Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

As usual, Marina was assigned the most important area: the private sector. There was something inexpressively awful in those windblown backyards, where the darkness touched her face, lifted her extended arm, and led her into a deep, rustling hole. The gray spots from streetlamps, which illuminated everything under it as if through the thick bottom of a glass bottle, only got tangled underfoot. Low-slung calico windows hung directly over the flowerbeds, and rather than pick out objects, the meager light seemed to produce unconvincing copies of them. Marina and sleepy Lyudochka, whom the feverish professor had foisted on her, often couldn’t tell where they were pasting the announcements, which kept trying to roll up and lick their frozen hands with smeared paste. The desertedness and silence (only dogs barking and jumping behind a slab of timber, creating the impression of a nighttime zoo) doused Marina with a bad presentiment—and indeed: from one of the lightly banging gates there suddenly emerged, drunkenly thrusting a bluish knife in front of him, a shapeless man wearing a long, unbuttoned leather coat and some kind of crazy hat with earflaps that looked like work gloves sculpted directly on his head. Lyudochka flapped her arms, as if to catch the wagging blade like a fly, screamed, and ran. So did Marina.

They could barely remember racing from the receding obscenities to their car, which was hidden behind a rise. Their umbrellas kept banging into each other and skipping in the air like inflated balls, and the stack of announcements Marina was now holding to her side rather than close to her chest kept trying to slip apart and float away. Their dingy white heap, tucked in under a large cloud-shaped birch, was closed and dark. Glacial. The driver and his girlfriend from bookkeeping probably hadn’t come back yet from the other end of the lane, where a solitary light blinked and teared, as if viewed through the wrong end of binoculars. Lyudochka, her makeup smeared, was hysterical. Hiccupping, she tugged at the rickety door and then picked up her coat hem and tried to sit right on the filthy hood. Marina was barely able to drag her partner to the nearest damp stall, crooked and black against the light birch leaves. She felt no regret making a seat of the announcements and poured a full lid of harshly and crudely fragrant brandy from the reserve flask the professor had given her. “I hate him. I hate him!” the trembling Lyudochka whispered after sipping from the threaded vessel, as if she were downing a raw egg, and Marina guessed that this wasn’t about the guy with the knife or even the driver doing who knew what with the plump-cheeked bookkeeper but about the professor himself. Looking sideways at Lyudochka (eyes like stars, a smear under her nose), Marina thought maybe she would take her on as her secretary. Once more she thought without any surprise that in fact she wasn’t interested in Lyudochka, nor was she, for example, in the girl she didn’t know with the crudely knit face and the fantastic braid that fell well past her waist, generously adorned, like a horse’s tail, with cheap barrettes, who had been making out with Klimov a week ago at the wet streetcar stop—while Marina sat above them at a streetcar window. They’d been making out below, not even hidden by the limp umbrella dripping down the girl’s back—and apparently hadn’t bothered to hide, as if there were no such person as Marina. An unfamiliar ring burned on the man’s ring finger like a glassy rash—not an engagement ring, not a man’s ring at all, a ring that obviously meant something in their relationship and that obviously was kept in one of his moldering, trash-filled pockets. Marina, languishing in secret impatience to run home, was trying incredibly hard not to lose her compulsory enthusiasm. Her husband, from whom not a peep had been heard for seven days, might have shown up to spend the night—but there was no way she could abandon this effort, even though home, which was also in this district, was a stone’s throw away and seemed even closer through this pure rural darkness. She could even make out the small thumbtack of the satellite dish on the roof of the nine-story building next to hers.

“I hate everyone I see,” the bleary Lyudochka stated, more calmly now but also more convincingly, and to Marina her turned face, oddly eaten away by the profound darkness, looked like an ear. Her partner’s abrupt lunge when she went to screw on the lid—as if trying to look at her watch, which was on her other arm—made it clear that Lyudochka was drunk; shining a little light on her own watch, which kept rolling away from the streetlamp like a doll’s eye, Marina could only make out the minute hand, which caught the light, and realized she had no hope of seeing her husband today so that she could officially kick him out. At last, she heard leaf-kicking on the small rise: the bookkeeper descended first, huddling and yawning, and the driver, sliding down pigeon-toed, hurried behind her, grinning and toting a crumpled newspaper full of a pungent mass of mini-apples picked with their withered leaves still attached. The couple had no paste or flyers at all; in response to Lyudochka’s tragic tale of the guy with the knife they magnanimously shared a tight fistful of stolen fruit with each of the victims. It was utterly absurd; you could only pretend that this was purposeful work. Taking a bite of the withered wilding, which had hardened like batting, Marina decided that the only way she could go back and get the others back to reality was to write up the bookkeeper and driver objectively.

The day after that expedition, their sacrifices appeared to have been in vain. The announcements, white everywhere, having suddenly flown out like clouds of moths to live for a day, had yielded no result whatsoever. But as evening came on, pandemonium ensued. Once they’d sorted out the hundred “instructions,” the population came to believe, as they did in God, that the Krugal campaign was handing out free money. In the back room at headquarters, where a low lamp lit only the hands on the wide, fabric-covered table, making it look like a gambling den, additional packs of bills were opened; sluggish Lyudochka took a long time placing her ruler and grasping a pencil in her sharp manicure in order to draw lines in a new record book. Quite a few unexpected problems had arisen. Having clarified that there were now definite restrictions, people lined up to be canvassers by the family-load, which substantially reduced the efficacy of the planned investments. Marina personally attempted to refuse a cultivated married couple with panicked eyes behind whose back in addition languished a puffy offspring of the male persuasion squeezed into a jacket with a great many zippers and fasteners who obviously had ID. They amicably agreed that only the head of the family would register—and he wouldn’t stop apologizing while Marina was processing his decrepit ID, which was as flat as a flyswatter. As it later turned out, though, his patient spouse, who quietly disappeared two steps away from Marina’s table, registered herself and her child with another registrar—and there were similar instances every day.

The women over forty who had obviously fallen under Apofeozov’s spell but who had come to his opponent for their fifty rubles made a strange impression. Slightly embarrassed but as presentable as generals in their pink and cream greatcoats of cheap cashmere, they hurriedly wagged their pen in the notebook, as if effacing their own signature, and immediately detached the banknote from the instruction, holding the latter at arm’s length and haughtily surveying the office in search of a trash can. The chipped steps leading to the headquarters were blanketed with these instructions, like paper snow. The wind dragged these same flyers—fresh and bumpy from the large raindrops, with smeared footprints that looked as if they’d been licked—into the narrow wells of half-basement windows, where they jammed the shaggily rusted window grills along with freckled birch leaves and hung like humid clusters on moist, wadded spiderwebs.