detail (sometimes I even draw a diagram if I suspect the buyer knows anything about the Second Industrial Revolution). I told him about their military origins and brought up the problem of darkness, the very problem the goggles were designed to solve. The man in the cap, a large heavy gentleman (like a Viking), interrupted me: “Will you take a check?” and before I said yes—with no doubt in my mind he could cover it—he started to reach toward the inside pocket of his overcoat, only to have his hand pulled away, by two mastiffs tugging on a leash. No problem, the deal was far enough along. I was feeling relaxed, almost friendly toward him—he had shown confidence in me and I in him. How sweet it is to close a deal, watching the fountain pen smoothly inscribing the specified amount (no small sum, that’s all I’ll say) and figuring how much more it is than the price I paid just a few weeks ago, not too far from here, at the dark edge of that garrison, at the hour I had chosen for testing the goggles, quickly focusing them on a little patch of woods across the highway, afraid of getting collared, and then ripped off, by second lieutenant Vinogradov, an official who was making a killing on the illegal sale of Red Army equipment. A man with a pack was coming toward me through the woods. Suddenly I saw him stop and look up, staring right at me, standing outside the garrison wall. I lowered the goggles and couldn’t see a thing; it was pitch black; the man couldn’t have seen me either.
The Swede, Stockis was his name, wrote his phone number on the back of the check, so I could call if I had problems at the bank, if the teller pressed the alarm button surreptitiously because of the incongruence between the clarity of the figure stamped on it and the opacity of my non-Nordic eyes. It may have been a mistake, but I trusted this man who was walking off with my goggles under his arm, pulled along by his dogs. So I brushed off a curious guy, one of those browsers with nothing but questions: “Could you do me a favor and keep your hands off?” I bellowed. Tyrannical as any Moscow shopkeeper, I was already gathering up my merchandise, sure there’d be no more buyers today. One more lesson: always leave after a big sale, there’s never more than one a day.
I still hadn’t cashed the check two days later. The paper lent a certain immateriality to my sale, a certain flash of intellectual effort that would fade when it was exchanged for cash, reduced to the singularity of a few bank notes, the biggest ones they have in Sweden, it’s true, the same bills, I thought, that King Gustav got paid in, if a king would bother … Well, haven’t we all learned the surprising fact that Olof Palme goes to the movies just like any ordinary citizen? Those bills with Selma Lagerlöf on them—Gustav could well have held them in his hands.
Five days later, when he came back to the same spot on the plaza, I showed him the check. He liked that.
I had decided suddenly to change the course of my life, to take to the sea. I had spent nights in railway stations, covered thousands of kilometers by train, made five plane trips in a week. Now I found myself steering a yacht through the maze of islands around Stockholm, at the invitation of this great big man, a Viking with a gold hoop dangling from his ear. We were headed to his house to discuss a subject that needed a place like this, covered with pines and completely surrounded by water: an island.
We docked off a narrow pebble beach: water quietly lapping against the rocks, wind whispering in the pines. I jumped down from the yacht. Stockis had a proposal, he had said, something that might interest me. And while we went up some wooden steps to a terrace overlooking the beach:
“On dark nights I come out here and keep an eye on my yacht with the goggles you sold me …”
“Are the dogs yours?” I shot back quickly, because my English wasn’t up to the circumlocutions of normal conversation, forcing me to latch on to a subject directly, like a mute. The blunt question stood for this long speech: “You have two mastiffs, don’t you, the spotted ones you had in the plaza, so why do you need night-vision goggles to guard your property? You may be fabulously wealthy, you certainly seem it, but isn’t that rather extravagant?”
Stockis had been to China (and in China, to Manchuria); I mean, he’d been around, all over the world, and he obviously knew how to carry on a conversation, however rudimentary the English. He came back with an explanation.
“You can’t even see your hand in front of your face some nights here in Stockholm. It’s dark by three in the afternoon in the winter. I don’t think you could have picked a better place to sell these goggles. I have a yacht and don’t sleep well. Sometimes I get up early and watch the sunrise from this terrace. But come, we’re not here to talk about that …”
We went into the house. Through a service door in the back. On the kitchen table I saw food-caked dishes, a half-eaten box of chocolates, candy wrappers all over, as if there’d been an explosion. We went to the study, down a hallway littered with beer cartons, stepping over ads for pizza parlors with Swedish names, with the mastiffs (which did belong to Stockis) nipping at my heels. The mess suited me fine, I’m the same when I’m home alone and end up drowning in magazines, pants, shirts I can wear one more day, clean enough, hung on the backs of chairs, glasses still holding the dregs of tea, but on top of it all anyway. I know what it’s like to let myself go, to slide down that slippery slope of slovenliness. Between trips I often find myself watching television, which I detest, until four in the morning, a book open in my lap, bored by whatever’s on, knowing the bad cop will betray the good one several dull speeches before it happens. And never anything about smuggling, there’s almost never a show with anything about smuggling, much less smuggling bugs or butterflies.
“Russia has several rare butterflies, extinct in the West …” he began. “There is one type in particular, the yazikus, which lives only from the end of May to mid-September. I would give everything to possess it.”
“Everything is not anything,” I replied, and then, to his broad chest, “How much?” because I do not believe in a numerical infinity, which I consider an intellectual concept, nothing more.
“Stockis is also a trade name,” he said, as if confident this would add some weight to his proposal, but not explaining why. I had followed him into the study, preceded by the panes of the plaid lumberjack shirt stretched across his broad back. When he turned to see what effect this revelation had on me, I climbed up on tiptoes and peered over his shoulder, to expand my field of vision. My gaze slid along glass display cases hung from every wall. There was just one window, in the north wall, and, on both sides of it, innumerable cases full of butterflies, glowing with a soft light.
Sure, we were here to look at butterflies, and for him to propose some deal with butterflies, I knew that, but he could still have some other field, and I said, “So, you have a business … that sells … ?”
He stopped in front of a case and tapped the glass, answering me without saying the word “butterflies.”
“I will be sailing to Istanbul at the end of May, on the Vaza. I have clients in the Middle East who are going to meet me on an island, on Crete, but before that we can look around Istanbul, you and I. Have you ever been to Istanbul?”
I had not been to Istanbul.
From floor to ceiling, up to the rafters, the study walls were covered with cases full of butterflies, which were held down, I noted, with round-headed pins, easy to get hold of. I did not know a thing about butterflies at the time, on that day near the end of winter.
“No questions until they make the first offer,” he lectured. “That way, you’ll know what kind of number: tens, thousands, tens of thousands. There are innumerable orders of butterflies. If a collection has specimens from a single order, it’s no good. It’s worth much more if it contains examples from various orders, organized lowest to highest…. By the way, there’s a forest in Finland, near Carelia, planted by the Russian army
