The Sin Collector

MASHA

Masha and Innokenty stood waiting at the apartment door, both of them uncomfortable. Masha felt awkward because she knew they were about to ask one of Innokenty’s acquaintances from his secret world of collectors about the vilest thing they knew: theft. Innokenty probably felt awkward because he didn’t know how today’s visit would affect his future business dealings.

The door finally swung open to reveal a gaunt elderly man in a faded old shirt and pants that had been ironed to a shine.

“Pyotr Arkadyevich Kokushkin,” the collector introduced himself. His breath smelled of cheap sausage.

Masha forced herself not to shoot an astonished look in Innokenty’s direction. He, meanwhile, seemed to have lost the keen sense of smell he was so proud of. He grasped the hand shot through with dark veins and contorted with arthritis, shook it heartily, and introduced Masha. Kokushkin muttered something welcoming and ushered them inside. It was completely dark in the apartment, and the only sound they could hear was the old man closing the door and setting at least ten locks in place. Then Masha felt a gentle prod at her back. Feeling her way along, she moved down the dark corridor.

The apartment stank of the frailty of old age: medicine, dust, mothballs. Finally, Kokushkin turned on a light, a single bulb hanging in the middle of the hall, and Masha gasped. Every wall was hung with pictures, crowded so tightly together it was impossible to see the wallpaper underneath. Lithographs, watercolors, pencil sketches, and scenes from the theater done in gouache paint. She saw famous signatures: Dobuzhinsky, Somov, Bakst. Masha froze in front of a sketch for the Ballets Russes, until she received another slight but palpable nudge. She turned around.

“This is for Nijinsky’s Afternoon of a Faun, isn’t it?”

“Yes, yes,” Kokushkin grumbled in agreement, and Innokenty winked at her. Masha hoped that meant she was making a good impression.

The room they entered was no less claustrophobic. The window looked out onto the wall of another building, and it was covered with a metal grate. There was no sign of any attempt to make the place cozy. No curtains, no flowers on the windowsill. A bookshelf stood in the corner, stuffed with volumes about art. There was one armchair, and a small dining set from the seventies. The place was like a remote, provincial hotel before perestroika. But the walls! Just like in the hall, they were covered in artwork. Masha walked along one wall, fascinated. She saw photo collages by Rodchenko, classical still lifes by Robert Falk, Nathan Altman, and Aleksandr Deyneka, and original book illustrations by Vladimir Lebedev and El Lissitzky. Masha was no expert on avant-garde Russian art or surrealism, but even she could tell that a fortune hung on these walls. Innokenty watched her, obviously pleased. The old man trudged into the kitchen, where a kettle was already whistling.

He returned soon, his felt house slippers flapping, and poured the tea into old cups with chipped rims. Masha took a sip of the almost-transparent brew. It tasted like old straw. Innokenty had somehow smuggled in a box of candy, and now he took it out with a flourish.

“Drunken cherries?” Kokushkin grinned in delight, rushing to rip the gleaming wrapper off the box.

Innokenty smiled. “Your favorite.”

“Ah, you remembered! You know what an old man likes!” Kokushkin’s wrinkled face filled with a look of sweet rapture, which did not fit his physiognomy in the slightest. He grabbed a piece and tucked it away inside one cheek. “I never buy myself chocolate. My whole life, there’s just two things I’ve loved: art and candy. I had to sacrifice one for the other. Actually, I sacrificed everything, not just candy!”

His Adam’s apple jumped as he gulped some sweet saliva. Then he turned to look at Masha, a little more favorably this time.

“Young as you are, you must be thinking, here I am, an old man sitting on a fortune, and I won’t even buy myself candy. A real miser, right? You wouldn’t believe all the people who have come to see me. Vultures from the bank, idiots who think it might be fun to invest in art. Ha! Nobody in Russia has any brains left! No honor, either, and no taste! We had art, once. We had one moment of greatness, and then it was gone, thank you very much to the Father of Nations, that champion of realism, all those Repins and Surikovs and their ilk! Get out of here, I told those dirtbags, go invest in your Aivazovskys and Makovskys, for God’s sake! But keep your dirty hands off my babies! Here’s what I’ve got for you!”

