The Man Who Couldn't Die Read online

  While trying to figure out how she was going to go on (in anesthetized moments of practical mental exertion), Marina would tell herself she could entirely compensate for her lost husband’s presence only by tending to whatever clothing remained. In leaving their home, Klimov was hardly going to take everything; something had to be preserved, if only old things from their happy, distant student days purchased at the gargantuan flea market on the edge of town, where Marina and Klimov had always held hands tightly and had a prearranged meeting place, just in case they got separated: a very fat, worn birch, as white as toothpowder. Marina hoped that Klimov would never go into the attic after that and get into the big brown suitcase where their unwashed memories lay, pressed into a distressing, mutely smelly lump, and remove them layer by layer like stiffened bandages. As it turned out, by searching out and going through what her husband wouldn’t want to take, Marina had restored him and herself to their best, their finest past. She felt she had equal rights to her husband’s faded property, and not just because it had been paid for with her parents’ money and afterward with her paycheck. It was just that, by leaving, Klimov had forfeited his moral right to create the illusion that he, the cheater, had never been there at all.

  Gradually, albeit just in Marina’s mind for now, there was a new, strictly symmetrical familial harmony in which Klimov’s continuous absence corresponded to Alexei Afanasievich’s absence, and the two incomplete husbands, quietly occupying adjoining rooms, presented the active women with increasing loneliness, and their vanishing difference in age, multiplied by kinship, could be discerned less and less given the drawing of identical wrinkles, whose wavy circularity resembled a tree’s annular rings. Self-confident Marina thought she could easily borrow from her mother that weekly meticulousness with which she—no less conscientiously than she attended to her stepfather’s body—cared for the body cavities and folds of his gray suit, which her efforts had kept so fresh and smart over the past fourteen years. With time, Klimov’s wedding suit, too, now moved to the corner of the closet by the heavy press of junk, would probably acquire a well-groomed similarity to the gabardine that flaunted the war veteran’s planks of medals and empty sleeves and occasionally took its owner’s place on the narrow family balcony. One had to assume that the morbid similarity between both their husbands’ things—the unworn clothing and the unambulating footwear that started looking ceramic—would one day create an idyll unattainable within the bounds of simple human actions. Knowing full well that it takes money to maintain specters, Marina, once she’d paid off the alcoholic’s debts, might buy something fashionable for Klimov—because fashion, like a distorted transfer of real time to the mute and foolish language of objects, could exist even given her apartment’s stagnation in the general secretary’s shadow.

  All this, actually, was the pragmatic lyric poetry of a madwoman. Deep down, Marina understood that she may have gone too far. If up until now she’d managed to construct and repair a fake reality without any particular damage to the reality of her own “I,” then the new phantom—her lost husband—threatened to change all that. How was it that Marina couldn’t remember herself for so many long years? She couldn’t remember how, over the course of a gloomy student winter with trees in plaster, she’d desperately envied Klimov for being himself, how she’d tried to interact with him, reading her own letters to him: cherished pages from notebooks covered in the extravagant handwriting of a schoolgirl’s compositions not desecrated by having been sent through the mail. Had anything changed now, when apparently the life you’d lived came back all at once and taught you not to repeat yourself—not that it predicted any kind of a future? Hadn’t Marina bought herself the same thing Klimov had, a ring that looked like a sugar lump—and at the same time agonizingly not the same thing, offending the eye with the ineluctable chicanery of its construction, its deformed excess, which simultaneously wiped from memory the unfound original? Holding out her slightly trembling hand outrageously adorned with the over-large acquisition, Marina realized that she was going to have to throw herself into maintaining the spectral Klimov’s life. As she looked at these people, these voters—who were in turn looking at her with pairs of brackish, infinitely patient eyes—Marina thought that if her life, her existence, were the condition for the parasite’s life, the possibility of feeding it and the power to stop it all immediately would console her—but the parasite would continue to thrive when all that remained of Marina was a tortured shell. “What a cool ring,” Lyudochka remarked, taking her extended hand with the confidence of a fortune-teller but not looking at her palm. Returning to reality and to headquarters, where it was lunchtime, Marina decided, first, that she would sign herself and her mother up for their legitimate fifty rubles and, second, she would call home, but certainly not to hide behind the anonymity of a trill and be taken for an Asian girl with a braid and lure Klimov out of his lackluster nap. In fact, she had to clarify whether Klumba had shown up and inquire about their finances once and for all; when she left the shouting clients for the back room, turbid potatoes were gurgling on the hotplate there, boiled to shreds, and long-legged Lyudochka was slicing a stale baguette and covering it with big slices of salami in its casing. Basically, life went on as if nothing had happened, even though all Marina heard in the receiver were long, impersonal rings.

