The Man Who Couldn't Die Read online

  No one could say for certain whether their playacting was fooling the sick man, of course. Nina Alexandrovna, at least, thought she picked up a certain agreement, a semblance of approval in the signals emitted by his asymmetrical brain. Of course, Alexei Afanasievich had always not so much liked as considered it proper that his innumerous family wait on him hand and foot, so he may simply have been pleased with their efforts and the theatricalized fuss occasioned by his illness. The pseudo-events, those spectral parasites, began to take increasing hold over the Kharitonovs, though, and feed on them. It was like a change in focus that reveals at least two landscapes in one. Nina Alexandrovna sometimes took fright at the distinct sensation that Brezhnev’s funeral had indeed been a deception, a film someone had spliced together, that the years were still divided into five-year plans and the country, with all its heavy industry, was continuing to build communism in the heavens above—where it was already half ready, its façades glittering. She did get out of the house, of course, and her own glutted eyes did observe the changes: the colorful litter on the street from imported wrappings, which her dream book said meant riches; the abundance in the shop windows of all kinds of meat—from mosaic slivers of pork to candy-pink Finnish sausage—which meant an advantageous marriage; the abundance of private commerce in all kinds of little things, including amazingly cheap Chinese pearls as white as rice, a strand of which Nina Alexandrovna dreamed of from time to time with hopeless emotion—but which the dream book said meant copious and bitter tears. The fact that she had seen all this in her waking hours only intensified the prophetic qualities of the objects that snuck into her field of vision. One day, on her way to the nearby market, Nina Alexandrovna suddenly saw, instead of the elegant minimart, the old grocery’s empty window (a bare bubble routed by competitors the day before yesterday), and on its skewed doors a fresh flyer for a candidate for deputy, a stern comrade with the handsome face of a Saint Bernard, a manager by the looks of him, with a perfect rectangle of biographical text beneath. This remarkably resurrected scene—the fat, sluggish cleaning woman at the back of the store, the black-and-white flyer, the sticky spot and curved glass from a broken vodka bottle on the front steps, which smelled like grapes in the autumn air—suddenly overwhelmed Nina Alexandrovna with such undeniable reality and the reliability of simple things that at the actual market, which seemed like a mirage with empty waving sleeves and buzzing flies, she obliviously paid whatever they asked and returned home to her angry daughter with her purse flat empty.

  In addition to the lady doctor, Evgenia Markovna, who maintained her neutrality and, if she did mutter something under her breath, then it was strictly to herself, there was one other person in the outside world—an extremely dangerous person—who had to be allowed to see the paralyzed man. This was the benefits office representative who brought his pension. Unlike the lady doctor, she was awaited by Marina with nervous impatience. She was the first thing Marina asked about when she came home from work, and if the pension was held up for a few days, Marina’s passionate desire to catch sight from the balcony of the familiar, barrel-shaped figure on tiny feet mincing through the front door brought to mind an intimate love such as Marina had not felt for anyone in the family since everything had ended between her and Seryozha. The benefits rep—whom Marina, in revenge for the conflicting emotions the woman elicited in her, had dubbed Klumba, which means “Flowerbed,” because she always wore flowery prints—had become essential to the family, her face dear to the point of automaticity. This massive lady, whose white collar opened like two notebook pages on her chest, seemed to play a critical personal role in the Kharitonovs’ fate.

  At the same time, Klumba’s penetration to a place where a different time murmured, as if from a loudspeaker and the nasal and erratic clock, inflicted palpable losses on that time, which her visits diluted somehow. Each time, Klumba demanded to “look at grandpa” before handing out the money—she said because these days lots of people were cunning, and in her personal practice there was an instance when a family took money for a dead man for four months. Shaking out her onion-skin-colored curls at the front hall mirror, she walked importantly, following Nina Alexandrovna’s gesture of invitation, to the far room, where she stood in the doorway perfectly still for a minute—after which she returned with a raspberry flush on her porous cheeks and, still not looking up, counted out the bills, letting the money fall into separate piles: a pathetic one for Nina Alexandrovna, and a substantial one for the veteran. “I don’t know how you can live in this smell,” she said in the end, as she stuffed her work papers into her large, messy bag.

