Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

“You should take that. I don’t need it,” the apartment’s owner said almost hostilely when she saw Nina Alexandrovna put the bottle on the table. She, of course, had no intention of drinking it. Only now did she notice that on the bottom, disturbed after so many years of warmth and immobility, a fluffy, stirred-up sediment looked like the slippery film left after the water drains from a washing machine. Right then she thought of Marina’s story about knock-off vodka. This Stolichnaya, purchased long before that incident, nonetheless seemed dangerous, especially in proximity to the growing new life, which amazingly, like an apple on a withered branch, was ripening in that feeble body, which had focused all its feelings and bloodstream inward and so was utterly defenseless. Pointing out the suspicious growth to the pregnant woman, Nina Alexandrovna used the opener lying on the table to pull out the nastily banged-in cork, which had hardened like a fingernail. Dumping the contents down the drain proved not so simple. The vodka seemed to get stuck in the bottle’s neck, and she had to shake it in blops, turning away from the warm spirits’ copious and fleshly stink—and even a brisk cold stream couldn’t immediately wash away the alcoholic mirages that appeared in the polished sink. At last the bottle was emptied, rinsed modestly clean, and sent wet into the garbage pail. Refusing coffee (yet another of the apartment owner’s precious objects—an imported white electric kettle with a visor—gurgled and clicked off, as if saluting, while the owner cut a dry and greasy cake that crumbled like burned paper), Nina Alexandrovna hurried to leave. As she was drawn through the cracked door—by either the distant winter street or the steamed darkness—she noticed that the latch had been knocked off and was dangling freely. There were black notches on the doorjamb as well, as if hacked by some mad woodcutter who’d mistaken it for a tree. “I haven’t had time to do repairs everywhere,” the owner said in justification, lopsidedly handing Nina Alexandrovna her coat. The visitor cautiously climbed into the winding sleeves, afraid of striking the child she’d felt for a second in its bubble—as if her hand were filled not with flesh but with a tense watery stream, as if there, in that heavy, crooked vessel, a magic fluid on the verge of becoming a human being was sloshing around. “I’m going to install a telephone very soon!” the pregnant woman said, now in the doorway, and Nina Alexandrovna, knowing full well that being happy for a stranger was practically stealing, nonetheless melted at the sight of the now warm little face and crinkly smile.

On the bus, Nina Alexandrovna smiled and raised her eyebrows in amazement at the thought of the odd misconception, which, thank God, she had managed to dispel. Even the thought that she had found out nothing about her nephew didn’t spoil her mood. Nodding like a roan, the bus dragged itself from rise to rise, and the way back felt long. Nina Alexandrovna scratched the little bit of thawing ice, as thin as the foil on a can of coffee, off the window and gazed at the snow-crusted fields, fields blindingly clean and lying in crude folds, like frozen sheets taken off a winter clothesline. Tomorrow was pension day again, and Nina Alexandrovna decided that after she’d waited for Klumba, she’d take a detour on her way to the market via the train station, where the City Information Bureau had once operated so efficiently. She hadn’t had occasion to be away from home for so long in quite a while, but today she’d taken an entire journey; despite her worry about Alexei Afanasievich, who hadn’t been fed his dinner on time, Nina Alexandrovna felt restored. Getting off at her stop, she started walking, in no hurry, readjusting her paper-light bag, which kept slipping off her shoulder, making her movements not quite natural, slightly on the theatrical side. What was that she’d been thinking about war this morning, in this very spot? What foolishness! Silver dots swarmed peacefully in the gray air, and the white, delicately drawn trees were so still, they looked like glass lamps that had been turned off. Constrained by unnatural snowdrifts that yardmen and snowplows had already pushed off the pavement, drifts as angular as furniture under sheets, the pedestrians hurried along single file and peeled off into the various stores; their faces, ruddy from the freezing temperature, were like different varieties of apples.

