The Man Who Couldn't Die Read online

  In fact, the true predator to loom up like Godzilla over District 18’s primitive urban landscape was Valery Petrovich Apofeozov. One relatively beautiful, sun-yellow Sunday, a brigade of Turks who did not speak Russian unfurled his portrait many meters high on the side of a twelve-story apartment building that was not one of the best but that stood on a hill and was visible at that moment from nearly every point of the engraved district, which gleamed like a ruble. Unfurled over some outdated mosaic figures whose hands were lifting a satellite and whose legs seemed to be wearing brown, black, and nude stockings, the painfully vivid portrait of the people’s leader billowed slightly, and from time to time folds stretched over it, making it seem as though the leader was chewing on a rusted balcony bit off the nearest wall and was just about to take a step forward to wade waist-deep through the smoking ruins like a swimmer through waves. At the same time, the viewer couldn’t shake the distinct impression that everything here was here thanks to him. Given such intent and loving care, the district seemed to acquire a self-awareness and even a semblance of sovereignty. It was hard to believe in its daily diffusion and dissolution without visible borders in the soaked urban tracts, which in turn dissolved from the cloudy rain and the industrial waste that fed the soil and air, just as it was hard to believe in the flat areas, which were scarcely nature and were more like half-green economic wastelands where nature did not get the solitude it needed to weave its private secret even between three birch trunks. The voting district’s residents, who had absolutely no choice about declining the printed campaign materials, knew, as any citizen does, the shape of their state, the outlines of their electoral district, which on maps looked like a woman’s hand with short, bent fingers. Moreover, the graphically legible lifeline, the role of which was performed by a dead little stream, turned out to be so long that in and of itself it inspired groundless but for this reason contagious optimism.

  The optimism epidemic set off by Apofeozov’s life-affirming persona took on truly fantastic forms. Several residents whose faces had become hollow-cheeked and gray from long years of poverty, like that cheap eviscerated fish they bought in frozen slabs from wholesale shops, suddenly yielded to the illusion that a car and bank account were possible in their lifetime, too. Under the influence of strange, iridescent fluids, unemployed Igor P., still a decent man in cracked glasses and clean clothing that looked like hospital pajamas they were so old, showed up one day in broad daylight at the supermarket, chaotically collected in his cart a mountain of items that fell to the floor, pushed his load up to the checkout line, and instead of paying, demanded cash. A dreamy smile wandered across the assailant’s intelligent face, and an ax-like item that looked to the cashier like her grandmother’s meat grinder but subsequently turned out to be a six-barreled rifle of Afghani production started shaking in his hands. Security hustled over and had no problem taking the heavy object, which hadn’t been fired in years, from the bluish hands of the former senior research associate, who immediately sank with relief—and this wasn’t the only instance of an optimistic criminal. Some even tried to get rich by showing their victim a chicken bone wrapped in newspaper.

