Ольга Славникова: The Man Who Couldn't Die

There was something odd and even sinister to Alexei Afanasievich’s abnormal longevity. Unlike most of those by now legendary war’s veterans, whose numbers decreased erratically by the year, Alexei Afanasievich had gone off to war not as a boy but as a grown man who had already graduated and worked in a school for a while. And if those relatively young old men who gathered time and again under new red banners, banners papery in the light, seemed like the offspring of the young men who had once gone off to the front—totally different people born out of life’s long dream, in which they had died, succumbing to its intolerable duration, the true bearers of the war’s memory—then Alexei Afanasievich, on the contrary, was striking for his authenticity , which had carried forward through the troubled and vividly illuminated years. By his mere presence he authenticated himself so thoroughly that, although he had never joined the Party, it would scarcely have occurred to anyone invested with power to ask for his ID. Each of this man’s positions and actions had lasted exactly long enough for him and the people around him to fully realize and remember what he had accomplished; the fifteen or so men he had once killed, as an army scout, without noise or weapon, were probably among the few who had come close to solving the riddle of death while still alive. Alexei Afanasievich had given them this knowledge, and blessed with it, their legs dancing, madmen looking vaguely past their own temple, they had dropped their submachine guns, bowls of soup, and dirty postcards to the ground. Alexei Afanasievich’s favorite weapon was a noose made of strong silk rope, which had an advantage over a knife: even on the darkest of nights, light of unknown origin would be caught and cast on a blade. That silk rope had never once failed him, and the scout himself, while stifling the fascist’s porridge-warm bellowing with his fist, palpably felt the moment when the soul quit the body with a jolt as gentle as a kitten’s jump. In intervals between dangerous jobs, so as not to lose his instrument, Alexei Afanasievich carried the noose around his own neck, the way other thoughtless men wore crosses in war. Occasionally, the worn cord was actually assumed to have a cross on it. Whether out of a manly distaste for snot-nosed washing, or out of concern that he would wash the patina and luck off the glossy silk, Alexei Afanasievich never rinsed the rope in any of the putrid bathhouses where he had occasion to steam away his own salty, frontline dirt—and as the rope became infused with his body, it became more and more a part of him. The scout had a raw red stripe on the back of his neck, where the filthy noose rubbed his spine, which was as skinny as a bicycle chain and slippery from sweat. In damp weather, Alexei Afanasievich would itch terribly from that crude mark forever after.

After demobilization, Alexei Afanasievich, though he had eight medals and countless other minor decorations, did not try to become any kind of boss, devoting himself wholly (as the factory newsletter wrote) to peaceful work in a technical archive; however, the look from his cold eyes, with their stony streak of green, contained a warning, and his movements were such that an observer couldn’t help but think how much his sun-scalded arms, his lame leg, and his healthy leg weighed separately . Because of his frontline lameness, Alexei Afanasievich marched as if the left half of his body held an additional, ever-present burden that he had to carry wherever he went, tugging and adjusting the invisible straps more comfortably. Each subsequent step, taken as he leaned on his sturdy, far-reaching cane, depended not on topography but exclusively on the habit of his unhurried, twisted gait and the burden of himself (the burden of his heart, which thumped relentlessly on the left, under his shirt). Alexei Afanasievich lived without ever explaining anything to himself but rather as if remembering himself one part at a time—and because of this, everything he’d lived through stayed with him, as if the veteran’s existence simply couldn’t end because some part of his consciousness never dozed, reliably combining the present and the past, where he was always and forever alive. His authenticity seemed to guarantee his immortality, at the thought of which Nina Alexandrovna, being younger than her husband by exactly a quarter-century, felt a mute, superstitious question arise deep inside her and saw a clear picture arise of her own funeral, as if it were to take place the day after tomorrow—and how strange it would be for her, who slept on a cot beside her husband’s tall bed, to suddenly find herself lying higher than Alexei Afanasievich, on the dining room table, in her dress and shoes, under a funeral sheet.