Kokushkin’s bony old hand flipped into an obscene gesture, and he thrust it proudly into the air. Masha gaped, alarmed and embarrassed by the man’s fury and by the chocolate-tinted spray from his lips.

Exhausted by this outburst, Kokushkin started coughing. Kenty had to pound on his skinny, bent back, and lift the man’s teacup to his lips. Their host slurped at the hot water, then sank, panting, into his armchair, which was covered with dainty flowers and less-than-dainty rips and tears.

“One of those little morons showed up here to fuss over me. Psychologists, they call themselves. This one said he’s writing his dissertation on how collectors think differently from other people. He even thought up a system to classify us, the idiot!”

“Really?” asked Innokenty with a smile.

“He thinks we collect because of childhood trauma. That we just have to collect something, anything. As if I didn’t even care what I collected! Stamps, candy wrappers, tchotchkes, whatever. Tchotchkes! ‘Sure, or I could collect jackasses,’ I told him, but he didn’t get the hint. ‘For you, Mr. Kokushkin,’ this jackass told me, ‘collecting is a psychological need dictated by your fear of death.’ Must have gotten that idea from that old quack Freud. ‘Collecting things protects you from the future and preserves your past.’ For God’s sake, what kind of past do I have that I should want to preserve it? My parents, shot? My two years in the gulag? And the future! In the future, this headshrinker said, we’ll have more and more of the investment types of collectors. You already know what I think about them.”

Masha sat and listened to the diatribe, uncomfortable. Even as he held forth, Kokushkin was racing through the box of candy. When it seemed completely empty, Innokenty winked at Masha again and lifted the padded sheet of paper, uncovering another whole level of treats. The old man grinned, and he picked up a new piece, turning it around lovingly in his fingers.

“That fool also told me about a type of collector who’s mostly interested in the social aspect of collecting. Like dumb kids, you know? He said when a couple collects the same things, they’re less likely to get divorced. Poppycock! I only had one love affair in my life, in the late forties, and she wasn’t some silly little biddy. Never scolded me for not giving her silk stockings, nothing like that. But when I told her I wanted to buy a fascinating miniature by Somov, the woman went reactionary on me! She told me I was fetishizing bourgeois art, the fool!”

Kokushkin turned to Masha. “What about you, young lady? Do you like Somov?”

“Yes, very much,” Masha said honestly. But even if she didn’t, even if she agreed with the long-lost lover that Somov was sort of petit bourgeois, Masha wouldn’t have had the courage to admit it.

“There you have it,” said Kokushkin, smacking his lips. “There’s a new generation now. Maybe they’ll have better taste. And there was one last part to his classification scheme.” Another in a long line of chocolates left its cushy, gold-plated nest. “This moron from the university told me that people collect art when they already have everything else. A house, a garden, suits from Savile Row. You know what really kills me, young lady? The idea that art is just a way to decorate their tawdry palaces in Rublyovka or some other ritzy suburb. Know how I bought my first paintings? There I was, still a grad student, a lab assistant. My salary was a joke. I couldn’t buy myself shoes, much less an estate. I bought my Lebedev then—for pennies, but even at that I didn’t eat for two weeks. I drank cheap kefir, I bummed bread from friends, I went around with holes in my socks. I let my beard grow so I wouldn’t have to buy razors. All I ever did for fun was wander around antique shops and run errands for old women, who later sold me these priceless canvases at a friendly price. Pretty soon everyone knew who I was, and you know what they called me? Crazy Pierrot, like the clown! Now I’m always getting calls from the Tretyakov Gallery, inviting me to their parties. They think if they get me drunk on cheap champagne, I might leave my collection to them. But these paintings are like my children. It won’t be too long till I die. Who can I trust to take care of them?”

Suddenly, the acrimony vanished, and the old man was all sentimentality, his eyes misting over. The transition was startling. This man could bring an audience to tears, thought Masha. His performance was worthy of Stanislavsky.

