Kolia (7 page)

LA MAISON DIEU

THE THOUGHT THAT HE
might get married one day was completely foreign to Kolia. With marriage came children and everything they entailed — and that was simply out of the question. He had watched Masha grow up, and that was the closest to fatherhood he could see himself coming. Theirs had been the perfect relationship: no real commitment or deep emotional attachment, which also meant no guilt or crushing sense of failure if she wound up as some sort of vile creature because she had taken a wrong turn.

Masha decided to forsake her father's circus dynasty to pursue her studies. She had always excelled at school, and was granted admission to the state university. She left her father to his liquor bottles and little balls of used tissue that accumulated into a spongy trail between the sofa and his bedroom. She hated stepping on them. She had no interest in comedy or mime. She wasn't as slender as her father, having inherited her mother's stockier build, and had put on weight when she turned thirteen, a little dough ball. She lacked the body strength and suppleness that were crucial for succeeding as an acrobat. She hated animals (cats being the sole exception) and just couldn't see herself as a clown. She distinguished herself in mathematics and had placed among the top students in her entrance exams. It wasn't long before her waistline narrowed, and boys began to be interested in something more than her lecture notes.

Pavel's health began to decline in the summer of 1981, and it fell to Kolia to keep an eye on Masha. What surprised him the most was the discovery of his own compassion for her; it proved to be as natural as it was unexpected. Initially, the two of them were not overly alarmed — it was Pavel's normal routine to spend forty minutes at a time in the toilet. But now he seemed to be literally decomposing as he sat there. He had set up a small table, with pen and paper, to take notes during his bowel movements. One morning, he noticed traces of blood in his stool. One week later, he passed out and collapsed to the floor. Masha found him lying in a cold sweat, and the sight of her father in such a condition shocked her so deeply that she couldn't go near the toilet for days.

Pavel's name ensured that he was admitted to the best hospital and given a private room. The diagnosis was liver cancer and it was made very clear to him that his drinking had caused it. The decision was made to initiate a rapid withdrawal. Pavel had no say in the matter. During the first few days, he sweated like a pig, shaking constantly and swearing incessantly. His nights were a stream of monstrous hallucinations — spiders, octopuses, cosmonauts and dogs returning from space with a third eye. And when he managed to get some sleep, he would wake up screaming, with no idea whether he was still in hospital or had, in fact, died. He hurled insults at anyone or anything that happened to be in the proximity of his bed, belching up bile that rivalled the stink coming from his scalp. Kolia and Masha simply added the insults to a growing list of injuries that included his diarrhea and the knockout punch of his breath.

For eleven months, Pavel dug in his heels at death's door, a door that everyone wished he would just walk through. His liver had turned to stone and the cancer had spread its poison to other organs; everything inside the big man's carcass was slowly shutting down. The doctor, a plump young redhead who more than filled her uniform, had been saying since June that it would be any day now. But “any day now” was taking its sweet time.

Once a day, Pavel's bloated body was given a cursory sponge bath. After years of a strict diet of apple wine and vodka, his face was almost unrecognizable. The flesh of his cheeks had melted away, leaving two hard welts, and his waxy complexion continued to jaundice, as if his catheter had backed up and his urine was trying to escape through his skin. A malignant yellow fluid seemed to seep from every pore of his body. The end-stage cancer drugs and the daily intrusion of toothbrushes wielded by overzealous staff had left his lips cracked and raw, and his gums swollen and bleeding. With his glassy eyes, he looked like he had just been stuffed by a taxidermist.

The afternoon that Pavel died, Kolia was walking in the park beside the hospital. He stopped to take a piss against a tree. When he returned to the room, he found Masha and Bounine sitting on either side of the bed. The various machines that had kept Pavel alive had all been disconnected, and someone had laid a sheet over the body.

The medal that Bounine had received in 1970 guaranteed him a comfortable retirement in a
dacha
in Rostov-on-Don, which meant he now lived at a substantial distance from Moscow. And, in the absence of a father figure, the twenty-four-year-old Masha turned to Kolia for strength. He had no inkling that she was about to fall so far.

As winter set in, she started staying out all night. Kolia wasn't overly concerned; it meant she would probably wind up finding somewhere else to live. But each time she returned to the apartment, it was in the company of a different young man. This, in itself, didn't bother him — she had the right to have some fun — but the men were getting older and older. One day she walked into the apartment with her catch of the day and Kolia was sure he was at least twice her age. He was bald and had the belly of a sea lion.

