The Man Who Couldn't Die Page 12

  It was much harder for paralyzed Alexei Afanasievich now than it had been for Nina Alexandrovna during those incredibly lonely months when there had been no one to help her and no one in the world who might steady her wayward knife, the way a teacher grasps and aims an unsteady pen for a first-grader’s hen scratchings, or to slap her on the back when, bent over with her weapon, she had coughed up her fear. The veteran was attempting the impossible. He was already a failed product of death, a defective good from whom death had taken a step back without dispensing with the continuity of life in his illuminated consciousness. The veteran had not reconciled himself to this and was now planning to make death by his own hand—to repeat the mirror image of what he had done to others with such ease. He was a cobbler without boots. The only human resource he had left was the grim patience of a prisoner multiplied by the endless years of his sentence: the ability to move toward his goal millimeter by millimeter and fashion any movement as if it were a clever detail for some homemade gadget. Death seemed to be lying in bed with him like his lawful wife, and the paralyzed man was studying every millimeter of this being through a mental loupe and transferring it to his own mind, which was still like a steel trap. Maybe his lack of success (Nina Alexandrovna had no idea how many attempts there had been or when this had started) could be explained by the very fact that the veteran had still not assembled the whole from its parts, had not pictured his own death in its entirety. The terrible grip of his mind left no doubt as to the ultimate outcome of his struggle, though. The moment Alexei Afanasievich understood, he would immediately succeed: he would cross the line between sleight-of-hand (which was all you could call the paralyzed one-handed tying of the noose) and the miracle of his authentic disappearance so easily and quickly that even he wouldn’t notice.

  Nina Alexandrovna didn’t know whether this would happen in a day, a month, or ten years. When she tried to gaze into the future, it seemed impossible, a figment of her imagination. Even that winter, which had already made itself felt in the mornings in the stannic asphalt and the void of the puddle at the front door, which looked like a broken toilet, seemed just as implausible to Nina Alexandrovna as it might to a Papuan who had never seen snow. Nina Alexandrovna simply couldn’t tell where the boundary lay where reality came to an abrupt halt. At some point, the future, which she had always used pictures from the past to imagine, ceased to communicate with this past. There was some disconnect or defect here, as there can be defects in glass—needles of moisture, like veins running through a perforated landscape. No matter how Nina Alexandrovna strained her inner vision, though, she had no sense of how long she had before she reached that spectral line. In essence, she, too, like her husband, was attempting the impossible. Whereas an ordinary person backs into the future with his unprotected back, keeping a more or less intelligible past in front of him, Nina Alexandrovna wanted to turn around and follow the guiding crystal ball—and plunge into the unknown face first.

