Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

She who had been compelled to shut herself up in the Red Corner more and more felt like seeing people, and right away. In going out to stores and the market, she told herself that it was this—the muffled, gyrating sounds of the overfull streets, the circle of little clay Chinamen sitting on their haunches beside a mountain of traders’ baggage, the mirrored glass in the windows of dilapidated private homes, which were strange, the way sunglasses can be strange on old people’s faces—that it was this that was reality , not a dream, that the objects here denoted nothing but themselves and did not predict her destiny. This alone would remain, she told herself, when Alexei Afanasievich was no longer on this earth. Somewhere among the new, abstract human breeds—especially often she came across bloated beauties in slim black coats, with lips like bonbons, and businesslike young men wearing jackets sticking out under leather jackets—the people near and dear to her, a mere handful, had gone missing, and now Nina Alexandrovna wanted to be convinced of the reality of their existence. One day, she thought she recognized the broad-shouldered man who spilled out in a businesslike way from the front seat and across the windows of a dirty Zhiguli that drove off immediately as her nephew—his purple ear, his bulging cap, his spattered trousers. But then the man lit up out of his fist, turned his repulsive, pockmarked, alien face toward the smiling Nina Alexandrovna, and moved toward her quite calmly. Reality had preserved a few islands of goodness after all. One day, next to a concrete wall behind which a Metro construction site was rattling and thumping away, Nina Alexandrovna saw a fine-looking man who from the back looked like her son-in-law Seryozha carefully supporting the elbow of his ungainly companion, who was wearing a flowered, rhinestoned scarf and a long coat and whose cautiously stepping feet reminded her of duck’s feet; a block farther on a child in a red snowsuit chased chubby pigeons that were too lazy to fly and only ran, spreading their wings and tails just slightly, while the child was responsibly shepherded along by a gangly soldier who looked as flat as a domino in his greatcoat. Although touched, Nina Alexandrovna couldn’t shake the feeling that only she and no one else was seeing this. The sun’s odd light, the harsh light of the last autumn clarity before a wet snowfall, like an ax hacking away at a bared wooden carcass left over for the winter from the summer’s splendor, had come from so far away, its source lay so many tremendous thousands of kilometers away, that the reality en route to demolition seemed insignificant, illuminated from there out of some pitying interest. The man on the street whose temple was beveled by the sun was also quite blind, his opinion was of no account, and his head spun from the presence of the abyss, and maybe from death’s presence in each piece of substance, from the heightened background on winter’s eve; strange though it seemed, only this background let the weary Nina Alexandrovna feel briefly like one of the many people in the fresh air, which was practically solid from the cold, so that there was even something crystalline about the little sun, which had sprouted icy needles.

Election day opened as if to order: a splendid, wintry, golden Sunday, a long, quiet morning, a blush along the entire butt cheek of the sleeping apartment building; the windows of the prefab buildings—so faceless that it was almost impossible to imagine a human face looking out from them—were gently tinted a pearly white. Splendid snow-mica toward the top sprinkled over the unsuccessful, dwarfish relief sculpted by the various types of autumn snow from the unattractive material that had fallen to the ground; snow in the pose of a cat lay on the cornice of a very tall and bare school window that looked out on a playground where an empty basketball hoop was covered with a frosty sky, like a bulging iridescent film for blowing clusters of melancholy soap bubbles.

Starting around ten, the school with the polling place where Marina had been assigned as an observer shone in the sun and snow like a very bright, very clean diagram and was filled with the drone of voices. In the auditorium, a buffet table sponsored by the A Fund had been set up around four samovars, where four pretty servers wearing sarafans and kokoshniks were cheerfully selling fantastically cheap baked goods, yeast dough in sealed bags, and frozen pelmeni that looked like bruises. In the vestibule, everyone who had come to vote was met by the candidates’ portraits in alphabetical order—the two main ones and three additional ones; these false targets, shot into the air by Apofeozov’s headquarters, were as unprepossessing as good color printings allowed, absent gazes that looked past the voter, who, in turn, let his gaze fall on these sunken faces as he did on the sunken keys of the voting machine. On the other hand, Fyodor Ignatovich Krugal, who toward the end of the campaign had tried desperately to look younger, had insisted that his flyer run a ten-year-old photograph of him that had once hung in the plush lobby of the provincial dramatic theater—and doubtless someone had vaguely recognized this winning three-quarters pose, the curving jaw that looked like a pill in a paper nest, the grape cluster of Italian curls placed on what looked like a larger fruit, the jutting brow of an actor who played lead roles but in the theatrical troupe’s second-string cast. Of all the candidates, Apofeozov alone was present here and now . The joy on his face was irrefutable proof that the birdie had only just flown from the photographer’s camera.

The observers from Apofeozov headquarters—a prim gentleman who looked like a well-educated Hitler and whose jacket was a little too big for him and kept slipping off his right shoulder, and a slim brunette in a peach blouse who had red spots on her clavicle, which poked out of her low neckline like glasses’ earpieces—were so amiable and even loving, it was as if they’d become man and wife for this Sunday. They wandered confidently among the voters, like salesclerks in an expensive shop, and readily came to the assistance of perplexed old women who kept being afraid of ruining the big white sheet of paper given them, where the candidates’ names stood firmly and in order, while the empty boxes opposite their names kept slipping and getting mixed up; other timid voters, seeing such authoritative graciousness from the consultants, approached them with questions and even stood in line, their round, woolen backs gradually melting around the edges, as if covered in sweat from their zeal for listening to competent and pleasant voices. Marina knew she had the right and duty to stop this, but her soul, which seemed filled with pig iron, remained so fixed as to feel immovable. The cramped school desk (the voting organizers had set up a presidium table and a classic, dry-throated gray pitcher for the Apofeozov people) pressed painfully against her knees and in a way reminded her of the medieval stocks where a criminal was ensconced on a square for the crowd’s enjoyment; it took Marina an incredible effort of will just to wiggle out of this instrument of torture and go to the bathroom. She, too, could have mingled and talked to people, but the voters who flooded past (turnout, as everyone noted, was unusually high) were an indistinguishable mass with a multitude of human hands carrying something, handing things to each other, manneredly removing their tight gloves, as if plucking flowers, and pulling an unusually dirty handkerchief out of their pocket like a page out of a book. In the homogenous crowd, Marina could not pick out her canvassers and recognized them only when they demonstrated their familiar trick of taking a flat object out of tight clothing and showed their passport; at that moment, as if just looking on, Marina saw the dank headquarters basement and the slow line trailing along the walls, where people, because they were now where someone else had just been, were like shapeless specters. The canvassers, too, probably recognized in the sleepy woman behind the desk the person who had given them the advance money in the basement; their looks, cast from the registration tables, were the remembering looks of traitors. One slight consolation was that nearly all her recruits showed up at the head of a decisively arranged handful of invitees: after being given their ballots, these communities of all ages crammed together into the cramped, curtained booths, which were like department store changing rooms, and occupied them for an amazingly long time, evoking concern among the salesclerk-consultants about the integrity of the goods—after which the delegation’s head, somewhat tousled and rather disheveled, as if he really had stripped down to his underpants in the booth, led his people toward the ballot box.