Kolia by Perrine Leblanc Page B

river. They weren’t worth a damn thing to him. He already had a watch, and he didn’t need another one.
    When he finally opened the door to the apartment, Masha was playing cards in the salon. He decided to do something useful with himself and teach her how to cheat.

LA MAISON DIEU
    THE THOUGHT THAT HE might get married one day was completely foreign to Kolia. With marriage came children and everything they entailed — and that was simply out of the question. He had watched Masha grow up, and that was the closest to fatherhood he could see himself coming. Theirs had been the perfect relationship: no real commitment or deep emotional attachment, which also meant no guilt or crushing sense of failure if she wound up as some sort of vile creature because she had taken a wrong turn.
    Masha decided to forsake her father’s circus dynasty to pursue her studies. She had always excelled at school, and was granted admission to the state university. She left her father to his liquor bottles and little balls of used tissue that accumulated into a spongy trail between the sofa and his bedroom. She hated stepping on them. She had no interest in comedy or mime. She wasn’t as slender as her father, having inherited her mother’s stockier build, and had put on weight when she turned thirteen, a little dough ball. She lacked the body strength and suppleness that were crucial for succeeding as an acrobat. She hated animals (cats being the sole exception) and just couldn’t see herself as a clown. She distinguished herself in mathematics and had placed among the top students in her entrance exams. It wasn’t long before her waistline narrowed, and boys began to be interested in something more than her lecture notes.
    Pavel’s health began to decline in the summer of 1981, and it fell to Kolia to keep an eye on Masha. What surprised him the most was the discovery of his own compassion for her; it proved to be as natural as it was unexpected. Initially, the two of them were not overly alarmed — it was Pavel’s normal routine to spend forty minutes at a time in the toilet. But now he seemed to be literally decomposing as he sat there. He had set up a small table, with pen and paper, to take notes during his bowel movements. One morning, he noticed traces of blood in his stool. One week later, he passed out and collapsed to the floor. Masha found him lying in a cold sweat, and the sight of her father in such a condition shocked her so deeply that she couldn’t go near the toilet for days.
    Pavel’s name ensured that he was admitted to the best hospital and given a private room. The diagnosis was liver cancer and it was made very clear to him that his drinking had caused it. The decision was made to initiate a rapid withdrawal. Pavel had no say in the matter. During the first few days, he sweated like a pig, shaking constantly and swearing incessantly. His nights were a stream of monstrous hallucinations — spiders, octopuses, cosmonauts and dogs returning from space with a third eye. And when he managed to get some sleep, he would wake up screaming, with no idea whether he was still in hospital or had, in fact, died. He hurled insults at anyone or anything that happened to be in the proximity of his bed, belching up bile that rivalled the stink coming from his scalp. Kolia and Masha simply added the insults to a growing list of injuries that included his diarrhea and the knockout punch of his breath.
    For eleven months, Pavel dug in his heels at death’s door, a door that everyone wished he would just walk through. His liver had turned to stone and the cancer had spread its poison to other organs; everything inside the big man’s carcass was slowly shutting down. The doctor, a plump young redhead who more than filled her uniform, had been saying since June that it would be any day now. But “any day now” was taking its sweet time.
    Once a day, Pavel’s bloated body was