Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire. José Manuel prieto

from his ear. We were headed to his house to discuss a subject that needed a place like this, covered with pines and completely surrounded by water: an island.

      We docked off a narrow pebble beach: water quietly lapping against the rocks, wind whispering in the pines. I jumped down from the yacht. Stockis had a proposal, he had said, something that might interest me. And while we went up some wooden steps to a terrace overlooking the beach:

      “On dark nights I come out here and keep an eye on my yacht with the goggles you sold me …”

      “Are the dogs yours?” I shot back quickly, because my English wasn’t up to the circumlocutions of normal conversation, forcing me to latch on to a subject directly, like a mute. The blunt question stood for this long speech: “You have two mastiffs, don’t you, the spotted ones you had in the plaza, so why do you need night-vision goggles to guard your property? You may be fabulously wealthy, you certainly seem it, but isn’t that rather extravagant?”

      Stockis had been to China (and in China, to Manchuria); I mean, he’d been around, all over the world, and he obviously knew how to carry on a conversation, however rudimentary the English. He came back with an explanation.

      “You can’t even see your hand in front of your face some nights here in Stockholm. It’s dark by three in the afternoon in the winter. I don’t think you could have picked a better place to sell these goggles. I have a yacht and don’t sleep well. Sometimes I get up early and watch the sunrise from this terrace. But come, we’re not here to talk about that …”

      We went into the house. Through a service door in the back. On the kitchen table I saw food-caked dishes, a half-eaten box of chocolates, candy wrappers all over, as if there’d been an explosion. We went to the study, down a hallway littered with beer cartons, stepping over ads for pizza parlors with Swedish names, with the mastiffs (which did belong to Stockis) nipping at my heels. The mess suited me fine, I’m the same when I’m home alone and end up drowning in magazines, pants, shirts I can wear one more day, clean enough, hung on the backs of chairs, glasses still holding the dregs of tea, but on top of it all anyway. I know what it’s like to let myself go, to slide down that slippery slope of slovenliness. Between trips I often find myself watching television, which I detest, until four in the morning, a book open in my lap, bored by whatever’s on, knowing the bad cop will betray the good one several dull speeches before it happens. And never anything about smuggling, there’s almost never a show with anything about smuggling, much less smuggling bugs or butterflies.

      “Russia has several rare butterflies, extinct in the West …” he began. “There is one type in particular, the yazikus, which lives only from the end of May to mid-September. I would give everything to possess it.”

      “Everything is not anything,” I replied, and then, to his broad chest, “How much?” because I do not believe in a numerical infinity, which I consider an intellectual concept, nothing more.

      “Stockis is also a trade name,” he said, as if confident this would add some weight to his proposal, but not explaining why. I had followed him into the study, preceded by the panes of the plaid lumberjack shirt stretched across his broad back. When he turned to see what effect this revelation had on me, I climbed up on tiptoes and peered over his shoulder, to expand my field of vision. My gaze slid along glass display cases hung from every wall. There was just one window, in the north wall, and, on both sides of it, innumerable cases full of butterflies, glowing with a soft light.

      Sure, we were here to look at butterflies, and for him to propose some deal with butterflies, I knew that, but he could still have some other field, and I said, “So, you have a business … that sells … ?”

      He stopped in front of a case and tapped the glass, answering me without saying the word “butterflies.”

      “I will be sailing to Istanbul at the end of May, on the Vaza. I have clients in the Middle East who are going to meet me on an island, on Crete, but before that we can look around Istanbul, you and I. Have you ever been to Istanbul?”

      I had not been to Istanbul.

      From floor to ceiling, up to the rafters, the study walls were covered with cases full of butterflies, which were held down, I noted, with round-headed pins, easy to get hold of. I did not know a thing about butterflies at the time, on that day near the end of winter.

      “No questions until they make the first offer,” he lectured. “That way, you’ll know what kind of number: tens, thousands, tens of thousands. There are innumerable orders of butterflies. If a collection has specimens from a single order, it’s no good. It’s worth much more if it contains examples from various orders, organized lowest to highest…. By the way, there’s a forest in Finland, near Carelia, planted by the Russian army for the production of masts. A friend of mine got the mast for his yacht, a sailboat, there … I don’t know Russia. But they say it still has some yazikus, butterflies that are worth a lot of money” (or did he say “a fortune”? I don’t remember). “And they say Czar Nicholas II was the last person to capture one. He was the last czar, too, right?”

      (Who says? I felt like asking Stockis, who told you that?)

      He was thinking, about to add something, maybe about the offices the Nobel brothers had in Baku and St. Petersburg, but out came:

      “Wait,” he struck the arm of his chair, worried, and asked me: “How will you recognize it?” like in some detective novel, so that I pictured myself waiting in some nightclub or restaurant, with a copy of Botanic World Illustrated spread out on my table. But I wouldn’t have any trouble identifying the insect: it would show up for our meeting with a green umbrella tucked under its right-front leg, in outsize boots that rattled around on its last pair of tiny legs. And it would have its wings folded, so that if not for its skinny thorax it could have been some flashy cowboy in a sunflower overcoat.

       2

       HELSINKI

      For a reader of Conrad, the passage across the Baltic, the Gulf of Finland, can be as charged with mystery as journeying to the South Seas. I was skimming over it on a fine ferry, almost a hundred meters long, with twelve decks. Standing on the aft deck (the captain’s deck), I imagined myself the hero in a storm, warning the captain of danger, an approaching iceberg. At nightfall I saw the carnival lights of another ferry passing me by, looking lovelier, more luxurious than mine, with more pleasures for their passengers. The other ship disappeared in the fog and I turned my back on the picture window, trying to get in shape for this trip, which was no less of an adventure. I had abandoned a normal life, apprentice writer with occasional weekends on the loading dock at a meat-packing plant in St. Petersburg. It’s easy enough, anyone could see my main motive, what made me jump into the cold water of dealing (a euphemism, to avoid “smuggling”), fully aware what I was getting into. Like that captain in Conrad, in full command of his seafaring faculties, with a successful career in the English navy, who listens to Lord Jim’s disturbing tale—the disgrace, the loss of honor—and then makes some careful annotations in the binnacle log, winds his watch, and throws himself into the water. I wanted to be converted, to become something more than a novelist, more than a storyteller, and so I jumped into the cold water of dealing, I learned all the numbers and “How much does it cost?” and “I’ll give it to you for half price, since you’re my friend” in more than seven of the languages of eastern and northern Europe.

      I relived those trips in my dreams, as if my bed kept moving all night, just as if I was in a sleeping car or a ship’s cabin, below sea level. Yesterday, asleep, I thought I heard the wings of a helicopter over my head, an asthmatic gasp, a slow crackling, syncopated, as if it was about to crash, and the next morning I stood at the newsstand, in a trance, staring at a photo of a ferry tilted up on its side, listing, half submerged. I felt sure that a dream of shipwreck had been about to take off from that sound of wings, but had mutated into a peremptory summons, an open hand slapping on my door, knocking. It had wanted to be a rescue helicopter, a long ladder unrolling slowly toward our raft tossing in the waves, wind and cold eating into our bones, women screaming. In fact, I did hear screams eventually,