Butterfly Skin (6 page)

All in all, it was a comic scene. But I didn’t find it funny at all. When I was tired I sat on the edge of the bath, looking at my prick, which was still aroused, its head as huge and red as if all the blood in the world had flowed into it. As a young child I had already guessed what the world around me was like. I didn’t even have to watch TV, I already knew anyway. Although I do remember the anchorman on the Sunday politics program explaining that in America a rape took place every fifteen minutes. The Sunday politics program, a fatted hog, a privileged swine. Every fifteen minutes. Only in America.

My parents sat beside me, watched the same screen, listened to the same words. Not a single muscle twitched in their faces, as if this had nothing to do with them – incredible, every fifteen minutes a woman weeps and struggles with tears of despair in her eyes, her scream smothered by a sweaty palm. I didn’t know then how much time one rape takes, but I did understand that just as one rapist started cooling off, the next was setting to work – on the other side of the country, with a different woman. Believe it or not, I felt that this concerned all of us, not just the ideological struggle, the conflict between two systems and TV propaganda.

I was fourteen years old, I already masturbated, imagining youthful plantation owners flogging black female slaves with canes – but at that moment I wasn’t thinking about my fantasies, I wasn’t aroused – after all, I didn’t feel aroused when the TV news told us about the labor camps in Cambodia, and Soviet war films showed Nazi German newsreels with dump trucks piling up skeletons covered with skin from the concentration camps. I wasn’t aroused – I just felt I’d heard something that was directly connected with my life.

I was fourteen years old, it was my life then, and it was still mine now. I sat on the edge of the bath and my prick seemed huge, and I realized that somehow I had to tell people about the world I had lived in for as long as I could remember. I was a bookish boy, but I could never find the right words. Perhaps because I had seen them too often on paper.

This is a comfortless world, a world that has no place for hope, where death is inevitable and suffering is routine and unendurable. This is a world in which children’s heads are piled up into pyramids in Rwanda, to make it easier to count them, a world in which a thirty-year-old man sits on the edge of his bath in Moscow and cries because he can’t come, he can’t come even when he imagines how, strip by strip, he tears the skin off a fifteen-year-old girl who is begging for mercy, a girl who has no more tears, because her eyes have been gouged out.

He cries precisely because this picture is the only thing that arouses him.

IF ALEXEI ROKOTOV HAD NOT BEEN BORN IN 1975, HE
would never have become a journalist. If he had appeared in the world a couple of years earlier, he would have been a computer programmer, and five years later he would have become a financial manager or a lawyer. But at the time when Lyosha was fifteen, there was no better profession in the country than that of journalist:
Sixty Seconds
on the Petersburg TV channel every Friday,
Outlook
on Channel One every Saturday, the magazine
Spark
in the mailbox. Every week the journalists made a small revolution by opening the eyes of the populace to the atrocities of the communists and the wretchedness of Soviet life in general. The indestructible colossus was reeling to cries of “but the king is naked!” and the bold cartoons in the newspapers seemed like a premonition of imminent victory.

Lyosha remembered one of the cartoons very well. Two ants were standing beside the flattened body of their friend, a huge foot was disappearing up into the sky, and one of the ants was saying: “You know, they’ll come up with some way of getting rid of them soon.” It seemed to Lyosha that the sole hovering above the ants’ heads was the clay foot of a colossus, and the fear of it was only a game fostered by the state’s lies. And there was no profession better than the one that could crush those lies – that was why Lyosha Rokotov began studying to enter the faculty of journalism, hoping that five years of hard toil would raise him up to the heavenly heights inhabited by the bright but distant stars of Liubimov, Nevzorov and Korotich. This was the dream he used to spur himself on for the first two years of study, but then he noticed that somehow his dream had grown tarnished. Either his former idols had changed, or Lyosha himself had begun to suspect that the way the world changed didn’t really have anything to do with what they wrote in the newspapers. During the communist putsch of 1991 he stood in the cordon to protect the rebellious White House and even photocopied several flyers in the office of a friend who had gone into business. Lyosha and his friend must have printed the wrong number of copies or got their timing wrong – by the time they overcame their fear and started handing out the proclamations, the flyers were already out of date and it was time to print new ones. Hundreds of the flyers remained lying in Lyosha’s room for ages, like a prophecy of the times when the main question concerning the press would not be “how can we print?” but “how can we distribute?”

