Medea and Her Children

CHAPTER 7

Valerii Butonov came from the Rastorguevo district of Moscow. He lived with his mother, Valentina Fyodorovna, in a low private house which had long been threatening to fall apart. He had no recollection of his father and as a boy was convinced that his father had died in the war. His mother did not particularly insist on that, but neither did she undermine the legend. Valentina Fyodorovna’s short-stay husband had signed up for contract work somewhere in the Russian North even before the war. He had sent back one letter of little interest and then dissolved forever in the polar wastes.

Like most boys his age, Valerii spent his protracted childhood hanging on rickety fences or driving a captured German penknife, his most precious possession, into the run-down suburban soil. In this activity he had no equals, winning with his knife easily and lightheartedly, like a latter-day Alexander the Great, all the cities and states gambled on the barren patch of land behind the Rastorguevo bus station.

The neighborhood kids, having ascertained his total superiority, stopped playing with him, and he spent many hours in the courtyard of his house, implanting the penknife in the pale wall-eye where the lower branch of an enormous pear tree had been sawn off, gradually moving farther and farther away from his target. Over these long hours he gained an insight into the mechanics of throwing, knew it inside out with both hand and eye, but derived the greatest pleasure from the lightning moment when the knife in his hand and his chosen target came into alignment, culminating in the quivering of the haft in the heart of his target.

Sometimes he would take a different one, a kitchen knife, and choose a different target, and with a crunch or a moan or a thin whistle the knife would penetrate it. His mother’s old house, already falling apart, was covered in scars from his boyhood practicing. Perfection proved boring, however, and in the end he packed it in.

New vistas opened up when he moved from primary school to the newly introduced ten-year secondary school where much was new and unfamiliar: urinals, porcelain washbasins, a stuffed owl, a picture of a naked man with no skin, wonderfully shaped glass vessels, metal contrivances with valves. The place that really fascinated and delighted him, however, was the sports hall, which, for those times, was very well equipped. From the fifth grade on, he honed in on the horizontal bars, the parallel bars, and the leather vaulting horse.

A physical giftedness, so much admired in the classical world, and just as rare as musical or poetic talent, or a talent for chess, became apparent in Butonov. He didn’t know that the modern world rated his talent lower than intellectual gifts, and reveled in progress which became more striking with every passing month.

The physical education mistress sent him to the Central Sports Club gymnastics section, and by the new year he was taking part in the first competitions in his life. The trainers were astonished by his phenomenal grasp, his natural economy of movement, and his self-discipline. He achieved results immediately which usually had to be diligently pursued for years.

He wasn’t yet twelve years old when he was first sent for trials. On that occasion the junior athletes were not taken outside of Moscow; they were simply put up in a military hotel on Commune Square, in four-bedded rooms with a red carpet, a decanter and telephone on a hardwood table, in the ponderous opulence of the Stalin style with a military nuance.

It was during the school year, so in the mornings the gymnasts dispersed to their schools and, when they returned, had lunch in the local military cafeteria with thirty-ruble vouchers. The sports complex was located in the right-hand wing of a low, squat building, at the heart of which was the Great Hall. It was there that the future flowers of Soviet sport passed the best hours of their happy childhood. Entry was possible only with a pass, and everything together, the vouchers for lunch, the top-quality calorific food with chocolate, condensed milk, and cakes, the pass itself with his photograph in its little booklet, and especially the dark blue woollen tracksuit with a white stripe by the collar which was issued free, inspired a due respect in the youthful Butonov for his own body, which was deemed worthy of these heaven-sent goodies.

He wasn’t too good at school, always carrying some unredeemed failing mark, which he usually put right by the end of the term for fear he would be banned from training. Since he was the sports star of the school, his teachers usually bit the bullet and awarded him highly questionable passing marks without too much trouble.

By the age of fourteen he was a strikingly built youth with regular facial features, his hair cut short in the sporting fashion, disciplined and ambitious. He was a member of the youth gymnastics team, training under the master of sport schedule and aiming for first place in the forthcoming All-Union Competition.

