The Man Who Couldn't Die Page 3

  She quickly ceased to understand altogether what it meant to earn money now. When she picked up her pension, she occasionally ran into people she’d known who everyone had once considered crafty and clever at getting along and who were now fussy men in big-assed Chinese down jackets and ladies with imploring eyes wearing balding Astrakhan fur and remnants of metal-intensive Soviet jewelry, crude rhombi of scarlet and cornflower blue stones that still sparkled. If these practical people hadn’t been able to adapt to the new goods-and-money reality, which had the metabolism of a shrew and always seemed to have swallowed something greater than its own weight, then what could you expect of Nina Alexandrovna, who had always been too timid to understand how life actually worked? Basically, she had to rely on others, in exchange agreeing to do work that was the same day in and day out. Had she stayed on at the job to which pensioners who had greatly overstayed their time continued to cling, listlessly turning voracious pencil sharpener handles for entire days at a time, she could never have withstood the abrupt change in the frenzied bosses, the bickering over the rare paid orders, the quiet gambling with office shares, thanks to which the former director, who’d been fired for renting out space as a chemical storeroom, suddenly returned as the owner of all six now quiet floors of the building. As it turned out, Nina Alexandrovna had left at exactly the right moment and now could look after Alexei Afanasievich without asking her bosses for twenty extra minutes at lunch. She kept telling herself she wasn’t lonely and her family needed her more now.

  Her son-in-law, Seryozha, who one would think would become the modest family’s breadwinner and head, hadn’t been able to put his two incomplete degrees to any use, though, and worked as a guard at a parking lot one day out of three, always returning with the fresh, though no stronger than usual, smell of alcohol. This thirty-three-year-old, medium-tall, smooth-shaven, and already practically bald man looked strangely like an anatomical plaster cast, a kind of popular-science example of man in general. To his wife’s caustic comments made every time her husband rashly set his small, elegant hands to housework, Seryozha responded with the placid smile of that anesthetized shade that one sees on models in anatomical atlases displaying their crimson interwoven musculature like Laocoonian snakes. On his days off, Seryozha preferred to quietly disappear, sometimes not showing up until dawn, cautiously fumbling with his keys and the loose-fitting locks. He would turn on the stealthy light in the front hall that penetrated the rooms around the corner, from time to time leaving under the mirror some money of unspecified origin, which Marina, before going to work, would disdainfully scoop into her wallet. A few years before, Seryozha had tried to go into business, threading wooden “talismen” that looked like wormy mushrooms onto leather cords and trying to sell them in the wet-leafed square in front of the city’s only picture gallery, where they sold all kinds of rubbish—from pulpy landscapes in polished frames heavy enough to be called furniture to wire rings with teardrop stones complete with horoscopes. By way of encouraging this crafts business—not that she had much of a choice—Marina even wore a piece of jewelry her husband had given her for a while—a lacquered semblance of a quasi-human ear that rubbed rust-brown warts on her white synthetic sweater. Naturally, his trading—out of a dilapidated painter’s case (borrowed from one of his distant acquaintances to serve as a counter and to create the right atmosphere)—came to naught. Now the leftover goods, wrapped in old newspaper that had dried out like birch bark, were lying under the bed—and the failed artisan had yet to demonstrate the slightest inclination for taking up anything else.