  Naturally, there was no smell, nor could there have been. Nina Alexandrovna scrubbed Alexei Afanasievich’s bedpan better than her cooking pots, and his laundered sheets, which were always hung out on the balcony, may have had tiger stripes from old urine, but those stripes had no more smell than the printed roses that decorated the benefits rep’s crimplene dress. Evidently, though, it really did smell here as far as Klumba was concerned: her inflamed nose found the smell of a room sprayed before her arrival with harsh streams of flowery air freshener highly suspicious. Apparently, she feared getting too close to illness and misfortune and had to overcome this fear dozens of times a day, heroically maintaining the crude mosaic of her work face and tapping out her feminine assault with her heels. “My work is nothing but germs,” she said angrily, seeing a sticky spot on Nina Alexandrovna’s gleaming kitchen. In reality, the spot was just a pretext for a fight. On the most carefully cleaned surface, Klumba saw pathogenic microorganisms, whose mere existence—which was, in contrast to the little green men alcoholics see, a scientifically proven fact whose objectivity could not be denied—was quietly driving the woman out of her mind. Nina Alexandrovna frequently noticed the benefits rep stealthily lick her manicured index finger and peck at imagined crumbs. The paralyzed man’s room, where sunlit dust lay on things rendering them both fit for writing with your finger and also oddly empty, like blank pieces of paper, must have seemed to Klumba like a graphic image of the world as she imagined it. More than once after Klumba left, Nina Alexandrovna would uncover stealth commas left by her visitor’s finger in secluded places. Something in this pensioner’s home bothered Klumba, something that had to do with her basic frustration at the everyday, which was why, having just hurried Nina Alexandrovna to sign off, since she still had eighteen more addresses today, she suddenly got stuck halfway into her raincoat and made up for her dismay with loud tirades that she tried to pass off as perfect models of good sense. This went on until the humpbacked old woman from the apartment upstairs, who had been “waiting on her pensun” since six that morning, took the two flights of stairs, measuring the height of each stair with her cane, and started ringing the bell, reminding them there, inside, of a photographer and his camera, both covered with a black cloth and aiming a radiant look at the expressionless object to be photographed.

  Klumba may have viewed her contact with people as an exchange of microbes, and in this sense microbial life was for her a phenomenon more spiritual than medical—what is otherwise called “fluids” or “aura”—only Klumba, a down-to-earth person with a higher education, did not recognize mystical words. Looking at her conventional little mouth, drawn like a cock’s comb (while the old neighbor lady, wielding the pen like a crochet hook, fished up the lost thread of her signature that she’d started, and straightening her scarf with a motion like a kitten washing itself, deposited the money in her purse), Nina Alexandrovna thought that for Klumba, a kiss was probably unsanitary and consequently immoral. In her own way, meanwhile, the benefits rep was not devoid of human emotions. She understood Klumba a little when, beset by monetary worries, Nina Alexandrovna forgot her boiling kettle, which was rattling quietly on the flooded burner, and Klumba grabbed it, boiled dry, with her bare hand. Desperately trying to shake her heavy hand cool, Klumba shouted at Nina Alexandrovna so loudly that the rubber burn that instantly covered her retracted palm felt unbearably icy.

&n
bsp; Klumba’s sympathy mechanism must have worked differently from most people’s. Another person’s pain completely bypassed her soul (which, although it was carried from place to place by this well-balanced, firm-stepping body, was, one had to suppose, a rather small and underdeveloped structure, crowded out by a ponderous liver nearly the size of a saddle) and acted on Klumba physiologically, that is, immediately dropped from the other person’s ailing organ into her healthy one. Although scarcely capable of imagining another person’s loneliness or the agony of unrequited love, Klumba served as the ideal mirror for the sufferings of the flesh and in this respect was defenseless. As she visited disabled and half-destroyed old people in the course of her job, Klumba bore their ailments like fluorescent marks and went on and on about her wards, who inhabited the musty burrows of their disability, as about biting microbes inside a large anthill. At the same time, evidently, Klumba was utterly pitiless. In her faceted eyes set exactly a centimeter apart one read such impatience that the neighbor lady, fumbling along the wall and accidentally turning the light on in the bathroom, preferred to get out before Nina Alexandrovna could get free and drag her upstairs, like a broken bicycle. Sometimes Nina Alexandrovna got the impression that Klumba went from apartment to apartment visiting the old and destitute with the secret goal of destroying this little world, like a parasite infiltrating the city’s healthy organism, as if her knowledge of a disabled person robbed him of his individual existence. Klumba seemed to be fighting unwholesome human wreckage, attaching it to herself and fostering its dependence on her own heroic persona—and by no means just financial dependence. The regime seemed to have robbed pensioners of certain important human characteristics.

  As a rule, Klumba arrived morose and cleared out even more so: her black bag clattered its bottom metal and her nose burned like a lump of coal. But if the benefits rep was in a good mood for any reason, the danger for the next time multiplied. For some reason, raised spirits in her always found expression in loud, abusive tirades against the authorities, which neither respected nor pitied unfortunate old people in the least, forcing them to starve on their miserable crumbs. This heat was stoked by the fact that Klumba was, as a woman and a citizen, a supporter of Valery Petrovich Apofeozov. When she saw his figure at the center of things, the intertwining of national and local branches of authority created an unexpected drawing rich in imagined profiles and—like in magazine picture puzzles—hidden pirates, so much so that the enthusiastic Klumba really did have something to talk about. For her, Valery Apofeozov was not merely a goal but also a means for hating everyone else, especially Muscovites: his existence seemed to give Klumba many additional rights. The voice of a visitor, younger than her by ten or fifteen years, compelled her to rattle and clatter teacups in the kitchen; indeed, the voice itself rattled, borne off toward the sick man’s room on pointy red kitten heels. Breaking off in the middle of a word and convinced that “grandpa” was watching (Alexei Afanasievich’s gaze became perfectly intelligent), Klumba continued without commas from where she’d left off—after which, leaving the door flung open, she could be heard throughout the apartment for a good fifteen minutes. Nina Alexandrovna could only hope that the paralyzed man would take the berated politicians for superintendents or repairmen who had become characters in that humor magazine Crocodile.

