Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire. José Manuel prieto

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 the lobby, I looked out the window and saw that the day was turning nice again: big beams of light shot out like fans from the bottom side of gray clouds, that sort of thing. If you had been looking out this same window an hour earlier, you would have seen a downpour splashing on the flagstones, but when I dialed the number and someone picked it up on the second ring, the sun burst out from behind a cloud, the rays so bright they hurt, and I had to half-shut my eyes. The booth had a list of prefixes—typewritten with penciled corrections—for the major Russian cities. I could say I was calling from Simferopol, I realized, for a better bargaining position, so I’d be under less pressure, the rain less of a threat.

      “I’m calling about the ad.” (Why else would I be calling? I ought to introduce myself first, but that meant a name. I could invent a name: say, Andrei Gavrilov. Maybe I should start with a greeting: “Good afternoon, but it’s probably already evening …” No, straight to the point, no preliminaries.)

      “Yes,” she responded dryly. (Fifty or fifty-five years old, fleshy, full breasts, in a dark housedress and slippers at the moment. Flinty blue eyes. I could just picture her.)

      “Can you tell me about it?”

      “I don’t give out information on the phone.” (Seventy, no, more than seventy years of Soviet rule).

      “But do you have any rooms?” (Several years in Russia myself. I can elbow my way on to a city bus, if need be, and haggle over a kilo of figs in the market, with the best of them.). “I have a letter of recommendation,” I added. The lie occurred to me as I watched a multicolored helium balloon go up across the bay.

      “Oh, good!” Meaning, that changes things, and in more than one sense: she knew it was false, totally false, but wasn’t that a testimonial to my ingenuity? Anyway, they