The Tool & the Butterflies Page 7

  “You’ve finally lost it!” Alice shouted back, trying to free her hair from Ksenia’s iron grip. “What are you talking about? I’m only thirteen! I’m still a virgin! And this is a Smurf!”

  “A what?” Granny Ksenia hadn’t let go, but she wasn’t yanking on her hair anymore.

  “A gnome,” Alice explained, hiding it behind her back.

  “I’ll show you a gnome!” said Ksenia, still all worked up. “Right under my nose! A miscarriage at thirteen! You little hussy!” She started pulling her hair again. Alice vigorously crossed herself.

  “I swear to God—I am a virgin!” her great-granddaughter shouted in pain. “I’ll be damned if I’m lying! I found him right here, on the stove! He didn’t come out of me! Stillborn babies don’t cry! When there’s a miscarriage, there’s always blood. Where’s the blood, huh?”

  The last argument cooled the old lady’s temper. She released Alice’s hair and rummaged around on the stove bench, looking for a wet spot. When she saw that everything was perfectly dry, Ksenia turned her face toward her great-granddaughter.

  “Well, show me!” she commanded.

  “Just don’t kill him,” the girl pleaded tearfully.

  “Show me already!” Alice opened her palm, and her granny studied the naked homunculus intently. Now he was lying still, just fluttering his doll-like eyelashes.

  “He’s cute!”

  “That’s what I’m saying!” the girl said happily. “My little Smurf!”

  “Looks like a late abortion …” Ksenia conjectured. “But he’s alive …”

  “Please, Granny, my dear, sweet Granny, can I keep him? I’ll take care of him!”

  Ksenia pondered that at length. She carefully touched the gnome with one rock-hard fingernail, and it smiled at her with its tiny mouth full of minute teeth so intoxicatingly that the old lady smiled in reply. Alice cracked a smile too.

  “But what will we feed him?”

  Alice hopped off the stove and ran over to the window; it was already letting in the sun. She sat down at the table across from it.

  “Grammy, he’s so little! His dinner will fit in a thimble!”

  “What if he gets sick? What are we gonna do, show up at the hospital with a Smurf?”

  “He won’t get sick!” the girl reassured her. “I’ll take care of him! I’ll give him hugs and kisses!”

  “Dunno …”

  “I’ll do all the chores! I’ll chop the wood, I’ll fetch the water, I’ll milk Glashka in the mornings, too, and I’ll scratch your back! How ’bout it?”

  “If you’re lying, I’ll throw him in the well myself!” she threatened.

  “I’m not lying, Grammy! I’m telling the truth!”

  “You’d better be! And make sure he doesn’t just go to the bathroom wherever he pleases, like your parrot!”

  “He’s not a bird! He’s a person! And I’ll make him some swaddling clothes …”

  “One strike and he’s out!” the old lady declared, thereby granting her approval for this new resident.

  “Maybe I could stay home from school today?” the girl asked. “All we have is geography, then three hours of cross-country skiing. And I’m coming down with a cold,” she sniffled. “Plus, you can’t leave a Smurf all by himself. It’s his first day …”

  “I’m gonna go get some firewood,” Ksenia said. “The fire’s gone out—look, there’s already frost on the inside of the windows!”

  “I’ll do it!” Alice sprang off her stool, willing to move mountains.

  “Sit down already!” Granny Ksenia set out toward the door. “He’s probably hungry. Give him some mashed taters with milk.” “Why study geography?” she thought. “Nobody ever goes any farther than Vladimir anyway.”

  Granny slammed the door. Alice placed the gnome on the rag they used to wipe the table, covered him with one corner, and darted over to the stove, where there was a little left over from dinner. She put some food in a plastic bowl left over from the long-dead parrot, Adolf—who was actually a parakeet and had flown into the hot stove and burned up like a paper airplane—put a drop of milk on top and brought the meal over to the table …

  He didn’t like the smell of the rag the big girl had wrapped him up in one bit. The moist fabric irritated his tender skin, but he bore all his trials and tribulations gladly, since he had just been saved from his seemingly inevitable demise. He ate. The girl nudged the scraps of potatoes toward him with a match and then put them in his mouth. The food proved comestible, and he chewed it exactingly, thinking about who he was and why he was here, in a village cabin, a doll for a girl who was big for her age, but without the smarts to match … The word “amnesia” appeared in his minuscule brain, and he understood what it meant pretty well.

