Butterfly Skin

1

YOU ARE TEN YEARS OLD, OR PERHAPS YOUNGER. YOU are riding in the subway with your mother, looking toward the front of the train through the transparent doors of the cars. Suddenly you notice that somewhere up ahead, something has happened: people jump to their feet in a strange state of alarm and run back against the movement of the train, as if they are fleeing from something, until they reach the locked doors between the cars – and they tug and tug at the handles… But then their faces contort as panic sweeps over their normal features like a wind driving ripples across the surface of a pond. Something invisible is approaching, something nameless and formless, more terrible than death, more horrible than a nightmare. Something they have known about and tried to forget all their lives.

And now the front cars slowly enter the transparent wall of condensed horror, but you can no longer bear to look at the faces flattened against the glass, the mouths opened in mute screams, the eyes bulging out of their sockets – you turn your gaze to the passengers still untouched by the horror, sitting in the nearest cars, and again you see that faint shadow of anxiety change to panic, you see them jump to their feet and run, run and pound on the locked glass doors… and the invisible wall gets closer and closer, advancing implacably, like in a dream. But you don’t leave your seat, you don’t feel for your mother’s hand, you just think with relief that it will all soon be over.

These are only my fantasies. I was ten years old, or perhaps younger, and I often imagined this scene. As I got older, however, everything changed, it was no longer a wall, but more like a wave, a wave from a distant cold sea that froze the blood, a wave that swept along the train from the front to the final car. But now no one jumps up from his seat, everybody sits there until the shuddering contorts their faces like a hand crumpling a used tissue.

Yes, as a boy I certainly had a rich imagination. When I grew up a bit, I started telling other people what I used to believe when I was a child: that there was a place in the subway where hell seeped through into the tunnel in a thin layer of horror – and the trains passed through it so quickly that only really sensitive people noticed. I used to give the girls a suggestive look at the words really sensitive. Sometimes it worked.

Now I know it has nothing to do with sensitivity. It is my own personal hell, my personal horror, my concentrated nightmare. The passengers will never have any idea about it, nothing will distort their faces, not a single hair will shift out of place. I am the only one who notices the signs, the only one who senses the approach, the only one who understands the language of the things and objects that warn me in vain of the approach.

The fine hairs on woolen scarves stand up on end, leather coats are covered with fine cracks, feathers creep out of down-filled jackets as if seeking escape, stockings grip legs even tighter, the colors drain out of the advertising posters, any moment now the glass in the windows of the car will rain down on to the seats, the handrails cringe under my fingers, the doors scream in horror. Everything stops, as if time has been switched off, the clatter of the wheels fades away, and suddenly you can hear what the two girls standing by the closed doors are talking about. One is small and skinny, with tousled black hair, the other is graceful, with long legs and light hair. Just a minute ago they were laughing and nudging each other as they discussed how they were going to spend their first pay cheque, but now their faces have aged ten years, and you hear the light-haired one say: I can’t believe she’s gone, and see her wipe her eyes with a handkerchief as contorted as your own face, and the smaller one takes hold of her hand and replies: And I still can’t even cry.

And then the sounds get duller, space curls up round the edges of your vision like old wallpaper on a damp wall and everything goes dark before your eyes, as if the entire world is hiding behind those whirling black spirals: the sudden surge overtakes you, sweeps over you. You can’t breathe, the outlines of your body blur within this black cocoon as despair and hopelessness congeal: reach out your hand and you can touch them.

The old horror of childhood? No, this is not horror, 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 contours of your face, to the hairs stuck to your forehead, to the gnawed ends of your fingers.

You carry this cocoon, this cloud, with you as you leave the subway. You will make conversation, discuss work, come to decisions, write business letters. You will flirt with girls, play with your children, smile at people you know, try to live the way you always do. But on days like this, if you reach out your hand, you can touch the boundary of hell: suffering oozes out of doors slightly ajar, flows across the walls of buildings, crunches under your feet like broken glass; every gesture causes pain, every touch makes you shudder convulsively; your skin dissolves, leaving only the naked bleeding flesh, just barely covered by the gray cloud of anguish.

Days like this are excruciating for me. In order to cope somehow, I start remembering the women I have killed.