  As she dragged her bag up the stairs, Nina Alexandrovna, winded, distinctly heard what she thought was the telephone tinkling, barely pushing through the taut obscuration in her head. By the time she’d sorted out the locks and the keys, which looked like dogs had gnawed them, and squeezed into the stuffy front hall, the phone was silent. Over it, looking at Nina Alexandrovna with mirror eyes hot from sleep, wearing haphazardly pulled-on jeans frayed by decrepitude, her startled son-in-law was shifting from foot to foot. As usual, Seryozha must have slept in after his night shift and the call had awakened him, but for some reason Nina Alexandrovna imagined that her son-in-law had not been too late to get the telephone, so sedately white on its smooth runner, like in a picture, but had stood over it like that, gawking, as if trying with his outstretched arm to dampen the cascading rings and channel the assertive noise through his fingers—anything but touch the receiver. Actually, these were just fantasies that immediately flew from Nina Alexandrovna’s mind when she noticed how skinny her son-in-law had grown. His house slippers looked like they were on his hands, not his feet, so slender had his hairless ankles become, and his sunken belly hung from his ribs like an empty sack. This was no surprise. After all, now he had to work nearly every night; sometimes, when he showed up at home, he could barely throw his elusive jacket on a hanger before getting into the bed that her daughter, rushing off to the TV studio, hadn’t even had time to make properly. Nina Alexandrovna supposed that one of her son-in-law’s relief men had fallen ill, and she was afraid they wouldn’t pay him for the extra work, and Marina, who had become almost too beautiful of late, with lips like a vivid ulcer, would start ragging him again.

  Nina Alexandrovna told Seryozha she’d heat up the borscht and went into the kitchen, where she put the food away in the old refrigerator, shocking her fingers on raw electricity as usual. Then, she took a generous scoop of the pink medley from the full soup pot, which had a part-circle of orange fat with a transparent tear, heaped it into a smaller pot, and put it on the gas, and the cold jelly began to bubble quietly around the edges. The borscht had turned out well. Ten minutes later, after Seryozha had thrown on a shirt and perched round-shouldered on a stool, there was a full bowl of the hot, colorful soup with a big dollop of lovely sour cream and an array of thick sandwiches on a separate plate in front of him. Looking at the dreamy smile that gradually lit up Seryozha’s young face as his sunken cheeks warmed from the food, Nina Alexandrovna felt something inside her relax and soften where everything in a person should be firm. Of course, lately she’d become overly trusting in the good. The harder life got, the more pliantly Nina Alexandrovna responded to its random and weak smiles, which might not have
meant anything like what she was seeing from her perspective. Even she guessed how easy it was to buy her with the mere sight of a baby in a stroller or, say, the scene of a friendly conversation, when two men who were utter strangers to Nina Alexandrovna, perfumed youth wearing expensive clothing made somewhere that had to be overseas, simply clapped each other on the shoulder—but she was willing to value herself more and more cheaply because she lacked even crumbs of kindness for her emotional moisture to soften into a warm pap. Now, too, looking at her son-in-law digging the soft, thick, whitened mass out of the bowl with increasing enthusiasm, Nina Alexandrovna believed he might find a good job soon and the family wouldn’t have to stretch itself so thin waiting for pension day.