From a distance, all the people looked blurred and slightly translucent to Nina Alexandrovna; as a person got closer, he firmed up, acquired a flush to his cheeks, a fur coat, sometimes even a beard, at the same time losing a captivating haze, as if he’d emerged from the fog of his own soul. This odd effect was observed at a distance of about ten paces and came about in two indistinct stages—a right and a left—like someone taking clothing off or putting it on; Nina Alexandrovna, who had always seen this but only now realized it, thought that perhaps a human soul really could be seen at a distance—this was the gentle miracle of myopia—so all people were better far away than up close. At the end of her day’s trajectory of freedom, she lingered by a newspaper kiosk to check out the magazine covers and the young beauties dressed in what were either evening gowns or lacy lingerie; she was drawn by the sudden discovery that the depictions were blurring in her mediocre eyes not at all the way live people did. They lacked some kind of watermark certifying a creature’s authenticity. Inadvertently, Nina Alexandrovna’s gaze slipped down from the beauties to a level array of unfamiliar newspapers. There, amid unfamiliar spikes and dips of very large and very small type, she was struck by a single word printed in powerful letters and so spaced out that they had to be mentally squeezed like an accordion—but they spread out again, emitting a low, stripy sound. “WAR”—and an undulating, radioactive chill ran down Nina Alexandrovna’s spine.

Naturally, “WAR” had nothing to do with this outside time where the shops shone as before and jingling red streetcars bunched up at a stoplight (only the souls seem to move closer). This was about inside time, for which there was now a vague but secretly anticipated endpoint. Nina Alexandrovna stood in the small, packed line for a newspaper, the coins in her freezing fingers sticking together like fruit drops. After taking her capriciously folded copy from the low window, she tried to step aside with her paper; she couldn’t wait to open up to the horrifying page. To make sure not to bother anyone, Nina Alexandrovna climbed the long, unnatural snowdrift pushed all along the thoroughfare, a snowdrift the half-toppled poplars poked out of like widely spaced teeth from a jaw. As soon as she tried to unfold the unusually thin newspaper, the wind slammed into the page, from the outside first and then the inside. The turbulent street air just wouldn’t let her turn the newspaper all the way back, allowing her to read it only firmly folded in fourths—nonetheless, Nina got the general drift of what the top headline had been saying. “WAR in Television: Crude Takeover at Studio A” announced the headline under the banner, and next to it was a grainy, as if heavily peppered photo where broad-shouldered figures in some kind of uniform berets were dragging a bearded fat man out of an armchair: his tie, dark and askew on his protruding belly, made him look like a gutted fish. Below that was a more modest headline: “Triumph of the Victors.” Next to that, a slightly more decipherable photograph depicted something like a demonstration: in the front row, a shriveled old woman with a face like a grasshopper’s and an old fellow with medals spread wide across his chest and wearing ugly felt boots that were firmly trampling the snow had unfurled a banner which, in a handsome designer font—better than the one used in the newspaper—said: “Krugal! Give us our money!” “Mr. Krugal’s election campaign was run on the voters’ money,” the article began, but before Nina Alexandrovna could get to Krugal’s pilfering of some philanthropic fund, she turned over the quarter-folded paper to find a photo of a woman wearing Marina’s knit cap. The woman, emerging from some blurry underground, had her arm raised to ward off the photographer and the arsenal of microphones thrust at her: the large-scale palm, thrown out in a helpless kind of farewell gesture, repeated with amazing precision the outline and angle of the innumerable maps of the electoral district that had been pasted up on all the neighborhood fences, garages, and posts and were now frayed as if from a cultural deficit. Nina Alexandrovna could try to fool herself all she liked, but she had knit that motley cap the color of buckwheat groats herself, and the woman blocking off the reporters with a childish gesture was Marina, who was somehow mixed up in this scandal. Inside time had definitely been annihilated from without, and the reason for this went well beyond any conceivable family circumstances.