Butterfly Skin (2 page)

But you’re not coping too well, to be honest. You parted company with your last lover a week ago, it’s over between you now – that’s why, instead of the sweet pain of gratification, your skin is smarting with the nagging pain of separation.

You turn off the shower, rub yourself down with a towel and your raw spots ache. Smiling, you walk through into the kitchen and put the kettle on. The music from the other room is almost inaudible. You look at the clock: you still have enough time for a cup of coffee.

This is how the day begins. Outside the window, a colorless sun in a gap between December clouds. Good morning to you, darling Ksenia. Don’t forget to dress warmly, there’s a strong wind today. Don’t forget to take the present for Mom, your cell phone, money, ID, travel pass. Don’t forget – you have a lot to do today, darling Ksenia, take good care of yourself. Ah yes, and the keys too. Don’t forget them, please.

AND SO… ONCE UPON A TIME A LITTLE GIRL LIVED
with her mommy and daddy, went to the kindergarten, then to school, danced and laughed and never cried. Mommy and Daddy got divorced, school came to an end, the little girl went to work and now, six years later, here she is sitting in a tiny office cubicle with her strong fingers pounding away at a keyboard, her tousled hair more or less held in place by a hair slide, her painted lips pursed in concentration and not a trace of the morning’s relaxed mood left in her voice.

“Ksenia, are we putting the news about Berezovsky at the top or is everybody already pissed off with him?”

“He’s the one who’s pissed off. What else have we got, apart from Berezovsky?”

“I’ll just take a look.”

This is an ordinary day. The Little Lady of the Big House. It’s just a title – Senior Editor of the News Department – a pitiful staff of three, plus the freelancers. True, they’re all a few years older than you, and some even have formal qualifications in journalism. Think of themselves as professionals, shit! Sharks of the pen, jackals of the keyboard, freebooters of the computer mouse. There was a time when you had to have sharp words with them, it’s true, but now you have them all in line, working at full stretch.

Alexei from the next desk asks on ICQ Internet Messenger:

“how are you doing?”

She answers: “ok” and then asks: “when will I have the interview?”

“I’m just typing it up.” Yes, he’s sitting there in his earphones, deciphering it.

Daily work inevitably becomes routine: making sure they choose the right news, correcting mistakes, telling off the young girl translators, deciding who to take commentaries from today. A couple of times a week you end up with good material, something you can really take pride in, not feel ashamed of. But then, you don’t feel ashamed of what you put out every day either, although there’s really not that much to feel proud of, except maybe the successful start to your career: after all, at twenty-three you’re already the department’s senior editor. The boss. It’s funny.

Ksenia likes her job. She enjoys rummaging through the news and she enjoys coordinating, managing and controlling even more. In a few years’ time she’ll be a good manager, although it’s not yet clear where. Maybe she’ll become a genuine senior editor, get into paper journalism, if Putin doesn’t grab all the newspapers the way he’s already grabbed the TV channels. Or perhaps she’ll go into pure IT business. “IT” stands for information technology, and it’s part of everything to do with the internet. In America they like to add the letter “e,” from the word “electronic,” but in Russian it’s not always convenient to add that letter. You definitely can’t add it to the word “business,” for instance. “You know,” Ksenia explained to one of her foreign friends, “the combination ‘eb’ in Russian is the same as ‘fuck’ in English. So you get ‘fuck-business.’ I can’t even say that to one of my friends, let alone my mom.”

Ksenia likes her job. She enjoys feeling confident, successful and prosperous. She likes being able to do everything at once: edit an interview, instant message, look through the news. By twelve they’ll put the first section of material out on the web, and then she can go to the cafeteria with Alexei, read the latest jokes at Anecdote.ru, call in to see Pasha and have a word about money.

* * *

Pasha Silverman, Ksenia’s immediate boss, the editor-in-chief and founder of the newspaper Evening.ru, had no interest at all in journalism until the age of thirty-seven.

He moved from the Chechen capital, Grozny, to Moscow in the late eighties – just in time: first there were no more Russians left in the city, then there were no Chechens, and then the city itself disappeared. By the mid-nineties Pasha was heavily involved in advertising, but during one of the repeated market carve-ups, he got squeezed out of TV and billboards, and by the beginning of the next decade all that remained of his former glory was an internet agency, which was lifted up on the rising wave of the investment boom of 2000.

