Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

At the same time, other, much better attended press conferences were being held. At the Palace Hotel’s business center, which was regularly used for filming presentations by the A Fund, a monkey house of photographers was going crazy, scurrying across the floors practically on their bare knuckles in search of an impressive shot, filling the air with continuous clicking and minty dissolving spots; the several TV companies were doing a respectable job as well, including one from the capital, red lights shining above their cameras’ viewfinders. His thoroughbred face quite bloated—a heavy thought was written on his forehead, as if with a finger on velvet—Apofeozov hunched menacingly over the tailed microphones and his gray, bloodshot eyes with the sealing-wax bags tracked back and forth. To his right and left were his nephews, now called consultants, one wearing a pearl-white tie, the other a sky-blue. They were intently passing documents to each other behind their uncle’s back, tattering the pages more and more so that eventually they turned into a tall stack of compromising material in which the nephews rummaged intently, digging in them with identical Parkers, as if they were plucking commas out of the printed text. The old, preelection financial scandal retreated into the shadows; what the losing candidate said promised Krugal every possible trial and made the failed actor out to be an utter swindler, practically a second Sergei Mavrodi. The chairman of the local Union of Deceived Contributors, a short man with gray peppered through his red hair and a shiny face almost the same color red from freckles, was in the hall at the ready, and he reacted instantly, reading out an anti-Krugal statement pulled from his antediluvian briefcase, choking on a few words—after which the very fresh, airy, extremely well-preserved and well-read page was added to the paper trash the nephews were already stuffing by the handfuls into the shiny briefcases open at their feet. All this time, in the next room, waiters—prim youths with birdlike profiles and dressed such as poor Krugal could only dream—were setting up a buffet: the most delicate salads in crisp baskets; expensive smoked meats, pale and laced with fat; amber petals of dry-smoked sausage; and all the red caviar sandwiches you could want—although they were a little soggy by the time they were bitten into by the mingling, droning, well-disposed press. Those correspondents who had already had time before this for plain mineral water with Professor Shishkov sized up the losing candidate’s refreshments: for some reason they were especially hungry and tried to glean something from all the emptied platters, if only one last stuck-on, well-fingered delicacy—and the bottles cooed like doves as Absolut was poured into tilted glasses. Even the deceived contributors’ leader, known for his principled refusal to take part in buffets and banquets, gave the noble fish assortment its due, since in the past he’d been an avid and successful fisherman; someone noticed the activist, holding on his knee the misaligned flaps of his plywood and leatherette box, neatly burying an opened but tightly closed bottle deep among his papers. In the end, a good five TV channels ran the necessary commentary on Apofeozov in the news. As for Studio A, where the shaken but not broken Kukharsky still sat, they ran all the footage, including the private scenes where the fat-nosed Apofeozov clan, imitating a tea ad, drank amber tea at a cozy round table covered in a white tablecloth spread tight as a drum and barely big enough for the multivalent family, so that some, crowded in, were only able to put an elbow on the common territory and participate in the shots with a slice of a smile—while the politician’s seven-year-old granddaughter, heaving her little chest, tightly swathed in silk, like a grown-up, played the piano, her hands meandering over the keys like little bowlegged turtles. All this was very touching—but the episodes shot on the fly near Professor Shishkov’s campaign basement aroused much greater interest among TV viewers.

Marina slept through Monday, which the observers had been given off. The news of the victory, which she received over the phone from Shishkov personally, filled her weary mind with blissful lead. On Tuesday morning, unable to get through to the professor, who was either out of the service zone or had turned off his mobile, she set off for headquarters, feeling a need and a duty to go to work—expecting to enter into her new activity and new life from there. As she approached the basement, but still across the icy street where rickety tin streetcars were going in both directions, she could tell that the courtyard in front of headquarters was full of people, who had spilled over into the adjoining courtyards. All the snowdrifts looked like coastal cliffs in bird nesting areas, occupied by the slanting figures of line-standers, who were not paying each other the slightest attention but seemed to be searching for the same thing in the flickering of white dots that from a distance formed a powerful white swell and altered the perspective; adding to the picture, above the courtyard, twittering mobs of sparrows soared up, switching positions, and dropped, as if a net had been tossed into the cloudy sky, while the black hearts of the trees, bared due to their total lack of leaves and visible now in their interweaving of vessels, were ravens.

