Butterfly Skin (20 page)

And, by the way, about blood. Fifty-two hours and fifty-two minutes.

“Anyway, sort things out with these two fags of yours and come,” says Vlad. “Maybe we’ll all stay there, damn the theater. I’ll take up mime, say, or ballet – you don’t need language for that. Maybe Andrei and I will adopt a boy – they say that’s no problem in Asia. We’ll live with you – you’ll be the mom and we’ll be the dads. In the mornings we’ll go swimming, and then we’ll sunbathe. Andrei will teach him music, you’ll teach him to read books and I – I’ll teach him to act.” Vlad looks pensively at the smoke from Olya’s cigarette dissolving into the air. “You know, sometimes I think I would have made a good father. I think I understand what children need.”

“And what’s that?” asks Olya.

“Just to be loved. For what they are.”

Vlad stops, musing wistfully, and Olya realizes he has already set out the stage: Andrei sitting with a tin-whistle in his hand and one foot resting on a big drum, a dark-skinned little boy playing in the sand with Vlad, and Olya, the communal mother, standing there holding a book – from the distance you can’t make out what it is. The boy raises his head and speaks in international language – “mama.” And this scene is so impossible, so unreal, that Olya stops counting the hours and minutes and realizes it’s time to accept the facts, go to the pharmacy, buy a pregnancy test and get the answer that she already knows.

The mouse would never have survived the news.

EIGHT DIFFERENT FOLDERS OF DOCUMENTS, TWO
with newspaper clippings. A metal mesh tube with two pens and three pencils sticking out of it like aerials, the sharply pointed leads make her heart skip a beat. Keeping pencils like that on your desk is like carrying a razor around in your vanity case, but you can’t explain that to Taniusha, who is responsible for Pasha’s office housekeeping. An ergonomic keyboard that supposedly doesn’t make Ksenia’s exhausted, bitten-down fingers so tired. An optical mouse with a red laser eye on its flat sole. A Samsung liquid crystal display monitor. This is what the desk of a young professional, a journalist and IT manager, looks like, the desk of the rising star of the Russian internet, Ksenia Ionova. “We met the blogger and the producer of the Moscow Psycho project in her office to ask…” Oh, shit, I have to make it a rule to insist that they show me the text before they publish, I’ll just phone Pasha, to apologize. “In her office!”

Ksenia knows now what fame looks like. Modest fame, low-key, but even so, fame. Thankfully people don’t recognize her in the street yet, but when she was at her dancing class one girl came up to her and said she’d heard her on the radio, she realized straight away the voice was familiar. Yes, three recordings for radio, ten interviews for the online press, a few articles in the major newspapers – that’s fame, isn’t it? It’s a different matter that so far fame is no reason for giving up work. So it turns out that very little has changed in Ksenia’s life. Every morning she looks through the breaking news, gives the girl translators a roasting, sends Alexei to report on something and tries to get commentaries from Moscow newsmakers on the latest event of the day. For other people she may be a newsmaker herself, but in her own editorial office she’s a journalist, the senior editor of the news section. Her personal project – all right, hers, Olya and Alexei’s – is their own personal business, it has nothing to with her job, Ksenia doesn’t even need to be reminded of that.

It’s time to sort out those papers. It’s funny to recall that her elementary school teacher once told them computers would save the forests from being cut down: paper wouldn’t be needed anymore. She should see the offices of internet companies. But then, Ksenia doesn’t have a very clear idea of what offices looked like before the appearance of computers. She wonders if they had typewriters on every desk. Or did people write the draft versions of contracts by hand?

Last year’s report from the Public Opinion Foundation is dispatched into the waste paper basket as outdated. A print-out of the movie theater programs for December 15 – an attempt to catch the film
Underworld
on the big screen, she missed it last time – goes into the basket too, all twelve pages of it. The rough draft of the business plan with Olya’s remarks – into the basket. A list of people for Alexei to interview, printed out before the meeting in the café and left on her desk two weeks ago, goes the same way. A print-out of the news on Evening.ru for January 8, with glaring errors, corrected on the web, but preserved as a caution to the guilty parties – into the basket. What’s a folder of contracts doing on my desk? Into the accounts department! An envelope with photographs of New Year celebrations – into my purse. A folder of newspaper cuttings about my beloved self – into my purse too.

