Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

Shishkov was also pleased with the way fateful events had unfolded that morning. Even though his hairy gray knees had been shaking in his trousers as if from applied cold and his left temple had been throbbing, the professor felt like Napoleon Bonaparte. The night before, his main investor (whose image even in the imagination of Shishkov, who had been admitted to see the body, was unreal, more like a fog that had gathered on the far side of good and evil) had acquired a controlling share in the Apofeozov television studio. The holder of the missing shares had refused to sell his politically profitable property for a very long time, but in view of the election results he immediately agreed. The investor, having invested a necessarily fair but nonetheless quite considerable sum (it was amusing to think he might start paying out money on the basis of the registrars’ notebooks, with their pages like tattered cabbage leaves), immediately held a shareholders’ meeting consisting of himself, and ordered Kukharsky fired, appointing in his place the Krasnokurinsk poet whose skinny chapbooks, bound by binder rings and decorated with magniloquent complimentary inscriptions, were lying in the investor’s desk.

This historic order in hand, the professor and the poet, who had skipped breakfast to come in earlier, had headed for Studio A—and rightly picked up twenty or so young studs in camo from a friendly security firm along the way. The resistance offered by Kukharsky’s security was perfunctory. For a little while, those men, who differed from those attacking only in the more peaty shade of their jackets and pants, secured several successive doors with their skidding bodies—but after one good jarring blow they leaped back like a popped cork and ran ahead of the enemy through the corridors, continuing to skid in their boots, which seemed to have grown heavier, as if they’d scooped up fear, and scaring the employees, who poked their heads out of their work spaces with the confusion of targets at shooting practice. The final skirmish in front of Kukharsky’s office was short and sweet. The attackers twisted the demoralized defenders’ arms and dealt with them exactly as they would folding camping furniture, also breaking a lightweight chair that got mixed up in the melee—and the highly cultured professor caught himself thinking how pleasantly exciting he found the sight of a bloodied face with a nose that looked like a used teabag in a saucer, the oofing and umphing of the brawlers, and the direct missile of an army boot knocking the stuffing out of a china cabinet whose heavenly smile over its own remains elicited a muffled groan from someone in the crowd.

Clearly, the use of teargas was now superfluous. All those nut job directors and reporters had probably acted on the mercenaries’ nerves and were cackling like geese after the victors. In the directors’ anteroom they had attacked the fighters, dropping burning cigarette butts and pointy women’s shoes on them in the parterre. Before proceeding to Kukharsky’s office, the reporters got sprinkled: the crisscrossing streams that filled the air of the dressing room with a herring-fat dust rainbow made the employees stagger back and goggle. To the hawking and screeching of a half-strangled birdman (one person grabbed his burned throat and fell backward onto his panicked comrades, and another fell to all fours and disgorged his viscous breakfast and juice on the trampled carpet), the professor’s mercenaries burst into the holy of holies. Sensing a certain membranous rustle under his skull and trying not to inhale the offensive, sickly sweet perfume, the professor followed.

Kukharsky, tiny behind his horseshoe desk, had his cheek pressed to the telephone receiver, as if he suddenly had a toothache—though there was obviously no one at the other end. The professor, covered on his flanks, neatly approached the desk and placed a copy of the order in front of Kukharsky. Grinning from ear to ear, so that his beard looked like a wool sock stretched while being put on, Kukharsky picked up the paper with his hairy fingers and gently ripped it into two ethereal ribbons. Then he repeated the diminishing procedure many times while snarling and looking up into the professor’s eyes until not even tiny pinches were left of the order and lofty signature. After letting him complete this tough, painstaking labor, the professor took another out of the file, like a saint who had accepted martyrdom, an even whiter copy, and suddenly—by instinct—gave his mercenaries a commander’s circular signal kind of like a compass. Immediately, the men rushed around the director’s desk and tried to extract Kukharsky from his quilted leather armchair—but ended up just rolling him around, his legs pulled up and his red maw cackling and looking like a split watermelon. For the first time since the raid began, the professor was distraught—especially as surviving employees, their faces now covered with weepy wet handkerchiefs, began to appear, one after another, in the office’s half-open doorway. Someone wrapped up like the invisible man in an entire terry towel (it was Kostik, stone-cold and lightning quick on the uptake, who subsequently earned his living selling photographs to both print media and the Internet) was shooting the sensation of the day, diving behind backs, his point-and-shoot buzzing like a model airplane—and the professor instantly understood that to an onlooker what was happening looked nothing like what it did to his agitated soul.

