Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

Actually, ninety minutes after his victorious seizure of the studio, the professor understood full well that Apofeozov’s lawyers were already preparing their lawsuits and cursing excitedly. For instance, they could seize on the formal circumstance that the official period defined by law between a shareholders’ announcement and its implementation (which consisted, basically, in the investor signing previously prepared documents) had not passed. No matter what headaches his opponent tried to cause for Shishkov and his team, though, the basic facts were now irreversible. The new director, who had not had dinner and was now scarfing down a huge sandwich brought by the secretary, holding down the ham with his index finger, had only to solve a few small technical problems. “Let’s say I’m prepared to look into the question of an apartment for your assistant,” the professor began warily as he sat down with his visitors. “A modest, one-room apartment, naturally, and not downtown, well, you get the idea. In return, though, I would like a favor in the form of…How can I put it?” the professor faltered, feeling a pleasant sentimental warmth in his chest. “A certain young someone helped me greatly during the campaign but lately has become rather…unmanageable. I would like to make modest arrangements for her further fate. Her name is Marina Borisovna, and she’s a fine television journalist. Here’s what happened with Marina Borisovna. Basically…”

The pleasure Professor Shishkov derived from his own beneficence was not so important as to distract him from his top priorities, however. After being summoned to the studio for ten and not having first caught sight of the professor until noon or so, Marina sat there in the poorly tidied, nauseating waiting room examining either the glowing Lyudochka, who was rehearsing new smiles into her compact, or the large china shard with the surviving handle that had fallen under the secretary’s desk. People she did and didn’t know zipped by her, as did the focused, utterly unstoppable professor, who, like a deranged theorem, was made up of only acute angles. The hubbub’s epicenter was the director’s office, where, when the door opened, she observed the new boss’s static figure within, like a picture in a flip-book. The more modest office across the way, which Marina in her naïve old dreams had seen as hers, had still not acquired an owner or status, but a tall woman wearing a hideous jacket with shoulders lined like house slippers kept looming up there. The woman’s legs were indeed quite fine. When she walked into the waiting room, playing up this beauty, Lyudochka would rise from her secretary’s chair as if randomly and they would vie for the best walk, traipsing back and forth over the crunching china crumbs. No fewer than four hours passed before Lyudochka, hearing the intercom’s expectorating mumble, laid on another smile, and snapping it into her gleaming compact, like a coupon in an elegant wallet, headed off with her notebook to answer her boss’s summons. Returning shortly thereafter (without the notebook and with a pink cocktail spill on her clothes), she announced in a delicate official voice, “Marina Borisovna, the director is busy today, unfortunately. He’ll see you tomorrow at twelve-thirty.”

Marina was so weary from her hours of sitting on the edge of a chair and from her exhausting idleness amid the feverish activity of Studio A’s new masters that she barely dragged herself home and, ignoring her mother, who was following her around with an enormous tattered newspaper in her dangling hand, fell lifeless on her bed. As she plunged into a droning doze, she remembered that tomorrow was the twentieth—pension day—and instead of the usual pleasant anticipation for which Klumba was forgiven the fact of her existence, Marina felt a spiritual heartburn. What the joy from getting that money—those large, starched hundreds that allowed them to eke out another month of life—had turned into was spoiled, drunkenly astray, and inexpressively vile. As she drifted off, Marina knew she hated the twentieth. Somehow this boded nothing good for her at the studio tomorrow.

That night, Marina’s sleep was heavy and troubled. She kept butting heads with the pillow and couldn’t seem to get warm in her bed, whose deep pockets had accumulated enough damp and snowy cold, you could scratch it off. Unlike Marina, Nina Alexandrovna smiled in her sleep, and on her lips lay a spot of light of unknown origin. What was so good that she was thinking about it as she fell asleep? What was it—more important than the newspaper with those horrid photos printed not with ink but with street filth, more important even than the state in which Marina had come home from work yesterday, frightening Nina Alexandrovna with her complete unresponsiveness and total personal absence? What on earth was she dreaming? Something strange, piquant, and springlike: the thawing earth, felt-like from last year’s grass, tiny little flowers that didn’t yet look real, touchingly white like toes in the holes of an old sock. As she washed up in front of the bathroom mirror, which Marina had splashed with dirty water and toothpaste, as usual, Nina Alexandrovna tried to remember . Something stepped closer and closer, more and more confidently, promising to decipher her happiness.

Lit by the morning sun, Alexei Afanasievich lay under his Chinese blanket, which was a little short for him, and his left, wide-open eye was perfectly transparent and as if pricked, like light green glass. Looking at her husband, Nina Alexandrovna noticed that the sun today was unusual, the way it can be in airplanes: harsh, slightly iridescent, perpetual . This astronomical light, which seemed not to know cloud cover, allowed her to see something stretched over the veteran: the light haze of nonbeing, probably consisting of that light dust of immortality against which brushes and rags were powerless. After her usual morning routine with Alexei Afanasievich, Nina Alexandrovna noticed that the haze, while retaining the dissipating trace of her labor, was slowly changing outline, so that any ruptures in the oh-so-delicate whiteness oddly lost their human meaning. The little workshop on the headboard, between the two gold, sun-stung balls, was ready for his morning labors: a few long strings freed from bast and rid of pesky nubbins lay on the pillow to the left and right of the veteran’s head—and Nina Alexandrovna, having removed these preparations during the washing-up, restored his rag bench to order. Alexei Afanasievich was in no hurry, though. It was surprising, but today he was silent the whole time. Even the turning from side to side and the cotton wool touching his thoroughly baked bedsores, which always aroused a guttural protest in the paralyzed man, today passed without a murmur. Perhaps the puzzling celebration in her soul had something to do with it, but Alexei Afanasievich emerged from Nina Alexandrovna’s hand particularly well-groomed and handsome. The wide-toothed comb had laid his transparent gray hair out hair to hair, and his scraped cheeks were like sugared honey. She couldn’t imagine that the paralyzed man had any interest in his appearance. Lying in the same place for so long excluded any ability he might have to see himself from the outside . Today, though, Alexei Afanasievich seemed to have some sense of his good looks and was pleased; his raised index finger, which made the veteran thumb-size but a man nonetheless, touched the invisible vertical like a taut string. This quiet bass vibration, echoed somewhere very high up, must have been the spectral sound to which Alexei Afanasievich listened so intently. Suddenly Nina Alexandrovna realized how to decipher her dream.