That evening, he attempted to raise the subject with her, but Masha was livid.

“What are you, some kind of monk?”

“No, I'm just discreet. That's all.”

The teacup that Masha launched at Kolia barely missed his ear and shattered against a cupboard.

“You spent way too much time with men when you were a kid, Kolia.”

“Not in the way you think.”

“Are you jealous?”

Kolia felt like slapping her. He tried to change the subject.

“You've been wearing some pretty nice clothes lately.”

“So what?”

“And a lot of mascara.”

“So what?”

She started walking towards the door, but Kolia grabbed her by the arm.

“And what about the jewellery? That's new.”

She freed herself from his grip and ran around to the other side of the kitchen table.

“I paid for everything with my father's money.”

“What money?”

“My daddy's money.”

“Which daddy?”

“What do you mean, ‘which daddy'”?

“You know what I mean.”

The teacup was followed by the saucer, the salt shaker, and the cotton tablecloth. The salt shaker whizzed by him, but the saucer found its target, striking the back of his hand as he tried to shield his face. Masha slammed the door behind her, leaving Kolia sucking on his knuckles and spitting blood on the floor.

She returned three days later. While she was in the shower, Kolia went through the pockets of her coat. Some money, a few German condoms, and a small address book, which was full of phone numbers with no names beside them, just initials. He didn't know what to do. He was pissed off at Pavel for dying. Kolia called Bounine. He said he was just too old to worry about whatever Masha might have gotten herself mixed up in. She was, after all, the legal age for such shenanigans. He didn't give a damn. Kolia would have to deal with it by himself.

The irregular hours of Masha's new lifestyle apparently had no effect on her studies. Six months after the turnstile of admirers had begun its daily rotation, she received her degree from the university with honours. She was invited to enroll in graduate studies.

When one of Masha's companions showed up at the apartment two days in a row, Kolia was understandably surprised. The third time, the man in question introduced himself as Aleksandr. He was forty, blond, medium height and had a straightforwardness about him that Kolia immediately liked. He crossed his fingers.

And Aleksandr did, in fact, return. Soon he was joining them at the dinner table and bringing Masha gifts, which, although not particularly romantic, were very practical. After they had been seeing each other for only a few months, he asked her to marry him. She said yes. Masha was twenty-five. Kolia told himself that it was time.

She moved out of the apartment to begin a new life in Rostov, where her fiancé was the headmaster of an elementary school. With her Uncle Bounine close by, Masha was happy. Kolia found himself alone in Pavel's apartment, which now belonged to him. He had finally found a home, and at the age of forty-six, his life took another turn.

CIRCUS GIRLS

KOLIA HAD FREQUENTED THE SAME
prostitute since the thaw of the 1960s. She was tall with ash blond hair, which set her apart from her colleagues who tended towards the platinum blond of Marilyn Monroe. He had called her once a week, until she was finally accepted into the theatre, where she changed her look and her name, and disappeared from the ranks of the sex trade. After that, Kolia had to make do with the girls in the circus.

After Pavel's death and Masha's departure from Moscow, Kolia started to see himself differently. He was convinced that he was getting uglier. He could see the clear signs of aging, and his skin seemed to be sagging in a way that made his skull more prominent. Ever since he had watched Pavel self-destruct and melt away before his eyes, the image that the mirror sent back to Kolia was slowly internalized. Death was imposing its mask upon him. What he saw couldn't have been further from the truth. But he had no way of knowing that. Even though there was nothing repugnant about his face, he detested his reflection, and this unrecognizable image soon became an obsession.

At the time, Kolia was trying to put together a duo which would feature a young female auguste as his foil. He was still playing the pickpocketing mime in the ring, but would now regale the crowd with the occasional
Hello! Achoo! Watch out!
Hearing Kolia speak had become a highly anticipated part of the show. The act was also popular on tours outside the Soviet Union. Kolia had been granted a visa.

The new auguste
was named Yulia. He had seen her perform a short sketch at the end of her training at the circus school, and had hired her on the spot, before she even had her diploma in hand.