Out loud, she said, “Don’t worry, Mr. Kokushkin, you have some time to think about it. You’re still in very good shape! As it happens, Innokenty and I came to talk to you about the Chagall you lost a while back.”

“Come with me.” Kokushkin stood up with a wheeze and stalked out of the room.

Kenty and Masha exchanged looks, then followed him farther down the hall.

Kokushkin opened the door to a narrow room, and Masha and Kenty found themselves staring dumbly at a toilet, its plastic seat yellowed with age.

“You’re looking in the wrong place,” the old man croaked. He pointed around to the other side of the door. There, hanging perfectly at eye level for anyone sitting on the toilet, was a landscape of a Belarusian village by Marc Chagall. There were no lovers flying off into the dense aquamarine sky, but Masha—much as she did admire Somov—was always swept off her feet by Chagall. She gasped quietly in appreciation. Kokushkin was clearly pleased.

“That’s right. Those oligarchs might piss in golden toilets, but I’ve got a Chagall in front of my pisser! The older I get—and you know I’m not modest about these things anymore—I have the honor and the pleasure of staring at this little Chagall of mine many times every day, for a good long while, too.” Kokushkin pulled the door shut. “Is that the painting you’re wondering about?”

Masha nodded. “Yes.”

Kokushkin headed back to the living room and sat down stiffly in his armchair.

“They stole it from me. I get robbed all the time. It’s the cross a lot of collectors have to bear. Six months ago, they ripped off that Chagall, then a month later the police brought it back. I remember thinking they must have finally learned to do their job. I didn’t ask any questions—they just turned it over, thank God. A few years back I testified against a sonovabitch who robbed me and a couple of my friends. He got off, believe it or not! There he was, his face like a brick, the asshole! I’ll teach you to take my Zinochka, I thought—I had this wonderful study by Zinaida Serebriakova missing—you’re gonna rot in jail, you pig! Later Ardov told me—and he lost even more than me, ten paintings gone—that the thief had been hired by one of those gazillionaires to beef up his collection. So the guy was very selective. He knew what his boss wanted. He knew how to work the court, too.”

Kokushkin nodded to himself for a bit, and Masha took advantage of the lull to take a file full of photographs out of her bag.

“Mr. Kokushkin, I have a strange favor to ask of you. But I think, maybe, with a professional’s visual memory—” Masha laid out several enlarged photos of the arm found on Red Square the past winter.

“Well now.” The old man put on some ancient glasses held together with tape. He looked the picture over for a while, frowning in revulsion. “I recognize it. Sure. That’s him. The one who took my Zinaida.”

Masha froze. “Are you sure?” she asked, not quite believing her own luck.

Kokushkin pushed the photo away impatiently. “Listen up, young lady. I’ve got arthritis, osteoarthrosis, bad veins, and high blood pressure. But I’m not senile yet! No problem there! The lout’s name was Samuilov. He had two tattoos on his fingers. The whole time I was testifying, he was digging around in his ears with those fingers. Looks like he can’t do that anymore!”

“No, he can’t,” Masha said quietly, picturing a one-armed body rotting in a ravine somewhere. She gathered up the photographs and put them back in her bag. “Thank you very much, Mr. Kokushkin. You can’t imagine how much you’ve helped us.”

“Oh, I can imagine.” Kokushkin was still grumbling, but he was obviously flattered.

After a certain amount of ceremony at the door, she and Innokenty finally made their exit.

“There’s nobody like that old guy!” said Kenty enthusiastically as they walked down the stairs. “I’ve met a few collectors in my time, but there are legends about Kokushkin. He could be rich as Croesus, certainly have enough for electricity, groceries, even his precious candy. He only parts with a painting when he can exchange it for one he wants more. You didn’t even see his bedroom or his pantry. He’s got canvases lined up there in rows, facing the walls, and he knows where everything is. He’ll pull out whatever picture he likes, give it some light, dust it off, and hang it up—maybe in the bathroom!”

“He really did help us out, Kenty,” Masha responded. “Now we know that the arm they found with the stolen Chagall belonged to a professional thief.”

“Well, we could have guessed that, seeing as the painting was stolen.”

