Butterfly Skin Read Online Free PDF

discussed the terms for yet another advertising campaign, and Ksenia thought she wanted to be like Olya someday. Perhaps she simply liked Olya’s way of inclining her head during a conversation, smiling with just the corners of her mouth and waving her hand fluently when she rejected an unacceptable proposal. Ksenia even liked the not exactly old-fashioned, not exactly provincial Petersburg way she smoked a cigarette, drawing in the smoke through a long cigarette holder. On that first occasion they got through the business quickly and spent another forty minutes talking about all sorts of nonsense, she can’t remember exactly what now. They immediately started calling each other “Olya” and “Ksyusha,” and now they meet a couple of times a week, and Ksyusha is glad her premonition didn’t deceive her: it was friendship at first sight.
    “And so,” says Olya, stubbing her cigarette out in the ashtray, “I want to ask you to make some inquiries about him, about this man. I don’t really know anything about him, but you’re a journalist, so you can manage it, right?”

5
    KSENIA WALKS THROUGH THE PASSAGE FROM ONE subway line to the other in a dense crowd of people, in a vortex of deep human waters, a subterranean reflection of the traffic jams on the Moscow streets. Instead of frosty Tverskaya Street with its smell of petrol, there is the stale air of Pushkinskaya Station; instead of the stench of tobacco in the front seat of a private car acting as a taxi, there is the smell of sweat in the stuffy carriage. Save fifteen, no, twenty minutes and two hundred, no, one hundred and fifty rubles, get there for seven as she promised, not be late at least this once.
    She was never late for business meetings or assignations, but somehow she had never managed to get to her mother’s place on time, ever since she was a child, when it used to take her an hour to get home from school, stopping for a chat with Vika, and then with Marina, who she called Marinka, saying goodbye ten times on every corner, and then deciding to make a detour anyway, walking to the garages first, and then to the bus stop. It took her fifteen minutes to walk to school and an hour to walk back. She had to be at the dance studio by three. Ksenia didn’t really have to hurry, but her mom was nervous anyway, she said she would go crazy, times weren’t what they used to be, now they didn’t even let little children go to school on their own, let alone Ksenia, a beautiful ten-year-old girl, the delight of any pedophile, a future Lolita, the light of her parents’ lives, the fire of God only knew whose appalling loins. Ksenia was stubborn, she forbade her mother to meet her, swore she would come home on time, but she still came late. Her mom made a show of drinking her decoction of one-hundred-percent natural valerian from virgin forests somewhere in Siberia or the Urals, her mom clutched at her heart, her mom said her daughter didn’t love her at all. Ksenia persuaded herself that these reproaches were a proof of love. Not of her love for her mom, of course, but of her mom’s love for her. Because if her mom didn’t love her, why would her mom get so anxious?
    Lyova was already in eleventh grade at school and he was regarded as quite grown up already, he had even applied for a place in college amid a general atmosphere of approving indifference: who could ever doubt it, of course he would get in. Ksenia heard Lyova telling a friend or a girlfriend on the phone that if not for the army he would never have applied for college; who needed an education now? And he probably wouldn’t be a physicist, there was no money in it, unless you went away to America. Afterward, many years later, Ksenia was surprised at how much he knew about everything in advance: he had been right twice over – he didn’t become a physicist and he went away to America.
    She was always home late from school; only once, when half the class, including Vika and Marinka, was off