His trainer, Nikolai Vasilievich, was an intelligent sports insider who had seen it all, had high hopes of him, and anticipated a major athletic career. He took a lot of trouble with Valerii, and his straightforward way of calling him “my son” was very meaningful and important to the boy. Valerii looked for shared features with his idol: he was glad their hair was the same color and their greyish-blue eyes similar; he narrowed his eyes the way Nikolai Vasilievich did, imitated the rolling, springy way he walked, and even bought himself white handkerchiefs like the ones Nikolai Vasilievich had.

He did not, however, win the All-Union Competition, even though he was sure he had. He performed excellently, felt like a knife in flight, and knew he had hit the target; but there were other important things he did not know, which his trainer knew only too well, about the secret mechanisms of success, about friends in high places, about rigged judging and the barefaced corruption of sport. The two decimal points which relegated Butonov to second place seemed to him such a cruel injustice that in the changing room he threw off his free Central Sports Club outfit and went back to Rastorguevo wearing his school trousers over his bare body.

Nikolai Vasilievich might just have succeeded in getting him back, papering over the defeat with meaningless words, slippery, half-true explanations of what had happened, but unfortunately one of Valerii’s older teammates—Butonov was the youngest on the team—revealed the secret side of his unjust defeat to him. It was a fix, and his own trainer was implicated. The boy who won had been trained by the son-in-law of the head of the federation, and the panel of judges was not independent—not bribed exactly, but tied hand and foot.

A number of things fell into place now: why the day before his performance Nikolai Vasilievich, who had taught him to reach for the sky, had told him for no apparent reason, “Okay, Valerii, don’t get too wound up. For you at your age second place won’t be bad, not bad at all.”

The trainer came out several times to Rastorguevo. The first time Valerii went up and hid in the attic like a little kid. The second time he came out but talked through his teeth, refusing eye contact. The third time Nikolai Vasilievich talked to Valentina Fyodorovna, but she only held her arms out wide and bleated, “I’m sure it’s all fine by me, what is there to get upset about, but it’s up to Valerii . . .” She too liked the free Olympic suits and saw nothing wrong with second place.

Valerii, however, was implacable. Nikolai Vasilievich was afraid the boy would defect to the Worker Reserves or Spartak and someone else would get the credit for his three years’ work, but that did not happen. The monstrous secret self-esteem of Butonov which had flourished in the shade of the Rastorguevo pear tree drove him on now to seek a different path, more certain, where there were no humiliating possibilities of defeat, no corrupt, rotten fixes, and treachery.

The summer holidays had begun, but he didn’t go to any trials, just lay for days at a stretch under the pear tree, all the time wondering how what had happened could have happened, and after a week was vouchsafed a revelation: you shouldn’t allow yourself to become dependent on circumstances or other people. Had he been musing under a fig tree, the revelation might have been of a more sublime nature, but that was the best that could be expected from a Russian pear tree.

Two weeks later he enrolled in the circus college. How wonderful it was! Every day Butonov came to train and experienced the delight of a five-year-old boy on his first visit to the circus. The training ring was entirely real: it smelled just as it should, of sawdust, animals, and talcum powder. Balls, colored clubs, and physically perfect girls flew freely through the air. This was a special, wholly unique world: that was what every cell in his body told him.

There was no question of competition here; each person was worth exactly what his profession was worth. The aerial gymnast could not be incompetent: his life was on the line. No telephone call could halt the bear when it reared up with its immobile muzzle completely incapable of expression and went to savage its trainer. Being related to the director, enjoying the support of someone higher up, was not going to help you turn a backward somersault.

“This is not like sport,” a sadder but wiser Butonov reflected. “Sport is corrupt. This isn’t.”

Although he would have been hard-pressed to articulate the thought fully himself, he was profoundly aware that at the very peak of artistry in the Soviet Union, in the zone where you are totally master of your profession, there is a tiny platform of independence. Up there, on the summit of Mount Olympus, were the stars of the circus, who freely crossed frontiers into other countries, and wore unimaginably beautiful clothes, and were rich and independent.