2

AN ELECTRIC BEEPING. NOT A METALLIC CHIME, NOT the tinkling of a small bell, but the artificial trill of a microchip. The signal of an alarm clock bought in IKEA, a child’s alarm clock covered in bright-colored soft plush, with a big dial and yellow hands. Out from under the blanket comes a hand, a thin hand, with a silver ring on the index finger, an arm with a faint scar just above the elbow. The little palm swats a blue velvet pimple, the ringing stops, the arm disappears.

You don’t want to open your eyes, you don’t want to wake up. As if through half-closed eyes we see the corner of a pillow, a braid of hair, the edge of a blanket. You want to sleep, with your head hidden under the blanket, swaddled up as tight as you can get, hidden away, as if you were nestling inside a cocoon, sleeping like that forever, ever since you were a child.

Good morning!

Who did you say good morning to in that muffled sleepy voice? There’s no one else in the room. A patch of yellow sunlight – it matches the hands of the clock – on the bright-colored kilim by the bed, an open laptop with its matte screen reflecting nothing, a fluffy pink rabbit lurking between the wall and your body. Good morning, as if you were trying to wake yourself up. Yes indeed, good morning, Ksenia.

Yes, your name is Ksenia, you live in a rented flat, cheap, found through friends. That’s about a third of your salary, everything’s very Western, the way grown-ups live. You’re completely grown up now, twenty-three years old, you work in the news department of the internet-newspaper Evening.ru. E-v-e-n-i-n-g dot ru, not a very well-known newspaper, second flight – maybe you’ve never heard of it, but our news section is good.

Outside the window there is rain, outside there is December, gray sky, not a single snowflake. You only imagined the patches of sunlight in your sleep. Slip your feet into the fluffy slippers, pick the white dressing gown up off the armchair, push the Play button and turn up the volume. The Gotan Project playing a remix of Gato Barbieri. That’s how the morning starts.

On the way to the bathroom you can’t resist looking at your email. Five messages, including four pieces of spam, two of them offering to increase the size of your penis and your breasts. You don’t need either – you don’t have a penis and your breasts are just fine.

What do you look like? Thin, short, with tousled black hair, lips puffy from sleep, big eyes that simply refuse to open in the morning. You look at the fifth message. Aha, from your friend Olya, good that it’s not about work. But then, how could it be about work? You went to bed at three and got up at eight – at that time everyone’s asleep, no one’s writing work emails.

You walk through into the bathroom, turn on the shower and freeze in front of the mirror, trying to put the day together in your mind. What’s in store for us today? The usual stuff first thing in the morning, then a talk with Pasha about money, lunch at the coffee house, Mom’s birthday, she asked you to be there at seven and not be late. You take off the dressing gown with a sigh and look in the mirror, already dewy with condensation: it’s damp, steamy and warm in here, the way you like it.

The bruises on your breasts and shoulders are barely visible, but your thighs – oh, that’s quite a different matter. And the welts on your buttocks sting in the scalding water. Yes, you like your body to retain its memories of your assignations for a long time. You like to be hurt. You have a small collection of various amusing gadgets at home, black leather toys, whips, gags, nipple clamps. On good days you don’t see anything unusual about your preferences. The way you think about it is more or less like this: sometimes I want to dance the boogie-woogie in a club in the Kropotkinskaya district, sometimes I ask someone to beat me and hurt me. Sex is like dancing; the important thing is to have a good partner. That’s the way you think on the good days, but on the bad days you remember that sex is not dancing, and it’s not easy for someone with your tastes to find a worthy partner. It’s not easy, but you cope one way or another. More or less.

But you’re not coping too well, to be honest. You parted company with your last lover a week ago, it’s over between you now – that’s why, instead of the sweet pain of gratification, your skin is smarting with the nagging pain of separation.

You turn off the shower, rub yourself down with a towel and your raw spots ache. Smiling, you walk through into the kitchen and put the kettle on. The music from the other room is almost inaudible. You look at the clock: you still have enough time for a cup of coffee.

This is how the day begins. Outside the window, a colorless sun in a gap between December clouds. Good morning to you, darling Ksenia. Don’t forget to dress warmly, there’s a strong wind today. Don’t forget to take the present for Mom, your cell phone, money, ID, travel pass. Don’t forget – you have a lot to do today, darling Ksenia, take good care of yourself. Ah yes, and the keys too. Don’t forget them, please.

