… I don’t know Russia. But they say it still has some yazikus, butterflies that are worth a lot of money” (or did he say “a fortune”? I don’t remember). “And they say Czar Nicholas II was the last person to capture one. He was the last czar, too, right?”
(Who says? I felt like asking Stockis, who told you that?)
He was thinking, about to add something, maybe about the offices the Nobel brothers had in Baku and St. Petersburg, but out came:
“Wait,” he struck the arm of his chair, worried, and asked me: “How will you recognize it?” like in some detective novel, so that I pictured myself waiting in some nightclub or restaurant, with a copy of Botanic World Illustrated spread out on my table. But I wouldn’t have any trouble identifying the insect: it would show up for our meeting with a green umbrella tucked under its right-front leg, in outsize boots that rattled around on its last pair of tiny legs. And it would have its wings folded, so that if not for its skinny thorax it could have been some flashy cowboy in a sunflower overcoat.
2
HELSINKI
For a reader of Conrad, the passage across the Baltic, the Gulf of Finland, can be as charged with mystery as journeying to the South Seas. I was skimming over it on a fine ferry, almost a hundred meters long, with twelve decks. Standing on the aft deck (the captain’s deck), I imagined myself the hero in a storm, warning the captain of danger, an approaching iceberg. At nightfall I saw the carnival lights of another ferry passing me by, looking lovelier, more luxurious than mine, with more pleasures for their passengers. The other ship disappeared in the fog and I turned my back on the picture window, trying to get in shape for this trip, which was no less of an adventure. I had abandoned a normal life, apprentice writer with occasional weekends on the loading dock at a meat-packing plant in St. Petersburg. It’s easy enough, anyone could see my main motive, what made me jump into the cold water of dealing (a euphemism, to avoid “smuggling”), fully aware what I was getting into. Like that captain in Conrad, in full command of his seafaring faculties, with a successful career in the English navy, who listens to Lord Jim’s disturbing tale—the disgrace, the loss of honor—and then makes some careful annotations in the binnacle log, winds his watch, and throws himself into the water. I wanted to be converted, to become something more than a novelist, more than a storyteller, and so I jumped into the cold water of dealing, I learned all the numbers and “How much does it cost?” and “I’ll give it to you for half price, since you’re my friend” in more than seven of the languages of eastern and northern Europe.
I relived those trips in my dreams, as if my bed kept moving all night, just as if I was in a sleeping car or a ship’s cabin, below sea level. Yesterday, asleep, I thought I heard the wings of a helicopter over my head, an asthmatic gasp, a slow crackling, syncopated, as if it was about to crash, and the next morning I stood at the newsstand, in a trance, staring at a photo of a ferry tilted up on its side, listing, half submerged. I felt sure that a dream of shipwreck had been about to take off from that sound of wings, but had mutated into a peremptory summons, an open hand slapping on my door, knocking. It had wanted to be a rescue helicopter, a long ladder unrolling slowly toward our raft tossing in the waves, wind and cold eating into our bones, women screaming. In fact, I did hear screams eventually, Kuzmovna yelling at Petrovich, and from the same direction, a flurry of slaps, like the stuttering wings. I leapt out of bed and into the hall as if propelled by the force of those blows, transmitted to my body through the air. A step ahead of me, in a floral bathrobe, with one hand on her belt and the other raised over her head, swinging back to pound on the door, the arm exposed, soft flesh slowly sliding toward the impact. “Petrovich!” Kuzmovna shrieked before her palm slammed once more against the blank of the door. “Petrovich!” she yelled again, pulling it back into launch position, winding up for a new attack. “Maria Kuzmovna!” I yelled. And then again, quietly, “Maria Kuzmovna.” Meaning, the time, a good place to start, it’s six in the morning, for one thing, and then there’s the knocking and the letter, the answer I had been writing, trying to write, to V., up, wide awake, till all hours. And also the completely tasteless soup she had served yesterday, the quivering of her fleshy arms, that sort of thing. Petrovich finally half-opened the door, and I heard them whispering furiously about something, who knows what, as if it was terribly urgent, which it surely wasn’t.
I had made many trips in the ship that sank yesterday between Helsinki and Stockholm. That’s what the wings were trying to say, the knocking and the open door I saw before going back to sleep, the light of the sea at the end of the passage. Kuzmovna was talking to Petrovich outside his room. I was puzzled by the unusual brightness of the water and the cold air pouring in through the door. I moved toward it, walking past Kuzmovna, catching her in mid-reply, motionless, like a wax figure. There was another long hallway that I had to walk down, past the doors of many rooms that I hadn’t noticed before, full of unknown people that Kuzmovna must have let in, new tenants who must have moved in recently, but when? The wall at the end of the passage had disappeared and the water came right up to it, like in a house on stilts: I was dreaming again.
I thought I hadn’t slept at all, but when I finally woke up, the sun was bright: it was late and so was I, later than usual leaving the pension.
“Shipwreck” I read on the front page of the paper at the newsstand by the Post Office, in such a rush I went right past. It hadn’t been a dream, I managed to tell myself, but the transmission of images in real time: the tangible heaviness of a helicopter about to crash, blades spinning desperately. I doubled back anxiously. My God! Hundreds of people had been trapped in the cabins of the Baltic. (The long hallway, the door, the cold wind of my dream.) I broke out in a sweat and the system securing my joints fell to pieces, like when there’s a warning signal in a dream, emergency lights flash, and the whole crew rushes to the engine room to pump out the water, abandoning less important systems.
I had just enough strength to turn, trembling, to the shipwreck article, after a brief glance at the weather report for Crimea and southern Russia. Nice all weekend: as if I could believe that. Cold water had awakened many of the passengers in their cabins, the article began. Screaming in terror, they ran down the flooded hallway in the dark, trying to reach the stairs before the sirens suddenly stopped wailing, and the ferry sank. I had imagined it dozens of times falling asleep in my cabin, but thought it would never happen with me onboard. With no desire to read the details, I put the newspaper back in the rack. I made a futile effort to straighten my back, then dragged myself limply to a bench near the Post Office door. But I would have been saved, I thought, half-closing my eyes to see better. I never went to bed early on those trips, and that would have saved me from dying trapped in my cabin, drowned. I would have had plenty of time to run from the salon to the darkened discotheque, pull open the glass door, out to the deck, to get a seat in a lifeboat. A bit calmer, I managed to pull my feet under the bench, raise my head. I sat staring at the sea, the horizon, through the tops of the pines. The same sea, in fact, but a bit warmer.
It is possible to reconstruct sensations and states of mind from experiences and states of mind that are infinitely more minor, on another scale entirely. Resting on that bench, overcome, I knew what it was to be lifted by a flimsy flying machine, the deafening noise onboard the helicopter, the blind confidence that we have, in spite of everything, in mechanical devices that sail through the water and fly through the air. I was able to reconstruct the satisfaction of a narrow escape from insignificant pieces of information, unrelated incidents, last-minute rescues, anxieties that were similar, but on a smaller scale. Like not having a place to spend the night in a cold city, very far north, Helsinki, in this case. I knew more about this shipwreck, my shock, my horror were greater than that of someone who just read about it over breakfast: in some way, I too had been there. This prostration thanks to my last trip. I had missed the last train when I got back to Helsinki. Arriving at the station only to watch it pull away from the platform was like being lost at sea. The sea: a cold city like Helsinki was similar; the mast, that was my knapsack; the punishing
