The Man Who Couldn't Die Page 6

  Upset, Nina Alexandrovna quietly entered the store. The little girls’ department was partitioned off by a rope strung with crude pieces of paper: scribbled on one in large faint purple marker letters was “Inventory.” In the little boys’ department, school uniforms in the same official navy blue as work records hung single file. There was also a gentlemanly little white jacket hanging separately at the unthinkable price of fourteen hundred rubles, and the toys were represented by silvery tanks with rasping working motors, a large array of cold steel and firearms, and some robot soldiers with matching plastic weapons as miniature as Christmas tree lights in individual square boxes. Nina Alexandrovna was horrified as usual by the ever-present thought that she might suddenly lose her mind and bring Alexei Afanasievich a toy tank or submachine gun, or one of the blunt little armored cars possibly made from repurposed real armor and painted authentic army green.

  Right at that moment she began feeling unwell, uneasy, again. She must have been examining the windbreakers on the hangers too closely because a young saleswoman, a professional smile on her large, inkily painted lips, hurried toward her. All of a sudden, though, Nina Alexandrovna decided that anyone who got close to her now would tell her some bad, depressing news. Hastily pushing past the checkout lines, she found herself back on the mirror-shiny front steps. Strangers were passing on all sides, their collision seemingly precisely calculated for where Nina Alexandrovna was cautiously descending the stairs. The people were in so much of a hurry and weaving in and out, sideways, holding their purses close, sometimes slamming into each other and their coat hems sticking together for a second—yet no one looked anyone else in the eye, and their faces, once they’d flashed by, disappeared faster than the dark leaves that teemed in each gust of wind. Nina Alexandrovna thought that it had been a long time since she’d seen so many people at once—or at least a long time since she’d been aware that hundreds of people were flashing by, and suddenly she realized that despite the specificity of each person who appeared before her—a specificity that was utterly unattainable when she was sitting in her apartment—she perceived them all perfectly in the abstract. It didn’t take even hundreds or a dozen for strangers to become an abstraction. All it took was two. As long as those two were just coming closer in the crowd, you could make out a curly head of hair, or a black knit hood, or a finlike rubber elbow, but the instant these two coincided, to say nothing of spoke, her mind erased them.

  Still holding onto the railing, Nina Alexandrovna was struck by the fact that lately the city’s population seemed to have increased dramatically. There were so many people, automobiles, and rocking buses with advertisements on their sides stratifying the transportation stream. All this poured and meandered through the streets like the green-mica cast from half-stripped trees. She didn’t know why she didn’t read the papers or watch the real news at all. Everything Nina Alexandrovna saw around her was lacking film or being shown on television. Without that, her surroundings felt inauthentic. They lost their status as the primary reality and seemed like a film in which Nina Alexandrovna felt uncomfortable, as if she were in front of a TV camera, and she moved as if she were constantly trying to encircle or circumvent something.

  With a shaky step that demonstrated to one and all her failure to coincide with reality, Nina Alexandrovna headed toward the market to buy food. In the glass sarcophagus at the front of a furniture showroom, a gingerbreadish armchair revolved very slowly, its tempting armrests making it look like something someone would want to take on its arm, like a lady; two young men efficiently overseeing the sidewalk were presenting passersby with announcements of some kind, and the one who blocked Nina Alexandrovna’s way was wearing tiny, pincerlike rings in his ears and in one large fleshy nostril. There had been none of this before—nor was there any in the life Nina Alexandrovna continued to lead within her own four walls. Here, in the outside world, she was surrounded on all sides by new objects that no book of dream interpretations could have explained—and she shuddered to think what kind of events would have to occur in ordinary human life to justify the presence in her dream of this armchair, grandly unoccupied under cold, bright-white clouds, or these long buses trailing their low tail sections, like half-paralyzed animals trailing their hind legs, or the computers being sold everywhere whose electronic entrails seemed to be glowing and swimming on their screens, like an X-ray. Before, no one could have imagined so many things going unbought; their four- and five-figure prices seemed to make them dangerous to have in circulation, like a gun kept dangerously at home. This was the first time Nina Alexandrovna had felt so depressed outside. On the other hand, since she knew nothing about her surroundings, it was all relatively simple. The main thing was knowing her way. Beyond that, she could ignore the colorful façade.