  She who had been compelled to shut herself up in the Red Corner more and more felt like seeing people, and right away. In going out to stores and the market, she told herself that it was this—the muffled, gyrating sounds of the overfull streets, the circle of little clay Chinamen sitting on their haunches beside a mountain of traders’ baggage, the mirrored glass in the windows of dilapidated private homes, which were strange, the way sunglasses can be strange on old people’s faces—that it was this that was reality, not a dream, that the objects here denoted nothing but themselves and did not predict her destiny. This alone would remain, she told herself, when Alexei Afanasievich was no longer on this earth. Somewhere among the new, abstract human breeds—especially often she came across bloated beauties in slim black coats, with lips like bonbons, and businesslike young men wearing jackets sticking out under leather jackets—the people near and dear to her, a mere handful, had gone missing, and now Nina Alexandrovna wanted to be convinced of the reality of their existence. One day, she thought she recognized the broad-shouldered man who spilled out in a businesslike way from the front seat and across the windows of a dirty Zhiguli that drove off immediately as her nephew—his purple ear, his bulging cap, his spattered trousers. But then the man lit up out of his fist, turned his repulsive, pockmarked, alien face toward the smiling Nina Alexandrovna, and moved toward her quite calmly. Reality had preserved a few islands of goodness after all. One day, next to a concrete wall behind which a Metro construction site was rattling and thumping away, Nina Alexandrovna saw a fine-looking man who from the back looked like her son-in-law Seryozha carefully supporting the elbow of his ungainly companion, who was wearing a flowered, rhinestoned scarf and a long coat and whose cautiously stepping feet reminded her of duck’s feet; a block farther on a child in a red snowsuit chased chubby pigeons that were too lazy to fly and only ran, spreading their wings and tails just slightly, while the child was responsibly shepherded along by a gangly soldier who looked as flat as a domino in his greatcoat. Although touched, Nina Alexandrovna couldn’t shake the feeling that only she and no one else was seeing this. The sun’s odd light, the harsh light of the last autumn clarity before a wet snowfall, like an ax hacking away at a bared wooden carcass left over for the winter from the summer’s splendor, had come from so far away, its source lay so many tremendous thousands of kilometers away, that the reality en route to demolition seemed insignificant, illuminated from there out of some pitying interest. The man on the street whose temple was beveled by the sun was also quite blind, his opinion was of no account, and his head spun from the presence of the abyss, and maybe from death’s presence in each piece of substance, from the heightened background on winter’s eve; strange though it seemed, only this background let the weary Nina Alexandrovna feel briefly like one of the many people in the fresh air, which was practically solid from the cold, so that there was even something crystalline about the little sun, which had sprouted icy needles.

  Election day opened as if to order: a splendid, wintry, golden Sunday, a long, quiet morning, a blush along the entire butt cheek of the sleeping apartment building; the windows of the prefab buildings—so faceless that it was almost impossible to imagine a human face looking out from them—were gently tinted a pearly white. Splendid snow-mica toward the top sprinkled over the unsuccessful, dwarfish relief sculpted by the various types of autumn snow from the unattractive material that had fallen to the ground; snow in the pose of a cat lay on the cornice of a very tall and bare school window that looked out on a playground where an empty basketball hoop was covered with a frosty sky, like a bulging iridescent film for blowing clusters of melancholy soap bubbles.

  Starting around ten, the school with the polling place where Marina had been assigned as an observer shone in the sun and snow like a very bright, very clean diagram and was filled with the drone of voices. In the auditorium, a buffet table sponsored by the A Fund had been set up around four samovars, where four pretty servers wearing sarafans and kokoshniks were cheerfully selling fantastically cheap baked goods, yeast dough in sealed bags, and frozen pelmeni that looked like bruises. In the vestibule, everyone who had come to vote was met by the candidates’ portraits in alphabetical order—the two main ones and three additional ones; these false targets, shot into the air by Apofeozov’s headquarters, were as unprepossessing as good color printings allowed, absent gazes that looked past the voter, who, in turn, let his gaze fall on these sunken faces as he did on the sunken keys of the voting machine. On the other hand, Fyodor Ignatovich Krugal, who toward the end of the campaign had tried desperately to look younger, had insisted that his flyer run a ten-year-old photograph of him that had once hung in the plush lobby of the provincial dramatic theater—and doubtless someone had vaguely recognized this winning three-quarters pose, the curving jaw that looked like a pill in a paper nest, the grape cluster of Italian curls placed on what looked like a larger fruit, the jutting brow of an actor who played lead roles but in the theatrical troupe’s second-string cast. Of all the candidates, Apofeozov alone was prese
nt here and now. The joy on his face was irrefutable proof that the birdie had only just flown from the photographer’s camera.

