Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

Right at that moment she began feeling unwell, uneasy, again. She must have been examining the windbreakers on the hangers too closely because a young saleswoman, a professional smile on her large, inkily painted lips, hurried toward her. All of a sudden, though, Nina Alexandrovna decided that anyone who got close to her now would tell her some bad, depressing news. Hastily pushing past the checkout lines, she found herself back on the mirror-shiny front steps. Strangers were passing on all sides, their collision seemingly precisely calculated for where Nina Alexandrovna was cautiously descending the stairs. The people were in so much of a hurry and weaving in and out, sideways, holding their purses close, sometimes slamming into each other and their coat hems sticking together for a second—yet no one looked anyone else in the eye, and their faces, once they’d flashed by, disappeared faster than the dark leaves that teemed in each gust of wind. Nina Alexandrovna thought that it had been a long time since she’d seen so many people at once—or at least a long time since she’d been aware that hundreds of people were flashing by, and suddenly she realized that despite the specificity of each person who appeared before her—a specificity that was utterly unattainable when she was sitting in her apartment—she perceived them all perfectly in the abstract. It didn’t take even hundreds or a dozen for strangers to become an abstraction. All it took was two. As long as those two were just coming closer in the crowd, you could make out a curly head of hair, or a black knit hood, or a finlike rubber elbow, but the instant these two coincided, to say nothing of spoke, her mind erased them.

Still holding onto the railing, Nina Alexandrovna was struck by the fact that lately the city’s population seemed to have increased dramatically. There were so many people, automobiles, and rocking buses with advertisements on their sides stratifying the transportation stream. All this poured and meandered through the streets like the green-mica cast from half-stripped trees. She didn’t know why she didn’t read the papers or watch the real news at all. Everything Nina Alexandrovna saw around her was lacking film or being shown on television. Without that, her surroundings felt inauthentic. They lost their status as the primary reality and seemed like a film in which Nina Alexandrovna felt uncomfortable, as if she were in front of a TV camera, and she moved as if she were constantly trying to encircle or circumvent something.

With a shaky step that demonstrated to one and all her failure to coincide with reality, Nina Alexandrovna headed toward the market to buy food. In the glass sarcophagus at the front of a furniture showroom, a gingerbreadish armchair revolved very slowly, its tempting armrests making it look like something someone would want to take on its arm, like a lady; two young men efficiently overseeing the sidewalk were presenting passersby with announcements of some kind, and the one who blocked Nina Alexandrovna’s way was wearing tiny, pincerlike rings in his ears and in one large fleshy nostril. There had been none of this before—nor was there any in the life Nina Alexandrovna continued to lead within her own four walls. Here, in the outside world, she was surrounded on all sides by new objects that no book of dream interpretations could have explained—and she shuddered to think what kind of events would have to occur in ordinary human life to justify the presence in her dream of this armchair, grandly unoccupied under cold, bright-white clouds, or these long buses trailing their low tail sections, like half-paralyzed animals trailing their hind legs, or the computers being sold everywhere whose electronic entrails seemed to be glowing and swimming on their screens, like an X-ray. Before, no one could have imagined so many things going unbought; their four- and five-figure prices seemed to make them dangerous to have in circulation, like a gun kept dangerously at home. This was the first time Nina Alexandrovna had felt so depressed outside. On the other hand, since she knew nothing about her surroundings, it was all relatively simple. The main thing was knowing her way. Beyond that, she could ignore the colorful façade.

From a distance, the market entrance was denoted by a pair of sparkly tall poplars. Their leaves, nearly invisible in the sun-filled air, looked like splotches on a mirror’s detached amalgam. At the sight of a familiar beggar with his one empty eye socket that looked like a navel and his bedraggled squeeze-box gasping greedily for air, Nina Alexandrovna felt a little better. Not far away, directly behind the market’s latticework fence, angry music pounded out from a newsstand, rendering the beggar’s squeeze-box as mute as a fish gill. Only very close, almost flush to it, could its vague growlings be heard—but Nina Alexandrovna still tossed a soundless new ruble into the cap that lay at the beggar’s feet like a black lozenge. The narrow aisles, drunk on sun and juices, were messy, as always; the sticky puddles had a muddy, visceral liquid at the very bottom, and their spots attracted the ferocious flies that buzzed everywhere and, when they stuck to your face, turned out to be unexpectedly cold, almost metallic. But for Nina Alexandrovna, everything here was familiar, and the fact that she had already heard the music coming from the market stalls many times at other markets added to her self-confidence. In no hurry, Nina Alexandrovna bought vegetables for soup, a little fresh sausage, freshly cut, a can of meat and a can of sardines, a firm onion in crackling gold, and a bloody-silver bream as big as a shovel painstakingly selected from the several offered her. Unlike the street chimeras, all these objects were at least related to humans because of their edibility; something told Nina Alexandrovna that she needed to limit herself to things like that. Nonetheless, she did stop by the Chinese fur and plastic toy stand. There, the deft salesman, whose high cheekbones reminded her of a Russian kettle, happened to be demonstrating some simple fun to some kids in filthy jeans: he would squeeze a rubber pear, which inflated a shiny spider through a long tube and made the spider—a stiff patty with dangling dead legs—hop clumsily. Imagining how much Alexei Afanasievich would like controlling something at a distance, Nina Alexandrovna immediately bought the spider, wound the tube around it, and stowed it neatly in her bag. By now she was almost totally calm, and even the scary spider, which when wound around looked like a medical device, a tonometer or stethoscope, evoked confidence in her. She told herself that she simply was finally developing the habit of paying more attention to her surroundings. As if to confirm that, she immediately noticed on a metal pole of the green market gates the portrait of a respectable man who looked like a good dog—the same portrait she’d seen on the doors of the vacant food store. The pole’s roundness magnified the portrait, like a loupe, making the candidate’s face look like it was constantly approaching the voter. Nina Alexandrovna smiled involuntarily in response to his wide-stretched smile.

Continuing past goods stalls with thinning sales (the beggar leaned over his squeeze-box, held tight in his lap, and took bites from a crumbling potato and a pickle), Nina Alexandrovna noticed two of those portraits pasted up in a row, like stamps, on a steel booth, together increasing the object’s cost, even if it couldn’t be mailed to anyone. All at once it became crystal clear that she’d already seen the dog-man flyer: in the underground passage, at the Children’s World register, and on her own building’s front door, which looked like a broken-down washtub and where the flyer efficiently covered the biggest dent and so in and of itself didn’t immediately catch her eye—and lots of other places, too. The thought that the director’s good face, pasted to many objects whose purpose was beyond Nina Alexandrovna, nonetheless made this puzzling thing ordinary and simple enough, and Nina Alexandrovna felt a grateful warmth. She even felt comfortable enough to allow herself to perch at one of the plastic tables on the street, where a puddle of spilled coffee was being sucked up by the wind, place her order with the androgynous teenager who rushed over, and be served a plate with an American sandwich so big she couldn’t get her mouth around it. Disassembling the sandwich into its soggy, reciprocally stained components and glancing at the people running in different directions, which the stormily flying leaves signaled in vain with bursts of light, Nina Alexandrovna felt she could relate to it all perfectly calmly. On her way home, the director-man’s face flashed by and drew her along, like the moon in a dense forest, until it brought the pacified Nina Alexandrovna to her front door, where it finally smiled with just its glossy eyes over some new, crookedly pasted-up paper loudly announcing a major recruitment of paid canvassers at such and such an address.