The Tool & the Butterflies Read online

  “You’re so nasty!” Shurka said, shaking his head. “Go on, get off my sleigh.”

  “Yeah, right!”

  “Off, I said! Scat! Or else I’ll put my foot up your ass!”

  “I’m not going anywhere! This ain’t your sleigh!”

  “How you figure?” the coachman asked, eyes wide. “Whose is it?”

  “Do we pay you for Glashka’s fodder?”

  “You pay in the summer … but what does that have to do with—”

  “Where are you taking this hay?”

  “To your village …”

  “Five houses. Five hundred rubles each for hay, right?”

  “Yeah …” Shurka conceded, feeling the urgent need for a drink.

  “As long as you’re delivering the hay for our cows, the horse and sleigh are ours. Bought and paid for. It’s like a taxi in the city. You rent it, then the car and driver are yours for the trip!” The girl lashed at the mare’s skinny croup with the reins.

  “Get a move on! Or should I put my foot up your ass? Watch it, I’ll throw ya into the snowbank headfirst!”

  Something had jammed in Shurka’s head. He wasn’t familiar with the concept of logic, but he knew that little Alice, with her prematurely developed womanly attributes, was putting one over on him. Not knowing what to say, the coachman decided to take umbrage, so he groped underneath the sleigh and pulled out a bottle of moonshine, as well as a rag, which he unwrapped to reveal a sliver of salo, a quarter loaf of black bread, and a nub of onion. The man swigging straight from a bottle of stagnant swamp let out a groan, then released a protracted burp, produced a knife from the depths of his sheepskin coat, and cut the cured fat into pieces. The warmth the fat had picked up from the rotting hay, the scent of the onion, and the aroma of the heel of Borodinsky bread teased Alice’s keen little nose, making her nostrils flare. She turned away involuntarily. He clasped his sandwich, took a huge bite, chewed, and cracked a sneaky smile.

  “What’re you smilin’ about?” The girl was really hungry, but she was too proud to ask for some, so she sat there stewing, swallowing useless saliva. It was still a ways to the village, and she had to feed and milk the cow before evening, then she would only be able to sit down to dinner with her granny after all her chores were done.

  “Want some moonshine?”

  “I’m thirteen, you lousy drunk! You forget already?”

  “And you never touch the stuff, right?” he asked sarcastically.

  “Just on holidays—and not that crap. I don’t want to go blind, that’s the last thing I need!”

  “This food is for drinkers only! Don’t you know ya have to eat a little somethin’ after every drink! C’mon, your mama didn’t think she was too good for moonshine!”

  “Yeah, and she went and got herself killed while she was tanked!”

  Twilight was setting in. The violet-tinged sun was diving behind the trees. Alice stood up on the sleigh, holding on to the reins to steady herself, and tried to catch a glimpse of the sunlight on the windows of the little village houses.

  “It’s getting cold!” the red-haired drunk observed and swallowed a swig from the bottle. He took another huge bite.

  “Fine, pour me one!” Alice relented.

  “Huh?”

  “Ya got a glass?”

  “Yeah, somewhere.”

  He pulled a table glass out from under the sleigh, blew on it to get rid of the scraps of hay, and smiled.

  “Just a dab’ll do me!” the girl warned him.

  “Yeah, yeah, dabby-do.” Alice pulled off one mitten with her teeth, blew on her hand to warm it up, and only then accepted the glass. She exhaled and emptied the moonshine into her mouth. She cringed.

  “How do you drink this stuff?” she coughed. Shurka held out a piece of Borodinsky bread with a square of salo and onion slices on top.

  “Go on, eat up!” Alice swallowed it like a frog swallows a mosquito and smiled at Shurka. “That’ll warm ya up!” he said encouragingly and lit a hand-rolled cigarette. “Can ya feel it?”

  “Yeah …” The girl was a little drowsy now, and the prospect of a sad evening slipped into her trove of irrelevant happenings.

  “Want a puff?” he said, offering her the half-smoked cigarette and ripping off part of the paper filter with his teeth.

  “Never smoked before, never will,” Alice declared. “What for? So my mouth can reek like yours?”

