Kolia by Perrine Leblanc Page B

church.
    He wasn’t rough with her and he didn’t insult her. He even managed to caress a thigh or grab the cheek of one of her buttocks, now and then. But touching her breasts meant lifting his shoulders up off the bed, and that was just too much of an effort. He existed only in his sperm. Secretly, Bounine hoped that one of the condoms he’d brought back from Germany would rupture and the young woman would become pregnant. But he didn’t have the strength to sustain a sexual exchange that would be vigorous enough to perpetuate the race.
    She refused to kiss him. She had nothing against the act of kissing itself, but she found his mouth repulsive. His lips were dry and chapped, and there were scabs in both corners which kept breaking open into sores that refused to fully heal. Bounine could no longer eat apples or even munch on a pickle. At the beginning, she always had to say “no” to his attempts to kiss her. Eventually, Bounine stopped asking. At night, when he was alone in bed, he would kiss the crook of his arm, knowing that if anyone could see him, he would die of shame or they would crush him like an ignoble insect for the same reason. As far as Bounine was concerned, being caught in flagrante delicto showing tenderness to oneself was worse than being caught masturbating. He always locked the door to his room at night. He was going to die soon. He was sleeping with a young woman. A man could catch his death from sleeping with an old whore.
    The old man’s aching bones made it impossible for him to leave his bed for most of the day. None of the medications his doctor prescribed ever managed to “freeze his pieces into place” and “kill the beast,” as he liked to put it. Along with his condoms, he had stronger pills brought back for him from Germany, which he hoarded at the cost of being almost permanently in pain. The moments when the pills did bring relief were a taste of heaven.
    Bounine had a cat. Every day, it would deposit a selection of dying birds and huge rats at the foot of his bed. Neither he nor Kolia was exactly sure what to do about this growing collection of carcasses, which would undoubtedly attract other predators in the neighbourhood. But they clearly had to be buried. Kolia dug a hole in the backyard that summer and presided over their interment. Bounine’s cat was called Monocle. He had lost an eye and his markings made him look like a pirate. His hunting instinct was almost completely gone, but his mere appearance was enough to scare off field mice for miles around. And Bounine loved him for that. In fact, without his mistress’s visits, the German pills, and the obligation to feed his beaten-up, swashbuckling cat every day, Bounine would have made a very sullen roommate.
    The night before he was to meet his new troupe, Kolia tossed fretfully in his bed at the old man’s house, unsure of how he would be received. He prepared a few words of introduction and rehearsed them with the voice that they had likely never heard.
    He had nothing to worry about; his arrival among their ranks was quite the event. There was one or two who attempted to bad-mouth him, saying that his presence was a disgrace, but their opinions were not widely shared. Kolia had never really taken stock of the impact his act had had on the Soviet circus in general, nor of the scale of his popularity, in spite of the full houses and the stacks of fan mail he received each week. He also didn’t realize that the authorization to leave Moscow and join the Rostov troupe had been an official favour.
    It was well known that Kolia was deeply attached to his master. And, moreover, it was thought that the presence of a friend would — in the words of the bureaucrat who was making the case for the authorization — “brighten up” the old man. They knew more about Bounine’s health than Bounine did. They knew that his condition was destroying him slowly but surely.