Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

While Nina Alexandrovna was standing on that snowdrift, fighting the wind-gasping newspaper, while Alexei Afanasievich, having constructed a rather crooked noose from his most successful cord, was trying on death like a hat (at the same point in inside time, a nuclear warhead had reached its target and swelled and burst, and a city had flown off the face of the earth like a tattered wrapper)—at that very same time, Marina was nervously loitering in the corridor of Studio A, where the faint narcotic smell of the teargas used the night before had yet to air out. The studio had broadcast a bloc of ads as if nothing had happened (in inside time the nuclear explosion, which glowed like a quickly growing, outrageously transparent disc, very much like the ad for dishwashing liquid in which a finger touches a greasy plate, cleaning it all the way to the edges), but any outsider who found himself in the corridor would immediately have noted the traces of disorder. The doors to all the editorial offices were flung wide, and frantic employees were sitting inside like animals in a zoo where the cages had suddenly been opened. Some were cautiously making their way to freedom, actually, and Kostik the computer wizard, who had recently become the anchor on the morning show “Hi, Everybody!” was pacing near the waiting room, sniffing predatorily, touching the slanting sideburns he’d let grow (for his image) with the tips of his fingers, as if to make them stick better. Small windows had been opened to air out the teargas, and drafts were dragging cold, inflated papers around, restless papers, like paper boats released on a pond. Studio A had been ravaged and turned inside out; for some reason, prehistoric mannequins had been put on display in the corridor: women’s torsos swathed in pink and nude stocking fabric that had shredded and laddered. The towheaded security guard posted by the waiting room kept shooting sideways glances at the mannequins, especially the most extensible one, a kind of woman-cloud, which for some reason had been set on a polished dowel.

Marina had been wandering around for two hours. She needed Professor Shishkov like crazy. Everyone said several hellos to Marina, but the forced tone of their greetings attested to the fact that she was just as much an occupier as the guy in the baggy camo with the ugly flushed face, white and pink, like a radish, who just yesterday had showered the employees with an oily, smothering stream from a gas canister. Each time she passed the makeup room—which was open like all the studio’s spaces—where two girls in dollish robes sat at a worktable heaped with makeup and cotton balls, Marina felt a hostile curiosity emanating from there. Even the mirror opposite the door wouldn’t accept her reflection; something seemed to get stuck there, and instead of Marina, an intense streak crossed it, like static on a screen. The whole scene in the studio corridor would have looked like it had been staged for a made-for-television movie if the truth hadn’t seeped through the semblance . No one there today was looking through the full-length windows that were much too big for the office cells and that, due to their cold size, always made up a substantial portion of the editorial reality. There were always smokers smoking along the corridor windows, staring at the sloping industrial landscape, which resembled a sorting station comprised of various structures, and anyone thinking at his computer would dissolve creatively in the raven skies outlined by the old frames, but today not a soul had a thought to going out; the employees were afraid to leave the studio even mentally and kept away from the windows, the way people keep away from the edge of a roof or a construction site. Everyone was united by a concealed alarm. Everyone was sitting and wandering as if tagged—and when the swift figure of Professor Shishkov moved away from the elevators, bouncing slightly, it was immediately obvious that this man was not entangled, like the others, in that sticky web of anticipation of God knew what, that quite to the contrary, he didn’t have ten minutes to spare. “Sergei Sergeich!” Marina rushed to intercept him but only pinched the dry fabric of the professorial sleeve. Breaking free of her fingers, like a huge strong insect abruptly smelling of some crude perfume, simply ablaze with this cologne smell, the professor muttered, “Later, later,” and flew toward the waiting room doors, where he disappeared, nearly snagging his jacket wing. Trying to slip in behind him, Marina encountered the official gaze of Lyudochka, who was sitting in the secretary’s place as if she’d always sat there. “There’s been no decision on your matter, Marina Borisovna,” Lyudochka said in a gentle voice, glancing sideways at her own hands, where a fresh, golden-caramel manicure was additionally decorated with a large new ring in a setting of diamond chips: the precious lump, which obviously wouldn’t fit into any glove, played on her long ring finger in a multitude of sharp reflecting sparks. “Fine. I’ll wait,” Marina said dully, and she sat down on a stiff office chair, pushing it out of line a little.

Truth be told, she hadn’t thought events would develop so swiftly. Left behind was the trying “deceleration” of the last campaign days: when, last Saturday, at precisely noon, the registrars, half-alive, propping each other up, rose from their tables and the line let up a roar as if it were a stadium. The full extent of the remaining money was a paltry 410 rubles. You could say they’d cut it close. At least two more hours passed before the line, grumbling and retaining its legitimate numbered order, under the group’s watchful eye, left the basement nearly single file. Marina should have paid attention to the phenomenon at the time—because the order worked out over the many days of them stamping on the snow, certified by the sweaty, by now almost venomous chemical number on their left hands, represented nearly a greater value to the voters than the fifty-ruble note they’d already drunk up, since it was their sole means of fighting injustice —but she, happy that things hadn’t reached the point of scandal, hadn’t paid attention. What had she actually been thinking about at the elections as she sat there like a second-grader who’d been held back, at her cruelly cramped desk, dying to pee and covering her official notebook with identical Greek profiles, like paper clips? Secretly, for herself, she’d been hoping that Klimov, who was still registered in the district but had never voted in his life, now, changed, would show up to perform his civic duty—and this innocent meeting of strangers, like former schoolmates, this new look from afar would be the start of something unknown, something free of what had happened so recently in their failed family. Time and again, Marina mistook long-limbed men of about the right height for Klimov. Once, this turned out to be an elderly Tatar with a greasy shaved head that looked like a pile of pancakes, who responded to her look by baring yellow teeth abraded like a horse’s hoof. Despite her fear of men, which resided deep inside her, Marina was so eager for a change that she thought she could fall in love with anyone who wasn’t Klimov. In that concealed nervous agitation she’d been experiencing since early morning, she was ready to scream, she was so impatient to see her husband, and in exactly the same way she was ready to start something with anyone who paid her the slightest attention. In this regard, though, Lyudochka had the most success. Few were the voters of the opposite sex who remained indifferent to her flourishes on the chair, where she would cross and recross her legs as if she were deftly rowing with a stiff oar in a winding current—so that ultimately even Apofeozov’s assistant, the well-mannered Hitler, couldn’t take it and slipped away.