Chapter 30 Happy Birthday, Kotik
Happy Birthday, Kotik
“Ready for your birthday present, Kotik?” Vitali took me by the hand, his eyes nothing but adoration. “This way.”
Boris walked behind us, softly closing the doors that Vitali threw open as we passed the bar and went into the back, where service staff were dashing to and fro with various glassware and stacks of decadent dishes on large trays.
I blinked rapidly, trying to adjust to the bright, fluorescent lighting. Everywhere, plates clinked, water sizzled on oil, and someone shouted orders. I almost slipped, heels unstable on the tile floor, but Vitali held me up, smiling at my newborn calf-like movements.
“There is no hurry, Katya,” he said.
“Where are we going?”
“You always try to ruin surprises for yourself. Trust.”
Maybe this wasn’t him proposing.
Please, God, don’t let this be him proposing.
Past the kitchens were the bare brick hallways which smelled like cleaning chemicals and cigarettes. We passed a utility room and then a janitorial closet. The third door was unlabeled. He stopped there.
“Now,” he warned, “I know I gave you the earrings. But money can’t buy everything.”
Boris grunted behind us.
The door opened from the inside, and Misha’s sour mug, complete with a cigarette, motioned me in.
Oh.
I wasn’t certain what I was looking at. It sure looked like a penis, but that didn’t make sense, nor did the thick, hairy legs stretched between it and the ceiling pipes.
My gaze traveled down to the round (also hairy) belly hanging over an ample (even hairier) chest, and all the way down to Clipboard’s soaked face.
“Here, let’s get you away from the door, there’s a draft,” Vitali said, and led me to the left, only momentarily pausing to help me step over the puddle forming under the upside-down man’s head. “Watch out for the piss.”
My eyes traveled from it to the glistening trail up the man’s face, and all the way up his chest and over his belly. His penis looked at me, and I at it. It still made no sense.
Vitali took off his suit jacket and draped it over my shoulders, so much like the night we met. This sure was romantic.
He unbuttoned his shirt cuffs.
“His name is Ruslan Aliev,” he said, carefully rolling up the right sleeve. “Born August 1952. Graduated on time, but wasn’t accepted into university because of his poor test scores.” The left sleeve. “Take him down.”
Misha pulled up a chair, then climbed it with a knife clasped between his teeth.
He fiddled with the ropes, then cut what he couldn’t untie.
The man came crashing to the ground with a squall into the thick cloth stuffed in his mouth.
He only then opened his wild eyes, and there was no recognition in them when he looked at me.
“See, Aliev here,” Vitali continued, “fell in with a bad crowd. Didn’t study hard enough.”
He circled the human heap, stopping where Clipboard could stare at his leather shoes. The man shrieked, but it was muffled.
“His mama passed in December of 1977. Papa in January 1978.” Vitali seized the wrist bound behind the man’s back and hauled him to the other side of the room as the pudgy legs kicked for traction.
Misha followed close by, but did not interfere.
Boris moved a chair away from an old, low-set radiator.
Vitali handed him off, allowing the man to twist into a sitting position. It was no longer clear if the wetness on his red face was pee or tears.
I clutched the suit jacket closer as Vitali came over. He caressed the line of my jaw with a knuckle, then gently pushed aside a lock of hair to expose my cut. “Would you say that’s about five centimeters, Kotik?”
“I don’t know…” I whispered, unconsciously touching my face.
“We’ll say five centimeters,” he decided, then turned back to Clipboard.
“Ruslan has one living brother, who converted to Christianity in February of 1978 and fled to Sergiev Posad, where a senior bishop took him into the grounds of the Moscow Theological Academy to study and eventually become a priest. They speak on the phone every other week for an average of forty-five minutes.”
At his nod, Misha pulled the cloth out of the man’s mouth and he immediately cried out.
“Please! God—help me! Please!”
“There, he continues to teach English and Arabic to this day. What’s interesting is,” Vitali crouched and held out two fingers, set at approximately five centimeters apart, to the man’s cheek, “the Russian Orthodox Church gives sanctuary for those who convert from Islam. They are provided with new identities. It is very difficult to trace such people.”
Without warning, Vitali slammed his hand against the side of Clipboard’s head, pressing the man’s right cheek into the radiator.
The man shrieked.
I clasped both hands over my mouth.
Gray vapor rose around Vitali’s hand.
I could smell Clipboard cooking.
When his head was yanked back, the hot metal tugged at chunks of skin before breaking loose, leaving a torn, glossy wound.
