The Man Who Couldn't Die Read online

  Now Nina Alexandrovna kept a very close eye on what was going on around her. Inasmuch as she had to keep her husband’s secret from absolutely everyone, she listened closely to steps in the apartment and didn’t let them get close to the forbidden Red Corner without taking hasty measures and wrapping Alexei Afanasievich up to the chin in his blanket. Now no one could catch her unawares. Nina Alexandrovna knew exactly who was where in the apartment at each specific moment, and in the morning the first thing she did was ascertain people’s presence, making herself heard under the long-occupied bathroom’s swollen doors, which even on the outside were wet from the steam of the noisy water and which also let through the wet, almost hoarse shout of one of the children. Risking their irritation, she would look in on them in their unaired bedroom, always discovering one of them in the stuffiness—and sometimes getting a blank, unblinking gaze from her daughter, as if she were weighing all objects.

  Intent though her surveillance was, Nina Alexandrovna felt cut off from the young family. She couldn’t even fight their slovenliness properly. Sometimes her daughter and son-in-law’s ignorant faces seemed like strangers’, as if they’d retreated into the shadows; the necessity of watching them kept Nina Alexandrovna from worrying about their daily well-being as she once had. For some reason, only once, one late inclement evening, did she manage to catch them together. Her son-in-law seemed to be leaving on a business trip. Beside him on the front hall floor was a haphazardly packed—as if everything that should have been packed crosswise lay lengthwise—gym bag, and Seryozha, pulling on his laced rust-brown boots as if they were lion’s paws, gave her a merry look, from which Nina Alexandrovna concluded that her son-in-law now had a new job because parking lot guards didn’t go on business trips. Marina, who had just come in from the TV studio, was seeing her husband off, leaning against the wall, her hands hidden behind her back. Occasionally her immobile face would flutter like a butterfly pinned for an entomological collection. Her daughter was looking far from her best, and her eyes were flooded, so that Nina Alexandrovna nearly said something about seeing a doctor right in her son-in-law’s presence. The expression in Marina’s eyes was such, though, that Nina Alexandrovna hurried to her room, nearly losing a slipper as she did, so as not to listen to their conversation, which didn’t happen, actually. There was just the constrained space of the front hall, the general skewedness of the gym bag dragging noisily across the floor, and Marina giving the lock a sharp turn. Since then, Nina Alexandrovna couldn’t stop feeling that she and Marina were each jealously guarding their own territory, and neither had anything against putting locks on the doors to their own rooms, no matter the cost, so that when they left home they wouldn’t leave their abandoned rears defenselessness.

  Now a guarded Nina Alexandrovna felt a strange need to announce her appearance, and her own call or the dull tap of her puffy limbs seemed like too little (little Marina, when she came in from playing, wouldn’t knock or ring but would slap the door with her dirty hand); Nina Alexandrovna felt as though she should throw something ahead of herself before entering—and in this one felt a vague reference to some folktale in which the character tosses various objects on his path so that loyal friends can follow this dotted line and find him. Here, it all felt backward. Her desire was not to sweep away the past but to explore the future along this dotted line. For the first time in her life, Nina Alexandrovna felt a need to sound out the unknowable tomorrow, a spectral tentacle of the mind that would tell her whether precisely what she feared and what Alexei Afanasievich, resisting being packed away, obviously continued to want had in fact happened up ahead: if you substituted movements for speech, his tensed resistance and his attempts to strain to the hilt what remained of his shackled strength reminded her of the bellowing of a mute.

  Nina Alexandrovna didn’t like losing anything. She sensed a void in her well-kept space if a bobby pin dropped or a coin rolled away (which was why she collected lots of little odds and ends around herself) and now felt more favorably inclined toward the willfulness of things. She pictured a vanished object, which later—she knew this—would certainly turn up, as having rolled ahead and arrived in the transparent box of tomorrow’s apartment (an observer, if there were one, would have been amazed at the similarity between Marina’s daydreams and the glassy sketches of future days that arose in Nina Alexandrovna’s mind—a similarity that better expressed their kinship than the approximate similarity of their facial features). Nina Alexandrovna’s futile attempts to project into the future were reminiscent of her long-ago efforts to keep Marina’s father real and alive and for the sake of that to be more than herself, and in just the same way, she could feel a wall in her forehead.

