Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire. José Manuel prieto

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СКАЧАТЬ pot of jam I left out on the lap-table?). I had watched the woman in the seat ahead of me open a book as dull (I managed to make out the title) as the correspondence between Sibelius and Aalto. The woman read until the words Passportny kontrol shouted in Russian at the far end of the car made her shut her book and me shut off my nerve endings, shrinking down like a mollusk into an armored shell, safe from the tricky questions of the customs agents, the iron hooks of their sneaky inspections.

      These days, showing any interest, simply picking up a book, reading the title, opening it, meant cracking this stony cover of mine, already loosened up a bit, it’s true, by the last few days in Istanbul.

      I went downstairs and sat on the bottom step outside the Maritime Terminal, reading in the late afternoon sun, warm breeze through the laurels, completely engrossed in No Return Address, a novel by W. S. Chase. A hair-raising scene of betrayal in Malibu; I looked up from my book and saw the light; at last it struck me (Chase’s fictional deception was the tip-off): V. had been gone more than an hour; I too had been betrayed. Now I saw myself (in a crane shot this time), a white point—brushed-linen shirt and pants, soft leather sandals—bounding up the steps of the Odessa Terminal, taking them two at a time, running into the waiting room, the door slamming behind me. For an instant I imagined that V. was waiting, asleep on the bench where we’d been sitting, her head resting on her arm. Must I add that when I saw the empty space, my hand automatically went to my pocket, checking for my wallet, the wad of bills?

      Women always run off with your money, I knew that from the Chase story, and I also knew that earlier, when I had bent over (like an idiot) to try to kiss V. (who’d sat perfectly straight, her back glued to the bench, so that my mouth pursuing hers left slithery traces in the air), she could have lifted my billfold, undoing the cord with pointy fingernails. Had she taken advantage of that moment, my weak knees, to rob me of nights on the steppes, butterflies fluttering foolishly against the illuminated sheet? While I mimicked their blind flight, drawn toward the pale rose of her mouth, a tight bud admitting nothing, not the warmth of a smile nor an affectionate word, not the faintest hint about heading home, sinking into her favorite chair, moving her feet closer to the heater, watching the snowfall out the window. No. I still had my cash, so that all of my plans, which had seemed to fall apart, were soon reconstructed, each with its own little compartment: the trip to Livadia, the hunt for the yazikus…. Only one cell was still empty, the one belonging to V., and a warning light flashed. I had two visions: in the first, I was leaning over V. in an endless kiss, feeling her start to warm up, lose the chill that had locked her arms (which were now around my neck, holding me fast), sensing her servomotors kick in and start to pump furiously, correcting the angle of her neck, filling her mouth with juice, and making her body glow (speeding up oxygen combustion); and in the second, I was alone, walking along a path by the sea, waves breaking below the cliff, a hawk crying high above me, a desolate figure in white scanning the horizon (like Ovidius Naso in Tomi).

      The discovery swept me away, flooding over me in waves, carrying me off, doubled over, clasping my feet, nearly drowning me, and during the whole trip to Yalta, the whole time, words kept spewing out of me: I kept talking to myself, shouting so loud that people looked at me, pumping the emptiness from the pit of my stomach, tears starting up in my eyes, staring unblinking at the coastline.

      While the ferry was preparing to cast off, I was still thinking of returning to shore, running back to the terminal: I had imagined finding her on the steps—maybe we had just missed each other when I raced upstairs, jolted by Chase’s tale of treachery. (I even waited on the dock at Yalta for three days, hoping she would get off the ferry.) Now, leaning over the rail, reading the ship’s wake, I saw that I had been tricked by a … I automatically switched to Russian, fearing the Spanish word would permanently tarnish the time we’d had in Istanbul, the risk we’d shared. Like a cook throwing slop in the ship’s wake, I hurled a torrent of curses, the stream of bile souring my stomach, without a scrap of conscience. I enjoyed spitting out furiously, swearing violently in the Russian I had learned years before in the meat-packing plants of St. Petersburg, sticking slippery pig quarters with a four-letter purge.

      I had been way too easy on V., I thought, when what she needed was a couple of súkas (bitches) from me—yelled out harshly, through clenched teeth, or flung lightly, carelessly—to grab hold of her wrists and shake her memory of the past, make her see I had her, she was mine. Then she wouldn’t have slipped off in Odessa: slick as a professional robbing a client in a hotel room (the Divan, in Istanbul). At the height of my misery I saw myself clearly, as if in a spotlight, playing the fool, helping her off the streetcar after our walk through the Grand Bazaar, the grateful look she threw me (practiced night after night on customers who stuffed bills in her garter, mesmerized by her winking navel), the friendly squeeze she gave my hands when she saw me off. My face burning with shame, I redirected the stream of súkas that I’d been pouring into the sea and felt it fall on my head like a rain of ashes.

       2

       LIVADIA

      I kept taking dream journeys, plowing through the sea, covering thousands of miles in trains so long that on curves you could look across at the engine at the front of the arc, pulling an endless line of coaches. Me riding in the ninth, having tea. For a few brief seconds, while the train went around the corner, I tilted my head, pressing my cheek to the windowpane and watching the engine throb laboriously. Afterward I had the feeling that my car was continuing on by itself, with the cries on the platform, the very look of the city I’d left, all carried along as if in a single block. Aboard I was like a time traveler in a capsule cutting through various ages like a stack of pancakes. Hours in the car, hours talking to my fellow travelers, shrank to nothing when I arrived at my destination, evaporating the moment I stepped onto the station platform. One trip from the Black Sea to the Baltic, three days of biting cold, disappeared as if by magic the moment I saw the first golden cupolas of St. Petersburg. The worst was waking up after a dream trip full of strange beauties—all swindlers trying to steal my bags—worn out from wrestling with them, a terrible anxiety pressing down on me. I opened my eyes not knowing where I was and lay staring around a room without a single painting or personal touch. In the corner I saw copper heating pipes: two tubes thick as a finger that fed the radiator in my room. Had those parallel lines provoked my prolonged glide along the rails in the dream? The little window I’d left open when I came to bed was rattling, the shadow of a beech tree fell across the glass, a woman in the garden was shouting in Tartar. I had finally reached the end of my journey: Livadia.

      Without enough energy to rise, I looked out the window at a beach dotted with early-morning bathers, many with dogs. I was keenly aware of everything; I hadn’t been here long enough to have registered the changes, this pension room, Livadia. It hurt to see those swimmers with their dogs, I confess. I didn’t have a house, my books were gone, I didn’t even have a dog. These strangers coming out of the woods bothered me, walking their dogs on the beach. I don’t think anyone in the pension had one. All rovers, like me, without a dog.

      Before moving to this pension I had checked out the Oreandra, a hotel in Yalta. I left in disgust: I would never stay in such a high-priced place, a hotel for foreigners (a jungestill built in 1905 where the rooms cost more than a hundred a night). I was not exactly a foreigner. I had lived in Russia too long. I knew, for example, that if you want a room, you have to look at the ads on lampposts, the concentric layers of signs tacked up there. I needed a pension that had rooms for single men (Russian, many specified, but that was a small snag, no problem). I pulled up layer after layer, as carefully as if they were the Dead Sea scrolls. They worked loose easily, soft from the rain. I found a sign about a pension in Livadia—perfect—with the name and number repeated on a fringe at the bottom, so you could tear off a strip. Only one strip left, that wasn’t so good: the room could be gone.

      I went back to the Oreandra. From a phone booth in СКАЧАТЬ