The Man Who Couldn't Die Read online

  As for Marina, she was among the few who didn’t succumb to the cheap goods. She’d been keeping especially careful track of her wallet for a while. She knew for a fact how much was there and in which denominations, and how much was left at home, in the cheap box decorated with broken shells made to look like plaster nostrils that was well hidden under her old, gray-worn slips. Somehow the accuracy of this reckoning (which gave Marina a quiet high and with that high a vacillating pain) was linked to the fact that Marina was on her own. Without Klimov, who had brought some in and spent some without asking, creating total indeterminacy and leakage, Marina could now control her budget wholly and entirely. Previously, her chaotic husband, carried away by the notion of future profits, might, for instance, buy a can of terribly expensive Finnish varnish (two-thirds of which, unused and haphazardly closed, later dried into hard, solid pieces) to finish his wooden creations. With Klimov around, to do something to protect what was hers, Marina had set money aside for a rainy day: sometimes the pockets of her old clothing, where you could still find stiffened pre-reform small denominations, were stuffed with money, and her winter coat, adorned with a crumbly, half-disintegrated fox, was occasionally as rich as Gobseck. Now, locked into her own expenditures and calculations, Marina kept her cash in one monitored place; taking and spending any sum out of that had become significantly harder.

  Marina may have been economizing for a future life of freedom, or for some consoling purchase; but more likely, for the first time she had conceived a vague doubt that she really would occupy the deputy directorship at the newly won TV studio. She couldn’t say where the ill wind was blowing from. Krugal, now perked up, was more welcoming than ever and at the sight of Marina good-naturedly wiggled his face (thus suddenly resembling an oven mitt)—and Professor Shishkov, no matter how bothered he was by the unplanned increase in the estimate, always found a second or two, in passing, to place his cold, narrow palm on the back of his protégé’s head. Marina must have pictured all too often her future prosperity and lived for this too much—and of course, that couldn’t happen without Klimov, without his shadowy presence. Now that Marina had realized (or harshly convinced herself) that there wasn’t going to be any more Klimov, whatever she’d imagined immediately lost its plausibility.

  Most agonizing of all was the fact that her cheating husband hadn’t vanished altogether. Marina, up to her ears in hiring canvassers (while she also had to prepare for the TV debates, at which Apofeozov, according to rumors, might appear with some killer “Program of National Salvation” and Fyodor Ignatovich Krugal was set on appearing in a tuxedo), still hadn’t been able to catch her husband at home and take away his keys. Meanwhile, the traces of his daytime appearances were getting odder and odder. For sure, he caught up on his sleep during the day—as attested by the messy bed and carelessly tossed blanket, which looked more like he’d been walking than sleeping on it; turning back the blanket, Marina failed to find any traces of his round, well-worn retreat such as her husband used to make for himself in bed every night. There was something she couldn’t put her finger on, as if Klimov had flattened out. His things, which Marina kept a stealthy eye on, with a hunter’s fixed gaze, would float away to wherever he spent his mysterious overnights and then return worn and shapeless, as if in that time they’d been worn by a dozen different and not very fastidious men. One time she discovered some laundry in the bathroom: stuck-together underwear hung on the line like a heavy pile of cooked noodles; a steamy, crudely knit sweater that dripped cloudy drops from the bottom like minute aquatic creatures was still warm to the touch; and the box of detergent stashed behind the basin was sodden.

  It was simply astonishing the way her husband managed to avoid seemingly unavoidable encounters. One time, as she wearily climbed the front stairs, Marina distinctly heard Seryozha’s oncoming steps, characteristically muffled, which, the moment they were discovered, hung suspended. Then the steps rushed up the staircase, four times lighter, as if someone had softly struck a dangerous matchbox all set to ignite from a hissing spark. It would have been easy for Marina to go up the next six flights of stairs and drive the fugitive headfirst to the attic hatch, which was closed by a lock that always hung there, but when she finally reached her own apartment, above her, right over her head, there was suddenly such a vacuum of silence that it seemed crazy to Marina to drag herself up there with her heavy bags, survey the perfectly bare landings, and herself stand alone in front of the myopic, battened-down, nighttime apartments. Once Marina thought she saw him in the bushes…though actually, the man, who dashed from the lit entrance to the twiggy, shadow-stirring darkness (although there was something very Seryozha-like in the concealing elbow thrown over his head), may have been your garden-variety vagrant collecting bottles. Anxious to get past the curtain of lilac that tumbled from the lawn and took up half the asphalt as quickly as she could, Marina could sense the man behind the branches, as if he were something arboreal akin to that person in the wallpaper design you imagine in the tedious gloom between sleep and wakefulness—when the chimeras that steal the sleeper’s reality become visible and produce a slow horror; she even sensed seeing the vague shadow, clutching a bubble of some bulky clothing to his chest, unbutton his trousers with uncoordinating hands.

