Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

But that wasn’t even the whole picture. There was still one last, almost incredible coincidence that enabled the veteran to surmount the elastic wall separating him from death and to pass through the only needle’s eye that fate had left him. The moment the agitated Klumba saw the “old man” in the noose and ready to head off to heaven’s pastures, her scream was the hysterics of a public-spirited woman in whose mind symbols and “literature” coincided very poorly with reality, which had suddenly declared unjust war on Klumba. The mechanism of someone else dying, which had already been set in motion and made its test run, suddenly echoed inside her in a rush of harsh and tremendous darkness—and after that, everything went smoothly. There were no further obstacles to Alexei Afanasievich dying. The rare, blessed gift of empathy made Klumba (who was Klumba no longer) the immortal man’s last helper, and in a way her visceral awareness of what was happening helped the veteran retain his authenticity to the very last moment and to move along intact to where he was met by a waiting God and a military band. Now the quaking woman, who had been splashed by the water in the glass the way a dancing ripple splashes a clumsy swimmer, was possibly the sole person in the world to have been honored with the knowledge of what death is. Finally, she stretched her neck up as if over the surface of the ripple and swallowed. “He died,” the woman said, gasping for breath. “Yes, I know,” Nina Alexandrovna replied, wiping the woman’s face and wet chest, where crystalline drops of saliva sparkled like dew. Now she understood that all was well . Alexei Afanasievich’s motionless eyes, clouded by the white powder of immortality, were staring at the ceiling. Trying not to press too hard, Nina Alexandrovna closed her husband’s viscous, not quite shut eyelids, which left a very small amount of cold, prickly moisture on her fingers.

A fine white dust lingered here and there in the bared room—on the floor under the trophy bed, on the metal frame of the official portrait where medal-bearing Brezhnev was half-covered with a burning gleam in the broken glass—and now she suddenly noticed how the sturdy Soviet cardboard had yellowed and desiccated over all these years. There was a little more dust in the sunbeam. It stratified there, dry and whitish, like strong smoke from cheap tobacco. In order for everything to appear the way it really was , the modest participants in this story had to learn just a few things involving the lost pension, the lost nephew, and something else. As for Alexei Afanasievich, he had already found out much more than Nina Alexandrovna could have informed him of in human words, and so there was no call to doubt his forgiveness; his invisible presence was felt in everything.

Suddenly, Nina Alexandrovna understood. Alexei Afanasievich had been standing behind her reading the copy of the newspaper hidden behind the breadbox; he had been listening to the radio without a radio and watching a TV show; and he had been awkwardly touching her soul–with the exact same rough touch of the back of his hand with which he had once touched a yellow, badly staining bouquet and stroked Nina Alexandrovna behind the ear the day she first discovered his noose on the headboard of his trophy bed. His presence was so pervasive that at first Nina Alexandrovna took fright, turned around sharply, and saw only a light flutter of dust blissfully transfixed in a powerful, cinema-like beam that cast a fluorescing square onto the room’s wall. Then and there she realized there was nothing to fear. This phenomenon, like any other, undoubtedly had its cause. Evidently, in the fourteen years of their nonverbal communication (Nina Alexandrovna’s daily monologues didn’t count), husband and wife Kharitonov had worked out an understanding that even now for some reason had not gone away. Evidently, their existence at death’s side had been their training. Now the veteran’s heavy body, with his big bones, a body that Nina Alexandrovna, folding the dark, slipping arms over the white ribs, covered with a sheet, bore no direct relation to this understanding —not that that mattered, either. For Nina Alexandrovna, it was clear that when she began visiting Alexei Afanasievich at the cemetery it would be more or less the same as it had been all these years alongside the paralyzed body, this flowerbed of tortured flesh whose juices had merely fed the large cardio root vegetable—because the authentic Alexei Afanasievich continued to exist.

Meanwhile, the woman in the chair, shifting from side to side, pulled out something soft from under her and with sickly astonishment looked under the bed, where a wobbling ball of yarn had rolled away, flicking its tail. She was gradually regaining her understanding of the world, and she tried to raise up on her unsteady arm and look at her watch. “Just a moment, hold on, just a moment,” Nina Alexandrovna intoned, understanding that she had to call an ambulance—not for Alexei Afanasievich anymore but for him, too, to draw up a death certificate and observe all the other formalities. Almost not shuffling even a little, Nina Alexandrovna hurried to the front hall, where she heard the broken telephone’s nasal drone and a key turning in the door with a deep click.

The Russian Library at Columbia University Press publishes an expansive selection of Russian literature in English translation, concentrating on works previously unavailable in English and those ripe for new translations. Works of premodern, modern, and contemporary literature are featured, including recent writing. The series seeks to demonstrate the breadth, surprising variety, and global importance of the Russian literary tradition and includes not only novels but also short stories, plays, poetry, memoirs, creative nonfiction, and works of mixed or fluid genre.

Editorial Board:

Vsevolod Bagno

Dmitry Bak

Rosamund Bartlett

Caryl Emerson

Peter B. Kaufman

Mark Lipovetsky

Oliver Ready

Stephanie Sandler

Between Dog and Wolf by Sasha Sokolov, translated by Alexander Boguslawski

Strolls with Pushkin by Andrei Sinyavsky, translated by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and Slava I. Yastremski

Fourteen Little Red Huts and Other Plays by Andrei Platonov, translated by Robert Chandler, Jesse Irwin, and Susan Larsen

Rapture: A Novel by Iliazd, translated by Thomas J. Kitson

City Folk and Country Folk by Sofia Khvoshchinskaya, translated by Nora Seligman Favorov

Writings from the Golden Age of Russian Poetry by Konstantin Batyushkov, presented and translated by Peter France

Found Life: Poems, Stories, Comics, a Play, and an Interview by Linor Goralik, edited by Ainsley Morse, Maria Vassileva, and Maya Vinokur

Sisters of the Cross by Alexei Remizov, translated by Roger John Keys and Brian Murphy

Sentimental Tales by Mikhail Zoshchenko, translated by Boris Dralyuk

Redemption by Friedrich Gorenstein, translated by Andrew Bromfield

Бессмертный © by Olga Slavnikova

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