Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

Most dangerous of all, though, was that the community brigade was in the charge of the energetic Klumba, whose head was crowned by a new mink hat as hairy as a coconut and on whose feet gleamed new boots with fashionably turned-up toes, in which Klumba braked cautiously as she stepped, as if she were constantly going downhill. The pensioner ladies around her, already wearing their dark red and navy winter coats edged in molting dog or cat fur, treated their basement elder respectfully and with a certain trepidation. No sooner did Klumba appear and begin talking to the group than they all crept away from the apartment entryways, which looked like wooden outhouses, to catch every word—although they listened as if they were always expecting bad news from her.

In charge at the headquarters entrance and personally driving off the local lush, who was nearly blind he was so bloated but who knew how to extract empty bottles from any human assemblage, Klumba squeezed through sideways, arousing agitation and a sympathetic murmur, into the registrars’ room—to yell at them. Surfacing in front of the tables with her hat askew and her raspberry red lipstick smeared from ear to ear, Klumba began denouncing the red tape in bouts of speech that resembled texts by Mayakovsky in their rhymes and meter. All work came to a standstill. The registrars, taught by experience, quietly carried the money to the portable safe, and the agitation behind Klumba’s back rolled to the corridor and reverberated there in a metallic echo, like when a semitruck stops short. Finally pulling out of the living human crampedness the practical bag Marina knew so well, Klumba demanded whoever was in charge of handing out the subsidies so they could coordinate measures.

A couple of times, unable to reach Shishkov, who had gone missing from time and space, Marina herself attempted to play a supervisory role. Klumba recognized her, but in stages. At first a suspicion dawned in her awareness and in her symmetric eyes burning on either side of her nose that instead of a supervisor they were foisting on her something she knew well that had nothing to do with supervisors, and as soon as she remembered who in fact this tightly belted Young Communist with the pinecone hairdo was, she would immediately expose the deception. Then, provocatively following Marina into the headquarters’ back room, immediately clearing out the alarmed staff, who abandoned their unsweetened tea-drinking, Klumba softened a little, and her speech, still labored, as if by a stammer, an involuntarily galloping rhyming (a side effect of visiting the North Hotel), became increasingly confiding. She accepted boiling water and a steeping teabag in one of the relatively clean mugs and took from her bag a securely bound file, and out of the file—stapled sets of documents: raggedly torn-out notebook pages covered in large, old people’s handwriting; statements addressed to Krugal enumerating medals, illnesses, and hardships; yellowed certificates attested to by old seals as pale as traces from glasses; diplomas falling apart at the folds into two richly soiled pieces; and archival excerpts as frail and flat as ironed rags. Occasionally even small photographs fell out of paper clips, in ones and twos. Time had stiffened the paper so that it curved like an uncut fingernail. Watching closely to see that nothing got lost or mixed up in Marina’s hands, Klumba pulled out the principal summary document: a list of District 18 residents, non-able-bodied invalids and veterans of war and labor who needed subsidies more than anyone but who for health reasons couldn’t stand in a line or even go outside. Their basement leader suggested home visits made by the community, which was prepared to work selflessly simply for the right to get them and their family members their subsidy without having to stand in line.

