Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

The main danger, though, which Marina hadn’t even let herself contemplate, so she wouldn’t fall prostrate and could keep working at headquarters, was that Klimov and his departure might destroy her painstaking construction, created over so many years of effort. Marina would have done anything to keep from undermining her stepfather’s heart, to keep it beating until better times. Klimov didn’t know how she’d humiliated herself before a certain Zoya Petrovna, the sanctimonious blonde with a mouth like stewed carrots who ran the archives at the dilapidated film studio downtown. Klimov had no idea the effort it had cost Marina each time to reach an agreement with Kostik, the film editor, a reluctant and cunning creature who was fond of all his colorful shirts, his love beads, and his delicate mirrored eyeglasses, but who took positively swinish care of his titanic computer, whose white antique beauty was permanently etched with grime and whose keys looked like molars ground down by rough fodder until they’d lost their letters, uncleaned for three hundred years. Undoubtedly, ratlike Kostik (a newly fledged fan of the general secretary, he had bombarded online auctions with requests for L. I. Brezhnev’s personal effects) had his own, virtual reasons for not particularly liking Kukharsky, but each time he helped the disgraced Marina “churn out some real pulp fiction,” he capriciously raised the agreed-upon fee in dollars and tried to edit into the “news” his own face looking out like an ape’s among the decorous Soviet faces. All this, outrageous and stupid as it was, had to be endured. Marina lied to her inevitable accomplices, saying she was preparing a surprise for that pig Kukharsky, a killer special project, an alternative postdocumentary film—which was mostly the truth, because her fake news turned out to be more expressive than what was supposedly authentic. Developed socialism’s special effects emerged distinctly in the material. Here, unlike in its Hollywood counterparts, nothing got blown up and no cars crashed. On the contrary, they constructed a grandiose, extensive meaning and structure that were clearly the geometry of a catastrophe lifted into the industrial air.

In order to achieve relative stability in her own district, Marina voluntarily made herself the heart of the paralyzed era, the heroine of a Soviet film; in retrospect, she almost came to love the Young Communists and her fictional Party membership. This affected her position in the conspiracy and at Professor Shishkov’s headquarters, for instance, where Marina, despite her low salary, had become a significant figure, the conscience of the entire effort. Nor would Marina, hewing to purely Party principles, let her stepfather find out about the death of his drunkard of a nephew, who looked like a dead man long before his live-in lover, an alcoholic with a face like stomach contents, killed the poor guy with a classic Russian ax. Marina had gone to the scene for the Studio A crime beat personally. Still fearless, she wasn’t terribly impressed by the dark little ax, with its rim of dirty sludge like you find under nails, or by the small bug-like blood spatters on the kitchen wall. Nonetheless, she refused to confirm this disgraceful death as a fact. For her anxious mother, who wasn’t allowed to see the real news, either, but who somehow could tell something bad had happened, the crime story became a vodka poisoning—which was also partly the truth since, according to the autopsy report, at the moment her nephew, unsteady on his feet, was leveled by the ax, his organism was as sloshed as soup and he had barely a few weeks to live. Nonetheless, Marina had to take care to maintain this person’s pseudo-life. Moreover, the newly departed lush, who, before the ax, would show up to put the touch on them for minor amounts on Red pension days, turned out to be a much more voracious parasite than the canonical Brezhnev. Even after inventing a philanthropic drug rehab for the nephew (behind which immediately loomed the two-humped shadow of the Apofeozov businessmen brothers, who now actually did run an anti-alcohol philanthropy together), Marina couldn’t settle what she discovered were his considerable drunk debts, which badly taxed her reserves. For some reason, she thought it was important to fully repay what was written down on the last page of her old planner: she had to finish out the worn handwritten calendar, zero it out. But the whole business was complicated not only by her limited discretionary funds but also by the terrible vagueness that arose as a result of the alcoholic’s surprise visits when, sometimes, he would be discovered in the kitchen, painfully sober, with the heavy expression of a made-up tragedian and knees pressed together femininely, agonizingly picking at the chocolate daubs from the homemade cake on his plate—and of course, without Marina’s knowledge, taking some serious hair of the dog. She just couldn’t zero him out—and evidently her mother, taking from the mailbox the latest transfer sent by Marina, still asked herself why her now grown-up relative didn’t show his face or come visit even for the holidays that had always been sacred for him, dates for reestablishing his rights and for being with his people. Doubtless, her mother secretly suspected that brusque Marina had insulted her relative—which was also true because the deads’ resentment for the living always seeps through the night and comes out on the wallpaper, and also because Marina had stashed the body.

