Butterflies
“Will you come round by eight tonight?”
“Why?” she asked quietly.
“There’ll be a party… a farewell party. Will you come?”
Lika gave him a smile and a nod. They parted till evening. Her heart went with both happiness and sadness when she came to the porch.
Her aunt was not at home. Lika poured a glass of juice and dropped into the chair at the table. Then she began to tell the cats about the conversation she had just had with Vlad. No, it was not usual for her to speak to cats, but the situation was unusual. Vlad asked her to come to his place, and she urged to tell anyone about it. Coco seemed to become all ears, as for Dashka and Mashka, they did not get interested in the story at all. As those two understood that Lika would not give them anything to eat, they left the kitchen.
And Coco, screwing up her eyes and pricking up her ears, stayed still on the stool opposite Lika. It moved its ears every time Lika went on with the story after pauses. By the moment Lika came to describe the invitation itself, emotions flooded her over, so she choked and started to cough. Coco jumped down from the stool, her back arched; it stretched.
“Hope you won’t go, will you?” Lika heard a strangely muted female voice.
Still coughing Lika sprang to her feet and looked around. There was nobody. She wiped off the tears that had filled her eyes because of the cough.
“Who’s here?” she shouted out. Her own voice distorted with fear made Goosebumps ran up and down her arms; her back got cold at once.
“It’s me, Coco,” there was an unflappable answer.
Lika stared at the cat, which had sat in front of her on the floor and was now unblinkingly looking into Lika’s eyes. It looked downright normal, anyway, as usual: pricked ears and a bit uppity look. By all means, nothing had changed about it. Lika did not know what to think. To tell the truth, she did not manage her thoughts, which like bubbles in a glass of champagne emerged and went phut when dealing with the reality. “Is this a hoax?”, “Talking cats do not exist,” “Just for laughs gags?”, “Did I go mad?”, “Have I fallen asleep and see a dream?” “Yes! This must be it! This must be a dream! I’m sleeping!” the girl cheered at that salvatory idea.
“No, you’re not, deary” the voice seemed to grin. “I’m talking to you in reality. By the way, it’s very difficult for me to provide sound chatter. Would you mind if I switched to a mental level?”
Lika kept on gaping at Coco. She had an itch to grab the cat and make it say something straight into her ear to make sure it was this fluffy creature that was talking. But she saw some kind of bellicose fire in the cat’s eyes, and it stopped her. “It’s a slumber,” she concluded. She had ignored Coco’s question and tried to remember the moment she might have fallen asleep. She attempted to trace back the events from the moment when she came home, got changed, went to the bathroom to wash her hands to the one when she proceeded to the kitchen and poured a glass of juice… No, she could not get the moment she had dropped off. That turned her incredibly upset.
“You don’t remember, do you?” Coco questioned from the far kitchen corner. It was now lying there on the floor with the same uppity smirk if you could say so about a cat and of what Lika had no doubts any more. It was eyeing her.
“Don’t remember what?” Lika was finally distracted from her thoughts.
“The moment you’ve caught off.”
“How come…? Are you reading my mind?”
The awareness of this fact decisively dumbfounded the girl. She sat down on the stool, clutched her head and leaned over the table. “I am sleeping,” she pronounced trying to sound as more convincing as possible.
“No, you are not. I am reality, deary” arouse in her head, and Lika understood at once that they had not been her own mental words. She reproachfully looked at Coco. “I’m sorry,” it went on in her head, “You haven’t allowed me… but it’s really difficult for me to speak audibly… Anyway, you don’t mind, do you, deary?”
Lika was being so tired of sorting out what was going on that she decided to accept the situation as it was. She hardly felt ready for the dialogue when “thank you” came in reply.
“Well-well, still planning to go to the party?” Coco asked Lika sending her thoughts to the girl mentally.
Unsettled by the event with the talking cat, Lika completely forgot about Vlad’s invitation. However, she almost recovered her poise, rooting herself to the thought that nothing was impossible, not excluding talking cats. The most important thing about it was to keep it secret.
“I’m going. It’s settled,” exclaimed Lika.
“Don’t you shout! I can perfectly hear you, even the things you don’t pronounce,” the current of alien thoughts flew into her brain.
“And that’s what I don’t like,” Lika answered in the same mute way. “Anyway, it’s none of your business. It’s up to me to decide! And you’re just a cat of mine,” she added loudly.
“Am I just a cat?” Coco interrupted the girl.