  The observers from Apofeozov headquarters—a prim gentleman who looked like a well-educated Hitler and whose jacket was a little too big for him and kept slipping off his right shoulder, and a slim brunette in a peach blouse who had red spots on her clavicle, which poked out of her low neckline like glasses’ earpieces—were so amiable and even loving, it was as if they’d become man and wife for this Sunday. They wandered confidently among the voters, like salesclerks in an expensive shop, and readily came to the assistance of perplexed old women who kept being afraid of ruining the big white sheet of paper given them, where the candidates’ names stood firmly and in order, while the empty boxes opposite their names kept slipping and getting mixed up; other timid voters, seeing such authoritative graciousness from the consultants, approached them with questions and even stood in line, their round, woolen backs gradually melting around the edges, as if covered in sweat from their zeal for listening to competent and pleasant voices. Marina knew she had the right and duty to stop this, but her soul, which seemed filled with pig iron, remained so fixed as to feel immovable. The cramped school desk (the voting organizers had set up a presidium table and a classic, dry-throated gray pitcher for the Apofeozov people) pressed painfully against her knees and in a way reminded her of the medieval stocks where a criminal was ensconced on a square for the crowd’s enjoyment; it took Marina an incredible effort of will just to wiggle out of this instrument of torture and go to the bathroom. She, too, could have mingled and talked to people, but the voters who flooded past (turnout, as everyone noted, was unusually high) were an indistinguishable mass with a multitude of human hands carrying something, handing things to each other, manneredly removing their tight gloves, as if plucking flowers, and pulling an unusually dirty handkerchief out of their pocket like a page out of a book. In the homogenous crowd, Marina could not pick out her canvassers and recognized them only when they demonstrated their familiar trick of taking a flat object out of tight clothing and showed their passport; at that moment, as if just looking on, Marina saw the dank headquarters basement and the slow line trailing along the walls, where people, because they were now where someone else had just been, were like shapeless specters. The canvassers, too, probably recognized in the sleepy woman behind the desk the person who had given them the advance money in the basement; their looks, cast from the registration tables, were the remembering looks of traitors. One slight consolation was that nearly all her recruits showed up at the head of a decisively arranged handful of invitees: after being given their ballots, these communities of all ages crammed together into the cramped, curtained booths, which were like department store changing rooms, and occupied them for an amazingly long time, evoking concern among the salesclerk-consultants about the integrity of the goods—after which the delegation’s head, somewhat tousled and rather disheveled, as if he really had stripped down to his underpants in the booth, led his people toward the ballot box.

  Marina’s partner was Lyudochka, of course, who showed up at the polling place wearing a miniskirt so tight it looked like it was about to split and didn’t leave much room for her heavy legs, which were swathed in velvety Lycra. Apparently, she had taken an active dislike to the Apofeozov brunette, so she perched on a light stool and kept crossing and recrossing her legs, with the obvious intention of letting the brunette’s provisional husband see the tightness and darkness, barely covered by the diagonally stretched fabric, and casting flickering looks over her open compact, making her foe’s mustache quiver like a leaf stuck on her upper lip. Nonetheless, her rival did not yield to the provocation and, her high forehead patterned like an actual tree haughtily blazing, demonstratively took the arm of her headquarters better half—for which he was encouraged with doses of a smile. Lyudochka responded with a sullen grimace. This was outrageous, of course, and the local teachers registering voters gave Lyudochka the hairy eyeball—but Marina herself was in such a state that she couldn’t inflict even that kind of indecent injury on her opponent.