There really was no way to avoid the canvassers—who were even standing in the sandbox—as she passed through the courtyard. The old windows of the five-story buildings whose inhabitants—to a man apparently—were also registered for the bonus were taking part in the event the way lists and posters hanging on walls take part in a meeting. A low-slung woman in a round-shouldered mouton coat overtook the delayed Marina, whom no one had recognized yet; moving at a forced run, as if kicking an elusive piece of ice in front of her, the woman headed for the basement, and Marina, picking up her pace, hurried after her. Out of the corner of her eye, Marina noticed that the people in the courtyard weren’t just standing there. The separate groups of people waiting were standing in some subtle order, and if someone stepped away from his trampled spot, he made sure to point this out to his neighbors, with a businesslike nod—while some even left a lumpy bundle on the ground with their pancake-shaped tracks, like on a taken chair. Meanwhile, the woman had already pushed through to the basement stairs. Standing on tiptoe, she was obsequiously dictating something to a woman from the group—Marina recognized her by her round steel glasses, in which an angry blind fire always burned in one or the other lens. The woman was recording the conveyed information in a notebook, which she lifted above the petitioner’s upturned mushroom nose—and only now did Marina notice that the group’s notebooks were exactly the same as the ones the registrars always used: with black leatherette covers and embossing that always reminded Marina of the silk lining of some beloved coat from long ago. Finally, the activist finished writing, and the woman, hastily pulling off her knit mitten, which was as big as a bast sandal, held out her surprisingly tiny white hand; the activist licked her indelible pencil on her striped tongue and began drawing on the extended palm—as neatly and efficiently as if she were slicing bread. Then she commandingly waved her hand, and the woman wandered off in the indicated direction, time and again holding out her hand with the freshly drawn number to the surrounding canvassers, who showed her their palms in turn and waved her on—to where the last in line poked up on the snowdrifts, smoking match-sized cigarettes.

“Hello,” Marina said politely, trying to maneuver around the group and feeling in her pocket for the crude, burr-edged key to the half basement. “Oh! Well, finally! You’ve shown up!” the activist exclaimed, and the glare in her glasses passed from left to right and right to left. “We waited for you all day yesterday. At least someone could have come!” “We had the day off after the election,” Marina tried to explain, her frozen face smiling. Now she saw that the group was almost completely blocking the basement door. Naturally, the painter was here, over the last month having acclimated to the cold, like a northern deer. His cheap cigarette was smoking corrosively, like a soldering iron, and instead of his black leather he was flaunting a grimy beige sheepskin coat with a waist like the perimeter of a packing case, torn in spots and patched with tape, which made the artist glint at unexpected moments. For some reason, Klumba was absent, which Marina took as a good sign. However, her place had obviously been taken by a short, solid gentleman with a surprisingly ruddy face that looked like white plumbing stained by rusty water. This man obviously enjoyed some authority, but he was sluggish. His fur boots, which were stamping only the very edge of the soft new snow, looked like they’d been outlined on paper with a dull pencil, and his shaggy cap, tall and airily covered in snow, reminded her of a dandelion. “Excuse me, may I get through?” Marina raised her voice, but it came out more plaintive than angry. “Just a minute,” the activist said in a police tone and grabbed Marina firmly by the arm. “When’re you gettin’ uth our money?” a creature with what looked like a dirty sock on his narrow head and a mouth as toothless as a pocket suddenly popped up and coughed out in a hoarse lisp. Marina recognized the lucky bottle collector, who even now was dragging behind him a cloth sack with his slow-churning glass loot. “Just a minute,” the activist repeated, upping her sternness, and she dragged Marina, who tripped, away from the basement. “We all congratulate our candidate Krugal on his victory in the election,” she said officially and with a proper smile that slightly skewed her glasses, which flashed like ambulance lights. “We would like to hear from you, as a supervisor, when the payments to our voters are going to begin. Right here”—the activist meaningfully shook the almost completely filled notebook—“right here we have the order for payments registered in the order of the actual line. Not only that”—here the activist confidingly lowered her voice and winked her visible left eye, which looked like a slimy onion in a rotted brown skin—“we’ve registered another 420 in the district for advance payment. Those people never got the money they were supposed to due to your workers’ poor work, and it’s not their fault, and they need to be compensated for moral damages. There is also the matter of invalids, whom Krugal ignored, preferring to distribute charity to healthy citizens, and he rejected the public’s proposal—” “Just a minute!” Marina interrupted, feeling some semiliquid ball-shaped weight dipping and seeking balance in her head like in a Johnny-jump-up. “Right now I have nothing to tell you. I have to make a call.” “This bureaucracy and red tape of yours again!” the activist said indignantly, and her face, netted with purple veins, started to look like a hot beet simmering in borscht. “You’re the one holding me up!” Marina suddenly blurted out an idiotic phrase from some satirical newspaper that was unexpectedly effective. The group stepped aside, letting her get to the steel doors, which were covered in colorful, 3-D obscenities: someone had been hard at work on Monday.