  From a distance, the market entrance was denoted by a pair of sparkly tall poplars. Their leaves, nearly invisible in the sun-filled air, looked like splotches on a mirror’s detached amalgam. At the sight of a familiar beggar with his one empty eye socket that looked like a navel and his bedraggled squeeze-box gasping greedily for air, Nina Alexandrovna felt a little better. Not far away, directly behind the market’s latticework fence, angry music pounded out from a newsstand, rendering the beggar’s squeeze-box as mute as a fish gill. Only very close, almost flush to it, could its vague growlings be heard—but Nina Alexandrovna still tossed a soundless new ruble into the cap that lay at the beggar’s feet like a black lozenge. The narrow aisles, drunk on sun and juices, were messy, as always; the sticky puddles had a muddy, visceral liquid at the very bottom, and their spots attracted the ferocious flies that buzzed everywhere and, when they stuck to your face, turned out to be unexpectedly cold, almost metallic. But for Nina Alexandrovna, everything here was familiar, and the fact that she had already heard the music coming from the market stalls many times at other markets added to her self-confidence. In no hurry, Nina Alexandrovna bought vegetables for soup, a little fresh sausage, freshly cut, a can of meat and a can of sardines, a firm onion in crackling gold, and a bloody-silver bream as big as a shovel painstakingly selected from the several offered her. Unlike the street chimeras, all these objects were at least related to humans because of their edibility; something told Nina Alexandrovna that she needed to limit herself to things like that. Nonetheless, she did stop by the Chinese fur and plastic toy stand. There, the deft salesman, whose high cheekbones reminded her of a Russian kettle, happened to be demonstrating some simple fun to some kids in filthy jeans: he would squeeze a rubber pear, which inflated a shiny spider through a long tube and made the spider—a stiff patty with dangling dead legs—hop clumsily. Imagining how much Alexei Afanasievich would like controlling something at a distance, Nina Alexandrovna immediately bought the spider, wound the tube around it, and stowed it neatly in her bag. By now she was almost totally calm, and even the scary spider, which when wound around looked like a medical device, a tonometer or stethoscope, evoked confidence in her. She told herself that she simply was finally developing the habit of paying more attention to her surroundings. As if to confirm that, she immediately noticed on a metal pole of the green market gates the portrait of a respectable man who looked like a good dog—the same portrait she’d seen on the doors of the vacant food store. The pole’s roundness magnified the portrait, like a loupe, making the candidate’s face look like it was constantly approaching the voter. Nina Alexandrovna smiled involuntarily in response to his wide-stretched smile.

  Continuing past goods stalls with thinning sales (the beggar leaned over his squeeze-box, held tight in his lap, and took bites from a crumbling potato and a pickle), Nina Alexandrovna noticed two of those portraits pasted up in a row, like stamps, on a steel booth, together increasing the object’s cost, even if it couldn’t be mailed to anyone. All at once it became crystal clear that she’d already seen the dog-man flyer: in the underground passage, at the Children’s World register, and on her own building’s front door, which looked like a broken-down washtub and where the flyer effi
ciently covered the biggest dent and so in and of itself didn’t immediately catch her eye—and lots of other places, too. The thought that the director’s good face, pasted to many objects whose purpose was beyond Nina Alexandrovna, nonetheless made this puzzling thing ordinary and simple enough, and Nina Alexandrovna felt a grateful warmth. She even felt comfortable enough to allow herself to perch at one of the plastic tables on the street, where a puddle of spilled coffee was being sucked up by the wind, place her order with the androgynous teenager who rushed over, and be served a plate with an American sandwich so big she couldn’t get her mouth around it. Disassembling the sandwich into its soggy, reciprocally stained components and glancing at the people running in different directions, which the stormily flying leaves signaled in vain with bursts of light, Nina Alexandrovna felt she could relate to it all perfectly calmly. On her way home, the director-man’s face flashed by and drew her along, like the moon in a dense forest, until it brought the pacified Nina Alexandrovna to her front door, where it finally smiled with just its glossy eyes over some new, crookedly pasted-up paper loudly announcing a major recruitment of paid canvassers at such and such an address.

