Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

Nonetheless, people who no longer felt they had any grounds for resisting reality suddenly felt something like it in the space between their own souls. What united them now was more important than each of them individually. Everyone felt this immortal connection, formalized in the line, as the sole force that the district’s inhabitants could now contrast to their own fate—which meant no one was trying to creep forward or cut out inattentive neighbors. For each of them, the person ahead had become like a big brother, and the person behind like a little sister. The deceived contributors’ agitated marshal watched through a cold, wind-beaten eye as an austere young lady in black felted braids reminiscent of the Medusa Gorgon conscientiously stepped back to let in a cultured old woman in a brown cap that looked as if it had been sewn from a stuffed bear, while two scary-faced worker types, whose numbers didn’t quite fit, in their case looking like the kinds of numbers that get put on the soles of shoes being turned over for repair, were waving to a comrade hurrying toward them, a low-level boss to look at him, who was carrying his own belly plus a worn briefcase as substantial as an accordion. The contributors’ marshal recalled quite a few lines like this—gloomy demonstrations in defense of Sergei Mavrodi, who was as curly haired as the baby Lenin in the little October star pin—and recalled people registering one foggy September dawn at a firmly shut MMM center, and recalled especially clearly, for some reason, the stone banks of Park Pond, which attracted sharp floating slivers, papers, and other trash like a magnet. The swirling magnetized glints and trash stupidly signaled a suicide who had lost other people’s serious money on MMM’s pyramid schemes and who was pulled out alive nonetheless and subsequently shown to reporters. The failed suicide’s hair remained wet, as if it had caught some watery infection, and the eyes in his gristly, eyebrowless face turned as gold as a bream. A lot happened in those informal communities called lines: meeting daily, sharing misfortunes, people became like family; some, a little younger, even got legally married, and brides, throwing back their white veils, which stuck from the wind, hurled liquidy rotten tomatoes at financial structures’ brazen windows. Life, though, which dragged all Russian riders without exception through the potholes, very quickly wiped out the lines’ ties. People stopped phoning one another, and when they happened to meet on the street, they reminisced tearfully about the good times and swore somehow to arrange a get-together of old comrades and drink a bottle of vodka near the dark blue fir in front of city hall, as usual.

Right then the deceived contributors’ marshal (a very lonely man who had nothing left from the battle and his loyal fellow fighters but piles of paper infested by pale roaches) observed a phenomenon that did and did not resemble what he had seen before. This line in the bizarre courtyard, at the door to the pathetic half basement, was in some way more powerful than all the lines before. Something suggested to the marshal that these people were not going to disengage so easily. Given that this was a matter of very small sums—a little more than a ridiculous hundred canvasser rubles apiece—what stood out was the very principle of the line as a form of popular self-organization uniquely combining hierarchy and equality without distinction as to the sex, age, or status of its human units. An attack of insane pride that was his, the marshal’s, secret trait and would suddenly come over him either in his cramped office cubicle, or in his bachelor kitchen of exactly the same size and proportions, amid crooked, half-eaten pots, began to bubble up in his chest of many buttons—and the marshal’s heart took a leap, like a white egg boiling in simmering water. Meanwhile, virtually all the deceived contributors had sorted themselves out by number. After an abrupt wiggle, like a looped hose wiggling under the pressure of released water (someone nearly fell, and whooshing grain poured from ripped-open drifts), the line’s awkwardly lying loops began to move . It didn’t progress by a single person, yet it moved, its multitude of feet emitting a soft, hoarse snort, like some persistent, self-aware energy pumping steadily onward through the human gut.