“What do you think, Kotik? Five centimeters?” Vitali asked, inspecting the man’s half-burned face. A blood vessel burst, flooding his right eye with a deep red.
“Stop…” I whispered, but barely heard my own voice.
Vitali didn’t wait for my answer. “Luckily, a train just came in from Moscow with one Daniil Tochkin, formerly known as Valid Aliev.”
Clipboard panted, eyes (eye) dashing around the room for anyone who’d help him. He stopped on me.
“Please!” he begged.
“Katya,” Vitali said, far too calmly. “Is he the one who hit you?”
“I don’t know…” I muttered again, and that was a lie, because all I could see at that moment was the red face seething above me.
Hands throwing me against the wall. The gun pointed at my face.
The strike and the sensation of my flesh splitting open, taking everything I had left inside me that wanted to believe monsters existed, and men couldn’t be monsters.
“Katya.” This time, his tone touched my bones. “Did. This. Man. Hit. You.”
Only then did Clipboard’s face flood with recognition, drowning his last sliver of hope.
I became suspended in a fragile moment where my past naivety and concept of virtue fell apart, and my future hadn’t yet formed.
Who Katya was before Vitali had left a long time ago, so quietly I barely noticed.
Or maybe I shut out her thundering, retreating steps.
I didn’t know who Katya would become. I like to think that if I did, I’d be okay with it.
But at that time, the man in front of me—the man who’d shattered my sense of humanity being basically good—knelt naked on the ground, and his eyes pleaded for me to help him.
And he held no regret for what he did, only the knowledge that the time for penance had arrived, and my forgiveness was the thread keeping the noose from tightening.
Except, he was wrong. It was not my forgiveness, but Vitali’s. And Vitali wouldn’t forgive him.
I understood his calm leading up to this day. “Yes…”
“No—I—it wasn’t! It was—”
“See, Kotik says it was you,” Vitali interrupted, “and I think it was you. Misha, do you think it was him?”
Misha was as pale as the man writhing naked on the floor. He muttered something and looked away.
“My point is,” Vitali stood and flicked a bit of organic residue off his wrist, “if you’re going around hitting so many women that you don’t even remember my Kotik, that’s too many women, Ruslan. She is a jewel. You do not forget such a woman. Just look at her—perfect.”
A part of Clipboard’s face began sloughing off.
“Vitali…” I rasped. “Please…”
“Are you a Christian, Ruslan?” he asked.
“Yes! Yes! Just please—anything—just let me—!”
“You already know you’re going to die,” Vitali continued. “You were going to die the moment you set foot in that podyezd. But I am a patient man. We aren’t animals. I’ve even brought in a priest to give you your last rites.”
Everything in me went numb, the tingle at the back of my skull turning into a buzz.
Boris opened the door and let in a skinny man with death written all over his face, followed closely behind by Ivan.
“My God, forgive me…” the man mumbled, his bulging eyes on poor, naked, burnt Clipboard.
“Some fears are earned with pain: a child will not touch fire after he burns his hand. Some fears are earned through camaraderie: a man who sees another burn will not walk into the flames,” Vitali said.
“So what is the fear that eats through a man who knows someone he loves will stop loving him—but he will never stop loving them? Tell me, do you think your brother will stop loving you when he finds out it’s his life or yours? ”
I could not look at either one of them, so I stared at my shoes. My expensive, expensive shoes.
“Batuyshka, please begin,” Vitali said, nodding to the newcomer. When the man only trembled in place, he added, “I said begin, Aliev.”
The man opened his mouth and quickly gathered himself enough not to end up on the wrong side of Vitali’s attention. He recited, “By the grace of His compassion and the love of mankind, forgive you, my child, Ruslan, all your transgressions…”
“Look at that,” Vitali said, “I didn’t even have to tell him your name. Why is that, Ruslan? Might you know him? Confess your sins.”
Clipboard howled, but Misha quickly delivered a kick to his ribs.
“Try again,” Vitali said. “Begin with your most heinous sin.”
“I only—I don’t—”
Another kick. It seemed to hurt Misha more than it did Clipboard.
“I’m sorry for touching her!” the man cried, whipping his head around to face me. “I’m sorry for touching her! Just let me go!”
“Continue, Batuyshka.”
The priest looked on helplessly. “I don’t have any… I don’t have the sacrament with me…”
Vitali snapped his fingers, and Ivan handed the priest a bottle of what I recognized to be a red vintage, although I couldn’t say more than that. It seemed important that I read the label, but the priest’s hands shook too hard.