The boy had intuited something crucial, although in many respects the circus was exactly the same as other Soviet institutions—the warehouse, the bathhouse, or academe. It had its Party committee, its local committee, its official subordination to superior institutions—and its unofficial subordination to any telephone call from the mystical heights. Envy, intrigue, and fear were the powerful levers of circus life, but this was something he had yet to learn. And in the meantime he lived that half-monastic life which sport had taught him. Although no formal vows had been taken, ascesis was observed, the rules of prayer were replaced by morning exercises and evening training, fasting was replaced by dieting, and the code of obedience by total subordination to the discipline of the trainer. The Master, as he was called here. As for chastity, which was not by any means esteemed in itself, a true sportsman’s life was organized in such a way that the ferocious physical demands and the harsh regime made terrible inroads into the free and easy party mood which draws two young people to pool their energies for the giving and taking of mutual pleasure.

The school remembers Butonov to this day. He acquired all the arts of the circus effortlessly: acrobatics, juggling, tightropewalking, and each of these arts laid claim to him. Butonov had no equal in gymnastics.

From the first months of his studies he was invited to take part in existing routines. He refused, because he knew exactly what he wanted to be: a trapeze artist. To work the air . . . Butonov’s teacher, replacing the discredited Nikolai Vasilievich, was an aging circus artist of indefinite nationality but from a circus dynasty, who looked like a Russian peddler but had the Italian name of Antonio Muzzetoni, and was popularly known as Anton Ivanovich.

Muzzetoni the Elder was born in a three-axled caravan on a faded red and blue circus horse blanket, on the road from Galicia to Odessa, to a lady horse rider and an acrobat. His face was etched with many deep vertical and horizontal wrinkles which were as intricate as the innumerable stories he told about himself.

In these, truth had blended with fiction so long ago that he himself no longer remembered what was embellishment. Seeing the exceptional gifts of his new pupil, he was already considering the possibility of eventually incorporating him into the troupe of aerial gymnasts in which his own son, nephew, and twelve-year-old granddaughter Nina flew from trapeze to trapeze.

By the end of his second year of training Butonov had matured greatly in knowledge, skill, and good looks. He was approximating ever more closely to the archetypal image of the builder of Communism familiar from red and white posters drawn with straight, uncomplicated horizontal and vertical lines, and with a deep transverse mark on the chin. His image needed a certain amount of further work, as was evident from the unimpressive ducklike end of his nose, but this was compensated for by the line of his shoulder, the quite un-Slavic long legs, and the refinement of his hands (heaven knows where that came from). And to cap it all, his quite incredible immunity to the female sex.

The circus girls, as in earlier days the girls at school, hung on him. Here everything was so exposed, so near at hand—the shaven armpits, and the contours of the groin, the muscular buttocks, the small, firm breasts. The other young circus artists of his age enjoyed the fruits of the sexual revolution and the artistic license flourishing in the backyards of Socialism, in an oasis on Fifth Street in Yamskoye Polye, but he viewed the girls with distaste and irony, as if Brigitte Bardot herself were waiting for him on a crumpled sofa back there in Rastorguevo.

Valentina Fyodorovna couldn’t believe her luck: her son didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t chase after women, had a good maintenance grant, and treated her well. She boasted to her neighbors: “Your Slavka is a right thug, but in all my born days I’ve never had a cross word from my Valerii.”

At the end of his second year Butonov was awarded an apprenticeship: he was one of a number of privileged students excused the standard curriculum, attached to a master and allowed to work in an act. Anton Ivanovich put him into his son’s program. Giovanni, or Ivan, although not endowed with his father’s talents, had nevertheless been schooled by him. From his earliest days he had been flying beneath the big top, turning his somersaults; but his real passion was for cars. He was one of the first circus people to import a foreign car into Russia: a red Volkswagen. It might have been old hat for Germany, but it was thirty years ahead of the sluggish progress of the Soviet car industry.

