Butterfly Skin (8 page)

Ksenia realized she had been set up. The rich grown-ups had put the little girl in her place! Of course they had! They couldn’t have some pint-sized chick throwing her weight around, demanding her rights! There, take your rights, three hundred and fifty conventional units of currency, there’s our divine kindness for you, we won’t go to the police
either
! Ksenia remembered that lesson for the rest of her life: you must never relax even in the very simplest job. You couldn’t trust anyone but your very closest friends.

She spent the whole evening watching TV dry-eyed, repeating to herself
big girls don’t cry.
Her mom said crying meant admitting you were helpless, admitting you’d been defeated, but what you had to do was fight. No, big girls don’t cry, I have to think of something, Ksenia kept repeating to herself, but even so she didn’t tell Marinka she had been sacked without being paid. Not because she was afraid of Marinka’s sympathy, it was just that Marinka would have suggested splitting her money, and Ksenia didn’t want to take anything from her. It was enough that Marinka had been raped. Ksenia didn’t say anything, even when Marinka phoned and admitted that she’d decided to go back to work from July 1, because Dimochka had phoned and apologized, and promised that nothing of the sort would ever happen again. But then, Marinka’s voice had a familiar vibe of excitement to it, and it occurred to Ksenia that something of the sort could very well happen again.

“Actually,” said Marinka, “it was quite interesting really, I’ve never had any men so much older than me.”

All right then, Ksenia told herself. So I was a fool. So I should have kept well out of the whole business. They would have sorted it out for themselves. She felt a bit annoyed with Marinka, but her resentment was weak, as if she was feeling it through a thick layer of felt, or rather, through the cocoon that was wrapping itself round her tighter and tighter.

Stay home alone, don’t think about Marinka, watch TV, read books. Nothing feels right, you’re all fingers and thumbs, everything’s wrong: it’s your own fault, you’re to blame for everything. You wasted an entire month. You didn’t earn any money, and it doesn’t look as if you’re going to earn any. You waded in to save Marinka, who coped perfectly well on her own. You forgot that first of all you have to think about
Mom.
What are you going to say when Mom comes back from Greece? Leave the curtains closed for days on end, never change your clothes, never go outside, slouch around the apartment in nothing but a T-shirt, smoke the grass you found in Mom’s desk, float in a scalding-hot bath, drink black coffee and feel as if the apartment is full of gray threads of cobweb… they mesh together round your body, weaving into a cocoon, drag across the parquet in pellets, like a convict’s ball. You’ll never achieve anything. You can’t work, not even as a courier. You’re no good for anything.

You tried masturbating, but that didn’t help for long. At that time you still managed without any additional equipment, your fantasies were enough. Ever since you were little you liked to imagine yourself as a princess abducted by fierce bandits, or a young lady sold into the sultan’s harem. When you got a bit older, the pretentiousness of these scenes began to irritate you slightly, so gradually the settings lost their splendor and everything was reduced to the interaction of two or three bodies, ropes, a gag and a whip. The imaginary torment is better than thinking about what
Mom
will say when she finally gets back: the pain and the shame were the same as in reality, but your dark subterranean fantasies worked like an alchemical retort, smelting them into pleasure. It swept over you in a warm wave and retreated, leaving behind on the seashore snatches of thoughts, fragments of images, a despair so solid, it felt as if you could touch it with your damp fingers.

Despair? No, this is not despair, it is anguish, concentrated anguish, a stifling feeling, a constant ringing in the ears, the flow of your own blood, darkness, darkness – the dark cloud will hang on the folds of your clothes, cling to the bulges of your face and the hairs stuck to your forehead, the gnawed ends of your fingers.

One morning you woke up in a puddle of blood. At first you just thought your period had started, but then you realized that when you went to bed, you took a knife with you and covered the insides of your thighs with cuts as you were going to sleep. You couldn’t remember anything, not this time or the others. Fortunately the cuts weren’t deep and the knife hadn’t caught any veins, but you were frightened.