When Lyosha was in his second year of study, a small civil war took place in Moscow. This time he was among the crowd of idle onlookers who watched as tanks bombarded the building he had defended two years earlier, and he wandered round the streets of Moscow alone, trying to understand what was happening. But when a man only a yard away from him fell to the ground, killed either by a stray bullet or a shot from a sniper, Lyosha realized that the antithesis of the lies was not the words that they wrote in the newspapers, but the fresh frosty smell in the air and the nausea that rose up in his throat at the sight of brains oozing out onto the asphalt.

He realized that never again could he talk about the danger of communist revanchism or the right policy for economic reforms – just as he had known earlier that he could never write for the newspaper
Pravda
: in short, by the end of October, Lyosha Rokotov had difficulty even understanding what he
could
do.

The only thing he liked out of everything he read was the “Art” column in the newspaper
Today
– and he decided he ought to start writing about books, films and exhibitions. As a trial run, he volunteered to report on the conference “Postmodernism and National Cultures” taking place at the Tretyakov Gallery. The editor of the student newspaper to which Lyosha promised the article said he should try to get an interview with Charles Jencks, the famous architect. Lyova only found out that he existed two hours before the conference started, there was no time to go to the library but, despite his apprehensions, the interview went really well. Jencks put forward his project for the reconstruction of the burnt White House: a blue facade, streaks of red where the burn marks were and a white top as a symbol of reconciliation. Amazed by the visiting star’s cynicism, Lyosha didn’t even bother to ask if he knew that those were the colors of the Russian tricolor. Jencks said: “If the White House is going to be white again, that means a decision has been taken to pretend that nothing happened.” Lyosha remembered those words many times – especially in the company of his colleagues who repeatedly mouthed magic formulas about the market and free competition. Once, in the late eighties, he used to believe in this abracadabra himself, but now it sounded strange, to say the least: it was becoming clearer and clearer that the system emerging in Russia had only the remotest of connections with the theories of Adam Smith and John M. Keynes. For some reason Lyosha recalled the old cartoon with the two ants, and it didn’t seem funny anymore. The White House was painted white again, and the huge foot remained poised in the air, blanking out half the sky. Jencks was right: nothing had happened.

Lyosha thought more and more often about the fact that most people didn’t want to have their eyes opened. They were prepared to forget about the terrible past for the sake of a quiet life. There was a certain mature wisdom in this, but it was beyond the comprehension of Lyosha’s youth. Now perestroika seemed to him like a brief moment of truth in which the population of one sixth of the world’s land surface suddenly found itself face to face with the wretchedness and horror of human existence. But the moment had been too short: people were only too glad to put the wretchedness and horror down to the bloody Soviet regime and pretend that it was all nothing to do with them. They were too busy: they were learning how to lick the asses of the new authorities – just as their parents had licked the communists’ asses twenty and thirty years earlier.

Lyosha never did write any more about culture, but at the Tretyakov Gallery conference he met redheaded Oxana, a final-year student at the Russian State University for the Humanities, who was happy to explain everything he didn’t understand in the presentations. A day later she continued his education in the Academy of Sciences apartment on Vavilov Street that had been left at her disposal for two weeks while her parents were lecturing somewhere on the east coast of the US. Of course, Oxana wasn’t his first woman, but it was the first time Lyosha had found himself in bed with a girl who could not only abandon herself to pleasure, but also sweep him away with her to places where what happened to the power of the people and free speech seemed entirely trivial and inconsequential – if only because in those places freedom had no need of speech and all the power belonged to Oxana, since she was the only one who knew how to get there.