  Of the entire family, only Marina had not given up. One day Nina Alexandrovna turned around and her plump blond teenager, whose face had always seemed to be smeared with berry juice, had become a shapely young woman swathed in a black, cheaply shiny, synthetic business suit. Marina had always been a top student in high school, university, and journalism school, but there was always something important missing from her top grades and her extensive journalistic articles, which always began, as she was taught, with some lurid detail—the way a clumsy draftsman, wishing to depict a standing figure, starts with the nose and eyebrows but then it comes out wrong and just doesn’t fit on the page—but for many of Marina’s fellow students who had no idea where to put their commas, their careers had yielded exceptional results. People who had copied off her during tests, devotedly breathing over her shoulder, now had jobs on newspapers generously patronized by the authorities and had even become dapper little bosses, whereas Marina, with her special “Red” diploma, toiled away freelance in the news department of a third-rate TV studio located in a bankrupted House of Fashion, where bolts of thick brown woolen cloth moldered away on wooden shelves in the storerooms and a pink mannequin with breasts like knees gathered dust. Marina put in a full workday, the same as staff—three or four stories plus editing—but they paid her only a fee, which came out less than what they paid the spiteful, muggy-eyed janitor who was constantly grumbling about all the cables on her floor. Marina tried to do a talk show interviewing local and visiting crazies on a generic orange set left over from some old kiddie show that was unclaimed due to the walls’ radical color, which made the commentators’ youthful faces look like scrambled eggs. All the set had were big plastic cubes interspersed with collapsing cardboard equipment boxes, half-liter cans filled with cigarette butts, and a shabby bracket off which square women’s jackets hung, like pillows with sleeves. But Marina devised a way to use the wretched interior. During the broadcast, she and her guest kept reseating themselves from one cubic meter to the next (the camera dispassionately registered Marina rocking from side to side, freeing up her skirt), and goggling puppets would pop out from behind the other colored cubes and make comments, their mitten-like knit faces gasping for air. Unfortunately, this original project, which poor Marina, on the air herself at last, took pride in for a few weeks, didn’t attract any advertising, and Studio A’s director, a fat, angry young man by the name of Kukharsky, who had a beard like a wasp snarl (his uncle, whose name was Apofeozov, headed up a fairly powerful municipal department), gave Marina’s show the ax.

  That evening, Marina was a dreadful sight—especially to Nina Alexandrovna, who hadn’t dared touched her daughter in a long time and didn’t know what her hair—dyed so many times, now just bits of yellowish chaff remaining from what used to be chicken fluff—felt like now. Marina sat at the kitchen table in silence. Her eyes were coated with the same ghastly film as the untouched bowl of soup in front of her. She sat without moving a muscle, but there were changes brewing in her, and for a minute Nina Alexandrovna even thought that Marina’s immobility had the same quality and was filled with the same mysterious, immured will as the immobility of Alexei Afanasievich, who lay three walls away with a clump of oatmeal in his mouth and an overturned baby doll in his twisted hand. Marina’s husband Seryozha, evidently sensing something similar, silently stretched out from behind the crowded table, one part at a time, flashed past in the front hall, and threw on his raincoat, as if trying to cover himself from head to toe. Marina turned her large white face only slightly and blankly watched him go—and Nina Alexandrovna abruptly remembered seeing Marina and Seryozha as a solemn wedding couple, brand-new out of the box, as it were, and because of that immediately realized they were never going to have children.

  At that moment, as she was not shy to explain at home, Marina joined battle for her place in the sun, a battle every self-respecting person ought to wage. Continuing to hold on at Studio A (by the skin of her teeth, clinging by just her long nails and steel-tapped stiletto heels), she recruited contributors and intrigued against young Kukharsky, whose removal required bringing down no less than Apofeozov himself—over whom billowing clouds of financial scandal were gathering with the change in the local weather. Mixed up in this was an investment fund that had soaked up every last drop of a multimillion ruble government loan, and a pair of other nephews loomed up, too, obscure figures of unproven kinship but very much alike, with ugly sau
cers for faces on which something resembling assembled features were drawn only in the middle, the rest being free space—and both had been caught stealing. The opposition press dragged in the nephews—whom they referred to as “businessmen”—for interviews one by one, but essentially nothing came of it. Clever fellows who repudiated each other nearly to the point of refusing to believe in each other’s existence, they turned out to be like the two reels of a tape recorder with the tape running between them and broadcasting a recorded text. Apofeozov himself, a thoroughbred of a man, although rather dog-like in appearance, who had wrapped himself up in menace, suddenly became captivating and marvelous. Ornate shadows played on his broad face, a face made of some rich material, turning first to the left and then to the right; his double-breasted suits fit superbly, and his amber, slightly prominent eyes gazed out so penetratingly that TV viewers lost their sense of the materiality of the television and screen that separated them from the politician. While giving interviews exclusively to his own people, Apofeozov appeared on air so often that he saturated the air, which when he exhaled it became strangely itchy and astringent. Time and again, Apofeozov’s invisible presence sent a noisy, gleaming wave out over the tree leaves, and even when there was no wind, it was as if some spirit were whirling up a tail of dust from the asphalt and solemnly kissing the dusty surface of an enervated pond as heavy as a velvet flag. Apofeozov’s spirit hovered everywhere, as if he himself had died; love letters poorly disguised as political statements started filling his mailbox thick and fast, to the secret annoyance of his longstanding secretary, who looked like an aging Pinocchio and was totally sexless.