  Much more frightened by her husband’s cheating than she could afford to be during the campaign craziness, Marina had evidently developed a fear of men. Subconsciously, she now saw them as degenerate creatures hiding in the dark and dirt to threaten her with an attack or some kind of impact that would turn her soul into a chemistry experiment heating various caustic substances in her chest. Maybe the man on the lawn and the painter with the curved knife, although real people, were equally the fruit of Marina’s fear, a fear that had conjured them up out of nowhere, without any justification for their existence. Actually, this had already happened—a long time ago, in her dormitory. Marina remembered how at first she hadn’t been afraid of anything and had gone into every unlocked room, even where they were drinking vodka, stupidly clinking their stupid glasses and pulling her onto their laps, which felt as uncomfortable as a grown-up’s bicycle. Later she suddenly started being afraid, especially of her Uncle Kolya Filimonov, who would walk around and sit, grabbing himself, as if he were anxious to get to the toilet; his eyes were as red as ladybugs, and his right hand had been hurt and was bandaged so that it looked like a rabbit. Because he liked looking out the window on airless nights, Marina started to be afraid of the dark. This had stopped later, when her mother, all dressed up, took her from their dorm, but now it was back. Maybe Marina should have turned to someone for support, but she’d learned from experience and wasn’t someone who bared her soul to anyone. In the evenings she switched off her bedside lamp, which immediately gave way to the powdery window light, and tossed and turned for a long time, shifting her two heavy pillows like sacks of memories worn to dust. In her mind, she was constantly talking to her husband, occasionally smiling a broken smile if some funny comeback got stuck in her mind. So many of these mental conversations had accumulated that, even if the girl in the halter had abruptly withdrawn, daily life would not have given Marina the chance to say all this in reality; all this—a euphoric mixture of fantasies and altered memories—had been hopeless from the start, and the more she worked through it, the less it could correlate with any future. As she gradually broke with reality, Marina’s enlightening daytime dreams were separated from waking only by a cloudy, milky membrane that let through sounds and basic colors. Her husband seemed to be leaving her these dreams to watch, the way he once might have left her a magazine or newspaper article to read.

  Had Marina been able to talk to the unfaithful Klimov for just a few minutes, that would have blocked, plugged the fantastic stream of conversation that didn’t let up even at work and that manifested itself in Marina’s handwriting in extra segments and a swollen caviar of letters, so that even visually the voters’ passport details in her notebook resembled stray thoughts. All of a sudden she
discovered that Klimov’s image, which Marina had long considered dulled, was in fact as vivid as a parasite that’s entwined its strong shoots around the mind’s every hope and movement.

  Marina’s feelings when seeking a meeting with the fugitive, counting the minutes to the end of the workday—living every day with ticking clockworks installed in her brain—bore a strong resemblance to her feelings in her first year of university, when she was chasing Klimov and would totally tune out if for some overriding reasons he hadn’t come to class. Outwardly, the situations then and now were ridiculously alike. Even minor details were reproduced, like the sour electrolytic tingling on her wet palms or her sudden wild impatience—which became an internal scream—when a well-off voter not only put her fat-bellied purse on Marina’s table but stood in front of her for more than a few minutes. Her feelings today, though—copies of her former ones—were hollow: her heart pounded, but her heart was empty. Her feelings no longer had an object and so now needed one even more than when the elusive Klimov simply cut a couple of classes or was quickly exiting a room where Marina had some need to enter—and the room became a dead end. Seeing him daily was an insurmountable need; if in her lectures they suddenly started talking about something disturbing and lofty (the Russian literature teacher, a fading enthusiast with dull, googly eyes and a slanting bang that looked like an arrow on a map of military actions, went on forever declaiming verses from the classics), Marina would turn around and look ecstatically at Klimov, who would immediately lay his shaggy head on his elbow, smearing his notes. Then, at least, there was someone to look at—although Klimov didn’t like it. Now, emptiness loomed in dozens of different images, most of them frightening and unpleasant. Sometimes Marina imagined that the male shadows of the day and night had entered into a conspiracy and were coordinating their movements—all in black footwear—whereas the only reality was Klimov’s rust-brown boots strolling through cheerful, nastily splashing slush.

