Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire. José Manuel prieto

wrote letters for or against you, promoting you to a ministerial post or dumping you in a distant outpost, ruining your reputation and your career. She suspected I was a foreigner, which gave her a bit of confidence, enough to open the door a crack, so she could throw me out, face first onto her lawn, telling me:

      “I don’t think it will be possible. We don’t have any vacancies. But you can come by anyway.”

      Before I left the phone booth, I ran my finger down the list for the Astrakhan prefix. A second balloon was now rising, rocking back and forth, as slowly as a coin falling to the bottom of a glass (not quickly, the way a bubble rises from the bottom of a glass—how odd!). The revolving door of the Oreandra pushed me toward the street with feigned friendliness, but instead of hurrying out before it slapped me on the back I continued the circle and returned to the lobby. I had decided to write myself a letter of recommendation on the spot, at one of the tiny marble tables in the lobby.

      I used my best Russian penmanship, imitating the shaky handwriting of a seventy-five-year-old man, Vladimir Vladimirovich, a friend in St. Petersburg. A single paragraph was all I needed, and I turned it out in the stiff superficial style of official letters, applications for jobs (and dismissals from them). And addressed it to Maria Kuzmovna (just like that, Maria, Kuzmá’s daughter, with no last name), the name on the ad.

      The coast road ran past blue mountains with pine trees growing up them (and the sea below). Sometimes there was a clearing and I would have a perfect view of the tourists’ sailboats and a large-hulled ship coming into the harbor. The wind carrying the balloons across the bay hit me in the face, a few raindrops still floating in it, but warm again. The asphalt ribbon of the highway slipped off onto the shoulder without a curb, irregularly, like it was pinned down by pine needles. A good road. I was glad it was asphalt not concrete, very much alike, but the asphalt was softer, making my walk easier. The lady at the front desk in the Oreandra had told me that a trolleybus went to all the little towns and beaches on the coast, Livadia and beyond, as far as Alupka. A strange route for a trolley. I let her tell me where to catch it—go five blocks down, wait at the movie house—and decided to walk.

      It would take a half hour, I figured, by the road through the pines. I walked against the traffic. That way I could see the cars coming toward me (as a safety precaution), and the shuddering of the cable long before the trolley appeared around a long curve, an ancient model, its wires held on by rope.

      Following its line I couldn’t get lost. I walked past several pensions, practically on the road. The trolley didn’t make regular stops, just pulled over when the driver saw anyone who wanted to go into Yalta, or the other way, to the mineral baths in Alupka. I had been to Yalta before, but it didn’t count. I had made a quick circuit of the peninsula, driving along the coast in a prewar convertible, hardly stopping at all. Without visiting Livadia, for instance. There is a Grand Palace in Livadia, built in 1911. Surrounding it is an English garden with the road down the middle. I stepped onto its grass and ran downhill, full tilt, so I wouldn’t fall. I slowed down at a gravel path. “It’s not far from the Palace, in fact, just 800 meters from the left wing.” Nice location, near a palace. I went a little farther, down to the sea. And found the two-story house I wanted: “Livadia” (the pension’s name, too).

      The Black Sea was a good place to live, lots of family-style pensions, very cheap since the crisis. The only problem was that these pensions, these solid houses built on stone foundations, with ten to fifteen rooms plus a kitchen, were not really family-run. Not any more. Not since the turn of the century. Now they were administered by the state, with the rooms listed on the vacation plans of unions from all over. Schoolteachers and retirees could stay practically free, paying with vouchers for meals, plus every service from laundry to midnight snacks: a cold glass of milk and some cookies.

      Vladimir Vladimirovich had spent a month there, I told Maria Kuzmovna. She didn’t remember him, naturally, but my dollars, which she could change into the new local money, widened the opening my fake reference had given me. I just let her know I didn’t approve of the old voucher system. I would pay in cash and in advance for board and bedding.

