Butterfly Skin Read Online Free PDF Page B

sick with flu, she came on time and ran into Slava in the entrance of the building (he was the one, by the way, who never wanted to be called “uncle” – just Slava, that was all) and he hesitated, as if he was embarrassed about something, mumbled “Hi” and hurried off to the bus stop. She walked in, shouted “Mom, I’m home!” and through the half-open door of her parents’ bedroom she saw the crumpled sheets and didn’t understand at first, then her mom came out of the bathroom wearing a robe over her naked body, with her hair all clumped together. “What are you doing here so early? You could at least have rung the doorbell.” She’d never asked Ksenia to ring the bell before, Ksenia had had her own keys since third grade, and now as she stood there in the corridor Ksenia started blushing uncontrollably, as if she’d done something unforgivable, almost criminal. She whispered, “Sorry, Mom, I didn’t think,” and went to her room, trying not to look round at the grinning door of the bedroom and burning with shame, feeling like a criminal for having found out something she wasn’t supposed to know. The latest number of Mom’s
AIDS-Info
, the sex education tabloid, was lying on the floor beside her bed, she’d been reading it yesterday before she went to sleep, she was proud that her mom and dad weren’t like other girls’ parents, they didn’t hide anything, on the contrary, to her grannies’ horror, they had explained everything to her at the age of six with a little book translated from French, so that now, at the age of ten, Ksenia knew absolutely
everything about that
. But today this pride and this joy had disappeared somewhere. Ksenia felt ashamed. She would rather not have known what had been going on only half an hour earlier in her mom’s bedroom. It would have been better if she didn’t read
AIDS-Info
, but read what all the girls did, something like Alexandra Ripley’s continuation of
Gone With the Wind
. She wanted to cry, but she’d forbidden herself to do that, big girls didn’t cry. Ksenia never cried, and anyway, what point was there in crying, tears wouldn’t help her grief, her mom was right, it was Ksenia’s own fault, she shouldn’t have come back at the wrong time, if she was so grown-up already and understood everything so well. And so Ksenia sits there in her room, takes the textbooks out of her briefcase and starts doing her homework. Mom always said: if you feel like crying, go and do your lessons. Especially since she has a test tomorrow, and she has to get an A.
    Ksenia walks through the passage under the stone vaulting of the Stalinist subway system. There are little wind-up khaki-colored soldiers crawling along the wall, with their machine guns chattering, but the toy guns can barely even be heard above the noise of the crowd. The soldiers crawl along as if they are delirious, with their entire bodies squirming, squirming as if they are dodging blows, as if in erotic ecstasy, crawling as if their legs refuse to carry them, crawling to some unknown destination, invalids continuing a futile war, a war that was over long ago. They will survive and ride through the carriages in the underground in metal wheelchairs, collecting money in paratroopers’ berets, crippled, with no legs, either drunk or stoned. Ksenia will lower her eyes into her book, trying not to look at them, trying not to remember how every time she encounters pain, suffering and physical deformity, people who have lost arms or legs, it is like some kind of prediction that could affect her personally. The same way she used to feel frightened by articles about psychotic killers, sadists and perverts who tortured their partners by hanging them from a hook in the ceiling by their outstretched arms, covering their bodies with the parallel stripes of scars, welts and bruises. It’s still there, that aching pain of separation, now what have you done, where are you going to find another lover like that? But