Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire. José Manuel prieto

through the slot in the glass. I approached it slowly, shock flooding me with a vague conviction … “My God, It’s incredible!”

      “Yes, I believe it’s for me. You’re right, it’s for me.” She must have noticed me yesterday, when I had come in to place a call to Stockholm, which had never gone through. Then she got a letter with a foreign name and concluded it was mine.

      I stood there speechless, as if I had been descended upon by an angel (her rustling wings with their white tips and tailfeathers quite a sight in the gloom of the Post Office), who had handed me an envelope that had the sender’s name (which I saw at once), but no return address (in the bottom right, where they put it in Russia). I had not been expecting a letter from her. She had disappeared without a trace in Odessa, leaving me with an uneasy feeling, like when you drop a letter that contains vital information into the indifferent mouth of a mailbox, afraid it’s gone for good. But no, it reaches its destination and weeks later, out of the blue, you get a response. (The response to its disappearance and, more than anything, the real and true response to itself.)

      I have never read letters very carefully. Nor had I had any interest in other people’s letters, in collections of letters. I didn’t know a thing about letters. I’d read novels, books of short stories, but never letters (nor plays; I never go to the theater). Whenever I get back from one of my trips, with a huge stash of cash in my clothes, I’d just glance through the few letters I’d received, from all over the world, Japan, New Zealand (and even Cuba!), maybe looking twice at a word or phrase if I couldn’t make it out. I’d never gotten a letter that affected me like V.’s. I read it over and over, like the chess player who defeated twenty opponents at once, blind, and can’t stop repeating the moves in his head, returning from ending to opening gambit again and again, in an endless loop, to the point of madness. In a lucid moment I held the thin rice paper up to the light, hoping to discover its secret, some mesmerizing device between its layers. I classified it (erroneously) as a love letter, but then, life had not given me much experience with love letters. I have gazed into the eyes of very dear women, talked on a balcony in the wee hours, walked silently in a cold fall rain, slept by the sea all afternoon, a girlfriend at my side, waking after nine on an empty beach, the tide rising, waves lapping the pines, a distant ship on the horizon, but I have never gotten a love letter. And her letter had a subtle musical quality, too, like a simple song, strong enough to lift us briefly, all too briefly, and express the inexpressible truth of our hearts. It had a kind of melody, pretty, and moved at a nice tempo, steady, with some ups and downs, of course, little details that could be passed over, like some song in Norwegian—I didn’t speak Norwegian, and I never would, but it could touch my heart anyway. Her letter colored those morning hours, and every day that week, with a clear light tone, so that I often smiled during the day, the way you sometimes feel bad, for no apparent reason, and I finally located the source of this joy, after I subjected it to analysis: could it be the day dawning so bright and sunny? No, that wasn’t it. The film I stayed up to watch? No, that wasn’t it either. No, it sprang from her letter, and the light was composed of its words.

      I now saw that the simple cut of the cotton dress she’d bought herself in Odessa, the broad shoulder straps, the three big white buttons, revealed much of what now left me breathless, her figures of speech, her turns of phrase, the smooth way she had of introducing speech after speech, developing a thought, grasping an idea from every side, quickly connecting it to another, like someone sewing, someone darning a hole in a sock, stretching it out with her fingers, holding it at arm’s length, giving a sigh of satisfaction, and picking up another, or maybe a wool sweater, with a hole at the elbow, biting the thread with her teeth, spitting on the end, and picking up her idea where she left off, at the last stitch. Quite a contrast between this woman, in a dressing gown open to the thigh, sitting down to write me this letter, in her peaceful home in some tiny village (almost a hamlet)—and the cold, hard, tough woman I had met in Istanbul.