      She didn’t have to read the letter twice, I noticed, not this Kuzmovna. Her fear was gone, most of it anyway. She was just cautious, probably had to be, without the false trust so many people invested in the newly opened market. The swarms of old soviet economic police were being replaced by fiscal inspectors, and I had seen many people slip up on deals that seemed safe. She gave me a sharp look. She was about fifty, with a broad chest like a landing strip for airplanes with soft tires, nearly flat. She yelled: “Mikhail Petrovich!”—another retiree in loose shirt and sandals—“Come here please.” She wanted a witness to our deal. So at least she wasn’t overcharging me. She wanted to know the purpose of my visit. No answer. She had to ask, she explained, since I was staying so long. I said, “I need a room with a view.” It could mean anything: a poetic nature, an interest in astronomy, a respiratory disease. “I have a room facing the sea,” she admitted at last. She folded the letter and put it away, slipping it into the pocket of her dress. Mikhail Petrovich, the retiree in the round glasses, couldn’t be her lover: he was too old and feeble to move Kuzmovna’s massive hips. I was in. A pair of unsuspecting vacationers showed up for the room, pockets full of vouchers, and she sent them packing: someone’s always messing up, Moscow or somewhere, sending two guests for the same spot (lie!); try the big sanatoria, maybe, or the Palace.

      I soon discovered that the boarders exchanged notes, which they attached to the doors of their rooms on little self-adhesive papers with a strip of glue that stayed sticky. I went sneaking from door to door, reading these little notes, forming impressions of the other guests. Kuzmovna’s always had a peremptory tone: “Mikhail Petrovich, don’t ever leave the oven on again!” Kuzmovna was bright enough ordinarily, but could not seem to learn my name. I let on that it was Joska, which ended the stammers provoked by a strange name, and soon notes started to appear, topped by that simple name, and decked with three exclamation marks (indicating amazement, urgency, incredible importance): “Don’t forget to empty the wastebasket!” or “How many times must I tell you, your breakfast gets cold by eight-thirty in the morning?”

       3

       LIVADIA

      The woods led down to the beach. I was cold walking through them, among the pines. When I came out on the beach, I was shocked by the heat, unimaginable under the trees. Just the sort of contrast you would remember years later, and made a (mental) note: “This sure beats the tropics, those dry lonely beaches.” At least I liked it better now, the nice combination of sunny beach and woods, the chance to withdraw to the shadows, light a fire in a clearing. The mere hint (mental) of the August sun made me queasy. By September, maybe before, the market would be full of fruits. That, too.

      I had traveled too much the past two years, I thought, when I was back under the trees. I had hurried away from great cities, with their museums and galleries, without seeing them, in and out in three days, not a moment to spare. Always rushing to catch a plane, the ferry leaving at 18:37, the train at 13:45. Always in some cab, the backseat heaped with bags, flying toward the dock, the station, the airport. Or else, I had floated through too many cities: Helsinki, Prague, Vienna, Stockholm, Berlin, buying and selling, immersed in liquidation sales when the Wall gave way, chasing after cut-rate antiquities in Kraków, barely alighting in its cobbled streets, soaring to Vienna on sandals winged with 500 percent profits. My sole activity: crossing the membranes of states (borders), taking advantage of the different values between one cell (nation) and another. And after a few days’ inactivity, taking off charged with oxygen, a terrific payoff with a minor toll on my nerves. I did not, for example, take the opium bars an Uzbeki tried to push on me in Samarkand. I had read how every hour in prison seems endless, and also, of course, about men in solitary confinement with nothing to do, a lifetime of letter-writing ahead.

      The problem of borders fascinates me, the practical angle, of course. In one night hundreds of people, hundreds of smugglers, crossed the Estonian border. A dream. The newspapers didn’t say a word about the incident or its political significance. Russia had set its colonies free, shrinking away from its customs posts, its barbed wire, its dogs. Crossing into Estonia or any of the other