Having carefully placed an old blanket under his extremely valuable back, he spent hours lying under the car. His ill-tempered, sluttish wife Lyalya remarked caustically, “If I got to lie under him as much as he lies under that car, he would be worth his weight in gold.”

The younger Muzzetoni’s relations with his father were less than straightforward. Although the son was already past thirty and, in Butonov’s eyes, getting on a bit (indeed by circus standards this was almost pensionable age for an “aerial”), he was as scared of his father as a little kid. They had been working together for many years now: Anton Ivanovich had broken all records for longevity under the big top. He had always, since he was a boy, been the first to master the riskiest stunts. In the 1920s he was the only person who could perform a triple screw somersault, and it was eight years before another gymnast appeared who could duplicate the feat. Of his son Anton Ivanovich would say with carefully contained exasperation, “The one thing Ivan is perfect at is falling.”

This aspect of the profession really was very important. They were working right up under the big top, and although they had the double reassurance of the lunges fastened to their belts and the safety net, serious injury was still possible. The younger Muzzetoni was considered a virtuoso at falling; the elder was a trailblazer by nature and had grown mightily tired of waiting for his son to deliver something he simply did not have in him.

That year, however, all the performers were preparing for a major circus festival in Prague, and Anton Ivanovich set to work on his son, brooking no contradiction. He was to revive the trick which had spread old Muzzetoni’s fame the length and breadth of the country before the war.

Giovanni submitted reluctantly to his father. The old man always forced him to work with total dedication. Valerii, who was invariably present at rehearsals, felt his muscles quivering. He wanted desperately to try himself in the long and complex flight, but Anton Ivanovich was having none of it: he kept him paired with his nephew Anatolii. They performed their meeting flights with synchronized precision, but this was not going to set anyone back on their heels: all trapeze artists began that way.

The rehearsals lasted for a good six months, but the day finally came for them to go to the Central Directorate at Izmailovo to present their program to the Artistic Council. At stake was the trip to Prague: for Butonov, his first trip abroad.

There was turmoil at the directorate, a coming together of the star performers and the administrative bosses of the circus. Everybody was on edge. The time for the displays was approaching. Anton Ivanovich climbed up to check the mountings, which were partly outside the top of the marquee, and scrupulously went over every nut and every bolt, running his hands along the cables. The safety inspector of the arena was his old rival Dutov, and although the conditions of Dutov’s job were such that any failure of the safety equipment would land him in jail, Anton Ivanovich was taking no chances.

Ivan was allocated a dressing room to himself, and Anatolii and Valerii shared another. The girls were put in a third. There were three of them, two young gymnasts and twelve-year-old Nina, Ivan’s daughter and an undoubted future star.

The artists were already putting on their maroon costumes with the gold stars when Valerii heard swearing in the corridor: some access was being obstructed by Ivan’s car and a circus wagon could not get through. Ivan gave a reply, the voice made some demand. Anatolii went over to the door and listened.

“Why are they going on at him? He’s parked it fine.”

Valerii didn’t believe in interfering in other people’s business and didn’t even bother to look out. Everything quieted down.

A few minutes later there came a knock at the door of their dressing room, and Nina stuck her head in. “Valerii, Toma wants you to come.”

Toma, one of the young gymnasts, had been coming on to him for a long time, and Butonov was both flattered and irritated.

He went to look in on her.

“Well, what do you think of my makeup, Valerii?” she asked, turning her little round face to Butonov as if to the sun.

Her makeup was the usual: a pinkish-yellow base with two delicate maroon wings of blusher, and the eyes heavily outlined in blue and drawn up to her temples.

“It’s fine, Toma. The Cobra Look.”

“Oh, you are beastly, Valerii.” Toma skittishly tossed her head, which was drenched with lacquer like a doll’s. “You only ever say horrid things.”

