Had the priest been of any help this time? What was it he’d said again – that if there’s nothing else you can do then perhaps pray for just that one person and that one person will sense it and pray for all the others? So there was some point to the misplaced praying, at least it was better than nothing at all… Only, if it hadn’t been Dmitri Dmitrievich there hiding behind that beard, if it really had been a priest there then here, right beside her, was an ordinary man. Would he sense that he was being prayed for and could he pray for the others?
She could have asked Dmitri Dmitrievich outright about it of course, but she had been unable to because it would have meant acknowledging how things really stood, and for some reason that kind of a confession was unthinkable to her – unacceptable, improper. Anyhow, she had already told Dmitri Dmitrievich twice that he shouldn’t be wasting his time and money like this, that he should get something in exchange and that she didn’t mind, but it wasn’t as if she could do more to force herself or her services upon him…
She could just ask, of course: Have you got a brother? And is your brother a priest? But it wasn’t right to pry into a client’s life like that…
Instead she listened as Dmitri Dmitrievich spoke. He was talking about the sun. Saying that the sun was probably not the one and only as we see it, but that there might be two suns… Or was it one sun with two faces? Natalya didn’t fully understand. In any case, one of them was an evil sun and the other a good sun; one was in fact black; even though it beams light to us, it is black by nature because it burns, scorches everything black. But the other one, the good sun, enlightens… How this could be true Natalya had no idea, but Dmitri Dmitrievich said that he had a big, thick book at home where it was all written down. Well, not written but illustrated, and the pictures weren’t real pictures, but hieroglyphs. That’s what he said – symbols… Natalya liked that word. So the symbols must be the pictures, lovely colourful pictures, only they had a deeper meaning. Dmitri Dmitrievich had found his tongue and talked about the book and the pictures in it as if they were from another world. He would have liked to show Natalya it, although he couldn’t cart it here to a strange bed – this bed was not the place for looking at picture books. Vova would probably have found it fishy, even if it was what the punter had paid for…
“You could come to mine one evening, when I have an evening off, we could have a cup of tea and look at the book…” said Natalya, finding herself blushing all over at the improper suggestion. “Of course,” she tried to rescue the situation, “if it’s not too much trouble for you to bring it round, and that – I live with my daughter in Lasnamäe, but I suppose it might be tricky for you to find it by yourself…”
“No, no,” said Dmitri Dmitrievich, “it’s not a problem at all, I’ve been to Lasnamäe many a time…”
Dmitri Dmitrievich gazed absent-mindedly through the window. There was nothing at all to see but the dingy greyish-pink, damp-blotched wall of the block opposite the old city’s narrow street. Perhaps the wall wasn’t so damp, just looked that way because of the snow that had fallen overnight, and that now drifted down intermittently in fuzzy specks whose dazzling whiteness cast greyness over even the sky and the occasional pedestrians scurrying by like strays, chins hunched between their shoulders… The building opposite was girded by a chest-high basement ledge that ran in a broken line along the wall. Above it ran rows of windows like soldiers, but tired, sickly soldiers in worn greatcoats, each slightly skewed, tilted, awry… Parallel to the ledge and above it flew a dark butterfly battling the wind, perhaps entirely black…
“A soul butterfly…” thought Dmitri Dmitrievich and flinched – but butterflies weren’t out at this time of the year, were they? There are no butterflies in winter. Perhaps it was a charred piece of paper – perhaps someone had for whatever reason burned some paper and a scrap had fluttered out of the window. But a piece of paper would have floated down; it would not have battled the wind, level with the ledge in the wall of the building… Perhaps the butterfly had slept somewhere between the windows or in a dark staircase and something had woken it… Was it in fact a real butterfly and not a hallucination? But Dmitri Dmitrievich was not inclined to hallucinations… So more likely it was a real butterfly that had broken loose from somewhere – perhaps some soot had found its way into the basement, the butterfly had woken up, flown into the yard in fright, and was now battling its own death…
Dmitri Dmitrievich felt sad – whether for the butterfly or himself he didn’t know. He was confused. He had always regarded women as beings that had been brought into the world only as a temptation. He neither despised nor hated them – perish the thought! On the contrary, he admired them, and that was his greatest weakness. He was otherwise something of a slouch – if he had the opportunity to eat, he ate more than he needed, and was unable to refuse good food, and the same was true of booze. Although he never got properly drunk, there was no question he enjoyed good wine and stronger drink, even vodka in cold weather, and the feeling of his head spinning gently, but no more than that… And it was of no great concern to him if he’d run out of tea at home or had no dry bread somewhere in a cupboard corner. He would simply boil some water, hot water was great, and it dulled hunger. It even lifted his mood. Neither food nor drink were real problems.
But when it came to women – they were things of beauty, fragile and exciting – even the ones who were wrinkled and haggard, even the ones who aroused pity on sight… or the slatternly alcoholics with bloated faces curing their hangovers with a morning beer outside Tallinn’s main railway station – the very sight of them was downright painful… But then there was something more fragile, more lovely about them than there was with men of that ilk… Of course he had tried to convince himself that there was nothing more special about women than humans in general, or indeed any living creatures, that their special magic was merely the product of their own sensuality. No amount of sermonising was any use. There was no way out; it was completely hopeless. Time and again when he had to talk to a woman, explain something to her, and he was unable to avert his gaze from her delicate, smooth skin and the curves of her cheek and neck, he would feel his excitement rising, want to kiss the curves… and the rest, of course. Women were so trusting; they had no idea of the danger they embodied… Once Dmitri Dmitrievich had feared he could endure it no longer. That would have been a disgrace – he would have been deemed mad. And then he definitely would have been unable to carry on living.
Vova was the way out. Through Vova he’d obtained satisfaction for some time now. Each time he bought a service through Vova, he convinced himself with the thought that it was just like eating and drinking, he was just satisfying his appetite, a foolish rubbing. If only he had the will, if only he weren’t so indolent, he’d be able to make himself the focus of his energies, reach new heights…
A bought woman was good – with a bought woman everything was clear. She wanted money and provided a service in exchange for it – it was something you could envisage as mechanical, at least once it was over. You could imagine it as a temporary weakness that you might eventually, gradually overcome, one that the service provider recorded simply in the form of the banknote she earned. To the service provider it was just work… What’s more, at a place like Vova’s everything was matter-of-fact and freely entered into. There was no fear that young girls were held by force or that anyone was being treated badly. It was a safe, businesslike transaction. With an older woman… Or, as Vova put it – it was good for an older bit of skirt, a bit of a workout did them good – and the good thing for him was simply that it appeased his own body…