  Apparently, the period of stagnation preserved in the Red Corner would not allow for forward movement, so everything had fallen back in place; now that was even more true. At night, the window sealed shut for the winter would crackle and tinkle as if holding back the press of some growing mass, as if the paralyzed immortality were flexing an invisible muscle. Nina Alexandrovna, who lately had been sleeping unusually alertly, as if lying all night at her own side, listened superstitiously to this crackling and quiet sucking in the cracks. Brezhnev, hanging oddly due to the fat crack in the glass, would wink and change like those playful effects that billboards use to catch your eye—several pictures of products and their smiling representatives fanning like a deck of cards all at once. Now in a state of constant emotional tension, Nina Alexandrovna guessed that what she was seeing was substantially a product of her imagination. Previously, she would scarcely have been upset at finding the tube of cheap lipstick she’d recently lost in the front hall behind her daughter’s calloused sandals, which should have been boxed up for the winter. Now, picking the crushed remnants up off the floor, remnants that looked like a gnawed chicken bone, Nina Alexandrovna turned cold at the thought of the blow that had destroyed the small tube, which had obviously been crushed by the heel not of some household member but of some malignant fate that had been in their home.

  Feeling sealed up in an autonomous little world that she would now have to protect even more zealously from outsiders, she sometimes felt an insurmountable urge to break free, to see people—at least to pay a visit to her nephew, who kept transferring money to her with the indifference of an ATM. Nina Alexandrovna didn’t remember even half her nephew’s debts, but the transfers kept coming—in precisely the same unround, embarrassed amounts in which her nephew had borrowed “without even any extra for a bottle,” and there was something mechanical about this, as if a totally different person were paying for her nephew. Nina Alexandrovna would have liked to understand what had become of her nephew’s sincerity when, while sipping the hot water she called tea that he hated so, he talked about his new wife, a good and long-suffering woman he’d found right in his lobby wearing just her nightgown and a man’s sturdy jacket with a medal. He’d told her about Nina Alexandrovna, of course, and so shuttled like a honeybee between various people, carrying warm flower pollen. Trying to solve this puzzle, Nina Alexandrovna wondered whether her nephew had become a “new Russian.” Knowing very little about that bizarre species of apparently synthetic people who had gold threads sewn into their faces and money inserted into their metabolism, incorporating it into their own biology through wine cellars and expensive restaurants, Nina Alexandrovna imagined the community of “new Russians” as the one place a person becomes inaccessible by joining, interacting with the world exclusively through ingested and secreted sums of money. If that were true, the precise figures of the transfer became understandable. Evidently there was a reverse logic to returning accumulated debts: the preciseness of the figure held a message and was no less important than the recipient’s correctly indicated address. Nonetheless, it seemed to Nina Alexandrovna that even a “new Russian” could retain something human. More than once she’d imagined one of those long, shiny cars stopping in front of her, ideally inserted into the reflected landscape, and her smiling nephew wearing a slight
ly baggy raspberry jacket and a gold tiepin, climbing out of the door, its glass tinted like a television set.

  Nina Alexandrovna jealously watched Marina and Seryozha but even more jealously watched Alexei Afanasievich, who obviously didn’t trust her anymore. Every so often, though, when she was busy with something, he would give her a look as if summoning his wife to come closer. The doctor, Evgenia Markovna (who herself had suddenly gone downhill, with an unfamiliar messiness to her bun of yellowing gray hair), noted an improvement in motor functions, which surprised her mightily. Shaking her dry little head, which had hardened from the temples up, and adjusting the errant tip of her stethoscope in her perforated ear, the doctor listened to the patient for a long time and then asked him to move his hand—and Alexei Afanasievich’s hand took a surprisingly easy jump, which made it look very much like a mechanical prosthesis. Actually, this was no cause for surprise. The delicate substance of immortality, from which there settled so much of the very even, rather bright dust characteristic of this room alone, had become palpably stronger. Apparently, if this dust—a by-product containing perhaps a small percent of the basic substance—were sprinkled on the cockroaches whose husks lay around the chemically treated kitchen, they would immediately start skipping like drops of water across a red-hot skillet.