Yulia was half a head taller than Kolia. Thick soles were discretely added to his famous red shoes, whereas she wore flamboyantly large but flat-soled shoes in the ring. They were trimmed with little bells, and the toe of each shoe ballooned out as if it had been struck by a hammer. Her costume was suitably understated and consisted of tight-fitting slacks, a matching oversized jacket, and a navy blue T-shirt. She wore a short blond wig, topped with a tiny black bowler hat, which she attached to the wig with a couple of rusty safety pins. She didn't paint her face white, but highlighted her lips in a bold red, and put two red circles on her cheeks. Using an old bicycle horn, she crafted a purple nose that honked when she squeezed it. In the ring, she would appear at Kolia's side, playing a guitar with a broken string, always remaining in his shadow. Kolia hadn't made any changes to the costume which had brought him to the attention of the public in the beginning, excluding, of course, the minor adjustment to his footwear. Yulia said nothing during their act, and with the neutrality of her outfits, it was difficult for the audience to determine whether she was a man or woman. The posters for the show presented her simply as “Little Bell.”
Kolia kept his name.

In the beginning, he attempted to adapt the sketches he had performed with the Bounines to their new duo, but it wasn't working. Little Bell's character didn't lend itself to the role played by Pavel, and even less so to that of Bounine's auguste. Kolia spent the entire summer of 1983 with the circus's staff writer, developing a dozen original sketches for the duo to take on tour. By the end of their first few weeks of working together with the new material, they had found their voice, in a manner of speaking, and the duo caught fire — quite literally. To the delight of the crowd, one of most popular skits involved the immolation of a small mountain of books.

There was something about Yulia that fascinated him. In her eyes, he could see a childish innocence that he had never witnessed before in another adult. For the most part, people seemed to carry around a dark shadow that always kept him at a distance. Kolia wondered if this guileless generosity was a part of the persona she had created for the ring, or if it was actually her that he saw in those eyes. When they weren't in costume, she avoided him. Not, as Kolia imagined, because she didn't like him, but because she found him intimidating. Kolia, on the other hand, found her attractive, but didn't risk the slightest advance in her direction. Since witnessing Pavel's death and the absolute ugliness that death leaves on the body, he had become convinced that women would forever be repelled by the sight of him. He decided to concentrate on being Yulia's colleague in the ring, and to give up any vague notions of meaning something else to her outside it.

COMBUSTION

KOLIA TRAINED IN FRONT OF A
mirror for weeks on end until he finally found the grimace he had been searching for. It employed every muscle of his face and neck, and it was indescribably grotesque. He contorted his lips into a sinister smile, and closed his eyes until they were only slits, raising his eyebrows into two perfect arches which reached the middle of his forehead. His scalp was freshly shaved, and rogue hairs, indistinguishable to the audience, sprouted from his ears. This was the face from which the grimace took shape. He revealed it to the crowd for the first time during an innocuous sketch about tea drinking, and two young boys seated right at the edge of the ring burst into tears and started crying uncontrollably. Kolia could hear them. The boys' distress caused Yulia to lose her timing, and the instant she stepped out of character, Kolia felt a shiver run up his spine. He spun around and winked at her with all the confidence of a master improviser, and Little Bell stepped back into the ring without missing a beat. The goal was always the same — make the audience laugh so hard they forgot that, only moments ago, they were afraid. And when the house lights went up and Yulia could see the two boys smiling and applauding enthusiastically, she finally understood the essence of her art. It was something which couldn't be taught at any circus school. It had to be lived. It had to be experienced in the ring when the act was
on
. And if it had to be given a name, as if it were the most banal phenomenon in the world, it would probably be called magic.

Before Kolia could mount the sketch in which he and Yulia would set fire to an oil drum full of books, he needed permission. The circus management wanted to know what type of books would be burned and why. Kolia had commissioned a set designer from the theatre to create books with colourful hardback covers, containing blank pages that would feed the fire and make it last. Employing the taciturn style he had learned from Pavel, he explained that the books would be “blanks” and that the two clowns would warm themselves around the drum as they burned. As usual, management demanded to see the sketch before they would authorize it. The director decided that he could burn exercise books, but not books. They suggested that a bucket of water be poured on the fire from a great height, not only to extinguish it rapidly, but to leave the two clowns soaking wet, thereby providing the requisite comic element. Kolia flatly refused. The idea was an unforgiveable cliché used by clowns in American circuses. He was reminded that burning books was morally and politically questionable, and Kolia replied that the books he would burn hadn't been written yet. When asked why he wanted to do this, Kolia answered simply, “Because.” He turned on his heels, convinced of the power he now held, and walked out of the office, his costume under his arm, and his makeup kit in hand.

That year, images of Gorbachev, with his birthmark stealthily erased, began to appear in official photographs released to the media, and in propaganda. Walls plastered with posters of Madonna and New Order would soon be giving him a run for his money.