The Man Who Couldn't Die Page 10

  Now, having cried her eyes out and soaked her handkerchief so thoroughly that it was slick, Nina Alexandrovna would have liked her husband to have given at least a faint sign of regret and guilt. After all, what had happened was worse and more hurtful than if she’d found Alexei Afanasievich with a lover—in their marital bed, whose height and vehement ringing, like the ringing of meadow grass full of grasshoppers, Nina Alexandrovna couldn’t forget on her own canvas cot. However, the paralyzed man, lying as before on the wet, wrinkled spot (where he evidently had slipped down, in some unknown way, along with all his lopsided bedding), was now so self-absorbed that his face, where the calm half had in the past fourteen years become much younger than the twisted half, seemed to be floating on the surface of deep water, the way they sometimes show it in the movies: waves, scrunching up and then smashing forth, rocking a drowned man’s straw hat. Evidently, the attempt to hang himself had not been without effect. Pulling out from under her husband the long wet sheet and the reddish oilcloth, crumpled and burning like a mustard plaster, Nina Alexandrovna felt that his body had filled with fatigue and become much heavier and turned over without its former apish agility, without the habit of yielding, a habit his lifeless limbs had somehow acquired over his years of illness. Picking the blanket up off the floor (and hearing in the front hall the whistling rustle of a jacket and a cautious bustle—probably Seryozha getting ready to leave), Nina Alexandrovna suddenly saw in the corner of the top sheet a light, half-empty swelling. Plunging her arm up to the elbow into the wide-open, shapeless bag, she pulled out into the light a tangled nest: shabby bathrobe belts; summer dresses sent long ago to the attic; tie strings and stretched elastics pulled from fitted sheets. The biggest was a battered gold polka-dot silk tie that stood out from the mass like a cobra among skinny worms. In horror, Nina Alexandrovna attempted to tie all this into a noose-like slip knot, winding the dangling ends around it (in the front hall the cramped shuffling continued, and clothes fell off a hanger as if in a dead faint, with a sigh and gentle clatter, to the floor). Suddenly—or so it only seemed, so fleeting was the ticklish touch—the paralyzed man’s left hand, entwined with swollen veins that looked filled with air, stroked Nina Alexandrovna behind her ear, accidently brushing the sharp seed of her earring.

  Nina Alexandrovna’s thoughts immediately took a different turn. How weary he must be from fourteen years of his lying weight torturing his back, from the discomfort of unstrung bones as heavy as chains, from the moribund functioning of his stomach, where food was transformed into soil and languidly pushed through the twists and turns of his intestines—while in his chest, an oar was planted crosswise at each tight inhale. All this Nina Alexandrovna knew vaguely from her own self. All this had been communicated to her through the nonverbal connection that had arisen between her and her husband the moment Alexei Afanasievich fell on the balcony, on the grumbling cans, and his brain exploded. But this connection meant exactly nothing in the sense of their relationship. Even if there had been something like love between Nina Alexandrovna and her husband, could she really now claim that Alexei Afanasievich had been patient and fed her with his languishing flesh, his veteran’s pension, which the state had been paying for nearly a quarter-century—and couldn’t pay forever to a man who couldn’t die. Alexei Afanasievich had the legitimate right to end his own suffering once and for all and to let Nina Alexandrovna find a way to feed herself. That’s what all the lonely women did today, women impossible to look at the way they were, dressed in what was no longer worth a ruble, on the street selling swollen pickles in cloudy brine and Turkish underpants set out on newspapers and gathered under headlights. Nina Alexandrovna was willing to join these ranks of disabled traders, only she didn’t know how. She’d been spoiled, after all; her husband had never left her without money. Touching herself behind the ear with her most impartial (middle) finger, she tried to remember the sensation, but stupidly fingering the sand of her hair, she just spread the vague warmth, transforming it into a venomous redness. Then she leaned over (incorrigibly believing in good) the already covered, swaddled Alexei Afanasievich, hoping to speak to him in the language of the floating electric figures that she feared from her vague memory about an article on ball lighting in Science and Life. But the brain inside his skull, which looked like a delicately glued-together archeological vessel, was mirror-smooth this time, so that looking into Alexei Afanasievich’s eyes, Nina Alexandrovna imagined she saw on the fluffed pillow her own face with traces of her former avian beauty.