3

AND SO… ONCE UPON A TIME A LITTLE GIRL LIVED with her mommy and daddy, went to the kindergarten, then to school, danced and laughed and never cried. Mommy and Daddy got divorced, school came to an end, the little girl went to work and now, six years later, here she is sitting in a tiny office cubicle with her strong fingers pounding away at a keyboard, her tousled hair more or less held in place by a hair slide, her painted lips pursed in concentration and not a trace of the morning’s relaxed mood left in her voice.

Ksenia, are we putting the news about Berezovsky at the top or is everybody already pissed off with him?

He’s the one who’s pissed off. What else have we got, apart from Berezovsky?

I’ll just take a look.

This is an ordinary day. The Little Lady of the Big House. It’s just a title – Senior Editor of the News Department – a pitiful staff of three, plus the freelancers. True, they’re all a few years older than you, and some even have formal qualifications in journalism. Think of themselves as professionals, shit! Sharks of the pen, jackals of the keyboard, freebooters of the computer mouse. There was a time when you had to have sharp words with them, it’s true, but now you have them all in line, working at full stretch.

Alexei from the next desk asks on ICQ Internet Messenger:

how are you doing?

She answers: ok and then asks: when will I have the interview?

I’m just typing it up. Yes, he’s sitting there in his earphones, deciphering it.

Daily work inevitably becomes routine: making sure they choose the right news, correcting mistakes, telling off the young girl translators, deciding who to take commentaries from today. A couple of times a week you end up with good material, something you can really take pride in, not feel ashamed of. But then, you don’t feel ashamed of what you put out every day either, although there’s really not that much to feel proud of, except maybe the successful start to your career: after all, at twenty-three you’re already the department’s senior editor. The boss. It’s funny.

Ksenia likes her job. She enjoys rummaging through the news and she enjoys coordinating, managing and controlling even more. In a few years’ time she’ll be a good manager, although it’s not yet clear where. Maybe she’ll become a genuine senior editor, get into paper journalism, if Putin doesn’t grab all the newspapers the way he’s already grabbed the TV channels. Or perhaps she’ll go into pure IT business. IT stands for information technology, and it’s part of everything to do with the internet. In America they like to add the letter e, from the word electronic, but in Russian it’s not always convenient to add that letter. You definitely can’t add it to the word business, for instance. You know, Ksenia explained to one of her foreign friends, the combination ‘eb’ in Russian is the same as ‘fuck’ in English. So you get ‘fuck-business.’ I can’t even say that to one of my friends, let alone my mom.

Ksenia likes her job. She enjoys feeling confident, successful and prosperous. She likes being able to do everything at once: edit an interview, instant message, look through the news. By twelve they’ll put the first section of material out on the web, and then she can go to the cafeteria with Alexei, read the latest jokes at Anecdote.ru, call in to see Pasha and have a word about money.

* * *

Pasha Silverman, Ksenia’s immediate boss, the editor-in-chief and founder of the newspaper Evening.ru, had no interest at all in journalism until the age of thirty-seven.

He moved from the Chechen capital, Grozny, to Moscow in the late eighties – just in time: first there were no more Russians left in the city, then there were no Chechens, and then the city itself disappeared. By the mid-nineties Pasha was heavily involved in advertising, but during one of the repeated market carve-ups, he got squeezed out of TV and billboards, and by the beginning of the next decade all that remained of his former glory was an internet agency, which was lifted up on the rising wave of the investment boom of 2000.

When Pasha first came to the internet, the major form of advertising was banners – little rectangular pictures at the top, bottom or side of the internet page. If the picture caught someone’s attention, he clicked on the banner with the mouse and found himself on the advertised site. Basically, that was all there was to it. You could take money for the number of people who would see the banner (that was called pay-for-views) and for the number of people who clicked on the banner (pay-for-clicks). Since then variations had appeared – square banners, pop-up window banners, flash banners and lots of other wonderful technical innovations – but the general principle hadn’t changed. The technology made it possible to show the advert to the right audience on the right site – that was called targeting – but basically Pasha made money out of people looking at little pictures on their computer screens and occasionally clicking on them for some reason or other.

