The Man Who Couldn't Die Read online

  Meanwhile, victory in the elections was far from a fait accompli. Apofeozov’s headquarters, pumped full of money like fully inflated biceps, was working wonders. Apofeozov was truly omnipresent. Five of his videos were playing continuously on every TV channel, deftly interspersing the candidate with a popular Moscow politician of similar political coloration, so that the voter really did start thinking that Apofeozov and the Muscovite—whose doughy bald spot and charming smile made him a carbon copy of everyone’s favorite yellow spherical cartoon creature Kolobok—were in fact like peas in a pod. No matter what paper you picked up, it was plastered with a portrait of Apofeozov, like a hundred-ruble bill; there was an unprecedented concentration of Apofeozov in the air, which trembled feverishly with dingily green, immature falling leaves. At times, Marina (who for more than a month had been playing old news for her stepfather, news which due to the repetitions had acquired the hypnotic power of a commercial) began imagining that Apofeozov, having become the form and essence of the present moment, the embodiment of the realest reality, was the opposite of the immortal little world she was defending. Apofeozov’s chief opponent in the true elections (of which the District 18 elections were a by-product, a crude material form concocted of haphazardly printed flyers and ballot urns wrapped, like coffins, in cheap red cotton cloth) was, of course, not Krugal but Leonid Ilich Brezhnev. Continuing (in Marina’s news) to fly abroad and welcome delegations—entire festivals of Hindus made white by their clothes and Negroes of various tribes with open miners’ faces and buttery Asians in knee-length military tunics—Brezhnev undoubtedly lived on in the collective consciousness of District 18 voters, who were still wearing their Soviet-era coats. Not that they’d admit it, but they continued to carry around this image, worn to holes here and there, but made to measure for them and still connecting them to the wide world more reliably than nutritious Snickers bars and American Terminator movies. However, in his fantastic vitality (which was nothing more than the indomitable will to eat, drink, build a suburban home that resembled the ogre’s castle in the fairytale, and open secret accounts in Switzerland), Apofeozov had become an increasing temptation for voting women, who suddenly entered a second youth with the help of margarine lipstick and cheap hair dye, though the gray roots showed straight through under even a dim 10 watts. Intense specimens who had obviously come to believe, along with Apofeozov, in the miracle-working characteristics of nourishing creams and rejuvenating serums were already noticeable on the streets under his wardship and becoming more and more numerous. Marina was worried that their sudden thirst for life would go haywire and bring Apofeozov a decisive voting advantage.

  Krugal worried about the exact same thing. His artistic soul keenly sensed voters’ unfavorable disposition. Nervous and capricious now, one day he raised quite a stink with his impresario, during which Shishkov’s secretary, fearfully cracking the door open, the way one lifts the lid on a boiling pot, thought she saw a flying jacket through the crack—after which Krugal stepped out in that same, messily hitched up jacket, holding handfuls of torn paper and with unshed tears, like in a child’s sad little eyes. After the row, the now sterner Shishkov let him go first, like a woman, and stealthily swallowed a few crimson pills from a plastic tube. The problem truly demanded resolution. Not only staff workers, depressed by the hostile pressure and aplomb, but also ordinary citizens existing between their mailbox and a television stuffed with campaign goods, couldn’t help but realize that the Salvation bloc’s enterprise was a beggar compared with Apofeozov’s aggressive show. Thus, the dictate of common sense notwithstanding, Shishkov’s personality came through: for the professor, stinginess took the place of that lost poverty which Shishkov felt deep down was the foundation of Russian spirituality. At the same time, he couldn’t help but see that in the near future a cruel loss awaited Krugal, who had insinuated himself into a battle between forces he didn’t understand, forces perhaps even mystical.