  Life burst in rudely: the door swung open as if from a blow flatwise to its full height, and Nina Alexandrovna shuddered. She thought Seryozha probably needed something in the closet—but it turned out to be Marina, not her son-in-law. She was wearing a twisted, ash-gray suit and holey slippers over black stockings, so that it was unclear which of the children had been fussing in the front hall all this time and clattering keys. “Mama, did she bring the money?” Marina asked impatiently, casting her usual quick glance at the paralyzed man, followed by another, closer one that seemed to press on the bridge of Alexei Afanasievich’s nose—at the wrinkled root of his old-mannish face where today there lay a suspicious, oddly even shadow. “Yes, yes. I’ve already been to the market,” Nina Alexandrovna said hastily and ingratiatingly, realizing she couldn’t quite remember how much each purchase had cost and that she was going to have to account for her spending, collecting from her pockets the pitiful change and answering to her daughter for the unheard-of food prices, which had quietly inflated again. Nina Alexandrovna was insulted that Marina seemed not to believe her and deep down thought that her mother was buying incorrectly—saving up for lottery tickets for her own pleasure, possibly, to win canned goods or a piece of sausage. “What do you have there?” Marina suddenly asked, indicating with her eyes the chaotic bundle of rag herbage that Nina Alexandrovna was squeezing in her damp fist. “Oh, I was just sweeping up the floor,” Nina Alexandrovna replied in an unnatural voice, putting her hand behind her back, a movement that immediately reminded her of the deltoid pain under her left shoulder blade. “Throw it out, for God’s sake. Why doesn’t anyone ever throw anything out here?” Frowning painfully and slowly disentangling the two-pronged belt lashing at her, Marina turned to walk away and only then, by accident, did Nina Alexandrovna see that the glass on Brezhnev’s portrait, with its steely sheen, had cracked in the corner.

  The explanation was not extensive. Marina was distracted and angry about something, and the money seemed to stick together in her clumsy counting fingers. For some reason, she was having a hard time eating. She seemed to keep biting her spoon, and the borscht in her bowl got cold and murky. Time and again, without a word, Marina would go out in the hall, and then a worried Nina Alexandrovna, up to her elbows in a burbling sink of greasy, badly scraped dishes, would start to imagine that her daughter had gone to see the paralyzed man for some additional verification. She couldn’t imagine what an indignant Marina would do if she found out about Alexei Afanasievich’s attempt to reject his monthly 1,300 rubles. Most of all, Nina Alexandrovna was afraid Marina would beat her stepfather. Who or what could stop her? However, she did not hear steps heading toward the far room. Peeking cautiously from the kitchen, Nina Alexandrovna saw in the dilute gloom that her daughter wasn’t going anywhere but was standing perfectly still, facing the darkest corner of the front hall, listening to the sounds of the front entrance, sounds that could have been drawn with a ruler, the blunt notes of someone’s ascending boots that couldn’t seem to get as far as their empty sixth-floor landing.

  Late that evening, after feeding Alexei Afanasievich a pale steamed meat patty and rubbing down especially zealously his sweetly sour body with a soapy sponge that sputtered in his wet gray hair, Nina Alexandrovna put her husband not in his usual place but farther from the edge, leaving the blanket’s selvage free. As she was coming in from the shower, all hot in her tight, chest-squeezing robe, Nina Alexandrovna noticed a dull strip of yellow light still under her daught
er’s door—the weak, uneven light sawed through the darkness—while a delicate tittering, like a bird’s chirp, came from her room. Deciding her daughter was reading something funny before going to bed, Nina Alexandrovna herself smiled and fluffed her hot, damp hair a little. Alexei Afanasievich’s body lay just as she’d left it; the tulle’s large-checked pattern fell dark on his forehead. Cautiously perching on the bed’s high footboard, Nina Alexandrovna wondered at its half-forgotten resilience and the superior quality of the luxurious metalwork. Trying not to disturb Alexei Afanasievich’s sleep—not that this was sleep in the ordinary sense of the word—clumsily, holding onto the back of the bed so as not to fall on him, she arranged herself at his side. The oilcloth crackled under the cold sheet, making the bed alien, like a doctor’s exam table; her husband’s body was alien and a little sticky, too, sweetly fragrant from shampoo. In this unwarmed flesh there was little, very little life, just the heart jumping up hard under the skin, like rubbed hair, and it seemed to Nina Alexandrovna that his heart was no longer pushing nutrients through the tissues but was itself feeding on the old man’s compressed organism, sucking at his half-empty muscles, like rotting, sprouted potatoes, through his circulatory system.