Pasha had always believed that dealing in advertising was dealing in something unreal. That didn’t frighten him: it had been explained to him many years before that in mathematics imaginary numbers like the square root of −1 were just as important as ordinary numbers. Trading in advertising in virtual space was a double unreality – and just as the number i, which didn’t exist in the normal scale of numbers, made it possible to solve equations and create graphs, the ephemeral banner advertisement allowed Pasha to consolidate his own business and help others to build theirs. Pasha liked the idea of working with things that weren’t real – perhaps because there wasn’t a single stone left standing in the city where he had spent his childhood.

A couple of years earlier the logic of business development had led Pasha to the idea that it would be good not just to trade in views on other people’s sites, but to have a platform of his own where he could show his own banners. He decided to set up a newspaper, intending at the same time occasionally to publish advertorial, or paid articles, especially since the time for elections was approaching and the political parties and independent candidates were still prepared to pay well for such material – although, of course, not as well as in the nineties, when the elections were really fascinating.

As an advertising man, Pasha was convinced that to get high traffic all you needed was the right kind of promotional campaign. After six months he realized that an online newspaper was not the same as washing powder or a new model of cell phone. The competition in internet media was pretty stiff, and Pasha sacked almost all his editorial staff and took on new people to replace them. One of these was Ksenia, and today Pasha knew it was her energy and talent he had to thank for the large numbers of people who read the news on his site, even if Tickertape.ru did provide much broader coverage.

Ksenia has a sense of style: she can make any banal news story entertaining – news about the economy comes out as a story about urgent daily realities and the experts’ comments sound like providential revelations. Pasha has raised her salary twice during the last year, but now, seeing her sit down in a chair and cross her legs, he regrets that he allowed himself to be sold on the idea. I won’t give her another kopeck, he tells himself, and smiles amiably.

How’re things, Ksenichka?

Fine, thanks, she replies.

Tousled hair, stubborn lips, strong thin arms wrapped round her knees. She doesn’t like Pasha’s familiar use of a diminutive Ksenichka – to everyone else she is just Ksenia, even to her lovers. And she doesn’t allow anyone except Olya to call her by her childhood name Ksyusha. Only Olya can pronounce Ksyusha in a way that doesn’t remind her of the fifth class at school and mocking children’s rhymes.

But Pasha calls everyone by familiar pet names and he has persuaded her to accept Ksenichka – persuaded, sold, soft-soaped – he told her that he was prepared to address her formally as Ksenia Rudolfovna if she wanted, but he asked her please, please to let him say Ksenichka sometimes, because otherwise he wouldn’t be able to do his job properly: I’m not young any more, it’s too late for me to learn new ways. Ksenia agreed and, of course, now he called her nothing but Ksenichka. Since then she had seen over and over again in business negotiations how Pasha extorted advantageous conditions while emphasizing that he had absolutely no right to them and was only asking as a personal favor. Maybe, if Pasha was not coping well with his business, it wouldn’t work – but when it came to PR support and advertising promotion, he was the best there was, and the clients let him have his way.

How’re things, Ksenichka?

Fine, thanks.

Fine? Pasha repeats, turning his monitor toward Ksenia. Let’s just take a look at our rating. Look, this is Rambler – and what spot are we on?

A screen with light-blue strips running across it. The Rambler Top 100 Ratings – the most important rating on the Russian internet, the unofficial table of ranks, a kind of independent audit. With meters set up on almost every site in the Russian internet, measuring the traffic. Ever half hour Rambler generates new ratings of sites according to about fifty subject categories. Whoever gets the most hits has the highest rating. Of course, everyone knows that this rating can be hyped up but even so, the advertisers take their bearings from it, and the small investors use it to decide if their money’s working hard enough.

The liquid crystal display of Pasha’s monitor shows the Media and Periodicals section. As usual, Tickertape and News.ru are fighting for first place, while Evening.ru is in the doldrums somewhere between ten and twenty.

What do you expect, Pasha? says Ksenia. That’s what comes of being tight-fisted. You know yourself that within the limits of the present budget I do the impossible.

