THE DEMONSTRATION

BY OPENING THE DOORS TO THE circus school, which admittedly he had done to make Pavel happy, Bounine had given Kolia a chance. Thirty years later and not long before he died, old Bounine would do one more thing for Kolia. He would get him out of prison.

It was 1988. The newly incorporated couple were living quite well in their dacha. Every Sunday, Masha would come over for tea. She would arrive at 5 p.m., after having met Kolia at the train station in secret.

Kolia had resumed his old pickpocketing habits to kill time while he waited for her. A ruble note or two, a handkerchief, a comb. The object itself mattered much less than the act of stealing it. A successfully executed theft was a victory over the order imposed by others. It was the perfect square.

Masha was still consumed by her desire to shrink her body even further and somehow magically reduce the circumference of her bones. She had discovered that green tea was the most effective diuretic available, and she drank it by the gallon. Her days were an endless cycle of pumping herself full of tea, waiting for the urge to pee, and pumping it all out again. She was a machine. Both Bounine and Kolia preferred black tea, although in recent years, Bounine had taken to adding a little milk and sugar to his to make it weaker.

There were two teapots on the kitchen table. The one which Bounine had brought back from Japan was for green tea. It was made of cast iron. Loose tea was placed in the base of the pot and then hot water added, but not too hot. After the tea had steeped for three minutes, Masha would pour it into her large teacup. The other teapot was made of porcelain, and was reserved for strong tea. The samovar — too bulky, too Russian, and just too dull — had been relegated to a cupboard along with the pots and pans.

This Sunday would clearly be a quiet one. Clearly, because catastrophes like the one that was unfolding were rarely announced. Masha had woken that morning to discover that the glands in her neck were swollen, but apart from that, no, nothing. The messages sent by her body were often indecipherable. Someone rang the bell at the front entrance. Two of the three cups were full. Kolia got up straight away, upsetting the table and knocking a little Bounine the Clown doll headfirst to the floor. Masha choked on a mouthful of tea. It wasn’t her boorish husband. On Sundays, he preferred to unburden himself with hookers and provide them with sons she would never raise. No. They weren’t expecting anyone.

Bounine didn’t move a muscle. Two male voices shouted Kolia’s full name — at least they were polite enough to use his full name, which, under the circumstances, was in no way reassuring. As he walked to the entrance, Kolia banged his elbow. Two militia officers were standing on the veranda, their hats, which almost touched its roof, had set the bird feeder hung over the door swinging back and forth between them. The first officer pursed his lips repeatedly. A truncheon and a service revolver hung from his belt over his groin. Kolia nervously rubbed his elbow. They asked him for his papers. He didn’t have them on him. He turned around and there they were in Bounine’s outstretched hand. Kolia didn’t look at Bounine, but he knew that the old man was afraid of absolutely no one in the entire country. One officer whispered something to the other after looking at Kolia’s papers. He asked Bounine politely, but firmly, to step back inside. He took hold of Kolia by the same elbow he had just banged, and walked him to a dark, nondescript car, nudging him at each step to test his mettle. When the car drove away, the front door of the dacha was still wide open.

Masha took her cup of tea into the salon, started choking again, and burst into tears. Bounine closed the front door, first making sure there had been no witnesses, then joined her. He pulled an address book from the bookcase, licked his index finger, and flipped through the pages until he found the name he was looking for. He picked up the receiver and dialled the number. As he explained the situation to his old friend in Moscow, he patted Masha on the head as if she were a four-year-old.

Kolia was driven to a nameless, beige building he didn’t recognize. The younger of the two officers led him down a grey hallway, once again holding him by the elbow. He was told not to look anyone in the eye, to keep his eyes fixed on the floor. It would go better for him like that.

Everything said to him was meant to discourage resistance and break his morale. He was led into a cramped office where an official was signing papers. This man asked Kolia the same questions for over an hour, and each time Kolia responded with the same answers, gradually raising his voice in frustration. Around 8 p.m., the official received a phone call which displeased him. His neck twitched with annoyance. He hung up. He started feverishly looking through the paperwork on his desk, and finally got up from his chair. He walked around to the front of the desk, leaned against it, and looked straight at Kolia.

