Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

Marina held out hope up until the polling place’s closing, and in the last twenty minutes, which were utterly dead—the schoolteachers, in the total absence of voters, stood up from their papers ahead of time and performed third-grade gym class—she imagined she saw Klimov, or Klimov’s ghost, in a terrible hurry, galloping straight across the virgin snow, leaving dark blue boot-deep tracks. All hope was lost when they locked the school’s front doors and turned off the light in the lobby, where the glossy candidates aged as evening fell. The commission chair, who was also the school’s principal, a young man, much younger than his math and botany teachers, but a mournful and mournfully sleek little man, gave the signal to begin, and the contents of the ballot box gushed out on the prepared table, contents that lay on the bottom in a layer as solid as halva and took effort to knock out. The closeness with which Marina followed the ballot counting led to her remembering almost nothing afterward. All she did remember was some ballots being inexplicably dirty and worn and the Apofeozov brunette nervously pacing behind the vote counters’ backs and sinking her teeth into the soft flesh of a ruddy, dripping pear. The sorting of ballots that took place on the table with the participation of many hands and webby shadows set off a slow calculation in Marina’s brain: several times she distinctly shuddered at her own voice counting out loud, but each time it turned out to be the voice of one of the teachers quietly exchanging croaks with the director, who had blurred like a sad blot at the far end of the table. They started tallying the results. Marina was shaken. Apofeozov’s victory by a margin of nineteen votes was so curious and disgraceful that among today’s Sunday public it seemed they could simply exclude those nineteen extra citizens who hadn’t fit their crosses and checks in the right box.

The brunette, however, had smiled with her beady little teeth too soon and had accepted in vain the congratulations of the principal, who held her dry little hand in both of his with such a tender look, it was as if most of all he would have liked to put this dear little thing in his gaping pocket. There was more of the same at the other polling places. Throughout this lovely, idyllic day, with its golden crust of snow, the odds had fluctuated in the air. Serving as a barometer had been the exhausted Krugal. Early that morning he’d arrived in his hulking 1978 BMW at Professor Shishkov’s now quiet, amber sunlight filled office. Strangely resembling a colorized black-and-white photograph, with floods of pink on his soft gray cheeks, the candidate had perched like an orphan in the professor’s waiting room, sucking down the innumerable cups of coffee served by the frightened secretary. The professor turned up a little later, fully pumped with medicines, to discover Fyodor Ignatovich on the edge of his monumental couch, where the candidate was sitting sideways, looking like a bent cigarette stuck to a protruding lip. Evidently, the failed actor, who had never won anything in his life and now dreamed of victory with all the powers of his bantam soul, had acquired a hypersensitivity to the atmosphere in which the likelihoods of various election outcomes not only swayed but rocked. From time to time, Krugal smiled agitatedly, massaging his heart, but a minute later he would sink and turn pale. Tousled, a blind spot on his glowing brow, Krugal walked and ran in zigzags around the crowded furniture, occasionally turning into Shishkov’s wide-open office—where the professor, who seemed starched by medicines but who had grasped something, regarded his partner closely, the way an antique portrait painted in dark oils might regard a visitor. Probably, some secret part of Krugal was unconsciously registering the most minute events, which were constantly altering the correlation of forces. His blood seemed to have extra beads running through it, like the beads in those clever toys you can rock to the very top of a twisted pyramid—and you could tell from the candidate how his success was being wrecked, success practically guaranteed by the rousing of some big drunken family or a water main breaking, as a result of which Sovetskaya Street was awash in smoking, watery grease and dozens of women who hadn’t finished their washing had decided against going to vote. The patient secretary, who had left her two boys at home unsupervised inventing TNT, had been run ragged looking after Krugal; through the window she could see the Executive Сommittee building dial, which looked like a bicycle wheel, though sometimes her eyes saw a gray rainbow of invisible spokes turning, nonetheless she could still register the main events of the day. At twelve-fifteen, Krugal’s spirits improved, and he even ate the hot pelmeni brought up from the cafeteria downstairs—after bringing his plate to a state of total chaos and piggery in the first minutes of his movable feast, a characteristic Krugal trait. At three, he went back to wandering and going missing, turning into other people’s offices, which were countless in this building. He was discovered nearly in the attic sitting on a stool splotched with either maintenance paint or pigeon droppings. Krugal, who hadn’t smoked since he was a kid, was greedily smothering himself with some nasty cigarette he’d bummed off someone and sneezing so that he sounded like a nasty rag being torn up. They brought him back, shook him off, and sat him back down on the couch. At about five, a ravenous appetite awoke in him. At five-thirty, something else happened, and Krugal’s features shuddered and suddenly became as plain as a Roman numeral. Forty minutes later, he seemed to wake up and looked at the secretary with a moist, human gaze. “So that’s how it is. I have nothing more to say,” he said unusually distinctly, but what this referred to was a mystery. Finally, at 6:08, not waiting for the polling places to close, Krugal became blissfully bored and yawned, gulping down the waiting room’s rather stuffy air, and a minute later was sleeping, restlessly, in the cozy depth of the couch, his smashed cheek sticking to the brown leather armrest. Right then, Professor Shishkov, who had taken no part in anything all day, emerged from his office and stood over his creation, thoughtfully rocking on his feet, touching cheap, crude-smelling brandy to his penicillin-ish lips.

Actually, Krugal’s victory in the overall elections was just as shaky as Apofeozov’s in Marina’s one district. The two candidates were as close as a man and his reflection in a mirror, and the decision as to which was real came down to a highly relative voting advantage. The three additional individuals in this Sunday’s spectacle had not vindicated Apofeozov’s hopes and had barely made a showing, garnering an insignificant percentage overall—and the one woman, a famous former athlete with a square, masculine haircut and sweet dimples on her chubby, angelic cheeks, had not had a single ballot cast for her, which was unprecedented. On Monday afternoon there were two press conferences and a live broadcast: in front of reporters, Krugal had the approximate look of the classic rabbit the magician pulls out of a hat, while Professor Shishkov, representing the chosen deputy as his proxy, spoke briefly, standing for just a moment, his voice flat and wooden and his entire gaunt body leaning on his spread fingers, which were trembling very slightly. The reporters, whose recorders wheezed ever so softly in front of the professor, letting their tape wind, asked boring, politically correct questions. Only the anchor for Political News —a veteran of regional TV, a still very lively and vivid lady with inappropriately delighted round eyes and a hairdo like a gold crow’s nest—was able to rouse Krugal by reminding him of some story from their shared theatrical youth spent in the town of Upper Ketlym. After this, the deputy kicked away chairs and wires to make for the TV anchor’s hand, at which he brandished his Roman nose—and all this was filmed by the dispassionate camera being carted around the studio like a motorcycle by a round-shouldered cameraman.