Fourteen years ago, Alexei Afanasievich’s procession across the earth had been cut irrevocably shorter when, after dinner, as he was smoking on their cramped, curly blooming balcony, his intrepid cane staggered under his considerable weight and started to shake. He himself remained standing briefly, perfectly erect, as if weightless, before collapsing onto the empty cans and basins, filling the entire wrecked patch of balcony. Nina Alexandrovna ran out from the kitchen at the terrible glass tocsin but couldn’t get onto the balcony because there was nowhere to step without stepping on Alexei Afanasievich, who had turned drastically white, like a belly half fallen out of a body, and she couldn’t see his face, just a lock of hair, perfectly still in the air, that had poked straight up when the back of Alexei Afanasievich’s head slipped, unconscious, down the balcony doorjamb. While the emergency crew was on its way and Nina Alexandrovna’s daughter Marina and her son-in-law Seryozha Klimov—at the time only a fiancé who spent the night—came running from friends’ and were able to tie towels together to drag the stuck body—which looked like it was trying to hug itself with its long outstretched arms—off the balcony, at least an hour and a half passed. Half of Alexei Afanasievich’s face was pulled down and oddly smeared, as if someone had tried to crudely wipe off his plain, soldierly features. His bristling eyebrows, which had always looked like two roosters, had now shifted in opposite directions, and his left eye, half-covered with a weakened eyelid, shone weirdly, a strip of bloody white.

And so it remained, this half face, a mere profile of something human, no matter the angle. During periods of inexplicable improvement, which would come on suddenly, for no apparent reason, Alexei Afanasievich, pulling his lips back crookedly as if trying to chew on his creased cheek, occasionally emitted awful, long, viscous sounds reminiscent of the shouts of a drunkard gripped by indignation or a plaintive song. Sometimes his left arm would come to life, and he would drag it back and forth over the blanket and even hold objects, picking them up with a cautious, creeping movement, but the objects, turned oddly or all the way over, still couldn’t fill the emptiness of his stiffened hand. This overturnedness of the things in Alexei Afanasievich’s senseless hand expressed his loss of the verticals and horizontals of normal space. Once upon a time, Nina Alexandrovna, a petite woman with a girlish fluff of hair, had taken pride in her husband’s heroic height, six foot three, but now that number, which had probably not changed, had no physical meaning. Nor did his clothing sizes (Nina Alexandrovna simply bought whatever was roomiest from the assortment flapping in the wind at the wholesale market). Alexei Afanasievich’s lameness, which previously had elevated him even higher above the level crowd, had vanished: the absence of all the toes on his left foot except for the squeezed woody knot of a pinky toe looked like the damage to a statue for which the mind can so easily compensate. In the end, the paralyzed man’s body, still authentic in its presence, which occasionally even suffered ordinary human illnesses (a cold, gastritis), had no spatial dimensions at all, just weight, beneath which the old trophy bed, which looked like an iron carriage, would never clank again . Unless Alexei Afanasievich was touched, weight, that invisible property of immobile objects, was merely his means of interacting with the Earth’s equally abstract astronomical center. When Nina Alexandrovna turned his body, well-tended by a paralytic’s measure and marked by old scars like the pale, flattened stalks you see under boulders, it felt like she was moving by a millimeter the entire invisible earthly mass—which had taken the veteran for a natural part of itself. This daily effort took such exertion that sometimes Nina Alexandrovna had to sit out the taut blackness that pumped into her head and made her feel how flimsy the skull’s bindings creaking behind her ears really were. When she came to and found herself in the same place, though, she resumed her labors as if nothing had happened—with a light-mindedness that combined oddly with her short height and fine gray hairs, which you couldn’t see, actually, in her airy, very fair hair, and which only made it shine all the harder under the invariant light of household electricity. She also continued to care for Alexei Afanasievich’s former clothing: his brown boots, whose aged layer of shoe polish looked like chocolate, stood in the front hall beside her dusty shoes; his puffy gabardine suit, which looked like it had inflated due to idleness, hung in the closet with mothballs in each pocket—readied long since for its final burial mission, in which, however, the veteran’s family both did not and did not want to believe.