Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

Upset, but trying her utmost not to give herself away, Nina Alexandrovna observed his desperate struggle. The paralyzed man’s material world, which had been stripped of any detail and reduced to large, schematic objects, the only ones accessible to his manipulations, reminded her of the letters on a child’s building blocks, or the top line on the eye chart; and the large font in which this destiny was written evoked her respect and a superstitious fear. Nina Alexandrovna sometimes thought of her Alexei Afanasievich as an overly ambitious pretender to the throne, a shadow general secretary of the Communist Party. The veteran’s struggle with matter, which previously had been limited to the toy stuffed animals he conquered, had taken on an altogether new quality. Nina Alexandrovna couldn’t imagine how the paralyzed man, who couldn’t bring a spoonful of kasha to his open mouth, might wrench his own death from the world around him. There are many things even a healthy man has trouble doing for himself—a haircut, say, or a foot massage—let alone commit suicide! Nina Alexandrovna knew from her own experience that this type of self-servicing requires agility, strength, and the skill of a hunter chasing a wild beast. What was she saying? It took more, much more. To be both hunter and hunted in your one and only body, to battle yourself with a kitchen knife—this Nina Alexandrovna remembered well. She remembered the new knife, sharpened spotlessly clean, until the whetstone’s slick was black—sticking into her ribs dully, like a finger, and even when she stripped to her bra, thinking her slippery blouse was the problem, it was still no use. You had to make some special movement, a little like the twist she knew how to make squeezing into an overcrowded bus and opening a jar simultaneously. It was too hard, though. Maybe it was something you had to learn to do. But how? Nina Alexandrovna knew better than anyone (maybe even better than her heroic husband) that it’s easier to kill someone else than yourself. Suicide is a job for the left hand , and if you’re not born a lefty, then you do it wrong way around. True, it was Alexei Afanasievich’s left hand that could move, but what use was that? After all, he was spread-eagle on the ground—yes, on the ground, even though there were five stories and a cellar between the veteran and the earth. Since the dimensions of his flabby body had lost all physical meaning, you could think of him as Gulliver in the land of the Lilliputians, tied down by hundreds of thin strings, over which his fat rubber spider scurried, testing the rigging.

Now, watching Alexei Afanasievich through the keen diopters of her dozing trance, Nina Alexandrovna understood deep down that an unnatural death, be it murder or suicide, was all about physical objects. You couldn’t do away with yourself without a tool. Virtually anything could be used to kill someone, after which it remained here , as innocent as ever and undiminished. Meanwhile, the everyday objects in this room (muffled by dispassionate philosophical dust) contained very little death; their shapes were too smooth, their corners too wooden; their harmless dullness could drive anyone to despair. At one time, Nina Alexandrovna had dreamed of special, expensive things, out of ordinary citizens’ reach, a gun or a rifle, say, things that held death like a faucet does water; just press—and out it spurts. Truth be told, she, too, had tried the rope—and this was the last thing that hadn’t worked for her. Maybe because she was four months pregnant and had been extremely sensitive and irritated not so much by smells (winter itself, all melting ulcers and icy bald patches, seemed to smell of the morgue) as by the least mess, which would not let her abide in the focused stillness she needed to calm down and stop her bitter thoughts from racing for just a while. She had been willing to pick up every speck and bring it to the communal kitchen’s garbage can, which stank of rotten newspaper juices. She had endlessly put away and taken out her few possessions, trying to achieve an evenness and parallelness from the robe and cardigan lying on the bed—the evenness of a sausage. Standing on a stool now, with the noose, cold and sticky from soap, right under her chin, she saw below her a room so perfectly neat it looked like a scale model (her library books, pens, and note to her parents looked like they’d been drawn on the table), but far away on the floor there were some torn white threads that she was not going to get to in this life. Her legs were trembling minutely, the stool was trembling more and more, and her mouth, like a wound, kept filling up with saliva. After a while she winced and slipped out of the noose, which caught in back on her pinned-up hair. She got to her knees on the stool’s tottering square and alit feeling as though she’d just stepped off a merry-go-round. Afterward, she washed the floors with the laundry detergent that was so hard to get and that foamed up in hot water. The noose, half stuck together from too much smeared-on soap, swung overhead like a flaccid, post-party balloon. It was with this hot, blubbering cleaning that her new life had begun, a life continuous to this very day. Nina Alexandrovna had never told anyone about her illegal and unsuccessful attempt. Least of all had she been prepared to tell Alexei Afanasievich, a man sufficiently stern that in his presence his spouse nearly forgot her own illicit act, the cigarette butts in the saucer, and how she had removed her silk blouse, which had stuck to the bloody spot under her heart, as if to commence lovemaking.

It was much harder for paralyzed Alexei Afanasievich now than it had been for Nina Alexandrovna during those incredibly lonely months when there had been no one to help her and no one in the world who might steady her wayward knife, the way a teacher grasps and aims an unsteady pen for a first-grader’s hen scratchings, or to slap her on the back when, bent over with her weapon, she had coughed up her fear. The veteran was attempting the impossible. He was already a failed product of death, a defective good from whom death had taken a step back without dispensing with the continuity of life in his illuminated consciousness. The veteran had not reconciled himself to this and was now planning to make death by his own hand—to repeat the mirror image of what he had done to others with such ease. He was a cobbler without boots. The only human resource he had left was the grim patience of a prisoner multiplied by the endless years of his sentence: the ability to move toward his goal millimeter by millimeter and fashion any movement as if it were a clever detail for some homemade gadget. Death seemed to be lying in bed with him like his lawful wife, and the paralyzed man was studying every millimeter of this being through a mental loupe and transferring it to his own mind, which was still like a steel trap. Maybe his lack of success (Nina Alexandrovna had no idea how many attempts there had been or when this had started) could be explained by the very fact that the veteran had still not assembled the whole from its parts, had not pictured his own death in its entirety. The terrible grip of his mind left no doubt as to the ultimate outcome of his struggle, though. The moment Alexei Afanasievich understood , he would immediately succeed: he would cross the line between sleight-of-hand (which was all you could call the paralyzed one-handed tying of the noose) and the miracle of his authentic disappearance so easily and quickly that even he wouldn’t notice.

Nina Alexandrovna didn’t know whether this would happen in a day, a month, or ten years. When she tried to gaze into the future, it seemed impossible, a figment of her imagination. Even that winter, which had already made itself felt in the mornings in the stannic asphalt and the void of the puddle at the front door, which looked like a broken toilet, seemed just as implausible to Nina Alexandrovna as it might to a Papuan who had never seen snow. Nina Alexandrovna simply couldn’t tell where the boundary lay where reality came to an abrupt halt. At some point, the future, which she had always used pictures from the past to imagine , ceased to communicate with this past. There was some disconnect or defect here, as there can be defects in glass—needles of moisture, like veins running through a perforated landscape. No matter how Nina Alexandrovna strained her inner vision, though, she had no sense of how long she had before she reached that spectral line. In essence, she, too, like her husband, was attempting the impossible. Whereas an ordinary person backs into the future with his unprotected back, keeping a more or less intelligible past in front of him, Nina Alexandrovna wanted to turn around and follow the guiding crystal ball—and plunge into the unknown face first.