Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

Not knowing what to say to that, Nina Alexandrovna smiled reassuringly and held out her hand to touch the pregnant woman, who nearly fell down shying away and backing into the scratched-up wall. Her coat flapped open comically, like chicken wings: evidently, she’d been squeezing her fists in her jangling pockets. Nina Alexandrovna’s heart suddenly melted. She thought about how incredibly comic she herself would have looked to a stranger when she was pregnant and tried to hang herself—like a cuckoo stuck in a cuckoo clock. “Don’t you smile. I really did buy the apartment,” the woman said challengingly, shaking out her hem. “Later they told me why it was so cheap. A man was hacked to death with an ax here.” “What man? What ax?” Nina Alexandrovna said gently, amazed at her pregnant fantasies and with no intention of budging. “I’m telling you, this is my nephew’s former apartment, and he’s definitely alive. I received a money order from him a few days ago.” At that moment, the mooring elevator groaned. The neighbor, holding the emptied bucket with its stuck-on snow-sole away from her body, slipped past, and her angrily pursed lips looked like neat sutures made with gray thread. “Gulya Kerimovna!” Nina Alexandrovna called out to the neighbor, suddenly remembering her name, as if someone had whispered it in her ear. But the neighbor (who had in very timely fashion brought in realtors to draw up and backdate a power of attorney for selling the apartment and who now kept the dollars she’d earned in one of her four—she didn’t remember exactly which one—well-worn armchairs) didn’t even turn around; hiding behind her cornflower blue back, she turned her keys in the locks as if she were drilling into her own door and trying to pass right through it. It really did seem to Nina Alexandrovna that the neighbor, rather than enter the half-cracked door, passed through the wood and steel: after turning into a surprisingly slender and undulating silhouette, she broke up into dynamic blue spots that quickly vanished from the wood’s surface the way the fog of human breath vanishes from a mirror’s. Nina Alexandrovna suddenly thought she’d been given a graphic illustration of how to forget someone: as if he’d gone through a wall and what lingered for a few seconds in your eyes was like a Chinese hieroglyph drawn with a quick brush.

“Fine. Let’s go. I’ll show you,” the apartment’s owner said decisively, moving Nina Alexandrovna away from the nice new door. Together they entered the half-empty front hall, which seemed to Nina Alexandrovna nothing like it was before—because the light turned on not where she expected but on the other side. However, a long bare cord and moldering socket still hung from the ceiling, and Nina Alexandrovna instantly remembered how the heat of the overheated bulb, after it had gone out, felt on her forehead and raised hand if you stamped abruptly or dropped a heavy bag on the floor. There were surprisingly few things in either the hall or the room, which was oddly drafty the way only spaces in abandoned buildings through which you can see the ashberry trees and garbage in the rear courtyard can be. The new life seemed haphazardly laid out on top of the remains of the old, not destroying it, but not using it either. To the left of the front door, Nina Alexandrovna saw the familiar peeling coatrack with a single, shriveled glove on the shelf posed like a dead sparrow; to the right, a new, almost identical one had been nailed up and on it hung a very few pieces of women’s clothing—all of it with big buttons and soft shoulder pads sticking out like empty camel humps. “Now you can see for yourself, the blood hasn’t been completely washed off here,” the pregnant woman said, clumsily turning herself out of her coat and loading it onto her half. Right then Nina Alexandrovna sensed the unreality of what was happening.