  Nina Alexandrovna felt sad and good and so sorry for Alexei Afanasievich but simply could not warm up. Turning on her back, her feet not reaching the foot of the bed, where, like in communicating vessels, a weak silvery color rose and fell, she floated on that metallic cloud into an obscure and gentle past, into a thirty-three-year-old October snowfall that covered the streetlamps thickly, like white bread being crumbled into milk—and the precious two tickets to the last showing presented to the ticket taker turned out to be wet. She was twenty-six, and he was all of nineteen, but over a lifetime, that difference in years seemed insignificant. It was surprising, but Nina Alexandrovna could barely remember his face, only a blob, a blob scorched by an ethereal chill she now found pleasant rather than unbearable. He was unattractive and ungainly on the whole. His hair—a stiff reddish cap—felt like doll’s hair, and in their complicated way his fingers, on which he carefully explained things to his interlocutors, resembled a small collection of chess figures. She went to his apartment a total of four times—the seventeenth floor, where the gray snow fluttering out the windows was darker than the sky and the distant courtyard, which looked like it was covered in cigarette paper, where his old brown furniture seemed too heavy to be so high up, and where the wreckage of his closet gave off a sharp whiff of musty wool and mothballs…. There were lots of small dark moles that looked like wrinkled winter berries on billowy snow on his white, very delicate ribs; his bony feet, which got tangled in the folds of the sheet, were covered in a soft, reddish down. For both, they were their firsts, and what they had for now was cramped, painful, and harsh, with a bare trickle of pleasure at the very bottom, but what they failed to achieve was replaced by a sweetness that simultaneously filled their tensed hearts, which found a rhythm, and in the curtained daytime room something like a pink balloon breathed, moist and cloudy. Hastily, to the nasal alarm of the clock that had woken up in the next room (his parents arrived at six-thirty), he tore the crumpled sheet off the couch, flinging open the tight window vent to air the room out, while outside, oatmeal-like spots hopped around as if hastily pecked at. He took hundred-ruble discs of impossibly satiny blackness out of their glossy foreign sleeves and holding them, cleanly, on the edges, by his palms, placed them on the record player and then lowered the obedient needle to their spinning, sentimentally damp smooth surface. He was boastful, good, and haunted. After lovemaking he taught her to smoke, lighting a drooping cigarette and switching it directly to her lips; outside, he always removed her prickly rustic mitten so he could hold her hot hand. He’d let her listen on the dorm’s cheap record player, which resembled nothing so much as a hot plate, to lightly scratched discs that sounded almost like the real thing but when the needle snagged would suddenly let out an arrow of sound, like a stocking with a run in it.

  Surprisingly, Nina Alexandrovna remembered everything except for his slippery image; any detail from those weeks she kept separately and in exemplary order, and due to this separateness, their relationship seemed longer than it really was. Nina Alexandrovna would shut her eyes and see his parents: elderly, with identical brown eyes like four two-kopek coins. They had affectionate names for each other and their friends, as if they were all children. Her father had a disproportionately large, almost elephantine skull solidly covered in curly gray hair; his mother had a mustache, burr-stiff, and a lot of skin and corn-yellow amber hanging on her neck. Both of them were gynecologists well known in the city. It was their fame and specialty that left no secret to the relationship between the “young lady” and their younger son, and they made the “young lady” blush. In her own Severouralsk, where she had graduated from vocational school before going to the university, she’d had no idea that there were people like this: Jews who were suddenly fired and exiled, as if dying then and there, in their homeland, holding their own wake amid the chaos and discarded furniture moved from where it belonged and holding unneeded keys in its locks, like dangling cigarettes. Naturally, she shouldn’t have come. She was a total stranger at the oval family table, where they ate laboriously on cracked dishes as dingy as a smoker’s teeth, where the adults were still wearing all Soviet-era clothes, as clumsy as if lined with cardboard, and the children sparkled in foreign-made jeans outfits and fancy little sweaters—and he, crazed and tipsy, barely escaping the confinement of his talkative relatives, was anxious to see her home.