When Pasha first came to the internet, the major form of advertising was banners – little rectangular pictures at the top, bottom or side of the internet page. If the picture caught someone’s attention, he clicked on the banner with the mouse and found himself on the advertised site. Basically, that was all there was to it. You could take money for the number of people who would see the banner (that was called “pay-for-views”) and for the number of people who clicked on the banner (“pay-for-clicks”). Since then variations had appeared – square banners, pop-up window banners, flash banners and lots of other wonderful technical innovations – but the general principle hadn’t changed. The technology made it possible to show the advert to the right audience on the right site – that was called “targeting” – but basically Pasha made money out of people looking at little pictures on their computer screens and occasionally clicking on them for some reason or other.

Pasha had always believed that dealing in advertising was dealing in something unreal. That didn’t frighten him: it had been explained to him many years before that in mathematics imaginary numbers like the square root of −1 were just as important as ordinary numbers. Trading in advertising in virtual space was a double unreality – and just as the number
i
, which didn’t exist in the normal scale of numbers, made it possible to solve equations and create graphs, the ephemeral banner advertisement allowed Pasha to consolidate his own business and help others to build theirs. Pasha liked the idea of working with things that weren’t real – perhaps because there wasn’t a single stone left standing in the city where he had spent his childhood.

A couple of years earlier the logic of business development had led Pasha to the idea that it would be good not just to trade in views on other people’s sites, but to have a platform of his own where he could show his own banners. He decided to set up a newspaper, intending at the same time occasionally to publish
advertorial
, or paid articles, especially since the time for elections was approaching and the political parties and independent candidates were still prepared to pay well for such material – although, of course, not as well as in the nineties, when the elections were really fascinating.

As an advertising man, Pasha was convinced that to get
high traffic
all you needed was the right kind of promotional campaign. After six months he realized that an online newspaper was not the same as washing powder or a new model of cell phone. The competition in internet media was pretty stiff, and Pasha sacked almost all his editorial staff and took on new people to replace them. One of these was Ksenia, and today Pasha knew it was her energy and talent he had to thank for the large numbers of people who read the news on his site, even if Tickertape.ru did provide much broader coverage.

Ksenia has a sense of style: she can make any banal news story entertaining – news about the economy comes out as a story about urgent daily realities and the experts’ comments sound like providential revelations. Pasha has raised her salary twice during the last year, but now, seeing her sit down in a chair and cross her legs, he regrets that he allowed himself to be sold on the idea. I won’t give her another kopeck, he tells himself, and smiles amiably.

“How’re things, Ksenichka?”

“Fine, thanks,” she replies.

Tousled hair, stubborn lips, strong thin arms wrapped round her knees. She doesn’t like Pasha’s familiar use of a diminutive “Ksenichka” – to everyone else she is just Ksenia, even to her lovers. And she doesn’t allow anyone except Olya to call her by her childhood name “Ksyusha.” Only Olya can pronounce “Ksyusha” in a way that doesn’t remind her of the fifth class at school and mocking children’s rhymes.

But Pasha calls everyone by familiar pet names and he has persuaded her to accept Ksenichka – persuaded, sold, soft-soaped – he told her that he was prepared to address her formally as Ksenia Rudolfovna if she wanted, but he asked her please, please to let him say “Ksenichka” sometimes, because otherwise he wouldn’t be able to do his job properly:
I’m not young any more, it’s too late for me to learn new ways
. Ksenia agreed and, of course, now he called her nothing but Ksenichka. Since then she had seen over and over again in business negotiations how Pasha extorted advantageous conditions while emphasizing that he had absolutely no right to them and was only asking as a personal favor. Maybe, if Pasha was not coping well with his business, it wouldn’t work – but when it came to PR support and advertising promotion, he was the best there was, and the clients let him have his way.

“How’re things, Ksenichka?”

“Fine, thanks.”

“Fine?” Pasha repeats, turning his monitor toward Ksenia. “Let’s just take a look at our rating. Look, this is Rambler – and what spot are we on?”

A screen with light-blue strips running across it. The Rambler Top 100 Ratings – the most important rating on the Russian internet, the unofficial table of ranks, a kind of independent audit. With meters set up on almost every site in the Russian internet, measuring the
traffic
. Ever half hour Rambler generates new ratings of sites according to about fifty subject categories. Whoever gets the most hits has the highest rating. Of course, everyone knows that this rating can be hyped up but even so, the advertisers take their bearings from it, and the small investors use it to decide if their money’s working hard enough.