  The professor had hit on a new and surefire campaign move, though. For quite a while an elementary arithmetic thought had given him no rest, that the two thousand-plus votes he needed for victory (half of a 25 percent turnout plus one vote from the Unknown Soldier), would cost, based on the average price of a bottle of vodka, one-third of what it cost to purchase newspaper space, produce flyers, and rent auditoriums, where the entreated voters would consist of a few vagrants, whose wild hair and short stature made them look like alcoholic goblins, and a dozen or so old women bored out of their minds. But the election commission did not permit simply pulling up with vodka in secluded apartment courtyards, where at any time, day or night, you’d find people of all ages hanging out—not that there were any guarantees that someone who took a full half-liter today would vote for Krugal tomorrow. Theoretically, votes couldn’t be bought at all, inasmuch as electoral law forbade candidates from rendering services to the population by whose will they could come to power—although in practical terms, of course, mutually beneficial processes went on sub-rosa. Every so often young men wearing windbreakers and caps in specific company colors appeared in the irrational spaces of District 18 glassed in by the rather murky sun, like flies on windows, and passed out groceries in the name of the philanthropic Fund A; moreover, a couple of times near garages, observers saw modest vans that said “Bread” on the side from which bottles wrapped in election flyers, like napkins, were quickly lowered into workers’ poster-flat hands thrust out of their sleeves nearly to the elbow.

  All this illegal, small-potatoes fuss, this waste of money, which the district sucked up like a gigantic brown sponge, actually made Professor Shishkov physically ill. His keen intellect, which knew how to use even symmetry alien to him exactly the wrong way around, yielded an idea as sudden as a win at roulette (at which, working his hunches, the professor seemed always to lose, drawing down intellectual resources incomparable to the rare luck of a scientific find—which comprised his private creative drama). Instead of rendering services to the population, he should buy and pay for their services: then it would be perfectly legal to call the corrupt voter—who basically just wanted a drink—a canvasser. Then and there, the professor sketched it out on his torn napkin (he was having dinner at his plastic cafeteria, and once he’d finished his soggy salad, he started on his sticky-ish signature dish): if each hired canvasser simply brought the adult members of his own family to the ballot box, then all it would take for an absolutely assured victory was laying out fifty thousand, at most, and, if he wanted to increase turnout, eighty thousand, before the elections. The bonus for success, should Krugal get elected, could be paid out piecemeal afterward; the scheme’s elegance was that the bonus, while serving as a guarantee of the canvassers’ work, simultaneously relieved Shishkov of the lion’s share of the investment risk.

  Leaving lumpy pelmeni covered with dollops of sour cream, like subsided soap foam, on his plate, the professor immediately dialed his secretary’s mobile and called a staff meeting. A few hours later, all the wheels headquarters had, from Krugal’s spit-and-polish BMW to the professor’s puny heap, had been brought out by the deathly pale staff, which had been alerted and were plunging into the long, sediment-filled gullies. What a night it was! A fine drizzle, a chill, the street lamps’ bright gloom, sour mouths that had the metallic taste of sandwiches and tooth decay, snatches of hard, seasickly dozing while the car taxied to its assigned objective, letting rare bright spots through its windows. Equipped with cans of paste and stuck-together stacks of announcements warm from the printer, people reluctantly climbed out into the darkness, stepped on the damp asphalt’s wet, mercurial ripple, and headed out under sagging umbrellas, two by two, to post their pieces of paper on every single swollen front entrance and push them into the scorched and crumpled mailboxes, which had accumulated the kind of mess around them that trash cans do, what with the elections’ imminence. That strategic night, the professor sat in his dank headquarters sleepless and thoroughly chilled. His nose, which he honked into a fluttering handkerchief, was as full
-blooded as his heart, and on a piece of paper in front of him lay a few pills whose sequence apparently held the program for solving this crisis, a mysterious code known only to the professor.

  As usual, Marina was assigned the most important area: the private sector. There was something inexpressively awful in those windblown backyards, where the darkness touched her face, lifted her extended arm, and led her into a deep, rustling hole. The gray spots from streetlamps, which illuminated everything under it as if through the thick bottom of a glass bottle, only got tangled underfoot. Low-slung calico windows hung directly over the flowerbeds, and rather than pick out objects, the meager light seemed to produce unconvincing copies of them. Marina and sleepy Lyudochka, whom the feverish professor had foisted on her, often couldn’t tell where they were pasting the announcements, which kept trying to roll up and lick their frozen hands with smeared paste. The desertedness and silence (only dogs barking and jumping behind a slab of timber, creating the impression of a nighttime zoo) doused Marina with a bad presentiment—and indeed: from one of the lightly banging gates there suddenly emerged, drunkenly thrusting a bluish knife in front of him, a shapeless man wearing a long, unbuttoned leather coat and some kind of crazy hat with earflaps that looked like work gloves sculpted directly on his head. Lyudochka flapped her arms, as if to catch the wagging blade like a fly, screamed, and ran. So did Marina.

