The Man Who Couldn't Die Page 23

  Meanwhile, with the part of her long-distance hearing not completely taken up by Klumba’s decibels, Nina Alexandrovna sensed that the door to Alexei Afanasievich’s room was open. The saga of the criminal elections, which could not compare to the benefits rep’s dangerous comments and contradicted everything the paralyzed man had been told and shown over the past fourteen years, was penetrating there quite freely. It was as if some solid membrane had burst and Nina Alexandrovna clearly heard the sick man’s quiet, guttural bursts, as she did the slow creaks of the chainmail mesh that suddenly had tensed with an abundant clank, as if Alexei Afanasievich had risen from his bed. That was impossible, of course, but his event-free time had obviously not withstood the press of events conveyed to the damaged Red Corner, leaving no hope whatsoever of restoring that bubble of immortality. Feverishly casting about for how to deal with this situation now, Nina Alexandrovna had the cowardly thought that Alexei Afanasievich wouldn’t be able to ask—and the simplest thing would be to hush up this kitchen row between women without going into explanations. But then she realized that then she would have to treat Alexei Afanasievich like an inanimate object. Never again would they be able to speak in the language of floating electrical figures, never again would that wordless physical understanding be restored that is known only to people who have cared for the half-alive bodies of paralyzed and comatose partners for many years and have learned a thing or two about the characteristics of their invisible presence independent of the body. Evidently, Nina Alexandrovna would somehow have to find the words and overcome the shame of her years-long deception, so insulting for the veteran, and chronicle the changes for Alexei Afanasievich. She could not imagine a situation in which Alexei Afanasievich, who had never faltered before anything in this world, including street thugs and capricious bosses, would forgive this cowardice of saving the Brezhnev portrait and hanging it up for him as a symbol. Looking at Klumba, who had rifled all the way through the lists and held her nail firmly on a line she’d found, Nina Alexandrovna mentally saw the dust of immortality, like poplar fluff, being removed from the match that had finally burned down and fallen from the veteran’s fingers. The transparent flame, eating a clean, sootless hole in the white substance, bared what was there in fact: old furniture cracked and filmed over from long years of polishing, the crazy little TV set, the broken spider toy no longer capable of jumping but only wheezing dull rubber air, and the worn baby doll lying in wait in the blanket’s folds.

  “So you mean you don’t believe your daughter stole twelve thousand rubles?” Klumba’s harsh voice snapped Nina Alexandrovna out of her reverie and brought her back to the kitchen. “It’s supposed to be distributed according to these lists, but the lists, it turns out, here they are, and you’re wrapping herring in them. Look: number ninety-four, A. A. Kharitonov. Your old man is supposed to get a subsidy, too, and they brought him food, and they would have brought money, only Marina Borisovna had no shame. You have to look for it. Dig through her closets! Not just twelve thousand, you’ll find even more! There’s a good reason the people at headquarters kept beating around the bush and slipping money up their sleeves. People stood in line for days to get their due, and these people probably signed for its receipt! Now the canvassers are supposed to get a bonus and the headquarters isn’t paying out anything, while your daughter has hundreds of thousands under her panties and beads, so you go look, just to satisfy yourself, or you and your old man aren’t going to get anything!” Pain pulled tight on Nina Alexandrovna’s entire shoulder, like a sturdy belt fastened on the last hole; her left arm, lying like a log on the table, went totally numb to the point that there was just a weak Morse code being tapped out in her fingers. Looking at line ninety-four, where Alexei Afanasievich and their home address and telephone had been written down in an unfamiliar, cramped handwriting, Nina Alexandrovna felt this whole story—heretofore abstract with all its headquarters, politicians, and invalids—suddenly take on an incontrovertible reality. “Your apartment is stuffed with money, but I’ll give you your pension. I’m not a thief,” Klumba stated sarcastically, jamming the scattered lists into her bulging bag. “I’ll look in on the old man and tell him separately how his subsidy was stolen from him. Maybe then Marina Borisovna won’t have the gall to spend it all on herself and there’ll be at least one invalid her philanthropy will reach.” With these words, the benefits rep, her lips drawn into a tube and her printed roses getting closer together and farther apart in the agitation of her bodily folds, headed for the hallway. The way before her was perfectly free—so free that Nina Alexandrovna even thought Klumba might fall through that freedom as if it were an open hatch. In any event, she heard the unmasker stumble and gasp and slap her hand hard against the wall.

