Ольга Славникова: The Man Who Couldn't Die

Klimov the skeptic, who had opposed the entire scheme (at the time he hadn’t yet lost all his rights and had tearfully defended himself against his mother-in-law’s slightest digs), remarked more than once that if they wanted to retain the atmosphere of the seventies, then they should hang a portrait of Vysotsky, but Marina, guided by instinct, ignored her husband’s advice. There was something false, of course, alien, even, about this particular portrait of Brezhnev. As Seryozha, who was busy with his then wildly lucrative (despite the sewer smells) video store at the train station, said, “It’s a prop right out of a Hollywood movie about Soviet life.” Yet this encapsulated time, which had survived its own violent demise in this one individual room, obviously possessed properties no one had ever observed in its natural state.

These properties had something to do with immortality. The general secretary’s rejuvenated photo—half documentary print and half retouched and clearly made during his lifetime—was striking for that very quasi-drawnness you see only in a dead person’s features. So precise was this impression that, when she realized exactly what the impotent fold of Brezhnev’s mouth and the sepulchral tidiness of the hatched-in hair reminded her of, Nina Alexandrovna began wiping the portrait with anxious deference and avoided turning it over and seeing the half-erased inventory number on the back. But what was amazing was this: the general secretary, whose death had here been reversed and whose longevity had become a natural feature that only kept increasing, had somehow borrowed an authenticity from Alexei Afanasievich that Brezhnev himself had never possessed. If Brezhnev had been a cardboard figure in whose name books were written and on whom mutually exclusive medals had been hung, like a game of tic-tac-toe, then now there was no reason to question his existence, if only because the general secretary could no longer die—even if he were to admit his desire to do so. Also a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, he was now, in outside time, not dead but missing in action. Having effectively distanced himself from those veterans with schoolboy faces ruined by drink who shuffled along behind their new Communist leaders and continued to live in the present day, he had attached himself and even begun to bear a certain iconic resemblance to Alexei Afanasievich, who had never belonged to the Party. Anyone entering the room (though in fact they let in almost no outsiders) could see the paralyzed man’s forehead, as worn as a coin, and the two needly, low-hanging eyebrows—and see the same thing on the cheap wallpaper covered with teacup flowers. Even Nina Alexandrovna somehow succumbed to the reassuring illusion that Brezhnev in his official portrait was not the former head of the Soviet state at all but simply a distant relative.

Naturally, as the project’s author, Marina had to decide whether this spectral time had any need of events. She had outlawed the principal natural event (death), thus rendering any event related to it (illness, injury, leadership changes, and so forth) impossible—and any attempt to add to this list made even the decisive (she had decided so much!) Marina uneasy. One got the feeling that the list permeated life so deeply that it might eventually include anything, even something no one had ever connected with death—as if, at the slightest attempt to pull out the plant, the roots would suddenly pull hard sideways and down and lift a little, like a seine loaded with every kind of dirt that ever comes under men’s feet. One way or another, Marina prohibited anything that might arouse negative emotions (in this sense, her stagnation had achieved perfection). She cut short any attempts by Nina Alexandrovna to inform the patient of anything personal—about an apartment in the next entryway being robbed, for instance, or Alexei Afanasievich’s nephew poisoning himself with rotgut vodka. “Mama, the money!” Marina would exclaim in an anguished voice, obviously referring to Alexei Afanasievich’s heart but at the same time clutching at her own, the plump heart beating in her chest. “Daughter, dear, does it hurt?” “Mama, leave me alone!” Upon receiving this familiar rebuff, Nina Alexandrovna felt on her left side, under her ribs, a subtle ache, which she experienced as a heaviness in her fingertips. Aware that, with the consolidation of inside time, any illness of hers had simply become impossible, though, she took all this back with her to the kitchen. She now pictured Alexei Afanasievich’s heart—which had to be safeguarded as the family’s principal treasure—as a large crimson tuber for which his paralyzed body had become something like a vegetable bed entwined with engorged blue roots.

It was strange to think that that heart had ever loved her. Had it really? Nina Alexandrovna had been beautiful once. Hers was a regular, rather insipid beauty so devoid of any color that the eye had nothing to latch onto. Her oval face, constituted in the refined, old-fashioned manner of penmanship lessons, simply could not withstand that inner darkness where an ordinary person might store and reproduce visual images—and so was not preserved in the memory even of people who knew her quite well; you could feel no emotion for her in her absence. There was probably some secret connection here to her fear of simple physical darkness, a fear Nina Alexandrovna had never been able to overcome. As a result, no one had ever really seen her high, virtually satin-stitched eyebrows, or the sweet outline of her lips, which were always chapped, like slices of apple left out on a saucer—but Nina Alexandrovna’s figure was quite ordinary, and her appearance on the street demanded no effort of attention whatsoever from passersby. No one had ever once tried to meet her, or asked for her phone number, even when she had purposely taken evening strolls through the Park of Culture, where the benches overflowed like seats on public transportation and tiny lights ran conscientiously down the garlands decorating the central paths, like ants down their trails. She had lived, unremarked, with sickly little Marina, who had been stricken with every ailment known to man, in the workers dormitory where she, the accidental mother, was always being yelled at by the superintendent’s wife, Kaleria Pavlovna, a large woman with a tiny mouth. One soft winter’s night, Kolya Filimonov, her neighbor down the hall, threw himself out his window and lay swelling up from the snow for several hours, in the shadows, resembling nothing so much as a parachutist’s bulging cupola, now deflated. A marriage proposal from an elderly, childless widower, who immediately gave her a light beige blouse in crinkly flat Syrian packaging, was an absolute lifesaver for Nina Alexandrovna; on her wedding day, she and her things were thrown out of the dorm.

So had that happened or not? Alexei Afanasievich had never permitted any romantic nonsense (which he called literature ) between himself and his young wife. His rare kisses, mainly in public, on holidays, had been as dry as a toothbrush. Alexei Afanasievich had strict rules about not touching Nina Alexandrovna at all during the day, as she scurried about her household chores, as if touching her would implicate him in women’s work. If he did take her by the arm at an evening gathering at the institute, say, then he held his gabardine elbow out, thereby denoting and maintaining the distance between himself and his spouse, which left her to mince along, her stubby, polish-dotted fingers resting on his undemonstrative woolen sleeve. Even at night, looming over his wife at an angle, nearly crosswise, as if he were a plane dive-bombing someone fleeing a routed echelon, Alexei Afanasievich made no attempt to talk to her and would not let her make a sound. Nina Alexandrovna had only to moan ever so softly and he would immediately cover her mouth and half her face with his salty, leathery palm. Nina Alexandrovna’s swollen lips retained that salt long after, making all her food seem tasteless and insipid, as if she were eating something still alive.