The Sin Collector

INNOKENTY

Innokenty sat on the stool and thought, gloomily, that he was going to have to get his suit dry-cleaned after this. Kolyan’s friend’s place was incredibly dirty. It wasn’t just dirt; it was filth elevated to a philosophical principle. And for the past half hour, Kenty had been talking with a philosopher, and suffering terribly because of it. Kolyan’s friend was not the simple kind of drunk, the conceptual kind. Instead, he was a drunk with principles.

The ordinary conceptual drunks limited their belief system to the dictate that a bottle should be split between three people, with some food to chase it down, if possible. But for the principled ones, drinking had a higher purpose, and it was a thinking man’s most worthy endeavor.

Leonid, a young man with a weak chin and thin hands, was pontificating. “We don’t bother anyone,” he said. “We don’t get involved in these managerial games of yours, sitting in an office, all these cheap attempts to justify our existence. We make no justification! In vino veritas!” he declared, jabbing one finger toward the peeling paint on the ceiling.

“I think you may be misunderstanding the meaning of that expression,” Innokenty noted, trying to find a position that minimized the contact between the fine flannel on his rump and the sticky stool.

“The truth is in the wine!” the other man translated for him, offended.

“No, that’s not quite it,” said Innokenty, flashing a quick grin. “Or rather, when they said that, the Romans didn’t mean that getting drunk put you in touch with the secrets of creation. They were only pointing out that someone who is drunk tells the truth, just like what we Russians mean when we say, ‘Drunkenness reveals what sobriety conceals.’”

“Oh yeah?” Leonid looked puzzled. Apparently, Kenty’s analysis had rocked the foundations of his philosophy.

“If you have no objection, let’s move on to Nikolai Sorygin,” suggested Innokenty.

“Kolyan? He was a good man. But he was a flower, you know?”

“A flower?”

“Yeah. I have this theory, see.” Leonid wiped his bony nose, which was covered in tiny black spots.

Innokenty raised one eyebrow in a polite expression of surprise.

“Some drinkers are the tragics. They drink because life is hard. Their wife left them, you know, or they got fired, or they got fired and then the wife left. Then there’s the Stakhanovites, the good Soviet workhorses. That kind has a wife, a girlfriend, all sorts of jobs and needy relatives, and nobody ever leaves him alone. Those guys do it just to relieve the stress, poor things. Next we have the black marketeers,” continued Leonid, speaking more majestically now. “They drink for the company. And the spleenists. That comes from the English word spleen.”

Innokenty nodded seriously to indicate he had heard of such a word.

“The spleenists have too much free time. Bored housewives, for instance. Or coddled little mama’s boys. Then there are the machos. They drink for the same reason some people get laid, to prove their worth as men.”

“Sorry—which group do you belong to?” By now Innokenty was desperate to get away from this disgusting place and its self-important drunkard. But the antiques business had helped him hone his conversational skills, and he knew that the only place to hook the golden fish that no investigators had caught would be in the stream of this speech. So he directed an attentive gaze into the man’s watery eyes.

“Oh,” said Leonid, languidly waving one hand. “I’m a philosopher. An observer of souls. For me, alcohol is a tool for learning about the world. But like I said, Kolyan was a flower. That’s when you drink the same way that you breathe. For him, vodka was sort of like the sun, or water, or the soil where he put down his roots. No family, no work, no extra ideas. Life carried him along in its current, free and floating.”

“Where did it carry him?” Innokenty asked, eager not to lose this gleaming fish in the murky water.

“Where do you think?” asked the increasingly unsober philosopher, surprised. “Same place it carries everyone. To death! He could never do anything to hurt anyone, see? Kolyan only wanted to drink and enjoy himself.” Leonid looked at Kenty over the vodka bottle and concluded his story almost biblically. “Like a bird, he came by his nourishment easily.”

He made a gesture, offering to split the rest of the bottle of Stolichnaya that Kenty had brought as an offering. Kenty shook his head, and the liquid flowed with a gentle gurgle into Leonid’s glass.

“Kolyan was a flower,” he said, drifting off now, “and they crushed him. Or they fed him the wrong kind of fertilizer.” His head fell to the table. Almost immediately Kenty heard a plaintive, whistling snore.

Innokenty took a deep breath and stood up. He tried to wipe off the seat of his pants, and sighed sadly. All that time down the drain, and dry-cleaning costs, too, with zero results. Could a fish even survive in such poisonous waters?

A flower, he repeated to himself, jogging down the dingy stairs. Before his eyes, an incongruous image flashed: blooming chrysanthemums, inked in fine lines like a Japanese print. Words of poetry raced around his head. Chrysanthemum buds, released by the rain again, rise from the soil. A haiku by Matsuo Basho, composed around the same time that Moscow was being built in the image of Heavenly Jerusalem.

Not that poor Kolyan will rise ever again, thought Kenty as he finally surfaced outside. What a relief to expel the apartment’s nauseating air from his lungs.

But Kenty was not pleased with himself. He hadn’t found out anything for Masha, hadn’t helped her at all. He got in his car and switched on the radio. Someone was singing a syrupy song about chrysanthemums blooming in the garden.

“Oh God,” moaned Kenty, feeling even guiltier.

It was time to go and admit to Masha how worthless he was.