  Marina’s day had become so overloaded that she couldn’t steal even a minute to call home and find out whether Klumba had brought the money. Sitting in campaign headquarters—in a dank half basement with splotched boards in the corner that had been rented for a song—she was registering in a soggy notebook the many many citizens who had shown up in response to the announcements that all of Shishkov’s personal staff had spent the past week pasting up throughout his voting district. District 18—where primaries for the regional Duma were being held (the previous deputy, a financially Russified man from the Caucasus, had been shot in the brand-new box of his suburban home, where his blood had looked like cocoa in the construction dust)—did not have much going for it. It was a sloping, bloated area, the cheek of the large Southwest District, and stretched from downtown to the industrial swamps, where the horizon seemed to be rotting away from fumes and the earth’s fabric seemed holey, rolled into feathery hurds: a ball-bearing factory and the nine-story gray Khrushchev-era apartment buildings attached to it, whose numbering would drive any normal person insane; building after building after building; two private-sector streets poorly connected by falling fences, with dingy little scarlet flowers in age-warped cottage windows and dahlia beds like graves in scraggly front gardens; a narrow, polluted stream in banks slick even in winter, under the snow, the stream wet with dark soaked spots that ate through the light flakes, and come autumn, empty, as if it had been turned off, without a single shape on the black water; a small section of a good block where, however, the unavoidable difference between the new prosperity on the street and the poverty of the apartments hidden from view had reached the point of metaphysical incongruity; and, finally, the main attraction, the Palace of Political Education, one of those concrete and glass giants amid the paved rectangles of windy squares for which there are absolutely no words but that reign over an area, occasionally attracting chains of tiny human figures to some second-rate pop concert. Since eight-thirty in the morning, district residents, smelling of wet wool and their own kitchens, had crowded in front of Marina’s wobbly table. They handed her their life-bedraggled passports and leaned over the notebook to use the official pen to add their chicken-scratch signature next to their passport information. After that, the recruited person was given a folded piece of paper, “Canvasser’s Instructions,” inside of which a fifty-ruble note was pleasantly and firmly stapled; then he was presented with another, tidier notebook, where opposite his freshly entered name the sum of 120 rubles was entered: this was the bonus the canvasser would get after the election victory of the Salvation bloc’s candidate, Fyodor Ignatovich Krugal.

  Marina’s present situation was nothing to be envied. She’d been fired from Studio A, after all. Some five-year contract Marina had managed to forget about had ended, and now young Kukharsky had remembered and ultimately did not deny himself the pleasure of calling Marina into his office and, sprawled out in his upholstered leather armchair, his lemon-yellow tie falling to his navel, and with a caramel behind his hairy cheek, telling her off in no uncertain terms. While Marina was shrinking in front of Kukharsky, her colleagues managed to clear out her modestly inhabited, utterly innocent desk, put her belongings in sticky black trash bags, and set them outside the door. She had no choice but to go home, lugging a thin bag split by sharp corners in each hand; downstairs, the guard demanded she show him the contents and discovered an unwashed Studio A mug, so she had to call upstairs and sort that out. For some reason, the pain and fear were exactly like the time when she and her Mama were driven out of the dormitory. The superintendent’s beautiful wife, working her hands like a doctor palpating a belly, checked their opened suitcase. Her Mama had been beautiful, too, with long curls and wearing a new blouse with candy buttons—but now she couldn’t go run down the dark, sweetly scary corridor whose linoleum had a watery wave from a distant window. That she had experienced all this before made it harder rather than easier for Marina. She felt somehow Kukharsky had seen in her that awkward creature who asked everyone for presents (the present box contained buttons, stamps, colored chalk, a wrapper folded like a candy that Marina considered a prettily made toy and was very afraid of crushing), that dorm starveling she had been—wearing a dress made from foot-binding flannel—before she learned to despise her own childhood and be a top student.