  Apart from the get-rich-quick spirit that had stamped the golden autumn with a strange literalness and lent the foliage the paranoid gleam of a dream coming true, a more complex emotional phenomenon was felt in the district that could be defined as citizens’ sudden belief in immortality. The situation here and now had taken on incredible acuity; moments now seemed to stop at the least whim, at the wave of a hand, and since you were alive this minute, then it was totally unnecessary for you ever to alter this satisfactory state of affairs. The inhabitants simply wanted someone to give voice to their condition, to assert authoritatively what they were each thinking privately. Unlikely to have established business contacts with the Apofeozov headquarters, more likely sensing in the atmosphere a seductive void that he could and should fill, a doctor of nontraditional medicine—the author of a rainbow of brochures and an honorary member of some incredibly long-named academies by the name of Kuznetsov, which, ironically enough for that industrial district, means “Smith”—came to District 18. Initially, the lettuce-green posters posted everywhere and carefully stuck to even very complicated surfaces, led the public to take Mr. Kuznetsov for yet another candidate, but they soon figured out what was what and flocked to the Progress Cinema, which for over three years had been rented out for shows and had stood encased in a multi-tiered scaffolding that made the building look like a Chinese pagoda—so much so that many of the district’s inhabitants had supposed the cinema in the scaffolding was long gone. As it turned out, though, it wasn’t. You had to enter through a covered wooden walkway splotched in ossified repairs that began far from the old front entrance and, under the uneven weight of many steps, had warped so badly that stagnant water oozed between the weak floorboards like doughnut filling. After sidestepping a damp area of sludgy water in your nonwaterproof footwear, you ended up in that very same lobby where you had once eaten ice cream before seeing Irony of Fate. In the dimness (the filthy windows glowed like blank frames from an old film), the gray columns still stood, like shadows, each as if between two mirrors coated by time, and walking up to one of them and not seeing your own reflection in the nearest one, you suddenly felt the emptiness of this architectural cave, even if the ruin was full of people who had bought their thirty-ruble tickets next to the old refreshment stand. The stand—apart from Dr. Kuznetsov’s assistant, of whom all you could see were his quick white hands and low-bent bald spot—was decorated with a monster of a machine that had happened to survive and had three, spectrally gray cylinders for selling fruit juices, of which one was blacker than the others and of a color reminiscent of a burned-out lightbulb. The conversations between the people waiting impatiently for the performance to begin seemed to reverberate on the resonant ceiling, which had its own feminine voice and collected the sounds on an invisible lens; finally, a loose-jointed buzzer buzzed.

  Everything in the theater was exactly as it had been during the days of Soviet cinema. The rows of flipped-up wooden chairs, like rows of wooden briefcases, were all mixed up: row five followed row eight and row fifteen was missing altogether. On the other hand, the metal rings of the green plush drapes, which had hardened with age, like canvases painted with stiff oils, clattered exactly as before, and the small yellowed screen was still in place, as if it had collected dust from all the film beams that had ever flickered above viewers’ heads, beams that had once held popular artists—the objects of candidate Krugal’s unjust envy—like cosmonauts in a spaceship flying at the speed of light. Dr. Kuznetsov always arrived ten to fifteen minutes late, forcing the seated hall to spend a long time looking at the coffee table prepared for the maestro and the spindly-legged chair that was too tall for him which, taken together—due to the fact that you could see through this rather contrived composition—reminded you of a magician’s setup. Finally, when the most nervous were starting to think that Kuznetsov had been in the hall for a long time and would materialize any second from the cleverly set-up, supposedly empty set, the long-awaited maestro stepped on stage with his cozy, flannel-soft step. After blowing and spitting at the microphone, which hissed as if it were red hot, the professor told the audience in a slightly muffled voice that the human organism was meant to live for at least one hundred fifty years and that following up on his therapeutic lecture would not only help each person start down the path to longevity but also, through its particular sonic and symbolic components, produce a rejuvenating transfusion of energy not unlike the way his unenlightened colleagues in ordinary clinics performed a routine blood transfusion. Gradually, the warmed-up hall’s discordant wooden creak fell into alignment, like galley oars gnashing or park swings swinging, straining to clear the bar; the gussied-up women, one in four of whom was a Kuznetsova, too, leaned in waves from right to left and left to right, insensibly rubbing soft shoulders and gazing at the maestro with many pairs of eyes deeply set in darkness; ev
ery so often, eyeglasses would flash lemur-like in the swaying rows.

