Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire. José Manuel prieto

wings. I leapt out of bed and into the hall as if propelled by the force of those blows, transmitted to my body through the air. A step ahead of me, in a floral bathrobe, with one hand on her belt and the other raised over her head, swinging back to pound on the door, the arm exposed, soft flesh slowly sliding toward the impact. “Petrovich!” Kuzmovna shrieked before her palm slammed once more against the blank of the door. “Petrovich!” she yelled again, pulling it back into launch position, winding up for a new attack. “Maria Kuzmovna!” I yelled. And then again, quietly, “Maria Kuzmovna.” Meaning, the time, a good place to start, it’s six in the morning, for one thing, and then there’s the knocking and the letter, the answer I had been writing, trying to write, to V., up, wide awake, till all hours. And also the completely tasteless soup she had served yesterday, the quivering of her fleshy arms, that sort of thing. Petrovich finally half-opened the door, and I heard them whispering furiously about something, who knows what, as if it was terribly urgent, which it surely wasn’t.

      I had made many trips in the ship that sank yesterday between Helsinki and Stockholm. That’s what the wings were trying to say, the knocking and the open door I saw before going back to sleep, the light of the sea at the end of the passage. Kuzmovna was talking to Petrovich outside his room. I was puzzled by the unusual brightness of the water and the cold air pouring in through the door. I moved toward it, walking past Kuzmovna, catching her in mid-reply, motionless, like a wax figure. There was another long hallway that I had to walk down, past the doors of many rooms that I hadn’t noticed before, full of unknown people that Kuzmovna must have let in, new tenants who must have moved in recently, but when? The wall at the end of the passage had disappeared and the water came right up to it, like in a house on stilts: I was dreaming again.

      I thought I hadn’t slept at all, but when I finally woke up, the sun was bright: it was late and so was I, later than usual leaving the pension.

      “Shipwreck” I read on the front page of the paper at the newsstand by the Post Office, in such a rush I went right past. It hadn’t been a dream, I managed to tell myself, but the transmission of images in real time: the tangible heaviness of a helicopter about to crash, blades spinning desperately. I doubled back anxiously. My God! Hundreds of people had been trapped in the cabins of the Baltic. (The long hallway, the door, the cold wind of my dream.) I broke out in a sweat and the system securing my joints fell to pieces, like when there’s a warning signal in a dream, emergency lights flash, and the whole crew rushes to the engine room to pump out the water, abandoning less important systems.

      I had just enough strength to turn, trembling, to the shipwreck article, after a brief glance at the weather report for Crimea and southern Russia. Nice all weekend: as if I could believe that. Cold water had awakened many of the passengers in their cabins, the article began. Screaming in terror, they ran down the flooded hallway in the dark, trying to reach the stairs before the sirens suddenly stopped wailing, and the ferry sank. I had imagined it dozens of times falling asleep in my cabin, but thought it would never happen with me onboard. With no desire to read the details, I put the newspaper back in the rack. I made a futile effort to straighten my back, then dragged myself limply to a bench near the Post Office door. But I would have been saved, I thought, half-closing my eyes to see better. I never went to bed early on those trips, and that would have saved me from dying trapped in my cabin, drowned. I would have had plenty of time to run from the salon to the darkened discotheque, pull open the glass door, out to the deck, to get a seat in a lifeboat. A bit calmer, I managed to pull my feet under the bench, raise my head. I sat staring at the sea, the horizon, through the tops of the pines. The same sea, in fact, but a bit warmer.

