Farther along the road were some industrial buildings and stables. Butonov headed toward them. Still at a distance, he saw the gates of the stables open, the gap filled with a velvety blackness and out of it, its white teeth gleaming, came a tall black stallion which, because of its unexpectedness, seemed to Butonov to be enormous, like the steed of the Bronze Horseman statue in St. Petersburg. But far from there being a bronze horseman, the stallion was being led by the reins by a small curly-haired boy who, on closer inspection, turned out to be a young woman in a red shirt and dirty white jeans.
Butonov looked first at her boots, which were light, with a thick toe cap and a rough heel, very suitable boots for horse-riding; and then his eyes met hers. Her eyes were mirror-black and crudely extended with black makeup; her gaze was alert and unfriendly. They all stopped. The stallion neighed and she patted its withers with a surprisingly white hand with short red nails.
“Looking for Chovdar?” she asked rather rudely. “Over there.” She pointed in the direction of the nearest shed before putting her foot in a very high stirrup and vaulting up into the saddle, giving Valerii a dose of a sweet, alluring, and wholly unperfumelike smell.
“No, I’m looking for Rosa.” Butonov had already worked out that this was Rosa.
“I have a parcel from Lyalya Muzzetoni.” He pulled the plastic bag out of his carryall and held it up.
Without getting down from her horse, she took the bag and threw it with a sweeping gesture through the open stable door, gave a flash of her teeth suggestive of a snarl rather than a smile, and asked hurriedly, “Where are you staying?”
“The October Hotel.”
“Right, okay. I’m busy at the moment.” She waved her hand and with a cry galloped off.
He looked after her with a feeling of irritation, admiration, and something else he would have to analyze for a long time yet. One way or another this was the last day in his life when he still had absolutely no interest in women.
That night Valerii lay for a long time in the hotel bed with its smell of detergent, remembering the insolent Gypsy girl, her magnificent stallion, and the small yellow horses of some rare breed which he had observed in the paddock behind the stable while waiting for the bus back to town. “Obnoxious little person,” Valerii decided, drifting off into a dream of horses, the smells of the stable, and the lazy pleasure of a warm day doing nothing. A long, quiet tapping at the door brought him back up out of that state. He raised himself slightly from the pillow.
He had evidently forgotten to lock the door. It opened slowly and a woman entered the room. Valerii said nothing, peering. He thought at first it was the maid.
“Ah, so you were expecting me,” the woman said in a slightly hoarse voice, and then he recognized her: it was this morning’s horse-rider.
“I decided that if you asked who was there I’d turn and go away,” she said without a smile, and sat down on the bed.
She took off the same boots he had approved of that morning. First she stepped on the back of the left one and took it off, then pulled the right one off with her hands and with a certain amount of effort threw it over into the corner.
“Well, what are you gawking at?”
She stood up beside the bed and he saw how small she was. He also just had time to reflect that he didn’t like such sharp little women in the slightest.
She pulled off the white sweater she had so recently been presented with, undid the button on her dirty white jeans, and, without taking them off, dived under the blanket, put her arms around him, and said in a tired, serious voice, “I’ve had the hots all day. I wanted you so much.”
Butonov breathed out all the breath in his lungs and forgot for the rest of time what kind of women it was he usually liked.
Everything he discovered about her, he learned later. She was not a Gypsy at all, but a Jewess from the family of a professor in St. Petersburg. She had run off with Sysoev seven years ago. Her parents were bringing up the daughter from her first marriage and didn’t trust her. But the most important and surprising thing was that by morning he had discovered that in his not quite twenty-nine years there was a whole continent he hadn’t discovered, and it was wholly incomprehensible how this slight girl, so hot outside and inside, had managed to immerse him in herself so completely that he seemed to himself to be a pink sweet dissolving in a thick sweet liquid while all his skin groaned and melted with tenderness and joy, and every touch, every slipping and sliding of skin pierced him through to the heart, and all that was surface seemed to end up inside, in the very deepest part of him. He felt himself turned inside out and accepted that if she had not plugged his ears with her slender little fingers, his soul would undoubtedly have flown out and away.
At six o’clock in the morning the weird little watch she had not taken off all night tweeted feebly. She was sitting on the windowsill with her legs wrapped around his loins. He was standing in front of her and could see a mound bulging beneath her belly button, indicating his presence.
“That’s it,” she said, and stroked the bulge through the thin membrane of her stomach.
“Don’t go,” he begged.
“I’ve gone already,” she laughed, and he noticed the vampire-like way her little upper fangs protruded.
He ran his fingers over her teeth.
“No,” she laughed, “I’m not a vampire. I’m a common little whore. Do you like it?”
“Very much,” he replied honestly, and she jumped off, leaving his arrow unloosed.
She went into the shower. Her legs were slightly bowed and not joined very attractively to her body, but this only fanned the flames of his desire for her. He picked out of the devastated bed the broken golden chains which had slipped from her neck during the night.
The water was beating down in the shower. He fingered the chains and looked out of the window. There was the same shining mist as yesterday, and you could tell the sun was hiding beyond its disappearing radiance.
She came into the room covered in large drops of water. He held out the chains to her. She took them, let them fall to their full length, and tossed them onto the table. “You can give them back when you’ve had them mended. Is today Wednesday?”
She shook the last of the water from her little breasts and pulled the jeans onto her slender wet body with difficulty. There were still large drops of water in her springy black hairstyle which nobody was yet calling “Afro” and which belonged solely to her. A few small scars, already arousing and loved, which you didn’t need to touch to feel their hardness, marked her body beneath her breasts, to the left of her belly, and on her right forearm. She did not seem feminine in the least, but by comparison, all the women he had known before now seemed like semolina pudding or boiled cabbage.
“Do you know what, Valerii? We’ll meet in exactly one week’s time at the Central Post Office in St. Petersburg. Between eleven and twelve.”
“How about today?” Butonov asked.
“No, impossible. Sysoev will kill you. Or maybe me.” She laughed. “I’m not sure exactly who, but definitely someone.”
They met up three times more in the course of a year, and then she disappeared. Not just from Valerii, but altogether. Neither her parents nor Sysoev knew who she had gone off with or where to.
From then on, Butonov never refused a woman. He knew that miracles don’t happen, but if you kept on the edge of the possible, at the limit of your concentration, then here too, in the physical depths themselves, lightning strikes and everything is lit up, and that same feeling flares within you of a knife hurled at a target, which shudders and dies right there in its heart.
CHAPTER 8
Getting back home from the coves after nine at night, the grown-ups put the sleeping small children to bed before settling down in Medea’s kitchen for a cup of tea. Although they were all tired, they did not want to part: something was in the air, a vague sense of “to be continued.” Even Nora, the conscientious mother, agreed to put her daughter to bed in a strange place in order to sit here and enjoy the tea.