Butonov did not turn up to take his final winter exams. In the circus college, in addition to the special subjects, you were taught the usual school subjects and couldn’t get a leaving certificate without passing in those despised disciplines too. Butonov never went back to the college again. He lay about on the divan for six months waiting for his military draft papers. He turned eighteen in February, and had his hair cropped by the army in early spring. He was first invited to enroll in the Central Army Sports Club, his top-grade certificate in gymnastics having made a suitable impression, but to the amazement of the enlistment office he turned the offer down. Butonov didn’t care about anything anymore, but he didn’t want to go back into sport. He had joined the army, and that was that.
But it didn’t work out that way, as it never does. There was no escaping a talent which marked him out, and some extraordinary opportunity invariably came his way. Butonov could shoot better than anyone else, with a semiautomatic, a carbine, or a pistol as soon as he got it in his hands. Even the lads from Siberia who had been hunting since they were children couldn’t match his keen eye and steady hand.
At the training review Butonov was spotted by the colonel, who was a great shooting enthusiast. Within a year he was in the Central Army Sports Club team, but now in marksmanship. It was back to training, trials, back to working out. His military service passed in a thoroughly agreeable manner, at least in the second half of his term.
He returned to Rastorguevo, having put on seven kilograms in weight and three centimeters in height, and his demobilization papers were issued on time, without the usual delays, almost to the day. Most importantly, however, he again knew precisely what he wanted to do. He rapidly obtained a high school diploma without difficulty as an extension student and that same summer enrolled at a physical education institute, but again surprised the world by registering for the faculty of sports medicine.
The diagram which Butonov remembered from his school days of the man with his skin removed and his muscles exposed was now the focus of his interest. He studied anatomy, the bane of freshmen, with immense enthusiasm and great respect. Butonov, whose memory wasn’t good enough, who forgot books without a trace as soon as he had read them, now grasped everything, remembered everything in what everyone else found the dreariest activity imaginable.
Butonov had one other peculiarity which, along with his physical giftedness, made him the man he was: an ability to accept instruction. His trainer Nikolai Vasilievich, who betrayed him, and poor Muzzetoni both appreciated his capacity for gladly subordinating himself, for getting to the heart of a new technique and somehow assimilating it from the inside.
Butonov met his third and final teacher in his third year at the institute. He was a small, nondescript-looking fellow, a China-Eastern Railroad man with the cover name of Ivanov, and he had a dark and tortuous past. He was born, or so he said, in Shanghai, knew Chinese to perfection, had lived many years in India, had been to Tibet, and in semi-European Russia was an ambassador of the mysterious Orient. He knew his way around in the martial arts, which were just coming into fashion, and he taught Chinese massage.
The Deutero-Ivanov was delighted by Butonov’s unusual flair for the physicaclass="underline" there was independence and cleverness in his fingers. Butonov could instantly locate a slipped disk, or a ridge of deposited salts, or where there was simply a muscular spasm, and his hands assimilated the arcane science of pressure points by themselves, without the need of involving his head. If Butonov had had the words and a certain versing in the humanities, he could have talked about a back in good heart, of joyful legs, clever fingers, and also about lassitude in the shoulders, lethargic hips, or drowsy arms, all of which peculiarities of the life of the body he could diagnose at any given moment in the person lying before him on the massage table.
The Deutero-Ivanov invited him around to his half-empty one-room flat hung with Tibetan icons. A fine connoisseur of the Orient, he tried to interest his exceptional pupil in the nobility of yoga, the wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita, the elegant Chinese divination method of Ba-Goa; but Butonov proved totally immune to the domain of the spirit.
“That’s all a bit too up in the air,” he would say, making a slight movement with the abducent muscles of his right hand.
His teacher was disappointed, but at least Butonov mastered the practicalities of yoga and pressure-point massage very rapidly and with all their subtleties.
Ivanov himself was enjoying major success in those years not only as a brilliant masseur whose services were enjoyed by a variety of stratospheric celebrities: a world champion weightlifter, a ballerina of genius, a notorious author. He took part in various seminars in people’s homes, sophisticated entertainments of those years; he conducted specialized courses on yoga. He involved Butonov too in his activities, at least in the part visible on the surface. Butonov had no intimation of the other side of Ivanov’s activity—informing for the secret police—and it was not until many years later that he understood that his teacher had been wearing invisible epaulettes.
His teacher promoted Butonov to be his assistant. He led his audience of yoga enthusiasts straight along the exalted path of liberation to moksha, while Butonov contorted himself on the mat, teaching them the lotus position, the lion, the snake, and other inhuman configurations.
One of the groups met in the appropriately large apartment of a top academician, invited there by his daughter. The participants of these meetings were all as one constituted of doughy flesh, and it was for Butonov to teach them that sensitivity to the physical body with which he himself was so endowed. They were scholars, physicists, chemists, mathematicians, and for all of them Butonov felt a quite inexplicable slight contempt. Among them was a tall, somewhat plump girl called Olga, a mathematician with heavy legs and a rather coarse face, which changed in the course of the exercises from its natural delicate pink to an alarming red.
Two months after they met, to the disapproving amazement of friends on both sides, Valerii and Olga got married. The mistress of the apartment, upon learning of the proposed alliance, clicked her tongue and wondered, “What on earth is poor Olga going to do with that magnificent beast?”
But Olga didn’t do anything with him in particular. She was a cold, cerebral person, which may perhaps have been related to her profession: by now she had already defended her doctoral dissertation on topology, an abstruse area of mathematics, and the meticulous mental jewelry making that went on in her large head beneath its covering of long, badly washed hair was the main thing that gave meaning to her life.
Butonov was not particularly awed by the twisted symbols which ran, like birds’ footprints in the snow, over the papers on his wife’s table. He just muttered skeptically to himself when he looked at the little signs, infrequently accompanied by human words on the left hand side of the sheet: “from this it follows, as is evident from the above . . .” ; “let us consider the definition . . .”
Olga had an accommodating, slightly sluggish personality. Valerii was amazed by how little she moved about and how generally lethargic she was: too lazy even to do the few yoga exercises which would relieve her constipation.