blood.

It’s not true that when you kill you forget everything. At every moment of my existence I am aware that what I do is absolutely monstrous. But that does not stop me – and so my very existence proves that there is something wrong with the world. I think it would be easier for me to accept this world if I did not exist.

And so all I want to do is destroy the lies, to speak out so that people can no longer pretend they don’t hear me. So they can’t carry on living as if they don’t know. I cut off the nipples, rip open the abdomens, melt the fat of bodies that are still alive with a blowtorch – and that is my way of speaking.

I scream with their voice, I send them to bear witness to my pain and torment, to the world in which I live. I slice through skin as if I am ripping apart the curtain of falsehood and lies. I take out the hot kidneys, the liver, the heart as if I am touching the raw bloody centre of being with my bare hands, the place where there are no lies, where suffering and despair are no longer cloaked by anything. The scream becomes a howl, then a groan. These are the sincerest sounds. Pain knows no falsehood.

But they still don’t understand anything, and then everything ends, the thread snaps, and someone else’s life shrivels away under your hands like a butterfly skin, and even if they have understood something, the understanding dies with them. Perhaps it is what kills them. Sometimes I think that no one is strong enough to endure such pain. Sometimes I am astonished that I am still alive.

These girls, so beautiful, so touching in their defenseless nakedness, don’t understand a thing. And I live in the hope that perhaps one of the readers of the Moscow morning tabloids with
the soul-chilling details of the latest victim of the Moscow Psycho
, yes, that one of them will understand me. Because, when you read in the newspaper on your way to work that the body of an eighteen-year-old girl has been found with her own intestines wound round her neck and her severed hand stuck in her tattered vagina – when you read that, something has to change in the world around you, surely? You can’t just close the newspaper as if you’ve been reading an article about one more football match, a Duma election, or the details of the local pop-star’s new affair.

That is precisely why I take what is left of them – so beautiful, so touching in their defenseless nakedness – to places where they can be found by people – mushroom pickers, young mothers with baby buggies, couples seeking solitude.

I often think about suicidal killers who have selected a good vantage-point and fired off several clips from their automatic weapons before the police shot them dead. I think about the Chechens and the Arabs who have blown themselves up in the middle of festive crowds in Russia or Israel. The Washington sniper, or the two fans of Marilyn Manson who shot half a school before killing themselves in Littleton, Colorado. Whatever it was you wanted to say, your cry went unheard. You were written off to politics, insanity and the influence of pop-culture. We need to resolve the conflict in the Middle East, stop the war in Chechnya, introduce measures to prevent mental illness and ban rock concerts. Then the world will probably be a better place, won’t it?

And even though the idea of dying at the dense heart of an explosion or being transformed into the happy rapid-fire chatter of a warm gun sometimes seems unbearably tempting to me, I still despise it a little. That is working with the masses. However much I might rely on the newspapers and TV, in the first instance I always address an individual – like the poet who shows his poems to his beloved before printing them in an edition of a thousand.

When you address an individual, you speak far more sincerely than when you are trying to get through to all the people. I would like to believe that those who will read about me in the newspapers will appreciate my sincerity and perhaps, in the end, understand me.

Sometimes I am frightened by the thought that everybody already knows all about what I am trying to say. That the people I meet in the street know as well as I do that they live in hell, but they have accustomed themselves to this idea, learned to live with it. That every one of them is surrounded by the same cocoon of despair and anguish. That I am a failure, the one lousy sheep in the flock, an idiot who has brought a revelation from the day before yesterday, the bearer of Bad News that nobody wants to hear, because they all know it already.

Sometimes I think that everybody lives in hell, but they have accustomed themselves to this idea. But only for a moment, and then I calm down. No, that really can’t be true. It’s not possible to accustom yourself to hell, that’s what makes it hell.

THEY SAY THE MOSCOW SUBWAY ONCE USED TO BE
bright and clean. It probably was too, at some time. But Ksenia never saw those days. Either they were over before she was born, or she doesn’t remember very well what the subway looked like when she traveled in it with her parents, not on her own. Olya now, she can’t stand going down under the ground, but Ksenia likes it.

Olya says that a while ago she started smelling urine in the underground. That the smell wasn’t there seven years ago, when she’d just arrived in Moscow, but that it’s appeared now. Ksenia tries to remember more clearly – and it seems to her that it has always smelled like that. The smell has always been around – you just had to forget about it. But I try not to forget about it, thinks Ksenia, I don’t know why.

She sits in a half-empty car, looking at the sticker with a picture of a baby chopped to pieces on the window opposite her. Ksenia knows that below it there is the laconic slogan “Thou shalt not kill,” or a little poem about the evil of abortion:
murderers of those unborn/when your fiendish work is done/may your nails be bloody and torn
. This child that has fallen to pieces makes Ksenia insanely angry, she thinks how she herself would gladly rearrange the faces of people who paste up things like that. With a razor, in roughly the same way as shown in the picture. But then, nobody else is taking any notice of the sticker; those four passengers facing Ksenia can’t see it, it’s up above their heads.

Strange people ride the Moscow subway at half past midnight, thinks Ksenia. One man is tall, with hair that is unshorn and uncombed, wearing a long coat and jeans that are wet up to his knees. A bottle of beer is standing between his feet and his face can’t be seen, because he has lowered his head and his shaggy locks hide it. He’s probably sleeping, thinks Ksenia, but it would be really interesting to know, for instance, what color his eyes are, if his nose is long or short, if his expression is fierce or, on the contrary, good-natured. Maybe he looks like the charming fascist in the film
Brother 2
, or maybe he’s like uncle Yura, Mom’s friend, who disappeared from the scene a long time ago. Sitting beside him is a couple: a peroxide blonde, white jacket and a skirt that barely covers her podgy knees in black tights. She looks about thirty-five or forty, but the way blondes of that kind spend their lives, she could be twenty-five or even twenty-three, the same age as Ksenia. Her companion is an elderly man in a black Chinese down jacket, with the flaps of a gray suit jacket protruding from under it and trousers to match. A briefcase is standing on the floor between his feet. He has one arm round the blonde’s shoulders and is clutching her paw in his other hand. He has a dull wedding ring on his ring finger, but the blonde doesn’t have anything on her hand apart from a little cheap silver snake. A strange couple, who are they? Two people in Moscow on business? Lovers? A cheap whore and her client?