Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

Here, in District 18, even shaded by the waist-length portrait of her waterproof foe, everything coincided gratifyingly with the rhythm of leisurely steps and unhurried thoughts; everything here was pedestrian , and the remains of the leaflets about hiring canvassers, which had disintegrated in the wet and lingered the way a butterfly leaves patterned dust, nothing but a fluffy scrap of letters, evoked waves of nostalgia. Obviously, no one had read these old papers—pasted up in the dark and as if spoiled by the light of the many passing days—in quite a while. Not only that, it was gratifying to observe a tall blonde in a worn green coat and black bell-bottoms, which looked like two whale’s tails, trying to read, with a childlike curiosity, the chilled notice half stuck into a fence’s cracks. At the sight of this simplehearted child tall enough for basketball licking a melting ice cream bar with her milky tongue, Marina felt that life had a sentimental value independent of Klimov’s presence or the invented Communist Party membership that no longer warmed or inspired her in any way. Her paralyzed stepfather, papered over with skin that was already thinned and run through with frozen veins, resided in the ocean-bottom depths of old age’s oblivion. For him, all the objects in his room, including the Brezhnev portrait Marina had stolen from the university’s Theory and Practice of the Press department, were nothing more than his memories. These long-ago things, covered with the finest layer of dust, made thirsty by her mother’s endless housecleaning, remained in place with the help of the same magnetism as did the weak smell of the burned match from which her stepfather probably had been intending to smoke when a small vessel in his head burst with a roar. It would be simply blasphemous to rouse this half-dead body to participation in life, even if it was an invented life and bore no relation to reality. It was wrong to taunt the old man with the television, which made the paralyzed man’s neck tense on its taut roots, where what looked like an old scar, like a dirty silk cord, appeared. The alternate reality, in which Marina really did join the Party because she properly wanted to be among responsible and progressive people, probably had come out fairly convincingly for her, but deep down Marina always guessed that it wasn’t she but her stepfather who by some incomprehensible force was maintaining his autonomous little world around him, and this force, this magnetic field, was no illusion. Now Marina just wanted to leave her stepfather in peace and save herself, her strength and blood, for feeding the spectral Klimov, whom she couldn’t forget anyway. The district Marina was used to considering her own, though it was driving her quietly mad, nonetheless did allow her to breathe. Sometimes she imagined it as a discrete small town where she could know all the inhabitants by face and name, buy food in the same little shops, graciously exchange greetings with the salesclerks, and see newly arrived strangers laid out before her—the way they confidently tromped through the streets and used the newsstands and public transport, thinking they didn’t differ in any way from the locals, while their differences became a free show for everyone. This idyll (which betrayed Marina’s secret inclination to construct self-contained, illusory worlds) was so speculative that it demanded no improvement from District 18 whatsoever. Marina found even the little river’s trampled banks, blotted with thick, sudsy garbage, beautiful. Blue stove smoke floating through the soft drizzle and smelling like wet wool was more romantic than banal gas burners, and the face, as bare as a mushroom, of the old woman gathering logs with her black canvas glove symbolized the reassuring mortality of all living things, which were under no obligation to overrule peaceful natural law.

For Marina, a loss in the elections now would be tantamount to being driven out of her own home. She could view an Apofeozov occupation only as a personal insult and a major calamity. So she patiently bore the trials of the campaign’s last few weeks and carried out Professor Shishkov’s instructions more conscientiously than anyone else. In order to work as slowly as possible, Marina counted silently, maniacally counting to as high a number as possible without losing track, even when she was recording an applicant’s passport information. If the other registrars drooped more and more under the yoke of delay, even laying their heads on their tables, then Marina was like an indefatigable windup doll with a clockwork mechanism. In response to any impatient canvasser’s trick, she would calmly shift to a tough division problem that demanded her full concentration. Sometimes the windup would last for as many as several difficult-to-pronounce thousands, and the higher the count went, the harder it became to balance the imagined number column and simultaneously manipulate the registration materials spread out below. Often, Marina would drop what she’d been carrying right in front of the people languishing in line. For minutes at a time, it seemed that if she worked not slowly but, on the contrary, incredibly fast, she could be rid of, exhaust, the wearisome uncertainty and come to the end—whatever that meant—ahead of time.

Nonetheless, the alarm bells that penetrated Marina’s days of exhaustion were not just her fraught nerves dancing. One fine day she discovered that the line, which had been a phenomenon that renewed itself daily, had become a permanent entity. This happened when one of the basement unfortunates who flashed by, easily identified by his canvas raincoat—possibly army, possibly a fisherman’s, evidently his one garment for all seasons and all life’s occasions—suddenly appeared in front of her table. Taking the filthy document, like half a smoked chicken, from the autochthon’s big hand, Marina noticed behind his thumb’s healthy haunch a tiny, painstakingly drawn number. Thus it had come to pass that the line had become something like a citizen organization and had spontaneously inherited the power of lines that had once drilled through unnourishing socialism, like roots drilled into poor soil.

The line had given rise to its own activists. A few dyed ladies kept permanent guard at the basement door. One, taking new arrivals by the arm with the professionalism of a lab nurse, wrote a number on their palm, while the other recorded the line-standers in a tattered notebook that looked like a twisted, unfastened umbrella. She discovered the painter who, not coughing softly now but hacking and screeching like a rooster getting its throat slit, wouldn’t leave the courtyard, which was already sprinkled with groats and glassy broken ice. His job was to escort out imposters who had stood in line since morning but didn’t have their ink mark from yesterday, half-eaten by sweat, on their hand—which the painter did by grabbing the retracted arms, like big balky fish caught on a spinning rod, and stomping on dropped caps with his heavy army boots. He also stayed at his post when the soap opera was on television and the courtyard turned into a quickly whitening frame, where in people’s wake their icy footprints disappeared as well on the increasingly pixilated, also disappearing ground, and the thin cornices were like hourglasses spilling a fine white flour. All the rest of the time, the painter engaged in commerce: he placed on the steps, under the overhang, not his own paintings, in the pathologo-anatomical genre, but bundles of decorated clay bells and little hollow ceramic birds that hooted instead of whistling, and offered them to potential customers—a painful reminder for Marina of the departed Klimov. Evidently, having slashed prices to sell, the painter was asking fifty rubles for each piece of craftsmanship—and making no sales whatsoever. When people made their way out of the dim hell with their hard-earned fifty rubles, they had no desire to trade their share of justice right there, at the door, for hollow rubbish and instead hurried to the nearest store, where they were awaited by full sealed containers whose muteness promised a depth of sensation, a clarity of conversation, an infinite multiplication of essences, and an iridescent layering of ordinary objects.