  Nina Alexandrovna had to follow her—if not to avert her scandalous monologue then at least to be present. But right then, for the first time, she experienced a physical pain that wouldn’t let her stand up. A strap was strangling her left shoulder, as if some very heavy weight were hanging from it—and every attempt Nina Alexandrovna made to stand on her buckling legs led only to her head tightening up, peeling and ringing, like a firmly inflated ball being struck. So that meant Marina was going to be tried. Of course, she didn’t take the money. Of course, all this would be cleared up. She just had to sit here a bit and then stand. Suddenly a scream reached Nina Alexandrovna—not even a scream but a triumphant wail broken by snatches of independently babbling, hottish air, that even on the inhale continued, inhuman sounds like the hollow vibrations of a water pipe. In that first moment, Nina Alexandrovna thought she was the one screaming, with both her hands pressing on her ears, listening to the bubbles whooshing. Then she realized that the scream was coming from the paralyzed man’s room, and she jumped up on light feet, as if she were young again.

  The hallway led in an unfamiliar direction, as if Nina Alexandrovna were running through a train car listing hard on the turn, and while hurrying through the train on light feet, she inexplicably lagged behind its speed of motion and was thrown into the small table as the telephone started ringing softly. At last she struggled through the half-open door and saw the scene she seemed to have had in her mind a second before. Klumba, unrecognizable, was screaming. She had nearly collapsed. Her mouth, sucking in air, was open in idiotic astonishment, and she couldn’t take her eyes—disturbed and cloudy, like water in a glass just used for rinsing a watercolor brush—off Alexei Afanasievich, who was lying inert in a freely thrown noose. The vital color had drained very quickly from the veteran’s face, which was oddly heavy, his eye sockets sunken. Even though the rope hadn’t pulled tight and, impregnated with tar, was bulging under his chin, Nina Alexandrovna suddenly realized that she did not see the watermark that signaled life in her husband’s myopically blurred face. Instantly she was at his bedside throwing back the blanket. A limp rubber toy jumped out and slammed to the floor with a bruised squeak. Putting her trembling hand where the scout’s unfailing heart had always beat, like a simple two-stroke engine, Nina Alexandrovna felt nothing. There was only a final minty pain that licked her palm and dissolved into emptiness.

  If in the next few minutes someone (not Klumba, who had sunk to the floor with a moan) had observed the room from the heavens, say, he would have been amazed to see a disheveled old woman straddling a long old man on her bared bluish knees, jumping frenziedly and periodically dropping to his bared mouth. Nina Alexandrovna didn’t know the rules of artificial respiration or CPR. She pressed down on his slippery basket of ribs with the same desperate strength she used to plunge blocked toilet lines. After a few presses—she couldn’t count them—she breathed a hot bubble into his slimy gray mouth, which was already sticking to his firm teeth, but the bubble disappeared behind the veteran’s cheek. The more force she applied, the more clearly she felt that she and Alexei Afanasievich were communicating vessels and that the tightest stopper was in her head. Finally, it became clear to her that the obstruction couldn’t be breached. Slowly, Nina Alexandrovna tumb
led over on her side and lay on her husband’s pillow, staring very closely at his elongated profile, at the firm little scar of unknown origin, white on the veteran’s neck, at the sharp wrinkle under his dangling tuft of gray hair, like an important line drawn by a nail. All this, infinitely precious, was already disappearing, melting away, becoming the past. Cautiously holding his head, which had become heavy and hard, like a sealed vessel filled with treasure, Nina Alexandrovna removed the worthless noose. So there had been no artificial death. At that moment she heard the woman who had kept the veteran from suicide fumbling around on the floor and shuffling her soft feet, in an effort to sit up.

  “Get me something to drink,” Klumba rasped quietly with her flaccid vocal cords as she climbed, like a fat grasshopper everted every which way, onto the armchair with the knitting and needles. Beside the bed, for Alexei Afanasievich to wash down his medicine, was a faceted glass of boiled water; Nina Alexandrovna hastily straightened her ridden-up robe and brought the glass, which seemed to retain a weak dilution of his vanished life, to that strange being half-recumbent in the chair. Instead of taking what she’d been brought, Klumba grabbed Nina Alexandrovna’s hand hard and began disgorging a soft milky bile into the offered water. This wasn’t Klumba anymore. Her small, symmetrical eyes had become inhumanly identical (the left and right could have switched places without any disturbance) and looked as if they were seeing several layers of the things around her. Her features were strangely smoothed out, and her fluffy curls, which her fingers kept getting stuck in as if she were doing this for the first time in her life, looked like a wig.

  Nina Alexandrovna now almost understood what had happened. In order for the man who couldn’t die to die, there had to be a reason—which was not just the broadcast from the kitchen. Alexei Afanasievich’s heart clearly wasn’t as strong as everyone had supposed. His attempts to get into the noose (and those tarry laces that had appeared on the headboard from out of nowhere undoubtedly held death) had pretty much worn out the perishable two-stroke mechanism. When Alexei Afanasievich finally curtailed the millimeters separating him from the finish line, his heart, which was human after all, probably fell morbidly out of sync. Today, when it all came together—the obedience of his loyal instrument unexpectedly seized by his fingers, the proximity of the beauty in the hood looking at him not sideways, as once to the merry Bengal-fire crackling of a German submachine gun, but straight in the eye, and the sudden discovery of a different, outrageous reality that the veteran could no longer connect to his own authentic life, where he was always and eternally alive—a burning nettle had lashed his heart. The female scream that had come out of that fuzzy being who didn’t look like his stepdaughter or his calm wife, who always warned of her appearance with a shining message from her guileless brain, had given him the push he needed to complete his adrenalin leap into nonbeing.