Valerii turned and went out into the corridor. A grey-haired man in overalls and wearing a tartan shirt was emerging from the door of Ivan’s dressing room. It was the shirt that caught Butonov’s attention, and that was why he remembered the encounter later. They were on in ten minutes.

Everything went like clockwork, worked out second by second: blackout, a leap, lights, a push, a trapeze, a drumroll, a pause, music, blackout again. The score even indicated when to breathe in and out. Everything was going splendidly.

Giovanni saved his strength during this number, standing with his chest thrust out there in the heights immediately under the big top, godlike, holding the light on himself while the juniors went through their paces. Their work was clear-cut and competent but nothing out of the ordinary. The jewel in the crown, the triple screw somersault, was all Giovanni’s. Not all the members of the Artistic Council had seen the trick, which was very rarely performed.

Old Muzzetoni was a shrewd director and had everything in place for maximum effect: the light flexible, floating; the music building up. Then suddenly a complete break: all the light on Giovanni up there under the roof, the arena in darkness, the music fortissimo and then cut.

Giovanni was sparkling, his head in gold, and wearing greaves devised by a clever designer to disguise his bowlegs. A hushed drumroll. Giovanni throws up his golden head. He is a demon incarnate. A momentary touch to his belt to check the carabiner.

Butonov had noticed nothing, but Anton Ivanovich’s heart had almost stopped. Giovanni was taking too long checking it, something was wrong. Everything was still on course; he wasn’t behind yet. The drumroll stopped. One, two, three, one second too many, the trapeze was going back, the push, the leap, Giovanni was still in flight and nobody knew, but already Anton Ivanovich could see that the formation was flawed and he could never complete that final pirouette. He was right.

Anatolii sent him the trapeze at the right moment, but Ivan missed it by twenty centimeters. He wasn’t in the right place at the right moment; he stretched out in mid-flight for the trapeze, attempting the impossible feat of following it back, and hurtled out of the geometry he had perfected, plunging down to the outer edge of the net where it was most dangerous to land, where the tension was greatest, where he was most likely to be jarred and thrown out . . . He hit the edge, as his father knew he must.

The net stretched and threw Ivan up. But not out. Farther inside the net. He really was good at falling. It was a disaster, of course it was, but at least the boy hadn’t been hurt.

But he had been. They lowered the net. The first to get to him was Anton Ivanovich; he grabbed the carabiner: the link was loose. He cursed under his breath. Ivan was alive but unconscious. He had taken a hard knock. Was it his skull? His spine? He was laid on a board. The ambulance arrived seven minutes later. He was taken to the best place of its kind, the Burdenko Institute. Anton Ivanovich accompanied his son.

Butonov saw his master only two weeks later. He had heard that Ivan was alive but unable to move. The doctors were working their magic on him but could give no assurance they would get him back on his feet.

Anton Ivanovich had lost so much weight he looked like an Italian borzoi. A dark suspicion was haunting him: he could not imagine how Ivan could have noticed the loose carabiner only immediately before the leap. Privately he knew that an upset of that kind would not have put him off; he would just have kept his cool. Indeed, something very much the same had happened to him once, and he had taken the belt off, unfastened himself completely, and just gone ahead. But Ivan had panicked, lost his cool, gone to pieces. Something else that didn’t fit was why, immediately before he was due on, he had been ordered to move his car although it was perfectly well parked. Anton Ivanovich checked afterward himself: the wagon had had room to get through.

When Anton Ivanovich mentioned his misgivings to Butonov, he blurted out, “That workman from the estates office wasn’t the only person who paid Ivan a visit.”

Anton Ivanovich caught him by the sleeve. “Tell me about it.”

“While he was away moving his car, Dutov went into his dressing room. I saw from the corridor, he came out in a tartan shirt.”

By this time Valerii knew that Dutov himself was the safety inspector for the arena.

“Damnation! I’m a bright one. What a silly old fool I am,” Anton Ivanovich said, clutching at his sagging face. “So that’s what it was all about. That fits.”