“You are just a cat even if you can talk.”
“So you’d prefer to join the party than to have a chat with the talking cat? After all, it’s not every day that you get a chance to talk to the cat that can answer you. You might be even the only human in the world that’s been given such an opportunity!”
“Do you mean it’ll all finish tomorrow, and you’ll become an ordinary cat again?” Lika asked cheerfully, and a sad sigh was the answer to her.
“Indeed, nothing concerns nowadays humans except their own primitive desires.”
“You, who is constantly sleeping and eating, dare tell me this…” Lika loudly resented.
“That’s being a very superficial judgment, deary. Outward inaction doesn’t always imply inner passiveness. Appearance can…”
“I guess that’s not your case,” Lika unhesitatingly broke the flood of the cat’s thoughts. “Generally speaking, I should be getting ready for the party,” she declared and proceeded to the bathroom having picked a bathrobe on her way. “I have no time to chat with you,” she added as she imagined herself wearing a short pink dress, beautiful high heeled shoes on her slender legs, the dark locks of her hair is blown on by the wind the same way as in a shampoo commercial while she would be walking across the yard to Vlad’s porch. And at the same moment he would come up to the window and would see her so incredibly beautiful that it would make him lose his head.
“Like in a cheap romance,” Coco sighed.
“Do not listen nor watch if you don’t like it!” Lika retorted and defiantly slammed the bathroom door shut.
She opened the tap and got under a cool flow of water. She still hoped she had been dreaming of the talking Coco. She even turned the water cooler; hardly holding back the holler because of the cold pouring down on her.
“Don’t catch a cold,” she heard the cat’s muted voice from behind the door.
Lika shuddered with cold or probably disappointment. The cold water did not work. Her own thoughts were still floundering. She was trying to think about Vlad, but the image of the talking cat extruded everything. “Might they exist? I must google it. There must be someone who’s already come across it… What if no one? What if…? Oh, no! What if I got cranky? What will they do? They’ll take me to the asylum! No, no, no! I can’t go there! I won’t tell anyone about Coco, no means! And what if anyone hears me replying her? Argh! Why is it so difficult? I’ll have to be on the look-out all the time. Oh, it’s so tiring…”
“I won’t speak with you in other human’s presence,” Coco interfered into the flood of Lika’s uneasy thoughts.
“It’s very kind of you,” Lika said loudly and spitefully.
“I will do you some good only if you don’t go to the party.”
“What?” Lika shouted indignantly. She put on the bathrobe and opened the door. The Coco was sitting in front of her as if nothing had ever happened. “My own cat intends to control me. It’s too much for me! Why can’t I go to the party I wonder?”
“I have nothing against parties.”
“Does this mean you’re against Vlad? What has he done wrong? Anyway, you don’t know him at all. You’ve never even seen him!”
“Nevertheless, I know he’s got a rare blood type,” hissed Coco.
“What…? What’s it all about?” filled with indignation, Lika could not find the words to say. She headed for her room. There, she strode from one corner to another pretending she was looking for her dress. She now looked into the closet then opened the door of the bedside table and then for some reason she turned on and turned off the light. She felt aggrieved at the cat’s words. But finally, Lika got tired of endless hubbub in her head and ordered herself to stop that. She opened the window wide and got the full lungs of fresh air, held the breath and then slowly breathed out. Then she had another deep breath. So that was the way she stood making herself breathe deeply and regularly avoiding any thoughts.
“Well,” she said to herself “I’m perfectly well now! I’m ready to get ready.”
Lika shut the window and opened the wardrobe. She took her favorite dress out of it and was about to put it on when she heard the sound of the opening front door. It was Aunt Ann.
“Lika, are you here?” she heard her aunt’s sonorous voice.
Lika went out in to the corridor with a bit of circumspection.
“Something wrong?” Aunt Ann got anxious at once.
“No!” almost shouted the girl and stared at the cats. All three of them were persistently rubbing against Aunt Ann’s legs purring loudly.
“Did they behave badly?”
“No. It’s Okay,” Lika made herself sound calm.
Aunt Ann brought some warm buns from the bakery. And when they sat at the table to have some tea, Lika told her about Vlad’s invitation not mentioning a word about Coco. Aunt Ann was not pleased by the fact of the invitation but she was not going to keep Lika out of it. She just asked Lika to come back home until eleven.
