Ольга Славникова: The Man Who Couldn't Die

The heartrending emptiness, which pressed in and gnawed at itself, frightened Nina Alexandrovna so badly that she crossed herself under her blanket, clumsily planting her pinched fingers on her wrinkled brow. And in the morning the faces of her daughter and son-in-law were different , as if they’d never seen each other before. Leaning against the window, which was covered with rain, like bird poop, Marina gulped down her unsweetened kefir and ran off to work, leaving her cloudy, dripping glass on the cold windowsill. Only then, nicely steamed from his shower and blotchy red from the hot water, did Seryozha come into the kitchen wearing a clinging t-shirt—and Nina Alexandrovna, pushing toward him the plate of turnovers Marina had totally ignored, thought that the only reason her son-in-law hadn’t become a real drinker was that for some reason his exemplary, never-ailing organism wouldn’t let him. Separated from the world by an insuperable physiological sobriety, her son-in-law apparently kept running into a transparent wall and was quite incapable of breaking his habit of drinking the same weak beer and ironing his own worn-out synthetic shirts so that they smelled like scorched loneliness. Sometimes, attentive Nina Alexandrovna noticed her son-in-law trying to take an interest in his surroundings: he would run his eyes over the lines of the fat books opened in front of him at a right angle that seemed to be leaning into the corner of some separate room, or tune in the transistor radio, which sounded like it had a cold, and force himself to listen to what was happening on every elusive station he caught through the thick of the static. Every so often, Nina Alexandrovna thought that her son-in-law was making a conscious effort, tensing his gaze, and was on the verge of having a good talk with Marina, and her heart would melt sweetly, as if a declaration of love were in the works. But the moment would pass, the spark would go out, and Marina herself would invariably spoil the occasion, bestowing a sarcastic grin on her husband or demonstratively starting to wash dishes so that the abruptly turned-on water would bubble up and spill into the sink along with the grease and food scraps. In those moments, Nina Alexandrovna’s son-in-law’s mirror eyes seemed to see everything twice as big as it was; she had also noticed for some time that Seryozha had acquired the habit of shrugging his shoulders even when no one was talking to him.

It had been Marina’s idea. Keep Alexei Afanasievich from finding out about the changes in the outside world. Keep him in the same sunny yet frozen time when the unexpected stroke had cut him down. “Mama, his heart!” Marina had pleaded, having grasped instantly that, no matter how burdensome this recumbent body might be, it consumed far less than it contributed. Initially, clear-eyed Marina may have been moved by more than primitive practicality. There had been a period of infatuation between her and her stepfather, when the little girl would crawl all over Alexei Afanasievich, who seemed as big as a tree to her. She would go through all his pockets and invariably find chocolates planted there for her. Alexei Afanasievich taught her how to fish and how to toss plywood rings on a post. Once the two of them had cleaned out every last gaudy toy with the digger claw on a Czech grab-n-go. All that lasted about a year. For a while, the dragonfly pond out back of their brand-new nine-story apartment building had sucked on their two red-and-white fishing floats as if they were pacifiers; by the next summer, the pond had turned into a swamp plastered poison green with plants—and now there were stalls on the spot. Marina couldn’t forget this entirely, at least not until that rather bizarre moment when, a month after Brezhnev’s television death, she hung a medal-strewn, beetle-browed portrait of that official paragon on the wall.

In retrospect, Nina Alexandrovna could only wonder at young Marina’s perspicacity. You’d think she had nothing on her mind beyond Seryozha and her synopses. Yet, at the first historic tremor, she had divined in the decrepit general secretary’s replacement by a younger, more energetic one not a pledge of Soviet life’s continuity but the beginning of the end. She immediately began preserving the substance of the era for future use and purging it of any new admixtures, no matter how harmless they seemed at first. So it came to pass that their good old Horizon television—on which only impressionistic bursts of static were still in color—showed the farewell to that great figure of the modern day (the richly beflowered tomb, wreaths made to look like medals, the craned neck and half-face of a watchful man lined up to view the body)—and then went stone dead. Marina temporarily forbade anyone to buy another, but she did take out a subscription to Pravda . No one could say for certain whether Alexei Afanasievich could read now. He had always carefully worked his way through the newspapers, holding his place with a school ruler, as if measuring the quantity of information by the millimeter, but now he looked at the newspaper page that Nina Alexandrovna held at half-mast without moving his eyes at all. It might as well have been a bedsheet she’d picked up to mend. Nina Alexandrovna was charged with reading the paralyzed man specific articles, which Marina made fat deletions in and supplied with handwritten insertions. Nina Alexandrovna carried out these instructions, although she was embarrassed by both the articles and her own voice. She had to tilt the newspaper very slightly to find the end of Marina’s almost indecipherable sentence—and sensed vaguely that Alexei Afanasievich’s immured brain, with its dark bruise from the stroke, was sending her staticky, buzzing bleeps in reply. Every once in a while she imagined (she couldn’t bring herself to verify this) that if she just leaned closer to this desiccated head with the crookedly stretched mask where his face used to be she would be able to talk to Alexei Afanasievich without using any words at all.

Very quickly, outside time became so altered that there wasn’t even anything in Pravda for Marina’s pen to rework. By the time they started knocking out windows in the stuffy Soviet rooms (overnight, the still relatively young and full-cheeked Apofeozov went from being first secretary of the Party district committee to being a democratic leader who had publicly torn up his Party card), inside time had come to a standstill, and this was the time maintained in Alexei Afanasievich’s room, which had a faint smell all its own that lacked an objective source, like the acrid trace of a burned match. Everything in the room manifested a tendency to stand still, to doze off in an uncomfortable position. Nina Alexandrovna would catch this special quality of autonomous time, at the boundary between wakefulness and sleep, when suddenly she merged with her surroundings and felt nothing but her own weight—which was bliss, but spoke to Nina Alexandrovna of her weariness even more than an attack of hypertension could. In the afternoons she noted how good it felt to hold the weight of most objects in the room.

Something suggested to Nina Alexandrovna that this stopped time knew no essential difference between order and disorder. She couldn’t help but see that things in the room would accumulate and then shed their ordinary meaning. This loss of meaning was especially obvious while she was cleaning. Nina Alexandrovna battled resolutely against the thick and amazingly even dust that eagerly settled on a wet spot where tea had spilled, quickly becoming a fuzzy patch. She was endlessly wiping and feeling everything like a blind woman, whether she needed to or not. Privately, Evgenia Markovna, the doctor who came to check on the patient, must have wondered at the sterile chaos maintained around the sick man. The china figurines on the sideboard looked like products of Nina Alexandrovna’s housecleaning, shiny knickknacks sculpted by hand and rag. Here, too, were crowded empty prescription bottles that should have been tossed long ago, also freshly wiped and clear right down to the medicinal tear at the bottom. The glassed-over Brezhnev portrait, which the doctor never examined but always turned to look at as she left the room, also bore the rag’s traces: a violet rainbow from cheap window cleaner. Each time as she finished with the portrait, Nina Alexandrovna would cautiously lower her bared leg with the swollen tendons to the floor and climb down from the wobbly chair in two moves, and Alexei Afanasievich would shut his big right and small left eye in approval, as if he were seeing precisely what he thought he should see.