Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

In addition to the lady doctor, Evgenia Markovna, who maintained her neutrality and, if she did mutter something under her breath, then it was strictly to herself, there was one other person in the outside world—an extremely dangerous person—who had to be allowed to see the paralyzed man. This was the benefits office representative who brought his pension. Unlike the lady doctor, she was awaited by Marina with nervous impatience. She was the first thing Marina asked about when she came home from work, and if the pension was held up for a few days, Marina’s passionate desire to catch sight from the balcony of the familiar, barrel-shaped figure on tiny feet mincing through the front door brought to mind an intimate love such as Marina had not felt for anyone in the family since everything had ended between her and Seryozha. The benefits rep—whom Marina, in revenge for the conflicting emotions the woman elicited in her, had dubbed Klumba, which means “Flowerbed,” because she always wore flowery prints—had become essential to the family, her face dear to the point of automaticity. This massive lady, whose white collar opened like two notebook pages on her chest, seemed to play a critical personal role in the Kharitonovs’ fate.

At the same time, Klumba’s penetration to a place where a different time murmured, as if from a loudspeaker and the nasal and erratic clock, inflicted palpable losses on that time, which her visits diluted somehow. Each time, Klumba demanded to “look at grandpa” before handing out the money—she said because these days lots of people were cunning, and in her personal practice there was an instance when a family took money for a dead man for four months. Shaking out her onion-skin-colored curls at the front hall mirror, she walked importantly, following Nina Alexandrovna’s gesture of invitation, to the far room, where she stood in the doorway perfectly still for a minute—after which she returned with a raspberry flush on her porous cheeks and, still not looking up, counted out the bills, letting the money fall into separate piles: a pathetic one for Nina Alexandrovna, and a substantial one for the veteran. “I don’t know how you can live in this smell,” she said in the end, as she stuffed her work papers into her large, messy bag.

Naturally, there was no smell, nor could there have been. Nina Alexandrovna scrubbed Alexei Afanasievich’s bedpan better than her cooking pots, and his laundered sheets, which were always hung out on the balcony, may have had tiger stripes from old urine, but those stripes had no more smell than the printed roses that decorated the benefits rep’s crimplene dress. Evidently, though, it really did smell here as far as Klumba was concerned: her inflamed nose found the smell of a room sprayed before her arrival with harsh streams of flowery air freshener highly suspicious. Apparently, she feared getting too close to illness and misfortune and had to overcome this fear dozens of times a day, heroically maintaining the crude mosaic of her work face and tapping out her feminine assault with her heels. “My work is nothing but germs,” she said angrily, seeing a sticky spot on Nina Alexandrovna’s gleaming kitchen. In reality, the spot was just a pretext for a fight. On the most carefully cleaned surface, Klumba saw pathogenic microorganisms, whose mere existence—which was, in contrast to the little green men alcoholics see, a scientifically proven fact whose objectivity could not be denied—was quietly driving the woman out of her mind. Nina Alexandrovna frequently noticed the benefits rep stealthily lick her manicured index finger and peck at imagined crumbs. The paralyzed man’s room, where sunlit dust lay on things rendering them both fit for writing with your finger and also oddly empty, like blank pieces of paper, must have seemed to Klumba like a graphic image of the world as she imagined it. More than once after Klumba left, Nina Alexandrovna would uncover stealth commas left by her visitor’s finger in secluded places. Something in this pensioner’s home bothered Klumba, something that had to do with her basic frustration at the everyday, which was why, having just hurried Nina Alexandrovna to sign off, since she still had eighteen more addresses today, she suddenly got stuck halfway into her raincoat and made up for her dismay with loud tirades that she tried to pass off as perfect models of good sense. This went on until the humpbacked old woman from the apartment upstairs, who had been “waiting on her pensun” since six that morning, took the two flights of stairs, measuring the height of each stair with her cane, and started ringing the bell, reminding them there, inside, of a photographer and his camera, both covered with a black cloth and aiming a radiant look at the expressionless object to be photographed.

Klumba may have viewed her contact with people as an exchange of microbes, and in this sense microbial life was for her a phenomenon more spiritual than medical—what is otherwise called “fluids” or “aura”—only Klumba, a down-to-earth person with a higher education, did not recognize mystical words. Looking at her conventional little mouth, drawn like a cock’s comb (while the old neighbor lady, wielding the pen like a crochet hook, fished up the lost thread of her signature that she’d started, and straightening her scarf with a motion like a kitten washing itself, deposited the money in her purse), Nina Alexandrovna thought that for Klumba, a kiss was probably unsanitary and consequently immoral. In her own way, meanwhile, the benefits rep was not devoid of human emotions. She understood Klumba a little when, beset by monetary worries, Nina Alexandrovna forgot her boiling kettle, which was rattling quietly on the flooded burner, and Klumba grabbed it, boiled dry, with her bare hand. Desperately trying to shake her heavy hand cool, Klumba shouted at Nina Alexandrovna so loudly that the rubber burn that instantly covered her retracted palm felt unbearably icy.

Klumba’s sympathy mechanism must have worked differently from most people’s. Another person’s pain completely bypassed her soul (which, although it was carried from place to place by this well-balanced, firm-stepping body, was, one had to suppose, a rather small and underdeveloped structure, crowded out by a ponderous liver nearly the size of a saddle) and acted on Klumba physiologically , that is, immediately dropped from the other person’s ailing organ into her healthy one. Although scarcely capable of imagining another person’s loneliness or the agony of unrequited love, Klumba served as the ideal mirror for the sufferings of the flesh and in this respect was defenseless. As she visited disabled and half-destroyed old people in the course of her job, Klumba bore their ailments like fluorescent marks and went on and on about her wards, who inhabited the musty burrows of their disability, as about biting microbes inside a large anthill. At the same time, evidently, Klumba was utterly pitiless. In her faceted eyes set exactly a centimeter apart one read such impatience that the neighbor lady, fumbling along the wall and accidentally turning the light on in the bathroom, preferred to get out before Nina Alexandrovna could get free and drag her upstairs, like a broken bicycle. Sometimes Nina Alexandrovna got the impression that Klumba went from apartment to apartment visiting the old and destitute with the secret goal of destroying this little world, like a parasite infiltrating the city’s healthy organism, as if her knowledge of a disabled person robbed him of his individual existence. Klumba seemed to be fighting unwholesome human wreckage, attaching it to herself and fostering its dependence on her own heroic persona—and by no means just financial dependence. The regime seemed to have robbed pensioners of certain important human characteristics.