Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

Thus prepared, and knowing that Marina would be kept late at work, Nina Alexandrovna decided that the next day she would pay her visit, a weather forecast promising twenty below notwithstanding. That night, as thick ice feathers froze on the apartment windows, she dreamed of a strange, lackluster beach, a sea consisting of several long bands of silver, and above the sea, ash-gray cumulus clouds in which the sun was merely indicated, like the capital city on a map. Flat waves ran onto shore and ironed out the fine sand, and this sand—this sand held everything , both the matter of the world pulverized into atoms and the sleeping woman who kept sifting the colorful, dusty flour between her fingers but couldn’t find a single stone or shard or any remnants whatsoever of the reality that had drained into this watery sandy pit. In the morning, Nina Alexandrovna awoke with no memory of her dream and for some reason with wet eyes and her hair matted at the temples. She didn’t remember her dream until she was outside, when she saw the neon luminescence of the drifting gray snow on a sidewalk made desolate by the freezing temperature. In her dream, finely shredded foam glowed on the sluggish water that poured onto the endless sloping sand like a pancake onto a skillet—and now the lackluster landscape, singed at its white corners, was solidly covered with a volatile silver glow: people turned around and exhaled a white flame, and reflecting scraps sped after the bus that had trundled off right under Nina Alexandrovna’s nose from the congested, pointlessly stamping stop. Lining up modestly at the edge of the crowd, which kept sending frosty representatives into the thoroughfare, Nina Alexandrovna observed through her stuck eyelashes a subtle luminescent streaming on the road, which was scraped to the bare asphalt and covered in white wrinkles. Sand was sprinkling from barely noticeable rivulets of disintegrated matter, and the impersonal cold penetrated Nina Alexandrovna’s light coat like pitiless radiation, making her defenseless spine ache as if it had been lowered onto the last living thread, exactly as in her dream. At first, Nina Alexandrovna thought that if her family survived this era—which for others had stopped short at 1990, apparently—then the logical outcome would, of course, be war.

While the heavy bus, which kept dropping on its ass, was hauling Nina Alexandrovna and the rest of its squeezed passenger load to the Vagonzavod stop, the frost abated somewhat—and continued to abate, creating the intermittent impression of the air subsiding dramatically, like a melting snowdrift. Feeling her body’s center of gravity drop, Nina Alexandrovna gingerly descended, as if climbing down a tree, over the bumpy paths, in the direction of some two-story stuccoed barracks that stood quite a bit below road level. At this point, the residential area was even lower than the humped sidewalks, which were as narrow as small berms: the lower-floor windows sealed with insulating tape looked up touchingly, and in front of them, as if in deep holes, the modest front gardens were white with smooth, untouched snow, which seemed to touch the branches, as if the bare twigs had latched on and pulled invisible threads from a fine white fabric. Right there—a stone’s throw over the fence—Nina Alexandrovna saw in the branches of a ruddy, deformed apple tree a trough made of a shipping crate with the remnants of a mailing address, and in that trough, two perfectly identical little titmice pecking at some frozen bread, and to hear it you’d think a wall clock was striking the hour on the tree.

Far past the barracks, the standard-issue apartment buildings began on bare vacant land, without any courtyards, connected by a system of paths as intricate as a billiards game, converging and diverging at irregular angles. After well and truly wandering, Nina Alexandrovna suddenly found herself in front of the right entrance with the same slab underfoot, wobbling on the diagonal, only now the entrance was cut off from the world by a brown steel door. The only things on its entire surface were crudely cut holes through which she could see the steel aperture of an enormous lock. Distraught, Nina Alexandrovna stepped back to look for the familiar windows, although the tenth floor left her with no hope of drawing anyone’s attention. After lifting her swaying head incorrectly , instantly making the pain squawk, she saw that at a certain height both the building and its receding windows clearly lost their connection to the ground, passing through a centimeter of invisibility to become unreal, as if made of some very flimsy material. While Nina Alexandrovna was coming back down beneath the clouds and blinking back a harsh tear, a blurry, round-shouldered person applied himself, like a spider, to the impregnable doors and gnashed an invisible key as if sawing through metal—but by the time Nina Alexandrovna, still not done blinking, reached the treacherously tottery slab, the door lock, which was the size of a bench plane, had come crashing down and the brown steel was once again shut tight. For a while she could hear the man ascending and slapping the banister and humming some repulsive march.

But she was in luck. About a minute and a half later, the steel clanged again, and out the door, carrying a tidy garbage can packed with newspaper, came a neighbor Nina Alexandrovna recognized—a positive-minded woman with a very serious, judgmental face who in Nina Alexandrovna’s memory had never spoken ten words but who sometimes had knocked on her nephew’s wall so that crumbs sprinkled down under the wallpaper and the cheap clock that hadn’t been drunk away skipped a beat and stopped. Holding the squealing door for Nina Alexandrovna, the neighbor drilled an intense look into her—but at the last moment her look shifted so that the woman ended up greeting not Nina Alexandrovna but the twiggy bushes poking up out of the snowdrift. As she ascended in the shuddering elevator, whose buttons had turned into black ulcers long ago, Nina Alexandrovna thought that the neighbor simply didn’t know how to get along with people without erecting a wall between herself and them. But a nasty presentiment dogged her; next to a radiator where she had once found a treasure—a drunken woman in a man’s jacket with a medal “For Courageous Labor”—there now sat a healthy kitty spotted like a cow: its round little head tilted back, it had chewed off a piece of bloody innards that had stuck to the tile, and the spot made around the kitty’s meal was stamped with partial boot prints.

The apartment door had been replaced, naturally. Instead of the old leatherette wretchedness, which had occasionally dropped rusted-through wallpaper nails, like rotten teeth, there was sturdy insulation covered in figured lath and equipped with a clean, purple peephole the size of a good shot glass. Nina Alexandrovna pressed the sugar-white bell and heard way back in the apartment a musical intro like when a magic box opens in movie fairytales. Nothing followed, though. After listening to its melodious summons a good fifteen times, Nina Alexandrovna suddenly had the feeling that someone was standing behind her. Turning around, she saw a pale creature approximately Marina’s age. The creature’s pinched face reminded her of an autumn puddle frozen over with icy splinters. Her bloodless emaciation didn’t connect with her huge pregnant belly, where her shaggy rabbit-fur coat—with brown spots exactly like that kitty, which now seemed to have gone missing—wouldn’t close. “Who are you looking for?” the pregnant woman, evidently the apartment’s owner, asked in a vibrating little voice. Her keys played nervously in her hand and under Nina Alexandrovna’s gaze were hastily put back in her pocket. Calmly, trying not to scare off the mistrustful creature (suppressing a strange desire to pat her coat, that soft childish fur, the cheap, crunchy fell), Nina Alexandrovna explained about her nephew and gave his name. “I don’t know anything. I bought the apartment through an agency,” the pregnant woman said quickly, mixing the keys in her pocket with some kind of soft trash; her blunt little boots, which looked orthopedic due to the slenderness of her legs contrasted to the size of her belly, took tentative steps right and left.