and accidentally steps on a butterfly. That’s all he does. Returning to the present he discovers that his momentary interruption has not only had unfortunate consequences for the trampled butterfly—its death—but he has come back to a very different world, which has spun far off its previous orbit. We cannot know the position and spin of an electron (or a butterfly, in this case) at any given moment—I knew that when I decided to go to Astrakhan. I trampled on the order in my life more and more often, straying farther from the path each time: the Caspian Basin, for example, was almost on the complete opposite side of the earth from my birthplace. Even if nothing had made me think I would wake up someday believing I were a butterfly dreaming it was a man, I still have to worry about breaking some law and getting stuck here, alone on the delta of the Volga River, on an island swamped by a rising tide, slipping and sliding into outer space, penetrating the night like a sounding device that was sent out to photograph Venus, or a few hundred kilometers of its surface, the Venusian seas, obtaining images of unsurpassed beauty and then going too far, and unable to correct its course, flying over Saturn, beyond all hope, to discover more heaps of dust, new rings, all useless, all destined to be lost to the world and its people, to be swallowed up forever in the galactic night. As I passed across Istanbul, V. saw my solitude, and I was saved, caught by the heavy mass of a woman who drew me with the full gravitational force of her belly dance, her omphalic wisdom. The letters she sent me were like new directions, page after page, the binary sequence I needed to correct my course.
Why had I traveled to Stockholm (and then later to Istanbul)? To get rich. Inspired by base instincts yet again—I should write that down, to explain to V., and to myself, how I had arrived at that table in the café in Istanbul. The account I gave of my travels at that time was quite brief and largely false. Now I could describe them in detail, scrupulously, like an eye following the sinuous Cufic writing on the doors of some Tartar houses (the Tartars from Khanato in Crimea) here in Livadia. In her second letter she told me about her trip back: how she traveled across Russia to get home, how her mother clapped her hands to her cheeks, speechless with amazement. I should begin with the trip that brought me to Istanbul, the chain of purchases (and sales); list the transactions that eventually led me to that café by the Saray, the nightclub with exotic dancers and strippers.
Because before the butterfly business, I had sold glasses for seeing at night (natt kikare, in Swedish). And before that—just to give her a sense of the turbulent atmosphere in Russia at the time—I told her I had laid eyes (and hands) on the skins of Amur tigers, on the endangered species list; the tusks and teeth of mammoths, preserved in the permafrost on the banks of the Liena, in Yakutiya; new antlers from young reindeer (for months my refrigerator held a bottle of blood obtained when the horns were sawed off, blood that had medicinal properties, scientifically proven); also snake venom (from the Karakorum desert in central Asia); and red mercury, a mineral no one had seen before, worth hundreds of times its weight in gold. On one occasion I was contacted in Tallinn by a potential buyer, a Scotsman, redheaded and red-blooded, with a dagger in the bag he wore over his kilt, not a knife, but a dirk, which he pulled to intimidate me: he wasn’t going to fall into a trap in Russia, so far from Scotland. It’s not so much whether you deal (obey the laws) as what you deal (maximum gain with minimum risk).
My list—the preceding one—is considerably shorter than Amerigo Vespucci’s. Did V. know (no, of course not, I’d just learned it myself) that the continent where I was born owed its name to a letter, one Amerigo Vespucci sent to Lorenzo de Medici in 1501? I’ll copy his list, Amerigo’s merchandise, for the sake of comparison. Here is what the Italian wrote, his mouth watering: “The aforementioned ships carry the following: They are laden with immeasurable cinnamon, fresh and dried ginger, abundant pepper and cloves, nutmeg, mace, musk, civet, liquidambar, benjamin, purslane, mastic, incense, myrrh, red and white sandalwood, aloe wood, camphor, ambergris, sugar cane, much lacquer-gum, mumia, indigo, tutty, opium, aloe hepatica, cassia and many other drugs that would take too much time to record … I do not wish to go on because the ship does not allow me to write.” You see, behind every voyage of discovery is hidden (that’s it! hidden!) some low motive, a little spice and “immeasurable cinnamon!” All I had wanted was to make a little money, a small fortune, just enough for a modest palace, a couple of balconies, some grandly appointed rooms, where I could live in style. At night, as I passed through my billiards room, I would pick up the cue, idly run a few balls, then go out to the balcony and stare off at the horizon, penetrating the darkness, cutting through it smoothly, like a warm knife through butter, or those night-vision goggles, the kind helicopter pilots use, with a thousand-meter range, which would also come in handy for observing the flight of certain nocturnal butterflies, their iridescent wings.
“In total darkness, Herren, the lenses in these goggles pick up the very lowest rays, invisible to the naked eye, a wavelength below infrared. Behind the lens the photons are focused and then accelerated by a high-voltage current. Hear that faint buzzing? Same principle as a television, cathode ray tubes. The photons are propelled onto a phosphorescent screen, agitating it, creating the image on it. Like this. You look through here, through this opening. No, you can’t see anything, because it’s not dark yet. It’s turned off. No. Impossible. It would burn out. The photon current is very strong this time of day, bright as it is. Your eyes would be burned out, permanently damaged, like a man who’s been in prison for years. Gets blinded when he’s let out, his retinas ruined. Actually, that’s what I just explained … A steal like this and you stand here trying to make up your mind!”
“With these goggles you could go out on the Baltic, the high seas, in the dark of night, keep watch for the coast guard, sail to some designated spot, some buoys marked with paint, only visible through these goggles, my cargo floating safe and sound in a watertight container …” He was thinking out loud, the smuggler who bought the first pair from me, a Pole, pushing a lock of blond hair off his face, a gesture that would allow me to identify him later, in case of trouble, a grilling from customs agents.
“Or you could spend as much time as you like spinning the dial on a safe, again in perfect darkness, your ears tuned to the click of the correct combination, or else stand and watch your prey, man or animal, through this scope, attached to a high-powered rifle, using this silent lantern to light the scene with infrared rays, invisible to the naked eye …”
I was pointing at a battery of gunsights made for the assault troops of the Russian army. But the Red Army was now completely bankrupt, infantry, motorized, aerotransport units all liquidated, selling their privori nochnovo videnia (night-vision equipment), top quality but ten times cheaper than Western stuff, a price difference that gave me a nice profit margin.
I lost count of the trips I made carrying this illegal military equipment, traveling to Hamburg, Vienna, Amsterdam, Stockholm, so many other northern European cities, feigning sleep during customs checks at 3 A.M., enduring dozens of searches that didn’t get to the bottom of my deep bags. I had passed through the smoking ruins of the Eastern Empire, from Varsovia to Cracovia, from Buda to Pest. And in the best plazas of those capitals, I had learned how to spot a buyer a long way off, to pick one out of the slow parade of passersby inspecting the merchandise suspiciously. The Swede I saw come around the corner one afternoon, walking toward me, smoothly slicing through the sea of heads—his walk, his bearing, gave him away. I broke off my pitch, wasting no more time on cash-poor gawkers, I practically pushed them aside, clearing the ground for this man with a pile of crowns in the bank, a BMW owner, but not flashy, dressed in a worn overcoat and cloth cap. After just a couple of questions, he picked up the goggles to take a look (but didn’t get one), a ring inexplicably dancing on his finger (thick as a Viennese sausage), which told me right away that his overcoat held a checkbook, and that he was going to buy them.
He took his eyes off the goggles and raised his eyebrows, sure my answer would be close to the sum he was secretly willing to pay. No fear of a trick: the price I asked for the goggles eliminated