  “Something happened to me,” he thought. “Some kind of physical or psychological trauma.” But probably psychological, since his arms and legs were in perfect working order, and he had experienced no physical discomfort aside from the odor of the dirty rag … He also got to thinking about the quite palpable difference in his dimensions and those of his environs. He felt like Gulliver in the land of the giants. Did this kind of thing really happen? He had a creeping doubt that his whole being was being manipulated by some hallucination, and he was actually just mentally ill.

  Granny came back in with the firewood, tossed it in the stove, and informed Alice that she was going to Stepachevo for the bread and pasta, but first she’d take the milk to the neighbors and see if the farmer’s cheese had ripened.

  “What should I call him, Granny?”

  “Something cute … Like ‘Aborty.’”

  “Eww,” went Alice, and that noise made the foreign name “Eugene” flicker in her voice. She pronounced it out loud, in the French manner, which she liked. “You’ll be Eugene! But I’ll call you Zhenka!” she added. “No need to put on airs.” That was nice and simple, short for “Evgeniy,” the Russian for “Eugene.”

  “Why ‘Eugene’?” he thought. “What kind of name is that? And ‘Zhenka’ is far too familiar …”

  Alice plucked the Smurf out of the rag and carried him to her room, where she had a two-story plastic dollhouse with no front wall set up on the floor. That little house had everything: a bed, a dining room table (two dolls were sitting there now, like husband and wife), and even a bathroom with a tiny toilet. The girl placed Eugene on the bed and covered him with a dolly blankie.

  “Do you like it, Eugene? It’s all yours now! King in the castle!”

  He realized that this was to be his fate: living in a plastic dollhouse with plastic toys and peeing in a toilet that wasn’t even hooked up to the plumbing. And he needed to relieve himself—very badly. He tossed the stupid blanket aside, got to his tiny feet, and hurried into the caricature of a bathroom.

  “You can walk!” Alice exclaimed. He nodded. “And you can understand humans?!” The girl was absolutely floored. Suddenly, she found herself thinking that he’d grown a little in the past few minutes—at the very least, he was unmistakably longer than her finger—or did it just seem that way to her? The gnome turned his back to the girl, used the toilet, and then proceeded into the dining room, covering his private parts with his hands, dragged the wife doll out of her chair, and flung her from the second floor of the house. Then Eugene moved on to the husband, but first he undressed him, slapped on his clothes to cover his willy and protect his body from the cold, and only then did he hurl the naked mannequin from his dollhouse life.

  Alice was watching everything unfold like she was at some Smurf theater, though the Smurf, admittedly, was utterly alone, if one didn’t count the subjugated dolls.

  “So can you talk?” the girl asked with bated breath.

  He was asking himself the same question. Since he could understand human speech, it followed that he could talk, too—provided he wasn’t mute. Eugene adjusted the collar of his shirt and coughed into his tiny fist.

  “Yes, I can.”

  His voice didn’t sound childlike anym
ore; it had taken on a certain adolescent timbre, which he could detect, too. “I must be young,” Eugene concluded.

  All of a sudden, Alice grabbed him—passionately and less tenderly than she’d intended—and began kissing her precious discovery on his tiny cheeks, nose, and forehead.

  At first, Eugene was terrified he was about to be crushed, but he soon realized that the girl’s fingers were more delicate than they had been in the morning. He caught himself thinking that he liked the way Alice was kissing him. Her wet lips excited him, making him stronger and suppler. Zhenka felt like he was growing, like his muscles were hardening and his spirit rapidly strengthening. The girl also fancied that her new friend was getting bigger right there in her hand. She knew for sure that his little body, his arms, and his legs had gotten longer, and now his head was covered with little black hairs.

  “Are you growing?” She opened her hand.

