The Sin Collector

MASHA

Masha waited for Julia Tomilina’s best friend next to the entrance to her apartment building. The woman was running late. Finally, the door opened a crack, and from the dark depths, a bright-pink stroller emerged. Masha jumped up and held the door open while Tanya Shurupova, squinting with the effort, shoved a double-wide baby limousine through the narrow doorway. Drops of sweat were rolling down her pretty face.

“Thanks,” Tanya panted. “Phew.” She wiped her forehead and smiled at Masha with embarrassment. “You don’t mind if we talk in the park, do you? The twins just fell asleep, and I need to keep moving or they’ll wake up and start yelling.”

Masha smiled. “Girls?”

“No, they’re boys. The pink stroller, huh? It’s a hand-me-down from friends. Beggars, choosers, you know.”

She and Masha crossed the street with the stroller and walked into Yekaterininsky Park. Masha stole a look at Tanya. Her ponytail was pulled back with an ordinary rubber band, and there were dark circles under her eyes.

“Not sleeping through the night yet?”

“Sleeping! Ha! First one sleeps, then the other. I don’t even have time to eat. We don’t have grandparents around to help us, they’re all gone, both sides. And the government thinks those grants will make us have kids and solve the population problem!”

“What does make us have kids?” Masha broke in, having never considered the question before.

Tanya laughed. “Decent men. Men with their heads on straight.”

“So raising decent men is an important job, I guess.” Masha smiled, nodding at the two little bundles in the stroller.

“I’m doing my best,” lamented Tanya. “But will it work? Do you watch TV? They’re talking about polygamy! Those politicians think that if every man has three wives, we’ll start breeding like rabbits. Are you kidding? We’d be nervous wrecks is all. If you want people to have more kids, you need society to tell men not to have affairs, that you’re a shitty man and a shitty father if you cheat on your wife.”

“Would they stop?”

“Probably not,” Tanya said, tiredly. “But they might do it less. Nationwide, a good policy like that would make thousands of women decide to get pregnant. You can’t tell right now, but I spent five years making ads at a consulting company. Believe me, if we had every television, every movie screen, every online think piece talking about protecting families, about respecting them no matter what, we’d see results within a year or two. Not to mention five years, or ten! Russian men are lazy. Half of them have mistresses just for the prestige of it, or because they’re used to getting everything they want. And the female body is within their reach. Society says it’s cheap. Nobody’s going to judge you if you satisfy your physical needs. Our society is rotten. Right now, everyone’s writing about that oligarch who dumped his wife for some young girl. But what are they talking about? About what restaurants he takes her to! What kind of yachts and airplanes he gives her! Not one of those bastards ever bothers to write that he ditched his wife and their five children. Five! Sure, he’ll leave them some money. But kids need more than money.”

Tanya stopped suddenly. “I’m sorry to dump all that on you. You’re young, you probably don’t have kids yet. But the thing is, the most defenseless people are the old folks, children, and the mothers stuck at home with them all day. I really don’t care anymore what my husband is getting up to at eleven o’clock at night. I just want him to take over with these guys once a week, you know? It’s been three months since I’ve had time to go to the beauty salon across the street. It takes forty minutes to get my hair cut. I don’t have forty minutes!”

Tanya smiled at Masha morosely. “Sorry,” she continued. “You don’t want to hear all this. You came to hear about Julia, right? Actually, it’s connected with what I was just telling you. You said on the phone you wanted to understand what kind of person she was. She was perfectly ordinary. We worked together. I got married early, and then I could focus on my career. But Julia was trying to find herself a husband, so she was on the secretarial track. Looking for Mr. Right is a lot of work, and it goes badly most of the time! I mention that because Julia slept at my place pretty often. She’d show up crying with a bottle of martini mix, and I couldn’t let her go home alone drunk, so I let her sleep on the couch. My husband hated it.

“She went through some bouts of depression. No energy, something always ached, and she was always running into my office to whine, like a little kid. I actually talked her into taking meds for a while, an antidepressant called Smilify. Isn’t that silly? She made up other names for it. Spoilify. Shittify. So there wasn’t anything wrong with her sense of humor. I don’t know whether the drugs made much difference, though.

“The problem, basically, is that Julia really wanted to fall in love. Her life was boring. There was nothing keeping her mind busy. So, eventually, she did fall in love. With a married man. It didn’t bother her that he was married with kids. All these jerks have mistresses, so why shouldn’t Julia be one of them? He worked for our company, too, but he was the head of the northwest regional office. He traveled down here from St. Petersburg pretty regularly for business. A friendly guy, a little over forty. He took Julia on vacations, always brought her presents.

“Julia was insanely happy. Once I even heard her singing a love song in the ladies’ room. You know how it is those first months, when you get totally carried away. She kept coming to me for advice. Wore me out. She showed me all the lingerie she bought to wear for him, the new perfume, new stilettos with heels so high they’re only good for the bedroom. I couldn’t help being happy for her. The situation wasn’t so great, but Julia wasn’t depressed anymore, and I was grateful, just for that, to this Good Samaritan from St. Pete. So.”