Lika was perfectly happy with the way she looked that evening. That hue of pink harmonized with her brown hair, which Aunt Ann had made into beautiful locks. Eyeing herself in the mirror, Lika smiled and tried to imagine Vlad’s face at the moment he saw her.
“What if he tries to make a pass at you?” it suddenly shot past in her head. She shuddered.
“Coco, are you here?” Lika turned round in search of an uppity cat muzzle, but it was not there.
“I’m not in the room, but it’s been me who asked you that,” it repeated “So what’s then?”
“It won’t happen,” the girl answered turning red at the thought that she could not be one hundred per cent sure of her own words; her heart banging against the ribs and her palms wet.
“Oh, you’d be a brilliant actress with such an ability of uttering something that you don’t really believe in,” Coco said. Lika got all the bitterness hidden behind the words at once and felt ashamed. She wanted to say some words in her own defense, but silence was the only answer to her.
Chapter 4
Secret
Trying to breathe deeply and slowly, Lika stretched out her hand towards the door-bell. The hand was trembling, and she put it down without pressing the button. Two minutes had gone before she made herself calm and was able to press her finger over the door-bell forthright.
“Hi!” she blurted out as soon as she saw his face in front of her after he had opened the door.
“Hi!” he answered falling into the depth of her eyes. Time came to a sudden standstill. Both of them seemed to fall out of the reality going on beyond the world and time. But the enchanting moment was ruined.
“Hi, Lika!” Emily shouted from the corridor, “Why have you stuck there?”
Vlad and Lika smiled at each other.
“Why are we standing here, indeed? Come in, please,” said Vlad and took Lika’s hand in his one, “Make yourself at home.”
Along a wide corridor they went into a large bright lighted room. There were seven people there – most of them were their classmates. Vlad’s best friends, Oleg and Malik, were talking with Ariana and Angelica, pretty girls from another eleventh grade. Anton, another classmate, was speaking on the phone aside. Vlad brought Lika closer to the armchair in which a lad looking a bit older than themselves was sitting. He might be nineteen or twenty. He had an attractive and very kind face, but his big eloquent eyes were hiding sadness. When Vlad introduced Lika to the guy, he smiled, but his smile was full of rue as well. Lika was about to recognize that smile when Vlad said that Sergei (that was the guy’s name) was his cousin. It made her recollect the fact that Vlad’s aunt who must have been Sergei’s mother died in winter. Lika smiled in return. She did not know why she felt some kind of solidarity with him. That was, probably, because she, having grown up without a mother, was able to feel the same pain as he did. And though her mother was alive, she sometimes forgot about it.
They had a little chat with Emily who had just come up to them. Emily was beautiful, tall, and slender. Her eyes were so black that you could not say whether they had pupils or not. The strange magnetism they disseminated embraced and hypnotized everyone who dared look into their depth. And at the moment, she was trying to catch Sergei’s eye to enchant him with her magic.
Somebody turned on the music. It made it difficult to keep on talking. Ariana and Angelica stepped into the centre of the room coiling in a dance. Somebody drew the curtains, and it got almost dark. The girls’ bodies turned into a weird game of light, shades, and crimson glitters, which was added by Angelica’s bright dress.
As Lika did not want to dance, Vlad offered to show her around the flat. She was happy to leave the room, which was trembling with the loud rhythms she had never been fond of.
Vlad’s room surprised her with its orderliness and minimalism. There was just a sofa, a wardrobe and a table with an armchair near it. On the window sill two flowers in pots seemed to look out into the yard as if they felt lonely in the almost empty room. A photo frame on the table looked lonely as well. Lika picked it up to view it more closely. It was definitely well-turned. A twelve-year-old Vlad and his parents, a happy smiling family, were looking at her from the picture. Love, bliss, warmth and something else, which seemed to be quite familiar but completely forgotten, emanated from the photo and made Lika’s heart ache. She remembered her mother. She often called her to mind but did not allow herself to think about her for too long. So this time she did the same sweeping those thoughts away and looked around at Vlad.
“Where’s that?”
“Crimea. Sevastopol. Look,” he started explaining pointing his finger at the back scene behind the image of his father, “This is the monument to scuttled ships. You can see a small part of it.”
“Oh, yes, I can. It’s a very beautiful photo. You’re so happy here…”
“Yeah, I like it too.” Vlad nodded, and his smile became much warmer as if the southern sun from the photo could really warm him. “Have you been to the sea?” he asked.
“Only in my dreams,” Lika smiled.