The liquid crystal display of Pasha’s monitor shows the “Media and Periodicals” section. As usual, Tickertape and News.ru are fighting for first place, while Evening.ru is in the doldrums somewhere between ten and twenty.

“What do you expect, Pasha?” says Ksenia. “That’s what comes of being tight-fisted. You know yourself that within the limits of the present budget I do the impossible.”

Her face turns even more stubborn, her lips squeeze together angrily.

“Ksenichka, darling,” Pasha replies, sitting on the edge of the desk, “how can you call it being tight-fisted? Look, in the last year I’ve raised your salary twice. Sure, the first time was when I put you in charge instead of Lena, but the second time was simply because you deserved it, and that’s all. But you tell me, have you started working any better since then? Or, rather, will you start working any better if I give you another two hundred dollars?”

“If I say yes,” says Ksenia, “you’ll say I’m not putting in enough effort, so I don’t deserve a pay rise, if I say no–”

“Then I won’t give you a raise anyway,” Pasha says with a nod. “You understand the whole thing. Every employee has a natural limit: after that, no matter how much you raise their pay, you won’t get anything more out of them. Now, if you came up with some special kind of project – one that generated lots of advertising and lots of traffic! – then I’d give you a separate budget. And, of course, part of that budget would go toward a raise for you. But sorry, I won’t give you any money just like that.”

“What kind of project would you like to have?” Ksenia asks with a smile.

“I don’t know,” Pasha answers with a shrug. “Something that would fit into the concept of our publication and also attract readers. And wouldn’t be like what our friends in the other internet media have.”

I get it, Ksenia thinks with a nod. Magical fairytale stuff – I don’t know what it is, but bring me it.

“I’ll think about it,” she says, getting up.

“You have to understand my position,” Pasha says apologetically. “I haven’t got a lot of money, the election advertising didn’t come up to expectations… well, not entirely up to expectations.”

“I sympathize,” Ksenia says morosely, and for a moment Pasha remembers that he is lying shamelessly: business is going well and there’s plenty of money, but that’s no reason to start giving it away to the staff. Because if someone works for seven hundred and fifty dollars, there’s no point in giving them a thousand. At least, not until someone else starts trying to poach them. And so before every conversation about a raise, Pasha tells himself “there’s no money, there’s no money, there’s no money” until he starts to believe it – and then he can repeat these words with a clear conscience. In the unreal world that he inhabits, it’s the only way.

Ksenia has only a vague idea about all this. But even so, she goes back to her desk feeling quite satisfied: now at least she knows what to do. She just has to come up with some project, then go back to Pasha and start the conversation by saying: “Remember, you promised me…”

She doesn’t take offence at his obvious lies about the election campaign money: deep in her heart Ksenia suspects that if she were in Pasha’s place, she would act the same way. She enjoys observing her boss: he is far from stupid and there are things she can learn from him. Her colleagues sometimes complain that they’re pissed off with Pasha, that he’s so mean. They might be pissed off with him, and he might be pissed off with them, but who else do we have apart from Pasha? she asks herself. A good boss who’s sociable without fraternizing too much and is friendly without any harassment.

Before joining Pasha’s Evening.ru Ksenia used to work as a journalist in the internet section of the Moscow branch of a Western publishing house. Almost all the employees were local, but the office was still dominated by an extreme spirit of American political correctness: a strict dress code, no jokes about sex, no flirting. Her friend Marina, who dropped in occasionally, used to joke that the tea in the plastic cups was about to freeze solid in the positively benevolent atmosphere of the place, but at the beginning Ksenia had actually liked the atmosphere there. Coming to work with her nipples still itching after the clamps and fresh bruises on her thighs, she used to smile to herself and think complacently that her colleagues would recoil in horror if they only knew how she spent the nights. Ksenia had good career prospects, with a chance of moving from the internet department to the advertising department, and she was already mulling over this option. From the age of nineteen, when almost by accident she had found herself as an assistant in one of the laboratories of the Central Institute of Economics and Mathematics, she had always been involved in the web, and sometimes it seemed to her that real life and real business were not here, but out in the
real world
. But all that came to an end rather sooner than expected, at the out-of-house pre-Christmas party.