  Sitting on her palm with his legs dangling over the side, Eugene heard his doll clothes ripping.

  “Looks that way.”

  “Can you maybe not grow?” The girl sounded upset.

  “I don’t think I can.”

  “What if I don’t feed you?” Alice really didn’t want the gnome to grow. A grown-up gnome was just a dwarf! She didn’t like dwarves, she was afraid of them. And little people, too …

  “If you don’t feed me, I’ll die.”

  “No, no, I’ll take care of you!” She started kissing Eugene again, like a beloved doll, while he relaxed and relished his mounting strength. “You’re so wonderful!”

  He reciprocated the girl’s affection, kissed the edge of her lips, but she didn’t even notice. She kept kissing him and kissing him, until she suddenly realized that the gnome was growing again. He was bursting out of her palm; he was twice as tall as when she found him on the stove, and his doll clothes had come apart at the seams and fallen to the floor.

  The girl put Eugene on the table, realizing that, while he had once been a boy the size of her little finger, he had now grown bigger than a pickle jar, and he was standing before her, hands on his sides, unabashedly displaying his nakedness. Alice was embarrassed that her eyes had settled on the place where boys are different from girls. For the first time, she felt subtle impulses transforming her from a curious girl into an amorous woman. She blushed and reluctantly looked up at Eugene’s face, noting how attractive he was … Then a defensive wall flashed into existence in her brain—the memory of the time when, out of curiosity, she had visited O, the only sex shop in Sudogda. The experience had left her with a vile feeling, like she was some special kind of dirty … Alice suddenly realized that she was being tempted by the same impurity now as she looked at Eugene’s naked body. She crossed herself.

  “If you keep growing, I’ll throw you away!” she declared.

  “Everything is in God’s hands!” the growing gnome said resignedly.

  The doors squeaked in the entryway, and the girl realized that her granny had come back from Stepachevo.

  “I’ll hide you and tell Ksenia that you ran away.”

  “Do as you think best,” Eugene agreed. She hid him under the blanket on her bed and was about to run out to meet her grandmother, but then she lifted the corner of the blanket.

  “Please, don’t grow! And don’t make any noise!” she warned him.

  He lay there, weary from their fly-by-night kisses, breathing in the smell Alice had forgotten in the bed sheets, feeling intoxicated and almost pleased. Eugene stopped thinking about who he was, how he’d wound up in this village cabin of all places. He simultaneously felt like a newborn and an adult, since he could think rationally but didn’t know his own growing body. Utterly unexplored, it was developing according to its own laws—rapidly, as if his life would consist of one winter day. Hidden from the white light by a warm blanket, he probed his anatomy and checked how it felt, in both senses of the word, as if he had spent an eternity paralyzed and insensate, and now everything had unexpectedly come back to life, and his body was experiencing the joy of the Resurrection.

  “Where’s your Smarf?” Granny inquired as the girl was putting the groceries away.

  “Smurf … my Smurf disappeared!” Alice broke into natural tears, like true misfortune had befallen her. “I looked everywhere, but I … but he …” She even threw in some masterful sobbing. “He ran away!’

  “Maybe he fell through a crack?” Ksenia suggested. “Down into the cellar?”

  “I looked everywhere, I checked everything!” Alice wailed.

  “Quit whining! Fiddlesticks to him! It’s a disgrace, living with some stranger’s abortion! Now he won’t be going to the bathroom God knows where.”

  “It’s sooo sad!” the girl howled.

  “Want some cheese to go with that whine?”

  “We don’t even have a cat!”

  “Cause we don’t have mice! I’m going to Vladimir tomorrow.”

  “What for?”

  “They didn’t adjust my pension for inflation! I’m gonna take care of it!”

  “Go for it!”

  “I’ll spend the night with Lyudmila and come back on Saturday. No skipping school!”

  “Fine,” Alice agreed dully.

  “Not ‘fine—’ school! Now stick the pot on the stove, we’re makin’ pasta! Go down to the cellar and put some cabbage in a bowl!” The old lady and the girl had lunch.