Nonetheless, in the homemade movies, within the confines of the family, as steady as a stool, the family of four followed the simple laws of Soviet well-being. Once Marina had driven Klimov out, she had to feed yet another phantom, who, in point of fact, had long since inhabited the apartment as a reluctant vision that barely fed on human food and sat in his armchair with the newspaper as the personification of a husband in the abstract . Klimov had barely ever stopped by where the twisted patient lay, following his visitor with his eyes. The only thing that connected Klimov to her parents’ room, which was set up like a Red Corner, a Soviet shrine, was the contents of the wardrobe, the only one for the whole family—and lately Nina Alexandrovna herself had been bringing out his half-undressed hanger, on which Klimov’s sole silk tie dangled like a sword on a sling.

While trying to figure out how she was going to go on (in anesthetized moments of practical mental exertion), Marina would tell herself she could entirely compensate for her lost husband’s presence only by tending to whatever clothing remained. In leaving their home, Klimov was hardly going to take everything; something had to be preserved, if only old things from their happy, distant student days purchased at the gargantuan flea market on the edge of town, where Marina and Klimov had always held hands tightly and had a prearranged meeting place, just in case they got separated: a very fat, worn birch, as white as toothpowder. Marina hoped that Klimov would never go into the attic after that and get into the big brown suitcase where their unwashed memories lay, pressed into a distressing, mutely smelly lump, and remove them layer by layer like stiffened bandages. As it turned out, by searching out and going through what her husband wouldn’t want to take, Marina had restored him and herself to their best, their finest past. She felt she had equal rights to her husband’s faded property, and not just because it had been paid for with her parents’ money and afterward with her paycheck. It was just that, by leaving, Klimov had forfeited his moral right to create the illusion that he, the cheater, had never been there at all.

Gradually, albeit just in Marina’s mind for now, there was a new, strictly symmetrical familial harmony in which Klimov’s continuous absence corresponded to Alexei Afanasievich’s absence, and the two incomplete husbands, quietly occupying adjoining rooms, presented the active women with increasing loneliness, and their vanishing difference in age, multiplied by kinship, could be discerned less and less given the drawing of identical wrinkles, whose wavy circularity resembled a tree’s annular rings. Self-confident Marina thought she could easily borrow from her mother that weekly meticulousness with which she—no less conscientiously than she attended to her stepfather’s body—cared for the body cavities and folds of his gray suit, which her efforts had kept so fresh and smart over the past fourteen years. With time, Klimov’s wedding suit, too, now moved to the corner of the closet by the heavy press of junk, would probably acquire a well-groomed similarity to the gabardine that flaunted the war veteran’s planks of medals and empty sleeves and occasionally took its owner’s place on the narrow family balcony. One had to assume that the morbid similarity between both their husbands’ things—the unworn clothing and the unambulating footwear that started looking ceramic—would one day create an idyll unattainable within the bounds of simple human actions. Knowing full well that it takes money to maintain specters, Marina, once she’d paid off the alcoholic’s debts, might buy something fashionable for Klimov—because fashion, like a distorted transfer of real time to the mute and foolish language of objects, could exist even given her apartment’s stagnation in the general secretary’s shadow.