Butonov visited Ivan in the hospital. He was encased in plaster from his chin to his sacrum and looked like a mummy. His hair had thinned, with two deep bald patches encroaching from his brow. He blinked to say hello and could hardly speak. Valerii, swearing to himself for having gone in, sat there for ten minutes or so on a white visitors’ stool trying to think of things to say. “Um, er,” was followed by silence. He had had no idea until then just how fragile a human being is, and he was profoundly shocked.

The autumn was dull and wet. The pear tree in Rastorguevo had lost its leaves and stood there black, looking as if it had been burnt, so Butonov wasn’t able to lie beneath it to see whether some new revelation might come to him.

There was half a year left before he would graduate from the circus college. The visit to Prague, of which he had had such high hopes, had gone down the tubes. The circus college too was in the process of going down the tubes. Butonov couldn’t stop picturing Ivan’s lackluster eyes. One minute there had been Ivan, Giovanni Muzzetoni, the famous circus performer, everything Butonov wanted to be: independent, rich, able to travel abroad, and driving around in the best car Butonov had ever seen. (He had got rid of the humpbacked red Volkswagen long ago, and now had a spanking new white Fiat.) And in a single instant it was all gone. Butonov had been wrong, there was no independence, it was all a sham. And now Ivan was going to be paralyzed until the day he died.

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 physical: 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.

Valentina Fyodorovna took an immediate dislike to her son’s fiancée, in the first place because she was four years older than Valerii, and in the second place for her lack of thrift. But Olga just smiled unconcernedly and, to Valentina Fyodorovna’s considerable annoyance, failed even to notice her dislike.

Their connubial bliss was exceedingly moderate. Butonov, who from childhood had sought out muscular pleasures, had somehow neglected a small group of muscles controlling quite special delights. Achievements in this area of endeavor didn’t win awards or get you onto teams, and his instincts were faced down by youthful vanity.

There was one more factor contributing to his surprising reserve toward women, and that was that they had been falling in love with him from the moment he wore his first trousers. Their wearisome infatuation pursued him like a rain cloud, and as he got older, he began to feel this relentless interest in him as an intrusion on his body and tried desperately to safeguard his most prized asset, whose value was only emphasized the more by the amazing availability of women’s hungry bodies and the endless propositions he was bombarded with.

His first sexual experiments were neither particularly successful nor particularly significant: a thirty-year-old neighbor; the dinner lady in the Central Sports Club canteen; a swimmer in his class whose face appeared to have been washed off by her sport; and all of them really keen, gasping for it, eager to continue the relationship. For Butonov himself these encounters ranked little higher than an agreeable wet dream climaxing on the boundary of sleep before the image of his temptress was finally dissipated by the banging of doors in the corridor and the sound of the toilet flushing on the other side of the wall.

All was tranquil and well ordered in the Butonovs’ life. They got married three months after Olga defended her doctoral dissertation, and three months after that she became pregnant; and three months before her thirtieth birthday she gave birth to a daughter. While she was carrying, giving birth to, and feeding with her large but nutritionally disappointing breasts the very small baby girl produced by two such large parents, Butonov completed his sports medicine course and sold himself to the tennis players.

His job was to keep an eye on the health of the healthiest people on the planet, treating their injuries and massaging their muscles. In his free time he did exactly the same thing, but on a private basis. He earned good money; he was independent. His patients were referred to him by his teacher, and all doors opened for him, from the restaurant of the All-Russian Theater Society to the Communist Party Central Committee’s ticket office.

A year later, international tennis did finally take him abroad, first to Prague—he finally made it to Prague—and later also to London. What more could anyone aspire to?

To Butonov’s credit it needs to be said that he received his high fees for work well done. He maintained the bodies of the tennis players, ballerinas, and actors entrusted to him in a state of irreproachable fitness, but additionally busied himself with heavy posttraumatic rehabilitation. His vanity had finally found a worthy foundation. It was said that he could work miracles. The legend of his hands grew, but he had no illusions as to what legends were worth and worked now as he had as a gymnast to the fullest extent of his abilities, and these gradually extended further and further.