  A worthy enemy was even found for Apofeozov: someone named Shishkov, a politician and PhD, long-legged and long-faced, like a chess king, who previously had raged at exams and thundered on perestroika discussion tribunes and who now owned a chain of pelmeni shops where he himself demonstratively ate the little dumplings, dabbing at his thin but vivid lips with a vast number of napkins taken from plastic cups. Ever the top student, Marina felt a spiritual kinship to this crafty and crazy professor who had bet an uncompromising experiment on his own ailing stomach—to say nothing of the fact that Shishkov had definitely promised his former student, if he won, the position of deputy director at Studio A with a nice percentage from advertising and a salary of six hundred adjusted rubles. By the most modest estimates, this promised money was more than twenty paralyzed Alexei Afanasieviches could bring the family. Marina (who didn’t know that the studio’s future director had already been readied in the provinces, a grim, unrecognized poet determined to redo everything according to his own lights) had something to fight for. All means were now good: at secret meetings over brown tea and soggy crackers, realistic compromising material was developed out of the raw material they’d gleaned, material that asserted, for example, that through his nephews Apofeozov personally had stolen more than seven hundred thousand American dollars (in reality it was three million three hundred, which no one knew for certain, even Apofeozov himself, who rather embarrassingly couldn’t add a million four hundred and a million nine in his head). Using money from a friendly bank, they placed specific, conjecturally toned articles in the central press that were then rerun in local papers, which cited the authoritative source. Marina had a lot on her plate. Now she would come home in various cars that cautiously pulled up to the front door closer to twelve o’clock, and something truly reptilian appeared in her grin. She paid no attention at all to her husband, whether present or absent, while strangely, as Apofeozov’s enemy, she became alluringly pretty. Even before this she’d been proud that her suit was two sizes smaller than the sweaty denim things she’d worn as a university student, but now she’d grown quite thin and she’d hung around her waist a wide black patent leather belt with a buckle that looked like the lock on a respectable firm’s door. Now, when she passed through the studio halls on her scuffed stilettos, breathing shallowly through her inflamed, hastily lipsticked mouth, lots of men took a second look—and one time Shishkov himself, sitting one empty seat away at the secret conference table, ceremoniously pulled her over sideways and allowed himself one fatherly kiss that smelled of pelmeni.

  Nina Alexandrovna looked at Marina through new eyes, too. This harassed woman she only half knew, who it had become almost impossible to touch physically, had become a kind of vision, a domestic apparition. They seemed to be showing her daughter on television but never allowing a visit, when she could quietly fix her daughter’s unattractive black collar or just stroke her hand, which lay heavily on the oilcloth until her half-bent middle finger suddenly started jumping, like a key on a broken player piano, at which point Marina would make a fist and gather it firmly into her other hand—but the tic would skip to her face, where fine, sensitive threads took to dancing. “Mama, lay off,” she would mutter through her teeth, even though Nina Alexandrovna hadn’t said anything. She silently heaped up pan-fried patties made from sticky cheap ground meat and suddenly remembered, for instance, ten-year-old Marina flying in from the yard with her hair ribbon in a tangle and a black busted knee shouting from the doorway, “Mama, leave me alone!” Nina Alexandrovna very much disliked these new nerves and the artificial thinness and flaccid shadows, and she couldn’t stop her imagination from convincingly ascribing a whole set of hidden illnesses to her daughter. But she didn’t dare ask Marina to spend time on doctors, who in the heat of battle she could perceive only as new enemies. Meanwhile, Nina Alexandrovna’s imagined ulcer became as much a reality for her as her husband the paralytic with whom she had to live. Occasionally at night, as she lay on her crooked cot, which smelled like old canvas, and listened to Alexei Afanasievich’s body close by, above her, to his soft, bubbling snore, Nina Alexandrovna allowed herself to dream that everything might still work out and she might have a grandchild. Sometimes she heard odd noises coming from the next room, sounds Marina and Seryozha were obviously producing together. Nina Alexandrovna couldn’t explain the nature of those sounds, which suggested nothing organic or bodily and definitely not human speech, just iron squealing, wooden creaking, a pencil cup clattering to the floor—as if the four-legged pieces of furniture were battling and butting each other in their owners’ absence (although they were in fact there).