“The sea is magnificent!” he uttered with inspiration, “Nothing compares to it. You should see it by all means,” he added looking into her eyes and moving his face toward hers, “It’s like your eyes…”
Lika closed her eyes and felt the same lightness and desire for flight as she had in her dream at night. His breathing so close to her face reminded her of the touch of the white butterflies’ wings.
Lika was about to pull the bathroom door when she heard Emilie’s voice coming from there. The talk was about Rita. What Lika heard plunged her into shock. She stood there rooted to the spot; something cracked deep inside her. It was about her hopes and dreams that were collapsing. A minute ago she was the happiest girl in the world; her dream being so close to coming true befuddled her. Happiness had been so close that she had almost caught hold of it, and now it was spilling out just like sand through her fingers. Poor thing, she wanted to go down the drain, to vanish, to stop being not to hear what she had got to hear but could not make herself get under way. She could not even make herself release the door knob clasping it so hard as if she wanted to force all her pain inside it. Tears went pouring from her eyes, and somehow it made it difficult to breathe.
“Does Lika know?” brought her to life. “Do you think we should tell her?” made her let the knob out and withdraw. She did not even remember to pick her bag from Vlad’s room. She ran away without saying goodbye to anyone.
In the yard she breathed in evening chill, and it turned her to breathing normally. What she could not do at the moment was to come back home with her eyes being red from crying. She had to be back with a happy expression on her face at any price otherwise she would never dodge Aunt’s persistent questions; and her aunt was quite skillful at getting answers to her questions.
Lika looked up at her own window. It was dark whilst the neighboring window had a clear cat’s silhouette pictured in the bottom of its illuminated frame. “Coco?” she asked herself recollecting the talking cat at once. “I might’ve died… Everything that happened today wasn’t real, it can’t have been real! I must have died,” she ingeminated looking at the window.
“You can say so,” it overblew inside her head.
“Coco?” she asked.
“Oh, you get used to recognizing me. Well done.”
“So I’m really dead?” Lika inquired and the placidity spilling all over her body surprised her.
“Every single day is a short life, and every single night when you fall asleep, you die. Today you differ from yesterday you, and it won’t be today you who’ll see the light of dawn tomorrow. It’ll be another person, another you, a new you. Surely, you’ll have the same face and the same body, but your look will never be the same again, your smile will change, your gestures will transform because today you’ve got some new experience, you’ve filled your heart with some new content, and at night you’ll die to meet a new you in the morning.”
“And pain? Will it go with the night?”
“Is pain that bad?”
“I don’t know… It’s sometimes unbearable,” Lika said and remembered once again how it felt when the world she lived in collapsed. The pain’s clingy grip on her was still tight. “Tomorrow, when I wake up, will it still hurt?”
“Only if you want it. It can be different. Lots of people want pain. They can’t live without it.”
“People don’t want pain,” Lika uttered wearily and shrugged.
“Why do they let it germinate then?”
“Probably, they don’t know how to live without it?”
“Well-well-well, let’s see… I’ll take the lid off and explain how to live without pain, and we’ll see whether it will work for you.”
“I think I’ll be able to live without pain,” Lika started warming up.
“Then stop antagonizing life. Take it as it is with all its perfection and malformation, sublimity and ignobility, genius and lack of talent, excessive loyalty and betrayal. Life… life is not what we think of it. It’s much bigger, wider, and deeper. You just need to overcome the borders that cut you off the life infinity.”
“What borders?”
“The borders that divide the world into black and white, good and evil, right and wrong, joy and pain…”
“Don’t we have to know what’s good and what’s bad?” Lika did not allow Coco to finish.
“You already know the difference, you can’t deny it, but you can learn how to perceive both of them just as an experience. Stop coloring your life in black and white. Let it be golden or violet, moreover, you’d better let it shine with all existing colors.”
“Is this the secret?”
“Yes. You just stop weighing everything and everyone on your scales.”
“It’s something abstract. I thought you’d give me some precise instructions…” Lika sighed.
“Want instructions? Then try to enjoy the pain that is inside you now.”
“What nonsense! How can you enjoy pain? Do you think I am completely mad?” Lika rebelled; she tried to see the cat’s eyes in the lighted square of the window.
“Right you are, it’s almost impossible to enjoy pain. Do you know why?”
