Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

The fact was that the immobility permanently occupying the apartment’s far, dusky corner was more potent and vibrant than all the rest of their walking and talking family life put together. In the new era that had suddenly overtaken them, the Kharitonov family, which had not been handed any party favors at capitalism’s kiddie party, survived primarily on Alexei Afanasievich’s veteran’s pension. Heedless Nina Alexandrovna, who had spent her entire life in a quiet design office beside a nice clean window that was always decorated, like a scarf, with either frost patterns or fancy maple branches, had never worried about the future because for so many years each new day had been no different from the day before. Any small happiness, such as a length of stiff dyed Yugoslav wool or her coworkers’ wedding—two engineers, no longer young, identical in height, who for many years had not admitted their relationship to anyone and had finally found their way to the Registry Office—would completely obscure the future’s vagueness. Later, when all the air in the new life had become like it can be in a room where the windows are broken out and all the familiar faces have strangely drained into themselves, like water into worn sand, Nina Alexandrovna suddenly realized that now it was impossible, forbidden, and foolish to be happy for someone else . At that point her own joys suddenly seemed utterly insignificant, as if what she saw in her hand were cheap spangles, colorful rags, and crusted coins. As for actual money, using it took a special knack now. While inflating to incredible sums, it simultaneously deflated and melted away in her hands so that economizing made no sense. Nina Alexandrovna tried to lay in stores when she could. Once she bought a whole sack of incredibly cheap, coarse macaroni, which cracked woodenly in its paper bags and took an hour to cook, at which point the pot’s contents became an inedible paste. There were other food purchases as well, sprinkled with the poppy seed of insect excrement and splotched with greenish mold. Once, Nina Alexandrovna had her wallet stolen from her right in the store, in the cramped lines that stretched like anchor chains around the clattering cash registers, but instead of horror she experienced the only true relief she’d felt in years.

She quickly ceased to understand altogether what it meant to earn money now. When she picked up her pension, she occasionally ran into people she’d known who everyone had once considered crafty and clever at getting along and who were now fussy men in big-assed Chinese down jackets and ladies with imploring eyes wearing balding Astrakhan fur and remnants of metal-intensive Soviet jewelry, crude rhombi of scarlet and cornflower blue stones that still sparkled. If these practical people hadn’t been able to adapt to the new goods-and-money reality, which had the metabolism of a shrew and always seemed to have swallowed something greater than its own weight, then what could you expect of Nina Alexandrovna, who had always been too timid to understand how life actually worked? Basically, she had to rely on others, in exchange agreeing to do work that was the same day in and day out. Had she stayed on at the job to which pensioners who had greatly overstayed their time continued to cling, listlessly turning voracious pencil sharpener handles for entire days at a time, she could never have withstood the abrupt change in the frenzied bosses, the bickering over the rare paid orders, the quiet gambling with office shares, thanks to which the former director, who’d been fired for renting out space as a chemical storeroom, suddenly returned as the owner of all six now quiet floors of the building. As it turned out, Nina Alexandrovna had left at exactly the right moment and now could look after Alexei Afanasievich without asking her bosses for twenty extra minutes at lunch. She kept telling herself she wasn’t lonely and her family needed her more now.

Her son-in-law, Seryozha, who one would think would become the modest family’s breadwinner and head, hadn’t been able to put his two incomplete degrees to any use, though, and worked as a guard at a parking lot one day out of three, always returning with the fresh, though no stronger than usual, smell of alcohol. This thirty-three-year-old, medium-tall, smooth-shaven, and already practically bald man looked strangely like an anatomical plaster cast, a kind of popular-science example of man in general. To his wife’s caustic comments made every time her husband rashly set his small, elegant hands to housework, Seryozha responded with the placid smile of that anesthetized shade that one sees on models in anatomical atlases displaying their crimson interwoven musculature like Laocoonian snakes. On his days off, Seryozha preferred to quietly disappear, sometimes not showing up until dawn, cautiously fumbling with his keys and the loose-fitting locks. He would turn on the stealthy light in the front hall that penetrated the rooms around the corner, from time to time leaving under the mirror some money of unspecified origin, which Marina, before going to work, would disdainfully scoop into her wallet. A few years before, Seryozha had tried to go into business, threading wooden “talismen” that looked like wormy mushrooms onto leather cords and trying to sell them in the wet-leafed square in front of the city’s only picture gallery, where they sold all kinds of rubbish—from pulpy landscapes in polished frames heavy enough to be called furniture to wire rings with teardrop stones complete with horoscopes. By way of encouraging this crafts business—not that she had much of a choice—Marina even wore a piece of jewelry her husband had given her for a while—a lacquered semblance of a quasi-human ear that rubbed rust-brown warts on her white synthetic sweater. Naturally, his trading—out of a dilapidated painter’s case (borrowed from one of his distant acquaintances to serve as a counter and to create the right atmosphere)—came to naught. Now the leftover goods, wrapped in old newspaper that had dried out like birch bark, were lying under the bed—and the failed artisan had yet to demonstrate the slightest inclination for taking up anything else.

Of the entire family, only Marina had not given up. One day Nina Alexandrovna turned around and her plump blond teenager, whose face had always seemed to be smeared with berry juice, had become a shapely young woman swathed in a black, cheaply shiny, synthetic business suit. Marina had always been a top student in high school, university, and journalism school, but there was always something important missing from her top grades and her extensive journalistic articles, which always began, as she was taught, with some lurid detail—the way a clumsy draftsman, wishing to depict a standing figure, starts with the nose and eyebrows but then it comes out wrong and just doesn’t fit on the page—but for many of Marina’s fellow students who had no idea where to put their commas, their careers had yielded exceptional results. People who had copied off her during tests, devotedly breathing over her shoulder, now had jobs on newspapers generously patronized by the authorities and had even become dapper little bosses, whereas Marina, with her special “Red” diploma, toiled away freelance in the news department of a third-rate TV studio located in a bankrupted House of Fashion, where bolts of thick brown woolen cloth moldered away on wooden shelves in the storerooms and a pink mannequin with breasts like knees gathered dust. Marina put in a full workday, the same as staff—three or four stories plus editing—but they paid her only a fee, which came out less than what they paid the spiteful, muggy-eyed janitor who was constantly grumbling about all the cables on her floor. Marina tried to do a talk show interviewing local and visiting crazies on a generic orange set left over from some old kiddie show that was unclaimed due to the walls’ radical color, which made the commentators’ youthful faces look like scrambled eggs. All the set had were big plastic cubes interspersed with collapsing cardboard equipment boxes, half-liter cans filled with cigarette butts, and a shabby bracket off which square women’s jackets hung, like pillows with sleeves. But Marina devised a way to use the wretched interior. During the broadcast, she and her guest kept reseating themselves from one cubic meter to the next (the camera dispassionately registered Marina rocking from side to side, freeing up her skirt), and goggling puppets would pop out from behind the other colored cubes and make comments, their mitten-like knit faces gasping for air. Unfortunately, this original project, which poor Marina, on the air herself at last, took pride in for a few weeks, didn’t attract any advertising, and Studio A’s director, a fat, angry young man by the name of Kukharsky, who had a beard like a wasp snarl (his uncle, whose name was Apofeozov, headed up a fairly powerful municipal department), gave Marina’s show the ax.