Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

Apparently, the period of stagnation preserved in the Red Corner would not allow for forward movement, so everything had fallen back in place; now that was even more true. At night, the window sealed shut for the winter would crackle and tinkle as if holding back the press of some growing mass, as if the paralyzed immortality were flexing an invisible muscle. Nina Alexandrovna, who lately had been sleeping unusually alertly, as if lying all night at her own side, listened superstitiously to this crackling and quiet sucking in the cracks. Brezhnev, hanging oddly due to the fat crack in the glass, would wink and change like those playful effects that billboards use to catch your eye—several pictures of products and their smiling representatives fanning like a deck of cards all at once. Now in a state of constant emotional tension, Nina Alexandrovna guessed that what she was seeing was substantially a product of her imagination. Previously, she would scarcely have been upset at finding the tube of cheap lipstick she’d recently lost in the front hall behind her daughter’s calloused sandals, which should have been boxed up for the winter. Now, picking the crushed remnants up off the floor, remnants that looked like a gnawed chicken bone, Nina Alexandrovna turned cold at the thought of the blow that had destroyed the small tube, which had obviously been crushed by the heel not of some household member but of some malignant fate that had been in their home.

Feeling sealed up in an autonomous little world that she would now have to protect even more zealously from outsiders, she sometimes felt an insurmountable urge to break free, to see people—at least to pay a visit to her nephew, who kept transferring money to her with the indifference of an ATM. Nina Alexandrovna didn’t remember even half her nephew’s debts, but the transfers kept coming—in precisely the same unround, embarrassed amounts in which her nephew had borrowed “without even any extra for a bottle,” and there was something mechanical about this, as if a totally different person were paying for her nephew. Nina Alexandrovna would have liked to understand what had become of her nephew’s sincerity when, while sipping the hot water she called tea that he hated so, he talked about his new wife, a good and long-suffering woman he’d found right in his lobby wearing just her nightgown and a man’s sturdy jacket with a medal. He’d told her about Nina Alexandrovna, of course, and so shuttled like a honeybee between various people, carrying warm flower pollen. Trying to solve this puzzle, Nina Alexandrovna wondered whether her nephew had become a “new Russian.” Knowing very little about that bizarre species of apparently synthetic people who had gold threads sewn into their faces and money inserted into their metabolism, incorporating it into their own biology through wine cellars and expensive restaurants, Nina Alexandrovna imagined the community of “new Russians” as the one place a person becomes inaccessible by joining, interacting with the world exclusively through ingested and secreted sums of money. If that were true, the precise figures of the transfer became understandable. Evidently there was a reverse logic to returning accumulated debts: the preciseness of the figure held a message and was no less important than the recipient’s correctly indicated address. Nonetheless, it seemed to Nina Alexandrovna that even a “new Russian” could retain something human. More than once she’d imagined one of those long, shiny cars stopping in front of her, ideally inserted into the reflected landscape, and her smiling nephew wearing a slightly baggy raspberry jacket and a gold tiepin, climbing out of the door, its glass tinted like a television set.

Nina Alexandrovna jealously watched Marina and Seryozha but even more jealously watched Alexei Afanasievich, who obviously didn’t trust her anymore. Every so often, though, when she was busy with something, he would give her a look as if summoning his wife to come closer. The doctor, Evgenia Markovna (who herself had suddenly gone downhill, with an unfamiliar messiness to her bun of yellowing gray hair), noted an improvement in motor functions, which surprised her mightily. Shaking her dry little head, which had hardened from the temples up, and adjusting the errant tip of her stethoscope in her perforated ear, the doctor listened to the patient for a long time and then asked him to move his hand—and Alexei Afanasievich’s hand took a surprisingly easy jump, which made it look very much like a mechanical prosthesis. Actually, this was no cause for surprise. The delicate substance of immortality, from which there settled so much of the very even, rather bright dust characteristic of this room alone, had become palpably stronger. Apparently, if this dust—a by-product containing perhaps a small percent of the basic substance—were sprinkled on the cockroaches whose husks lay around the chemically treated kitchen, they would immediately start skipping like drops of water across a red-hot skillet.

Alexei Afanasievich, who now slept much less than before, would not be parted from his Chinese inflatable spider, which jumped for him with a whistle and a kind of obscene smacking, its cloth feet quivering on the flight up, and flew at Nina Alexandrovna from the folds of the blanket, occasionally touching her leaning face with its fake fringe. The spider had become like a second heart for Alexei Afanasievich, connected to him by a mysterious link, apart from the tube; its convulsions never ceased, even when the toy hopped off the bed and dangled between heaven and earth, huffing on the dust. Although he couldn’t see his fledgling (rarely observing from his pillow the leaps of its blurry body), Alexei Afanasievich continued to work the swollen paw, which the rubber pear, squeezed to the bottom, filled over and over again with a pleasant roundness—but occasionally jammed the badly strained mechanism. This persistent, steady work seemed to have taught Alexei Afanasievich to combine the twisted and normal halves of his face so that he ended up with almost one whole: a bystander wouldn’t have noticed anything special other than an expression of distasteful sarcasm and a thread of saliva dried on his salty stubble like egg white.

Nina Alexandra managed to sneak an occasional peek, but Alexei Afanasievich was unusually hard to fool; the paralyzed man was probably picking up the simple impulses released by her consciousness much better than she was his electrical rebuses, one instant of darkness after another. Lately these impulses had been coalescing, like clouds, or lingering until they coalesced, losing their distinctness, into a solid shroud. Despite this overcast, Alexei Afanasievich could apparently tell quite well whether Nina Alexandrovna was dozing off or just pretending as she sat in her chair over the hole of a mitten she was knitting, outside his blurry field of vision. Clearly she was present, though, and holding her breath, whereas asleep she tended to snore. Very rarely, Nina Alexandrovna would sit so long (the yarn moldering in her damp hand) as to produce the hypnotic illusion that she had drifted off, and then her half-closed eyes, which looked like they’d been smeared with a clear oil, witnessed what her mind could scarcely believe. She didn’t even try to figure out how the various ropes and strings, some of unknown origin, got into Alexei Afanasievich’s bed. She simply observed what she could. First, raising his shoulder and making himself asymmetric, like during a vigorous walk with his cane, the veteran would slowly lay out the outlines of a noose on his swaddled body. Then, after a long buildup, he would give a sideways jerk, like when he used to take his characteristic, very very small step, and a fold would form on the blanket, and above it, if he was lucky, the rim of the main loop would rise up with a divine opening, into which he endeavored with slow persistence to insert the rope’s end. The rope thrust out of the paralyzed man’s hand, violating the laws of physics and looking as taut as a cobra lured into the air by a fakir’s flute; the paralyzed man’s attempts to get the rope to land in the hanging opening reminded Nina Alexandrovna of a spectral needle-threading. An incredible tension blurred both the rope and noose in the trembling air and brought up a scour of glistening sweat on the veteran’s temple. Finally, his hand would fall to the bed and lie there for a while as if severed. Then Alexei Afanasievich would begin preparing for his lateral jerk all over again. And something almost imperceptible happened to him: as he started building up to this exertion, the gray-haired, disheveled muzhik began to resemble a woman in labor, emitting the occasional suppressed moan.