Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

Marina’s day had become so overloaded that she couldn’t steal even a minute to call home and find out whether Klumba had brought the money. Sitting in campaign headquarters—in a dank half basement with splotched boards in the corner that had been rented for a song—she was registering in a soggy notebook the many many citizens who had shown up in response to the announcements that all of Shishkov’s personal staff had spent the past week pasting up throughout his voting district. District 18—where primaries for the regional Duma were being held (the previous deputy, a financially Russified man from the Caucasus, had been shot in the brand-new box of his suburban home, where his blood had looked like cocoa in the construction dust)—did not have much going for it. It was a sloping, bloated area, the cheek of the large Southwest District, and stretched from downtown to the industrial swamps, where the horizon seemed to be rotting away from fumes and the earth’s fabric seemed holey, rolled into feathery hurds: a ball-bearing factory and the nine-story gray Khrushchev-era apartment buildings attached to it, whose numbering would drive any normal person insane; building after building after building; two private-sector streets poorly connected by falling fences, with dingy little scarlet flowers in age-warped cottage windows and dahlia beds like graves in scraggly front gardens; a narrow, polluted stream in banks slick even in winter, under the snow, the stream wet with dark soaked spots that ate through the light flakes, and come autumn, empty, as if it had been turned off, without a single shape on the black water; a small section of a good block where, however, the unavoidable difference between the new prosperity on the street and the poverty of the apartments hidden from view had reached the point of metaphysical incongruity; and, finally, the main attraction, the Palace of Political Education, one of those concrete and glass giants amid the paved rectangles of windy squares for which there are absolutely no words but that reign over an area, occasionally attracting chains of tiny human figures to some second-rate pop concert. Since eight-thirty in the morning, district residents, smelling of wet wool and their own kitchens, had crowded in front of Marina’s wobbly table. They handed her their life-bedraggled passports and leaned over the notebook to use the official pen to add their chicken-scratch signature next to their passport information. After that, the recruited person was given a folded piece of paper, “Canvasser’s Instructions,” inside of which a fifty-ruble note was pleasantly and firmly stapled; then he was presented with another, tidier notebook, where opposite his freshly entered name the sum of 120 rubles was entered: this was the bonus the canvasser would get after the election victory of the Salvation bloc’s candidate, Fyodor Ignatovich Krugal.

Marina’s present situation was nothing to be envied. She’d been fired from Studio A, after all. Some five-year contract Marina had managed to forget about had ended, and now young Kukharsky had remembered and ultimately did not deny himself the pleasure of calling Marina into his office and, sprawled out in his upholstered leather armchair, his lemon-yellow tie falling to his navel, and with a caramel behind his hairy cheek, telling her off in no uncertain terms. While Marina was shrinking in front of Kukharsky, her colleagues managed to clear out her modestly inhabited, utterly innocent desk, put her belongings in sticky black trash bags, and set them outside the door. She had no choice but to go home, lugging a thin bag split by sharp corners in each hand; downstairs, the guard demanded she show him the contents and discovered an unwashed Studio A mug, so she had to call upstairs and sort that out. For some reason, the pain and fear were exactly like the time when she and her Mama were driven out of the dormitory. The superintendent’s beautiful wife, working her hands like a doctor palpating a belly, checked their opened suitcase. Her Mama had been beautiful, too, with long curls and wearing a new blouse with candy buttons—but now she couldn’t go run down the dark, sweetly scary corridor whose linoleum had a watery wave from a distant window. That she had experienced all this before made it harder rather than easier for Marina. She felt somehow Kukharsky had seen in her that awkward creature who asked everyone for presents (the present box contained buttons, stamps, colored chalk, a wrapper folded like a candy that Marina considered a prettily made toy and was very afraid of crushing), that dorm starveling she had been—wearing a dress made from foot-binding flannel—before she learned to despise her own childhood and be a top student.

