Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

Immediately, the now buzzing hall sprang to life, and more notes were sent to the stage than the professor could possibly get through by the performance’s end. However, after sorting through the squares and scrolls of paper with his usual knack (the long-lived assistant meanwhile stood perfectly still like an impenetrable barrier on the path to any human thought about her therapeutic poetry), he handed out the most frequent diagnoses and took over supervising the reading entirely. He said that an elegy edged on the right by an elegant ornament to the rhyme and having as its subject a recent kiss in a lyric garden as unnatural as a flower shop helped the stomach; for high blood pressure, a ballad was read, a long one, like a multiplication table, in which two medieval kings, one handsome and the other ugly, multiplied endlessly in tessellated rhymed quatrains and deep secret mirrors—and what the languishing Kuznetsovas in the audience listened to for appendicitis was a treasure house, so easily was everything the long-lived assistant’s pen touched transformed into emeralds and rubies. Even a common sparrow, which for some reason had flown into these poetic skies covered with a frightening moiré of clouds, became at the poetess’s word a golden figurine and, one had to suppose, was immediately plunked into the common treasure chest.

No one understood why such vivid happiness spilled from the stage. The women who were offered something that was simultaneously a cure for illnesses and about love had the vague feeling that they were getting exactly what they wanted. Others had hysterics. A chubby, likeable woman on whose cheeks’ tear tracks sparkled like tinsel nearly rushed the stage to sing. She was nabbed before she could and blanketed in polite murmuring by the professor’s assistant, who materialized out of the dimness not all at once but one distinct contrasting part at a time, kind of like a movie. It cost the professor no small effort to bring the audience to relative order. He stood on tiptoe and waved his arms as if he were trying to hang an invisible towel on a high branch. Finally, after restoring quiet, Dr. Kuznetsov moved on to the most important part of his performance and reported on the essence of a personal discovery he had made. No, he uttered solemnly, strutting in front of the screen on one side and the audience on the other (moreover, the screen reflected him no less closely than the raised faces), there was no universal recipe for longevity. What people said today about breathing exercises and the necessity of drinking cold and warm water alternately was undoubtedly beneficial and would help each of us, and everyone sitting in that hall would get noticeably younger in the coming years. But in order to achieve the ideal correlation to one’s true age (here the audience turned their gazes to the rosy, sixty-year-old blonde with cheeks like two jars of jam), an individualized health regimen was desirable, along with special blank verse composed for each person separately. Those who were prepared to take care of themselves comprehensively the professor invited to his personal consultations in such and such a room at the North Hotel. He also informed them that his estimable assistant’s book would be available for sale in the lobby as they exited.

There was something inexpressibly seductive in the professor’s performances. Because they took place in the Progress catacombs (the professor was exceptionally sensitive to his environment’s emanations), the more mysterious cinematic effects were emphasized all the more distinctly—along with stage effects picked up, like an infection, from some variety show. Thus, individual lady patients imagined there was no Dr. Kuznetsov in the hall at all, there was just a depiction on the dusty screen that, like a flock of silly butterflies, could land on everything that fell into the film beam; others subconsciously saw in the healer an art scholar introducing before the viewing that same film about love in which they had always dreamed of playing the heroine, and now their dream was finally about to come true. The professor’s work in the district could also be compared to the work of the early days of cable television, when the business’s pioneers would run several American films a night; at the time it seemed as if real life, in watercolor due to the low quality of the pirated cassettes, was just about to begin here, too, that each person would be like Sharon Stone or Arnold Schwarzenegger, and if someone still had material problems, then they would be measured in the millions of dollars.

Now, in some unfathomable way, romantic hopes had returned to human hearts, which in District 18 were like fruits in a Garden of Eden. Candidate Apofeozov, having acquired a private house and a Mercedes by his talents, so praised by the press, was a genuine hero of the new era in which low-level managers and the unemployed, homemakers and the homeless had all of a sudden come to believe. Even though for all these ten years most residents hadn’t been able to break away from the gloom of their miserable apartments, which had rusted like enamel basins, their family jalopies, and all the Soviet goods they’d acquired, which were now worthless and screamed their fantastic unreality from every corner and at every step—Apofeozov, endowed with an indestructible will for actual reality , became what every inhabitant of the district should have become had it not been for the illusory quagmire of the everyday, of habits, of outmoded professions. Only Apofeozov, whose tie pin cost so much as to become an almost magical object, could represent the district in the Duma; Apofeozov was loved the way people could love an American president running in District 18. Professor Kuznetsov’s experiments (his female patients, after spending time with him in the hotel, returned covered in gooseflesh, as if they’d been rolled in semolina, and for a while would express themselves exclusively in verse) promised each person not only longevity and an extended youth but in essence the rescinding of their past life. Each could now start over, from childhood if they liked, which is what happened with many. Immediately several stores, including Athens Furs, were robbed with the help of cap guns—good-looking hunks of metal, caps that clicked loudly like smelly tiddlywinks—after which the Athens window, decorated with marble copies of gods and heroes dressed in fur coats, started looking tediously like the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. Children’s World, in turn, enjoyed brisk sales of metal and plastic toy guns, so that Nina Alexandrovna, wandering there as before in vague search of a Young Magician’s Set that might distract the veteran from his magnetic rope play, was struck by how empty the department was, like frontline positions abandoned by a retreating army. Only tin soldiers, like spent cartridges, lolled on the shelves, which were cleared back to the wall. The sleek manager who was loitering for some reason behind a bare counter looked shell-shocked, and his smile, which automatically popped up whenever a customer got close enough, made no sense at all.

Actually, no insanity could surprise Krugal’s campaign headquarters: things happened here that made the performances at the outwardly invisible Progress Cinema seem like sweetness and light. Professor Shishkov’s plan, which had seemed at first like the model of a brilliant economy of means, had become a black hole. The top estimate for the cost to ensure victory for his candidate had been left in the distant past. In the basement, whose walls, rubbed by the human mass’s slow scuffling, had changed from latte to dirty pink, insane sums were handed out every day. Professor Shishkov lost weight and firmly avoided discussions of their prospects, and his gestures and expressions were like a Moebius strip. Twice, without telling anyone, Shishkov took the red-eye to Moscow and brought back sponsor cash obtained in exchange for secret promises. But even these fat packets, which in the beginning had looked like a reserve , were snapped up like ice cream bars during a hot spell, and the district residents kept coming. The slightest delay opening headquarters in the morning, and the outside metal door would start to boom under the pounding of fists, and individuals would squat at the windows—where you could barely see strips of slanted light, like the edges of sheets in half-open drawers—impatient: their inverted faces looked down, into the inverted little world of the headquarters basement, and for some reason these people seemed like giants, their hanging heads looking into a dollhouse standing defenseless before them.