  They could barely remember racing from the receding obscenities to their car, which was hidden behind a rise. Their umbrellas kept banging into each other and skipping in the air like inflated balls, and the stack of announcements Marina was now holding to her side rather than close to her chest kept trying to slip apart and float away. Their dingy white heap, tucked in under a large cloud-shaped birch, was closed and dark. Glacial. The driver and his girlfriend from bookkeeping probably hadn’t come back yet from the other end of the lane, where a solitary light blinked and teared, as if viewed through the wrong end of binoculars. Lyudochka, her makeup smeared, was hysterical. Hiccupping, she tugged at the rickety door and then picked up her coat hem and tried to sit right on the filthy hood. Marina was barely able to drag her partner to the nearest damp stall, crooked and black against the light birch leaves. She felt no regret making a seat of the announcements and poured a full lid of harshly and crudely fragrant brandy from the reserve flask the professor had given her. “I hate him. I hate him!” the trembling Lyudochka whispered after sipping from the threaded vessel, as if she were downing a raw egg, and Marina guessed that this wasn’t about the guy with the knife or even the driver doing who knew what with the plump-cheeked bookkeeper but about the professor himself. Looking sideways at Lyudochka (eyes like stars, a smear under her nose), Marina thought maybe she would take her on as her secretary. Once more she thought without any surprise that in fact she wasn’t interested in Lyudochka, nor was she, for example, in the girl she didn’t know with the crudely knit face and the fantastic braid that fell well past her waist, generously adorned, like a horse’s tail, with cheap barrettes, who had been making out with Klimov a week ago at the wet streetcar stop—while Marina sat above them at a streetcar window. They’d been making out below, not even hidden by the limp umbrella dripping down the girl’s back—and apparently hadn’t bothered to hide, as if there were no such person as Marina. An unfamiliar ring burned on the man’s ring finger like a glassy rash—not an engagement ring, not a man’s ring at all, a ring that obviously meant something in their relationship and that obviously was kept in one of his moldering, trash-filled pockets. Marina, languishing in secret impatience to run home, was trying incredibly hard not to lose her compulsory enthusiasm. Her husband, from whom not a peep had been heard for seven days, might have shown up to spend the night—but there was no way she could abandon this effort, even though home, which was also in this district, was a stone’s throw away and seemed even closer through this pure rural darkness. She could even make out the small thumbtack of the satellite dish on the roof of the nine-story building next to hers.

  “I hate everyone I see,” the bleary Lyudochka stated, more calmly now but also more convincingly, and to Marina her turned face, oddly eaten away by the profound darkness, looked like an ear. Her partner’s abrupt lunge when she went to screw on the lid—as if trying to look at her watch, which was on her other arm—made it clear that Lyudochka was drunk; shining a little light on her own watch, which kept rolling away from the streetlamp like a doll’s eye, Marina could only make out the minute hand, which caught the light, and realized she had no hope of seeing her husband today so that she could officially kick him out. At last, she heard leaf-kicking on the small rise: the bookkeeper descended first, huddling and yawning, and the driver, sliding down pigeon-toed, hurried behind her, grinning and toting a crumpled newspaper full of a pungent mass of mini-apples picked with their withered leaves still attached. The couple had no paste or flyers at all; in response to Lyudochka’s tragic tale of the guy with the knife they magnanimously shared a tight fistful of stolen fruit with each of the victims. It was utterly absurd; you could only pretend that this was purposeful work. Taking a bite of the withered wilding, which had hardened like batting, Marina decided that the only way she could go back and get the others back to reality was to write up the bookkeeper and driver objectively.