  But that wasn’t even the whole picture. There was still one last, almost incredible coincidence that enabled the veteran to surmount the elastic wall separating him from death and to pass through the only needle’s eye that fate had left him. The moment the agitated Klumba saw the “old man” in the noose and ready to head off to heaven’s pastures, her scream was the hysterics of a public-spirited woman in whose mind symbols and “literature” coincided very poorly with reality, which had suddenly declared unjust war on Klumba. The mechanism of someone else dying, which had already been set in motion and made its test run, suddenly echoed inside her in a rush of harsh and tremendous darkness—and after that, everything went smoothly. There were no further obstacles to Alexei Afanasievich dying. The rare, blessed gift of empathy made Klumba (who was Klumba no longer) the immortal man’s last helper, and in a way her visceral awareness of what was happening helped the veteran retain his authenticity to the very last moment and to move along intact to where he was met by a waiting God and a military band. Now the quaking woman, who had been splashed by the water in the glass the way a dancing ripple splashes a clumsy swimmer, was possibly the sole person in the world to have been honored with the knowledge of what death is. Finally, she stretched her neck up as if over the surface of the ripple and swallowed. “He died,” the woman said, gasping for breath. “Yes, I know,” Nina Alexandrovna replied, wiping the woman’s face and wet chest, where crystalline drops of saliva sparkled like dew. Now she understood that all was well. Alexei Afanasievich’s motionless eyes, clouded by the white powder of immortality, were staring at the ceiling. Trying not to press too hard, Nina Alexandrovna closed her husband’s viscous, not quite shut eyelids, which left a very small amount of cold, prickly moisture on her fingers.

  A fine white dust lingered here and there in the bared room—on the floor under the trophy bed, on the metal frame of the official portrait where medal-bearing Brezhnev was half-covered with a burning gleam in the broken glass—and now she suddenly noticed how the sturdy Soviet cardboard had yellowed and desiccated over all these years. There was a little more dust in the sunbeam. It stratified there, dry and whitish, like strong smoke from cheap tobacco. In order for everything to appear the way it really was, the modest participants in this story had to learn just a few things involving the lost pension, the lost nephew, and something else. As for Alexei Afanasievich, he had already found out much more than Nina Alexandrovna could have informed him of in human words, and so there was no call to doubt his forgiveness; his invisible presence was felt in everything.

  Suddenly, Nina Alexandrovna understood. Alexei Afanasievich had been standing behind her reading the copy of the newspaper hidden behind the breadbox; he had been listening to the radio without a radio and watching a TV show; and he had been awkwardly touching her soul–with the exact same rough touch of the back of his hand with which he had once touched a yellow, badly staining bouquet and stroked Nina Alexandrovna behind the ear the day she first discovered his noose on the headboard of his trophy bed. His presence was so pervasive that at first Nina Alexandrovna took fright, turned around sharply, and saw only a light flutter of dust blissfully transfixed in a powerful, cinema-like beam that cast a fluorescing square onto the room’s wall. Then and there she realized there was nothing to fear. This phenomenon, like any other, undoubtedly had its cause. Evidently, in the fourteen years of their nonverbal communication (Nina Alexandrovna’s daily monologues didn’t count), husband and wife Kharitonov had worked out an understanding that even now for some reason had not gone away. Evidently, their existence at death’s side had been their training. Now the veteran’s heavy body, with his big bones, a body that Nina Alexandrovna, folding the dark, slipping arms over the white ribs, covered with a sheet, bore no direct relation to this understanding—not that that mattered, either. For Nina Alexandrovna, it was clear that when she began visiting Alexei Afanasievich at the cemetery it would be more or less the same as it had been all these years alongside the paralyzed body, this flowerbed of tortured flesh whose juices had merely fed the large cardio root vegetable—because the authentic Alexei Afanasievich continued to exist.

  Meanwhile, the woman in the chair, shifting from side to side, pulled out something soft from under her and with sickly astonishment looked under the bed, where a wobbling ball of yarn had rolled away, flicking its tail. She was gradually regaining her understanding of the world, and she tried to raise up on her unsteady arm and look at her watch. “Just a moment, hold on, just a moment,” Nina Alexandrovna intoned, understanding that she had to call an ambulance—not for Alexei Afanasievich anymore but for him, too, to draw up a death certificate and observe all the other formalities. Almost not shuffling even a little, Nina Alexandrovna hurried to the front hall, where she heard the broken telephone’s nasal drone and a key turning in the door with a deep click.

 

 

 
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