Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

“So you mean you don’t believe your daughter stole twelve thousand rubles?” Klumba’s harsh voice snapped Nina Alexandrovna out of her reverie and brought her back to the kitchen. “It’s supposed to be distributed according to these lists, but the lists, it turns out, here they are, and you’re wrapping herring in them. Look: number ninety-four, A. A. Kharitonov. Your old man is supposed to get a subsidy, too, and they brought him food, and they would have brought money, only Marina Borisovna had no shame. You have to look for it. Dig through her closets! Not just twelve thousand, you’ll find even more! There’s a good reason the people at headquarters kept beating around the bush and slipping money up their sleeves. People stood in line for days to get their due, and these people probably signed for its receipt! Now the canvassers are supposed to get a bonus and the headquarters isn’t paying out anything, while your daughter has hundreds of thousands under her panties and beads, so you go look, just to satisfy yourself, or you and your old man aren’t going to get anything!” Pain pulled tight on Nina Alexandrovna’s entire shoulder, like a sturdy belt fastened on the last hole; her left arm, lying like a log on the table, went totally numb to the point that there was just a weak Morse code being tapped out in her fingers. Looking at line ninety-four, where Alexei Afanasievich and their home address and telephone had been written down in an unfamiliar, cramped handwriting, Nina Alexandrovna felt this whole story—heretofore abstract with all its headquarters, politicians, and invalids—suddenly take on an incontrovertible reality. “Your apartment is stuffed with money, but I’ll give you your pension. I’m not a thief,” Klumba stated sarcastically, jamming the scattered lists into her bulging bag. “I’ll look in on the old man and tell him separately how his subsidy was stolen from him. Maybe then Marina Borisovna won’t have the gall to spend it all on herself and there’ll be at least one invalid her philanthropy will reach.” With these words, the benefits rep, her lips drawn into a tube and her printed roses getting closer together and farther apart in the agitation of her bodily folds, headed for the hallway. The way before her was perfectly free—so free that Nina Alexandrovna even thought Klumba might fall through that freedom as if it were an open hatch. In any event, she heard the unmasker stumble and gasp and slap her hand hard against the wall.

Nina Alexandrovna had to follow her—if not to avert her scandalous monologue then at least to be present. But right then, for the first time, she experienced a physical pain that wouldn’t let her stand up. A strap was strangling her left shoulder, as if some very heavy weight were hanging from it—and every attempt Nina Alexandrovna made to stand on her buckling legs led only to her head tightening up, peeling and ringing, like a firmly inflated ball being struck. So that meant Marina was going to be tried. Of course, she didn’t take the money. Of course, all this would be cleared up. She just had to sit here a bit and then stand. Suddenly a scream reached Nina Alexandrovna—not even a scream but a triumphant wail broken by snatches of independently babbling, hottish air, that even on the inhale continued, inhuman sounds like the hollow vibrations of a water pipe. In that first moment, Nina Alexandrovna thought she was the one screaming, with both her hands pressing on her ears, listening to the bubbles whooshing. Then she realized that the scream was coming from the paralyzed man’s room, and she jumped up on light feet, as if she were young again.

The hallway led in an unfamiliar direction, as if Nina Alexandrovna were running through a train car listing hard on the turn, and while hurrying through the train on light feet, she inexplicably lagged behind its speed of motion and was thrown into the small table as the telephone started ringing softly. At last she struggled through the half-open door and saw the scene she seemed to have had in her mind a second before. Klumba, unrecognizable, was screaming. She had nearly collapsed. Her mouth, sucking in air, was open in idiotic astonishment, and she couldn’t take her eyes—disturbed and cloudy, like water in a glass just used for rinsing a watercolor brush—off Alexei Afanasievich, who was lying inert in a freely thrown noose. The vital color had drained very quickly from the veteran’s face, which was oddly heavy, his eye sockets sunken. Even though the rope hadn’t pulled tight and, impregnated with tar, was bulging under his chin, Nina Alexandrovna suddenly realized that she did not see the watermark that signaled life in her husband’s myopically blurred face. Instantly she was at his bedside throwing back the blanket. A limp rubber toy jumped out and slammed to the floor with a bruised squeak. Putting her trembling hand where the scout’s unfailing heart had always beat, like a simple two-stroke engine, Nina Alexandrovna felt nothing. There was only a final minty pain that licked her palm and dissolved into emptiness.