  “Good for you. It’s a rotten habit,” said Shurka, flicking the unfinished cigarette away—but he did it so clumsily that the still-burning tip hit the horse right in the croup. The unexpected burn made the old mare want to rear up on her hind legs. She gave a despairing jerk but only managed to rise a few inches off the ground before her full weight came crashing down on the road, overturning the sleigh. Its riders flew off in opposite directions.

  While Alice was digging herself out of a snowbank, the enraged coachman hurried over toward the supine horse and nailed it with his felt boot, right in its ailing, distended stomach. All the animal did was exhale steam and give him a crooked glance from under her sparse white eyelashes.

  “Worthless bitch!” Shurka cursed, giving her another hard kick.

  “She isn’t a bitch, she’s a mare!” Alice objected, pulling herself out of the snow and rubbing her injured side. “A mare, not a bitch.”

  Suddenly, Alice was thinking back to a class early in the school year. They were studying a Mayakovsky poem where a horse fell over, and all the passersby started neighing with laughter, while tears ran from the horse’s eyes … For some reason, Alice felt so sorry for that mare in the poem, and she shed some furtive tears herself. This nag collapsing didn’t elicit any sympathy, though—all it did was irritate her. Thirteen years had sufficed for Alice to learn that old age was irritating, not worthy of sympathy. Her grandma irritated her every damn day! Mayakovsky’s poem must have been about a young horse.

  “Come on, help me!” Shurka yelled.

  They unhitched the horse together. Then they grabbed the tack and dragged the damn horse by the neck until she struggled to her knees, and then finally stood on all four hooves. They flipped the sleigh back on to its runners together, and then got the horse back into her collar and shafts. Huffing and puffing, they heaved the scattered bundles of hay back into the sleigh.

  “Motherfu—!” he hollered, but stopped himself.

  “What is it? Wolves comin’?” asked Alice, turning to face him.

  “The friggin’ bottle got busted! Two liters down the drain!”

  “Why don’t ya eat the snow? It soaked it all up.”

  “You’re a genius, Alice!” He fell to his knees, detected the homemade alcohol by smell, and gathered handfuls of wet snow into his hat. “Got a whole cup’s worth!” he proclaimed.

  The traveling companions sat down on the sleigh and ordered the mare forward in chorus, then continued their journey in silence. Shurka melted a portion of snow in the glass and drank it immediately. It was a little diluted, but the sheer volume was enough to get him drunk, so he began lowing some old song, then fell asleep again, his toothless mouth hanging open. Alice glided over the January snow and contemplated her marriage prospects. How would she come by her future husband if there were no decent men to be found, even in Vladimir? Just drunks and losers. Her village was even worse: three old maids who looked after this one bedridden guy named Vykhin. Then there was Old Lady Ksenia and Shurka. He wasn’t from their village, though; he was from Stepachevo, where the store was. More folks lived there, but there wasn’t a single boy or man. The only boys who didn’t go off to trade school after ninth grade were a bunch of pimply nerds, and the lack of competition had made them far too cocky. They’re grabby—let your guard down, and they’ve got their hands up your skirt the next second! Alice was no pushover. Actually, she could push the creeps around. She’d given a few of them black eyes, too. But they’re like flies—swat as many as you want, but they’ll keep going after the sweet stuff!

  Alice sp
otted rectangles of electric light. The village was close. She tried shaking Shurka awake. No luck. The horse, sensing the proximity of human abodes, picked up the pace, and soon the girl was hopping off the sleigh and hurrying down the well-trodden path through the snow to her house. She wasn’t thinking about Shurka anymore, about how a night out in the cold could do him in. That was his problem. He was a grown man. Plus the mare could always take him back to his house in Stepachevo. At least it was warm there, and he had a patch of hay.

  “What took you so long?” her grandmother asked with irritation in her voice. She was actually Alice’s great-grandmother. It’d already been eight years since her grandmother was ripped to shreds by stray dogs, or maybe wolves. It was around this time of year. She was running a little late, so it was almost nighttime when she walked home from Sudogda … and ran afoul of man’s best friends.

  “Where have you been?” Granny Ksenia asked. Even though she was technically a great-grandmother, she was just a hair over sixty. She had Alice’s granny, Pelagia, at fifteen—the one who wound up being fodder for wild animals and who, fifteen years after her own birth, had also brought a daughter into the world, Alice’s mother, Irka Kapronova. The latter bore fruit at fourteen—and they had chicks every time!