  She also observed one other unhealthy phenomenon. Unexpectedly, her past life—everything that Marina considered very far in the past, separated from the present day by many years—had suddenly turned up here and surrounded her now much more solidly and persistently than the reality of the crumbling streets and her basement workplace, all of which, along with the streams of public transport and the daily crowd of visitors mumbling with closed mouths, increased the pressure. I have my whole life with me, Marina told herself, looking off into open space (which was so narrow and had such limited sky, you could scarcely call it freedom), and right then she felt her loss, as if, although she had preserved all her morally outdated property, her most important capital had been illegally confiscated. Her attempt to save money in the battered box, under a clattering mat of glass beads, tangled chains, and cheap earrings attached like mosquitoes, now looked like a greeting from the past. From behind her present treasure house, its absolute prototype suddenly came forward, striking at Marina’s heart: the dormitory gift box—a tea canister rough with crude rust that inside preserved its dull gold—as if breathed on—its mirrorlike walls and bottom but not the empty candy that had been squashed and now looked like a dead bug spreading its crushed lower wings. Imagine the presents and candies Marina could buy herself with the fourteen hundred rubles she’d saved to keep from frittering them away.

  Meanwhile, the past’s return highlighted the fact that in those fifteen years that had wiped clean away the foundational medal-wearing era that Marina had single-handedly attempted to preserve, Klimov hadn’t changed one bit. The fact that her husband had suddenly hooked up with another, exotic woman—whose head had too much coarse, tarry hair for that small bulb to preserve a human brain structure—only underscored the fact that he himself had remained the same. Now Marina knew for a fact not only that Klimov had someone else but also exactly how and what was going on between them. For example, when Seryozha leaned in to kiss the woman, or ran his finger, as he once did to Marina, across her wide, charred eyebrows, which after Marina’s tweezed petioles must have seemed positively masculine, Marina had been a superfluous witness. The situation was undoubtedly dangerous. Marina could only imagine how badly Klimov wanted to get rid of his wife so she wouldn’t spy on him and his girlfriend through some metaphysical crack. Her sense of victimhood was immediately aroused as soon as someone’s damp steps, tapping like wooden blocks, were heard under the arch leading to their courtyard (no one had brought Marina home in a long time). Marina could barely keep herself from running straight through the puddles, where treacherous pieces of brick, which looked like someone’s boots left in the water, lay like dark chains, but the front door, which the lamp made watery, at the far end of the courtyard, just wouldn’t get any closer.

  The main danger, though, which Marina hadn’t even let herself contemplate, so she wouldn’t fall prostrate and could keep working at headquarters, was that Klimov and his departure might destroy her painstaking construction, created over so many years of effort. Marina would have done anything to keep from undermining her stepfather’s heart, to keep it beating until better times. Klimov didn’t know how she’d humiliated herself before a certain Zoya Petrovna, the sanctimonious blonde with a mouth like stewed carrots who ran the archives at the dilapidated film studio downtown. Klimov had no idea the effort it had cost Marina each time to reach an agreement with Kostik, the film editor, a reluctant and cunning creature who was fond of all his colorful shirts, his love beads, and his delicate mirrored eyeglasses, but who took positively swinish care of his titanic computer, whose white antique beauty was permanently etched with grime and whose keys looked like molars ground down by rough fodder until they’d lost their letters, uncleaned for three hundred years. Undoubtedly, ratlike Kostik (a newly fledged fan of the general secretary, he had bombarded online auctions with requests for L. I. Brezhnev’s personal effects) had his own, virtual reasons for not particularly liking Kukharsky, but each time he helped the disgraced Marina “churn out some real pulp fiction,” he capriciously raised the agreed-upon fee in dollars and tried to edit into the “news” his own face looking out like an ape’s among the decorous Soviet faces. All this, outrageous and stupid as it was, had to be endured. Marina lied to her inevitable accomplices, saying she was preparing a surprise for that pig Kukharsky, a killer special project, an alternative postdocumentary film—which was mostly the truth, because her fake news turned out to be more expressive than what was supposedly authentic. Developed socialism’s special effects emerged distinctly in the material. Here, unlike in its Hollywood counterparts, nothing got blown up and no cars crashed. On the contrary, they constructed a grandiose, extensive meaning and structure that were clearly the geometry of a catastrophe lifted into the industrial air.

