Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

The understanding that the range of possibilities was increasing, that the options for the future were growing farther and farther apart, made Nina Alexandrovna feel strangely empty and free to act. Now it was not out of the question that Alexei Afanasievich, after so many years of immobility, might by some miracle get back on his feet and forget about his attempts to hang himself; it might also be that thanks to his astonishing improvements he might actually carry out his plan. Also likely was that nothing in his usual life would change and the stagnation sealed up in that room, a stagnation sprinkled with a white sleeping powder, would retain its unique qualities and the dead would remain alive here forever. Never before had Nina Alexandrovna had such a broad range of options. Her movement from past to future had always followed the sole possible line, as if through a schematic tunnel where the inhabited cubicle “today” shifted continuously into the waiting “tomorrow:” if something altered the direction of this curve, then that “something” (Alexei Afanasievich’s stroke, the introduction of free prices, the ruble’s fall) immediately found itself in the past, and the more unexpected the turn, the stiffer that shift. Now Nina Alexandrovna’s fate had slipped off that line like beads off a thread. Suddenly, she found herself in the middle of a big white patch without guidelines; the future no longer stood up ahead in the form of an unfilled shop window, and there was no point peering into it. From here, from the vantage of her new freedom, Nina Alexandrovna was surprised to note that it was the suicide attempt that had given the impetus to Alexei Afanasievich’s recovery. That attempt had yielded an effect that medicines could not have achieved. The more furious the veteran’s efforts to hang himself on one of his hardened, odd-smelling cords, the more actively his organism’s restoration proceeded. His left leg had already started quietly to bend, and the veteran’s knee poked up out of its horizontal nonexistence like a calloused tree root out of the earth; a crooked yawn had suddenly begun coming over Alexei Afanasievich, too, nearly ripping his half-dead facial muscles, and his face seemed to express the torments of Tantalus trying to take a bite out of some invisible fruit. Having lain all those years at death’s side, a few millimeters from its sovereign boundary, Alexei Afanasievich, in his attempt to breach this final gap, had been thrown back into life by death, had bounced back from its unreached line, like a ball from a wall, and now his efforts were yielding an inversely proportional result.

Amazingly enough, Alexei Afanasievich’s death and recovery posed identical practical problems for Nina Alexandrovna, including moving furniture, which now was divided into lifeless stationary objects and objects that due to the crowding kept having to be dragged around to turn the room into its nighttime version with the cot. Nina Alexandrovna tried to gauge the best way to pull and drag apart the awkward furniture jam that had formed over the years beside the paralyzed man’s bed in light of his capabilities and convenience of care; she also wished she could replace the wallpaper, which was greasy from age and was pulling away from the walls in puffy yellowed folds. One day she stopped by the nearby hardware store, which had once smelled like a shed and toxic new pressed-wood furniture; nowadays the fragrant store was filled with fantastic, graceful plumbing fixtures that looked like cases for marvelous musical instruments, and Nina Alexandrovna thought she could sew an evening gown out of the wallpaper there if it hadn’t been paper.

The main thing, though, was employment. Nina Alexandrovna thought she might work as an aide in an old folks’ home. After fourteen years of caring for a paralyzed man, she didn’t have a drop of squeamishness for old people’s turbid organisms or the musty mushroom smell of their gnarled excretions. In their dilapidated corporality, old people seemed closer to nature than young people were, and therefore purer. Merely imagining replacing Alexei Afanasievich with some other “granddad” was just as hard as it was impossible to imagine another daughter replacing Marina, some stranger who wore red lipstick and drank fruit kefir in the kitchen. Be that as it may, Nina Alexandrovna knew she could handle the work. Right now she was physically stronger than she’d been at twenty-five and thirty. Her hands—now twice as thick and flabby on their backs but covered with a rough, chitinous armor—dragged and flipped over something that would have been unthinkable for her even to have attempted in her student years. Of course, Nina Alexandrovna’s own health had been badly rattled. The feeling of a fist under her shoulder blade would linger for hours, and even gripping a knife as she cut vegetables she could feel it in the back of her head, where a solid air bubble throbbed right under the bone. The combination of physical strength and the unreliable fine mechanics poorly installed in her crude muscular mechanism made Nina Alexandrovna acutely aware of her own transience and each moment’s insecurity. Sometimes she felt as though she could barely think. Whatever she drilled her gaze into became an insurmountable obstacle to thought, and if she succumbed to temptation and physically moved the impediment out of the way, then she couldn’t stop herself from cleaning, as if demonstrating to herself how much simpler and more natural it was to move things than to mentally picture them having lately become free-flowing.

She did need to worry about the future, after all, and prepare for it in some real way. The only person Nina Alexandrovna could go to for advice and help was her now sober nephew. When Nina Alexandrovna finally realized that her son-in-law Seryozha was gone and wasn’t coming back to their suddenly very quiet apartment (Marina’s shuffling steps, which Nina Alexandrovna continued to listen to closely, did not fill the silence, which prickled from the fine ticking of the clock), she decided, no matter what, to seek out the sole male relative capable of heading up the family at a critical time. Having no idea how to go about this properly, or whether the information bureau was still functioning, Nina Alexandrovna decided to start by inquiring at her nephew’s old apartment, where she had gone regularly before his new spouse came on the scene. There was a time when she would drag bags of rotten garbage out of that den and defrost the aging refrigerator, which suffered from incontinence and barely endured its huge wet ice blocks for the sake of one frozen bag of faded hake; then Nina Alexandrovna would wash the impossible floors down to their pale, etched out spots and in the bathtub wash the gray sheets, which had started to ferment like mash. Now things in her nephew’s apartment were very different, of course, and so as not to embarrass herself in front of her newly rich relative, Nina Alexandrovna prepared for her visit. She pulled out of the closet a half-forgotten, minutely moth-eaten bouclé suit, which was now so snug that her figure looked like a sheep’s carcass; she searched for her fake Czech pearl beads, which had peeled like an old manicure (Alexei Afanasievich had never understood her tender attachment to all these baubles, which for her were like cheap caramels, her favorite candies, were for her sweet tooth—anything but symbols of wealthy diamonds, which were unattainable and therefore unreal ). Finally, after finding that her old evening bag was too small for the rough, deposit-laden daytime city, Nina Alexandrovna borrowed Marina’s leather bag, which was hanging idle—perhaps too young for her, but decorative and obviously recently purchased. Bags like this, made of pieces exquisitely selected according to the radial laws of avian plumage, hung in the best shops in the clothing section of the wholesale market, where the customers were fashionistas with money; this one, practically unused, with its comfortable broad strap, had a design that reminded her of a grouse. You could even see the wing’s curve. Removing some loose papers that scattered staples behind them, papers that had been stuffed inside so the bag wouldn’t lose its shape, Nina Alexandrovna first shoved the papers into the trash can, where they stood straight up, and then, frightened that someone might still need the unintelligible lists speckled with coded comments, she shook the limp chicken innards off the pages and laid them out to dry on the kitchen windowsill.