  Now Marina depended utterly on Professor Shishkov. Shishkov had spared a whole twenty minutes on personal sympathy for Marina, had patted her in a fatherly way, dabbing at her welling eyes with his impeccable handkerchief and giving her little shoulder a penetrating squeeze. Important work had been found for her that marked the final stage before she became deputy director and justice triumphed. The felonious Apofeozov, who needed deputy immunity so as not to be brought up on a number of charges, had plunged into the elections when they cropped up—and the professor, rejecting perfect symmetry at this stage of the struggle (in general, he shunned the symmetrical, seeing in it a dangerous duplication of things and equality of sides), ran against Apofeozov not himself but a loyal man with the full approval of the interested banks. Mr. Krugal, the director of that very same Palace of Political Education—whose architecture resembled a ball-bearing factory in the Communist future, thereby attracting the working electorate’s heart—was a man with a failed past either as an actor or a TV newscaster. At the same time, he was so ignorant that this rare quality of his, which somehow permeated his entire staff, came across even in the posters and advertisements hung on the Palace in numbers no fewer than the bedsheets on neighborhood apartment balconies. Everything Krugal had to say, including “Hello, dear comrades!” had to be written down, so there was much work to be done. As the new speechwriter, Marina was warned that any text presented a number of natural obstacles for the candidate—line breaks, for instance. She also had to avoid more than two epithets in a row and the word “reconstruction,” which the candidate couldn’t say due to an old dislocation of his jaw. As he issued his final instructions, the professor looked so deeply into Marina’s soul that, as if for the first time, she herself saw his frozen eyes behind which it was like white fish flesh with fine bones, and she saw his disagreeable nose shaped like a pike’s head. For the first time the thought that today Professor Shishkov was the person closest to her in the world made her uneasy.

  The concept of “responsibility” simply moved Marina to selfless labor. After just a few days she felt comfortable with Mr. Krugal, a short man with a big head, a squeezed, pseudo-Roman profile that fell lower on his face than normal, and an exceptionally tensed forehead that looked like it was being stretched and that came out in black-and-white photos as a splotch. A magisterial and even massive person in his flyers, Fyodor Ignatovich in life made the impression of being a reduced copy of himself. Krugal had been chronically at odds with Marina’s predecessor, who had been exceptionally touc
hy with regard to Russian language and style and therefore exceptionally thin-skinned; and the moment anyone felt Krugal had insulted them, Krugal took offense, too. But now, inexplicably, the candidate had picked up his dismissed consultant’s faultfinding and was latching onto all kinds of niggling details in the prepared texts. Crossing his legs and twisting in one direction, munching cookie after cookie and twisting in another, and squinting at pages in a third, he would analyze and reanalyze sentences that seemed dubious to him until they lost any spatial or semantic meaning; a thing as simple as bringing natural gas into private homes—which because of the tanks, among other mundane reasons, often burned to charred kebabs—seemed to Fyodor Ignatovich filled with danger and ambiguity, and the fateful word “reconstruction,” which had ended up in his speech after all and become attached to something he was going to have to promise, made the candidate wince and cautiously wiggle his off-center jaw, which clicked smoothly behind his ears. The web of fine pencil marks Krugal conscientiously spun around Marina’s paragraphs flummoxed her until she realized she could just erase them. All this notwithstanding, she was doing well, according to the fatherly professor. Unlike Krugal, Shishkov, who signed off on the texts, made sure to praise Marina at every staff meeting. Imagine her surprise when she unwittingly discovered they were paying her approximately half as much as the most unimportant person in the campaign headquarters, young Lyudochka, who was forever giving herself manicures and admiring her ten mirrorlike nails, occasionally removing a stuck-on hair from her precious work of art. Actually, the imbalance could be explained away by the fact that Marina was the last hire, paid some remainder salary. Moreover, unconsciously she felt that the less she got in the present, the more she was building up for the future: now her salary of fourteen thousand seemed as inevitable as a top exam grade following a sleepless night.