On the floor of the front hall, bare as before, with clayey tracks worn across the old floor cloths, lay the one and only rug (right then Nina Alexandrovna couldn’t come up with another definition) the size of a grave’s flower bed. The rug’s placement was off —not in front of the door, as one would expect, but slightly to one side—and not quite to the wall; on it for reliability—to press down harder on what was hidden beneath it and might somehow pop out—stood all the worn footwear there was here, plus a cart with a splattered bag. Dropping heavily first to one knee, then the other (her belly, stretched in checked fabric, looked like it was about to fall out, like a ball from a basketball net), the pregnant woman cast aside her ridiculous barricade and turned back the rug. The sense of unreality immediately vanished. Nina Alexandrovna could only wonder how she hadn’t immediately remembered about that spot—now nothing but dark red cracks between the faded planks. About four years before (no, I’m sorry, a good six!) her nephew, needing to earn a little extra on May Day, contracted to paint some structure the Communists were planning to take out on the square to hurt Yeltsin. For some reason, her nephew brought home an entire can of revolutionary oil paint and tripped, as often happened with him, on level ground, spilling the contents. Fortunately, that day Nina Alexandrovna had dropped by to clean: the thick paint tongue spilled on the floor hadn’t dried yet—it had just darkened and set a little—and Nina Alexandrovna scraped up the soft paint with a heavily greased knife, wiping the collected clods on stuck-together newspapers, while her guilty-looking nephew (she recalled especially vividly his shaking forelock with yellow dry weeds of gray hair) fussed with gasoline, which left swaths on the rust-brown floor that looked like damp, swollen cheese. After telling the pregnant woman the whole story, Nina Alexandrovna saw with relief a new interest on her elongated little face and, simultaneously, pink dots of a delighted strawberry color. “Well, would you like me to prove to you that I’ve been in this apartment?” A newly dawned-upon Nina Alexandrovna, supporting the heavy woman by her elbow, which was swaying like a testicle, led her to the toilet, where, as in the old days, the old basin, red with rust, was making a furious noise.

Due to some awkward gradation of the niche, the painted plywood behind the basin, which concealed the wastewater pipe, which was making very strange sounds, stood out a good ten centimeters from the wall. Slipping her hand into the tight crack—there, inside, just like in someone’s mouth, first breathing cold air, then plowing up a deep warmth—Nina Alexandrovna immediately felt a slippery glass neck, shifted it aside, and pulled it out into the light: a bottle of Stolichnaya covered with yellow slime, like a newborn babe. “Oh my!” the apartment’s owner said, clutching her flat cheeks. “Give me a rag,” Nina Alexandrovna demanded, and taking a silly scrap of lingerie with a little mother-of-pearl button, wiped off the slime along with the label, which over the years had turned into foul-smelling curdled milk. It was still filled with vodka, though. One day, having found her nephew in a state of drunken bewilderment, intent on putting on his watch, which kept slipping away like a lizard, Nina Alexandrovna decided that the unopened bottle, which her nephew didn’t see on the absurd table, cluttered as it was with so much dingy glass, was one too many that evening. Subconsciously, she was sure her nephew and his wife had long since found and partaken of their half-liter—but today the momentary inspiration, which was connected somehow to the apartment’s echoing, thoroughly visible space, which sounded like a radio tuned to an empty frequency, suggested to Nina Alexandrovna that the Stolichnaya was still behind the tank.

“This isn’t mine. I don’t drink vodka,” the frightened pregnant woman said in her own defense as she stepped back into the hall and allowed Nina Alexandrovna to carry out the virtually immortal product. Reassuring the woman, who obviously felt she’d been caught at something unseemly, Nina Alexandrovna told her in plain words what had happened. For some reason, she thought that the story of an alcoholic who gave up drinking and became one of the new rich would encourage the apartment’s owner, who obviously was planning to give birth without a husband. Intuition whispered to Nina Alexandrovna that the child’s father was a drinker—and the overall blue cast to the pregnant woman’s face and her overall resemblance to the most delicate and delicate-skinned toadstool on a dandelion stalk spoke to the fact that vodka was a familiar family misfortune many generations deep. In the kitchen, where the bottle naturally brought them, Nina Alexandrovna noted the well-scrubbed cleanliness—the luxury of poverty, when the happiness achieved is not the presence of things but the absence of that repulsive quality with which ungodly relatives surround a person. Now she understood that for the sake of purchasing an apartment in wild Vagonzavod, which left off in ravines and onto sad, snow-swept fields only slightly lighter than the sky, the woman was prepared to stretch herself very thin indeed. Actually, in the kitchen, next to the cracked teacups and the warped cutting boards, which looked like parts of a broken trough, there was a lovely stainless steel sink—new, like the door and bell. Evidently, the woman believed in a normal future and was buying it one piece at a time. To the pregnant woman, those expensive things, which were in striking contrast to the poverty of the one-room habitation with its faded wallpaper made nearly of ordinary paper, may well have seemed eternal.