The Sin Collector

MASHA

Masha woke up a couple of minutes before her alarm went off and lay there, staring fixedly at the wall across the room. Her father’s favorite Turkish carpet hung on that wall, one part shining bright red in a patch of sunlight, the rest a dull, shadowy carmine with black ornaments touched with blue.

Hanging over the carpet was a shelf holding the books from Masha’s childhood that she refused to give away. She sometimes read fifty pages at a time without her mother knowing, pulling out a tattered volume at random and letting it fall open. Sometimes it was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, sometimes Jane Austen or a Brontë sister. She loved perusing the pages she knew almost by heart. Other people liked to look through old photo albums, smiling nostalgically at the pictures from their childhood. But for Masha, photo albums were a chore. Pictures from before she turned twelve were no fun because her father was in them. In pictures from after, the problem was that he wasn’t.

From the other side of the wall came sounds of rustling sheets and labored breathing, and Masha, as always, shrunk away. Her mother usually spoke in precise, clinical terms, but she had once given in to mawkishness and called this particular activity “deliverance from solitude.” As far as Masha could tell—why did these walls have to be so thin?—her mother underwent the process of being delivered from solitude a couple of times per week. And every time it happened, Masha felt less like an honor-roll student, less like a bright-but-not-quite-beautiful young woman, and more like a queasy little girl left behind on the platform, watching the train pull away.

It was a very unpleasant feeling, and a humiliating one. It would be stupid to blame Belov, the stranger who washed in their bathroom and brewed his own special coffee in their kitchen, for—well, for what? For taking her father’s place? Or just for not being her papa? Yes, that was it. He was the UnPapa. The UnPapa sensed Masha’s antagonism and, capable psychologist that he was, took Masha’s side when things were rough with her mother, let her have plenty of space, and gave her silly presents. This alarm clock, for example, which played snippets of Glenn Miller swing tunes.

Just now the alarm clock sprang to life, and Masha vengefully let it play to the end. By the time the thing quieted down, the rustling in the next room had, too. Masha giggled and stretched. Glenn Miller was a little like Belov. He was great, sure, but nobody could stand swing music every morning. Masha picked her watch up off the nightstand, and gave her daily nod to the photograph hanging on the wall. It was a portrait of a man with a long, thin face and an ironic squint, whose hint of a receding hairline made his forehead look even higher.

“Morning, Papa,” said Masha. “Why’d you have to go and get murdered?”