  Nina Alexandrovna herself had lost her appetite; the sour bun from the street stand had settled in her stomach like a wad of heavy dough. Alexei Afanasievich was usually sleeping at this time of day—or rather, drifting into what in his unvarying existence might be considered human sleep—and snoring softly. His half-shut right eye glittered, while his brain burned like a frosted lamp, clearly delineating the spattered bruise from the stroke that made Alexei Afanasievich look like Mikhail Gorbachev, of whom he had never heard. Nina Alexandrovna usually spent this time in the kitchen, so as not to disturb the paralyzed man with her heavy, ambulating presence. Now, though, in a state of mollified good will, she had an urge to feed him. She decided to check on him first, though, so she cautiously cracked open the bedroom door. Only then did it occur to her that she couldn’t hear him snoring. Standing bewildered on the threshold, Nina Alexandrovna immediately saw—but failed to understand—that something unusual was going on in the bed, whose big gilded knobs burned like headlights. The sheets, which Nina Alexandrovna had left smooth and tight, with the neat paralytic slipped inside like a pen in a shirt pocket, were now rumpled and bunched up at the invalid’s feet, and the blanket was hanging at an angle over the side. Alexei Afanasievich’s left arm was lying quite apart and seemed nearly as big as his entire body, whose odd bending had something armless and fishlike about it. What struck Nina Alexandrovna most, though, was the flimsy white rope fastened to the bed’s latticed headboard like a monogram woven in the air. At the other end, the rope ended in a noose, which lay askew on the paralyzed man’s face. Betrayed by this seemingly carelessly drawn circle, Alexei Afanasievich was looking through it wildly, and his protruding right eye blinked, while the other, half-closed, twitched like a tree’s withered, raindrop-splattered leaf.

  Standing there for a minute, her thoughts at a total impasse, Nina Alexandrovna realized she simply could not acknowledge this. The string lowered around the lattice and around itself in limp, empty loops represented not a running knot he had made but a graphic diagram in the air of how its intended knots should be tied. There was something innocent in the white, drapey silkiness of the rope, which bore some vague relation to a daintily embroidered blouse she recalled on an adolescent Marina. The first thing to do was to destroy any evidence of the crime. Cautiously, grasping it with two wary fingers, Nina Alexandrovna flipped the noose off the sick man’s face, and in response the paralyzed man let out an indignant, throaty grunt. Murmuring something reassuring, Nina Alexandrovna tried to remove the deadly rigging from the bed. The knot in the noose slipped off easily, like a bead, and dropped into her hand; but her light tug pulled the half-finished, branch-like work on the headboard lattice so tight that it took Nina Alexandrovna a quarter of an hour to gnaw through the tough silk stalk with scissors and free the scratched twig. All this time, Alexei Afanasievich, lying in a cooled patch of venomous old-man urine, breathed more evenly and vigorously than usual, and Nina Alexandrovna could feel his brain pushing out dark, concentric circles, like a stone tossed on the water.

  So that’s how it was, she told herself, dropping into her chair. Alexei Afanasievich had attempted to hang himself. Incredible. This wasn’t just about the remainder of his paralyzed days. The particular way Alexei Afanasievich was living, steadily adding minute after minute to the sum total years lived and preserved and not letting himself be distracted for a moment from increasing the quantity of his existence, meant one thing: the moment he died, all he had built would vanish as if it had never been. A distraught Nina Alexandrovna felt herself trying to form a mental picture of things that her ordinary little mind simply could not absorb; it felt as though a tight woolen cap had been pulled over her head. She had the vague sense that her gray-haired husband’s life, which to the disinterested outsider was thoroughly unremarkable, like a set of unimportant archival files—not counting his heroic war—was in reality an unacknowledged act of heroism. His life had in fact been colossal and, like everything colossal, pointless. Any bit of fluff, any scrap of existence, to say nothing of larger, more valuable items, had come into play for Alexei Afanasievich now. Everything had become building material for his nest, his anthill, which he had been creating instinctively rather than according to any rational plan. It was crystal clear that this life of accumulation, which never let anything drop, could exist wholly either on this or that side of the line of death—but not both. Alexei Afanasievich had probably been trying to put a halt to his building before its natural completion. He was truly preparing to destroy more than his own comfortable future, with his velvety puréed soups, fluffy porridges, and fake newscasts; he was planning to annihilate everything in one fell swoop.