  The professor, who was so marvelous at adjusting his patients to the wooden-lattice milieu their bodies were inside, was unusually convincing because of his appearance as well. His large face was made up of parts that looked sanded, without any wrinkles whatsoever, and between these broad patches of youth lay winding darknesses that also looked sanded, darknesses that retained the professor’s age, like soil in the cracks of a polished stone. From a distance, the caprice of these dark deposits made his face look like jasper. Even more convincing was the appearance on the stage of Kuznetsov’s assistant, who, the maestro swore, had recently turned sixty. The youthful, languid blonde, sky-high tall, her ears sticking out of her limp locks, ears that in turn had silly gold earrings sticking out from them, like fishhooks, was not only long-lived but also a famous poetess. After she was announced, she strode nonchalantly downstage (the front rows distinctly heard the blonde’s big feet scuffing against each other under the crushed evening gown, whose only adornments were a few crude rhinestones), brought a thin passport-sized book right up to her eyes, and began in a mournful, nasal singsong to recite a poem about dark passion and a glass of red wine, about the evening seas and a youth of antiquity with curls like tea rose petals whom the poetess reproached for cruelty and the loss of certain important keys described with a metalworker’s precision. After pausing, like a little bird, to feed on the crumbs of applause skipping through the rows, the professor informed the quieted audience that the poems of his talented companion not only possessed great artistic merit but also, by virtue of the energy they contained, healed various illnesses, from women’s ailments to neuroses, and suggested that sufferers send him anonymous notes to the stage.

  Immediately, the now buzzing hall sprang to life, and more notes were sent to the stage than the professor could possibly get through by the performance’s end. However, after sorting through the squares and scrolls of paper with his usual knack (the long-lived assistant meanwhile stood perfectly still like an impenetrable barrier on the path to any human thought about her therapeutic poetry), he handed out the most frequent diagnoses and took over supervising the reading entirely. He said that an elegy edged on the right by an elegant ornament to the rhyme and having as its subject a recent kiss in a lyric garden as unnatural as a flower shop helped the stomach; for high blood pressure, a ballad was read, a long one, like a multiplication table, in which two medieval kings, one handsome and the other ugly, multiplied endlessly in tessellated rhymed quatrains and deep secret mirrors—and what the languishing Kuznetsovas in the audience listened to for appendicitis was a treasure house, so easily was everything the long-lived assistant’s pen touched transformed into emeralds and rubies. Even a common sparrow, which for some reason had flown into these poetic skies covered with a frightening moiré of clouds, became at the poetess’s word a golden figurine and, one had to suppose, was immediately plunked into the common treasure chest.

  No one understood why such vivid happiness spilled from the stage. The women who were offered something that was simultaneously a cure for illnesses and about love had the vague feeling that they were getting exactly what they wanted. Others had hysterics. A chubby, likeable woman on whose cheeks’ tear tracks sparkled like tinsel nearly rushed the stage to sing. She was nabbed before she could and blanketed in polite murmuring by the professor’s assistant, who materialized out of the dimness not all at once but one distinct contrasting part at a time, kind of like a movie. It cost the professor no small effort to bring the audience to relative order. He stood on tiptoe and waved his arms as if he were trying to hang an invisible towel on a high branch. Finally, after restoring quiet, Dr. Kuznetsov moved on to the most important part of his performance and reported on the essence of a personal discovery he had made. No, he uttered solemnly, strutting in front of the screen on one side and the audience on the other (moreover, the screen reflected him no less closely than the raised faces), there was no universal recipe for longevity. What people said today about breathing exercises and the necessity of drinking cold and warm water alternately was undoubtedly beneficial and would help each of us, and everyone sitting in that hall would get noticeably younger in the coming years. But in order to achieve the ideal correlation to one’s true age (here the audience turned their gazes to the rosy, sixty-year-old blonde with cheeks like two jars of jam), an individualized health regimen was desirable, along with special blank verse composed for each person separately. Those who were prepared to take care of themselves comprehensively the professor invited to his personal consultations in such and such a room at the North Hotel. He also informed them that his estimable assistant’s book would be available for sale in the lobby as they exited.

