Ольга Славникова: The Man Who Couldn't Die

That evening, Marina was a dreadful sight—especially to Nina Alexandrovna, who hadn’t dared touched her daughter in a long time and didn’t know what her hair—dyed so many times, now just bits of yellowish chaff remaining from what used to be chicken fluff—felt like now. Marina sat at the kitchen table in silence. Her eyes were coated with the same ghastly film as the untouched bowl of soup in front of her. She sat without moving a muscle, but there were changes brewing in her, and for a minute Nina Alexandrovna even thought that Marina’s immobility had the same quality and was filled with the same mysterious, immured will as the immobility of Alexei Afanasievich, who lay three walls away with a clump of oatmeal in his mouth and an overturned baby doll in his twisted hand. Marina’s husband Seryozha, evidently sensing something similar, silently stretched out from behind the crowded table, one part at a time, flashed past in the front hall, and threw on his raincoat, as if trying to cover himself from head to toe. Marina turned her large white face only slightly and blankly watched him go—and Nina Alexandrovna abruptly remembered seeing Marina and Seryozha as a solemn wedding couple, brand-new out of the box, as it were, and because of that immediately realized they were never going to have children.

At that moment, as she was not shy to explain at home, Marina joined battle for her place in the sun, a battle every self-respecting person ought to wage. Continuing to hold on at Studio A (by the skin of her teeth, clinging by just her long nails and steel-tapped stiletto heels), she recruited contributors and intrigued against young Kukharsky, whose removal required bringing down no less than Apofeozov himself—over whom billowing clouds of financial scandal were gathering with the change in the local weather. Mixed up in this was an investment fund that had soaked up every last drop of a multimillion ruble government loan, and a pair of other nephews loomed up, too, obscure figures of unproven kinship but very much alike, with ugly saucers for faces on which something resembling assembled features were drawn only in the middle, the rest being free space—and both had been caught stealing. The opposition press dragged in the nephews—whom they referred to as “businessmen”—for interviews one by one, but essentially nothing came of it. Clever fellows who repudiated each other nearly to the point of refusing to believe in each other’s existence, they turned out to be like the two reels of a tape recorder with the tape running between them and broadcasting a recorded text. Apofeozov himself, a thoroughbred of a man, although rather dog-like in appearance, who had wrapped himself up in menace, suddenly became captivating and marvelous. Ornate shadows played on his broad face, a face made of some rich material, turning first to the left and then to the right; his double-breasted suits fit superbly, and his amber, slightly prominent eyes gazed out so penetratingly that TV viewers lost their sense of the materiality of the television and screen that separated them from the politician. While giving interviews exclusively to his own people, Apofeozov appeared on air so often that he saturated the air, which when he exhaled it became strangely itchy and astringent. Time and again, Apofeozov’s invisible presence sent a noisy, gleaming wave out over the tree leaves, and even when there was no wind, it was as if some spirit were whirling up a tail of dust from the asphalt and solemnly kissing the dusty surface of an enervated pond as heavy as a velvet flag. Apofeozov’s spirit hovered everywhere, as if he himself had died; love letters poorly disguised as political statements started filling his mailbox thick and fast, to the secret annoyance of his longstanding secretary, who looked like an aging Pinocchio and was totally sexless.

A worthy enemy was even found for Apofeozov: someone named Shishkov, a politician and PhD, long-legged and long-faced, like a chess king, who previously had raged at exams and thundered on perestroika discussion tribunes and who now owned a chain of pelmeni shops where he himself demonstratively ate the little dumplings, dabbing at his thin but vivid lips with a vast number of napkins taken from plastic cups. Ever the top student, Marina felt a spiritual kinship to this crafty and crazy professor who had bet an uncompromising experiment on his own ailing stomach—to say nothing of the fact that Shishkov had definitely promised his former student, if he won, the position of deputy director at Studio A with a nice percentage from advertising and a salary of six hundred adjusted rubles. By the most modest estimates, this promised money was more than twenty paralyzed Alexei Afanasieviches could bring the family. Marina (who didn’t know that the studio’s future director had already been readied in the provinces, a grim, unrecognized poet determined to redo everything according to his own lights) had something to fight for. All means were now good: at secret meetings over brown tea and soggy crackers, realistic compromising material was developed out of the raw material they’d gleaned, material that asserted, for example, that through his nephews Apofeozov personally had stolen more than seven hundred thousand American dollars (in reality it was three million three hundred, which no one knew for certain, even Apofeozov himself, who rather embarrassingly couldn’t add a million four hundred and a million nine in his head). Using money from a friendly bank, they placed specific, conjecturally toned articles in the central press that were then rerun in local papers, which cited the authoritative source. Marina had a lot on her plate. Now she would come home in various cars that cautiously pulled up to the front door closer to twelve o’clock, and something truly reptilian appeared in her grin. She paid no attention at all to her husband, whether present or absent, while strangely, as Apofeozov’s enemy, she became alluringly pretty. Even before this she’d been proud that her suit was two sizes smaller than the sweaty denim things she’d worn as a university student, but now she’d grown quite thin and she’d hung around her waist a wide black patent leather belt with a buckle that looked like the lock on a respectable firm’s door. Now, when she passed through the studio halls on her scuffed stilettos, breathing shallowly through her inflamed, hastily lipsticked mouth, lots of men took a second look—and one time Shishkov himself, sitting one empty seat away at the secret conference table, ceremoniously pulled her over sideways and allowed himself one fatherly kiss that smelled of pelmeni.

Nina Alexandrovna looked at Marina through new eyes, too. This harassed woman she only half knew, who it had become almost impossible to touch physically, had become a kind of vision, a domestic apparition. They seemed to be showing her daughter on television but never allowing a visit, when she could quietly fix her daughter’s unattractive black collar or just stroke her hand, which lay heavily on the oilcloth until her half-bent middle finger suddenly started jumping, like a key on a broken player piano, at which point Marina would make a fist and gather it firmly into her other hand—but the tic would skip to her face, where fine, sensitive threads took to dancing. “Mama, lay off,” she would mutter through her teeth, even though Nina Alexandrovna hadn’t said anything. She silently heaped up pan-fried patties made from sticky cheap ground meat and suddenly remembered, for instance, ten-year-old Marina flying in from the yard with her hair ribbon in a tangle and a black busted knee shouting from the doorway, “Mama, leave me alone!” Nina Alexandrovna very much disliked these new nerves and the artificial thinness and flaccid shadows, and she couldn’t stop her imagination from convincingly ascribing a whole set of hidden illnesses to her daughter. But she didn’t dare ask Marina to spend time on doctors, who in the heat of battle she could perceive only as new enemies. Meanwhile, Nina Alexandrovna’s imagined ulcer became as much a reality for her as her husband the paralytic with whom she had to live. Occasionally at night, as she lay on her crooked cot, which smelled like old canvas, and listened to Alexei Afanasievich’s body close by, above her, to his soft, bubbling snore, Nina Alexandrovna allowed herself to dream that everything might still work out and she might have a grandchild. Sometimes she heard odd noises coming from the next room, sounds Marina and Seryozha were obviously producing together. Nina Alexandrovna couldn’t explain the nature of those sounds, which suggested nothing organic or bodily and definitely not human speech, just iron squealing, wooden creaking, a pencil cup clattering to the floor—as if the four-legged pieces of furniture were battling and butting each other in their owners’ absence (although they were in fact there).