Ksenia has a special album and a large cardboard box from IKEA at home for photographs. The newspaper clippings will be confined to the bottom drawer of the desk, which contains her entire personal archive: a few letters, the check for her last dinner with Nikita, for a satanic six hundred and sixty-six rubles, a sentimental dried rose (Ksenia remembers who it was from), the cover of a Dario Argento video cassette with his autograph, Vika’s hairclip, which was forgotten at Ksenia’s place and not returned before Vika left for Germany, an incomplete list of Marina’s men covering three pages, drawn up three years ago when Marina stayed the night at Ksenia’s place, a clipping from the
Megalopolis-Express
newspaper from 1995.

The article caught Ksenia’s eyes that morning when, after washing the blood off her slashed thighs – not for the last time, alas – she decided to go out into the city, walk as far as the nearest street stall and buy something to eat. Too bad, she hardly had any money left at all – she hadn’t wanted to take any from Mom, she’d been sure she was going to get her pay, but now it was screw you, Ksenichka, no pay for you. It turned out that during the week when she hadn’t left the building, a kiosk selling books and tabloid newspapers had appeared where the vegetable stall used to be. Ksenia bought
Megalopolis
-
Express
because one of her mother’s guests had said it was the only newspaper that was possible to read. And anyway, the titles of the others didn’t mean anything to her. When she reached a shop, Ksenia bought a bagful of food, went back home and sat down to read, dropping sour cream on the newspaper from her tomato salad. The photos of semi-naked girls were definitely only improved by these white and pink blotches.

The article was included in the “Confessions” section, right smack between the replies to readers’ questions (“Dear editor, please tell me if it is possible to get pregnant from oral sex…”) and stories about a sect of Satanists who were despoiling graves outside Peter. Ksenia’s attention was caught by the sentence in a frame at the centre of the page: “I cut myself with a knife, confesses
M-E
correspondent Maya Lvova.” Ksenia vaguely remembered that Maya Lvova specialized in intimate stores about her sex life – two years earlier Ksenia and Vika and Marina had had lively discussions about Maya’s reminiscences of how she was deflowered – obviously in anticipation of their own defloration. This time Maya Lvova wrote in her typical ornately explicit style about how a year earlier she had suffered severe depression as a result of the death of her mother and other events of a personal nature. “I hadn’t gone out for a month,” wrote the correspondent, “I blamed myself for everything that had happened. So great was my despair that I attempted to end my life, inflicting clumsy cuts on myself with a kitchen knife.” However, a faithful friend was on hand to take the failed suicide off to her dacha, where Maya made the acquaintance of a handsome and masterful man not much older than herself. The entire tone of Maya’s article made it clear that this man was a rather well-known individual and so she could not give his name, preferring – entirely in keeping with the style of the newspaper – the euphemism “my demon.” “On our first night,” she continued, “I simply could not become aroused. Yes, I desired him insanely, but it was as if my body had died! And then my demon turned me over onto my stomach and slapped me several times on my buttocks, which were quivering in anticipation.” Later, when she re-read this article. Ksenia always giggled at this point, imagining Maya Lvova’s fat thighs quaking like jellied meat on a wobbly table. However, in the summer of 1995 Ksenia was in no mood for merriment, and she read all the way through to the happy end in a single breath (“…can be bought in certain sex shops in Moscow, but my demon prefers to import them from abroad.”) Carefully lowering an unfinished tomato onto her plate. Ksenia dialed Marina’s number, trying to contain the thrill of arousal or, as Maya Lvova would have said –
the quiver of anticipation
.

That was how Ksenia met Nikita, her first dominant lover – and he taught Ksenia most of what she still likes in bed now. Despite all the men Ksenia has had since then, Nikita is still her first, in a class of his own. Their affair only lasted six months: then Nikita went away to America, where he is now quite well known in the BDSM community of San Francisco. Ksenia had to find others who were capable of satisfying the appetite for submission and physical pain that had suddenly awoken within her. It wasn’t easy, but it was worth the effort.