      That woman hadn’t come to me in Livadia, I realized. Reading this letter was a surprise, like cutting into a fruit and discovering ripe flesh. I had not seen her soften up, I thought; it had happened since she disappeared that afternoon, shortly after I (foolishly) sat down to read Chase, after admiring the fresh intelligence of her arms with their golden down, unshaved. I had appreciated her intelligence my first morning in Istanbul; I had taken her for the very model of intelligence at first sight (those white teeth chewing lettuce at breakfast), the organic intelligence of shapely ankles, deep blue eyes, pale blond hair, falling to her shoulders. She had a few bumps, but luscious ones, like the plump—bare—arms bursting from the sleeves of her blouse, the ones I had squeezed as if testing the softness of a pillow, good for laying your head on, imagining the days on the beach, the dips in the sea we could enjoy in Livadia.

      Before I got the first letter, during the three days I had waited at the Yalta dock, in a downpour that lasted just as long, I thought (wrongly) that I should have treated her rough, the way I saw her treat Leilah, the other girl from the Saray (the way you pound a peach or a mango to tenderize the flesh). But V. had ripened on her own, bedded down in the hay, in the loft of her hut, staring out the blue slot of the window, watching the leaves on the trees changing color, the flocks of wild ducks crossing the sky in perfect formation. She woke up dazed, her mouth thick with saliva, her ears tuned to new sounds, the cheeping of chicks just out of their shells, the clanking of the bucket against the lip of the well. She had guessed the hour from the faint glow around the apple trees in the garden and slipped downstairs, sliding her hands over the ladder rails; or maybe she had leapt down and thrown on her clothes, a simple percale smock (or her bathrobe), and then went into the kitchen and sat down to write me this letter, surrounded by jars of preserves. In the same soft light of that hour, the same silence, the same sense of peace, reinforced by the rattle of the bucket against the side of the well, the creaking of the rope in the pulley. She had gotten up way before me, with this amazing handwriting and this letter full of truths I hadn’t suspected she knew. It came to seven sheets covered with her small but well-formed writing, saying things I had always imagined could be said in letters, but that I had never seen spelled out so nicely, with never a false step. It was written at one sitting, I now felt sure, but by whom? How could it have been written by the same girl I rescued from Istanbul, by the same V. who told me those lies about working as a figure skater, tracing endless circles on the ice? I had seen her behave coarsely, yelling at her friend Leilah, almost coming to blows; but then, I had also heard her claim she’d studied art, drawing or painting, I can’t recall. (I do remember: it was at lunch in a Chinese restaurant in Istanbul. While we waited for our order, I made some comment—out of place—about the painting that was hanging on the wall in front of us, its vertical perspective. Immediately realizing the absurdity of my remark, I turned to the glazed duck, praising the dish we’d been served. But she had stopped my move toward my plate, saying that she had studied painting and had never heard that term, vertical perspective. I assumed she was lying—she had never studied drawing (or painting)!—and so I joked that I’d just made it up. But she was bent over her plate again, carrying a piece of bread to her mouth, taking a bite without lifting her eyes. I hastily abandoned vertical perspective, and we finished eating in silence. V. waited almost two months to break that silence, without showing any impatience, like those people who won’t talk about complex subjects, can’t say such things out loud. Who write treatises instead, books that are rarely complex, just the reverse, quite simple. Her letter wasn’t complex either, not in and of itself, but it created an unbearable complex within me, as the fine thread of her handwriting unreeled our days together in Istanbul, the difficulties of our flight, the drama in the Russian merchant ship, ending in a disappearance in Odessa. Her letter’s real subject (I realized after several rereadings) was friendship, love if you like, but a love that had waited for days to pass, for the great Russian rivers to start to rise, the trees to sprout, the afternoons in Livadia to grow longer, for her pen to break the ice of those days of screams and shouted orders, of fear, suspicion, and danger.

      A brief description of V. may help explain my confusion, the uncertain state in which I found myself. After I went to meet Stockis at the Istanbul club, while I was standing there at loose ends, I saw the girls from the Saray (among them V. and Leilah) at the sidewalk café across the street, having what I later learned was breakfast—it was already lunchtime. I saw V. that morning, sitting at a nearby table (as if posed), and my eye was drawn to her. She