Madness Treads Lightly

CHAPTER 10

“You have to know how to enjoy life, sunshine. The first snow. The smell of the grass in spring,” Regina’s mama used to tell her.

Her mama was quiet, intelligent, and unattractive. A lonely librarian, already an old maid at forty-one, she’d let the tipsy electrician Kiril, a broken-down thirty-year-old just back from the front, have his way with her.

He’d come to the library one freezing January evening to fix the wiring. Outside it was forty below. The stove was going full blast, spreading a languid heat through the reading room. Everyone had gone home to their families. But Valya Gradskaya was in no hurry to get anywhere. They asked her to wait for the delayed electrician.

That pitiful little former soldier with the bulbous nose, crooked chin, and crass sneer became the father to Regina Valentinovna Gradskaya.

It was quick and dirty, on the worn prerevolutionary sofa in the reading room, under large portraits of classic Russian writers.

“Why did you tell me this?” Regina asked her mama when she turned eighteen. “Couldn’t you have come up with a romantic story about a heroic Arctic explorer who perished on the ice, or a broad-shouldered soldier covered in medals? Why do I have to know that my father was an ugly bastard named Kiril?”

“He did fight,” her mama replied with a guilty smile.

“He’s a bastard!” Regina shouted. “He’s a monster! Men like that shouldn’t be fathers!”

“It was January of ’46, Regina. What heroic Arctic explorers? There was one man for every ten women. I was forty-one. I was alone in the world and I very much wanted a child. It was my last chance.”

“You should have lied to me.”

“I can’t mislead you, you know that.”

Regina did. And she quietly despised her mother’s pathological honesty.

“Natasha Rostova was no beauty,” Valya would tell her daughter officiously. “Just look at how Tolstoy describes his beloved heroine.” And she would shut her eyes and recite from memory long passages from War and Peace. “And Princess Maria? That portrait is a hymn to spiritual beauty. Just listen!” And another excerpt from the classic novel would follow. “Pushkin’s Tatyana wasn’t noted for her beauty, either.” Long excerpts from Eugene Onegin followed. “You see, Regina, it’s foolish and tedious to beat yourself up over the fact that your features aren’t particularly attractive. Nothing in life depends on your appearance. The main thing is inner beauty, goodness, and intelligence.”

At twelve, Regina already knew that was a crock. A beauty, even if she was sickeningly dumb, would still have an easier time of it in this world than an ugly woman with a brain. No amount of inner beauty and goodness and intelligence could help an ugly girl. The older Regina got, the more deeply she came to believe that.

All her life, she’d been at the mercy of her appearance. Regina Gradskaya was convinced that an unattractive woman could be neither successful nor happy. All it took was one look in any mirror to be unhappy, for any victory to go up in a puff of smoke. Unattractive girls didn’t have victories, anyway.

She was fourteen when her mama, frightened by the crashing and banging, ran into her room from the kitchen and found her daughter trampling on the shards of a large, broken mirror, repeating quietly and with concentration, “I hate you! I hate you!” Her clenched fists were covered in blood.

“Regina, darling! What’s the matter?”

“Go away! I hate you! This nose, these eyes, these teeth. I hate you!”

The next day her mama dragged her to a psychiatrist.

“It’s a transitional age,” the psychiatrist said, and she prescribed tranquilizing drops. “Believe me, child, appearance isn’t the main thing in life. At fourteen, everyone thinks they’re ugly ducklings. By sixteen you’ll blossom. You’ll see.”

By sixteen I’ll have lost my mind, Regina thought.

Regina had always been a good student. That came easily to her. In school she taught herself three languages, English, German, and French, using old high school textbooks she found in the stacks of the municipal library. She got into Moscow Medical Institute on the first try, without any pull.

In the first anatomy classes, lots of her classmates went white and even fainted beside the zinc tables where the cadavers lay. Regina Gradskaya calmly picked up her scalpel. She felt neither horror nor disdain—only a cold curiosity.

All medical students get used to anatomy, but it takes time. Regina Gradskaya didn’t have to get used to it.

The composure of the taciturn, hopelessly unattractive first-year student from Tobolsk stunned her teachers. To say nothing of her schoolmates. The girls she shared a room with in the dorm were wary of her. They might even have been a little afraid of her. No one once borrowed sugar, tea, or a piece of bread from her.

Five girls lived in the room, and they shared nearly everything. If one of them was going on an important date, the whole room fitted her out—someone gave her shoes, someone else a skirt. Regina never lent anything of her own or borrowed anything from anyone else. She didn’t go out on dates. She was neat and thrifty in her daily life, and she managed to save from her miserly stipend. She kept a strict account of everything, even her notebook pages and the ink in her fountain pen.

She got top marks in all her courses. In six years of study, she was never once sick and never missed a single class. She slept four hours a day and read virtually everything there was in the institute’s library. She was especially enthralled by books on psychiatry.