  In order to achieve relative stability in her own district, Marina voluntarily made herself the heart of the paralyzed era, the heroine of a Soviet film; in retrospect, she almost came to love the Young Communists and her fictional Party membership. This affected her position in the conspiracy and at Professor Shishkov’s headquarters, for instance, where Marina, despite her low salary, had become a significant figure, the conscience of the entire effort. Nor would Marina, hewing to purely Party principles, let her stepfather find out about the death of his drunkard of a nephew, who looked like a dead man long before his live-in lover, an alcoholic with a face like stomach contents, killed the poor guy with a classic Russian ax. Marina had gone to the scene for the Studio A crime beat personally. Still fearless, she wasn’t terribly impressed by the dark little ax, with its rim of dirty sludge like you find under nails, or by the small bug-like blood spatters on the kitchen wall. Nonetheless, she refused to confirm this disgraceful death as a fact. For her anxious mother, who wasn’t allowed to see the real news, either, but who somehow could tell something bad had happened, the crime story became a vodka poisoning—which was also partly the truth since, according to the autopsy report, at the moment her nephew, unsteady on his feet, was leveled by the ax, his organism was as sloshed as soup and he
had barely a few weeks to live. Nonetheless, Marina had to take care to maintain this person’s pseudo-life. Moreover, the newly departed lush, who, before the ax, would show up to put the touch on them for minor amounts on Red pension days, turned out to be a much more voracious parasite than the canonical Brezhnev. Even after inventing a philanthropic drug rehab for the nephew (behind which immediately loomed the two-humped shadow of the Apofeozov businessmen brothers, who now actually did run an anti-alcohol philanthropy together), Marina couldn’t settle what she discovered were his considerable drunk debts, which badly taxed her reserves. For some reason, she thought it was important to fully repay what was written down on the last page of her old planner: she had to finish out the worn handwritten calendar, zero it out. But the whole business was complicated not only by her limited discretionary funds but also by the terrible vagueness that arose as a result of the alcoholic’s surprise visits when, sometimes, he would be discovered in the kitchen, painfully sober, with the heavy expression of a made-up tragedian and knees pressed together femininely, agonizingly picking at the chocolate daubs from the homemade cake on his plate—and of course, without Marina’s knowledge, taking some serious hair of the dog. She just couldn’t zero him out—and evidently her mother, taking from the mailbox the latest transfer sent by Marina, still asked herself why her now grown-up relative didn’t show his face or come visit even for the holidays that had always been sacred for him, dates for reestablishing his rights and for being with his people. Doubtless, her mother secretly suspected that brusque Marina had insulted her relative—which was also true because the deads’ resentment for the living always seeps through the night and comes out on the wallpaper, and also because Marina had stashed the body.

  Nonetheless, in the homemade movies, within the confines of the family, as steady as a stool, the family of four followed the simple laws of Soviet well-being. Once Marina had driven Klimov out, she had to feed yet another phantom, who, in point of fact, had long since inhabited the apartment as a reluctant vision that barely fed on human food and sat in his armchair with the newspaper as the personification of a husband in the abstract. Klimov had barely ever stopped by where the twisted patient lay, following his visitor with his eyes. The only thing that connected Klimov to her parents’ room, which was set up like a Red Corner, a Soviet shrine, was the contents of the wardrobe, the only one for the whole family—and lately Nina Alexandrovna herself had been bringing out his half-undressed hanger, on which Klimov’s sole silk tie dangled like a sword on a sling.