Her face turns even more stubborn, her lips squeeze together angrily.

Ksenichka, darling, Pasha replies, sitting on the edge of the desk, how can you call it being tight-fisted? Look, in the last year I’ve raised your salary twice. Sure, the first time was when I put you in charge instead of Lena, but the second time was simply because you deserved it, and that’s all. But you tell me, have you started working any better since then? Or, rather, will you start working any better if I give you another two hundred dollars?

If I say yes, says Ksenia, you’ll say I’m not putting in enough effort, so I don’t deserve a pay rise, if I say no–

Then I won’t give you a raise anyway, Pasha says with a nod. You understand the whole thing. Every employee has a natural limit: after that, no matter how much you raise their pay, you won’t get anything more out of them. Now, if you came up with some special kind of project – one that generated lots of advertising and lots of traffic! – then I’d give you a separate budget. And, of course, part of that budget would go toward a raise for you. But sorry, I won’t give you any money just like that.

What kind of project would you like to have? Ksenia asks with a smile.

I don’t know, Pasha answers with a shrug. Something that would fit into the concept of our publication and also attract readers. And wouldn’t be like what our friends in the other internet media have.

I get it, Ksenia thinks with a nod. Magical fairytale stuff – I don’t know what it is, but bring me it.

I’ll think about it, she says, getting up.

You have to understand my position, Pasha says apologetically. I haven’t got a lot of money, the election advertising didn’t come up to expectations… well, not entirely up to expectations.

I sympathize, Ksenia says morosely, and for a moment Pasha remembers that he is lying shamelessly: business is going well and there’s plenty of money, but that’s no reason to start giving it away to the staff. Because if someone works for seven hundred and fifty dollars, there’s no point in giving them a thousand. At least, not until someone else starts trying to poach them. And so before every conversation about a raise, Pasha tells himself there’s no money, there’s no money, there’s no money until he starts to believe it – and then he can repeat these words with a clear conscience. In the unreal world that he inhabits, it’s the only way.

Ksenia has only a vague idea about all this. But even so, she goes back to her desk feeling quite satisfied: now at least she knows what to do. She just has to come up with some project, then go back to Pasha and start the conversation by saying: Remember, you promised me…

She doesn’t take offence at his obvious lies about the election campaign money: deep in her heart Ksenia suspects that if she were in Pasha’s place, she would act the same way. She enjoys observing her boss: he is far from stupid and there are things she can learn from him. Her colleagues sometimes complain that they’re pissed off with Pasha, that he’s so mean. They might be pissed off with him, and he might be pissed off with them, but who else do we have apart from Pasha? she asks herself. A good boss who’s sociable without fraternizing too much and is friendly without any harassment.

Before joining Pasha’s Evening.ru Ksenia used to work as a journalist in the internet section of the Moscow branch of a Western publishing house. Almost all the employees were local, but the office was still dominated by an extreme spirit of American political correctness: a strict dress code, no jokes about sex, no flirting. Her friend Marina, who dropped in occasionally, used to joke that the tea in the plastic cups was about to freeze solid in the positively benevolent atmosphere of the place, but at the beginning Ksenia had actually liked the atmosphere there. Coming to work with her nipples still itching after the clamps and fresh bruises on her thighs, she used to smile to herself and think complacently that her colleagues would recoil in horror if they only knew how she spent the nights. Ksenia had good career prospects, with a chance of moving from the internet department to the advertising department, and she was already mulling over this option. From the age of nineteen, when almost by accident she had found herself as an assistant in one of the laboratories of the Central Institute of Economics and Mathematics, she had always been involved in the web, and sometimes it seemed to her that real life and real business were not here, but out in the real world. But all that came to an end rather sooner than expected, at the out-of-house pre-Christmas party.

