Butterfly Skin Read online

  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 said and then, remembering your games, he tried to grab you by the hair and force your head down, and then you said it again, feeling yourself getting angrier and angrier: “Don’t,” and he said: “If you don’t do it right now, it’s over.” And then you pushed him away and said: “Then it’s over.”

  “If you don’t do it right now, it’s over.” That was the last straw. Not the vanilla public image, not the demand to suck him off. No, it was those nine pitiful words that decided everything. Sasha could have tried to break your will and force you down on your knees (oh, how glad you would have been to suck him off then!) or retreated smoothly, pretending it was all just a joke. You would both have forgotten about it, and the next time at your place you would have been his submissive slave again, but those words – if you don’t do it right now – those words meant he lacked the strength of will to be a genuine master, and he lacked the wisdom to realize it. A pitiful attempt at blackmail, a little boy moaning and telling his mother: “If you don’t buy me that railway engine, it means you don’t love me anymore.” So it means I don’t love him, you thought, and that was the most terrible thing, because the words – the ones he said and your reply – couldn’t be taken back now. You couldn’t pretend they were never spoken. That evening you deleted him from your ICQ and put his telephone number on your Motorola’s blacklist.

  Moscow is a small town, you’re bound to meet again – but never again will you lie on the floor in front of him, with your hands tied above your head and your eyes closed so that you can’t see which breast will take the next blow from the d
ouble length of telephone wire.

  4

  AFTERNOON, AND THE CARS ARE ALREADY BUMPER to bumper. The creeping afternoon traffic jam. Bolshaya Nikitskaya Street looks like a river covered with drift-ice in spring. Olya, that is, formally, Olga Krushevnitskaya, a successful businesswoman of thirty-five, an IT manager and co-owner of a small online shop, maneuvers in her Toyota, cursing through her teeth. On her way to have coffee with her friend, she repeats to herself: “So, what was it he said? I wouldn’t even shit in the same field. Just slammed the door and walked out. And what am I supposed to do now? No point in complaining – they warned me: Olya, you’ll come unstuck with these two, there’ll be hell to pay.”

  Three years earlier Olya herself invited Grisha and Kostya (that is, Grigorii and Konstantin) to join her business. Or rather, the business wasn’t hers then: Olya was a hired manager on a salary, and she only managed to grab herself a quarter of the business when the shop was bought from the first owners – who, by the way, got three dollars for every one they had put in. That was the way they set up the shares: money from Grisha and Kostya, and from her – knowledge of the market and experience, three years of hard graft. But at the very beginning of the whole thing, someone at the Internet Business Club told her: those two bears will never get along together in your little den.

  They won’t get along together in my den. Won’t shit in the same field. They’ll take their money – then it’s goodbye and farewell to Olya’s business. Wolves. Bears. She’d served them faithfully for three years, fed them with her own flesh and blood, interest on profit, flattery and lies. You know how much I like working with you, Grisha. Believe me Kostya, in our business everything depends on you.