Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

Standing there for a minute, her thoughts at a total impasse, Nina Alexandrovna realized she simply could not acknowledge this. The string lowered around the lattice and around itself in limp, empty loops represented not a running knot he had made but a graphic diagram in the air of how its intended knots should be tied. There was something innocent in the white, drapey silkiness of the rope, which bore some vague relation to a daintily embroidered blouse she recalled on an adolescent Marina. The first thing to do was to destroy any evidence of the crime. Cautiously, grasping it with two wary fingers, Nina Alexandrovna flipped the noose off the sick man’s face, and in response the paralyzed man let out an indignant, throaty grunt. Murmuring something reassuring, Nina Alexandrovna tried to remove the deadly rigging from the bed. The knot in the noose slipped off easily, like a bead, and dropped into her hand; but her light tug pulled the half-finished, branch-like work on the headboard lattice so tight that it took Nina Alexandrovna a quarter of an hour to gnaw through the tough silk stalk with scissors and free the scratched twig. All this time, Alexei Afanasievich, lying in a cooled patch of venomous old-man urine, breathed more evenly and vigorously than usual, and Nina Alexandrovna could feel his brain pushing out dark, concentric circles, like a stone tossed on the water.

So that’s how it was, she told herself, dropping into her chair. Alexei Afanasievich had attempted to hang himself. Incredible. This wasn’t just about the remainder of his paralyzed days. The particular way Alexei Afanasievich was living, steadily adding minute after minute to the sum total years lived and preserved and not letting himself be distracted for a moment from increasing the quantity of his existence, meant one thing: the moment he died, all he had built would vanish as if it had never been. A distraught Nina Alexandrovna felt herself trying to form a mental picture of things that her ordinary little mind simply could not absorb; it felt as though a tight woolen cap had been pulled over her head. She had the vague sense that her gray-haired husband’s life, which to the disinterested outsider was thoroughly unremarkable, like a set of unimportant archival files—not counting his heroic war—was in reality an unacknowledged act of heroism. His life had in fact been colossal and, like everything colossal, pointless. Any bit of fluff, any scrap of existence, to say nothing of larger, more valuable items, had come into play for Alexei Afanasievich now. Everything had become building material for his nest, his anthill, which he had been creating instinctively rather than according to any rational plan. It was crystal clear that this life of accumulation, which never let anything drop, could exist wholly either on this or that side of the line of death—but not both. Alexei Afanasievich had probably been trying to put a halt to his building before its natural completion. He was truly preparing to destroy more than his own comfortable future, with his velvety puréed soups, fluffy porridges, and fake newscasts; he was planning to annihilate everything in one fell swoop.

This was indeed inconceivable, monstrous, and unfair; this devalued the life he had lived. Nina Alexandrovna’s hands, resting in her lap, could not lie still; they kept jumping, like writhing fish cast ashore. Had the veteran managed to stick his head through the noose, which was in fact too small, then Nina Alexandrovna’s diligent marriage would have drowned in oblivion, leaving her no one’s widow and no one’s wife, alien and isolated. It would also have meant the disappearance of her predecessor, Alexei Afanasievich’s first spouse, a stout young woman with an oval face like a large medallion and dark hair that covered the bottoms of her ears and gleamed like a record in the sad daylight that permeated the old snapshots of her that remained in her maidenly purse, which was as heavy as an encyclopedia and worn down to its gray fabric. Nina Alexandrovna could not imagine what voids might arise if Alexei Afanasievich made an exit like this . She had some notion of them from the light of those faded snapshots, which preserved the woman’s pose-in-the-park on a backdrop of pointy leaves, deep in a star-shaped kaleidoscope of trees; speaking to the void, too, was the light of a today spent in sorrow—a sun-filled light, so resembling that photographic light, which gave an odd taste of the astronomical distance of its source, of just how far that light had traveled to outline the tall trees in their fever of falling leaves, the coarse sugar of the window tulle, and these little medicine bottles. This meant her husband had been planning to abandon Nina Alexandrovna to her fate. Of course, he didn’t know that his handsome pension was supporting the family, and now it was simply too late to tell him. Nina Alexandrovna didn’t have the words to inform him, out of the blue, about the changes, which even she found implausible. She simply wouldn’t know where to begin because she herself didn’t understand how or why all this had actually come about. If you looked at present-day capitalism from that distant fork in time, then this looked more like a puppet show or the nightmare of a convinced Communist who finds himself inside his own dream. The sole basis for that figure’s existence, if only in men’s minds, was the victory in the Great Patriotic War.

It turned out that Alexei Afanasievich had always been the creator and center of Soviet reality, which he’d managed to hold onto a little longer; and now this reality, squeezed to the size of their standard-issue living space, retained its permanence, inasmuch as its pillar had not disappeared; on the contrary, it was trapped along with all its medals glowing in their boxes (a Red Banner, a Patriotic War 1st class, Glory 2nd and 3rd class, and four Red Stars), which, unlike the general secretary’s meaningless decorations, possessed an internal logic and event-linked significance. Now, though, the veteran, who had turned into a body, into the horizontal content of a high trophy bed, had suddenly declared war on his own immortality. For the first time, Nina Alexandrovna was struck by the fact that Alexei Afanasievich had wended his way back from that hostile Germany, lugging this gilded cot—tens of kilos of lovely metal, separately luxurious in its Gothic mesh, chain netting, and separate headboard and footboard that looked like chromatically tuned musical instruments—and for what? What dream had he clung to in his fierce, war-rattled mind when, already lame and shackled like a convict to his trophy, he had made his way frenziedly through half-destroyed train stations and loaded his goods on passing dusty plywood trucks? Had he been dragging his future royal rest from war across half of Europe or had he after all had some woman in mind and the continuation of his stock? Or had Alexei Afanasievich guessed even then, as he languished in the unhurried peacetime freight train, which jerked every half step like a fishing line, sitting at the feet of his disassembled bed, as if at the foot of his own future, that this German beauty he couldn’t part with due to the senseless obstinacy that had overtaken him would become a worthy gallows for him—that this importunate thing was in fact his inevitable death, acquired, after all, in war? He probably felt that, no matter what, he had to bring death home—across the entire upside-down space littered with architectural devastations—drag it there and finally lie down in it, in the bed and in death, under the protection of his authentic, rear line, reliably closed walls. Actually, Nina Alexandrovna thought, every person hopes to die in his own bed, so what was surprising about that? Only Alexei Afanasievich had preferred to find and choose for himself what would become his last place on earth and the last thing he saw. Alexei Afanasievich’s choice was so specific and willful that he didn’t spare whatever remaining strength he had that hadn’t been exhausted by the war or dragged out of him by the hospital in order, without God’s help, with only crude luck pushing from behind (small change from what he’d paid for thirty victories over an agile and well-fed enemy), to drag the monster he’d taken such a liking to home to the Urals, never to be parted from it again.