They rented a guesthouse outside Moscow. Some people were thinking of going back to the city, but most were intending to stay overnight. The table was laid in the banqueting hall, the Big Boss proposed a toast in fairly decent Russian, the local DJ turned on the strobe lights, the Euro-pop started playing – and an hour later, as she watched her colleagues hopping about friskily, Ksenia was reminded of the old school dances. She liked to dance and she was good at it, but this mawkish oompah-oompah didn’t inspire her. When she was a bit younger, she used to bring her favourite CDs with her – but this wasn’t the right occasion for that. She shrank back against the wall and exchanged a couple of words with Liza from the marketing department, who was wearing an unusually short skirt and was already slightly drunk, and then she went to the table to pour herself a punch. When she leaned over, someone’s hand gave her buttock a gentle squeeze. Two fingers landed precisely on a fresh mark, a long diagonal bluish-black stripe, but that wasn’t important – before Ksenia even realized what she was doing, she swung round and struck out.

Fifteen years earlier, when karate emerged from the underground, her parents had immediately sent her brother Lyova to a club. Lyova had practiced his blows on his little sister and tried to teach her a couple of katas and mawashis. Ksenia was a bad student and she thought she’d forgotten everything in the years since then, but her body’s memory proved very retentive: her blow landed with perfect precision.

Something squelched under Ksenia’s fingers and she was amazed to see blood spreading across the white shirt of the deputy director, ruddy-faced thirty-five-year-old Dima. He had started off as a Komsomol businessman, but come off the road on the steep curve of the 1990s and ended up as a common-or-garden executive, or, to use the modern term, a manager. Now he was on his way up: if you didn’t count the Big Boss, Dima was the third most important person in the whole office. Fortune seemed to be smiling on him again, and perhaps that was why he didn’t move aside and pretend nothing had happened, but tried to hit Ksenia back, and she saw her own right hand move in a slow-motion movie sequence to deflect the blow, and her left hand swing and jab once again into that astonished pink-and-red face.

Afterward, as she tried to thumb a lift on the snow-covered highway and rubbed the stinging knuckles of her fingers with the bitten nails, Ksenia blamed herself and wondered: Did I break his nose or just split it? Yes, Lyova would have been delighted with her, but Ksenia felt ashamed anyway. Good girls didn’t behave like that, and neither did bad ones. Maybe he had touched her by accident, and she had just struck out without bothering to check? Ksenia felt so upset she could have cried – but she never cried. When she got home, she rang her lover at the time and asked him to come over and be rougher than usual: maybe so that the drops of blood would take the place of her uncried tears.

After the holidays she gave in her notice: not even because of that guilty feeling she’d had, and certainly not because she was afraid of revenge. In a single instant Dima had suddenly ceased to be a boss for her. It wasn’t the harassment, it was just that Ksenia couldn’t respect a man who had let through two of her amateurish blows in a row.

But she’s sure of Pasha. He doesn’t confuse the office with the bedroom, and if anything did happen, he’d catch her hand. Or hit her himself.

And anyway, Pasha avoids direct conflicts. He knows nothing about Ksenia’s sexual preferences, but he understands her very well – far better than many of her lovers.

* * *

It was like this: the two of you were in a large group of people you didn’t know very well, some friends of Sasha’s, at the birthday party of one of the girls from his class at school, someone he used to be in love with. Sasha called to collect you, and before you went to the party you made love, never suspecting that it was the last time. At the party people started talking about sex, and you couldn’t resist saying that you liked rough sex, BDSM, to be exact, also known as playing: what do you mean, you don’t know what that is? Well, it has a triple meaning: BD is bondage/discipline; DS is domination/submission; and, well, SM is sadomasochism, that’s obvious. In principle, these are all different things: some people who play like bondage, others like submission, and some just like pain for its own sake, but sometimes someone likes all of them together, although I’m pretty much indifferent to bondage. Everybody stopped talking, as if they were embarrassed, and Sasha said something like That’s too much for vanilla people like us to understand. I never thought you were such a pervert. You immediately tensed up. Although, of course, that was his right, if he wanted, he could stay in the closet, as the fraternal fags put it, let him pretend to be a decent, vanilla individual, if he felt so ashamed in front of his friends. You got up and walked into the kitchen. Sasha followed you. Get on your knees and take me in your mouth, he said, and you flew into a rage. You never promised to submit to him anywhere except in the bedroom, no 24/7, and you had no intention of sucking him off in the kitchen at a birthday party for an old classmate he used to be in love with when he was a delicate little boy and no doubt incapable of beating a girl so hard with a riding crop that the marks on her buttocks took a week to heal. I don’t want to, you