Kolia (9 page)

Bounine didn't perform. That was out of the question. He could barely hold himself upright with his two canes, but, nonetheless, he did attend the unveiling ceremony for the statue. To get through it, he imagined that all the dignitaries were as naked as the day they were born. He grumbled into his beard during their dull speeches and insulted them just for the fun of it, smiling broadly all the while.
Bunch of cowards. Your dicks are as limp as Chinese noodles.

Bounine died not long after the ceremony, but he lived just long enough to see the promulgation of a new law prohibiting censorship in the media.

THE DEMONSTRATION

BY OPENING THE DOORS TO THE
circus school, which admittedly he had done to make Pavel happy, Bounine had given Kolia a chance. Thirty years later and not long before he died, old Bounine would do one more thing for Kolia. He would get him out of prison.

It was 1988. The newly incorporated couple
were living quite well in their dacha. Every Sunday, Masha would come over for tea. She would arrive at 5 p.m., after having met Kolia at the train station in secret.

Kolia had resumed his old pickpocketing habits to kill time while he waited for her. A ruble note or two, a handkerchief, a comb. The object itself mattered much less than the act of stealing it. A successfully executed theft was a victory over the order imposed by others. It was the perfect square.

Masha was still consumed by her desire to shrink her body even further and somehow magically reduce the circumference of her bones. She had discovered that green tea was the most effective diuretic available, and she drank it by the gallon. Her days were an endless cycle of pumping herself full of tea, waiting for the urge to pee, and pumping it all out again. She was a machine. Both Bounine and Kolia preferred black tea, although in recent years, Bounine had taken to adding a little milk and sugar to his to make it weaker.

There were two teapots on the kitchen table. The one which Bounine had brought back from Japan was for green tea. It was made of cast iron. Loose tea was placed in the base of the pot and then hot water added, but not too hot. After the tea had steeped for three minutes, Masha would pour it into her large teacup. The other teapot was made of porcelain, and was reserved for strong tea. The samovar — too bulky, too Russian, and just too dull — had been relegated to a cupboard along with the pots and pans.

This Sunday would clearly be a quiet one. Clearly, because catastrophes like the one that was unfolding were rarely announced. Masha had woken that morning to discover that the glands in her neck were swollen, but apart from that, no, nothing. The messages sent by her body were often indecipherable. Someone rang the bell at the front entrance. Two of the three cups were full. Kolia got up straight away, upsetting the table and knocking a little Bounine the Clown doll headfirst to the floor. Masha choked on a mouthful of tea. It wasn't her boorish husband. On Sundays, he preferred to unburden himself with hookers and provide them with sons she would never raise. No. They weren't expecting anyone.

Bounine didn't move a muscle. Two male voices shouted Kolia's full name — at least they were polite enough to use his full name, which, under the circumstances, was in no way reassuring. As he walked to the entrance, Kolia banged his elbow. Two militia officers were standing on the veranda, their hats, which almost touched its roof, had set the bird feeder hung over the door swinging back and forth between them. The first officer pursed his lips repeatedly. A truncheon and a service revolver hung from his belt over his groin. Kolia nervously rubbed his elbow. They asked him for his papers. He didn't have them on him. He turned around and there they were in Bounine's outstretched hand. Kolia didn't look at Bounine, but he knew that the old man was afraid of absolutely no one in the entire country. One officer whispered something to the other after looking at Kolia's papers. He asked Bounine politely, but firmly, to step back inside. He took hold of Kolia by the same elbow he had just banged, and walked him to a dark, nondescript car, nudging him at each step to test his mettle. When the car drove away, the front door of the dacha was still wide open.

Masha took her cup of tea into the salon, started choking again, and burst into tears. Bounine closed the front door, first making sure there had been no witnesses, then joined her. He pulled an address book from the bookcase, licked his index finger, and flipped through the pages until he found the name he was looking for. He picked up the receiver and dialled the number. As he explained the situation to his old friend in Moscow, he patted Masha on the head as if she were a four-year-old.

Kolia was driven to a nameless, beige building he didn't recognize. The younger of the two officers led him down a grey hallway, once again holding him by the elbow. He was told not to look anyone in the eye, to keep his eyes fixed on the floor. It would go better for him like that.

Everything said to him was meant to discourage resistance and break his morale. He was led into a cramped office where an official was signing papers. This man asked Kolia the same questions for over an hour, and each time Kolia responded with the same answers, gradually raising his voice in frustration. Around 8 p.m., the official received a phone call which displeased him. His neck twitched with annoyance. He hung up. He started feverishly looking through the paperwork on his desk, and finally got up from his chair. He walked around to the front of the desk, leaned against it, and looked straight at Kolia.

“Everything's fine, Comrade Chatrov, you can leave. It's over. Wait here until someone comes to get you.”

Kolia was about to say something, but the official gestured for him to keep quiet.