  As usual, Alice only provided vague answers to her granny’s questions. She didn’t want to get dragged into the same old conversation about her schooling and her future. She changed out of her school clothes, grabbed an empty bucket, and went out to milk Glashka the cow. She retuned half an hour later with the result, went over to the mirror without putting the bucket down, and noticed several ripening pimples dotting her forehead.

  “Thought there’d be more.” Her granny had crept up silently and looked in the bucket. “Two gallons? Not even!”

  “What are ya doin’ creeping up on me like a ghost!” Alice yelled, angry at both Ksenia and her adolescent breakout. “Feed Glashka better and you’ll get more out of her!”

  “Don’t get wise with me!” her granny retorted. She took the bucket out of Alice’s hand and filtered the milk through some gauze and into one-gallon jars, filling two with a little left over. “Each of the neighbors’ll get a pound of farmer’s cheese and two cups of milk. That’ll buy us some bread and spaghetti—that’s if they deliver it to the store!”

  “You can go on a diet if they don’t!” Alice quipped. “That’s the style now.”

  “And you can go down to the cellar,” said her granny, not backing down.

  “What the heck for?”

  “To make you less lippy! And no grub for you tonight!”

  “I’ll go to Officer Dyskin! You have no right! You signed the guardianship papers! You’re obligated to feed me or else you’ll answer to the law!” This unheard-of impudence nearly made Granny Ksenia drop her jar of milk, but she held on to their irreplaceable capital and answered bitingly.

  “Your mother was just like you when she was your age—all sass and all about the boys. But where there’s men, there’s flim-flam and alcoholism! Just watch, you’ll wind up dead, just like her!”

  “How can you say that about your own granddaughter? You’re the one who raised her that way, or else your genes aren’t no good!”

  Granny Ksenia didn’t know what “genes” were, but it didn’t sound like a curse, and there was some hidden truth to Alice’s words. The old lady tempered justice with mercy.

  “Alright, hurry up and eat! You still gotta wash the dishes and do your homework!”

  “Whatcha got?” Alice asked, looking at the pot Granny Ksenia was taking out of the large brick stove with a set of heavy tongs. She grabbed a trivet from the windowsill and deftly slipped it under the scorching pot.

  “It’s taters and eggs. Go on, get some pickles outta the fridge, and some sunflower oil offa the shelf there. If it hasn’t gone and run out already …”

  They had dinner, and Alice went to her room to watch TV—that’s if they got lucky and their antenna was actually picking something up. Their seventies-era black-and-white Rubin-205, which had lived to see practically every innovation in television technology, tried its hardest, yet mostly just showed Channel One. It would sometimes freeze up and lose the picture, so they’d have to whack it on the side. It sometimes showed Channel Two as well, but the only way to prove the existence of that mythical signal was to take some pliers and turn the metal dowel that once held a knob that had vanished before Alice was even born. She didn’t feel like it … The girl didn’t even think about doing her homework—she just flopped on to her bed and idly watched some show where people dressed up like Christmas trees shrieked and grimaced. She was waiting for the singing to end—there was a sitcom she liked coming up next. The leading lady was a tomboy just like her, a little older, though. She moved to Moscow to find love, but those bigcity types clipped her wings, used her, and tossed her out on the street. Alice knew for sure that the heroine would turn into a princess and get married at the end of the show—not to a prince, but maybe to an honest cop at least … They were just showing a bunch of politicians that night, though, yapping at each other like a pack of wild dogs for the whole country to see, spewing all kinds of insults. The sparks were really flying! Alice couldn’t stand politics, so she decided to go to sleep. It was cold in her room. She wanted to sleep by the big wood-burning stove, but that was where her granny always slept, so the girl went in and said in her most honeyed voice that she had caught a cold—probably because it was so damp in her room—and would have to miss school.

  “Go sleep by the stove!” Ksenia instructed. “I’ll brew up some raspberry tea for you! And don’t forget to put a warm shawl on, or you’ll freeze your little butterfly shut for good. I’d still like to have some great-great-grandchildren.” That was all she ever called what was between Alice’s legs: her little butterfly.

