Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

She was amazed at how she’d failed to remember and understand. That long-ago spring, back before they’d built buildings on the damp, dragonfly lot, had blurred in memory. She and Alexei Afanasievich were either out for a walk or coming back from the movies. Nina Alexandrovna overtook the veteran, who was working his splattered cane hard, like a lever, and began quickly climbing the warmed slope, plucking coltsfoot flowers, golden, like uniform buttons on gray army cloth. Of course, she was flirting, gathering this silly eggy bouquet, but she’d never expected Alexei Afanasievich to suddenly climb up after her, noisily poking his cane in the not-yet-dried bushes and leaving flagrant, plowed up tracks on the soft epithelia of a recent rivulet. When he stopped in front of Nina Alexandrovna with a streak of mud on his wet temple holding one defective flower, yellowed like a cheap cigarette and badly crushed, which he held out to her with an expression of pained displeasure, Nina Alexandrovna took serious fright and hurried to descend to the path, carefully holding up her husband, who was slipping in his muddied shoes over the mats of last year’s grass. At the time, shamed, her nose yellow, Nina Alexandrovna had taken the addition to her bouquet as an earned reproach. In exactly the same way, her husband sometimes would hand her the salt shaker forgotten on the dinner table or a knitting needle picked up from the floor. Now she suddenly guessed that Alexei Afanasievich, having crudely taken her on his trophy bed, was in the light of day shy, like a youth, and didn’t know the right way to approach the timid Nina Alexandrovna, who had always been in such a hurry to put him off through some kind of service: he never recovered the grave simplicity with which he had once taken her hand along with the watch that had come undone and nearly fallen on the floor and suggested that she move in with him.

Which meant he had once had that simplicity. Alexei Afanasievich was authentic because his consciousness had preserved the true significance of every episode and minor incident when he had scorned Nina Alexandrovna for forgetfulness—but he couldn’t just go up to her and hand her what she had forgotten , just as he never had known how to derive symbols from everyday objects. That was why the myopic flower added to the sticky bouquet, which smelled like a chicken, meant exactly nothing other than the abandoned Alexei Afanasievich’s clumsy attempt to bring back his runaway wife. In all the decades of their life together, the Kharitonovs had never reminisced about anything together. They hadn’t accrued any symbolic property in common, such as any love, however brief, immediately tries to acquire. But Alexei Afanasievich had no need to capitalize on his emotions. Fully self-aware, he possessed not the symbols of things but the originals. The grim business of reconnaissance, when a man in camouflage disappearing locally to the dull tremor of a burning missile is required not to be , so that even a fascist’s weak brain signals can’t detect the enemy nearby—that business doubtless assumed a loss of authenticity. By rejecting his full self, the man ceased to be aware of what death was or even when he had been picked out . He merely had a better sense of his oneness with the fighting mass of his fellow countrymen. Unlike many of his heroic comrades who recklessly entrusted themselves to nonbeing, Alexei Afanasievich had refused to let go of the thread of his own existence and so had survived. Everything he did, including his quiet work with nooses and his insane lunge at a cunning submachine gun, a lunge his command knew about, took place in the clear awareness and full memory of his school’s apple orchard and his waiting wife. Holding on to this altogether was nearly impossible, but Alexei Afanasievich furiously refused to let go. After this, all the veteran ceremonies where his war had become widely accessible symbols were utterly beside the point for Alexei Afanasievich, which was why he didn’t need any of the literature that Nina Alexandrovna waited for so long and so hopelessly from her husband, not understanding that it was the absence of symbolism that signified the authenticity of his emotions. Alexei Afanasievich authenticated himself by his mere presence, and that was more than enough.

Yes, it was all perfectly clear to her now—and highlighted even more clearly than ever was the fact that Alexei Afanasievich’s suicide would lead to the loss of much more than simply a man’s life. Not because the emotion would be gone, but because it would be as if there had never been any. That different time—that ideal stagnation , when a natural ending was impossible by definition—had become a trap, and Alexei Afanasievich could now go only by betraying his wife with his death, which he had taken, like a woman, into his cold bed. Because Alexei Afanasievich himself preferred the other’s eternal company, Nina Alexandrovna, who now spent her time in the kitchen scraping dishes under the hot faucet, which smelled like a foul mouth, suffered such attacks of jealousy that the fist under her shoulder blade was a joke by comparison. More than anything in the world, Nina Alexandrovna would have liked right now to see her rival face-to-face and see whether she was that pretty. She didn’t realize just how blasphemous and dangerous her thoughts were; her hot wet hand wiped away her cloudy tears, which had scummed over as if with chlorine, and she wiped her hand on the dish towel for a long time, as if searching for pockets in it. Had Nina Alexandrovna been offered the chance to die that minute and see the fateful hooded lady and reclaim her husband, who had been summoning that lady for so long and at such incredible effort, Nina Alexandrovna would have agreed. She was so upset, she had even forgotten about the pension. She had completely lost sight of the fact that she needed to throw the blue blanket over the rope workshop before Klumba’s arrival.

Meanwhile, a disheveled Klumba, who was now quite prepared to play her benevolent and salutary role in the Kharitonov family’s history, approached the veteran’s residence even more quickly than usual.

That day, the city, lit from a distance at an unusual and harsh angle, looked like an assemblage of improbable staircases, twisted ledges, and stepped pyramids, and because all that was left of the streets and buildings in this parallel time was a fan of ruins and caked ashes breathing radiation, if you looked closely through the soapy, frosty air, they created a striking yet defenseless dramatic effect. Everything seemed slightly inauthentic. Because they had already ceased to be the day’s top news story, the deceived voters’ scattered picket lines looked like clusters of arrivals from the provinces, and their main dance in front of the provincial authorities’ ribbed tower, which looked like it was squinting from a jolt of sun, might have been a talent show.

Klumba, though, her attention averted from public activism to performing her direct responsibilities for the benefits office, did not feel the struggle’s decline. Feverish excitement drove her from address to address nearly at a run. The firm snow chipped and grated under her sturdy heels, and her short shadow raced across the snowdrifts like a hyper little dog. At every pensioner apartment she descended upon, stamping loudly from the cold, she was awaited by yet more eloquent proof of Krugal’s baseness; the poverty and germs that had gone hog wild and spilled out everywhere like flickering sand worked her into a state of morbid amazement over and over again. She didn’t understand how she could have been so outplayed. Two hundred forty-eight disabled people, all with documents, had received zero and had not played their proper role; they had simply been ignored. Nonetheless, they had pushed their candidate through, a mangy artist with a crooked jaw that made his face resemble a left boot. Today’s pensioner rounds were for Klumba a way of reinforcing her own sense of correctness. Once again, she was convinced of the reality of her team of invalids: the trembling, open-ended scrawls endlessly drawn by the eighteen-year-old girl idiot and the pathetic kitchen utensils of the lonely old men touched her as never before. For some reason, for the first time in her benefits career, it broke her heart in two. Klumba was almost certain that this highly unexpected turn in voter affairs concealed some especially crafty machinations. She couldn’t wait to get to the apartment of this Marina Borisovna, who had run the headquarters for Klumba’s foe and was probably complicit in her candidate’s behind-the-scenes machinations. Klumba hoped to discover some major evidence of foul play there.