Ольга Славникова - The Man Who Couldn't Die

On the other hand, he never brawled and never drank, the way other veterans did whose memories of the war had become symbols. Unlike them, Alexei Afanasievich kept it all in his mind, fully preserved, link upon link (the inevitable elements of secrecy in reconnaissance work had probably given this chain its special strength). On Victory Day, the former scout tossed back a single shot poured to the brim—without spilling a drop—and took his family, all dressed up for the occasion, to enjoy the fireworks. Loudspeakers everywhere blared verses about the immortality of great deeds. Brass bands blew hot marching music that sent sparks flying. And little Marina, all excited, her summer sandals flapping, raced ahead and scrambled up everything in her path, including railings and lampposts, raising hot bumps on her silly furrowed brow. When at last the dull, friable salvo rang out and sparkling bouquets were set off above the oohing crowd, leaving a faint burning ember in the pale sky, a laughing Nina Alexandrovna knew moments of utter feminine happiness alongside her hero, who in honor of the holiday had his arm around her plump little shoulder. At those fireworks she felt happier than the real heroines of May 9th, the sprightly aunties with their white curls and gold teeth shuffling along to the jangle of medals and the yapping of squeeze-boxes held chest high. “They don’t make people like that anymore,” murmured Alexei Afanasievich, as he greeted yet another frontline woman, who planted a pursed carnation of red lipstick on his well-scraped cheeks. Nina Alexandrovna, standing modestly back, thought that someday she would prove to her husband her full value, her feminine selflessness, maybe even her valor—but now the years had flown by and he had had a stroke.

The Kharitonovs never really got the hang of love. Now the traces of her former beauty had become more noticeable than the beauty itself had ever been; the years seemed to have applied a crude layer of stage makeup to Nina Alexandrovna’s face and neck. At times, Nina Alexandrovna thought that her paralyzed husband not only didn’t love her but simply didn’t realize that she was she. Maybe this was because Nina Alexandrovna was often embarrassed to talk to him; it felt like talking to herself or, even worse, a cat or a dog. Given the limitations imposed by her daughter, any sentence had to be fully composed in her mind before it could be spoken; sometimes Nina Alexandrovna would start out smartly and gaily, right at the door, but then she would forget a word, instantly forget everything else, blush, and get mixed up, exactly as if she’d been caught out in a lie—and as a result fewer and fewer words remained. Relief came only when she did something physical with the patient: fed him his cereal and strained soup, having wrapped an old sheet around him (on which half his dinner would be left in curdled patches), like at the barber’s; or scraped off his stubborn, salty, fish-scaly stubble (once she dreamed of Alexei Afanasievich in a salt-and-pepper beard that sucked up his eyes and cheeks, and she awoke in tears). The harder the job, the more natural it felt. If during these ablutions Alexei Afanasievich’s body, which had accumulated a shapeless layer of fat on its sides, was especially hard to turn over, Nina Alexandrovna would shout smartly at the sick man, as if she were a stranger—a nurse or an aide.

Evidently, nothing from outside time could serve as an event for inside time anymore; communication between the two times had ceased. Inside had its own daily routine, which was defined by task: feeding and shaving him, plumping his pillow, slipping a bedpan under his bursts of defecation, wiping his body down with rubbing alcohol-soaked cotton balls that quickly hardened, covering him with a blanket for modesty’s sake. The fact that Alexei Afanasievich’s body was also laboring (when it swallowed, its throat expanded more powerfully than any athlete’s muscle) created the illusion of a shared life that even had a kind of temporal goal. These daily events weren’t enough, though. Inside time demanded a broader scope as well, and even Nina Alexandrovna sensed that every scene played out between her and the paralyzed body required context for plausibility.

