Read Online Butterfly Skin by Sergey Kuznetsov - Free Book Online Page B

but in fifth grade it all came to an end. Ksenia sat in her room and did her lessons in order not to cry and in the kitchen Dad, who had come for the weekend to see his daughter, tried to explain something to Mom, but she just kept repeating: “If the girl wastes her time on nonsense like that, she’ll end up a loser, like you.”
    And this time too, her mother said to her father: “It’s a good thing, let her get used to being independent,” but she told Ksenia that she was a fine girl, of course, but really there wasn’t any need, the family had money anyway, “if you’re doing it for me, there’s no need.”
    “Oh no, Mom,” said Ksenia, “it’s just that I think it’s time I started earning some money.”
    During the holidays Ksenia and Marinka found jobs as couriers from an advertisement. There wasn’t a lot to the job: collect correspondence from several firms and deliver it to the addresses shown. True, it took almost all day, but they promised to pay them a hundred dollars a month. Over the summer that would mount up to three hundred, not really a lot, but a decent sum, enough to stop her feeling like a sponger.
    Mom left on June 25, and the next day Marinka phoned and said she wasn’t going to work because she was ill. Ksenia asked what was wrong with her, she said she’d caught a cold and Ksenia started getting ready, although she hadn’t liked the sound of Marinka’s voice. She was already half way out the door when the phone rang again: through her tears Marinka confessed that the evening before the man she handed in her list of jobs to had raped her.
    “I got back in the evening,” Marinka sobbed, “and there was no one in the place apart from him. I followed him into the office, as usual, and he asked if I’d like some tea. And I said yes, because I’d got caught in the rain and I was frozen. He put in a little splash of cognac, and then started making passes at me and, well…”
    “So did you let him, or did he rape you?” Ksenia asked.
    “I don’t know,” Marinka answered, “I kept saying ‘I don’t want to.’ In America it would be rape.”
    “And what are you going to do?” Ksenia asked. “Will you go to the police?”
    “No, of course not! I just won’t go back there anymore, that’s all.”
    “But what about the money? They still haven’t paid you anything. Don’t be stupid, Marinka!”
    “Well, that means there won’t be any money,” Marinka sobbed, “I won’t go back there again. Why don’t you just stop hassling me?” she said and added after a pause: “He said I could call him Dimochka.”
    And for some reason, that was the moment when Ksenia’s fury turned everything black in front of her eyes. That “Dimochka” stung her far more than the rape, more than the fact that Marinka was willing to forego the money as long as she never had to go there again. Ksenia knew these fits of fury – because of them the kids in her class thought she was crazy and were afraid to tease her even in elementary school. But just then Ksenia recalled what Lyova’s
sensei
used to say: you mustn’t allow your negative emotions to take complete control of you, you must direct them, put all their energy into the blow. And so she carried her fury with her all the way, like a glass of water, trying not to spill a drop. She had a picture in front of her eyes all the time: the villainous Dimochka tearing Marinka’s clothes off, her matte skin gleaming dully in the semi-darkness of the office with its cheap “European-style” refurbishment, her light hair billowing out in a halo round her head. The picture was blurred, not because Ksenia couldn’t remember Dimochka’s face properly, but because the mist of her fury prevented her from seeing any details.
    In the office Ksenia took the list of jobs and the correspondence as usual, and only then asked in an icy voice if the managing director was in. Dimochka, a tall, balding middle-aged man, gave her a surprised look through