  There was something inexpressibly seductive in the professor’s performances. Because they took place in the Progress catacombs (the professor was exceptionally sensitive to his environment’s emanations), the more mysterious cinematic effects were emphasized all the more distinctly—along with stage effects picked up, like an infection, from some variety show. Thus, individual lady patients imagined there was no Dr. Kuznetsov in the hall at all, there was just a depiction on the dusty screen that, like a flock of silly butterflies, could land on everything that fell into the film beam; others subconsciously saw in the healer an art scholar introducing before the viewing that same film about love in which they had always dreamed of playing the heroine, and now their dream was finally about to come true. The professor’s work in the district could also be compared to the work of the early days of cable television, when the business’s pioneers would run several American films a night; at the time it seemed as if real life, in watercolor due to the low quality of the pirated cassettes, was just about to begin here, too, that each person would be like Sharon Stone or Arnold Schwarzenegger, and if someone still had material problems, then they would be measured in the millions of dollars.

  Now, in some unfathomable way, romantic hopes had returned to human hearts, which in District 18 were like fruits in a Garden of Eden. Candidate Apofeozov, having acquired a private house and a Mercedes by his talents, so praised by the press, was a genuine hero of the new era in which low-level managers and the unemployed, homemakers and the homeless had all of a sudden come to believe. Even though for all these ten years most residents hadn’t been able to break away from the gloom of their miserable apartments, which had rusted like enamel basins, their family jalopies, and all the Soviet goods they’d acquired, which were now worthless and screamed their fantastic unreality from every corner and at every step—Apofeozov, endowed with an indestructible will for actual reality, became what every inhabitant of the district should have become had it not been for the illusory quagmire of the everyday, of habits, of outmoded professions. Only Apofeozov, whose tie pin cost so much as to become an almost magical object, could represent the district in the Duma; Apofeozov was loved the way people could love an American president running in District 18. Professor Kuznetsov’s experiments (his female patients, after spending time with him in the hotel, returned covered in gooseflesh, as if they’d been rolled in semolina, and for a while would express themselves exclusively in verse) promised each person not only longevity and an extended youth but in essence the rescinding of their past life. Each could now start over, from childhood if they liked, which is what happened with many. Immediately several stores, including Athens Furs, were robbed with the help of cap guns—good-looking hunks of metal, caps that clicked loudly like smelly tiddlywinks—after which the Athens window, decorated with marble copies of gods and heroes dressed in fur coats, started looking tediously like the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. Children’s World, in turn, enjoyed brisk sales of metal and plastic toy guns, so that Nina Alexandrovna, wandering there as before in vague search of a Young Magician’s Set that might distract the veteran from his magnetic rope play, was struck by how empty the department was, like frontline positions abandoned by a retreating army. Only tin soldiers, like spent car
tridges, lolled on the shelves, which were cleared back to the wall. The sleek manager who was loitering for some reason behind a bare counter looked shell-shocked, and his smile, which automatically popped up whenever a customer got close enough, made no sense at all.

  Actually, no insanity could surprise Krugal’s campaign headquarters: things happened here that made the performances at the outwardly invisible Progress Cinema seem like sweetness and light. Professor Shishkov’s plan, which had seemed at first like the model of a brilliant economy of means, had become a black hole. The top estimate for the cost to ensure victory for his candidate had been left in the distant past. In the basement, whose walls, rubbed by the human mass’s slow scuffling, had changed from latte to dirty pink, insane sums were handed out every day. Professor Shishkov lost weight and firmly avoided discussions of their prospects, and his gestures and expressions were like a Moebius strip. Twice, without telling anyone, Shishkov took the red-eye to Moscow and brought back sponsor cash obtained in exchange for secret promises. But even these fat packets, which in the beginning had looked like a reserve, were snapped up like ice cream bars during a hot spell, and the district residents kept coming. The slightest delay opening headquarters in the morning, and the outside metal door would start to boom under the pounding of fists, and individuals would squat at the windows—where you could barely see strips of slanted light, like the edges of sheets in half-open drawers—impatient: their inverted faces looked down, into the inverted little world of the headquarters basement, and for some reason these people seemed like giants, their hanging heads looking into a dollhouse standing defenseless before them.