  No one knew what season it was in the sick man’s room. In outside time, as has been mentioned, it was autumn. Nina Alexandrovna’s shoes had worn thin and now soaked through in the lightest rain, turning her wet mesh stockings purple. In the evenings she sometimes noticed the same kinds of stains, only black, on her daughter’s feet when she wearily pulled off her wet Italian boots, which had softened to a semblance of stewed prunes—though they’d been bought quite recently. A cold wind had come up very early, in the first few days of September, and started rinsing the earth; the grass, not yellow as yet, became pickle-juice green, and street vendors covered their goods with moisture-dotted clear plastic. The feet of mother and daughter were defenseless against the inclement weather. No matter which pair of shoes, even their winter boots, deep barefoot imprints formed inside. The September pension was marked by the purchase of shared (primarily for Marina, of course) light boots. Waiting for Klumba’s appearance on the twentieth, Nina Alexandrovna sensed a lethargy, a minty numbing, a fist under her left shoulder blade that steadily turned her toward uneasy thoughts about her daughter’s illnesses.

  Klumba showed up looking very businesslike, her makeup damp as if it had been affixed to her focused face with spit, and wearing a soggy wool suit that smelled of sheep. Having glanced as usual into the pale washed room with the paralyzed man in the bluish bed and then returned to the kitchen with her list at the ready, she noticed in passing that “for some reason the grandpa in the bed had a rope.” After counting out the long-awaited money and seeing out her visitor, who spent a long time tucking her smashed curls into her sack-deep velour beret, Nina Alexandrovna hurried to the bedroom, overcome by a strange unease. Nothing special: just the belt from her green robe, which had become a rag long ago. Evidently it had been lying around somewhere and landed on Alexei Afanasievich’s blanket, dragged in by something during housecleaning. Before, too, Nina Alexandrovna had had occasion to leave various things in the paralyzed man’s bed—to say nothing of the fact that Alexei Afanasievich always had a few of his toys there with him: a couple of small dolls and a stuffed rabbit. Nina Alexandrovna had learned long ago, by trial and error, that most ordinary objects were too small or too flat for her husband’s hand and required some dexterity. If he was to pick them up with his mitten-hand, they had to be mainly china figurines: the German beauties and shepherdesses with little flowerlike faces he’d brought back as trophies. Alexei Afanasievich dropped one of them, and it broke into four pieces, and the head, its little cheeks gleaming, rolled under the chair. For some reason, it upset Nina Alexandrovna that when her husband stretched an empty hand out of its imprisonment, a hand that was like a prosthesis compared with his entire dormant body, he could master not real things but just likenesses, the little substitute figures the outside world derisively slipped him, avoiding contact. She took the hint, though. She replaced the china with plastic dolls that Alexei Afanasievich raked up, like a cannibal, and dragged under the blanket headfirst until the smiling little person slipped from his awkward, weakened grasp. Also good were toy rubber whistles that sometimes, in his claw, emitted a raspy, half-stifled squeak, announcing the paralyzed man’s ultimate victory over the inaccessible matter that surrounded him. Today Nina Alexandrovna had planned to buy Alexei Afanasievich something new and as amusing and sweet as possible: the little Chinese dinosaur with the apron-like flannel belly she’d seen the month before in the little girls’ department at Children’s World. Tucking in the sick man’s blanket (his left hand, placed on top, traced out something like a welcoming gesture, although his brain was clouded), Nina Alexandrovna quickly gathered her things, took a little money, slipped her feet into her now dry, round-toed shoes, and left.

  Meanwhile, the sun had peeked out, and the puddles on the wet blue asphalt were like cleanly washed windows. Next to the underground passage, old grannies were selling their last oily-soft brown cap boletus mushrooms bruised from fingers and pine needles, sturdy little white-bellied cucumbers, and cheap, stiff asters that smelled like a pharmacy. A fair-haired, bent-over bicyclist rode by all shiny, sending his wheels rippling through the little puddles, and the sun spilled all over him, including his spokes and whooshing glass windshield. Hurrying, stepping on her buckling soles as if she were pressing on unresponsive pedals, Nina Alexandrovna headed to Children’s World, outside of which, to her bitter joy, there were always several strollers filled with bouncing babies all asleep. This time, next to the polished porch, there was only one stroller, covered in brown checked fabric like a rolling suitcase—and exactly the same stroller, only empty and lined in oilcloth, was displayed in the window, under rattles hung on invisible silks, as if it were a Garden of Eden fil
led with colorful plastic birds and fruits. Unable to resist the temptation to peek, Nina Alexandrovna stealthily leaned over the baby’s eyebrowless face, as soft as clabbered milk, where its little closed eyes were like flat wrinkles—at which point a squat young mama in gilt eyeglasses ran down the front steps, kicking at and scaring away her own purchases. Nina Alexandrovna stepped back and apologized, and the mama, without saying a word, tilted the stroller back on its wheels, turned it and let it bang down, and wound off decisively through water and fallen leaves.