Right then someone came forward who had until then held back: the Krasnokurinsk poet, physically hungry and pale but full of a primitive might. Pushing aside the sweaty fighters, who reeked of canvas and whose necks looked like they’d been rubbed with red pepper, the new director personally rolled up his sleeves. He made an abrupt tank maneuver with the heavy armchair and deposited the fleeing Kukharsky in the corner. Then, having oriented the seat smack-dab in the middle of the office and desk, he climbed, wagging his butt, into the chair’s stoutly creaking depth and stretched out his perfectly parallel arms and clenched fists in front of him. Now the newly appointed director gave his subordinates a blank stare, as if he had seized and pulled the levers of studio administration, and under the visor of his jutting brow, his eyes were like air bubbles stuck to a sunken board. Everyone quieted down instantly at the sight of this phenomenon, which imperturbably allowed itself to examine the former director with a direct challenge to all the studio’s accumulated administrative experience. Because the pretender had placed himself smack-dab in the middle of the main space, he looked like a convincing, pivotal person, and all of a sudden it seemed to the employees that a third, omniscient eye was swelling under his short, straight bangs, like a soap bubble slightly larger than the ones under his eyebrows.

The unseated Kukharsky—distinctly superfluous to the side of the midline that the new director had almost physically set out across the desk and the thick of the people crowding in—smiled crookedly and shrugged, his entire body catching the magpie gaze of the now absent camera like a ray of saving sun. Actually, all he had to do was leave and come back. But he couldn’t get out, having just overcome an obstacle in the form of a solidly ensconced rival who had no intention of abandoning his newly won position. Dragging out the first few badly fastened files he came across from under the pretender’s elbow (the pretender paid no attention, merely pressing his short legs harder into the desk crosspiece), Kukharsky tried to squeeze through. This wild climax lasted a few minutes. Kukharsky climbed, smirking and muttering something as if into his own ear, crawled and stood on tiptoe. His forehead was sprinkled with beads of moisture, and the loose papers pressed under his elbows quietly slipped down his belly. The midline that the employees now saw even on the wall, apparently, barely let the former director through and distorted his solid figure like a funhouse mirror. Observing this villainous scene, some people began to realize that in the eyes of the pretender—the only geometrically regular , properly seated creature—even they would look like fluid dispositions and that for all the seriousness of the newly arrived ogre (the keenest of them guessed that the collective would never see a hint of a smile on this three-eyed face), he saw the seized studio as one big house of mirrors created for his directorial pleasure. Finally, the tormented Kukharsky, nearly straddling the tall back of the unshakeable armchair (which the pretender, all puffed up with his sweeping force, leaned all the way back at the last moment), found himself on the other side; the papers in his grip immediately lost whatever cohesion they had left and spread out on the floor with a silent sigh. “You may pick them up,” the triumphant professor said sarcastically, drumming his white, as if chalk-rubbed, unmusical fingers on the solid directorial desktop. In response, the beet-red Kukharsky flung the empty manila folders on the papers and shaking his head like a bull, pulled his hopelessly ruined jacket down as if it were a shoulder bag. “You’re not going to get away with this so easily,” he said in a reedy voice squeezed at the top, and his shaking hands threw his jacket lapels back over his tattered shirt, providing a glimpse of the hairy fold of his belly and his surprisingly small navel, as downcast as a faded rose. “You’ll answer for this in court!” The employees parted for the outcast like funeral mourners. For a while, they could hear Kukharsky walking away, a scuff of lime down his back, over the black scuffs left by his security detail’s boots, skidding on the light parquet floor, and shouting tragic threats into space. Not idle threats.