chatter while his accomplices ransack the display cases. After all, museum robberies were on the rise in Russia. But it never even crossed my mind to steal the yazikus from the Natural History Museum, even though it would be a lot less work and a much shorter trip—a few trolley stops from my home—than organizing an expedition to the Volga delta.
That trip held the opposite appeal: tramping around in my tarred boots, hiking through the trees. If the Russian state, in the person of some anonymous hunter, had gone ahead and bagged a couple of specimens of yazikus for its collection, then I don’t see why I should have to get them by force, stealing them instead of winning them honestly, playing by the rules. I had had no plans to use a handkerchief soaked in ether on the old lady who had been so slow to open her blue eyes, eyes that were strangely bright, probably in mint condition from how little work she gave them. But she was sure I was a foreign occupier, she’d seen plenty of movies about partisans, and during my interrogation she had to lie at any cost, even her life; so she just kept talking, that is, zagoborit menia, misleading me with aimless remarks, denying any knowledge of where the weapons were hidden, or the yazikus, those were her instructions, she had gotten them from Konstantin Pavlovich, the konsultant: “Nadieshda Ivanovna, you know that this is a terrible time for our country. We have been hit by a crime wave, youthful crooks attracted by our wealth, anxious to enrich themselves, as you well know. This new tide comes from the West. They will ask about certain specimens from our collection. I will mention no names because then you can’t remember them. This is all you need to know: deny everything. You know nothing. The specimen they want does not exist; you have never heard of it. There is one butterfly in particular … But no. You only have to say (playing dumb, you know): No, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Yazi? Kuz? Well, no, never …”
It was obvious she was lying. She was agitated, like a person not used to it. She kept rocking in her chair, as if an accomplice behind me was busy filling his sacks. Not too long ago, some thieves—very polite, attentive young people, eager for knowledge, like so many previous generations of pioneering youth who had toured the museum in big groups, totally innocent in appearance—had come into one of these rooms and stolen some mammoth teeth. I had read it in the newspaper before I left for Helsinki. I did not, however, draw any practical conclusions from that item in the Sankt Petersburkie Vedomosti. True, there was no reason for such considerations at the time, when I was at the station, waiting to board the train to Helsinki, but when Stockis gave me a list of the butterflies he wanted, and I decided to visit the Natural History Museum, back in Petersburg, it had not yet dawned on me that the Volga expedition was completely unnecessary, since the specimens Stockis wanted were all in that museum, caught by the long arm of the state, conveyed from their far-flung confines to the former capital of the empire and confided to the feeble custody of a frail old lady, easy to knock out with a handkerchief soaked in ether. Instead of knocking out dozens of butterflies, that is, moving tortuously across the irregularities of the map, burned brown by the sun, breaking ground in my hob-nailed boots, I could reduce my ether overhead to the few drops it would take to put this old crone to sleep and then board the trolley outside the museum, blending in with the raincoats, and cross the city on the bus. Much shorter, and much safer, than a trip to the Caspian Basin.
4
CASPIAN BASIN
We would land somewhere between the mouths of the Volga and the Astrakhan. Traveling through the tangle of the delta’s canals in a coastal steamer, I saw the Caspian as an empty wineskin, with the steamboat dropping down into it through the narrow neck. I would leap ashore, into a patch of reeds in some spot not marked on the map, and a week later I would be at some other beach waiting for the same steamer, which would take me home, fabulously wealthy, my saddlebags stuffed with rare specimens.
But first I had boarded the boat in Astrakhan, at a dock so full of barges that it looked to me—viewing the countryside from the heights of the city—like it would be possible to walk across the Volga without ever touching the water. I began my descent to the dock down a poorly paved street, positive I was headed in the right direction because a thin stream of water was running down-street, too, trickling along the edge of the sidewalk. That water could hardly be wrong about the way to the Volga, from which it had so recently ascended to heaven, then fallen to earth again and been dammed. Deep in a cold storage room someone had opened the tap, I thought, like releasing a bird to return to the woods, and the water now led me to the Volga: flowing along, following the course of gravity. I stopped in the middle. Water swirled around my heels and I felt a chill from deep in the Volga through my leather boots. In a shed near the shore, some workers were stacking barrels of pickled fish. I got within twenty meters of it and was about to ask how to get to pier no. 5, where the steamer was docked. I had already taken a big breath and picked out one of the workers—the man standing in the doorway of the shed cupping his hands to shield the flame of a match, who would raise an arm when he caught my question and point either to the right, fifty meters beyond the shed, or to the left, past the building with the barred windows—when I saw the sign myself, nailed to the top of a post, over the head of the worker, almost scraping it: “River dock no. 5,” written in rustproof paint. The man finished lighting his filter-tip and went back in the shed.
The low light at that hour made me look even more like a criminal, a sturgeon poacher, a member of one of the huge gangs trafficking in Caspian caviar. The steamer let off dozens of silent men who tossed their packs ashore and then jumped after them surefootedly and took off without a backward glance, their sights already on the banknotes snaking through the reeds. I didn’t turn back either. I moved toward the riverbank feeling the eyes of the captain on my back. My equipment differed considerably from that of a sturgeon fisherman, but I chose not to disillusion him. He would not have believed me anyway, even if I spread the contents of my pack on the cabin floor: no clubs to stun the poor sturgeons, nor curved knives to slit their bellies: just flasks of ether, two butterfly nets with adjustable handles, an acetylene torch for night hunting, and an inflatable rubber boat, to cross the delta’s numerous waterways. V. V. Sirin’s Diurnal and Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire says two yazikus were captured in one of the fields in this delta, in the Caspian Basin, in 1893.
Standing in the reeds, I saw the steamboat move away. I watched it back up, testing the depth of the river with its propellers, then straightening its course and continuing its trip.
By eleven that morning I was on the edge of a field, dark green with hundreds of butterflies floating above it, but no yazikus in sight. The heat kept intensifying, rising gradually, like the sounds from the orchestra pit at the opera. Without daring to leave the protection offered by the trees, I opened Diurnal Butterflies and flipped through it like a conductor glancing over the score one last time before striking the music stand with his baton. None of the butterflies paid any attention to the stick (of my net), which I slowly drew out after five minutes scanning the book, trying to match a butterfly from the page with the one that landed a few inches from my eyes, on a branch. When I found it at last, a common colias, I waved my net, desperately hoping that the butterflies would synchronize their flight across the field, get into formation, glide along the ground, rise in a loop-the-loop, pair up to waltz past me, prettily, then get in line and drop into the bottles of ether, one per bottle, with me cavorting joyfully, like a faun, blowing a panpipe, sealing the bottles, holding them up to the light, admiring each specimen before setting it in the bottom of my pack.
The music (Disney) disappeared as soon as I swung the net, missing completely, and started racing around the field, in giant strides (Chaplin), scaring off the colias, streaming with sweat, and getting stung by mosquitoes—they were nowhere to be found during the waltz of the butterflies, but when I stepped into the grass, breaking the luminous skin of my field of dreams, they swarmed up and rushed toward me like a group of ugly actresses, with no talent, mobbing the producer at a casting call, hoping to win the role of Sleeping Beauty. Dying