More than anything, Regina Gradskaya was afraid of losing her mind. She realized that her obsession with her own appearance bordered on pathology, and that that border was so unstable that her deep inferiority complex could cross over into pathology at any moment.

The deeper Regina delved into psychiatry, the more clearly she realized that there was no precise boundary between normality and pathology. Strict and specific as official medicine’s dogmas were, no one really knew how to treat or cure mental illness. They hadn’t developed anything new besides aminazine and haloperidol, whose effects on the human organism were much worse than any straitjacket, padded cell, or round of electroshock treatment.

Psychiatry’s essence had remained unchanged for over a hundred, even two hundred years. Doctors considered their objective to be making mentally ill people safe and helpless rather than curing them.

Regina was convinced that the human soul should be treated with something completely different from drugs. She began to study psychic practices and hypnosis and read everything there was to be read on these subjects. She learned to treat people with her voice, hands, and gaze. Sometimes it felt as though she were penetrating a person’s mind and soul and seeing the essence of his or her emotional pain.

The patients at the Serbsky Forensic Psychiatry Institute, where she landed as a young resident, were unusual. Regina had murderers, rapists, and sadists pass through her office. By working with these people and cautiously testing her psychic and hypnotic abilities on them, Regina discovered that there were some strong and gifted personalities among them—such as one doesn’t find among normal people.

What interested her most were the serial killers, the seemingly sane ones with a higher education and a very high IQ, who were fully aware of and admitted to their actions. They killed disinterestedly, not for the sake of material benefit, but to resolve their own profound inner problems. There were very few of them among the ordinary killers. To Regina, they seemed like geniuses of villainy—the living refutation of Pushkin’s famous aphorism: “Genius and villainy are incompatible.”

These men aroused neither fear nor revulsion in her. She found them more interesting than all the others. She dug around in the black depths of their subconsciouses as calmly as she’d dissected cadavers in her first year of medical training. It was as if she were searching for answers to the questions that inflamed her soul.

Later, when her colleagues found out about her experiments, she was forced to resign from the institute. Regina was unperturbed. She knew she’d be fine.

By age thirty, Dr. Regina Valentinovna Gradskaya owned a two-room apartment in downtown Moscow, a very good car, a closet full of expensive dresses, and more jewelry than she could wear. Her patients included famous actors, writers, singers, Party officials, and their children and wives. She treated them for alcoholism, drug addiction, impotence, depression, and psychoses. Her patients were guaranteed full anonymity, but most important, her treatment was gentle and effective. No Antabuse or abstinence, no destructive psychotropic medicines of any kind. Just her voice and her hands.

Veniamin Volkov showed up at her apartment one cold November evening in 1982. A high-level Young Communist official she knew had called and asked her to take on a new patient, “a good guy, from your part of the world, Tobolsk.”

Broad-shouldered and blue-eyed, Volkov perched timidly on the edge of his chair and began quietly telling her about his difficult childhood and how he was now having difficulty with intimacy.

Regina learned the truth very quickly. Under hypnosis he told her all the details of how he had raped and killed seven women.

“I’m afraid,” he said. “I’m scared that sooner or later they’ll catch me. I don’t want to kill, but the urge to kill is stronger than I am. I get insatiably needy, and that need becomes my essence, my soul, and my soul is above my psyche, above my reason. Only it’s come crashing down.”

Regina often had to deal with male and female sexual problems. Under hypnosis, her patients shared the most intimate details of their lives. There was nothing mysterious for Regina in that complex sphere of the human psyche. She listened to her patients’ most intimate sexual experiences with the cold curiosity of a researcher.

At thirty-six she was still a virgin and had long since realized that she was frigid. Unlike her patients, though, this didn’t bother her. Given her appearance, frigidity bordering on asexuality was a blessing. She couldn’t imagine a man capable of taking an interest in her not out of pity.

Listening to the revelations of this serial rapist and murderer, looking at his broad shoulders and strong, handsome hands, Regina was suddenly surprised to discover that this was exactly the kind of man she’d been waiting for all her life. This discovery didn’t scare her. She already knew she could harness Venya Volkov’s ferocious need, could guide his powerful energy in a completely different direction.

Without bringing him out from under hypnosis, she went over to him, ran her hand over his bristly cheek, cautiously removed his jacket, and slowly began unbuttoning the shirt on his muscular, hairless chest.

“You won’t kill anymore,” she said, touching her lips to his hot skin.

For the first time in her life, Regina felt a keen, animal desire, but even at that moment her cold curiosity didn’t leave her.

Venya was totally under her control. She did everything she wanted the way she wanted. She penetrated the depths of his subconscious, and this made her pleasure all the more acute.

At a certain point his hands closed lightly around her throat. But she was prepared for that. With a powerful effort of will, she ordered him to remove his hands from her neck.

He obeyed.

She brought him out from under her hypnosis fifteen minutes after it was over. He was sitting buck naked on the fluffy rug in the middle of the room, and he looked around in fright. She threw her robe over him. He remembered and understood nothing, but she knew that everything that had just happened was etched deeply in his soul and he would never forget it. She sat down beside him on the rug.

