Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

Late that evening, after feeding Alexei Afanasievich a pale steamed meat patty and rubbing down especially zealously his sweetly sour body with a soapy sponge that sputtered in his wet gray hair, Nina Alexandrovna put her husband not in his usual place but farther from the edge, leaving the blanket’s selvage free. As she was coming in from the shower, all hot in her tight, chest-squeezing robe, Nina Alexandrovna noticed a dull strip of yellow light still under her daughter’s door—the weak, uneven light sawed through the darkness—while a delicate tittering, like a bird’s chirp, came from her room. Deciding her daughter was reading something funny before going to bed, Nina Alexandrovna herself smiled and fluffed her hot, damp hair a little. Alexei Afanasievich’s body lay just as she’d left it; the tulle’s large-checked pattern fell dark on his forehead. Cautiously perching on the bed’s high footboard, Nina Alexandrovna wondered at its half-forgotten resilience and the superior quality of the luxurious metalwork. Trying not to disturb Alexei Afanasievich’s sleep—not that this was sleep in the ordinary sense of the word—clumsily, holding onto the back of the bed so as not to fall on him, she arranged herself at his side. The oilcloth crackled under the cold sheet, making the bed alien, like a doctor’s exam table; her husband’s body was alien and a little sticky, too, sweetly fragrant from shampoo. In this unwarmed flesh there was little, very little life, just the heart jumping up hard under the skin, like rubbed hair, and it seemed to Nina Alexandrovna that his heart was no longer pushing nutrients through the tissues but was itself feeding on the old man’s compressed organism, sucking at his half-empty muscles, like rotting, sprouted potatoes, through his circulatory system.

Nina Alexandrovna felt sad and good and so sorry for Alexei Afanasievich but simply could not warm up. Turning on her back, her feet not reaching the foot of the bed, where, like in communicating vessels, a weak silvery color rose and fell, she floated on that metallic cloud into an obscure and gentle past, into a thirty-three-year-old October snowfall that covered the streetlamps thickly, like white bread being crumbled into milk—and the precious two tickets to the last showing presented to the ticket taker turned out to be wet. She was twenty-six, and he was all of nineteen, but over a lifetime, that difference in years seemed insignificant. It was surprising, but Nina Alexandrovna could barely remember his face, only a blob, a blob scorched by an ethereal chill she now found pleasant rather than unbearable. He was unattractive and ungainly on the whole. His hair—a stiff reddish cap—felt like doll’s hair, and in their complicated way his fingers, on which he carefully explained things to his interlocutors, resembled a small collection of chess figures. She went to his apartment a total of four times—the seventeenth floor, where the gray snow fluttering out the windows was darker than the sky and the distant courtyard, which looked like it was covered in cigarette paper, where his old brown furniture seemed too heavy to be so high up, and where the wreckage of his closet gave off a sharp whiff of musty wool and mothballs…. There were lots of small dark moles that looked like wrinkled winter berries on billowy snow on his white, very delicate ribs; his bony feet, which got tangled in the folds of the sheet, were covered in a soft, reddish down. For both, they were their firsts, and what they had for now was cramped, painful, and harsh, with a bare trickle of pleasure at the very bottom, but what they failed to achieve was replaced by a sweetness that simultaneously filled their tensed hearts, which found a rhythm, and in the curtained daytime room something like a pink balloon breathed, moist and cloudy. Hastily, to the nasal alarm of the clock that had woken up in the next room (his parents arrived at six-thirty), he tore the crumpled sheet off the couch, flinging open the tight window vent to air the room out, while outside, oatmeal-like spots hopped around as if hastily pecked at. He took hundred-ruble discs of impossibly satiny blackness out of their glossy foreign sleeves and holding them, cleanly, on the edges, by his palms, placed them on the record player and then lowered the obedient needle to their spinning, sentimentally damp smooth surface. He was boastful, good, and haunted. After lovemaking he taught her to smoke, lighting a drooping cigarette and switching it directly to her lips; outside, he always removed her prickly rustic mitten so he could hold her hot hand. He’d let her listen on the dorm’s cheap record player, which resembled nothing so much as a hot plate, to lightly scratched discs that sounded almost like the real thing but when the needle snagged would suddenly let out an arrow of sound, like a stocking with a run in it.

Surprisingly, Nina Alexandrovna remembered everything except for his slippery image; any detail from those weeks she kept separately and in exemplary order, and due to this separateness , their relationship seemed longer than it really was. Nina Alexandrovna would shut her eyes and see his parents: elderly, with identical brown eyes like four two-kopek coins. They had affectionate names for each other and their friends, as if they were all children. Her father had a disproportionately large, almost elephantine skull solidly covered in curly gray hair; his mother had a mustache, burr-stiff, and a lot of skin and corn-yellow amber hanging on her neck. Both of them were gynecologists well known in the city. It was their fame and specialty that left no secret to the relationship between the “young lady” and their younger son, and they made the “young lady” blush. In her own Severouralsk, where she had graduated from vocational school before going to the university, she’d had no idea that there were people like this: Jews who were suddenly fired and exiled, as if dying then and there, in their homeland, holding their own wake amid the chaos and discarded furniture moved from where it belonged and holding unneeded keys in its locks, like dangling cigarettes. Naturally, she shouldn’t have come. She was a total stranger at the oval family table, where they ate laboriously on cracked dishes as dingy as a smoker’s teeth, where the adults were still wearing all Soviet-era clothes, as clumsy as if lined with cardboard, and the children sparkled in foreign-made jeans outfits and fancy little sweaters—and he, crazed and tipsy, barely escaping the confinement of his talkative relatives, was anxious to see her home.

Afterward there had been one postcard from him, mailed from Moscow, and nothing more. Ever since, Nina Alexandrovna had disliked Jews and had always spoken of them with suspicion and dislike, but she never did learn to pick them out among the good people with whom her life thereafter brought her together. Marina was born in July, when it was hottest and the grass and tree leaves grew up big and holey, as if burned by cigarettes, and the yellow centers of the waterlilies on the pond by the district clinic were as rich as hard-boiled egg yolks. While looking after her crawling cotton bundle, Nina Alexandrovna tried to imagine a different, exotic heat, with palms, from the travelogue film club, with desert sands dissolving in an unreliable haze, like sugar in a glass of boiling water, and him in the city’s full stony blaze of sun, with a shadow no bigger than a ball’s on the slabs and a book under his arm. For a while, imagining him in connection with herself became a habit for Nina Alexandrovna, and she had an acute need to sense him alive , but the synchronous connection became more and more fantastic, his image wore out from overuse, and gradually Nina Alexandrovna began confusing her imagination with her dreams, in which he appeared like a plaster Young Pioneer, and colonnades and a gigantic three-tiered Soviet fountain burned in the sun like a giant chandelier, a fountain whose dust on the asphalt was hot and soft, like wet ashes. Here, on the marital bed, she also finished looking at the last dribs and drabs the soul had taken away: murk and snow, he came from Israel a very old and wrinkled man, and sat on a bench in some ghastly lane, and for some reason the tracks leading to him were as round as saucers of milk.