      It is possible to reconstruct sensations and states of mind from experiences and states of mind that are infinitely more minor, on another scale entirely. Resting on that bench, overcome, I knew what it was to be lifted by a flimsy flying machine, the deafening noise onboard the helicopter, the blind confidence that we have, in spite of everything, in mechanical devices that sail through the water and fly through the air. I was able to reconstruct the satisfaction of a narrow escape from insignificant pieces of information, unrelated incidents, last-minute rescues, anxieties that were similar, but on a smaller scale. Like not having a place to spend the night in a cold city, very far north, Helsinki, in this case. I knew more about this shipwreck, my shock, my horror were greater than that of someone who just read about it over breakfast: in some way, I too had been there. This prostration thanks to my last trip. I had missed the last train when I got back to Helsinki. Arriving at the station only to watch it pull away from the platform was like being lost at sea. The sea: a cold city like Helsinki was similar; the mast, that was my knapsack; the punishing sun, the snow sliding down the neck of my overcoat; the despairing castaway, me with my sopping shoes and cold feet; the distant shore, the coastline, and the glossolalic mission.

      I had the phone numbers of a few acquaintances in Helsinki, but when I dialed them, I got answering-machine messages or the recorded music that tells you the person you wanted, who should have been there to give you a place to stay, isn’t home, he’s off in Oslo or Copenhagen or God knows where. It was nine at night and the snow hadn’t let up since I left the ferry. I listened to one after another of these devastating messages, and I stood in the phone booth watching the Finns saunter by, all of them with homes, and beds to lie down in, with the easy manner of people with keys in their pockets. Of course, it wasn’t the first time: I had watched—trying to keep from freezing in a telephone booth, or in some clean well-lighted American fast-food place—as merry Viennese waltzed by, and happy Krakovians, and the fine folks of chilly Stockholm, looking forward to a hot cup of tea in their kitchens at home, while I was strolling around the great outdoors, looking for a spot to throw down my backpack and if I was lucky (in Prague) a cardboard box to shield my shoulders from the cold, sleeping on the ground.

      Someone had told me about a couple of priests who provided lodging for travelers. Would I still have the number? Yes, fortunately. One of them—I first greeted him in Finnish and then described my situation (“I’m in … distress, quite honestly”)—was kind enough to say he’d pick me up at the station. An excellent beginning: tomorrow at this hour, I would be home in St. Petersburg. “My name is Peckas,” he told me. Peckas? Perfect (great, terrific, whatever).

      He looked like a priest on a pirate ship. With his sleeves rolled up you could see he-man arms covered with tattoos, anchors and sayings in Finnish. I imagined his past with the fleet, the tough chaplain who forced the refractory cabinboy to his knees, putting a hand on his neck and pushing him down onto the polished boards of the deck, in Jakarta or some other South Seas port. Seeing him come toward me, rocked by the swaying of his muscular legs, his thick finger between the pages of a Bible, I felt like I’d been shipwrecked.

      Many wandering souls had taken shelter in the church, so the tongue-speakers couldn’t keep track of which of their guests had been baptized (they baptized them all; that was the price you paid for your lodging: letting them baptize you). Peckas put his arm around me good-humoredly and asked if I had been baptized at his hands. Two Nigerians and a Kurd, who were also spending the night in the church, piped up that they’d never seen me before. I explained that it had been another time, when they weren’t around. Peckas, speaker in tongues, let me lie, to use up my supply of lies for the day. The Kurd pulled me aside and asked me to say yes. Baptism would put the priests in a good mood, they’d slice up the salami for supper. Did I like the bland sausage in Helsinki? And the whipped cream? They wouldn’t leave without eating. They were devout Christians, but there’d be no mortadella or nut butter for me. I’d already taken a shower on the boat, I told them. So what did another bath matter? Should we go to the North-Nautic? Sure, the North-Nautic is a nice little place, at a hundred eighty dollars a night…. He had let them baptize him many times … I agreed, what else could I do? Peckas called to his companion with a big loud speech in Finnish—more than ten grammatical cases—and a second tongue-speaking priest appeared, also smiling and rosy as a baby.

      To talk to God, they told me, you don’t have to know any particular language; you can address him in any language whatsoever, because at the peak of your communion with him, you’ll be possessed by “the gift of tongues”—by glossolalia. To most ears they may be unintelligible sounds, but to God they are sounds that come from the deepest part of your soul and transmit all your love for him. I couldn’t stop staring at Peckas’s forearms,