  This was indeed inconceivable, monstrous, and unfair; this devalued the life he had lived. Nina Alexandrovna’s hands, resting in her lap, could not lie still; they kept jumping, like writhing fish cast ashore. Had the veteran managed to stick his head through the noose, which was in fact too small, then Nina Alexandrovna’s diligent marriage would have drowned in oblivion, leaving her no one’s widow and no one’s wife, alien and isolated. It would also have meant the disappearance of her predecessor, Alexei Afanasievich’s first spouse, a stout young woman with an oval face like a large medallion and dark hair that covered the bottoms of her ears and gleamed like a record in the sad daylight that permeated the old snapshots of her that remained in her maidenly purse, which was as heavy as an encyclopedia and worn down to its gray fabric. Nina Alexandrovna could not imagine what voids might arise if Alexei Afanasievich made an exit like this. She had some notion of them from the light of those faded snapshots, which preserved the woman’s pose-in-the-park on a backdrop of pointy leaves, deep in a star-shaped kaleidoscope of trees; speaking to the void, too, was the light of a today spent in sorrow—a sun-filled light, so resembling that photographic light, which gave an odd taste of the astronomical distance of its source, of just how far that light had traveled to outline the tall trees in their fever of falling leaves, the coarse sugar of the window tulle, and these little medicine bottles. This meant her husband had been planning to abandon Nina Alexandrovna to her fate. Of course, he didn’t know that his handsome pension was supporting the family, and now it was simply too late to tell him. Nina Alexandrovna didn’t have the words to inform him, out of the blue, about the changes, which even she found implausible. She simply wouldn’t know where to begin because she herself didn’t understand how or why all this had actually come about. If you looked at present-day capitalism from that distant fork in time, then this looked more like a puppet show or the nightmare of a convinced Communist who finds himself inside his own dream. The sole basis for that figure’s existence, if only in men’s minds, was the victory in the Great Patriotic War.

  It turned out that Alexei Afanasievich had always been the creator and center of Soviet reality, which he’d managed to hold onto a little longer; and now this reality, squeezed to the size of their standard-issue living space, retained its permanence, inasmuch as its pillar had not disappeared; on the contrary, it was trapped along with all its medals glowing in their boxes (a Red Banner, a Patriotic War 1st class, Glory 2nd and 3rd class, and four Red Stars), which, unlike the general secretary’s meaningless decorations, possessed an internal logic and event-linked significance. Now, though, the vetera
n, who had turned into a body, into the horizontal content of a high trophy bed, had suddenly declared war on his own immortality. For the first time, Nina Alexandrovna was struck by the fact that Alexei Afanasievich had wended his way back from that hostile Germany, lugging this gilded cot—tens of kilos of lovely metal, separately luxurious in its Gothic mesh, chain netting, and separate headboard and footboard that looked like chromatically tuned musical instruments—and for what? What dream had he clung to in his fierce, war-rattled mind when, already lame and shackled like a convict to his trophy, he had made his way frenziedly through half-destroyed train stations and loaded his goods on passing dusty plywood trucks? Had he been dragging his future royal rest from war across half of Europe or had he after all had some woman in mind and the continuation of his stock? Or had Alexei Afanasievich guessed even then, as he languished in the unhurried peacetime freight train, which jerked every half step like a fishing line, sitting at the feet of his disassembled bed, as if at the foot of his own future, that this German beauty he couldn’t part with due to the senseless obstinacy that had overtaken him would become a worthy gallows for him—that this importunate thing was in fact his inevitable death, acquired, after all, in war? He probably felt that, no matter what, he had to bring death home—across the entire upside-down space littered with architectural devastations—drag it there and finally lie down in it, in the bed and in death, under the protection of his authentic, rear line, reliably closed walls. Actually, Nina Alexandrovna thought, every person hopes to die in his own bed, so what was surprising about that? Only Alexei Afanasievich had preferred to find and choose for himself what would become his last place on earth and the last thing he saw. Alexei Afanasievich’s choice was so specific and willful that he didn’t spare whatever remaining strength he had that hadn’t been exhausted by the war or dragged out of him by the hospital in order, without God’s help, with only crude luck pushing from behind (small change from what he’d paid for thirty victories over an agile and well-fed enemy), to drag the monster he’d taken such a liking to home to the Urals, never to be parted from it again.