“There, you see? It’s all over. I’m alive. Being with you was very good. Now you’ll remember everything, carefully and calmly.”

He looked at the unattractive stranger sitting beside him who was wearing his shirt over her naked body.

“You risked your life,” he said barely audibly.

“So did you,” she smiled in response.

Afterward they had tea in Regina’s large, cozy kitchen. Venya spent the night. It was all repeated that night—but without hypnosis. Once again, at the critical moment, his hands closed around her throat. But right then he felt a sharp pain under his left shoulder blade and heard a calm voice: “You won’t, Venya.”

The pain brought him back to reality. He unclenched his hands.

Regina never let go of the handle of the small, razor-sharp kitchen knife she had pressed into Venya’s back. Only later, when it was all over, did the knife fall with a gentle thud onto the rug next to the bed.

“Forgive me,” Venya said while she cleaned the cut on his back with hydrogen peroxide and put iodine on it. “You must understand, it’s not my fault. It happens reflexively.”

“It will pass.” She kissed him gently on the shoulder. “My, I hadn’t expected the cut to be so deep. Does it sting?”

“A little.”

She blew on the wound. Neither his mother nor his father had ever consoled him when he was hurt. No one had blown affectionately and cautiously so that the iodine wouldn’t sting.

He felt like a little boy who was loved and pitied. As if he had admitted an awful, disgusting act, but no one had yelled at him, or put him in the corner, or slapped his cheeks—he had been petted and consoled.

He wished this woman would take him by the hand and lead him through life—wherever she thought best. He would have followed her with eyes shut, trusting blindly. She knew everything about him—and didn’t turn away in horror. She was pulling him out of the icy abyss of loneliness, stroking his head, warming him, consoling him. He didn’t notice her unattractiveness. He didn’t care what she looked like.

Regina had big plans. She knew she couldn’t manage alone. She needed someone just like Venya Volkov—strong, merciless, devoid of sympathy for others, yet at the same time devoted and submissive to her. The fact that she was also passionate about him was just a nice bonus, nothing more. Or so she told herself.

Fourteen years had passed since then. Regina’s calculations had been correct. The fierce need that had seared Venya Volkov’s soul had come to live an independent life, embodied in a powerful, relentless machine—Veniamin Productions.

Volkov hadn’t killed another person. Several times he’d had to hire hitmen and set up rivals and competitors, but this was less a murderous act than a necessary move in the complex and cruel game of show business.

Now all that remained of the Regina who had hated her own face was her voice and hands. Also her hair and figure. All the rest—the shape of her nose, temples, and lips, the cut of her eyes, her large white teeth—was the result of painstaking work by plastic surgeons.

Today it didn’t matter that the real Regina Gradskaya was fifty or that her natural, God-given face had been ugly. As far as she knew, not one old photograph remained. Even from her early childhood, even from her infancy. They had all been destroyed, burned. That Regina with the bulbous nose and small, close-set eyes, crooked chin, and buck teeth had died. The death of the old Regina and the birth of the new Regina—the cold, ideal beauty with the aquiline nose, oval face, and even, pearl-like teeth.

The operations, which had cost tens of thousands of dollars, had been done in stages at a Swiss clinic in the Alps, considered the best in the world, where a day’s stay cost fifteen hundred dollars—and that didn’t include the operations or procedures. And Regina had spent forty days there.

When the doctors said she could go out, she went to the small village nearby. On the very clean streets, welcoming Alpine doormen greeted the tall, thin lady—in German, French, and English. She would respond, exchanging a few polite words with passersby about the weather, the marvelous Alpine air, and the picturesque mountain landscape that surrounded them.

Neither the passersby nor the owners of the sweet little shops and cafés paid any attention to the fact that the lady’s face was covered by a solid veil. For the local inhabitants, ladies like this, the famous clinic’s rich patients, were familiar and desired visitors. They provided the little village with additional revenue.

On her first walk, Regina wandered into a lovely, toy-like Lutheran church and ordered a funeral service for herself, for the unhappy and ugly woman who had died here, in the Alps, under the plastic surgeon’s delicate scalpel.

A chorus of pretty Alpine children sang the requiem so tenderly and sorrowfully that Regina, standing in the half-empty church, nearly started crying under her thick veil. She stopped herself. Until her scars healed, she couldn’t allow herself to cry.

But now she could cry, and she could laugh. She didn’t look a day over forty, and that age suited her just fine. She would be the same age for another ten or fifteen years, and then she could go back to the Swiss Alps.

Every time she stopped in front a mirror to fix her hair or retouch her light makeup, Regina saw the little Alpine church and the clean faces of the Swiss children and heard the sweet polyphony of the requiem and the stern, cool sounds of the organ. Sometimes she felt like crying again—and she did, without reserve—provided the situation was sufficiently intimate for those strange, unexpected tears.