They were married six months later, and Lyosha quickly grew used to thinking of himself as part of “we.” By the time he graduated from university, this “we” already consisted of three parts, like the trinity of colors in the Russian flag. Little Dasha forced him to a fresh look at the question of which publications the young journalist Rokotov would like to see his work in. The 1996 elections were coming up, the Russian oligarchs were spending freely to support Yeltsin, and Alexei realized there wouldn’t be another opportunity as good as this for earning money for a long time. And in addition, no matter what, he still preferred President Yeltsin to the communist leader Zyuganov, and in agreeing to take part in a regional offshoot of the youth program “Vote, or You Lose!” Alexei wasn’t even really sinning against his conscience all that much – and that feeling was so intoxicating that just for a moment Alexei believed he really did have a brilliant future ahead of him.

Now, almost eight years later, he realized he had been mistaken. All the major events that convulsed the mass-media market had passed him by: during the battles over “Svyazinvest,” the conflict between Primakov and Yeltsin, the election won by Putin and the closure of the opposition TV channels belonging to the same oligarchs who had once supported Yeltsin, he had remained equally distant from big politics and big money. Now he had a modest job as a reporter in an insignificant online newspaper that wasn’t even in the top ten on Rambler. His female boss was five years younger than him – precisely the amount of time that he had wasted on studying at university.

Six months earlier, when Ksenia Ionova became senior editor of the news department, she had informed Alexei and his colleagues that their terms of employment had changed. Now they had to arrive at ten o’clock, submit a strictly specified amount of copy every week and also maintain contact with their readers in online forums. Evgenii had tried to object: “Ksyusha, no one’s IT editorial staff comes to work before twelve, not at Tickertape, or Gazette, so why should we?” Ksenia told him in an icy tone of voice that when they overtook Tickertape and Gazette, they could come to work at twelve too. If Evgenii Andreevich liked sleeping in in the mornings, then he could work for Evening.ru as a freelancer. “I’ll decide for myself,” Evgenii muttered, but he was wrong, because now Ksenia decided everything: a week later he was fired when he arrived in the office at midday yet again.

“I value what you write,” Ksenia said, “and I’m sorry we weren’t able to work together in the same office. But I’ll be glad to publish your material. We can discuss the matter of fees if you like.”

Evgenii’s articles really did appear from time to time on the Evening.ru site, and perhaps he hadn’t really lost too much money. Apart from that, history does not judge the victors: three months later the popularity of the news section had doubled, and although Evening.ru was still a second-flight publication, Alexei and his colleagues soon began to respect this skinny young woman with eyes as big as a manga heroine and a voice as icy as the Snow Queen.

But now as she sits opposite him in the local cafeteria, the ice in her voice has almost melted. She stirs the sugar in her cup and smiles. She reminds him of an ordinary final-year student, almost the same as Oxana ten years earlier.

“It’s a good interview,” Ksenia says, “it’s just a pity he doesn’t want to be named.”

“He’s afraid,” Alexei replies, “but if necessary, I have his signature.”

“It’s not that, it’s just that the readers don’t trust an anonymous source as much.” She drinks a mouthful of coffee from an old cup that goes back to the days of Soviet public catering. “He definitely doesn’t want to be named?”

“No way,” says Alexei. “It’s a matter of professional etiquette as well. Supposedly he has no right to discuss his colleagues’ actions.”

“The anonymous investigator from the Moscow Public Prosecutor’s Office speculates to the dictaphone about whether the murders attributed to the Moscow Psycho really all have been committed by the same person.
”
Ksenia lowers her tousled head to the printout.

“
These murders, which have created such a sensation recently, don’t in fact have all that much in common. The victims are females between the ages of fifteen and forty, who have first been raped, although in a number of cases it’s hard to tell, because their sexual organs have been cut out, burned away, or scalded with boiling water. In almost every case there is evidence of torture lasting several hours – cuts, burns and wounds – but there are virtually no bruises. The common factor in all these cases is that the bodies have deliberately been left in places where they will easily be found. It’s possible the killer wants to be caught, which is often the case. The famous Chicago serial killer William Hance even wrote above the bodies of his victims: ‘For God’s sake, catch me before I kill again!’ However, we can’t be entirely certain of the motivation in each particular case: perhaps the killer is taunting the police or enjoying the sensational reporting in the newspapers. But to get back to…
”