Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

After slamming the psychedelic folk art masterpiece behind her, Marina felt as though she was being smothered in the pink and brown corridor, where the fragmentary wooden row of numbered chairs reminded her of a dinosaur’s skeletal remains. Another five or six people turned out to be hiding in the basement. In the back room, Marina discovered a gathering of pale shadows reluctantly drinking yellow tea brewed from leaves already used three or four times. They were thrilled to see her. They jumped up, offered several pulled-back chairs at once, and also poured her a full, tarry mug of the collective beverage, barely warm, so that sugar didn’t dissolve in it but just hung suspended, like a teary cloud, picking up the sweepings. The first thing Marina did, though, after getting out of her coat, which dropped wet snowy husks on piled up bags, was to pick up the phone. As usual, the antediluvian equipment with a receiver like a two-kilo dumbbell honked like a formidable, almost automotive horn, but no matter how many times Marina dialed the professor’s iambically rhythmic number, the result was the same. “The subscriber is temporarily unavailable…. Please call later….” an impersonally polite, ignorant voice repeated, as if a train station were talking, and the other numbers she knew gave her hopeless busy signals. Right then, several arms and legs started banging on the outside door at once, probably rubbing the chalk graffiti to thin patches, and the steel rumble seemed to rattle the black spider webs growing in every corner of the basement like armpit hair. Marina shuddered. The registrars set their knocking mugs aside at once and looked at her with frightened round eyes that held identical points of light. But right then, out of the blue, the professor’s office called back. “I can’t tell you anything definite,” the professor’s not unkind secretary said hoarsely, and from her whistling, intermittent snuffles, Marina guessed she was blowing her nose in her hankie. “He promised to come by before twelve, so try calling back.”

Now they could only wait until twelve. The people who’d been pounding on the door had probably given up and left. The registrars, with heavy, upturned faces, as if to keep their features from spilling like wet compressed sand from a mold, had wandered away from the common table to lounge around the basement. Some pulled tattered, glossy-covered books from their bags. Observing them, Marina saw that the women were still caught up in delaying , which possibly wasn’t just a trace or habit that would pass but a kind of fibrous fabric that had been implanted in their being. It was as if their circulatory and nervous systems had been stretched out by red tape and were now much longer and more tangled, that now these poor ladies, who hadn’t been paid their November salary either, were inwardly imagining more or less the same thing the wild painter from the group had been trying to depict on his nacreous canvases: a twisted, convoluted organism with remarkable superfluities sending blood and nerve impulses wandering through labyrinths.

To keep busy, Marina removed the registration notebooks, now imbued with a languid chill and disconcertingly heavier, from the safe. After separating the bonus lists from the lists of payments made, she took to the calculator. Half of its buttons were stiff or stuck, so that it would suddenly spit out long figures. Marina got caught up in the work while resolutely battling this defect and tried not to listen to the people in line bombarding the fatigued steel over and over again. Actually, the attackers now tired fairly quickly, and their infrequent blows sounded like they were wrapped in cotton wool. The figures, rechecked many times, kept mounting in a column that got fatter and fatter. No matter how the frightened Marina tried to fool herself (unconsciously resorting to delay and rummaging through the foul-smelling notebooks), she couldn’t keep the sums from mounting. Apparently, the numbers were multiplying on their own, like fruit flies or something, and the preliminary results that Marina entered onto the stained piece of paper that came to hand were like fly eggs from which new generations of unpaid rubles were going to hatch.

After taking a short break before the terrible final result (the registrars brought Marina a steaming slush of instant coffee, made by washing out an old Nescafé jar, and a sandwich with a piece of herring in it that looked more like a comb than human food), Marina noticed that the headquarters’ rooms had cooled off. Each of the women had pulled on her coat and tried to fold herself into a strange, cumbersome pose for autonomous heat generation—nonetheless they were freezing, like the large stacks of unlit firewood piled up here and there. The radiator, which Marina checked to make sure, was barely warming its own dust and obviously not coping with the battering wind outside, which carried loose, drifting snow into the window shafts, making it seem as though curtains were fluttering on the windows from the street side. Nonetheless, they could see the contributors up top, through the white heaving: their dark mass occasionally crouched, becoming even darker, and a crooked stick poking out of the milk would occasionally scrape insolently at the window gratings. Suddenly, someone—Marina thought it was the artist, who flickered in a gap in the wind for a second—threw a stiff, collapsed object into the shaft; stealing up to the window, Marina saw that it was a dead cat. Its wadded fur looked stuck to its flat body, and its gelatinous eye, covered with a white film like cold fat, glared at the half-basement’s occupants. After pulling the stiff curtain to hide the repulsive missile—without the slightest confidence that another wouldn’t follow it—Marina nonetheless forced herself to return to her figures, which she feared much more than all the live and dead animals in the world. Five minutes later she had the final result—an outright mockery of the headquarters’ daily campaign thrift and the pathetic hundreds of rubles they’d managed to scrimp. Leaning on her shaky elbow, which she’d moved to one side so the registrars wouldn’t accidently see the terrible sum, Marina asked herself whether Professor Shishkov understood the magnitude of his obligations. Something told her that the professor’s brain was refusing to multiply the canvasser money sucked out of the district by a factor of 2.4 because he definitely had nowhere to put his hands on a million and a half rubles. She trembled just imagining the spontaneous voter fury that would greet a default.

Outside, meanwhile, the news spread that the main supervisor, the one with the Jewish nose and dyed collar, had gone into the basement. The amorphous mass, fat from its long idleness, slowly went into motion. The line formed. People showed their neighbors their left palms and stood single file, breathing on each other’s damp collars; some ran along the sections, calling out their number—the way the people being evacuated at train stations must have raced along in search of their family, torn away from them in the crush. Some little girl, to look at her, wearing a scanty little checked coat, clumsily wrapped up, as if wound around her head was not a scarf but an entire dress, was sniveling and trying to climb a frozen slide—but the higher she got, the less courage she had left to tear her gaze from the slippery rungs and look around. From high up, a large, glossy raven that had raised a human rumpus from its withered branch could see black scraps resembling the pecked remains of innards getting ready to reassemble into a black body, which was getting bigger—and the body coming to life as if it had been sprinkled with magic water. The line, more terrifying than any army, was stamping in the snow, and almost everywhere the trampled snow looked like a book with a yellow spine from which all or part of half the pages had been ripped out. Apparently, this was the moment District 18’s residents lost their faith in personal immortality. The example of the loser Apofeozov no longer meant anything, and the women, who were still wearing starkly flared peach and green coats for the weather from the month before last, had grown old overnight. Their faces, thickly powdered by the cold, had hardened, and their hair, escaping from their flirty mink berets, had become thin, disheveled locks.