  Afterward there had been one postcard from him, mailed from Moscow, and nothing more. Ever since, Nina Alexandrovna had disliked Jews and had always spoken of them with suspicion and dislike, but she never did learn to pick them out among the good people with whom her life thereafter brought her together. Marina was born in July, when it was hottest and the grass and tree leaves grew up big and holey, as if burned by cigarettes, and the yellow centers of the waterlilies on the pond by the district clinic were as rich as hard-boiled egg yolks. While looking after her crawling cotton bundle, Nina Alexandrovna tried to imagine a different, exotic heat, with palms, from the travelogue film club, with desert sands dissolving in an unreliable haze, like sugar in a glass of boiling water, and him in the city’s full stony blaze of sun, with a shadow no bigger than a ball’s on the slabs and a book under his arm. For a while, imagining him in connection with herself became a habit for Nina Alexandrovna, and she had an acute need to sense him alive, but the synchronous connection became more and more fantastic, his image wore out from overuse, and gradually Nina Alexandrovna began confusing her imagination with her dreams, in which he appeared like a plaster Young Pioneer, and colonnades and a gigantic three-tiered Soviet fountain burned in the sun like a giant chandelier, a fountain whose dust on the asphalt was hot and soft, like wet ashes. Here, on the marital bed, she also finished looking at the last dribs and drabs the soul had taken away: murk and snow, he came from Israel a very old and wrinkled man, and sat on a bench in some ghastly lane, and for some reason the tracks leading to him were as round as saucers of milk.

  Originally, his redheadedness had come out in Marina’s sparse baby hair, and there was something of him in the structure of her lionish little nose, which made Nina Alexandrovna imagine she’d had a boy. But gradually all this ironed out and his face gradually dropped from memory as well, and even the resentment, the burning resentment at that life yielded to simpler, plainer resentments: at the superintendent’s wife, who gave the young mama the most torn sheets worn to a gray gauze; and at her own parents, who fell ill whenever Nina Alexandrovna asked them to take little Marina for a few days and who with the years turned into identical village kulaks with faces like bone-dry gingerbread men. She held no grudges against Alexei Afanasievich, though. In essence, he had never abandoned her, had never once left her without flowers on International Women’s Day. Just as he had May 9th, Nina Alexandrovna had March 8th, which was observed
religiously. Even if they were just cheap stems, pins in an emptyish newspaper cone, nonetheless Nina Alexandrovna felt set apart from the many women who were only given a tiny little tulip at work, out of petty cash, and it was so nice to unpack the cold newspaper cone full of thawing March air and arrange the little bouquet that loosened up in the heavy, cut-glass vase where she now kept lost buttons: the wobbly circles now almost filled the vase to the top.

  Because Alexei Afanasievich was a man for whom Nina Alexandrovna could feel gratitude without having to invent anything about him, her husband suddenly seemed so valuable and unique that her eyes moistened and in the half-dark became like two deep inkwells, while the night’s ink slowly dried on the walls, dark in the cracks on the floor, and stuck several heavy old tomes together on the shelf—and right then, outside, all the way down, the streetlamps went out. The umbral pointers that leaned the floating room slightly laterally were replaced as a reference point by the invisible alarm clock ticking off to the side. Tenderly, as only she could, Nina Alexandrovna stroked her husband’s cold shoulder (as had often happened before, too, she imagined a nonexistent cord from a medallion or cross passing under her fingers), quietly slipped her feet into her cold slippers, which were damp from her shower, and trying not to run into anything, unfolded the tottering cot. Come morning, waking in a sweat, on the bare canvas with the loose sheet, Nina Alexandrovna told herself she’d manage somehow, and if today took more out of her than it did ten or twenty years ago, then that was what it was like for everyone, that meant those times had come, and despite the odd jerking in her tight chest, she had to get up and cook breakfast, and she would not let anyone lay a finger on Alexei Afanasievich, who was stretched out close to the wall—helpless, his arms pressed down, but who over his years of immobility had become neither an animal nor demented.