Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

Clearly, Marina did not have the right to publicly divulge the true state of affairs. On the rare occasions she did get out in the fresh air to smoke (other than her, only Lyudochka dared such a bold move as throwing her wind-dappled rabbit-fur jacket over her shoulders and making small talk with the frozen-stiff painter), Marina caught the expectant looks from the friendly group, which stepped back specially to get an unconstrained look at her from a safe distance. In any case, Marina took the compromising lists verified by Kukharsky’s familiar signature, which looked like a curly lamb, from headquarters, out of harm’s way. At home, she hid the papers in an awful old leather bag sewn from scraps that looked like a creation of Dr. Frankenstein’s, a bag she’d been tempted to buy by the naturalness of the material; she’d hoped that the shapeless monster, to which she would never entrust even the smallest denomination of currency, would digest everything she didn’t want to remember during her tense daily labors and especially at night, when her pillow became as heavy as a dead body and sleep just wouldn’t saturate her impervious brain, where a clear, still, empty, and anesthetized dozing buzzed and buzzed and buzzed.

Winter, which for a long time had resembled an old newspaper listing the last few summer and autumn events, finally took firm hold. Venturing forth into the splendid light frost from the stifling air of her domestic immortality, Nina Alexandrovna saw in the distance, amid the well-covered vacant lots, intricate, soapy-looking cloverleaves; on the horizon, in a dark blue strip, as if in the shadow of the vast, crisp, sparkling day, she could make out a light railroad bridge, micaceous like a dragonfly wing—and under it, clearly discernible in the spiky vegetative nap, the perfectly ethereal snow-covered river stretching out as if counter to the laws of physics. Nina Alexandrovna couldn’t believe it was already November and everything in her family was as before. Actually, she’d stopped trying to thwart Alexei Afanasievich’s left-handed exercises, tacitly agreeing that she had no right to stop him and prolong his royal decomposition in a gilded sleeper coach, his body’s daily torments, and the even bitterer torments of his irreconcilable spirit, which saw not the slightest sense in extending this recumbent existence. Now, if Nina Alexandrovna suddenly noticed the familiar flower of the undone rigging on the blanket, rather than rush forward, she averted her eyes. His persistent efforts to hang himself were no longer something to be hidden; it was all in the open now, the very slow fussing with ropes no longer required solitude or secrecy; husband and wife had tacitly admitted the possibility of death and its legitimate proximity. After this chaste barrier fell between the Kharitonov spouses, death for Nina Alexandrovna and Alexei Afanasievich became something much less shameful than their clumsy nighttime lovemaking, no hint of which had been permitted during the sensible daytime hours. In an odd way, this changed them both, since seemingly nothing in the relationship between the elderly spouses, one of whom was also a nonverbal, nonmoving doll, could change.

Once this had happened, Nina Alexandrovna could help Alexei Afanasievich when he was drenched from exertion with the old-man sweat, cloudy like moonshine, that burned his sheets. It would have taken Nina Alexandrovna, who was divinely nimble and light compared with the paralyzed man as she hovered over him in the apartment’s rectangular heavens, mere minutes to reproduce on the blanket the well-studied bowel of death, to make all the pulls and turns and offer her spouse the ready-made noose, like the hole from a world-size bagel. But Nina Alexandrovna understood that she, as a woman, had to make sure she didn’t touch that with her hands, that no matter how much beyond his strength it was for him to do that terribly slow, winding work, Alexei Afanasievich would never allow her to do anything improper. Basically, Nina Alexandrovna still didn’t dare speak with the paralyzed man about his attempts to contrive death’s universal monogram. Although Alexei Afanasievich couldn’t shut her mouth with a pneumatic palm fat with pumped-up air as he once had, she well sensed the inappropriateness of any discussion—and no outside listener, had he snuck up from the dark hallway, would have caught anything at all suspicious in the comments of the wife reporting as she tended to him about the weather, burned pancakes, and the doctor’s imminent arrival.

Meanwhile, her spirits fortified, Nina Alexandrovna soon became convinced that the paralyzed man, who was coming very close to a result, could never cross the invisible line. Not because Alexei Afanasievich lacked decisiveness or the frenzied soldier’s obstinacy: it was just that a rubber wall kept bouncing him back. Rather than contemplate the nature of this mystical boundary, Nina Alexandrovna decided to trust in fate: simply not to want anything for herself and to accept the possibility of any turn of family events. One fine quiet night, when the lines of the glowing landscape softened for the first time under a cloak of new snow and its reliefs began to smile under the streetlamps’ sparking light, Nina Alexandrovna suddenly realized she didn’t have to fear death. No more did she cut off the bed the results of Alexei Afanasievich’s labors; each subsequent knot, as intricate as a small animal’s brain, took up minimal space on the bed lattice, but now the reflecting gold of the lattice branches barely peeked through the tangled fringe. The wonderful trophy bed had come to look like a hothouse for cucumbers. Raggedy plaits bestrewed it, and standing out like a tubular flower was the same gilded tie—she had no idea whose—as well as a few cords of quite obscure origin, unusually filthy and stringy, smelling for some reason of sweetish ash and giving the impression of last year’s dried stems. The hothouse had not borne fruit, though. The hollow-bodied fruits (in essence, the loops, shapeless and devoid of content, were embodied nothingness) did not germinate or grow. Only a couple of times, while straightening Alexei Afanasievich’s beaten-down pillows for him, did Nina Alexandrovna find behind them pathetic seed buds, tiny and stuck together, like failed cucumbers, which resembled, in turn, collapsed balloons with a curved nipple at the tip. Evidently, Alexei Afanasievich was putting the rigging not so much on himself as on his own death, but the beast would not be caught, although it was undoubtedly clawing at and consuming his soul. To judge from the opening in the loops she found, death was the size of a field mouse.

For the visit from Evgenia Markovna, the doctor, all this unattractive activity was curtained off by the caked navy blanket that had once covered the marital bed: in the depths of its permanent folds, like the powder left over in a pharmaceutical pack, a new blue remained, better preserved than in memory. Unaware of the paralyzed man’s successes with death macramé, cautiously, not trusting her own words, the doctor gave a positive prognosis, specifically: the toes on Alexei Afanasievich’s left foot had started to move, the red webbing had stretched between them, like on a duck, and the battered big toe wagged back and forth, like a lever being tested by a mechanic. As to the fingers on his working hand, they were no longer mitten-like but moved independently, and this movement had made them surprisingly long, and their tendons apparently functioned all the way up to his elbow. One day Nina Alexandrovna caught her husband with his index finger firmly aimed at the ceiling—and this decisive gesture was strikingly different from his usual wayward movements. At first she tried to figure out what Alexei Afanasievich was trying to say or, maybe, ask for, but then she realized that for the paralyzed man what was important was the vertical, plain and simple—a finger-length vertical, negligible compared to his mighty size, yet a victory over the incorporeality of his recumbent body, a ten-centimeter measure of his real existence, a successful attempt to skewer nonexistence.