  “But what about you, Granny?”

  “I’ll sleep up top,” she said, referring to the little curtained space just above the stove.

  “Oh, thank you, Grammy!”

  “Sly Aly … sly as a fox.”

  Alice hopped up on the stove and stretched out, letting her whole body soak up the warmth from the bricks, smiling blissfully. She was already asleep by the time Ksenia brought her the raspberry tea. For the first half of the night, she dreamed a maiden’s childish dreams. A tremendous variety of sweets, fruits whose names she didn’t even know, human-sized talking dolls, and a fair-haired boy. It was a miracle how handsome he was! In the second half of the night, closer to morning, her caramel dreams gave way to horrors. Alice dreamed of rats with yellow teeth. They squeaked clamorously, about to attack the girl; the vile, hungry beasts, yellow-toothed, worse than wolves … An unbearable squeaking awakened her in the early morning. Whew, it was all just a dream! She scrounged up some matches and lit a candle, banishing the dream for good. The girl didn’t have a watch, and she couldn’t see the wall clock with the dead cuckoo, but she had a perfect sense of time, almost down to the second, and her little brain was ticking away. Fifteen minutes left until reveille. The stove had almost completely cooled off, so she moved toward the wall, where it was a little warmer. With her cheek pressed against the bricks, Alice heard the despairing squeaking again, but this was no dream. She was awake. Shock flung her away from the wall, and the despairing squeaking suddenly took on a plaintive note.

  “Gross, a rat!” Alice thought. “So it wasn’t a dream! He’s right under me.” She wasn’t any more afraid of rats than of any other creature—all the little gray rodents elicited was mild distaste.

  “You little shit.” She began searching for the cheeky creature in the creases of her cotton blanket, then down by her feet, where some birch branches for the sauna were hanging. “Where’d you get off to?” Alice caught an earful of ruckus up by her head, so she turned instantly, leapt like a cat, rummaged under the pillows, and ran her deft fingers over the felt mat underneath. She eventually seized the beast with her right hand. As she was dragging it out into the pure light of d
ay, the girl was already picturing herself flinging the nasty critter against the cracked plaster wall. She was winding up, but then the rat gave an especially despairing shriek, as if it understood that it was about to die.

  “It’s a baby rat!” Alice thought, loosening her fingers slightly. “A newborn, no doubt about it!” the girl concluded when she saw its pink skin and decided against killing the little creature. She opened her palm—and was struck dumb for a solid minute. In her hand, twitching its little arms and legs, lay a naked homunculus with a tiny, wrinkled face, scarcely larger than Alice’s index finger. It was male, and it was shedding bead-like tears.

  “He’s alive!” the girl finally said with a gasp, titillated by this as yet unobserved miracle of nature. “A gnome! I caught a gnome!” It engendered something like an unexpected celebration in her soul. “A little gnome of my very own!” Then she decided that it wasn’t just a gnome, but an honest-to-goodness Smurf, just like in that foreign movie! She had never actually seen it, but a lot of the girls from her class had gone to the movie theater in Vladimir and then talked her ear off about how funny those cute little guys were.

  “So are you a Smurf?” the girl asked the tiny person in a whisper. Her discovery stopped crying and was now looking at Alice’s face with his itty-bitty eyes. “You’re so cute!”

  The interminable whispering woke Granny Ksenia, and, unexpectedly as always, she stuck her head between the curtains that separated the stove bench from the upper room. In the first rays of sunlight, she caught sight of her great-granddaughter kneeling and holding something in her hands. It was moving.

  “What is it?” she screamed.

  Alice shuddered with surprise and accidentally squeezed the Smurf’s little body. The gnome, crushed by her childish fingers, cried out like a human infant and cowered like an animal whelp. Once she had overcome her initial fright, the girl turned to face her granny.

  “What do you keep scaring me for, you old hag?”

  “What is it?” Ksenia hopped agilely on to the bench and reached for the creature moving in Alice’s hand. A horrible thought entered her mind, and she let out a single hiccup. She grabbed her great-granddaughter by the hair and yanked. “How could you? You little bitch! You ain’t more than thirteen! A miscarriage, I can’t believe it! Who knocked you up?”