Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

The optimism epidemic set off by Apofeozov’s life-affirming persona took on truly fantastic forms. Several residents whose faces had become hollow-cheeked and gray from long years of poverty, like that cheap eviscerated fish they bought in frozen slabs from wholesale shops, suddenly yielded to the illusion that a car and bank account were possible in their lifetime, too. Under the influence of strange, iridescent fluids, unemployed Igor P., still a decent man in cracked glasses and clean clothing that looked like hospital pajamas they were so old, showed up one day in broad daylight at the supermarket, chaotically collected in his cart a mountain of items that fell to the floor, pushed his load up to the checkout line, and instead of paying, demanded cash. A dreamy smile wandered across the assailant’s intelligent face, and an ax-like item that looked to the cashier like her grandmother’s meat grinder but subsequently turned out to be a six-barreled rifle of Afghani production started shaking in his hands. Security hustled over and had no problem taking the heavy object, which hadn’t been fired in years, from the bluish hands of the former senior research associate, who immediately sank with relief—and this wasn’t the only instance of an optimistic criminal. Some even tried to get rich by showing their victim a chicken bone wrapped in newspaper.

Apart from the get-rich-quick spirit that had stamped the golden autumn with a strange literalness and lent the foliage the paranoid gleam of a dream coming true, a more complex emotional phenomenon was felt in the district that could be defined as citizens’ sudden belief in immortality. The situation here and now had taken on incredible acuity; moments now seemed to stop at the least whim, at the wave of a hand, and since you were alive this minute, then it was totally unnecessary for you ever to alter this satisfactory state of affairs. The inhabitants simply wanted someone to give voice to their condition, to assert authoritatively what they were each thinking privately. Unlikely to have established business contacts with the Apofeozov headquarters, more likely sensing in the atmosphere a seductive void that he could and should fill, a doctor of nontraditional medicine—the author of a rainbow of brochures and an honorary member of some incredibly long-named academies by the name of Kuznetsov, which, ironically enough for that industrial district, means “Smith”—came to District 18. Initially, the lettuce-green posters posted everywhere and carefully stuck to even very complicated surfaces, led the public to take Mr. Kuznetsov for yet another candidate, but they soon figured out what was what and flocked to the Progress Cinema, which for over three years had been rented out for shows and had stood encased in a multi-tiered scaffolding that made the building look like a Chinese pagoda—so much so that many of the district’s inhabitants had supposed the cinema in the scaffolding was long gone. As it turned out, though, it wasn’t. You had to enter through a covered wooden walkway splotched in ossified repairs that began far from the old front entrance and, under the uneven weight of many steps, had warped so badly that stagnant water oozed between the weak floorboards like doughnut filling. After sidestepping a damp area of sludgy water in your nonwaterproof footwear, you ended up in that very same lobby where you had once eaten ice cream before seeing Irony of Fate . In the dimness (the filthy windows glowed like blank frames from an old film), the gray columns still stood, like shadows, each as if between two mirrors coated by time, and walking up to one of them and not seeing your own reflection in the nearest one, you suddenly felt the emptiness of this architectural cave, even if the ruin was full of people who had bought their thirty-ruble tickets next to the old refreshment stand. The stand—apart from Dr. Kuznetsov’s assistant, of whom all you could see were his quick white hands and low-bent bald spot—was decorated with a monster of a machine that had happened to survive and had three, spectrally gray cylinders for selling fruit juices, of which one was blacker than the others and of a color reminiscent of a burned-out lightbulb. The conversations between the people waiting impatiently for the performance to begin seemed to reverberate on the resonant ceiling, which had its own feminine voice and collected the sounds on an invisible lens; finally, a loose-jointed buzzer buzzed.

Everything in the theater was exactly as it had been during the days of Soviet cinema. The rows of flipped-up wooden chairs, like rows of wooden briefcases, were all mixed up: row five followed row eight and row fifteen was missing altogether. On the other hand, the metal rings of the green plush drapes, which had hardened with age, like canvases painted with stiff oils, clattered exactly as before, and the small yellowed screen was still in place, as if it had collected dust from all the film beams that had ever flickered above viewers’ heads, beams that had once held popular artists—the objects of candidate Krugal’s unjust envy—like cosmonauts in a spaceship flying at the speed of light. Dr. Kuznetsov always arrived ten to fifteen minutes late, forcing the seated hall to spend a long time looking at the coffee table prepared for the maestro and the spindly-legged chair that was too tall for him which, taken together—due to the fact that you could see through this rather contrived composition—reminded you of a magician’s setup. Finally, when the most nervous were starting to think that Kuznetsov had been in the hall for a long time and would materialize any second from the cleverly set-up, supposedly empty set, the long-awaited maestro stepped on stage with his cozy, flannel-soft step. After blowing and spitting at the microphone, which hissed as if it were red hot, the professor told the audience in a slightly muffled voice that the human organism was meant to live for at least one hundred fifty years and that following up on his therapeutic lecture would not only help each person start down the path to longevity but also, through its particular sonic and symbolic components, produce a rejuvenating transfusion of energy not unlike the way his unenlightened colleagues in ordinary clinics performed a routine blood transfusion. Gradually, the warmed-up hall’s discordant wooden creak fell into alignment, like galley oars gnashing or park swings swinging, straining to clear the bar; the gussied-up women, one in four of whom was a Kuznetsova, too, leaned in waves from right to left and left to right, insensibly rubbing soft shoulders and gazing at the maestro with many pairs of eyes deeply set in darkness; every so often, eyeglasses would flash lemur-like in the swaying rows.

The professor, who was so marvelous at adjusting his patients to the wooden-lattice milieu their bodies were inside, was unusually convincing because of his appearance as well. His large face was made up of parts that looked sanded, without any wrinkles whatsoever, and between these broad patches of youth lay winding darknesses that also looked sanded, darknesses that retained the professor’s age, like soil in the cracks of a polished stone. From a distance, the caprice of these dark deposits made his face look like jasper. Even more convincing was the appearance on the stage of Kuznetsov’s assistant, who, the maestro swore, had recently turned sixty. The youthful, languid blonde, sky-high tall, her ears sticking out of her limp locks, ears that in turn had silly gold earrings sticking out from them, like fishhooks, was not only long-lived but also a famous poetess. After she was announced, she strode nonchalantly downstage (the front rows distinctly heard the blonde’s big feet scuffing against each other under the crushed evening gown, whose only adornments were a few crude rhinestones), brought a thin passport-sized book right up to her eyes, and began in a mournful, nasal singsong to recite a poem about dark passion and a glass of red wine, about the evening seas and a youth of antiquity with curls like tea rose petals whom the poetess reproached for cruelty and the loss of certain important keys described with a metalworker’s precision. After pausing, like a little bird, to feed on the crumbs of applause skipping through the rows, the professor informed the quieted audience that the poems of his talented companion not only possessed great artistic merit but also, by virtue of the energy they contained, healed various illnesses, from women’s ailments to neuroses, and suggested that sufferers send him anonymous notes to the stage.