Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

For all her self-confidence, she didn’t look like all that perfect and indifferent an automaton. Evidently (and here Marina wasn’t far from the truth), Klumba’s contempt for her pensioners and invalids was a defense against the immediacy of the pain and impoverishment that reached their benefactors in digested form—which meant that Klumba was left with the remainder, the toxic waste from the production of her own power. Had she belonged to the category of politicians who derive moral capital from the collective image of the suffering citizen, from ideal dead souls previously cleansed of everything worldly, she might not have done too badly. But in order to engage in this privileged business, you had to have both money and power already , and Klumba came from the lower depths. She’d gained her mite of power by primitive prospecting, out of the dirty ground; she’d had to sniff the stink of suffering, see the rabbity eyes and drool of fat, mentally disabled teenagers, see a lot of musty old flesh, stumps of worn-down old fingers, white glaucoma eyes, and stale human poop on unswept floors. One could only admire Klumba’s doggedness, her ability to curb her own feelings. Close up, across the table, Marina saw that the benefits rep did not in fact look younger. Quite the opposite. Purple, blue, and pink veins had swollen all over her, as if the woman had been filled with different colored inks like a ballpoint pen, and nasty tobacco-ish shadows had collected under her eyes, speaking to some hidden malady. It might well have been that Klumba (Marina didn’t know this) had in fact been given some mysterious ability, had some talent for experiencing a stranger’s infirmity herself, a talent that manifested itself crudely in her misfortune. Under other circumstances, Klumba (whose real name was Vera Valerievna Belokon, née Repina) might have become an exceptional diagnostician or, just as good, an indispensable nurse—not an ill woman but, thanks to her curbed and properly applied gift, quite a healthy woman with a sharp eye and rigorous hands capable of soothing inflammation and making firm dressings as pretty as a crochet doily. Evidently, this woman’s path was the path of mercy, and her life should have been spent in a chlorinated hospital for the poor. Now, Klumba’s path and its passionate depiction on the philanthropic stage had been distorted; her indomitable activity was a theater where she portrayed herself as best she could, and the list of invalids was the play Klumba passed out to the entire cast. Understandably, no power could force her to admit that she was doing something inauthentic; Klumba trampled the falsity of her efforts in a crushing passion that made her close-set eyes sink deep and glitter there like oily, spoiled egg whites. Definitely: up close, face-to-face, she was a pathetic sight; with eyes like that, Marina even thought, Klumba should wear dark glasses.

The moment Klumba got up and moved away, though, she again looked, at a distance, like a full-bodied, thirty-year-old woman with pink blazing in her cheeks and the unconscious happiness of moving, of breathing the cocktail of oxygen and snow, of sneaking a peek at her new boots wrapped around her leg so marvelously by a braided leather lace. Marina couldn’t figure out what caused this effect. District 18’s very air was now probably obliterating time’s devastation as it refracted, so that from far away even the pompous Khrushchev-era hulks with their 1950s resort design, which had turned to slime and rot, looked nice and new, elegant even; their precarious position at the edge of a snow-covered cliff—under which a dark, accident-fed sewer, a badly frozen puddle, lay, like a spot under a mouse—was as picturesque as a fairytale illustration. If you could somehow just not get close to anything, see everything from far away and nothing up close, then life in District 18 would be better for everyone. From that astronomical distance at which the district was illuminated and made visible (the distance from the Earth to the Sun these days was about 0.9884 astronomical units, or 147,864,640 kilometers), everything here must have looked like a little paradise beaded with buildings and gently coated with precious human breath. A protective arm seemed to sweep over the district, as if this land were the imprint of an enormous and benevolent hand that had drawn itself on the patterned surface, the way children outline their hands on paper. Marina caught herself thinking she was getting soft.

She had quietly doled out Klumba’s canvasser money long ago, the very first time—Klumba, her unexpected husband, her twenty-year-old son, and her in-laws. The entire family in the passport photos Klumba presented were like characters out of some Soviet black-and-white movie about a vanguard factory. As for the philanthropic lists, Marina wouldn’t take any action; basically, she couldn’t breathe a word of them. She shuddered to think what Professor Shishkov would say or do if he suddenly found out, if only from Lyudochka, about her conversations with the persistent Klumba, in which she, Marina, had nonetheless conceded, almost promised, to find the necessary funds for her invalids after all. Spending twelve thousand of headquarters’ money, putting it in the hands of the self-appointed activists who had besieged the half basement, was tantamount to stealing—worse even. Moreover, there hadn’t been sums like that in the safe, sums you could quietly pilfer, for a long time. Each morning, when they showed up for work and walked past the early birds who’d marked off the location, the way a group at an entrance marks the location of a funeral, the campaign workers didn’t know whether money would be brought that day, and if it wasn’t, then whether they could make yesterday’s leftovers stretch to the end of the workday. No one had any idea whether they would be able to survive as long as necessary without a scandal while hemorrhaging money, as if they were giving it out drop by drop to the accursed Apofeozov, or whether their efforts would be in vain after all and the sight of the battened-down half basement and the fury of the deceived people left in line on the street would give the lucky vampire a decisive advantage just before the election.

The conscious slowdown under the line’s terrible, physically palpable pressure was not lost on anyone. After closing up, the registrars shuddered, and the women climbed out from behind their tables like tortured insects from half-open matchboxes. Those who could still move and think would gather with set jaws and leaden occiputs to count the remaining money. The discovery that they’d managed to spend even four hundred less than the day before would evoke weak smiles of relief and hope: people were prepared to continue the red tape torture, to wind time around their bodies as if it were a taut, ringed boa constrictor. Meanwhile, Apofeozov’s people, on the contrary, were speeding up, stepping up the organizational pressure. Charter buses pulled up to the polling places, which were already open for early voting, almost like clockwork, and out of the buses, squinting, came entire labor collectives, among whom were many women all dressed up and carrying little white-blue-red flags. Others, for beauty’s sake, were underdressed: their knees in thin Lycra were bright pink over their tall boots, and their gauze scarves, tucked into their coats, looked glassy and faded in the snowy wind. Occasionally, five vehicles would pull up near the polling place simultaneously and discharge very specific young citizens—wearing fur-trimmed leather and short haircuts that exposed the baby-like softness of their small but hard skulls, like snowballs kneaded by strong fingers. Everyone, including the specific ones, followed the lead of knowledgeable managers who showed up out of nowhere and were so discreet that, while having faces, seemed not to have profiles at all; the arrivals proceeded in organized fashion to the ballot boxes. The only time the polling place was closed for some reason for the latest Apofeozov tour bus, they demonstrated a few times on the TV news: an indignant voter, shaking his cropped nap, explained on inked fingers about his civic duty, and the camera lingered on an official door with a naïve “Principal” plaque shut tight to democracy. Everyone understood that the votes cast early had in one way or another not been free; however, in the election campaign, as in any business, big money fed on those who had less—so Professor Shishkov found himself trapped, basically having played into Apofeozov’s hand. The 250 invalids and old people who never left home and were incapable of shuffling to their own polling places (and were hardly able to refute what, in fact, the 50 rubles received “for charity” obliged them to do), were like full hands of utterly useless cards that Shishkov was forced to accept by the foolish logic of the events he himself had set in motion. It was very important not to yield to Klumba’s pressure, especially since Shishkov’s fury, had he learned of the charity lists, might prove truly terrible. Despite his emphatic calm of the last few days, his long face quivered as if he were being thwarted, and once Marina caught the utterly self-possessed professor suddenly, with incredible force, rip an emaciated plant out of a pot—and the escaped root, which looked like a rat’s tail, sprinkled the professor all over with fine, caseous soil.