If in the next few minutes someone (not Klumba, who had sunk to the floor with a moan) had observed the room from the heavens, say, he would have been amazed to see a disheveled old woman straddling a long old man on her bared bluish knees, jumping frenziedly and periodically dropping to his bared mouth. Nina Alexandrovna didn’t know the rules of artificial respiration or CPR. She pressed down on his slippery basket of ribs with the same desperate strength she used to plunge blocked toilet lines. After a few presses—she couldn’t count them—she breathed a hot bubble into his slimy gray mouth, which was already sticking to his firm teeth, but the bubble disappeared behind the veteran’s cheek. The more force she applied, the more clearly she felt that she and Alexei Afanasievich were communicating vessels and that the tightest stopper was in her head. Finally, it became clear to her that the obstruction couldn’t be breached. Slowly, Nina Alexandrovna tumbled over on her side and lay on her husband’s pillow, staring very closely at his elongated profile, at the firm little scar of unknown origin, white on the veteran’s neck, at the sharp wrinkle under his dangling tuft of gray hair, like an important line drawn by a nail. All this, infinitely precious, was already disappearing, melting away, becoming the past. Cautiously holding his head, which had become heavy and hard, like a sealed vessel filled with treasure, Nina Alexandrovna removed the worthless noose. So there had been no artificial death. At that moment she heard the woman who had kept the veteran from suicide fumbling around on the floor and shuffling her soft feet, in an effort to sit up.

“Get me something to drink,” Klumba rasped quietly with her flaccid vocal cords as she climbed, like a fat grasshopper everted every which way, onto the armchair with the knitting and needles. Beside the bed, for Alexei Afanasievich to wash down his medicine, was a faceted glass of boiled water; Nina Alexandrovna hastily straightened her ridden-up robe and brought the glass, which seemed to retain a weak dilution of his vanished life, to that strange being half-recumbent in the chair. Instead of taking what she’d been brought, Klumba grabbed Nina Alexandrovna’s hand hard and began disgorging a soft milky bile into the offered water. This wasn’t Klumba anymore. Her small, symmetrical eyes had become inhumanly identical (the left and right could have switched places without any disturbance) and looked as if they were seeing several layers of the things around her. Her features were strangely smoothed out, and her fluffy curls, which her fingers kept getting stuck in as if she were doing this for the first time in her life, looked like a wig.

Nina Alexandrovna now almost understood what had happened. In order for the man who couldn’t die to die, there had to be a reason —which was not just the broadcast from the kitchen. Alexei Afanasievich’s heart clearly wasn’t as strong as everyone had supposed. His attempts to get into the noose (and those tarry laces that had appeared on the headboard from out of nowhere undoubtedly held death ) had pretty much worn out the perishable two-stroke mechanism. When Alexei Afanasievich finally curtailed the millimeters separating him from the finish line, his heart, which was human after all, probably fell morbidly out of sync. Today, when it all came together—the obedience of his loyal instrument unexpectedly seized by his fingers, the proximity of the beauty in the hood looking at him not sideways, as once to the merry Bengal-fire crackling of a German submachine gun, but straight in the eye, and the sudden discovery of a different, outrageous reality that the veteran could no longer connect to his own authentic life, where he was always and eternally alive—a burning nettle had lashed his heart. The female scream that had come out of that fuzzy being who didn’t look like his stepdaughter or his calm wife, who always warned of her appearance with a shining message from her guileless brain, had given him the push he needed to complete his adrenalin leap into nonbeing.