A microbus from downtown that had meanwhile pulled up to the tensely droning courtyard got stuck, like a boat in tall reeds, and barely honked its way through the human labyrinth, which yielded only reluctantly. Klumba—and it was she, determined, with a vivid blush that looked pasted on—was the first to jump awkwardly to the snow, and her freshly wound curls, which her slipping cap could barely contain, jumped as well. She was handed from the microbus a heavy, lightly battered roll of Whatman paper. Some half-buttoned-up reporters climbed out of the microbus after Klumba, bending and struggling with all their equipment. With the help of the artist, who’d run up, Klumba unfastened the springy roll, which popped open wide, and pulling out sheets, began showing the slightly disoriented line what she’d prepared. “We demand the election results be rescinded!” “Krugal! Give us our money!” “Our children want to eat!” “Down with the thief Deputy Krugal!” Klumba lifted all this as high above her head as she could. Her gloves, red like cockscombs, poked out humorously from her bared arms. Immediately, ten takers thrust their hands out from the line, dropping their steel watches in their sleeves, and the fat TV guy, wagging his granite jeans butt, climbed over the drifts to choose potential subjects. He especially liked a broad-shouldered old guy with a purple nose in the shape of a frozen potato and a clear, hundred-proof gaze, who looked a little like a Soviet film actor—not very steady on his feet but with medals under his camo quilted coat that were soiled but quite telegenic. Other candidates were found as well to represent District 18’s insulted populace. Lined up on the snowdrifts, like the proud defenders of some snowy small town, they held the wind-battered Whatman-paper slogans up by the corners (two couldn’t cope and changed places, sensing some vague trick in the order of the words on the paper), while reporters bustled below like an assault brigade. Someone ran toward Klumba with his pickerel-narrow cloth back, sweeping loops of cable over the worn, tobacco-fertilized snow, and nearby the artist assiduously tested the megaphone, which whistled and honked, occasionally bursting out with howling vibrations that made the sparrows launch from the bushes like splashing brooms of brown water. “Okay, cut, good work,” the fat TV guy ordered efficiently, rolling a gnawed match in his little crimson star of a mouth. “Now fifteen minutes of commentary. Where’s that Krugal team?” “Over there, downstairs, sitting around, phoning,” the activist in twinkling glasses reported. “They’ve been shut up for an hour and a half and still haven’t finished.” “Can we smoke them out? Anybody tried knocking?” the TV guy inquired, leaning his expansive body over the gloomy depression. “As if we hadn’t,” the activist said, offended, gesturing at the smeared door.

At that very moment, the heavy black telephone in the cold half basement started ringing like an entire streetcar. The registrars leaped up, as if they’d been half-asleep, and Marina dropped her coat and chair and grabbed the receiver. “Marina Borisovna? I’m connecting you to Shishkov.” The good secretary’s voice sounded like it was coming through a miniature radio. “Thank you, yes, I’m listening,” Marina said hurriedly, stepping on something soft. “He just arrived and he’s a basket of nerves,” the mistress of the professor’s office informed her, bringing her quiet voice closer, immediately after which mechanical scales started playing at length in the receiver. “Yes! Marina? Where are you?” Shishkov, seemingly terrified by something and sounding as distant as a cosmonaut, interrupted the sweet, didactic music. Trying to speak distinctly and choosing the simplest words, Marina described the situation outside the former headquarters. A staticky patch rustled and itched in the receiver, kind of like a little Shishkov angry at his end of the phone line, an electric bumblebee being prodded by a straw. She really didn’t like it that Shishkov didn’t interrupt her once. The receiver was itchy and thoroughly inflamed; a bumblebee, like a fat, dangerous larva, had coiled around a shaky straw, and Marina’s palm was sweating so profusely, the receiver was getting slick. “You see, the canvassers are expecting us to start paying their bonus right away,” she rushed to finish her report. “I don’t know what to tell them. At least three hundred people have gathered, and we workers have been waiting for two hours for we don’t know what, virtual prisoners.” “So wait,” the professor was suddenly close, having achieved his natural magnitude, as if he’d taken a seat and crossed his legs in the next room. “And what have you been doing, if I may ask?” “I’ve tallied how much we owe the canvassers,” Marina replied in a cheerless voice, feeling the professor somewhere behind her. “Something has to be done. After all, getting hold of such an inconceivable sum…” “You think it does?” the professor said archly. “How’s that?” Marina became distraught, looking through this crazy conversation at her registrars, whose puffy faces, smeared with yellow light, were furrowed with attention, as if they were all about to sneeze at once. Right then, feeling a pit under her heart, Marina realized that if she cited the exact figure to the professor, something between them would snap irrevocably. “Well? Where did you go?” a sarcastic Shishkov called to her. “You’re not planning to beat these debts of yours out of me, are you, Marina Borisovna?” “I…What are you…I simply meant…” Marina imagined then and there, this very minute, the professor about to put his big cold palm on her open neck, on her bare vertebrae rubbed raw by her loose chain. “All right, let’s forget that.” The professor was once again collected and purposeful. “Marina Borisovna, I seem to remember you wanted to work in television, is that right? Come here tomorrow around ten and we’ll resolve all urgent matters. The lease on the headquarters space ran out the day before yesterday. Collect the keys from the workers and return them to my secretary.”