You had to do something – and you forced yourself to go outside. You bought
Megalopolis-Express
from a newspaper kiosk and an article found by chance gave you the answer to the question “What should I do?” You phoned Marinka, and a week later you met your first dominant lover. He was called Nikita, and your body still responds to that name, even though eight years have gone by now. Nikita is far away, and none of your other playmates can console you either. You put your toys away in the cupboard and tell yourself that tomorrow after work you’ll definitely go visit someone, just in order not to stay home alone. Go visit someone, get drunk, come back home and fall asleep straight away.

It would be good to visit Olya, you think, it would be good to sit in front of the TV with your arms round each other and watch
Love Actually
or some other romantic movie. Olya likes romantic movies the same way you like Italian horror movies. A good idea, but it won’t work – tomorrow’s Vlad’s birthday. Olya promised to help, cook, clean up, wash the dishes. A grown woman, and she still can’t say no to her brother, But then, you wouldn’t have said no to Lyova, if he asked you to do something for him. A pity, it’s hard to ask from America. Hey, Lyova. Would you like me to come over to New Jersey and wash the dishes?

Yes, Lyova went away, Nikita went away, Vika went away, so many others disappeared off to God knows where, but Marinka’s still here. Ksenia’s on the point of recalling that old incident, the false rape, the childish sense of grievance. But you can’t stay annoyed with Marinka for long. When you get right down to it, some girls can’t say no to sex, others like to be beaten until they bleed – we all have our own strange tastes, it’s no big deal. So no more sitting here with your arms wrapped round your knees: pick up the phone and dial Marinka’s number. What are old friends for if you can’t go to see them when you feel totally wiped out?

Hello, hello, says Ksenia, just you try telling me you’re busy tomorrow evening.

“LOOK, IT’S REALLY LOVELY, ISN’T IT?” – AND MARINA
slips the T-shirt off one shoulder.

Marina has a beautiful T-shirt: her lover brought it from California. It’s handmade, he says, the old ex-hippies make them, that is, simply hippies, because the ex-hippies all became yuppies, they all became VIPs, and CEOs. The T-shirt is covered in bright swirls of color, acid style it’s called. As it happens, Ksenia has never tried acid, she doesn’t use drugs at all, if you don’t count coffee, grass and tea. She hasn’t tried acid, but she knows what the word “acid” means as an adjective, and she knows Marina is very fond of this word, although she thinks Marina hasn’t tried acid either, but then, you can never quite be sure of anything with Marina. There are acid drawings hanging on the wall, the computer monitor on the bar stool is displaying acid patterns that are almost the same as the hand-made T-shirt given to Marina by her Californian lover. “With patterns like that, who needs acid,” says Marina, breathing out the sweet smoke.

The T-shirt really is beautiful. With a T-shirt like that getting high is easy, with a joint or without one. Only you couldn’t go to the office in a T-shirt like that, that’s for sure. But Marina doesn’t have to go to the office, she doesn’t have any subordinates or any bosses, but she does have a handmade T-shirt that her lover brought from California.

And now she slips that T-shirt off one shoulder. “Look,” she says, “it’s really lovely, isn’t it, look, I can’t see for myself, tell me, how do you like my little darling?” It’s not really all that beautiful, to be honest: there’s a large blurred pink patch on her skin, like a cloud, overlying the tattooed outlines of a dragon.

“Wow!” says Ksenia, “that’s really super. But you used to have a butterfly there, what did you do with it?”

Marina hides her shoulder back under the beautiful T-shirt, shakes her straw-yellow hair and knocks off her ash –
oh, I haven’t smoked for so long
thinks Ksenia – and smiles:

“I used to have a butterfly, but I covered it over with the dragon. He emerged from the butterfly, like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, get it?”

Of course, what’s not to get? Dragon emerges from butterfly, butterfly emerges from chrysalis, from the large blurred patch as pink as a Barbie doll box.

“Remember the pink box Vika’s Barbie doll came in? She had the first one in the class, it cost crazy money, from abroad?”

“Of course I remember,” says Marina. “You don’t forget your first Barbie, it’s like your first man.”

Ksenia laughs. “You’ve definitely had more men than dolls.”

“Go figure, I used to be so stupid,” says Marina, “such a fool, I wanted a girl so much, so that she could have my dolls, but now I understand that a boy’s much better. Just look at him, just look, only nine months old, and you can already see he’s a real man, my little Chinese mandarin, my little orange, my precious little sweetie pie.”

