Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

The slippery, squeaky receiver seemed to hang itself up, and the telephone now looked at Marina lifelessly, like a sheep’s head placed on a table. She would have to lead her people out. At this point, Marina suddenly felt like the true daughter of her medal-bearing stepfather, as if the music of a military brass band carried on the wind had stumbled on some false note. A while was spent gathering up. The registrars opened the flimsy desk drawers, rattling the junk inside, wrapped their worn shoes in newspaper like sandwiches, and hastily rinsed out litter bins under the only faucet, which spewed out more putrid air than fizzy, rusty water. Finally, the column of six was ready to head out. Marina’s purse was made heavy by the crudely clanking keys, and the most nervous of the women, the one who had once fainted when a bundle of bills went missing from under her elbow, was holding a pot with a multistage aloe, the trusting green fledgling’s octopus tentacles swaying against her raised shoulder.

As soon as Marina pulled on the door, which emitted a steel shriek, the crowd’s husky and for some reason partly equine presence and the day’s blinding air hit her simultaneously. The human feet toward which she ascended over the rough, warped stairs took a small step back, weaving into a wreath. When Marina got to the top and stepped into the human circle, those birdies that always fly out from a photographer’s camera flew right into her face with a menacing whoosh, a click, and a mechanical screech. Bending under this splash attack (a sharp wing slid flat across her cheek, and another creature, as weightless as a tuft of dry weeds, tangled its claws in her tousled hair), Marina screened herself from the reporters with a thrown-up palm, as she’d once seen in some magazine about celebrities. “When is your organization going to settle with the canvassers?” “Was the voter deception planned in advance?” “Were you able to reach Deputy Krugal over the phone?” The questions, shouted out in different voices, were accompanied by furry, spongy microphones, and the biggest camera, the size of a wall clock, kept sending out an egg-shaped, hiccupping cuckoo on a spring, like on that kiddie show, Kinder Surprise . “There definitely isn’t going to be any money today. Beyond that, I don’t know,” Marina said in a raspy, muffled voice into the nearest microphone, feeling an emptiness behind her, which meant that in the confusion the women had been able to mix in with the deceived voters, who stood like an accordion, as if lined up for a group photo. “What do you think about a possible recount of the election results?” the pride and joy of ARM-TV, a well-groomed boy with marvelous, seemingly oil-infused lashes and the beautiful hands of a born pickpocket, shouldered his way through the crowd. “The elections are over,” Marina replied firmly to her vague former acquaintance, catching out of the corner of her ear the canvassers behind the press trying to chant a garbled slogan and failing at syncing their voices—so the slogan, bogged down in extra syllables, just wouldn’t get rolling. “That’s it. Cut!” a fat director of unspecified studio affiliation yelled, energetically waving his puffy hand. The director was dressed, as usual, in a short quilted jacket that made him look like a cluster of dark blue balloons, and judging from the gnawed match in his mouth, he was, as usual, trying to quit smoking. The press thinned out immediately. Marina looked around and saw a narrow escape route next to the gray wall, right under the balconies, which looked mostly like hanging doghouses. No one tried to stop her, and she hurried off, stumbling on rusty sewer pipes tied with wires and frightening the broad-bottomed kitties perched there, obvious relatives of the one lolling in the window shaft, its rotten teeth bared; Marina couldn’t shake the impression that the painter, following her with a heavy, seemingly blind gaze, had pulled a smirking knife from his sleeve.

In his large, insipidly lit office, Professor Shishkov, having spoken with his staff, walked up to the window. Downstairs, on the institution’s front steps, which were covered with ant-like chains of tiny footprints, a small picket line holding a white placard aloft was still stamping its feet. These dogged people had no intention of leaving. From time to time, the guards attempted to drive the protestors at least from the front steps, but all that did was draw attention from every floor to this display of scarecrows in front of the bastion of big and midsize business. The professor thought (although a certain chill prevented him from wholly believing this) that the canvasser problem would play itself out in a week, ten days at most. Once again, as had happened that morning, half an hour before his call to sweet Marina Borisovna, the professor had thought lyrically that in principle, for the sake of repaying the debt, he might sell his newly built summer house under the grandfather birch with the shaggy saddle and powerful mane, where it was so glorious to eat the summer’s first crisp, prickly cucumber straight from the garden, and beyond the garden a rounded little lake shimmered as if filled above the brim so that you were afraid to touch it and disturb the delicate, glowing film—and in soft, rainy weather it was simply marvelous to read on the whispering veranda, peering through the gauze of warm rain at the nearby woods, which looked like a bright shadow.

Refreshed by this noble thought, as if he really had taken a break at his Losinko home, the professor nonetheless got back to business. Sitting in his office was the man he was going to be working with: solid, powerful, and short-legged, with a boyish chestnut bang cut straight along a deep forehead crease, the new director of Studio A, grunting, had scooped up a handful of the professor’s special crackers, and after crushing them with his wonderful sugar-lump teeth, he ran his green silk tie over his slathered and crumb-strewn jaw. Sitting beside him was a tall woman with an ideal, Diana-like figure but a bulldoggish face whose exceedingly smart but makeup-wearied eyes looked as if they’d been drawn on in corrosive powder and who barely blinked. The woman, wearing an identical-looking, broad-shouldered, masculine jacket (the skirt, sewn from a length of the same fabric, wasn’t worth mentioning), was sitting with her irreproachable legs precisely placed and was sipping pale jasmine tea, repeatedly pushing the string from the elegant teabag label aside with her pinky. The director had recommended her to Shishkov as his deputy. Although this pair’s things (a pile of grubby, off-brand sports bags that looked a little like pigs, some in the trunk of the professor’s car, some heaped up in the office) had obviously been packed separately, the nature of their relationship left no doubt. Still, observing the way they were exchanging barked comments and quick, feral glances (the director, shooting quick glances, could calm himself by smoothing his tie and knocking specks of dust off his round shoulder), the professor agreed that together they made a suitable and strong team. This woman in the masculine jacket with lapels like shark’s flippers was just what was needed. Everything her demotic eyes—which were the color of cabbage soup and had a languid drop of yellow grease in them—saw she accepted with the imperturbability of a mirror, but she was apparently made of unbreakable stuff. From time to time the candidate for the position, abruptly lifting her pinky, said a few words in an even voice—and her comments, which were modest but accurate editorial corrections to the text of the conversation, attested to her calm, innate cynicism and total lack of complex ideas on simple subjects. The professor saw that the passion of this precious protégé differed most advantageously from sweet Marina Borisovna’s, for whom he had previously experienced a pleasant fatherly feeling. Now, though, he had begun to worry about her aggressive alarm, this gift of hers for reviving moribund problems and constantly trying to represent workers or simply citizens who were irrelevant to his future plans. At this moment the professor, while not letting on, was quite pleased with his new acquisition, which had arrived from Krasnokurinsk with bowls and skillets whose outlines were well noted in one piece of the gypsy luggage. In particular, the appearance of an alternate candidate had lifted from Shishkov the dear-to-his-heart but nonetheless burdensome responsibility he felt for the charming Marina, who had lost her grip on reality and gotten mixed up with a crazy voters group—and this made the professor feel younger, as he did every time he slipped the leash of a beloved being. He saw that these two on his Italian couch got along excellently and in their feral language may well have been expressing the philosophy of the revived Studio A significantly more accurately than the professor himself had in his proper but cagey instructions.