Taking a different series of hallways, the same young officer, who seemed to relish handing out orders from the height of his junior position, walked Kolia back to the car, which was waiting outside. He climbed in beside him.

“You've got a mug that attracts trouble,” he said.

In another location just as anonymous as the first, Kolia swore that he was innocent. He might have lifted a few worthless items from passersby on the platform, but nothing serious. It was simply to keep his skills honed, out of love for his art. Sure it was a bad idea, but let's not make a big deal out of it. He hadn't killed any women or children. That was crazy. Again and again, the interrogator tried to get Kolia to admit he was the killer they were looking for. He refused to confess. And then they started beating him. He lost several teeth. This wasn't a standard interrogation. The interrogator's shirt was soaked with sweat. He had been leading the investigation into this crime for years. He had to lock someone up, and soon. On the verge of complete exasperation, he repeated the accusation.

“You murdered children. You killed prostitutes. You carved their eyes out. You ate the genitalia of little boys, and the nipples of little girls with blond hair. Why?”

Kolia responded “No!” to each allegation.

He had no idea what they were talking about. He had forgotten about the pain in his elbow. His battered face had swollen into a bloody mess of open cuts. In the adjoining room where he was permitted to urinate, the image in the mirror was the face of a monster. For the first time since Pavel's death, what he saw corresponded to reality. His ugliness had attained a state of sublime perfection.

He was interrogated for another fifteen minutes and then thrown in a cell with just a mattress, a jug of water, and a bucket, into which he spat a few teeth and a viscous red mass. For a moment, he thought they had stuffed a testicle in his mouth as a means of getting him to confess, but it was just a mixture of his own blood and phlegm and snot. That was good news, and he vomited into the bucket until there was nothing left inside him. They let him sleep for a few hours, curled up on the mattress in the stench of his own vomit to make it plain they no longer considered him a Soviet citizen or even a human being. Monsters didn't warrant that privilege.

When he woke up at the dacha, he told himself it was finally over. They had managed to bring him to his knees;
anyone else would have broken much sooner. He simply didn't have the energy to ask why. He had been allowed to return home. That was enough. Bounine's doctor gave him a sedative and injected him with a painkiller.

His lips were torn and swollen thanks to the diligent work of a young officer who had been trained by a group of neo-Nazis disguised as comrades. For more than a week, he couldn't eat anything solid. He was fitted for a partial denture and he looked like a wizened apple every time he removed it.

When the media in the West started showing interest in the case of the Rostov Ripper, the local police began to interrogate known homosexuals in the city — that was their mistake. Kolia had been seen hanging around the train station, which was located in the same part of town where most of the murders had been committed. He wasn't known to have a wife or a girlfriend. He was a peculiar individual who hardly spoke to anyone, born in the wrong place to the wrong parents. He had something of a reputation in the circus, but he was still a suspect.

After doing a little digging and cross-checking of dates, Bounine had provided the authorities with a rock-solid alibi that expedited his roommate's return from Golgotha. Kolia had been touring with the circus when the last two murders were committed. As evidence, Bounine presented newspaper clippings to that effect. Kolia was offered a full range of handy household products as compensation for his suffering. He would also be able to avail himself of the services of a very good doctor, who would be dispatched to the dacha immediately to repair the damage done. The young officer who had beaten Kolia during his detention was relieved of his post.

The serial killer was apprehended much later, after a very long investigation. His name was Andrei Chikatilo, and he was married. He was sentenced to death and executed in 1994, after being found guilty of the murders of fifty-two young women and children in Rostov between 1978 and 1990.

IMPLOSION

BOUNINE DIED IN HIS SLEEP,
just as he had hoped, in July 1991, one month before the failed coup attempt in Moscow. It was Kolia who discovered him in the dacha, on returning from the circus after an evening performance. The old man hadn't gotten up that day. His bedroom door was still closed. The cat hadn't been fed and its water bowl was empty. Monocle had jumped up on the table and ransacked a box of biscuits left there. Bounine always got up to feed his cat, even when his bones ached mercilessly. And if he couldn't, he always phoned the circus. His affection for Monocle was the only thing that had kept him connected to the material world. Kolia kicked the door open and found the old master in his final state of deep sleep.

Bounine had requested that he be cremated and that a pianist play Schubert's
Impromptu No. 1 in C minor
as the casket entered the furnace. The price for this musical sendoff was sky high. The Moscow circus offered to pay. The day after his death, Bounine's obituary appeared in the newspapers:
The circus artist Ilya Alexandrovich Bounine, celebrated auguste
clown, astute critic of his time, and master teacher to our best contemporary clowns, died yesterday, July 21, at his home in Rostov-on-Don. He was born in 1901. Named People's Artist of the Soviet Union, Ilya Alexandrovich Bounine was honoured with a statue in his likeness, which was erected on October 8, 1990, in Moscow near the former location of the circus.