“Pain is displeasing… unbearable… you want to get rid of it,” Lika bitterly pronounced the words, and chills covered her. “Pain kills… it penetrates inside and gets stuck… it… It bites your soul, gnaws it and overcasts it with rooting wounds that keep on nagging. And then the pain will always be a part of you. It’ll never leave you, and you’ll never get used to it. You may forget about it for a while, you may look aside, but it’ll summon you and then it’ll devour you turning you into a wreck and then you’ll die. The pain will kill you…” with her head and shoulders down, she seized talking and felt depressed because of all the words she had said.
“Great. Pathetic. And it’s somehow true within the limits of your own world. Nothing more than stereotypes.”
“And what is out there beyond the limits?” Lika asked automatically though she was not really interested. At the moment she was captured by her own pain. She was fighting it and pressing it out of her soul.
“What do you do when the traffic lights turn red?”
“Why?…” Lika asked but no answer made her give hers. “I stop, of course.”
“And you don’t want to kick the traffic lights off the road, do you?”
“No, I don’t,” she answered quietly having realized at once the point of the question. “Do you mean it’s the pain conception that makes it feel wrong?”
“Not conception, but non-perception,” Coco corrected Lika and fell silent as if giving the girl an opportunity to think over everything they had discussed. In a minute the cat went on. “Enjoy the pain… the same way you enjoy good feelings. Common, feel its depth… make it stronger… concentrate on it, but don’t try to fight it… try to hear its calls, accept it and enjoy it. Common! You can do it!”
Lika stood still gazing inside her heart. She followed the cat’s instructions just because she wanted to prove Coco that its advice was useless.
“I can’t!” she shouted out with astonishment.
“You can’t?”
“I can’t enjoy the pain,” Lika stated with embarrassment, “There’s no pain…. It’s gone…”
“No, it hasn’t. Traffic lights can’t move. You’ve accepted the pain and the red lights have turned green.”
“That’s incredible!” Lika was amazed, “Is it that easy?”
“Genius lies in simplicity as they say. Another thing is difficult, deary…”
“Which one?” the girl was eager to get the answer and to overcome any difficulty.
“To remember to use it in the moment of pain… you know, a habit is a second nature,” Coco concluded, and Lika understood at once that the conversation had come to an end.
The girl was walking around pondering over Coco’s words. The thing that amazed her most was that the pain had really gone. Previously, she would replay what had happened at Vlad’s a hundred times in her head recalling all the details of the conversation she had heard, assigning more and more tragical meaning to the words, and feeling pain mercilessly tearing her heart into pieces. But now she could not and did not want to remember certain words as if the whole situation had cringed and shrunk and had turned into a small glass ball, which you could hang on a Christmas tree.
“How funny… Pain isn’t that awful if you try and see another point of it,” Lika thought and looked up in the darkened sky performing its first stars. “Mom,” she called quietly. Somewhere deep inside her soul she believed that her mother’s heart could hear her calls coming from the far part of the world. “I love you, Mom,” she whispered fervently, and two teardrops slipped down her cheek. It had been ages since she said these four words last. Even thoughts about her mother had hurt her a lot because they had caused her inexpressible pain that could only be born in the heart of an abandoned child. As a child and later as a teenager, memories so often took her back to the moment when her mother was packing a suitcase picking her own and Katie’s clothes from the wardrobe while Lika was walking on air being sure they all were going on holidays. She was crooning the song that was coming on spot as she was thinking what clothes she wanted to take with her. Finally, she picked out a pink skirt with lace and put it into the suitcase commenting on where she would wear it. But mother was not happy about it at all. She knelt in front of the girl, and Lika could see tears in her eyes. Mom embraced her and began to tell her something about their family and their problems, but Lika could hardly understand anything except the thing that something bad had happened to their family. Even after Mom had told her that Lika would have to live with her father since then, the girl did not realize that Mom and Katie were leaving for ever. It took her several months of waiting in vain, bitter crying at nights and rare short chats on the phone during which Mom used to tell her one and the same thing – she loved her and missed her but could not tell when she would come back – to understand it. Little by little, those phone calls came to naught, tears of yearning raged themselves out, and only expectance of a meeting tightly rooted in her heart occasionally reaching her in her dreams at night. In those dreams she saw herself as a toddler sitting on her mother’s lap and feeling one mother’s hand brushing her hair while another one gripping her shoulder. There was some kind of special warmth coming from her hands, which filled her whole body and warmed her soul. It was that very warmth she felt now instead of the pain she had used to, and at that very moment the day that had tortured her for so many years turned into another “Christmas ball’.