“Sure, but now we can do some more digging about that guy, and—”

“Maybe, my dear,” said Kenty, shrugging. “But it seems to me that the arm could be more like a symbol for thievery. We’ve been trying to figure out why these people, specifically, were murdered, right? With this Samuilov, it seems more straightforward than the others, doesn’t it?”

Masha nodded, still thinking.

Back at home, Masha hung up the phone, dumbstruck. Katya’s mother had just told her, in a strangled whisper, that Katya was dead. She had driven full speed into a concrete barricade on Nikolskaya Street. Death was instantaneous. The funeral would be Friday.

Masha’s mother walked in and asked, annoyed, where Masha had left their car this time. When her daughter turned around to face her, Natasha saw with a start that something was terribly wrong.

“What happened?” she asked, taking her daughter’s clammy hand.

Masha said nothing, just stared at her mother the way she used to stare at her father, pleadingly. Please make my pet beetle come back to life! Please don’t let the wolf eat Little Red Riding Hood! Please tell me that you, of all people, will never, ever die… Please!

“Mashenka. What happened? What is it, sweetheart?”

“Katya’s dead,” Masha whispered, her throat clenching tight to keep back the tears.

“Oh my God. How can that be?” Masha’s elegant mother was wringing her hands like a country babushka. She sank down heavily onto the sofa. “When?”

“Yesterday,” said Masha softly. “It’s my fault.”

“What do you mean, sweetheart? Your fault?”

“Mama!” said Masha, staring at her with pain in her eyes. “Katya asked to borrow the car for the day. She came by and took the keys—then she crashed into a wall. Sorry, Mama, your car—”

Natasha waved that piece of news away and turned toward the window.

Katya. She seemed to be standing right there with them. Little Katya, enchanted by Masha’s toys and picture books. Teenage Katya, awkwardly trying to fit in with Masha’s bookish friends. Katya the struggling college student, wearing too much makeup and doing funny impressions of her neighbors.

Natasha sat down on the floor and wept silently, wiping away her tears. Masha went over and laid her head in her mother’s lap. Katya had been her oldest friend, and not even a friend so much as family, a sister. Funny, uncomplicated, and unlike anyone else. Plus, Katya had known her father. Katya had known the Masha from before Papa had been murdered. That was a completely different Masha, a girl who read Jane Eyre under the covers at night. Masha laughed more with Katya than she ever had with anyone else, because it was only with Katya—and sometimes Kenty—that she could forget about her constant hunt for the mysterious entity that had stolen away her father, her childhood, that whole other life.

“The funeral’s on Friday,” she croaked.

“Poor Rita,” Natasha said sadly. “Poor Rita.”

It rained the day of the funeral. Masha felt a strange lightness throughout her body. It wasn’t the pleasant effervescence a glass of champagne might bring, but a kind of half-conscious numbness. She couldn’t take the risk of driving. Her stepfather drove her, and Masha did not utter a single word the whole way there.

Why? Why had Katya lost control of such a manageable little car? Suicide, maybe? No. Masha shook her head sternly in the backseat, not noticing her stepfather’s concerned glance in the rearview mirror. She just couldn’t accept that Katya was the type of person who could bring herself to voluntarily depart this life in somebody else’s Mercedes. Unless… Could it be about Innokenty? Hadn’t she been madly in love with him? But Masha shook her head again. That was all in the past! Suddenly she desperately wanted to see Kenty herself, bury her face in his shoulder, and cry. She texted him.

Katya died. On the way to the funeral. Can I see you tonight?

The response was instantaneous. Sure. Send me the address, I’ll come pick you up.

Masha tapped out the address for the wake she’d be going to after the service, at Katya’s apartment, in what she had called her “blue-collar suburb,” a place that Masha had never been. Why? she wondered. Katya had always been eager to come to her place.