Kolia was entrusted with the dacha and all the furniture within its walls, which also included the cat. The master's death sent the one-eyed Monocle to the briny deep in the autumn. Kolia sealed off the door to Bounine's bedroom, and at night, he did his best to convince himself that he didn't hear the sound of footsteps. After Monocle died, Kolia adopted another cat, which he allowed to jump up on his bed. It wasn't long before the cat's presence became absolutely necessary for him to fall asleep at night. After nightfall, the curtains in his room had to remain open. The lamppost in the garden gave off just enough light for him to distinguish his two hands in the dark. He would pull the blanket up around his head, as if it were chain mail, to protect him from what he couldn't see. In the absence of Bounine, Kolia feared running into his doppelgänger. But that would only last for a while.

Masha celebrated her birthday on December 25. Her husband had no interest in spending the day with her and had arranged to be elsewhere. They only spoke to each other when it concerned matters of household finance. He would be away in Moscow until the end of the week. After watching Gorbachev announce his resignation, which effectively put an end to the USSR, she turned off the TV and made up her mind to leave him. She had no idea how she was going to go about it, or whether she could even live on her own. The next day, Kolia welcomed her at the dacha.

He gave her his room and set himself up behind the French doors of the salon. The house began to take on new colours. Masha hung forest green curtains in the downstairs windows, and suggested they repaint the kitchen mauve. For her bedroom, she wanted a soft butter yellow. Kolia dug up the colours she requested in the circus's storeroom and brought back enough paint to cover all the walls in the house. New Year's Day was spent redecorating the dacha.

Masha laid down the law: no butter, chocolate, or cake, no semolina, polenta, or potatoes, and no fatty cheeses. Kolia learned to eat the banned items elsewhere. When carrots were available, she prepared carrot soup; when they weren't, she used beets or cabbage, and sometimes fish or chicken, if they were lucky. She made a fruit pie from a recipe she found in an Austrian magazine and delicious mushroom blintzes. She ate neither of these dishes herself. In the morning, she ate only kasha or ricotta cheese but never both; for lunch, she drank a cup of clear broth; and for dinner, she would permit herself fish or chicken, if there was any, with a light vegetable or some black bread. In the spring, she discovered her cheekbones, and she could discern her skeleton beneath her clothing. From that moment on, she started smiling more often. She had yet to start worrying about wrinkles.

She was always running, and Kolia could see that she was becoming even thinner. Before breakfast, Masha would go for a run that would last for an hour; before lunch, a thirty-minute jog; and at night, around six o'clock, she would go for another run, an hour and a half before dinner. After her runs, she would stumble back into the house completely famished, start cooking, sit down at the table, eat like a sparrow, and get up from the table still hungry. Each day, she repeated her cycle of starvation. She went jogging, he stole people's watches. To each his vice.

Kolia returned to the train station, which he had purposely avoided since his arrest. It wasn't long before he was plying his trade on the platform once again. But now he only stole from men who were carrying their jackets over their forearms or were in shirtsleeves; the others were too difficult to fool.

Sitting on a bench with his ankles crossed, he would read a novel while keeping watch for a potential victim. Once he had pinpointed an ideal candidate with the appropriate bounty — a wallet protruding from a pocket, a wristwatch, or a gold chain — he moved with absolute self-assurance, not even bothering to look around first. He would board the train right behind the well-heeled gentleman in question, brush up against him with a quick “Oh, I'm sorry — pardon me,”
and then back down the steps of the car to the platform, his prize in hand. He never got caught. He knew the employees' schedules, and he only went to the station every other day, never canvassing the same section twice in a row. He would find a vantage point, out of plain view, from where he could judge the probability of success of a particular manoeuvre, and once he had relieved his prey of the targeted trinket, that was it for the day.

Kolia had no qualms about stealing near a church. He didn't believe in God. And, more to the point, if the Church was sanctioned to deceive those sitting in its pews, he could certainly devote himself to this pious art. Most of his victims were hapless tourists, whom he would fleece while they studied his worn-out Soviet map. He never hurt or intimidated anyone. On occasion, he even made his marks laugh by showing them a few easy magic tricks. He stole without consequence, and it was a point of honour for him to never steal from a woman.

Each week, he gave a small amount of money to Masha for her personal needs, and to cover the cost of everyday expenses, which had skyrocketed — bread, sugar, bus tickets, train tickets, etc. From time to time, he would find something new on the store shelves and would bring it home to her as a gift. The price of a pair of designer jeans was prohibitive, but he bought them anyway, even if her waist was now smaller than the smallest size available. For himself, he bought a recent edition of
L'homme qui rit
, published in Paris. He spent the following months trying to get through the two volumes — his French was more than a little rusty. And somehow, they managed to remain oblivious to the current of uncertainty and violent change that had encircled their lives, as if it were nothing more than a voice-over.