Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

Much more frightened by her husband’s cheating than she could afford to be during the campaign craziness, Marina had evidently developed a fear of men. Subconsciously, she now saw them as degenerate creatures hiding in the dark and dirt to threaten her with an attack or some kind of impact that would turn her soul into a chemistry experiment heating various caustic substances in her chest. Maybe the man on the lawn and the painter with the curved knife, although real people, were equally the fruit of Marina’s fear, a fear that had conjured them up out of nowhere, without any justification for their existence. Actually, this had already happened—a long time ago, in her dormitory. Marina remembered how at first she hadn’t been afraid of anything and had gone into every unlocked room, even where they were drinking vodka, stupidly clinking their stupid glasses and pulling her onto their laps, which felt as uncomfortable as a grown-up’s bicycle. Later she suddenly started being afraid, especially of her Uncle Kolya Filimonov, who would walk around and sit, grabbing himself, as if he were anxious to get to the toilet; his eyes were as red as ladybugs, and his right hand had been hurt and was bandaged so that it looked like a rabbit. Because he liked looking out the window on airless nights, Marina started to be afraid of the dark. This had stopped later, when her mother, all dressed up, took her from their dorm, but now it was back. Maybe Marina should have turned to someone for support, but she’d learned from experience and wasn’t someone who bared her soul to anyone. In the evenings she switched off her bedside lamp, which immediately gave way to the powdery window light, and tossed and turned for a long time, shifting her two heavy pillows like sacks of memories worn to dust. In her mind, she was constantly talking to her husband, occasionally smiling a broken smile if some funny comeback got stuck in her mind. So many of these mental conversations had accumulated that, even if the girl in the halter had abruptly withdrawn, daily life would not have given Marina the chance to say all this in reality; all this—a euphoric mixture of fantasies and altered memories—had been hopeless from the start, and the more she worked through it, the less it could correlate with any future. As she gradually broke with reality, Marina’s enlightening daytime dreams were separated from waking only by a cloudy, milky membrane that let through sounds and basic colors. Her husband seemed to be leaving her these dreams to watch , the way he once might have left her a magazine or newspaper article to read.

Had Marina been able to talk to the unfaithful Klimov for just a few minutes, that would have blocked, plugged the fantastic stream of conversation that didn’t let up even at work and that manifested itself in Marina’s handwriting in extra segments and a swollen caviar of letters, so that even visually the voters’ passport details in her notebook resembled stray thoughts. All of a sudden she discovered that Klimov’s image, which Marina had long considered dulled, was in fact as vivid as a parasite that’s entwined its strong shoots around the mind’s every hope and movement.

Marina’s feelings when seeking a meeting with the fugitive, counting the minutes to the end of the workday—living every day with ticking clockworks installed in her brain—bore a strong resemblance to her feelings in her first year of university, when she was chasing Klimov and would totally tune out if for some overriding reasons he hadn’t come to class. Outwardly, the situations then and now were ridiculously alike. Even minor details were reproduced, like the sour electrolytic tingling on her wet palms or her sudden wild impatience—which became an internal scream—when a well-off voter not only put her fat-bellied purse on Marina’s table but stood in front of her for more than a few minutes. Her feelings today, though—copies of her former ones—were hollow: her heart pounded, but her heart was empty. Her feelings no longer had an object and so now needed one even more than when the elusive Klimov simply cut a couple of classes or was quickly exiting a room where Marina had some need to enter—and the room became a dead end. Seeing him daily was an insurmountable need; if in her lectures they suddenly started talking about something disturbing and lofty (the Russian literature teacher, a fading enthusiast with dull, googly eyes and a slanting bang that looked like an arrow on a map of military actions, went on forever declaiming verses from the classics), Marina would turn around and look ecstatically at Klimov, who would immediately lay his shaggy head on his elbow, smearing his notes. Then, at least, there was someone to look at—although Klimov didn’t like it. Now, emptiness loomed in dozens of different images, most of them frightening and unpleasant. Sometimes Marina imagined that the male shadows of the day and night had entered into a conspiracy and were coordinating their movements—all in black footwear—whereas the only reality was Klimov’s rust-brown boots strolling through cheerful, nastily splashing slush.

She also observed one other unhealthy phenomenon. Unexpectedly, her past life—everything that Marina considered very far in the past, separated from the present day by many years—had suddenly turned up here and surrounded her now much more solidly and persistently than the reality of the crumbling streets and her basement workplace, all of which, along with the streams of public transport and the daily crowd of visitors mumbling with closed mouths, increased the pressure. I have my whole life with me , Marina told herself, looking off into open space (which was so narrow and had such limited sky, you could scarcely call it freedom), and right then she felt her loss, as if, although she had preserved all her morally outdated property, her most important capital had been illegally confiscated. Her attempt to save money in the battered box, under a clattering mat of glass beads, tangled chains, and cheap earrings attached like mosquitoes, now looked like a greeting from the past. From behind her present treasure house, its absolute prototype suddenly came forward, striking at Marina’s heart: the dormitory gift box—a tea canister rough with crude rust that inside preserved its dull gold—as if breathed on—its mirrorlike walls and bottom but not the empty candy that had been squashed and now looked like a dead bug spreading its crushed lower wings. Imagine the presents and candies Marina could buy herself with the fourteen hundred rubles she’d saved to keep from frittering them away.

Meanwhile, the past’s return highlighted the fact that in those fifteen years that had wiped clean away the foundational medal-wearing era that Marina had single-handedly attempted to preserve, Klimov hadn’t changed one bit. The fact that her husband had suddenly hooked up with another, exotic woman—whose head had too much coarse, tarry hair for that small bulb to preserve a human brain structure—only underscored the fact that he himself had remained the same. Now Marina knew for a fact not only that Klimov had someone else but also exactly how and what was going on between them. For example, when Seryozha leaned in to kiss the woman, or ran his finger, as he once did to Marina, across her wide, charred eyebrows, which after Marina’s tweezed petioles must have seemed positively masculine, Marina had been a superfluous witness. The situation was undoubtedly dangerous. Marina could only imagine how badly Klimov wanted to get rid of his wife so she wouldn’t spy on him and his girlfriend through some metaphysical crack. Her sense of victimhood was immediately aroused as soon as someone’s damp steps, tapping like wooden blocks, were heard under the arch leading to their courtyard (no one had brought Marina home in a long time). Marina could barely keep herself from running straight through the puddles, where treacherous pieces of brick, which looked like someone’s boots left in the water, lay like dark chains, but the front door, which the lamp made watery, at the far end of the courtyard, just wouldn’t get any closer.