Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire. José Manuel prieto

used the same paper to explain how to preserve the specimen if I should capture it. First I should kill it by putting it into a wide-mouthed bottle full of ether, being careful not to touch the wings and spoil their fine iridescent powder. Once it was dead, I should pick it up by the thorax, the top part, and fasten it horizontally, somewhat loosely, so it could be moved when it was in the collection … He broke off in the middle of the instruction. Put two thick lines through it. Resumed more confidently, taking a different approach, from the word bottle. Use it to carry the captured specimens (now plural), so they would not get dislodged and damaged during transport. From where to where? I thought. We had spoken of only one point: Istanbul. He would prefer that the sale occur there, rather than somewhere too dangerous, like Russia, since the violent explosion of the mafia, or too safe, like Sweden, where the cops could not be bribed: forget Sweden.

      I bought a Handbook for the Young Insect Collector, too, for a thirtieth of what I paid for Diurnal and Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire. I thumbed through it right there in the bookstore. How to prepare a mount. Materials needed. The insect or butterfly net … It’s better to make your own net … I didn’t have time for that. I bought one with an adjustable handle, the kind they sell in Yuni naturalist stores (for “The Young Naturalist”: me, for one).

      At last I had my hands on a detailed description: it lived in sunny open spaces, border areas, its wings deeply cut on the outside edge, two series of submarginal spots, bright yellow. A verbal portrait complementing the photos from Stockis and the beautiful illustration in Diurnal Butterflies, a full-page vellum sheet, behind which pen-and-ink butterflies seemed to be flying in the morning mist, or just the way I saw them now, through half-closed eyes, lying on my back in a field in Livadia, only half-looking, sure that yazikus were long gone: whether killed by DDT, intensive farming, or seventy years of Soviet rule.

      The Natural History Museum would probably have one on display. I had studied every detail of the yazikus picture: the tiny legs that the illustrator must have painted with a fine sable-hair paintbrush, the antennae … they were engraved in my mind all the way there in the cab.

      Still inside, I stared out at the streetcar landing by the Winter Palace, at the women with raincoats and umbrellas rushing to board the trolleys. I began the climb, my black shoes glistening from the rain against the horizontal gray lines of the stairs going up to the museum.

      Leaving behind the moth-eaten bones of mammoths, their skeletons clumsily resting on bony feet, unable to take flight, I began the dizzying descent to the winged simplicity of the lepidoptera. Right at the door, eye-catching, a huge example of Lepidoptera fenestra. I drew closer to look, pinning it down in the middle of the multicolored flutter in the other glass cases, the silent flapping of the vanessas.

      There were no yazikus on display. I carefully checked all the little labels, straining to bend over them. I seemed to see a reflection of myself in a low genuflection, but quickly realized it was a live specimen of the local fauna, a little old attendant, slowly shifting in her chair in the corner, her soft cheeks puffed out by the gob of caramel she was sucking placidly. I stepped forward to look at her face. Her eyes were shut and she seemed asleep, but her jaws kept working automatically. She did not open them when she heard me talking to her. Just stopped sucking since the interior roar from that activity isolated her sonically from the room: Ya slushayu Vas (I hear you). I asked to see the yazikus: she was as slow to answer as if a team of stagehands had to roll back the tarpaulins and pick up the instruments that an orchestra had left in the rain at a summer concert. She blinked, opening just one eye, and studied me for a moment: “There is no such thing. I have never heard of such a butterfly. Who said we had one here? Konstantin Pavlovich … Well, he is not here today … Our nauchni (scientific) konsultant could explain it better, but he has Sundays off. He gave me strict orders … I mean, there is no such … If there was one, wouldn’t we have it here, in the best museum of entomology in Russia?”

      The whole time she spoke she was darting back and forth in her chair, peering around, trying to watch the corners behind me, since I could be part of a gang, the one who keeps the guard busy with friendly chatter while his accomplices ransack the display cases. After all, museum robberies were on the rise in Russia. But it never even crossed my mind to steal the yazikus from the Natural History Museum, even though it would be a lot less work and a much shorter trip—a few trolley stops from my home—than organizing an expedition to the Volga delta.

      That trip held the opposite appeal: tramping around in my tarred boots, hiking through the trees. If the Russian state, in the person of some anonymous hunter, had gone ahead and bagged a couple of specimens of yazikus for its collection, then I don’t see why I should have to get them by force, stealing them instead of winning them honestly, playing by the rules. I had had no plans to use a handkerchief soaked in ether on the old lady who had been so slow to open her blue eyes, eyes that were strangely bright, probably in mint condition from how little work she gave them. But she was sure I was a foreign occupier, she’d seen plenty of movies about partisans, and during my interrogation she had to lie at any cost, even her life; so she just kept talking, that is, zagoborit menia, misleading me with aimless remarks, denying any knowledge of where the weapons were hidden, or the yazikus, those were her instructions, she had gotten them from Konstantin Pavlovich, the konsultant: “Nadieshda Ivanovna, you know that this is a terrible time for our country. We have been hit by a crime wave, youthful crooks attracted by our wealth, anxious to enrich themselves, as you well know. This new tide comes from the West. They will ask about certain specimens from our collection. I will mention no names because then you can’t remember them. This is all you need to know: deny everything. You know nothing. The specimen they want does not exist; you have never heard of it. There is one butterfly in particular … But no. You only have to say (playing dumb, you know): No, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Yazi? Kuz? Well, no, never …”

      It was obvious she was lying. She was agitated, like a person not used to it. She kept rocking in her chair, as if an accomplice behind me was busy filling his sacks. Not too long ago, some thieves—very polite, attentive young people, eager for knowledge, like so many previous generations of pioneering youth who had toured the museum in big groups, totally innocent in appearance—had come into one of these rooms and stolen some mammoth teeth. I had read it in the newspaper before I left for Helsinki. I did not, however, draw any practical conclusions from that item in the Sankt Petersburkie Vedomosti. True, there was no reason for such considerations at the time, when I was at the station, waiting to board the train to Helsinki, but when Stockis gave me a list of the butterflies he wanted, and I decided to visit the Natural History Museum, back in Petersburg, it had not yet dawned on me that the Volga expedition was completely unnecessary, since the specimens Stockis wanted were all in that museum, caught by the long arm of the state, conveyed from their far-flung confines to the former capital of the empire and confided to the feeble custody of a frail old lady, easy to knock out with a handkerchief soaked in ether. Instead of knocking out dozens of butterflies, that is, moving tortuously across the irregularities of the map, burned brown by the sun, breaking ground in my hob-nailed boots, I could reduce my ether overhead to the few drops it would take to put this old crone to sleep and then board the trolley outside the museum, blending in with the raincoats, and cross the city on the bus. Much shorter, and much safer, than a trip to the Caspian Basin.

       4

       CASPIAN BASIN

      We would land somewhere between the mouths of the Volga and the Astrakhan. Traveling through the tangle of the delta’s canals in a coastal steamer, I saw the Caspian as an empty wineskin, with the steamboat dropping down into it through the narrow neck. I would leap ashore, into a patch of reeds in some spot not marked on the map, and a week later I would be at some other beach waiting for the same steamer, which would take me home, fabulously wealthy, my saddlebags stuffed with rare specimens.

      But first I had boarded the boat in Astrakhan, at a dock so full of barges that it looked to me—viewing the countryside from the heights of the city—like it would be possible to walk across the Volga without ever touching the water. I began my descent