Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

All this, actually, was the pragmatic lyric poetry of a madwoman. Deep down, Marina understood that she may have gone too far. If up until now she’d managed to construct and repair a fake reality without any particular damage to the reality of her own “I,” then the new phantom—her lost husband—threatened to change all that. How was it that Marina couldn’t remember herself for so many long years? She couldn’t remember how, over the course of a gloomy student winter with trees in plaster, she’d desperately envied Klimov for being himself, how she’d tried to interact with him, reading her own letters to him: cherished pages from notebooks covered in the extravagant handwriting of a schoolgirl’s compositions not desecrated by having been sent through the mail. Had anything changed now, when apparently the life you’d lived came back all at once and taught you not to repeat yourself—not that it predicted any kind of a future? Hadn’t Marina bought herself the same thing Klimov had, a ring that looked like a sugar lump—and at the same time agonizingly not the same thing, offending the eye with the ineluctable chicanery of its construction, its deformed excess, which simultaneously wiped from memory the unfound original? Holding out her slightly trembling hand outrageously adorned with the over-large acquisition, Marina realized that she was going to have to throw herself into maintaining the spectral Klimov’s life. As she looked at these people, these voters—who were in turn looking at her with pairs of brackish, infinitely patient eyes—Marina thought that if her life, her existence, were the condition for the parasite’s life, the possibility of feeding it and the power to stop it all immediately would console her—but the parasite would continue to thrive when all that remained of Marina was a tortured shell. “What a cool ring,” Lyudochka remarked, taking her extended hand with the confidence of a fortune-teller but not looking at her palm. Returning to reality and to headquarters, where it was lunchtime, Marina decided, first, that she would sign herself and her mother up for their legitimate fifty rubles and, second, she would call home, but certainly not to hide behind the anonymity of a trill and be taken for an Asian girl with a braid and lure Klimov out of his lackluster nap. In fact, she had to clarify whether Klumba had shown up and inquire about their finances once and for all; when she left the shouting clients for the back room, turbid potatoes were gurgling on the hotplate there, boiled to shreds, and long-legged Lyudochka was slicing a stale baguette and covering it with big slices of salami in its casing. Basically, life went on as if nothing had happened, even though all Marina heard in the receiver were long, impersonal rings.

As she dragged her bag up the stairs, Nina Alexandrovna, winded, distinctly heard what she thought was the telephone tinkling, barely pushing through the taut obscuration in her head. By the time she’d sorted out the locks and the keys, which looked like dogs had gnawed them, and squeezed into the stuffy front hall, the phone was silent. Over it, looking at Nina Alexandrovna with mirror eyes hot from sleep, wearing haphazardly pulled-on jeans frayed by decrepitude, her startled son-in-law was shifting from foot to foot. As usual, Seryozha must have slept in after his night shift and the call had awakened him, but for some reason Nina Alexandrovna imagined that her son-in-law had not been too late to get the telephone, so sedately white on its smooth runner, like in a picture, but had stood over it like that, gawking, as if trying with his outstretched arm to dampen the cascading rings and channel the assertive noise through his fingers—anything but touch the receiver. Actually, these were just fantasies that immediately flew from Nina Alexandrovna’s mind when she noticed how skinny her son-in-law had grown. His house slippers looked like they were on his hands, not his feet, so slender had his hairless ankles become, and his sunken belly hung from his ribs like an empty sack. This was no surprise. After all, now he had to work nearly every night; sometimes, when he showed up at home, he could barely throw his elusive jacket on a hanger before getting into the bed that her daughter, rushing off to the TV studio, hadn’t even had time to make properly. Nina Alexandrovna supposed that one of her son-in-law’s relief men had fallen ill, and she was afraid they wouldn’t pay him for the extra work, and Marina, who had become almost too beautiful of late, with lips like a vivid ulcer, would start ragging him again.

Nina Alexandrovna told Seryozha she’d heat up the borscht and went into the kitchen, where she put the food away in the old refrigerator, shocking her fingers on raw electricity as usual. Then, she took a generous scoop of the pink medley from the full soup pot, which had a part-circle of orange fat with a transparent tear, heaped it into a smaller pot, and put it on the gas, and the cold jelly began to bubble quietly around the edges. The borscht had turned out well. Ten minutes later, after Seryozha had thrown on a shirt and perched round-shouldered on a stool, there was a full bowl of the hot, colorful soup with a big dollop of lovely sour cream and an array of thick sandwiches on a separate plate in front of him. Looking at the dreamy smile that gradually lit up Seryozha’s young face as his sunken cheeks warmed from the food, Nina Alexandrovna felt something inside her relax and soften where everything in a person should be firm. Of course, lately she’d become overly trusting in the good. The harder life got, the more pliantly Nina Alexandrovna responded to its random and weak smiles, which might not have meant anything like what she was seeing from her perspective. Even she guessed how easy it was to buy her with the mere sight of a baby in a stroller or, say, the scene of a friendly conversation, when two men who were utter strangers to Nina Alexandrovna, perfumed youth wearing expensive clothing made somewhere that had to be overseas, simply clapped each other on the shoulder—but she was willing to value herself more and more cheaply because she lacked even crumbs of kindness for her emotional moisture to soften into a warm pap. Now, too, looking at her son-in-law digging the soft, thick, whitened mass out of the bowl with increasing enthusiasm, Nina Alexandrovna believed he might find a good job soon and the family wouldn’t have to stretch itself so thin waiting for pension day.

Nina Alexandrovna herself had lost her appetite; the sour bun from the street stand had settled in her stomach like a wad of heavy dough. Alexei Afanasievich was usually sleeping at this time of day—or rather, drifting into what in his unvarying existence might be considered human sleep—and snoring softly. His half-shut right eye glittered, while his brain burned like a frosted lamp, clearly delineating the spattered bruise from the stroke that made Alexei Afanasievich look like Mikhail Gorbachev, of whom he had never heard. Nina Alexandrovna usually spent this time in the kitchen, so as not to disturb the paralyzed man with her heavy, ambulating presence. Now, though, in a state of mollified good will, she had an urge to feed him. She decided to check on him first, though, so she cautiously cracked open the bedroom door. Only then did it occur to her that she couldn’t hear him snoring. Standing bewildered on the threshold, Nina Alexandrovna immediately saw—but failed to understand—that something unusual was going on in the bed, whose big gilded knobs burned like headlights. The sheets, which Nina Alexandrovna had left smooth and tight, with the neat paralytic slipped inside like a pen in a shirt pocket, were now rumpled and bunched up at the invalid’s feet, and the blanket was hanging at an angle over the side. Alexei Afanasievich’s left arm was lying quite apart and seemed nearly as big as his entire body, whose odd bending had something armless and fishlike about it. What struck Nina Alexandrovna most, though, was the flimsy white rope fastened to the bed’s latticed headboard like a monogram woven in the air. At the other end, the rope ended in a noose, which lay askew on the paralyzed man’s face. Betrayed by this seemingly carelessly drawn circle, Alexei Afanasievich was looking through it wildly, and his protruding right eye blinked, while the other, half-closed, twitched like a tree’s withered, raindrop-splattered leaf.