  The heartrending emptiness, which pressed in and gnawed at itself, frightened Nina Alexandrovna so badly that she crossed herself under her blanket, clumsily planting her pinched fingers on her wrinkled brow. And in the morning the faces of her daughter and son-in-law were different, as if they’d never seen each other before. Leaning against the window, which was covered with rain, like bird poop, Marina gulped down her unsweetened kefir and ran off to work, leaving her cloudy, dripping glass on the cold windowsill. Only then, nicely steamed from his shower and blotchy red from the hot water, did Seryozha come into the kitchen wearing a clinging t-shirt—and Nina Alexandrovna, pushing toward him the plate of turnovers Marina had totally ignored, thought that the only reason her son-in-law hadn’t become a real drinker was that for some reason his exemplary, never-ailing organism wouldn’t let him. Separated from the world by an insuperable physiological sobriety, her son-in-law apparently kept running into a transparent wall and was quite incapable of breaking his habit of drinking the same weak beer and ironing his own worn-out synthetic shirts so that they smelled like scorched loneliness. Sometimes, attentive Nina Alexandrovna noticed her son-in-law trying to take an interest in his surroundings: he would run his eyes over the lines of the fat books opened in front of him at a right angle that seemed to be leaning into the corner of some separate room, or tune in the transistor radio, which sounded like it had a cold, and force himself to listen to what was happening on every elusive station he caught through the thick of the static. Every so often, Nina Alexandrovna thought that her son-in-law was making a conscious effort, tensing his gaze, and was on the verge of having a good talk with Marina, and her heart would melt sweetly, as if a declaration of love were in the works. But the moment would pass, th
e spark would go out, and Marina herself would invariably spoil the occasion, bestowing a sarcastic grin on her husband or demonstratively starting to wash dishes so that the abruptly turned-on water would bubble up and spill into the sink along with the grease and food scraps. In those moments, Nina Alexandrovna’s son-in-law’s mirror eyes seemed to see everything twice as big as it was; she had also noticed for some time that Seryozha had acquired the habit of shrugging his shoulders even when no one was talking to him.

  It had been Marina’s idea. Keep Alexei Afanasievich from finding out about the changes in the outside world. Keep him in the same sunny yet frozen time when the unexpected stroke had cut him down. “Mama, his heart!” Marina had pleaded, having grasped instantly that, no matter how burdensome this recumbent body might be, it consumed far less than it contributed. Initially, clear-eyed Marina may have been moved by more than primitive practicality. There had been a period of infatuation between her and her stepfather, when the little girl would crawl all over Alexei Afanasievich, who seemed as big as a tree to her. She would go through all his pockets and invariably find chocolates planted there for her. Alexei Afanasievich taught her how to fish and how to toss plywood rings on a post. Once the two of them had cleaned out every last gaudy toy with the digger claw on a Czech grab-n-go. All that lasted about a year. For a while, the dragonfly pond out back of their brand-new nine-story apartment building had sucked on their two red-and-white fishing floats as if they were pacifiers; by the next summer, the pond had turned into a swamp plastered poison green with plants—and now there were stalls on the spot. Marina couldn’t forget this entirely, at least not until that rather bizarre moment when, a month after Brezhnev’s television death, she hung a medal-strewn, beetle-browed portrait of that official paragon on the wall.