Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

Now representatives of the district, of all its sloping streets and muddy layers, passed before the headquarters workers every day, and it was strange to think that the announcement’s text, like a spell, had brought this entire misbegotten population to life, drawn them out of hiding, that the voter, ordinarily invisible and anonymous (and therefore by implication mysterious even for the out-and-out PR types calculating their conduct with astronomical precision), now, before voting for a candidate, appeared in person, showed himself to the campaign headquarters life-size. Meanwhile, the guy in the wrinkled full-length leather coat smeared with pale, dried mud showed up. That morning, he’d found the tempting flyer, as uneven as a zebra’s stripes, on his rise by the fence and just didn’t connect this sudden gift from Father Frost with the previous night’s incident—not that he was likely to remember any of that anyway. He turned out not to be so scary, after all, just unkempt and nervous. His forehead was twisted by some tragic worry, his teary little eyes shone like pearls in a mollusk’s flesh, and he was constantly crumpling and straightening the cozily shabby mohair scarf at his throat. In the light of day, it was hard to imagine this unkempt intellectual knifing anyone, especially since his muffled voice, punctuated by a soft, breathy cough, was so pleasant. After introducing himself as a “well-known artist,” he roamed a little among the tables, delicately glancing at the papers being drawn up. Then he ran off for a couple of hours and, with someone’s vague permission, hauled in several pictures wrapped in Apofeozov campaign newsletters. Marina didn’t care for his masterpieces. The things they depicted were disagreeably damp and shapeless compared with their authentic originals; they pressed up against each other with a density characteristic of organs lying in a living creature’s opened interstices. The contrast between a work that has obviously spent its every square centimeter on elaboration and the paltry prices on the pictures was so provocative that many immediately reached for their purses. Lyudochka, for example, bought the small square of a pinkish painting in a board frame: the abundantly daubed canvas depicted some unbelievable liver, the mother-of-pearl swellings of which were quite unlikely to be identified as a tea service and table lamp.

As for Marina, she was among the few who didn’t succumb to the cheap goods. She’d been keeping especially careful track of her wallet for a while. She knew for a fact how much was there and in which denominations, and how much was left at home, in the cheap box decorated with broken shells made to look like plaster nostrils that was well hidden under her old, gray-worn slips. Somehow the accuracy of this reckoning (which gave Marina a quiet high and with that high a vacillating pain) was linked to the fact that Marina was on her own. Without Klimov, who had brought some in and spent some without asking, creating total indeterminacy and leakage, Marina could now control her budget wholly and entirely. Previously, her chaotic husband, carried away by the notion of future profits, might, for instance, buy a can of terribly expensive Finnish varnish (two-thirds of which, unused and haphazardly closed, later dried into hard, solid pieces) to finish his wooden creations. With Klimov around, to do something to protect what was hers, Marina had set money aside for a rainy day: sometimes the pockets of her old clothing, where you could still find stiffened pre-reform small denominations, were stuffed with money, and her winter coat, adorned with a crumbly, half-disintegrated fox, was occasionally as rich as Gobseck. Now, locked into her own expenditures and calculations, Marina kept her cash in one monitored place; taking and spending any sum out of that had become significantly harder.

Marina may have been economizing for a future life of freedom, or for some consoling purchase; but more likely, for the first time she had conceived a vague doubt that she really would occupy the deputy directorship at the newly won TV studio. She couldn’t say where the ill wind was blowing from. Krugal, now perked up, was more welcoming than ever and at the sight of Marina good-naturedly wiggled his face (thus suddenly resembling an oven mitt)—and Professor Shishkov, no matter how bothered he was by the unplanned increase in the estimate, always found a second or two, in passing, to place his cold, narrow palm on the back of his protégé’s head. Marina must have pictured all too often her future prosperity and lived for this too much—and of course, that couldn’t happen without Klimov, without his shadowy presence. Now that Marina had realized (or harshly convinced herself) that there wasn’t going to be any more Klimov, whatever she’d imagined immediately lost its plausibility.

Most agonizing of all was the fact that her cheating husband hadn’t vanished altogether. Marina, up to her ears in hiring canvassers (while she also had to prepare for the TV debates, at which Apofeozov, according to rumors, might appear with some killer “Program of National Salvation” and Fyodor Ignatovich Krugal was set on appearing in a tuxedo), still hadn’t been able to catch her husband at home and take away his keys. Meanwhile, the traces of his daytime appearances were getting odder and odder. For sure, he caught up on his sleep during the day—as attested by the messy bed and carelessly tossed blanket, which looked more like he’d been walking than sleeping on it; turning back the blanket, Marina failed to find any traces of his round, well-worn retreat such as her husband used to make for himself in bed every night. There was something she couldn’t put her finger on, as if Klimov had flattened out. His things, which Marina kept a stealthy eye on, with a hunter’s fixed gaze, would float away to wherever he spent his mysterious overnights and then return worn and shapeless, as if in that time they’d been worn by a dozen different and not very fastidious men. One time she discovered some laundry in the bathroom: stuck-together underwear hung on the line like a heavy pile of cooked noodles; a steamy, crudely knit sweater that dripped cloudy drops from the bottom like minute aquatic creatures was still warm to the touch; and the box of detergent stashed behind the basin was sodden.

It was simply astonishing the way her husband managed to avoid seemingly unavoidable encounters. One time, as she wearily climbed the front stairs, Marina distinctly heard Seryozha’s oncoming steps, characteristically muffled, which, the moment they were discovered, hung suspended. Then the steps rushed up the staircase, four times lighter, as if someone had softly struck a dangerous matchbox all set to ignite from a hissing spark. It would have been easy for Marina to go up the next six flights of stairs and drive the fugitive headfirst to the attic hatch, which was closed by a lock that always hung there, but when she finally reached her own apartment, above her, right over her head, there was suddenly such a vacuum of silence that it seemed crazy to Marina to drag herself up there with her heavy bags, survey the perfectly bare landings, and herself stand alone in front of the myopic, battened-down, nighttime apartments. Once Marina thought she saw him in the bushes…though actually, the man, who dashed from the lit entrance to the twiggy, shadow-stirring darkness (although there was something very Seryozha-like in the concealing elbow thrown over his head), may have been your garden-variety vagrant collecting bottles. Anxious to get past the curtain of lilac that tumbled from the lawn and took up half the asphalt as quickly as she could, Marina could sense the man behind the branches, as if he were something arboreal akin to that person in the wallpaper design you imagine in the tedious gloom between sleep and wakefulness—when the chimeras that steal the sleeper’s reality become visible and produce a slow horror; she even sensed seeing the vague shadow, clutching a bubble of some bulky clothing to his chest, unbutton his trousers with uncoordinating hands.