Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

Meanwhile, Marina was once again languishing in the waiting room, which over the past few days she had studied better than during all her years of working at Studio A. Demoralized to the nth degree such that even she found herself repulsive, she couldn’t take her eyes off the director’s door and kept wiping her damp palms stealthily on her synthetic skirt, which only made the stiff fabric greasy. Finally, the voices in the office got louder as they rose from their seats, and when the beaming director ran out on his short legs, which seemed to slip a little and lag behind his body as he saw his visitors out, Marina leaped up. She immediately became unbearably ashamed, but it would have been stupid to sit back down on her disagreeably warm chair. The director, today wearing a striped, sharply waisted suit, in which the upper part of his massive body dominated quite a bit over his lower, turned his eyebrows, which looked like they’d been mowed with a razor, toward her. For a while he busied himself some more with the tall blonde, who was vaguely familiar to Marina, reminding her of the dissolute literary circle at the Krasnokurinsk Worker —while the blonde’s companion, a good-looking gentleman with an amazingly fresh face and ruddy bags under his eyes, kept trying to wedge his face between them, like a forty-minute program, ingratiatingly touching the director’s massive shoulder. At last the blonde, smiling, her delicate, protruding ears as red as fruit in syrup, waved to the director from the hall, and her companion scurried after her, dragging her grandiose fur coat made of fiery tufts of fox. Then the director, stepping back a little from his office door, made Marina a reluctant sign of invitation.

“So you’re Marina Borisovna,” he said, informing himself, and slipped nimbly into his chair, rolling to the very middle of his polished, seriously empty desk. Marina, who had taken the small little rolling chair at one side, keenly felt the humiliation of her place on the side, which, according to the logic of position the director had created, was beneath his notice. “You know what, I’m going to be frank with you,” the director suddenly said in a freer voice, leaning back and throwing his short arm behind his head, revealing his jacket’s worn armpit and a loose thread. “I’m a plainspoken man, anyone will tell you that, and anyone who doesn’t know me will find out. I know you were promised the job of my deputy, but here’s the thing. That position has now been taken by someone else who is close and important to me in both the sexual and the spiritual sense, I won’t hide that.” “I see,” Marina mumbled politely, having known in advance that this was approximately what was going to be said. Nonetheless, her heart felt as if it had been wiped with a cold cotton ball before an injection. “Basically, Sergei Sergeich, well, you know Sergei Sergeich, he asked me to give you a job at the studio,” the director went on, giving his cropped head a hard jerk, which sent his hacked bang rearing back. “Actually, I’m prepared to take you on your former terms, which I know. You could even start today.”

“On contract?” Marina asked quietly, not trusting her own voice, which was shaking treacherously. The day before, she had glimpsed her old desk moved over to the wall and covered with dirty mugs that had the iridescent remains of some sweet tar, two rock-hard sugar balls, and some defiled greasy napkins under a mound of cafeteria meat patties that looked like something from a kiddie sandbox. “Well, yes,” the director confirmed, fondly stroking his round nape. “For you that would be an option. Sergei Sergeich said you’re a good commentator, but I asked your coworkers, and they said something different. Actually, I could be wrong. But if I am, you’ll easily find a job at another TV studio, so what do you need this contract for?” The new director may not yet have known that, under relentless pressure from graduates of the school of journalism, vacancies at any decent media outlet didn’t last ten days; however, he couldn’t help but understand that Marina, with her current political dowry, could work only for her own people, that none of the more advanced TV companies (which had far outdistanced freelance Studio A in the quality of their highly varied and decently paid projects) would take her on. Nonetheless, the director looked straight ahead with his perfectly calm, quietly shining little eyes, the color of damp coffee grounds. “As I already said, I’m a plainspoken man,” he repeated, abruptly reorienting his impressive pose toward and looking straight at the central, business point on his desk. “I will say that I would rather not hire you. Your presence would upset the person close to me, a person I respect and treasure. All of you who live here can find jobs somewhere through acquaintances. But I understand the meaning of compromise. I am warning you honestly that you won’t be getting promoted because my person has to be shielded from you. You yourself may leave eventually. Then you’ll write your resignation. That’s all.”

At these last words from the focused director, who had been tapping a few pencils against the table, Marina figured out what had been bothering her the past few days. A contrived Party spirit , which had accumulated much more power over her than had been in evidence at the beginning of this strictly in-house game, now assumed her incomprehensible but incontestable guilt before the Party—and Professor Shishkov’s total absence of guilt before her, to say nothing of that actor Krugal’s. Marina could stick to her guns and put her symbolic Party ticket on the desk of one of her benefactors. Doing so—in the absence of Klimov, who could never be discounted—meant such intense loneliness that its perfection almost entranced Marina, who had one sole talent: striving for the absolute. However, fear, garden-variety fear, held her at the edge of the abyss and the chair she was on, and with her hands pressed between her knees, she started rocking mechanically. Actually, rather than detain the director, she ought to slide over the old piece of paper he’d pulled out from somewhere, which looked singed along the edges, write her resignation, and go clean out her desk. But Marina’s hands were so damp, she was afraid of leaving greasy spots on the paper, like from those disgusting brown meat patties, and worst of all she was afraid of making grammatical mistakes, which would serve as the first proof of her poor qualifications. In her mind, this resignation, which would now be nothing but an obvious demonstration of her shameful weakness, set out on a blank sheet of paper, got mixed up with the work contract, which evidently would have to be signed separately. The director was silently, mockingly patient, smiling with just his cheeks, where his unshaven, splintery stubble had become noticeable. It was her self-loathing, and not just the simple thought that she had essentially nothing to fear given her stepfather’s pension, that decided Marina’s fate. Intuitively, she realized what should not under any circumstances be done in this office and knew that this was exactly what she was about to do.

Still on her rolling chair, Marina pushed off from the carpeting with her boots, her sharp heel crackling as it caught, and abruptly found herself directly facing the director—who hadn’t even thought to put his short legs and shoeless feet under his desk and was gripping the crosspiece like an ape. Marina was blocking the door, so that now they seemed to have suddenly switched places. Moreover, the office’s owner and situation were suddenly pushed against the wall and drawn on it as distinctly as on a cinema screen. “What kind of tête-à-tête is this?” the director, who did not like this new situation one bit, said irritably. “You and I aren’t in some café now.” “I’m not interested in your contract,” Marina said. It felt to her that the office and all its contents were slowly tipping on their side, toward the tall window that had pulled the sunshine slantwise across the gray carpet. “Are you going to run to Shishkov and complain?” the director asked, slamming his hand down on the slipping piece of paper and rolling the chattering faceted pencil. “You can tell the professor,” Marina said distinctly, feeling a smooth tilt in her head, “that I’m sick of covering his respected ass. He can use your close friend now. I don’t care. You can tell him he’s a punk and a scoundrel.”