  Alexei Afanasievich, who now slept much less than before, would not be parted from his Chinese inflatable spider, which jumped for him with a whistle and a kind of obscene smacking, its cloth feet quivering on the flight up, and flew at Nina Alexandrovna from the folds of the blanket, occasionally touching her leaning face with its fake fringe. The spider had become like a second heart for Alexei Afanasievich, connected to him by a mysterious link, apart from the tube; its convulsions never ceased, even when the toy hopped off the bed and dangled between heaven and earth, huffing on the dust. Although he couldn’t see his fledgling (rarely observing from his pillow the leaps of its blurry body), Alexei Afanasievich continued to work the swollen paw, which the rubber pear, squeezed to the bottom, filled over and over again with a pleasant roundness—but occasionally jammed the badly strained mechanism. This persistent, steady work seemed to have taught Alexei Afanasievich to combine the twisted and normal halves of his face so that he ended up with almost one whole: a bystander wouldn’t have noticed anything special other than an expression of distasteful sarcasm and a thread of saliva dried on his salty stubble like egg white.

  Nina Alexandra managed to sneak an occasional peek, but Alexei Afanasievich was unusually hard to fool; the paralyzed man was probably picking up the simple impulses released by her consciousness much better than she was his electrical rebuses, one instant of darkness after another. Lately these impulses had been coalescing, like clouds, or lingering until they coalesced, losing their distinctness, into a solid shroud. Despite this overcast, Alexei Afanasievich could apparently tell quite well whether Nina Alexandrovna was dozing off or just pretending as she sat in her chair over the hole of a mitten she was knitting, outside his blurry field of vision. Clearly she was present, though, and holding her breath, whereas asleep she tended to snore. Very rarely, Nina Alexandrovna would sit so long (the yarn moldering in her damp hand) as to produce the hypnotic illusion that she had drifted off, and then her half-closed eyes, which looked like they’d been smeared with a clear oil, witnessed what her mind could scarcely believe. She didn’t even try to figure out how the various ropes and strings, some of unknown origin, got into Alexei Afanasievich’s bed. She simply observed what she could. First, raising his shoulder and making himself asymmetric, like during a vigorous walk with his cane, the veteran would slowly lay out the outlines of a noose on his swaddled body. Then, after a long buildup, he would give a sideways jerk, like when he used to take his characteristic, very very small step, and a fold would form on the blanket, and above it, if he was lucky, the rim of the main loop would rise up with a divine opening, into which he endeavored with slow persistence to insert the rope’s end. The rope thrust out of the paralyzed man’s hand, violating the laws of physics and looking as taut as a cobra lured into the air by a fakir’s flute; the paralyzed man’s attempts to get the rope to land in the hanging opening reminded Nina Alexandrovna of a spectral needle-threading. An incredible tension blurred both the rope and noose in the trembling air and brought up a scour of glistening sweat on the veteran’s temple. Finally, his hand would fall to the bed and lie there for a while as if severed. Then Alexei Afanasievich would begin preparing for his lateral jerk all over again. And something almost imperceptible happened to him: as he started building up to this exertion, the gray-haired, disheveled muzhik began to resemble a woman in labor, emitting the occasional suppressed moan.