She picks Gleb up in her arms, kisses his little nose, his narrow eyes, his floppy my-little-elephant ears.

“Ma-ma,” says Gleb and crawls away again.

Marina hasn’t got any furniture, apart from a large mattress at the far end of the room and the bar stool with the monitor glowing on it. Marina used to call it her cybernetic altar, and Ksenia prefers not to think about the kind of rites that were celebrated in front of it during the night. And now here they are sitting on the floor, on a rug as shaggy and huge as a polar bear pelt, the one on which our world stands – according to the legends of northern peoples unknown to the ethnographers. Or perhaps, according to these legends, the whole world is the back of an immense polar bear, and we creep about in its fur, like little Gleb on this huge rug in his mother’s one-room apartment, while she sits there with her oldest and dearest friend. Marina’s wearing a beautiful T-shirt, handmade, brought from California by her lover, but Ksenia, as usual, is wearing a business suit, all dressed up, in full regalia and war paint, strong lips, big eyes, half an hour in front of the mirror in the morning. Even when Marina used to go to the office, she still didn’t wear business suits, she was a designer, a creative girl, almost bohemian, she preferred the ethnic style, men liked that, it suited her – but then, what had style got to do with it? Men had always liked her, with her long legs and that halo of bright hair round her head, with that constant smile that some called whorish and others called innocent.

“You’re really going overboard,” says Ksenia. “Remember what you used to say when you were pregnant? A boy is an enemy inside, like Intel Inside, you could even hang the logo on your belly. Because men and women are two different species, not simply the male and female of
Homo sapiens
.”

“Go figure, I used to be so stupid,” says Marina, “such a fool, I wanted a girl so much, and I was so furious about this pregnancy, such a dimwit, remember?”

How could she ever forget it? Japanese cinema week in Moscow, free entry, a hall full of people fighting for seats, illegible subtitles, someone’s head blocking out half the screen. Marina politely asks him to get down a bit and then summarily presses the head down with her hand,
why’s he acting so stupid, doesn’t he understand plain Russian?
But when the lights come up she sees that he doesn’t – slanting eyes, yellowish skin, oh, how embarrassing. Marina says “Arigato,” hoping that in Japanese one polite word can take the place of another, the man laughs and tells her in English that he’s not Japanese, although he does have some Japanese friends he was supposed to meet here, but they don’t seem to have come, and he didn’t understand very much, to be honest, Japanese with Russian subtitles – he had almost no chance. Perhaps a girl who speaks English so well could tell him what actually happened?

Marina told him, and they drank to friendship between peoples in the nearest restaurant, and then caught a taxi and kissed in the back seat, and Marina, who was already a little bit drunk, felt terribly curious, because she’d never had any Asian men. And is it true that Asians can, well, you know, I mean, well, in bed? The Asians do it much better on a mat than on a bed. What do you mean, a mat? He points down past his feet, at the rubber mat, ah shit, yes, on rice-straw mats, right?

They couldn’t find a straw mat in Moscow, though, so they tried it on the bed, and on the rug, and then Marina looked at the clock and suddenly remembered that in the morning her lover from California was supposed to call her, the one who would later give her the beautiful T-shirt, handmade, with the acid design, that she was wearing right now. And right now was when eighteen months had passed since that night, which wasn’t hard to figure, if you knew the age of the child and the average duration of pregnancy in females of the species
Homo sapiens
– that is, of course, if you still believed they were members of the same species.

But a year earlier, on a depressing winter evening just like this one, Marina had sat on the floor in just the same way, with her legs crossed, with a T-shirt pulled over her large belly, and said the boy was an enemy inside, and some kind of Chinese into the bargain, like his freaking dad.

“Why didn’t you call him?” Ksenia asked then.

“I don’t have his number,” Marina answered. “I gave him mine, but I didn’t take his. That is, he wrote it down for me, but I left it on the table in the kitchen, because I was so dimwitted in the morning, which isn’t surprising, we worked so hard, made an entire child together, slaving away for four hours, we were absolutely soaking.”

“Why didn’t you take any precautions?”