As proof that the list of the needy was no amateurish compilation but complete and objective, Klumba reminded her that she was authorized by the philanthropic A Fund, to which she had been invited, as an experienced social worker, back at the campaign’s start. It was according to these lists, which had been corrected more than once, that the fund had distributed large food baskets—and now that groundwork could be used a second time and to no less benefit. Having finally recognized Marina as someone who knew full well what a helpless ill man was, Klumba found Alexei Afanasievich’s number on the list with her chiseled index finger: opposite it, in the margins, which were speckled with bushes of notes and symbols, there was a checkmark and a plus sign. Indeed, Marina did recall waking up on her one day off in the past few weeks to harsh, police-like voices in the front hall. Jumping up, she saw her mother, alone, clumsily turning the locks and fumbling with a fancy bundle where on the background of vivid Aeroflot blue a polished Apofeozov headed into the bright future. Found in the gift was an entire set of literature, including Apofeozov’s program printed on coated paper, a general plan for the revamping of the district (where the sketches of modern structures, which, just like in shop windows, reflected fleapits ready for the bulldozer, suddenly coincided with Nina Alexandrovna’s notions of her unfilled days to come), as well as a biography of the candidate illustrated with photos from his family archive. In the first, a baby as naked as a jaybird, milky white and rather listless, reached for a blurry toy; then came a sullen schoolboy gazing intently at the ghost of his own nose; and then, as older, weary, and male-looking relatives of Apofeozov were replaced by a new population organized and cultivated by him personally, the family’s First Lady began playing a bigger and bigger role in the camera’s space, like a lady elephant in a submarine, and expressing through fixed poses her extreme delicacy—while her hands, constantly clutching the sleeves of some household member, were like the brutal clawed feet of an eagle hen. Highlighted in the same brochure by every possible typographical means were photos of Apofeozov with major politicians; moreover, the handshake, if there was one, made it look as though Apofeozov were grasping the lever of some mechanism or, at worst, a slot machine. The violation of election law by unbidden benefactors was blatant, and the very next day, while handing Shishkov the press release she’d written the night before, Marina reported the incident. But the professor looked the other way. Massaging his pale eye sockets, which shuddered under his fingers, he waved at Marina and left blindly, running into the white doorjamb as he went. Actually, proving a violation was almost impossible. The exact same kinds of literature, only without the cans of meat and condensed milk and sausage, were delivered to every voter; they poked out of the brutally violated mailboxes and lay scattered underfoot in residents’ lobbies, their pages enriched by prints from various soles. Like it or not, Marina ended up using the Apofeozov gifts, whose sad gastric scent made it clear that they were about to expire. What stung most was that her mother didn’t throw her opponent’s junk literature immediately in the garbage but quietly kept it and secretly examined the family chronicle, paying special attention to the big-assed doll stretching her little hand into the blurry foreground, as if it were her own future, where her well-deserved prize awaited her.

The charity lists Klumba brought included 236 people entered into the computer and another 10 written in by hand. Accepting the perilous papers, Marina promised to consult on them, evasively citing her instructions and making it clear that the headquarters’ resources in the sense of subsidies was extremely limited; their diplomatic talks, in which her visitor was immune to hints, like the impersonal wall behind her that was yellowed from rank whitewash, dragged the tea-drinking out for a good hour and a half. Watching Klumba dip her vanilla wafers into her cloudy tea until they were a rich velvet, Marina’s grated nerves felt that even this fierce public activist, who looked like she’d stepped out of a political cartoon, embodied the human enigma. Why did she, so fastidious during her state visits to the sick and elderly and obviously not wanting to have anything to do with their mean and musty daily life, defend their interests so passionately in the outside world, thereby identifying with them—the object of a metaphysical hatred she neither could nor tried to conceal? Even before, it had occurred to Marina more than once that Klumba was behaving like a crazed Chichikov, buying up dead souls not for a mortgage but for the sake of perpetual ownership of a host of dead people; by sharing her constrained property with death, thereby violating its legal rights, one could acquire yet another surrogate of immortality—and evidently it was something of this sort that Klumba had in mind in privatizing District 18’s moribund population. All the illnesses and infirmities of Klumba’s charges were now at her disposal. She needed only certain mechanisms to leverage this working capital intelligently—and the Apofeozov philanthropic fund and Professor Shishkov’s scheme, which Klumba was so calmly turning on its head, were of equal use here. And evidently she could do even more: the power bestowed by the summary indisposition of 250 voters was a good deal more than what an armed brigade of the same numbers could offer. Only what was to be done about her hatred for the very source of her moral enrichment—a hatred all the stronger because it wasn’t human in general but specifically a woman’s , that is, tangled up with one variety of the sense of beauty? Could Klumba, having taken in so much physical pain by proxy and worked to make that pain as real as possible for everyone, have been left unscathed by the transmission?