The achievement he was proudest of was Ivan Muzzetoni, on whom he had been working from the moment Ivanov showed him the first techniques and approaches to the spine. Butonov brought Ivanov to see Muzzetoni more than once. On one occasion Ivanov sent an illustrious Chinaman to singe Ivan’s back with aromatic herbal candles.

The main labor, however, was Butonov’s. For six years in a row, twice a week, almost without fail, he wove his spells over the paralyzed back, and Ivan rose up and could walk around the apartment supporting himself on a special walking frame, and slowly, very slowly, was restored to life.

Anton Ivanovich, his face now even more wrinkled, worshiped Butonov. His granddaughter Nina, who had fallen in love with Butonov at the age of twelve, evaluated men on the basis of only one criterion: the extent to which this or that admirer resembled Butonov. Bad-tempered Lyalya Muzzetoni, who had been planning for ten years to divorce Ivan, was transformed after his accident into a quite different person: admirably controlled and optimistic. She knitted sweaters to order, taking over as the breadwinner and never complaining. She usually presented Butonov with a woolly masterpiece on his birthday.

In the middle of October, Butonov came to see Ivan, looking fed up and generally out of sorts. He worked on Ivan for an hour and a half and was about to leave without his usual cup of tea or coffee. Lyalya waylaid him, brought in the tea, and got him talking.

Butonov grumbled that he was off the next day on an idiotic trip to Kishinev, a town which was of no use to anyone, accompanying a group of athletes making guest appearances.

Lyalya suddenly livened up and said enthusiastically: “Oh, but you must go! It’s absolutely marvelous there at this time of the year, and so that you don’t get bored, I’ll give you an errand. You can take a present to my friend.” She dug about in a cupboard and pulled out a white mohair sweater.

“They live on the outskirts, Chovdar Sysoev’s famous equestrian troupe. Haven’t you heard of them? He’s a scary old Gypsy, and Rosa is his rider.” Lyalya pushed the sweater into a plastic bag and wrote the address.

Butonov took the parcel without a great deal of enthusiasm.

His first half-day in Kishinev was free and, having slept the night in a hotel, he went out into the street early in the morning and headed off into the unfamiliar city as instructed, in the direction of the bazaar. The city had little to recommend it, lacking any hint of architectural interest, at least in the part which revealed itself to Valerii through the morning mist as it dissolved before his eyes. The air was balmy, though, southern, with the smell of sweet fruits rotting on the ground. The smell must have been coming from far away, because there were no trees at all in the streets of the new town. Only crimson asters, which had completely faded and had no scent whatsoever, were growing out of rectangular lawns bordered by concrete slabs. It was warm and the place had a touristy feel to it.

Valerii came to the bazaar. Horse carts and oxcarts and their attendant horses and oxen completely clogged the small square; dumpy men with warm fur hats and drooping mustaches were dragging baskets and crates, while women arranged mountains of tomatoes, grapes, and pears on their counters.

“I should take some home,” Valerii thought fleetingly before spotting right in front of him the battered back of a bus with the number he needed. The bus was empty. Valerii got in, and a few minutes later the driver climbed into the cabin and, without saying a word, drove off.

The road ran for a long time through the suburbs, which became increasingly more attractive, past modest little houses and small vineyards. There were frequent stops. In one stretch of the journey children piled in, then they all got off simultaneously when they reached the school. Finally, almost an hour later, they reached the end of the bus route, a strange, transitional place, neither town nor country.

Valerii did not yet know what an important day in his life had begun that morning, but for some reason he remembered every detail very clearly. Two small factories stood on either side of the road blowing smoke in each other’s faces, in total defiance of the laws of physics which dictated that the wind should carry their grey smoke in the same direction.

The observant Butonov shrugged. Greenhouses were ranged along the road, and that seemed odd too: what on earth did they need greenhouses for, when it was seventy degrees in late October and everything was ripening splendidly without them?

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.