“For me, ordinary sex is like beer for someone who likes vodka,” she explained to Marina. “It relaxes you, it’s a pleasant drink at negotiations or with lunch. It’s convenient, as a matter of fact. And it’s the same with sex: after a good vanilla lover I feel really relaxed. If I like the man, I enjoy having him near me – you know, I like the male body in general – but all that’s not what I’m talking about at all. When they beat me, put me on my knees, hurt me or humiliate me, the world goes away. The space around me seems to curl up, even before I come – and in cases like that I can come for a very long time – well anyway, almost immediately I’m in a different place. Maybe I’m liberated from my body, I don’t know. In the specialist literature it’s called subspace, meaning ‘submission space’ as far as can tell from the descriptions. I guess for me the difference between vanilla sex and play sex is the same as it is for you between kissing and the normal sexual act. You like to kiss, but you’re hardly willing to give up the pleasure you get from screwing.”

“I read somewhere,” replied Marina, “that highly successful businesswomen have leanings like that. They have to keep everything under control at work, but they let themselves go in bed.”

“Probably,” said Ksenia, who still wasn’t a successful businesswoman then, and shrugged her skinny shoulders. “Maybe. But I think there’s more to it than that.”

She made no secret of her own leanings, but several sad experiences had taught her that men get frightened when they find themselves in bed with a girl for the first time and, in addition to a condom, they are offered a selection of two whips, handcuffs, lashes, a leather paddle, a riding crop and nipple clamps linked together by a frivolous little silver chain. Some instances were positively tragi-comic. Once at a party at a club Ksenia met a superbly built young guy with blond hair, a genuine blue-eyed Slavic folk-epic hero. And his name was something ending in “slav,” just as it ought to be, maybe Svyatoslav or Miroslav. He was a friend of a distant acquaintances of Ksenia, and after countless tequilas with lime and salt, they caught a taxi and went tearing off to Ksenia’s place, because it turned out that Stanislav, aka Rostislav, lived with his mom and dad. Everything would have been fine, but along the way the youthful hero bit Ksenia on the neck, hugged her so hard that her bones cracked and, in addition, jabbed his cigarette into her knee, as if by chance. If not for the tequila, she might have realized that Vyacheslav, aka Mstislav, simply didn’t have very good control of his arms and legs, but Ksenia, who hadn’t had a BDSM lover for two months, became so aroused that they were barely even inside the apartment before she started eagerly demonstrating her new acquisitions.

“What’s that?” asked Slava, gaping at Ksenia with his astonished blue eyes.

“This is a riding crop,” said Ksenia, “and this is a lash. They’re used for beating women, as you know.”

The folk-hero lover reacted unexpectedly: his eyes glazed over and he slumped to his knees from his full heroic height, disgorging onto the linoleum three limes and one squid salad – that is, all his solid refreshments for the evening. Ksenia spent the rest of the night feeding the epic hero tea and listening to confused apologies. When it was nearly morning her maternal instincts got the better of her, she stroked Slava’s hair, led him into the bedroom, undressed him and five minutes later, trying hard not to hit a false note, she moaned that he was a wonderful lover. Since neither of them had slept all night and Ksenia didn’t even have the strength to moan properly, she wasn’t really hoping to deceive him, but even so, she felt she had done enough to heal the wound inflicted on his sensitive male soul. Then she said it was time for her to go to work, and led her failed lover to the subway by the most tangled route possible so that when he finally sobered up, he would never be able to find the way back to her apartment. Naturally, she gave him a false phone number, with one digit changed, as she always did in such cases. When she phoned Marina that evening, she summed up: “Maybe it was the worst sex in my life, but it’s one of the funniest stories.”

So now, bearing in mind her bitter experience, Ksenia is in no hurry to involve Alexei in her semi-taboo games. Certainly, she does leave a leather paddle or a cat-o’-nine-tails lying around in conspicuous places, but Alexei’s indifferent glance skims over them and he probably takes them for part of the interior design. They get together every two weeks, Alexei apologizes to Ksenia because he can’t manage it more often, but she doesn’t tell him she wouldn’t agree to more often anyway. Combining a light affair like this with work has proved to be rather convenient: as a manager she would actually say that Alexei has started working better. Though maybe the reason for that is the success of their project: the man is thirty years old, after all, and so far he has nothing much to be proud of.