  The day after that expedition, their sacrifices appeared to have been in vain. The announcements, white everywhere, having suddenly flown out like clouds of moths to live for a day, had yielded no result whatsoever. But as evening came on, pandemonium ensued. Once they’d sorted out the hundred “instructions,” the population came to believe, as they did in God, that the Krugal campaign was handing out free money. In the back room at headquarters, where a low lamp lit only the hands on the wide, fabric-covered table, making it look like a gambling den, additional packs of bills were opened; sluggish Lyudochka took a long time placing her ruler and grasping a pencil in her sharp manicure in order to draw lines in a new record book. Quite a few unexpected problems had arisen. Having clarified that there were now definite restrictions, people lined up to be canvassers by the family-load, which substantially reduced the efficacy of the planned investments. Marina personally attempted to refuse a cultivated married couple with panicked eyes behind whose back in addition languished a puffy offspring of the male persuasion squeezed into a jacket with a great many zippers and fasteners who obviously had ID. They amicably agreed that only the head of the family would register—and he wouldn’t stop apologizing while Marina was processing his decrepit ID, which was as flat as a flyswatter. As it later turned out, though, his patient spouse, who quietly disappeared two steps away from Marina’s table, registered herself and her child with another registrar—and there were similar instances every day.

  The women over forty who had obviously fallen under Apofeozov’s spell but who had come to his opponent for their fifty rubles made a strange impression. Slightly embarrassed but as presentable as generals in their pink and cream greatcoats of cheap cashmere, they hurriedly wagged their pen in the notebook, as if effacing their own signature, and immediately detached the banknote from the instruction, holding the latter at arm’s length and haughtily surveying the office in search of a trash can. The chipped steps leading to the headquarters were blanketed with these instructions, like paper snow. The wind dragged these same flyers—fresh and bumpy from the large raindrops, with smeared footprints that looked as if they’d been licked—into the narrow wells of half-basement windows, where they jammed the shaggily rusted window grills along with freckled birch leaves and hung like humid clusters on moist, wadded spiderwebs.

  Now representatives of the district, of all its sloping streets and muddy layers, passed before the headquarters workers every day, and it was strange to think that the announcement’s text, like a spell, had brought this entire misbegotten population to life, drawn them out of hiding, that the voter, ordinarily invisible and anonymous (and therefore by implication mysterious even for the out-and-out PR types calculating their c
onduct with astronomical precision), now, before voting for a candidate, appeared in person, showed himself to the campaign headquarters life-size. Meanwhile, the guy in the wrinkled full-length leather coat smeared with pale, dried mud showed up. That morning, he’d found the tempting flyer, as uneven as a zebra’s stripes, on his rise by the fence and just didn’t connect this sudden gift from Father Frost with the previous night’s incident—not that he was likely to remember any of that anyway. He turned out not to be so scary, after all, just unkempt and nervous. His forehead was twisted by some tragic worry, his teary little eyes shone like pearls in a mollusk’s flesh, and he was constantly crumpling and straightening the cozily shabby mohair scarf at his throat. In the light of day, it was hard to imagine this unkempt intellectual knifing anyone, especially since his muffled voice, punctuated by a soft, breathy cough, was so pleasant. After introducing himself as a “well-known artist,” he roamed a little among the tables, delicately glancing at the papers being drawn up. Then he ran off for a couple of hours and, with someone’s vague permission, hauled in several pictures wrapped in Apofeozov campaign newsletters. Marina didn’t care for his masterpieces. The things they depicted were disagreeably damp and shapeless compared with their authentic originals; they pressed up against each other with a density characteristic of organs lying in a living creature’s opened interstices. The contrast between a work that has obviously spent its every square centimeter on elaboration and the paltry prices on the pictures was so provocative that many immediately reached for their purses. Lyudochka, for example, bought the small square of a pinkish painting in a board frame: the abundantly daubed canvas depicted some unbelievable liver, the mother-of-pearl swellings of which were quite unlikely to be identified as a tea service and table lamp.