Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire. José Manuel prieto

merchandise, trucks with tarps covering their loads. Like the army of the night preparing an attack, with every precaution. In Ivangorod, the ancient fortress that now marked the end of Russian territory and the start of the Hanseatic League, you could walk down the main street in broad daylight and not see the preparations: the forces camped along the border, the jeeps with their lights out and their map boxes open, the index fingers tracing a sinuous route by which a few soldiers were taking out three helicopters with muffled blades. People had been filtering across this “transparent border” (as Izvetia called it) for a long time, gradually “draining the lifeblood from Mother Russia” (sic), but one moonless night the first divisions of smugglers began pouring out of the heart of Russia, overrunning the country like an an army of lemurs, and months later in Warsaw or Berlin, people were still talking about it. A single night. Some of them took more than one trip. A cargo of osmium oxide, for example, a rare earth, at seventy thousand dollars a kilogram, making a killing overnight. Estonia and the other Baltic republics took the weapon fate had given them and paid Russia back with smuggled goods. I traveled through Ivangorod when memories of that night were still fresh, inspiring long hours of stories in the train-station café. That day was over, but some people had seized it, as well as a fortune. I heard about it the afternoon I arrived, a few months too late, from a drunk selling fried meatballs, twirling his aluminum fork, and talking about crossing that border on foot, no problem. “A walk in the park!” (he winked), but with just two bottles of vodka in the pockets of the checked jacket he was wearing. By now, he told me, he could have been a millionaire in Tallin … “Kolya! My friend Kolya … We drank together here many times … Zubrovka … I visited him three days ago in his office in Narva, five minutes from here: two secretaries, nogui, vo! (legs up to here, this long), cellular phone. The transparent border!” he spit out furiously.

      It was no less transparent now, but you needed quick wits to go through: you might have to toss the goods and run. Russia had brought in soldiers from all over, garrisons in the Urals or Bashkirya, raw recruits with no real sense of customs, ready to take your watchband to stop the looting of their country.

      A curious incident, something that happened to me on one of my trips: a woman in Brussels tried to return some goods I supposedly sold her in Liège, some bad caviar. I had never gone to Liège, nor would I want to. Nor had I ever sold any caviar. Well, all right, one time someone gave me a bargain on a few tins of the finest caviar—beluga, anyone who eats caviar knows what that means. But this woman, on that trip to Brussels, saw me in the plaza by myself, cool and assured, singing the praises of my goods. (I’m embarrassed to admit, but at first, when I was starting out, I stood in plazas selling my merchandise, before I found clients who would buy whole shipments from me, items like Hasselblad cameras, two hundred dollars apiece. I should add that I’m interested in optics, that’s why I went to Russia, to study optics, but I didn’t graduate.) The lady could have been seeing double, suffering from some kind of optical aberration, maybe a temporary disphasia. Like déjà vu, the same physical principle. The theory is that one eye (we’ll say the right, but it can be the left) sees the image first, a split second ahead—a young man in a khaki jacket, a black watchcap over his ears, excellent teeth flashing a disdainful smile, thinking he won’t make very much here, he should go big time—and his image travels along the optic nerve to the brain, where it is received, processed, and stored; and then a bit later, the left optic nerve gets a second image (which looks the same, but is actually different, secretly altered—the young man thinking he ought to get better stuff, a bigger profit, at least a hundred grand a year), and that one reaches the brain, and hey! seen that one before!; and next thing you know the person, the fifty-year-old fury walking toward me, is sure she’s met me, and what’s worse, I’m the man from Liège, the one who sold her the lumpy caviar that tasted like asphalt.

      It took me completely by surprise, like déjà vu, providing an after-taste, a faint hint or a big hit, of nostalgia or euphoria. The woman didn’t have the nerve to throw her caviar in my face—she had the cans in her bag, maybe planning to present them in the lower house of the Belgian parliament, material evidence in a complaint about smuggling, tainted goods coming into the country from the east, Russland. Seeing me there—and inexplicably taking me for whoever had sold her the caviar in Liège—she spoke to a pair of teenagers, explaining the dirty trick I’d played, shaking an angry finger as she came toward me (twisting the top of my thermos in irritation, gripping it with the fleshy fingertips protruding from my cut-off gloves), and spat out a big speech in Walloon, brandishing the cans I had never seen (much less sold). Then she switched to plain English: pay her back or she’d call the cops. I started to explain that I never sold caviar, it wasn’t my line. And showed them the sort of things I sold, handing infrared telescope sights to the boys, who might want to follow their debut as bodyguards with a little turn at surveillance. Since the stuff had sidestepped customs, the woman wanted to have it out with me—the accused swindler—herself. Let’s just see, I thought, if she’ll call the police. I gave her a cutting answer, in English (I must say, English has an edge, I like that, at least in the tough novels I’ve read, Micky Spillane, plenty sharp): “What’s the problem? The money? You want your money back? Okay. Give me those damned cans and get your money back.” I knew I could unload them on some other Sunday stroller short the francs for caviar from Belgian shops. I’d never been to Liège, I hadn’t sold her those cans, but the old lady tapped them with a crooked finger and pointed at my chest, establishing a mysterious link between me, the caviar, and an unknown city (Liège).

      She took me for someone else, I figured. A month later, in Stockholm, a man came up to me, quite friendly, claiming we had met on the ferry, saying I had promised him some folk music tapes from southern Russia. He seemed to be suffering from some delusion, too, like the Chinese who can’t tell Western faces apart, or maybe it was a blindspot, like the Westerners who can’t tell Chinese faces apart—although I don’t look Chinese; that’s just an example.

      Later it was my turn: I was sitting in the bay window in a Greek restaurant, right here in Livadia, and simultaneously seemed to be in some faraway place. Like when you’re sitting in an armchair at home and suddenly feel like you’re in a pasture in Inner Mongolia, all the same physical sensations, wind bending the tall grass, small ponies grazing. I would really like to find an explanation for this phenomenon.

       4

       LIVADIA

      What I didn’t grasp were the empty points, the amazing stretch between the time when I had left V. on the Odessa steps, or actually, between the moment she left me in the Ferry Terminal, and the point at which she reappeared, yesterday afternoon when the window opened and the thin arm of the Post Office clerk reached out to hand me her letter.

      I had gone into the Post Office to make a long-distance call (since Post and Phones are in the same Russian ministry, in the same gray Moscow edifice). While the operator was making the connection, I was inspecting the model telegrams displayed under glass on her desk—announcements of train arrivals and departures, notes of congratulation—and it occurred to me I might have a letter at general delivery (poste restante). I looked up from a sample of a 500-ruble money order, located the general delivery window, and suddenly heard a voice: “Sir, there’s a letter for you.” This gospodín (sir) was unusual in Russia, so I figured it was directed at someone else, certainly not me. Some person behind me, somebody who had come in for his mail. And they addressed him with an expression starting to spread in Russia, the old-fashioned: “Sir.” (I was just plain “mister” to the streetcar drivers and porters of Petersburg). And “a letter for you,” that was odd, too. From whom? I wasn’t expecting one. No one knew where I was (except Stockis, who never wrote to me in Russia, for security reasons. We only spoke on the phone, our words—he was sure—going off into thin air), so I could hardly be getting mail here. It had been ridiculous to come to this window. Not only that, my call must be going through. Going back to stand by the desk, I heard some pounding—metal rapped against the window behind me (the handle of the postmark stamp, I found out later)—and then the voice piped up again, much louder: “Muzhina, I believe we have a letter for you. Isn’t this yours?