As a result, something arose that could be likened to the pseudo-metabolism in a feeding vampire’s organism. After she decided to invent pseudo-events (honorably shedding her own blood first), Marina one day announced—ostensibly to her mother, who was sitting near the sick man—that she was applying for membership in the Communist Party. During this open-ended period of candidacy, Marina, who had learned a thing or two over the years, acquired a cheap Korean television (which within twenty-four hours was white with dust, as if it had been draped with a cloth) plus the most basic VCR, which they concealed from the paralyzed man under a stack of desiccated newspapers. At the TV station, making use of the archives and the not altogether selfless help of secret allies discontent with Kukharsky’s internal policies, Marina edited the “evening news” for the sick man. The monotonous pictures consisted of collective applause, the kind of long shots of state workers that smudge not only hands but faces, a row of tall, smoke-belching, grated-window factory workshops, and summit-meeting kisses where the general secretary’s profile subsumes his partner’s oncoming profile, the way a processing machine subsumes its material. Soon Marina had teamed up with computer whiz Kostik (who fell in love with Brezhnev and asserted that using a program he had found on the Internet and downloaded illegally he could factor the general secretary’s voice into its female and male components), and they got so good at it that they were able to create the Twenty-Eighth and Twenty-Ninth Congresses of the Soviet Communist Party for the paralyzed man. Serving as material, in part, were black-and-white Duma sessions, which they spliced in (there was something artificial about Chernomyrdin, who flashed across the screen a few times and bore a distant resemblance to Brezhnev), but the general secretary himself delivered a speech many hours long, as if doing so were the most natural thing in the world, efficiently setting the text out in two stacks. Marina nearly believed she was actually hearing every word of the speech being delivered by the two-voice chorus. Meanwhile, the text suggested that there had been an increase in international tension, and the deputies in the audience listened meekly, like troops seated rather than standing in straight lines.

No one could say for certain whether their playacting was fooling the sick man, of course. Nina Alexandrovna, at least, thought she picked up a certain agreement, a semblance of approval in the signals emitted by his asymmetrical brain. Of course, Alexei Afanasievich had always not so much liked as considered it proper that his innumerous family wait on him hand and foot, so he may simply have been pleased with their efforts and the theatricalized fuss occasioned by his illness. The pseudo-events, those spectral parasites, began to take increasing hold over the Kharitonovs, though, and feed on them. It was like a change in focus that reveals at least two landscapes in one. Nina Alexandrovna sometimes took fright at the distinct sensation that Brezhnev’s funeral had indeed been a deception, a film someone had spliced together, that the years were still divided into five-year plans and the country, with all its heavy industry, was continuing to build communism in the heavens above—where it was already half ready, its façades glittering. She did get out of the house, of course, and her own glutted eyes did observe the changes: the colorful litter on the street from imported wrappings, which her dream book said meant riches; the abundance in the shop windows of all kinds of meat—from mosaic slivers of pork to candy-pink Finnish sausage—which meant an advantageous marriage; the abundance of private commerce in all kinds of little things, including amazingly cheap Chinese pearls as white as rice, a strand of which Nina Alexandrovna dreamed of from time to time with hopeless emotion—but which the dream book said meant copious and bitter tears. The fact that she had seen all this in her waking hours only intensified the prophetic qualities of the objects that snuck into her field of vision. One day, on her way to the nearby market, Nina Alexandrovna suddenly saw, instead of the elegant minimart, the old grocery’s empty window (a bare bubble routed by competitors the day before yesterday), and on its skewed doors a fresh flyer for a candidate for deputy, a stern comrade with the handsome face of a Saint Bernard, a manager by the looks of him, with a perfect rectangle of biographical text beneath. This remarkably resurrected scene—the fat, sluggish cleaning woman at the back of the store, the black-and-white flyer, the sticky spot and curved glass from a broken vodka bottle on the front steps, which smelled like grapes in the autumn air—suddenly overwhelmed Nina Alexandrovna with such undeniable reality and the reliability of simple things that at the actual market, which seemed like a mirage with empty waving sleeves and buzzing flies, she obliviously paid whatever they asked and returned home to her angry daughter with her purse flat empty.