Tanya fell quiet for a few moments. One of the twins squawked faintly and went back to sleep.

“Then one day, the worst happened. She came to see me with this twinkle in her eye and made this big production of showing me a pregnancy test. Positive. ‘What are you going to do?’ I asked her. ‘What do you mean?’ she said. ‘I’m going to tell him! Sometimes they just need a little push to, you know—’ ‘Julia,’ I told her, ‘he has his own kids back home.’ I did my best, but it was too late. She insisted everything was fine. He could transfer to Moscow, they could sell her apartment and buy a bigger one, near the park… Basically, she had these huge plans, and I figured I should mind my own business. Maybe they talked about him moving to Moscow all the time, and I just didn’t know about it. So I nodded, and she told me her boyfriend was coming in a week, and she would have time to put together some sexy romantic evening and share the happy news.

“I won’t bore you with the details: the beauty spa, the manicures, more new underwear. Vanilla candles. Bubble bath. Roses. Some special recipe for ham. Sometimes I blame myself, you know? I think that if I had been able to bring her back down to earth, even just a little, everything would have turned out differently. But they say that when you tell the truth, you lose a friend. And since I wasn’t even sure that I knew the truth, I kept quiet, I kept nodding, I gave her my approval, I even gave her the ham recipe.

“Finally it was D-Day. I ran into Julia’s boyfriend in the hall a few times that afternoon, and at meetings, and I kept trying to read, from the look on his face, how he would take the news he was about to receive that night. He seemed like a serious kind of guy to me, and I thought, well, you never know, and we’ve needed a new director for a while…”

Without changing her rhythm, Tanya rocked the pink barge back and forth, and straightened the little bonnets (those, at least, were blue) on the boys’ heads. She sighed, then turned to look at Masha.

“I’m an idiot,” she said, shrugging. “I had a feeling it wouldn’t end as well as Julia imagined. But I never thought it would be quite that bad. Apparently, after she delivered her news, Julia’s knight in shining armor froze for a couple of seconds, then started racing to get dressed. He must have felt too vulnerable to stay naked just then. He told her something like: (a) he never loved her, (b) he had only been using her for sex, (c) he loved his wife and children very much, and he didn’t need or want anyone else. Then he grabbed his coat, and that was it.

“Can you imagine how Julia must have looked? All her fancy makeup, not totally smeared away yet, her lacy lingerie. Her perfume all over the sheets. She lunged out of bed and starting breaking things. She said she went on a total rampage. Then she got dressed, tore her stockings, and went to the police station. She filed a rape complaint! I was terrified when she told me. I told her everyone knew they’d been sleeping together for months, and what about the baby? But she just turned away from me and said that the baby was gone.

“I tried to talk her into dropping the charges and forgetting all about that asshole. But honestly, I was pretty sure she was just trying to scare him. It’s one thing to freak out and make threats, but who would actually accuse someone of rape? That only happens in bad movies. And, honestly, I had my own stuff to deal with. I was house-hunting, trying to get a mortgage. But I saw Julia sliding back into depression. A couple of times I tried to recommend a good psychiatrist, but she said if she got revenge on that piece of shit, her depression would take care of itself.

“So she went for it, all in. She even testified in court. But the trial didn’t go well. It was as if she was the one on trial. They found people to testify about the affair. The guy testified about Julia telling him she was pregnant, and his lawyer demanded a pregnancy test. But Julia was the one who really ruined it. She described the whole sordid affair in such gory detail that she ended up going into hysterics right there on the stand. It was too over the top to be believable. And right in the middle, the guy’s wife jumped up from her seat and started shouting, damning her to hell and so on, like she was actually putting a curse on her!

“After Julia died, I found out the guy had left our firm, but some people from the St. Pete office told me he was just fine. His kids were growing up, his wife pampered him—she was probably afraid he’d cheat again. But I think he’s probably been scared straight. As for Julia… Julia quit, too, and went to work as a secretary at some little warehouse. I called her a few times, tried to get together, but it was like talking to a wall.”

Tanya laughed mirthlessly. “We’re all so alike, when it comes down to it. We all want love. Julia just ended up in a dark place. Somewhere you’re not supposed to go, even if you’ve really been hurt, even if you really want revenge.” Tanya mechanically brushed an unruly lock of hair away. “God, I really need that haircut.”

“If you want,” Masha said quietly, “I can walk the twins around while you go and get one right now.”

“Would you really?” asked Tanya, looking at her with a new spark in her eyes. But it quickly went out. “No, you can’t be serious. You’re a busy woman, you’re working. I’ll figure it out somehow.”

“I’m off for the day,” Masha said, smiling. “If you’d feel comfortable leaving them with me…”

Tanya shook her head. “No, thank you so much, but I’d worry about you. They’ll wake up any minute now. But thank you so much for offering, really! I’m very grateful.”

And they headed slowly down the path out of the park. Both women were thinking about Julia. Tanya was pondering women’s lack of power, how it could mutate into rage and villainy. Masha was thinking about what Tanya had said about the dark place. Julia had crossed over, blinded by the hatred that had grown out of love. And the door had shut silently after her.

She hadn’t even noticed the murderer standing there behind her.