Now Marina depended utterly on Professor Shishkov. Shishkov had spared a whole twenty minutes on personal sympathy for Marina, had patted her in a fatherly way, dabbing at her welling eyes with his impeccable handkerchief and giving her little shoulder a penetrating squeeze. Important work had been found for her that marked the final stage before she became deputy director and justice triumphed. The felonious Apofeozov, who needed deputy immunity so as not to be brought up on a number of charges, had plunged into the elections when they cropped up—and the professor, rejecting perfect symmetry at this stage of the struggle (in general, he shunned the symmetrical, seeing in it a dangerous duplication of things and equality of sides), ran against Apofeozov not himself but a loyal man with the full approval of the interested banks. Mr. Krugal, the director of that very same Palace of Political Education—whose architecture resembled a ball-bearing factory in the Communist future, thereby attracting the working electorate’s heart—was a man with a failed past either as an actor or a TV newscaster. At the same time, he was so ignorant that this rare quality of his, which somehow permeated his entire staff, came across even in the posters and advertisements hung on the Palace in numbers no fewer than the bedsheets on neighborhood apartment balconies. Everything Krugal had to say, including “Hello, dear comrades!” had to be written down, so there was much work to be done. As the new speechwriter, Marina was warned that any text presented a number of natural obstacles for the candidate—line breaks, for instance. She also had to avoid more than two epithets in a row and the word “reconstruction,” which the candidate couldn’t say due to an old dislocation of his jaw. As he issued his final instructions, the professor looked so deeply into Marina’s soul that, as if for the first time, she herself saw his frozen eyes behind which it was like white fish flesh with fine bones, and she saw his disagreeable nose shaped like a pike’s head. For the first time the thought that today Professor Shishkov was the person closest to her in the world made her uneasy.

The concept of “responsibility” simply moved Marina to selfless labor. After just a few days she felt comfortable with Mr. Krugal, a short man with a big head, a squeezed, pseudo-Roman profile that fell lower on his face than normal, and an exceptionally tensed forehead that looked like it was being stretched and that came out in black-and-white photos as a splotch. A magisterial and even massive person in his flyers, Fyodor Ignatovich in life made the impression of being a reduced copy of himself. Krugal had been chronically at odds with Marina’s predecessor, who had been exceptionally touchy with regard to Russian language and style and therefore exceptionally thin-skinned; and the moment anyone felt Krugal had insulted them, Krugal took offense, too. But now, inexplicably, the candidate had picked up his dismissed consultant’s faultfinding and was latching onto all kinds of niggling details in the prepared texts. Crossing his legs and twisting in one direction, munching cookie after cookie and twisting in another, and squinting at pages in a third, he would analyze and reanalyze sentences that seemed dubious to him until they lost any spatial or semantic meaning; a thing as simple as bringing natural gas into private homes—which because of the tanks, among other mundane reasons, often burned to charred kebabs—seemed to Fyodor Ignatovich filled with danger and ambiguity, and the fateful word “reconstruction,” which had ended up in his speech after all and become attached to something he was going to have to promise, made the candidate wince and cautiously wiggle his off-center jaw, which clicked smoothly behind his ears. The web of fine pencil marks Krugal conscientiously spun around Marina’s paragraphs flummoxed her until she realized she could just erase them. All this notwithstanding, she was doing well, according to the fatherly professor. Unlike Krugal, Shishkov, who signed off on the texts, made sure to praise Marina at every staff meeting. Imagine her surprise when she unwittingly discovered they were paying her approximately half as much as the most unimportant person in the campaign headquarters, young Lyudochka, who was forever giving herself manicures and admiring her ten mirrorlike nails, occasionally removing a stuck-on hair from her precious work of art. Actually, the imbalance could be explained away by the fact that Marina was the last hire, paid some remainder salary. Moreover, unconsciously she felt that the less she got in the present, the more she was building up for the future: now her salary of fourteen thousand seemed as inevitable as a top exam grade following a sleepless night.