Butterfly

by Dmitry Vedenyapin
translated by Yuri Vedenyapin

It must be acknowledged
that lately,
biology
from the point of view of technology,
has made great advances.
For example, scientists
studying butterflies can these days
use tiny radio transmitters,
attached to the insect’s body
and do not in any way, at least according to the inventors,
impede flight.

Of course, back in the 1960s,
something like this would’ve been completely inconceivable,
and so my uncle, an entomologist,
had no other choice but to do it the old way,
marking his “subjects”
with regular waterproof paint.

Inspired by my uncle’s example,
I once caught
a small tortoiseshell,
which had flown onto our veranda,
and I, too, marked it,
by drawing on its back
a crooked “A,”
which was the first letter in the name of the village
where my parents were renting a dacha.

According to data from entomological studies,
small tortoiseshells can live for up to half a year
(from May to October)
and, unlike other species,
which lead more or less “settled” lives,

migrate freely
all over the Holarctic.
“My” butterfly, however,
turned out to be a homebody.
That summer I saw it
a few more times:
once in the backyard
and again on the veranda:
it sat down onto our cheesecloth curtain,
and, as it seemed to me,
good-naturedly and almost conspiratorially
winked at me
with its beautiful dark orange wings.

Yesterday, forty-seven years later,
in the forest, on a sunlit path,
not far from the Estonian village of Käsmu,
one thousand two hundred kilometers away
from Moscow Oblast’s Aleksandrovka,
I once again met “my” butterfly.
Of course, it wasn’t what it used to be:
it had gone gray, and it could no longer fly as swiftly,
but there could be no mistake—
a crooked childish “A”
is hard to confuse with anything else.

I am under no illusion,
it would be foolish of me
to expect anyone
to take my words seriously.
Besides, I don’t have any proof.
I suspect, though, that even
if some form of proof
(for example, photographs)
existed,
it would still fail to convince anyone,
just because
This Cannot Be.

And yet it is the pure truth—
just not of the common
and insignificant kind,
which, frankly, is of no use to anyone,
but the real truth:
shining and unassailable,
the truth
which is impossible to believe.