Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

Originally, his redheadedness had come out in Marina’s sparse baby hair, and there was something of him in the structure of her lionish little nose, which made Nina Alexandrovna imagine she’d had a boy. But gradually all this ironed out and his face gradually dropped from memory as well, and even the resentment, the burning resentment at that life yielded to simpler, plainer resentments: at the superintendent’s wife, who gave the young mama the most torn sheets worn to a gray gauze; and at her own parents, who fell ill whenever Nina Alexandrovna asked them to take little Marina for a few days and who with the years turned into identical village kulaks with faces like bone-dry gingerbread men. She held no grudges against Alexei Afanasievich, though. In essence, he had never abandoned her, had never once left her without flowers on International Women’s Day. Just as he had May 9th, Nina Alexandrovna had March 8th, which was observed religiously. Even if they were just cheap stems, pins in an emptyish newspaper cone, nonetheless Nina Alexandrovna felt set apart from the many women who were only given a tiny little tulip at work, out of petty cash, and it was so nice to unpack the cold newspaper cone full of thawing March air and arrange the little bouquet that loosened up in the heavy, cut-glass vase where she now kept lost buttons: the wobbly circles now almost filled the vase to the top.

Because Alexei Afanasievich was a man for whom Nina Alexandrovna could feel gratitude without having to invent anything about him, her husband suddenly seemed so valuable and unique that her eyes moistened and in the half-dark became like two deep inkwells, while the night’s ink slowly dried on the walls, dark in the cracks on the floor, and stuck several heavy old tomes together on the shelf—and right then, outside, all the way down, the streetlamps went out. The umbral pointers that leaned the floating room slightly laterally were replaced as a reference point by the invisible alarm clock ticking off to the side. Tenderly, as only she could, Nina Alexandrovna stroked her husband’s cold shoulder (as had often happened before, too, she imagined a nonexistent cord from a medallion or cross passing under her fingers), quietly slipped her feet into her cold slippers, which were damp from her shower, and trying not to run into anything, unfolded the tottering cot. Come morning, waking in a sweat, on the bare canvas with the loose sheet, Nina Alexandrovna told herself she’d manage somehow, and if today took more out of her than it did ten or twenty years ago, then that was what it was like for everyone, that meant those times had come, and despite the odd jerking in her tight chest, she had to get up and cook breakfast, and she would not let anyone lay a finger on Alexei Afanasievich, who was stretched out close to the wall—helpless, his arms pressed down, but who over his years of immobility had become neither an animal nor demented.

Now Nina Alexandrovna kept a very close eye on what was going on around her. Inasmuch as she had to keep her husband’s secret from absolutely everyone, she listened closely to steps in the apartment and didn’t let them get close to the forbidden Red Corner without taking hasty measures and wrapping Alexei Afanasievich up to the chin in his blanket. Now no one could catch her unawares. Nina Alexandrovna knew exactly who was where in the apartment at each specific moment, and in the morning the first thing she did was ascertain people’s presence, making herself heard under the long-occupied bathroom’s swollen doors, which even on the outside were wet from the steam of the noisy water and which also let through the wet, almost hoarse shout of one of the children. Risking their irritation, she would look in on them in their unaired bedroom, always discovering one of them in the stuffiness—and sometimes getting a blank, unblinking gaze from her daughter, as if she were weighing all objects.

Intent though her surveillance was, Nina Alexandrovna felt cut off from the young family. She couldn’t even fight their slovenliness properly. Sometimes her daughter and son-in-law’s ignorant faces seemed like strangers’, as if they’d retreated into the shadows; the necessity of watching them kept Nina Alexandrovna from worrying about their daily well-being as she once had. For some reason, only once, one late inclement evening, did she manage to catch them together. Her son-in-law seemed to be leaving on a business trip. Beside him on the front hall floor was a haphazardly packed—as if everything that should have been packed crosswise lay lengthwise—gym bag, and Seryozha, pulling on his laced rust-brown boots as if they were lion’s paws, gave her a merry look, from which Nina Alexandrovna concluded that her son-in-law now had a new job because parking lot guards didn’t go on business trips. Marina, who had just come in from the TV studio, was seeing her husband off, leaning against the wall, her hands hidden behind her back. Occasionally her immobile face would flutter like a butterfly pinned for an entomological collection. Her daughter was looking far from her best, and her eyes were flooded, so that Nina Alexandrovna nearly said something about seeing a doctor right in her son-in-law’s presence. The expression in Marina’s eyes was such, though, that Nina Alexandrovna hurried to her room, nearly losing a slipper as she did, so as not to listen to their conversation, which didn’t happen, actually. There was just the constrained space of the front hall, the general skewedness of the gym bag dragging noisily across the floor, and Marina giving the lock a sharp turn. Since then, Nina Alexandrovna couldn’t stop feeling that she and Marina were each jealously guarding their own territory, and neither had anything against putting locks on the doors to their own rooms, no matter the cost, so that when they left home they wouldn’t leave their abandoned rears defenselessness.

Now a guarded Nina Alexandrovna felt a strange need to announce her appearance, and her own call or the dull tap of her puffy limbs seemed like too little (little Marina, when she came in from playing, wouldn’t knock or ring but would slap the door with her dirty hand); Nina Alexandrovna felt as though she should throw something ahead of herself before entering—and in this one felt a vague reference to some folktale in which the character tosses various objects on his path so that loyal friends can follow this dotted line and find him. Here, it all felt backward. Her desire was not to sweep away the past but to explore the future along this dotted line. For the first time in her life, Nina Alexandrovna felt a need to sound out the unknowable tomorrow, a spectral tentacle of the mind that would tell her whether precisely what she feared and what Alexei Afanasievich, resisting being packed away, obviously continued to want had in fact happened up ahead: if you substituted movements for speech, his tensed resistance and his attempts to strain to the hilt what remained of his shackled strength reminded her of the bellowing of a mute.

Nina Alexandrovna didn’t like losing anything. She sensed a void in her well-kept space if a bobby pin dropped or a coin rolled away (which was why she collected lots of little odds and ends around herself) and now felt more favorably inclined toward the willfulness of things. She pictured a vanished object, which later—she knew this—would certainly turn up, as having rolled ahead and arrived in the transparent box of tomorrow’s apartment (an observer, if there were one, would have been amazed at the similarity between Marina’s daydreams and the glassy sketches of future days that arose in Nina Alexandrovna’s mind—a similarity that better expressed their kinship than the approximate similarity of their facial features). Nina Alexandrovna’s futile attempts to project into the future were reminiscent of her long-ago efforts to keep Marina’s father real and alive and for the sake of that to be more than herself, and in just the same way, she could feel a wall in her forehead.