The crematorium was not especially gloomy. There was a businesslike air to the proceedings, like getting married at city hall. There were flowers and a small crowd of relatives. One ceremony finished up, and the next group filed in. A funeral march by Beethoven was playing, and Katya’s neighbor girls in their short black dresses stood around sniffling. Masha and her mother kept to themselves. They didn’t know any of these friends and relatives except Rita. Masha laid her bouquet of daisies on the gleaming, lacquered coffin and said a few words to Katya’s mother. But there was a line of other people anxious to express their condolences, so she left quickly.

Natasha departed for another ordinary, hectic day of work at her clinic, and Masha took a taxi to Katya’s apartment. She had promised Rita she’d help with the wake. Masha wasn’t the world’s best cook, so she’d picked up takeout from a restaurant nearby. Now she stepped inside, set down the heavy bags, and took a look around. She even sniffed the air, wondering if it would smell like Katya. The place was unattractive, both from a lack of money and a lack of taste. Masha could never have guessed that she was doing exactly what Katya had sometimes done in her home, tiptoeing around. The curtains were drawn shut, and the mirror was covered out of respect for the dead. Distraught, Masha touched a finger to a photograph of her and Katya, laughing, when they were little. There were more pictures. She recognized some—they’d been taken by her papa. Masha’s copies were hidden away in albums, but here they had stood proudly, all these years, in plain sight. So in a way, Masha had been in this apartment after all. Still, the place was so foreign she couldn’t even imagine Katya living here. She looked so much more natural, in Masha’s memory, framed in the doorway of Masha’s own apartment.

Masha found an apron and got to work. The table was already set, and she loaded it with the food she had brought, the cold salads and hardboiled eggs Rita had requested. She pulled a huge, sweating stockpot of soup out of the refrigerator and put it on the stove to warm up. She stood on a stool to reach the tray of freshly baked pirozhki Rita had put on top of the cabinets, up in the warm air near the ceiling, and she put them in the oven, preheated just as Rita had told her. Masha noticed she was breathing more easily now. That nauseating lightness was gone, her throat did not feel as tight, and the pinching feeling in her chest had disappeared, too. But still there was a name pounding away in her head, like a terrible metronome: Katya, Katya, oh Katya…

Soon the guests began arriving, and for a while, Masha was busy serving food to people she didn’t know. She could tell they were looking at her, confused: Who was this girl taking care of everyone like some junior lady of the house? But to both Masha and Rita, it seemed perfectly natural. Their ghost of a relationship, through Katya, was completely clear to both of them. But they also both understood that this connection, like a thread made of the finest crystal, would splinter quietly and break the minute Masha left today.

For now, though, Masha was carrying away dirty dishes, half-listening to people toasting Katya’s memory, soaping up dirty glasses and wiping them dry. She even tried washing the baking pan Rita had used for the pirozhki, though it obviously could stand to soak until the next day. She scrubbed away mercilessly, distracting herself from her own terrible thoughts, until Rita came into the kitchen and took the sponge from her hand.

“Leave something for me, all right?”

And Masha understood. Katya’s mother needed a way to forget, too, and Masha, selfishly, was taking that away from her.

They sat down on a couple of stools, hiding in the kitchen like a pair of conspirators. Neither Rita nor Masha wanted to go back into the room full of people.

“I didn’t do enough to protect Katya,” Rita said abruptly. Masha felt sick at what might be coming next. “I didn’t protect her. I knew she had it in her, that jealousy, that desire for what she didn’t have. Desire to be you, to have your perfect apartment, the clothes you and your mother had, that car… And beyond all that, desire for what you knew, your mind, your focus on your career. Your friends, the boys you hung around with. I saw that, and I felt sorry for her. But I shouldn’t have! I should have slapped it out of her when she was little!” Rita covered her face with her hands and sat silent for a second. “But I felt so guilty, bringing this child into the world with no father. I wanted so much for my little girl to be happy!”

Masha went to Rita and embraced her. She could feel her body jerking as she wept.

“I’m so sorry, Masha!”

“No, no, it’s my fault!” The tears were welling up in Masha’s throat now. “I’m the one who let her borrow the car!”

“The car!” moaned Rita. “And your clothing! She wasn’t wearing a single thing that belonged to her. It was all yours, Masha, right down to her underwear! What was wrong with her? Why would she do that?”