“Everything’s fine, Comrade Chatrov, you can leave. It’s over. Wait here until someone comes to get you.”

Kolia was about to say something, but the official gestured for him to keep quiet.

Taking a different series of hallways, the same young officer, who seemed to relish handing out orders from the height of his junior position, walked Kolia back to the car, which was waiting outside. He climbed in beside him.

“You’ve got a mug that attracts trouble,” he said.

In another location just as anonymous as the first, Kolia swore that he was innocent. He might have lifted a few worthless items from passersby on the platform, but nothing serious. It was simply to keep his skills honed, out of love for his art. Sure it was a bad idea, but let’s not make a big deal out of it. He hadn’t killed any women or children. That was crazy. Again and again, the interrogator tried to get Kolia to admit he was the killer they were looking for. He refused to confess. And then they started beating him. He lost several teeth. This wasn’t a standard interrogation. The interrogator’s shirt was soaked with sweat. He had been leading the investigation into this crime for years. He had to lock someone up, and soon. On the verge of complete exasperation, he repeated the accusation.

“You murdered children. You killed prostitutes. You carved their eyes out. You ate the genitalia of little boys, and the nipples of little girls with blond hair. Why?”

Kolia responded “No!” to each allegation.

He had no idea what they were talking about. He had forgotten about the pain in his elbow. His battered face had swollen into a bloody mess of open cuts. In the adjoining room where he was permitted to urinate, the image in the mirror was the face of a monster. For the first time since Pavel’s death, what he saw corresponded to reality. His ugliness had attained a state of sublime perfection.

He was interrogated for another fifteen minutes and then thrown in a cell with just a mattress, a jug of water, and a bucket, into which he spat a few teeth and a viscous red mass. For a moment, he thought they had stuffed a testicle in his mouth as a means of getting him to confess, but it was just a mixture of his own blood and phlegm and snot. That was good news, and he vomited into the bucket until there was nothing left inside him. They let him sleep for a few hours, curled up on the mattress in the stench of his own vomit to make it plain they no longer considered him a Soviet citizen or even a human being. Monsters didn’t warrant that privilege.

When he woke up at the dacha, he told himself it was finally over. They had managed to bring him to his knees; anyone else would have broken much sooner. He simply didn’t have the energy to ask why. He had been allowed to return home. That was enough. Bounine’s doctor gave him a sedative and injected him with a painkiller.

His lips were torn and swollen thanks to the diligent work of a young officer who had been trained by a group of neo-Nazis disguised as comrades. For more than a week, he couldn’t eat anything solid. He was fitted for a partial denture and he looked like a wizened apple every time he removed it.

When the media in the West started showing interest in the case of the Rostov Ripper, the local police began to interrogate known homosexuals in the city — that was their mistake. Kolia had been seen hanging around the train station, which was located in the same part of town where most of the murders had been committed. He wasn’t known to have a wife or a girlfriend. He was a peculiar individual who hardly spoke to anyone, born in the wrong place to the wrong parents. He had something of a reputation in the circus, but he was still a suspect.

After doing a little digging and cross-checking of dates, Bounine had provided the authorities with a rock-solid alibi that expedited his roommate’s return from Golgotha. Kolia had been touring with the circus when the last two murders were committed. As evidence, Bounine presented newspaper clippings to that effect. Kolia was offered a full range of handy household products as compensation for his suffering. He would also be able to avail himself of the services of a very good doctor, who would be dispatched to the dacha immediately to repair the damage done. The young officer who had beaten Kolia during his detention was relieved of his post.

The serial killer was apprehended much later, after a very long investigation. His name was Andrei Chikatilo, and he was married. He was sentenced to death and executed in 1994, after being found guilty of the murders of fifty-two young women and children in Rostov between 1978 and 1990.