Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

Marina’s partner was Lyudochka, of course, who showed up at the polling place wearing a miniskirt so tight it looked like it was about to split and didn’t leave much room for her heavy legs, which were swathed in velvety Lycra. Apparently, she had taken an active dislike to the Apofeozov brunette, so she perched on a light stool and kept crossing and recrossing her legs, with the obvious intention of letting the brunette’s provisional husband see the tightness and darkness, barely covered by the diagonally stretched fabric, and casting flickering looks over her open compact, making her foe’s mustache quiver like a leaf stuck on her upper lip. Nonetheless, her rival did not yield to the provocation and, her high forehead patterned like an actual tree haughtily blazing, demonstratively took the arm of her headquarters better half—for which he was encouraged with doses of a smile. Lyudochka responded with a sullen grimace. This was outrageous, of course, and the local teachers registering voters gave Lyudochka the hairy eyeball—but Marina herself was in such a state that she couldn’t inflict even that kind of indecent injury on her opponent.

She was surrounded by a strange, lifeless emptiness. Not that she hurt, but the cotton wool resting on her heart like a solid compress did. Ever since Klimov, caught in their marital bed embracing an unbuttoned pillow, covered in feathers, like a skunk in a henhouse, had finally been kicked out, Marina had felt bereft of ordinary human emotions. Each morning she woke up with the memory of how he’d woken up that time, without even looking at what had roused him (the chair piled with his clothing, which Marina had gently pushed over); his eyes opened immediately and looked up, as if they’d seen a snow-white angel on the ceiling lamp. Marina, whose heart was pounding as it had during their first declaration of love, had expected him to try to justify himself and cite fantastic circumstances that she herself could have dreamed up for him—but Klimov didn’t even try to say anything and walked around in front of Marina shamelessly, wearing just his clingy swimsuit, which he adjusted by slipping his finger under the side elastic and shaking his leg, whereas Marina was embarrassed even to change into her robe and stand in front of him in her swimsuit, as black and rigid as a fly. This whistling Klimov was an utter stranger and even a different color. His body, always white in the sun, like a 10-watt frosted lightbulb, and afterward shedding its sticky skin like a new potato, down to the same defenseless whiteness, now had a crude tan that lay in scarlet and brown patches on his filled-out shoulders. In his new guise, bowlegged and tenacious, including his polished bald head with three identical yokes of eyebrows and mustache, something quite Asiatic came through, as if his unattractive girlfriend had made him change his nationality. Klimov didn’t utter a word of objection to the demand to free up the veteran housing he had no right to; the things Marina had provided he kicked with cheerful indifference into his yawning gym bag, and after a while it became clear that all his pants and jeans had been stuffed into the very bottom of the lumpy packing, and if Klimov was to have something to wear when he left the building, he had to dump back out on the bed all his limp, unfresh rags, among which a bright red sweater Marina had once knit from very expensive English yarn stretched out like a victim pulled from rubble.

After Klimov’s departure, everything seemed both exactly the way it had before and at the same time slightly unreal, as if Marina had rendered habitable an invented environment that someone had once described in words. If she was going somewhere, she felt as though she were taking a narrated route, and she would recognize narrated buildings and lanes that corresponded rather loosely to their communicated features—and sometimes the discrepancies multiplied so quickly that Marina’s sense of direction evaporated and she could have gotten lost if it weren’t for the strange paucity of things. The world around her was surprisingly empty. This corresponded to the devastation of late autumn, when something on the naked streets seems to get cleared away or borne off, but you can’t figure out what, and the heart searches for what doesn’t exist, and you see trees on which not a single leaf remains filled with the substance of emptiness, and their blackened branches don’t have a single cell left not filled to bursting with empty, colorless space. All this time, Marina couldn’t shake the physical sensation that nothing was worth anything now. Randomly wandering into high-end clothing stores, she could barely keep from laughing when she discovered tags on soft slippers with seven-figure prices that meant exactly nothing. Now Marina imagined the same kind of label on the back of each person’s neck. When she watched Professor Shishkov scribbling and speckling the campaign’s newspaper galleys with insertions, as if deriving the square root from each statement and turning the article into a system of mathematical calculations, the professor seemed to be distracted by his irritatingly stiff, neck-scraping label. When candidate Krugal, having first looked around to make sure there were no reporters, started luxuriously scratching his back against the doorjamb, as if dancing the lambada, not sparing his cashmere Hugo Boss jacket one bit, Marina had no doubt that the artist had a whole sheaf of that lacquered stuff dangling from his collar. No, Marina didn’t really feel bad. She could smile and joke as if nothing were the matter—although her smile gave her away more than her usual, even serenity, her even voice, and her half-mast eyes. She really wasn’t suffering particularly. Her head, which had been splitting the entire month previous from campaign cares, had stopped hurting. Marina even had her appetite back, or at least, at the headquarters dining table, she ate as much as the others, only for some reason all the food was tasteless and dense, like underbaked bread that Marina seasoned with her own sourish saliva. Sometimes she thought she might not be nearly as picky about food as ordinary people, and if she needed to weigh down her stomach with something, then she might as well gnaw on a wet, stringy branch, say, or bite off a crumbled corner of the crackly brown Khrushchev-era apartment building that all the candidates had promised to raze. Crazy thoughts like that amused Marina. She felt like a toothy predator from a Hollywood movie capable of devouring steel, stone, and concrete. In moments like these, the far from foolish Lyudochka, who for some time now had been jealously eyeing all her possible future bosses, would give her coworkers a look to turn their attention to Marina Borisovna and would twist her finger at her temple as if she were dialing a long telephone number.

In fact, the true predator to loom up like Godzilla over District 18’s primitive urban landscape was Valery Petrovich Apofeozov. One relatively beautiful, sun-yellow Sunday, a brigade of Turks who did not speak Russian unfurled his portrait many meters high on the side of a twelve-story apartment building that was not one of the best but that stood on a hill and was visible at that moment from nearly every point of the engraved district, which gleamed like a ruble. Unfurled over some outdated mosaic figures whose hands were lifting a satellite and whose legs seemed to be wearing brown, black, and nude stockings, the painfully vivid portrait of the people’s leader billowed slightly, and from time to time folds stretched over it, making it seem as though the leader was chewing on a rusted balcony bit off the nearest wall and was just about to take a step forward to wade waist-deep through the smoking ruins like a swimmer through waves. At the same time, the viewer couldn’t shake the distinct impression that everything here was here thanks to him. Given such intent and loving care, the district seemed to acquire a self-awareness and even a semblance of sovereignty. It was hard to believe in its daily diffusion and dissolution without visible borders in the soaked urban tracts, which in turn dissolved from the cloudy rain and the industrial waste that fed the soil and air, just as it was hard to believe in the flat areas, which were scarcely nature and were more like half-green economic wastelands where nature did not get the solitude it needed to weave its private secret even between three birch trunks. The voting district’s residents, who had absolutely no choice about declining the printed campaign materials, knew, as any citizen does, the shape of their state, the outlines of their electoral district, which on maps looked like a woman’s hand with short, bent fingers. Moreover, the graphically legible lifeline, the role of which was performed by a dead little stream, turned out to be so long that in and of itself it inspired groundless but for this reason contagious optimism.