Masha, worried, said nothing.

“Here.” Rita fumbled in the pocket of her big, shapeless black dress and pulled out a set of thin bracelets. “These are the only things of her own that Katya was wearing. They sent them back from the police station. She used her very first student stipend to buy them, and she never let them out of her sight. I wanted to give them to you. To remember her by.” Rita handed the jumbled pile of silver jewelry to Masha.

“Thank you,” said Masha quietly.

“One more thing, too.” Rita’s cheeks flushed. “I’m ashamed to have to tell you this. But Katya didn’t just take your clothes. I found this in her room. They’re your mother’s, aren’t they?” Rita handed her a small packet. Masha peeped inside and found a flashy gold bracelet and ring. Natasha had loved them once, but for the past ten years she had preferred jewelry that she thought of as more distinguished—which turned out to mean less flashy but much more expensive, set with diamonds. Masha thought her mother must not have realized these neglected pieces had disappeared, and she figured she could sneak them back where they belonged. She raised her eyes to look at Rita.

“No,” she said calmly. “You’re wrong about that. Katya asked me if she could borrow these.”

Rita’s tense posture relaxed a little, and she sighed in relief. Nodding, she stood up and reached out to touch Masha’s cheek with one hand. Then she wiped her red eyes and plodded sadly out of the kitchen. Masha sat back down on the stool and took out her cell phone.

Come get me, she typed.

It seemed to Masha that the moment they had admitted their mutual guilt and sin—for her, that she had let Katya borrow the car, and for Rita, that she hadn’t cured her daughter of that horrible jealousy—as soon as they had spoken those words, Masha and Rita had severed the thread between them. There was no more point to her being here, and suddenly she was desperate to leave. She found her coat and, without saying good-bye to anyone, slipped out. As she rode the elevator down, she mechanically counted Katya’s bracelets. There were ten of them.

“Idiot!” she said to herself, out loud. Those damn numbers had infected her subconscious. She was automatically counting everything around her, looking for a clue. “Enough! Stop it! Katya is gone, and it has nothing to do with the numbers on those dead bodies.”

She sat on a bench outside to wait, staring straight ahead, until Innokenty’s car pulled up. He opened the door for her without saying a word, and Masha climbed in. Nina Simone was drawling gently inside.

“Let’s go,” said Masha softly.

Kenty had been waiting for a chance to ask Masha what was going on.

“So she died on Nikolskaya Street?” he asked. “Via Dolorosa.”

“What’s Via Dolorosa?” asked Masha. Then she understood, and recoiled in her seat.

“I’m sorry, Masha.” He did, in fact, look ashamed. “It’s becoming some kind of perverse game for me. Every time I hear the name of a place, on TV, on the radio, I can’t help it—I do the calculations, I think about whether those places match up with Heavenly Jerusalem, or the earthly one.”

“So? Do they?” Masha asked, uncertain.

“Not usually.” Kenty rubbed pensively at the bridge of his nose. “But this one does. If you put the maps of the two city centers on top of each other, Nikolskaya Street takes exactly the same path as the famous Via Dolorosa—the route Jesus took on his way to the cross. It starts at the Lions’ Gate and goes west through the old city to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Nikolskaya Street, as you know, runs from Red Square to Lubyanka Square. But before they built Red Square, the street led directly to the Nikolsky Gate of the Kremlin.” Kenty interrupted himself. “What a bunch of nonsense, though, right? Why am I telling you all this?”

Neither spoke for a while, and Masha thought their theory might simply be a way for them to avoid facing reality. Maybe it was easier to wall themselves off behind a preposterous barricade of smoke and mirrors, of historical, religious, and mystical allusions. Only now, hearing the sadness in Kenty’s voice, did Masha understand that he felt guilty, too. And that guilt was a way to compensate for the absence of another sentiment. Maybe if he had returned some of Katya’s feelings, she could have found a way to put her childhood jealousy behind her. And then she wouldn’t have taken Masha’s car and wouldn’t have died on Via Dolorosa.

Maybe everyone had their own Via Dolorosa.