Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

Having lost control of the situation but not his mind, Professor Shishkov understood full well that if he stopped handing out money to canvassers, then everyone who hadn’t received his legitimate share would vote against Krugal in the elections, merely out of a sense of outraged justice. So he kept it up, taking his medicine, seeking out funds, and just told his registrars to work as slowly as possible. Each of them invented his own red tape, which made it look as though the disciplined headquarters workers had suddenly fallen ill. They truly didn’t know what to do with themselves under the impatient stares of the pressing people in the middle of their workspace, which was now alienated and in a way undermined by the demand to slow things down. As a result, the registrars, working as if under someone’s hypnotic loupe, in its powerful magnifying jelly, became deathly afraid of making grammatical errors in the logbooks. One impressionable worker had a newly opened pack of fifty-ruble bills go missing, and one woman ground her twisted chair into its extreme position, as if shifting a system of levers, and proceeded to faint.

Some, unable to withstand the pressure from the soggy line that kept coming in from the street—pressure that mounted, pistonlike—would sit for hours in the headquarters’ back room, but even from there they could hear the line, which no one was waiting on but which, obeying its inherent direction, would automatically take a small step every ten minutes—like dozens of shovels driving higgledy-piggledy into a blunt heap of immovable earth. Sharp-witted Lyudochka was the first to notice that the expression “standing in line” was a misnomer because in fact no one was standing: no sooner did people line up single file than they immediately got the impulse to forge ahead, as if the line could become humanity’s long-sought means for passing through walls. Even in the absence of a registrar, the body of the line, pressed forward and cut off at the tail (those who had joined last and who had gone off on errands comprised a kind of extensible cloud impregnated with a very fine frozen rain) continued to function : dozens of feet shifted, scuffed, and kicked at bags, and some adjusted their fogged-up glasses on the shoulders of those standing in front of them. In order to stand and also rest a little, they had to step to the side and find a spot by the wall; there, shirking the common efforts and rubbing their somber coats against the dirty pink, unusually corrosive chalk, there were always individualists hanging around with their noses in books. How they were able to read under the bare, low-wattage bulbs, which rather than spread light seemed to suck it up and collect it from the whole corridor, a thimbleful for each, was anyone’s guess, as was why the district’s inhabitants kept streaming into headquarters for their pathetic fifty rubles with a doggedness worthy of some better application. Most likely, they were driven here by a sense of fairness that demanded the equal distribution of free stuff, just for the signing.

Some applicants, in no way discouraged by the delay getting to the dispensing tables, came several times each. The line’s stamp on them did not come down just to yesterday’s and the day before’s traces of corridor chalk but was expressed in the particular ways of habitués. Doubtless they had taken a fancy to the quaint playground opposite headquarters for their drinking, a playground that vaguely resembled a circus ring with props for small trained animals. In the evenings, the workers would sit for a while after closing and then emerge into the dark courtyard, where a thick layer of wet leaves lay like tea at the bottom of a teapot, and they would notice on the playground an untoward, residual presence: stooping figures whose stirrings the eye picked up against the small plaster statue of a Young Pioneer that had been shoved into a bush. Their volumes collided neatly, and sometimes their out-of-control shouts sent a maddened cat flying across the lawn like a sudden missile. Marina, who had not been singled out by any specific assignment but who had come to a feel an almost maternal responsibility for the staff’s well-being, understood full well that if the residents of the surrounding pensioner apartment buildings had still not complained to the newspapers or the police, it was only because they themselves, to a man, had taken canvasser money and had hopes for even more. After the workers separated and ran off to wherever, and the professor’s old heap, having fallen into a sneezed puddle, turned onto the avenue, Marina, overcoming her chemically complex fear of men and the dark, attempted to get closer to the picnic herself to ascertain whether it did or didn’t have anything to do with their headquarters. In reality, she only managed to take three or four hesitant steps over the slick leaves in that direction. If anything could be seen more clearly from that compromise distance, then it was the abandoned Pioneer hero with his smashed tie and scary little face, like plaster dough. Several times on the playground she saw a mellow fire sputtering in the drizzle; in its little red cloud you could see pink hands in thick gloves occasionally tossing cardboard scraps on the fire—but even in this dim light Marina was able to identify the faces of two or three half-basement acquaintances, which for some reason seemed very old-mannish and shimmered with a fleeting heat, like cracked coals. Ever since then, this inevitable discovery had weighed on Marina with a presentiment of disaster.

Marina’s intuition told her that the local populace’s persistence was a legitimate part of the general campaign madness. Evidently, the romantic determination to get rich inspired by Apofeozov’s person wouldn’t let the voters pass up even the very small chance his nominal opponent’s headquarters offered. It was also likely that the bonus promised to canvassers in the event of Krugal’s victory—even though it was a known and modest quantity—was in some way linked in their bewitched minds to all the fantastic promises that that unrecognized artist had made in his two low-budget videos. Despite the fact that an inspired Krugal, appearing on the backdrop of a streaming state flag, spoke about local improvements, in particular about the now notorious natural gas scheme for the private sector, the viewer got the feeling he was talking about some small town in Latin America; whereas when Fyodor Ignatovich, shot on a backdrop of the district’s real scrap heaps and characteristic semi-ruins, which were oriented, like anthills, from north to south, replaced the deplorable landscapes with computer pictures with the wave of an illusionist’s hand, the voter’s native clay soil slipped out from under his feet altogether. Perhaps because the sun in the pictures was unusually intense, lending the white architectural mirages’ surfaces the vividness of film screens, the resident had the vague feeling that they meant to relocate him to Rio de Janeiro; he probably imagined that his post-election bonus would simultaneously be a share in those fairytale tropical hotels that this large-browed man in the light, loose trench coat with all kinds of compartments and big buttons like electric outlets was somehow going to build in place of their potholes and damp hovels.

Although she’d written the scripts for both videos, even Marina couldn’t figure out why on paper the district sounded fictional —despite the fact that she now felt a strange tenderness for District 18, as if it were her little homeland whose presence so close to hand she hadn’t had so much as an inkling of before the elections. Previously, her life had always extended from home to the right—toward downtown, where with each intersection everything got fancier and cleaner, where a third-rate town was gradually replaced by a second-rate one. But now she had turned left, toward the poor, muddled place that Marina in the last four months had come to know better than in all the years before, when the district sloping to the horizon had been just a boring view out her window. Now that the traitor Klimov had left her altogether for his Asian girlfriend, Marina discovered that she was more at ease in her district than anywhere else. She liked to say hello on the street to people she half knew. She was surprisingly mollified by the landscape’s slope and its pallid colors, the prone poses of every part of the undulating relief, the black wooden dampness of the weather-beaten fences, and the old-people scent of damp nettles full of water, rot, and strong, rubbery spiderwebs. All this was real —unlike the situation in the “right” part of town, which Marina had for too long depicted as the place for her life going forward, without Klimov, but now, finding herself in this new life, she couldn’t convince herself of the reality of those streets, which moved a little too fast, like sped-up film.