  Upset, but trying her utmost not to give herself away, Nina Alexandrovna observed his desperate struggle. The paralyzed man’s material world, which had been stripped of any detail and reduced to large, schematic objects, the only ones accessible to his manipulations, reminded her of the letters on a child’s building blocks, or the top line on the eye chart; and the large font in which this destiny was written evoked her respect and a superstitious fear. Nina Alexandrovna sometimes thought of her Alexei Afanasievich as an overly ambitious pretender to the throne, a shadow general secretary of the Communist Party. The veteran’s struggle with matter, which previously had been limited to the toy stuffed animals he conquered, had taken on an altogether new quality. Nina Alexandrovna couldn’t imagine how the paralyzed man, who couldn’t bring a spoonful of kasha to his open mouth, might wrench his own death from the world around him. There are many things even a healthy man has trouble doing for himself—a haircut, say, or a foot massage—let alone commit suicide! Nina Alexandrovna knew from her own experience that this type of self-servicing requires agility, strength, and the skill of a hunter chasing a wild beast. What was she saying? It took more, much more. To be both hunter and hunted in your one and only body, to battle yourself with a kitchen knife—this Nina Alexandrovna remembered well. She remembered the new knife, sharpened spotlessly clean, until the whetstone’s slick was black—sticking into her ribs dully, like a finger, and even when she stripped to her bra, thinking her slippery blouse was the problem, it was still no use. You had to make some special movement, a little like the twist she knew how to make squeezing into an overcrowded bus and opening a jar simultaneously. It was too hard, though. Maybe it was something you had to learn to do. But how? Nina Alexandrovna knew better than anyone (maybe even better than her heroic husband) that it’s easier to kill someone else than yourself. Suicide is a job for the left hand, and if you’re not born a lefty, then you do it wrong way around. True, it was Alexei Afanasievich’s left hand that could move, but what use was that? After all, he was spread-eagle on the ground—yes, on the ground, even though there were five stories and a cellar between the veteran and the earth. Since the dimensions of his flabby body had lost all physical meaning, you could think of him as Gulliver in the land of the Lilliputians, tied down by hundreds of thin strings, over which his fat rubber spider scurried, testing the rigging.

  Now, watching Alexei Afanasievich through the keen diopters of her dozing trance, Nina Alexandrovna understood deep down that an unnatural death, be it murder or suicide, was all about physical objects. You couldn’t do away with yourself without a tool. Virtually anything could be used to kill someone, after which it remained here, as innocent as ever and undiminished. Meanwhile, the everyday objects in this room (muffled by dispassionate philosophical dust) contained very little death; their shapes were too smooth, their corners too wooden; their harmless dullness could drive anyone to despair. At one time, Nina Alexandrovna had dreamed of special, expensive things, out of ordinary citizens’ reach, a gun or a rifle, say, things that held death like a faucet does water; just press—and out it spurts. Truth be told, she, too, had tried the rope—and this was the last thing that hadn’t worked for her. Maybe because she was four months pregnant and had been extremely sensitive and irritated not so much by smells (winter itself, all m
elting ulcers and icy bald patches, seemed to smell of the morgue) as by the least mess, which would not let her abide in the focused stillness she needed to calm down and stop her bitter thoughts from racing for just a while. She had been willing to pick up every speck and bring it to the communal kitchen’s garbage can, which stank of rotten newspaper juices. She had endlessly put away and taken out her few possessions, trying to achieve an evenness and parallelness from the robe and cardigan lying on the bed—the evenness of a sausage. Standing on a stool now, with the noose, cold and sticky from soap, right under her chin, she saw below her a room so perfectly neat it looked like a scale model (her library books, pens, and note to her parents looked like they’d been drawn on the table), but far away on the floor there were some torn white threads that she was not going to get to in this life. Her legs were trembling minutely, the stool was trembling more and more, and her mouth, like a wound, kept filling up with saliva. After a while she winced and slipped out of the noose, which caught in back on her pinned-up hair. She got to her knees on the stool’s tottering square and alit feeling as though she’d just stepped off a merry-go-round. Afterward, she washed the floors with the laundry detergent that was so hard to get and that foamed up in hot water. The noose, half stuck together from too much smeared-on soap, swung overhead like a flaccid, post-party balloon. It was with this hot, blubbering cleaning that her new life had begun, a life continuous to this very day. Nina Alexandrovna had never told anyone about her illegal and unsuccessful attempt. Least of all had she been prepared to tell Alexei Afanasievich, a man sufficiently stern that in his presence his spouse nearly forgot her own illicit act, the cigarette butts in the saucer, and how she had removed her silk blouse, which had stuck to the bloody spot under her heart, as if to commence lovemaking.