Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

Someone else in Marina’s place symbolically flinging down her Party ticket would have found substantially more stinging words—but for her, even this was too much. Her legs were buckling and she needed to leave the office and not be terrified. “Hey!” The obviously upset director called to her, having jumped up, to judge from the way his chair creaked. Evidently, he’d realized that this Marina Borisovna, in inflicting these outrageous words on him, words that one way or another had to be conveyed to Shishkov, had unexpectedly placed him in the way of the professor’s ambitions, whose limits the director didn’t know. Marina didn’t stop, though. She just caught her heel again, pulling some white threads from the carpet’s synthetic curls. What did this remind her of? It reminded her of the way she, as a university student, had entered an auditorium, having failed to cross paths with the divine Klimov running out of his lectures, and had seen before her a stale emptiness and faces she didn’t need. Only now Marina couldn’t go back and chase down her retreating love. The emptiness before her was infinite, and she could only wade into it further and overcome the familiar resistance of a dimension without qualities. Now she probably could not say, “My entire life is up to me.” Having failed to cross paths with her true life somehow—now time, which never went backward, was part of this movement—Marina put on her coat. At last she understood why she’d been saving up money in the battered, shell-covered box. “Marina Borisovna, are you leaving for good?” a surprised Lyudochka tore herself away from the spluttering explosions and croaking commands of her computer game.

That very same moment, a flushed Klumba plopped her heavily sighing bag on the stool and saw the philanthropic lists on the windowsill.

At first, when the half-unbuttoned benefits rep materialized in the front hall, sniffing and making decisive gestures, it had occurred to Nina Alexandrovna that Klumba was drunk. But she didn’t smell of alcohol, and the strong Cahors of her bordeaux flush was probably the result of the cold and walking fast. Still, Nina Alexandrovna clearly sensed something abnormal in Klumba’s behavior. As Klumba pulled off her long Turkish sheepskin coat, she sought something with feverish little eyes, as if she’d never been in the apartment before, and even secretly pinched the thick clothing that was hanging up. Nina Alexandrovna was embarrassed that the night before, after she took that trip to see her nephew, she hadn’t swept the spider web, which had collected flakes of grout, from the front hall, or the crushed eggshell in the corners. Now she thought that before giving her her money, Klumba was going to give her a good scolding.

But what did happen was even more surprising. On her way to the kitchen, Klumba swiveled on her axis a couple of times, as if she were on a tour, and the enthusiasm on her flushed face was gradually mixed with disappointment, as if they’d watered down the wine. But suddenly her hot, catarrhish mouth opened and she stared at the well-wiped windowsill, where next to the light pyramid of washed kefir packages, the modest stack of Marina’s papers was drying out, spots faceup. Klumba looked like a woman who could not believe her own luck. And so, in fact, it was. In suggesting she take a good look around at this Marina Borisovna’s, Klumba had expected to discover new furniture, say, or an ostentatious mink coat with a fancy top button as big as the saucer in a gilt tea service. What she had found, her gaze having crashed into the familiar lines and worn comments in her own hand, exceeded her boldest speculations. In essence, Klumba had in her hands direct evidence that this Marina Borisovna had taken the invalids’ money and, moreover, had taken the database so that later she could use Klumba’s social instrument in her own interests. “Excuse me. Is that yours? Did you lose it?” Nina Alexandrovna asked, uneasy, not knowing how to take the ill-starred papers away from the benefits rep, papers on which she suddenly noticed a shriveled bit of chicken fat. “I’ll tell you what this is right now,” Klumba replied, gasping for air, and something in her exultant voice made Nina Alexandrovna turn to stone and take a seat on the stool.

…What she heard from the benefits rep over the next quarter hour was so horrific that an awkward smile kept appearing on Nina Alexandrovna’s face, the kind of smile on polite people suffering through improbable tales. Her pale, screwed-up grimace, which also betrayed the pain that gripped Nina Alexandrovna under her shoulder blade harder and harder, must have enraged the already agitated Klumba. Nothing remained of her exultant mood but a scream that shook the building. Nina Alexandrovna knew that Marina wasn’t working at the TV studio anymore. The photograph in the newspaper said clearly that her daughter had gone from being a correspondent to an object of interest in a scandal sheet and had landed in some incident. But these fraudulent elections with their general subornation and thievery and their spending of philanthropic money intended for old people were much more eloquent and worse than those odd-numbered campaign-period scenes that Nina Alexandrovna had attempted to draw for herself, simultaneously relieving and feeding her alarm.

Meanwhile, with the part of her long-distance hearing not completely taken up by Klumba’s decibels, Nina Alexandrovna sensed that the door to Alexei Afanasievich’s room was open . The saga of the criminal elections, which could not compare to the benefits rep’s dangerous comments and contradicted everything the paralyzed man had been told and shown over the past fourteen years, was penetrating there quite freely. It was as if some solid membrane had burst and Nina Alexandrovna clearly heard the sick man’s quiet, guttural bursts, as she did the slow creaks of the chainmail mesh that suddenly had tensed with an abundant clank, as if Alexei Afanasievich had risen from his bed. That was impossible, of course, but his event-free time had obviously not withstood the press of events conveyed to the damaged Red Corner, leaving no hope whatsoever of restoring that bubble of immortality. Feverishly casting about for how to deal with this situation now, Nina Alexandrovna had the cowardly thought that Alexei Afanasievich wouldn’t be able to ask —and the simplest thing would be to hush up this kitchen row between women without going into explanations. But then she realized that then she would have to treat Alexei Afanasievich like an inanimate object. Never again would they be able to speak in the language of floating electrical figures, never again would that wordless physical understanding be restored that is known only to people who have cared for the half-alive bodies of paralyzed and comatose partners for many years and have learned a thing or two about the characteristics of their invisible presence independent of the body. Evidently, Nina Alexandrovna would somehow have to find the words and overcome the shame of her years-long deception, so insulting for the veteran, and chronicle the changes for Alexei Afanasievich. She could not imagine a situation in which Alexei Afanasievich, who had never faltered before anything in this world, including street thugs and capricious bosses, would forgive this cowardice of saving the Brezhnev portrait and hanging it up for him as a symbol. Looking at Klumba, who had rifled all the way through the lists and held her nail firmly on a line she’d found, Nina Alexandrovna mentally saw the dust of immortality, like poplar fluff, being removed from the match that had finally burned down and fallen from the veteran’s fingers. The transparent flame, eating a clean, sootless hole in the white substance, bared what was there in fact : old furniture cracked and filmed over from long years of polishing, the crazy little TV set, the broken spider toy no longer capable of jumping but only wheezing dull rubber air, and the worn baby doll lying in wait in the blanket’s folds.