  As Alice washed the dishes, the sky turned from white to gray, and it was grim inside the lightless house, where Ksenia forbade her from turning on the overhead light until it was really dark. She always said, “There’s no such thing as an electric bill being too small!” The old lady thought the best thing you could do in life was learn to be thrifty. The only entertainment the family had was the TV and a radio set that could only pick up one station. Ksenia would often listen to political programs, with her ear right against the speaker. Her opinion almost always differed from that of the professional politicians, but she never shared it with Alice, saving the results of her deliberations for the store in Stepachevo, where the women from the five surrounding villages would gather at a specific time to buy fresh bread.

  “I’m going to my room,” Alice announced once she had finished with the dishes and dried her hands.

  “Homework!”

  “Fine!” The girl shut the door behind her and neatly put the hook in the eye. “Are you here?” she whispered.

  She lifted the corner of the blanket and nearly shrieked with surprise. Her toasty discovery, which had so recently been the size of a pickle jar, had grown rapidly in the brief time she was gone. He now very much had the shoulders of an adolescent, and Alice was hesitant to pull the blanket any lower. How could this be? She stood there, mouth agape. Maybe the Smurf had been replaced with something else? How could a gnome have gotten as tall as her?

  “Eugene, is that you?” She shook his shoulder. “C’mon, wake up!”

  The sleeping young man did not react to her decisive command; he just groaned quietly in his youthful bass and parted his big, juicy lips. His long, shiny black hair was spread across the pillow. Alice found herself involuntarily admiring the handsome Eugene, and the nearly imperceptible smell of sweets drifting from his half-open mouth stirred the girl’s soul with its novelty. Without intending to, she started stroking his head but then jerked her hand back as if she was afraid of getting burnt. But then she started touching him again, touching his face with her finger-tips, and not withdrawing them, lightly caressing the soft skin of this fabulously beautiful youth.

  He wasn’t asleep, just pretending. He liked the feel of this girl’s little fingers. They trembled faintly from her childish inexperience, and his eyelashes quivered.

  “You’re awake!” the girl said, pulling her hand back.

  “Yes.”

  “And you have been for a while?”

  “I have.”

  Alice blushed and launched into a whispered rebuke directed at this impudent entity that had transformed from a gnome to a gu
y almost as tall as her in half a day. How dare he grow when he promised he wouldn’t? And why would she want a guy in her bed? Now Granny would kill her!

  “You’re a liar!” she hissed. He sat on the bed, hands behind his head, and smiled.

  “I never lied to you! You asked me not to grow, but that proved beyond my power. I grew. I don’t know who I am or where I came from, but I am grateful for your warmth and benevolence, since I’m quite comfortable here. That was very kind of you, not letting a defenseless creature die. And I’ll be going tomorrow, don’t you worry!”

  “Going? Where?”

  “I have to get to the city.”

  “Vladimir?”

  “Moscow.”

  “What for?”

  “I don’t know what for. I just know that I have to.”

  “No, stay.” the girl said. “You’ll walk me to school!”

  He reached out to Alice, who was overcoming the excessive speed at which her little heart was contracting, and she placed her hands in his mitts. He drew his savior very close and pressed her to his chest, gently stroking the girl’s hair, and she whispered in alarm, “No, don’t, my hair ain’t clean …” He smiled in the twilight of the fading day, and she thought that here was her prince, though he had come to her by a strange route, as a miniature gnome, then turned into this miraculous youth. How divine he smelled …

  “Homework!”

  “I’m doing it!” Alice answered and pressed her tense lips to Eugene’s.

  Oh, what sweet torture! The girl could not resist. Her lips relaxed and submitted to his. This kiss was nothing like the nicotine smooches of the nerds from her school. Sensuous and sublime, it was a magical key that opened the maiden’s heart to her first, most elevated love. She lost any sense of time, although she still automatically answered Ksenia’s occasional questions, then greedily returned to his lips, as if she wanted to drown in this bottomless kiss. For a time, Alice detached her reason from her body, which her butterfly connected with his naked flesh in unison with her fluttering heart …