Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

Now, having cried her eyes out and soaked her handkerchief so thoroughly that it was slick, Nina Alexandrovna would have liked her husband to have given at least a faint sign of regret and guilt. After all, what had happened was worse and more hurtful than if she’d found Alexei Afanasievich with a lover—in their marital bed, whose height and vehement ringing, like the ringing of meadow grass full of grasshoppers, Nina Alexandrovna couldn’t forget on her own canvas cot. However, the paralyzed man, lying as before on the wet, wrinkled spot (where he evidently had slipped down, in some unknown way, along with all his lopsided bedding), was now so self-absorbed that his face, where the calm half had in the past fourteen years become much younger than the twisted half, seemed to be floating on the surface of deep water, the way they sometimes show it in the movies: waves, scrunching up and then smashing forth, rocking a drowned man’s straw hat. Evidently, the attempt to hang himself had not been without effect. Pulling out from under her husband the long wet sheet and the reddish oilcloth, crumpled and burning like a mustard plaster, Nina Alexandrovna felt that his body had filled with fatigue and become much heavier and turned over without its former apish agility, without the habit of yielding , a habit his lifeless limbs had somehow acquired over his years of illness. Picking the blanket up off the floor (and hearing in the front hall the whistling rustle of a jacket and a cautious bustle—probably Seryozha getting ready to leave), Nina Alexandrovna suddenly saw in the corner of the top sheet a light, half-empty swelling. Plunging her arm up to the elbow into the wide-open, shapeless bag, she pulled out into the light a tangled nest: shabby bathrobe belts; summer dresses sent long ago to the attic; tie strings and stretched elastics pulled from fitted sheets. The biggest was a battered gold polka-dot silk tie that stood out from the mass like a cobra among skinny worms. In horror, Nina Alexandrovna attempted to tie all this into a noose-like slip knot, winding the dangling ends around it (in the front hall the cramped shuffling continued, and clothes fell off a hanger as if in a dead faint, with a sigh and gentle clatter, to the floor). Suddenly—or so it only seemed, so fleeting was the ticklish touch—the paralyzed man’s left hand, entwined with swollen veins that looked filled with air, stroked Nina Alexandrovna behind her ear, accidently brushing the sharp seed of her earring.

Nina Alexandrovna’s thoughts immediately took a different turn. How weary he must be from fourteen years of his lying weight torturing his back, from the discomfort of unstrung bones as heavy as chains, from the moribund functioning of his stomach, where food was transformed into soil and languidly pushed through the twists and turns of his intestines—while in his chest, an oar was planted crosswise at each tight inhale. All this Nina Alexandrovna knew vaguely from her own self. All this had been communicated to her through the nonverbal connection that had arisen between her and her husband the moment Alexei Afanasievich fell on the balcony, on the grumbling cans, and his brain exploded. But this connection meant exactly nothing in the sense of their relationship. Even if there had been something like love between Nina Alexandrovna and her husband, could she really now claim that Alexei Afanasievich had been patient and fed her with his languishing flesh, his veteran’s pension, which the state had been paying for nearly a quarter-century—and couldn’t pay forever to a man who couldn’t die . Alexei Afanasievich had the legitimate right to end his own suffering once and for all and to let Nina Alexandrovna find a way to feed herself. That’s what all the lonely women did today, women impossible to look at the way they were, dressed in what was no longer worth a ruble, on the street selling swollen pickles in cloudy brine and Turkish underpants set out on newspapers and gathered under headlights. Nina Alexandrovna was willing to join these ranks of disabled traders, only she didn’t know how. She’d been spoiled, after all; her husband had never left her without money. Touching herself behind the ear with her most impartial (middle) finger, she tried to remember the sensation, but stupidly fingering the sand of her hair, she just spread the vague warmth, transforming it into a venomous redness. Then she leaned over (incorrigibly believing in good ) the already covered, swaddled Alexei Afanasievich, hoping to speak to him in the language of the floating electric figures that she feared from her vague memory about an article on ball lighting in Science and Life . But the brain inside his skull, which looked like a delicately glued-together archeological vessel, was mirror-smooth this time, so that looking into Alexei Afanasievich’s eyes, Nina Alexandrovna imagined she saw on the fluffed pillow her own face with traces of her former avian beauty.

Life burst in rudely: the door swung open as if from a blow flatwise to its full height, and Nina Alexandrovna shuddered. She thought Seryozha probably needed something in the closet—but it turned out to be Marina, not her son-in-law. She was wearing a twisted, ash-gray suit and holey slippers over black stockings, so that it was unclear which of the children had been fussing in the front hall all this time and clattering keys. “Mama, did she bring the money?” Marina asked impatiently, casting her usual quick glance at the paralyzed man, followed by another, closer one that seemed to press on the bridge of Alexei Afanasievich’s nose—at the wrinkled root of his old-mannish face where today there lay a suspicious, oddly even shadow. “Yes, yes. I’ve already been to the market,” Nina Alexandrovna said hastily and ingratiatingly, realizing she couldn’t quite remember how much each purchase had cost and that she was going to have to account for her spending, collecting from her pockets the pitiful change and answering to her daughter for the unheard-of food prices, which had quietly inflated again. Nina Alexandrovna was insulted that Marina seemed not to believe her and deep down thought that her mother was buying incorrectly —saving up for lottery tickets for her own pleasure, possibly, to win canned goods or a piece of sausage. “What do you have there?” Marina suddenly asked, indicating with her eyes the chaotic bundle of rag herbage that Nina Alexandrovna was squeezing in her damp fist. “Oh, I was just sweeping up the floor,” Nina Alexandrovna replied in an unnatural voice, putting her hand behind her back, a movement that immediately reminded her of the deltoid pain under her left shoulder blade. “Throw it out, for God’s sake. Why doesn’t anyone ever throw anything out here?” Frowning painfully and slowly disentangling the two-pronged belt lashing at her, Marina turned to walk away and only then, by accident, did Nina Alexandrovna see that the glass on Brezhnev’s portrait, with its steely sheen, had cracked in the corner.

The explanation was not extensive. Marina was distracted and angry about something, and the money seemed to stick together in her clumsy counting fingers. For some reason, she was having a hard time eating. She seemed to keep biting her spoon, and the borscht in her bowl got cold and murky. Time and again, without a word, Marina would go out in the hall, and then a worried Nina Alexandrovna, up to her elbows in a burbling sink of greasy, badly scraped dishes, would start to imagine that her daughter had gone to see the paralyzed man for some additional verification. She couldn’t imagine what an indignant Marina would do if she found out about Alexei Afanasievich’s attempt to reject his monthly 1,300 rubles. Most of all, Nina Alexandrovna was afraid Marina would beat her stepfather. Who or what could stop her? However, she did not hear steps heading toward the far room. Peeking cautiously from the kitchen, Nina Alexandrovna saw in the dilute gloom that her daughter wasn’t going anywhere but was standing perfectly still, facing the darkest corner of the front hall, listening to the sounds of the front entrance, sounds that could have been drawn with a ruler, the blunt notes of someone’s ascending boots that couldn’t seem to get as far as their empty sixth-floor landing.