Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

Meanwhile, victory in the elections was far from a fait accompli. Apofeozov’s headquarters, pumped full of money like fully inflated biceps, was working wonders. Apofeozov was truly omnipresent. Five of his videos were playing continuously on every TV channel, deftly interspersing the candidate with a popular Moscow politician of similar political coloration, so that the voter really did start thinking that Apofeozov and the Muscovite—whose doughy bald spot and charming smile made him a carbon copy of everyone’s favorite yellow spherical cartoon creature Kolobok—were in fact like peas in a pod. No matter what paper you picked up, it was plastered with a portrait of Apofeozov, like a hundred-ruble bill; there was an unprecedented concentration of Apofeozov in the air, which trembled feverishly with dingily green, immature falling leaves. At times, Marina (who for more than a month had been playing old news for her stepfather, news which due to the repetitions had acquired the hypnotic power of a commercial) began imagining that Apofeozov, having become the form and essence of the present moment , the embodiment of the realest reality, was the opposite of the immortal little world she was defending. Apofeozov’s chief opponent in the true elections (of which the District 18 elections were a by-product, a crude material form concocted of haphazardly printed flyers and ballot urns wrapped, like coffins, in cheap red cotton cloth) was, of course, not Krugal but Leonid Ilich Brezhnev. Continuing (in Marina’s news) to fly abroad and welcome delegations—entire festivals of Hindus made white by their clothes and Negroes of various tribes with open miners’ faces and buttery Asians in knee-length military tunics—Brezhnev undoubtedly lived on in the collective consciousness of District 18 voters, who were still wearing their Soviet-era coats. Not that they’d admit it, but they continued to carry around this image, worn to holes here and there, but made to measure for them and still connecting them to the wide world more reliably than nutritious Snickers bars and American Terminator movies. However, in his fantastic vitality (which was nothing more than the indomitable will to eat, drink, build a suburban home that resembled the ogre’s castle in the fairytale, and open secret accounts in Switzerland), Apofeozov had become an increasing temptation for voting women, who suddenly entered a second youth with the help of margarine lipstick and cheap hair dye, though the gray roots showed straight through under even a dim 10 watts. Intense specimens who had obviously come to believe, along with Apofeozov, in the miracle-working characteristics of nourishing creams and rejuvenating serums were already noticeable on the streets under his wardship and becoming more and more numerous. Marina was worried that their sudden thirst for life would go haywire and bring Apofeozov a decisive voting advantage.

Krugal worried about the exact same thing. His artistic soul keenly sensed voters’ unfavorable disposition. Nervous and capricious now, one day he raised quite a stink with his impresario, during which Shishkov’s secretary, fearfully cracking the door open, the way one lifts the lid on a boiling pot, thought she saw a flying jacket through the crack—after which Krugal stepped out in that same, messily hitched up jacket, holding handfuls of torn paper and with unshed tears, like in a child’s sad little eyes. After the row, the now sterner Shishkov let him go first, like a woman, and stealthily swallowed a few crimson pills from a plastic tube. The problem truly demanded resolution. Not only staff workers, depressed by the hostile pressure and aplomb, but also ordinary citizens existing between their mailbox and a television stuffed with campaign goods, couldn’t help but realize that the Salvation bloc’s enterprise was a beggar compared with Apofeozov’s aggressive show. Thus, the dictate of common sense notwithstanding, Shishkov’s personality came through: for the professor, stinginess took the place of that lost poverty which Shishkov felt deep down was the foundation of Russian spirituality. At the same time, he couldn’t help but see that in the near future a cruel loss awaited Krugal, who had insinuated himself into a battle between forces he didn’t understand, forces perhaps even mystical.

The professor had hit on a new and surefire campaign move, though. For quite a while an elementary arithmetic thought had given him no rest, that the two thousand-plus votes he needed for victory (half of a 25 percent turnout plus one vote from the Unknown Soldier), would cost, based on the average price of a bottle of vodka, one-third of what it cost to purchase newspaper space, produce flyers, and rent auditoriums, where the entreated voters would consist of a few vagrants, whose wild hair and short stature made them look like alcoholic goblins, and a dozen or so old women bored out of their minds. But the election commission did not permit simply pulling up with vodka in secluded apartment courtyards, where at any time, day or night, you’d find people of all ages hanging out—not that there were any guarantees that someone who took a full half-liter today would vote for Krugal tomorrow. Theoretically, votes couldn’t be bought at all, inasmuch as electoral law forbade candidates from rendering services to the population by whose will they could come to power—although in practical terms, of course, mutually beneficial processes went on sub-rosa. Every so often young men wearing windbreakers and caps in specific company colors appeared in the irrational spaces of District 18 glassed in by the rather murky sun, like flies on windows, and passed out groceries in the name of the philanthropic Fund A; moreover, a couple of times near garages, observers saw modest vans that said “Bread” on the side from which bottles wrapped in election flyers, like napkins, were quickly lowered into workers’ poster-flat hands thrust out of their sleeves nearly to the elbow.

All this illegal, small-potatoes fuss, this waste of money, which the district sucked up like a gigantic brown sponge, actually made Professor Shishkov physically ill. His keen intellect, which knew how to use even symmetry alien to him exactly the wrong way around , yielded an idea as sudden as a win at roulette (at which, working his hunches, the professor seemed always to lose, drawing down intellectual resources incomparable to the rare luck of a scientific find—which comprised his private creative drama). Instead of rendering services to the population, he should buy and pay for their services: then it would be perfectly legal to call the corrupt voter—who basically just wanted a drink—a canvasser. Then and there, the professor sketched it out on his torn napkin (he was having dinner at his plastic cafeteria, and once he’d finished his soggy salad, he started on his sticky-ish signature dish): if each hired canvasser simply brought the adult members of his own family to the ballot box, then all it would take for an absolutely assured victory was laying out fifty thousand, at most, and, if he wanted to increase turnout, eighty thousand, before the elections. The bonus for success, should Krugal get elected, could be paid out piecemeal afterward; the scheme’s elegance was that the bonus, while serving as a guarantee of the canvassers’ work, simultaneously relieved Shishkov of the lion’s share of the investment risk.

Leaving lumpy pelmeni covered with dollops of sour cream, like subsided soap foam, on his plate, the professor immediately dialed his secretary’s mobile and called a staff meeting. A few hours later, all the wheels headquarters had, from Krugal’s spit-and-polish BMW to the professor’s puny heap, had been brought out by the deathly pale staff, which had been alerted and were plunging into the long, sediment-filled gullies. What a night it was! A fine drizzle, a chill, the street lamps’ bright gloom, sour mouths that had the metallic taste of sandwiches and tooth decay, snatches of hard, seasickly dozing while the car taxied to its assigned objective, letting rare bright spots through its windows. Equipped with cans of paste and stuck-together stacks of announcements warm from the printer, people reluctantly climbed out into the darkness, stepped on the damp asphalt’s wet, mercurial ripple, and headed out under sagging umbrellas, two by two, to post their pieces of paper on every single swollen front entrance and push them into the scorched and crumpled mailboxes, which had accumulated the kind of mess around them that trash cans do, what with the elections’ imminence. That strategic night, the professor sat in his dank headquarters sleepless and thoroughly chilled. His nose, which he honked into a fluttering handkerchief, was as full-blooded as his heart, and on a piece of paper in front of him lay a few pills whose sequence apparently held the program for solving this crisis, a mysterious code known only to the professor.