  She was surrounded by a strange, lifeless emptiness. Not that she hurt, but the cotton wool resting on her heart like a solid compress did. Ever since Klimov, caught in their marital bed embracing an unbuttoned pillow, covered in feathers, like a skunk in a henhouse, had finally been kicked out, Marina had felt bereft of ordinary human emotions. Each morning she woke up with the memory of how he’d woken up that time, without even looking at what had roused him (the chair piled with his clothing, which Marina had gently pushed over); his eyes opened immediately and looked up, as if they’d seen a snow-white angel on the ceiling lamp. Marina, whose heart was pounding as it had during their first declaration of love, had expected him to try to justify himself and cite fantastic circumstances that she herself could have dreamed up for him—but Klimov didn’t even try to say anything and walked around in front of Marina shamelessly, wearing just his clingy swimsuit, which he adjusted by slipping his finger under the side elastic and shaking his leg, whereas Marina was embarrassed even to change into her robe and stand in front of him in her swimsuit, as black and rigid as a fly. This whistling Klimov was an utter stranger and even a different color. His body, always white in the sun, like a 10-watt frosted lightbulb, and afterward shedding its sticky skin like a new potato, down to the same defenseless whiteness, now had a crude tan that lay in scarlet and brown patches on his filled-out shoulders. In his new guise, bowlegged and tenacious, including his polished bald head with three identical yokes of eyebrows and mustache, something quite Asiatic came through, as if his unattractive girlfriend had made him change his nationality. Klimov didn’t utter a word of objection to the demand to free up the veteran housing he had no right to; the things Marina had provided he kicked with cheerful indifference into his yawning gym bag, and after a while it became clear that all his pants and jeans had been stuffed into the very bottom of the lumpy packing, and if Klimov was to have something to wear when he left the building, he had to dump back out on the bed all his limp, unfresh rags, among which a bright red sweater Marina had once knit from very expensive English yarn stretched out like a victim pulled from rubble.

  After Klimov’s departure, everything seemed both exactly the way it had before and at the same time slightly unreal, as if Marina had rendered habitable an invented environment that someone had once described in words. If she was going somewhere, she felt as though she were taking a narrated route, and she would recognize narrated buildings and lanes that corresponded rather loosely to their communicated features—and sometimes the discrepancies multiplied so quickly that Marina’s sense of direction evaporated and she could have gotten lost if it weren’t for the strange paucity of things. The world around her was surprisingly empty. This corresponded to the devastation of late autumn, when something on the naked streets seems to get cleared away or borne off, but you can’t figure out what, and the heart searches for what doesn’t exist, and you see trees on which not a single leaf remains filled with the substance of emptiness, and their blackened branches don’t have a single cell left not filled to bursting with empty, colorless space. All this time, Marina couldn’t shake the physical sensation that nothing was worth anything now. Randomly wandering into high-end clothing stores, she could barely keep from laughing when she discovered tags on soft slippers with seven-figure prices that meant exactly nothing. Now Marina imagined the same kind of label on the back of each person’s neck. When she watched Professor Shishkov scribbling and speckling the campaign’s newspaper galleys with insertions, as if deriving the square root from each statement and turning the article into a system of mathematical calculations, the professor seemed to be distracted by his irritatingly stiff, neck-scraping label. When candidate Krugal, having first looked around to make sure there were no reporters, started luxuriously scratching his back against the doorjamb, as if dancing the lambada, not sparing his cashmere Hugo Boss jacket one bit, Marina had no doubt tha
t the artist had a whole sheaf of that lacquered stuff dangling from his collar. No, Marina didn’t really feel bad. She could smile and joke as if nothing were the matter—although her smile gave her away more than her usual, even serenity, her even voice, and her half-mast eyes. She really wasn’t suffering particularly. Her head, which had been splitting the entire month previous from campaign cares, had stopped hurting. Marina even had her appetite back, or at least, at the headquarters dining table, she ate as much as the others, only for some reason all the food was tasteless and dense, like underbaked bread that Marina seasoned with her own sourish saliva. Sometimes she thought she might not be nearly as picky about food as ordinary people, and if she needed to weigh down her stomach with something, then she might as well gnaw on a wet, stringy branch, say, or bite off a crumbled corner of the crackly brown Khrushchev-era apartment building that all the candidates had promised to raze. Crazy thoughts like that amused Marina. She felt like a toothy predator from a Hollywood movie capable of devouring steel, stone, and concrete. In moments like these, the far from foolish Lyudochka, who for some time now had been jealously eyeing all her possible future bosses, would give her coworkers a look to turn their attention to Marina Borisovna and would twist her finger at her temple as if she were dialing a long telephone number.