Having lost control of the situation but not his mind, Professor Shishkov understood full well that if he stopped handing out money to canvassers, then everyone who hadn’t received his legitimate share would vote against Krugal in the elections, merely out of a sense of outraged justice. So he kept it up, taking his medicine, seeking out funds, and just told his registrars to work as slowly as possible. Each of them invented his own red tape, which made it look as though the disciplined headquarters workers had suddenly fallen ill. They truly didn’t know what to do with themselves under the impatient stares of the pressing people in the middle of their workspace, which was now alienated and in a way undermined by the demand to slow things down. As a result, the registrars, working as if under someone’s hypnotic loupe, in its powerful magnifying jelly, became deathly afraid of making grammatical errors in the logbooks. One impressionable worker had a newly opened pack of fifty-ruble bills go missing, and one woman ground her twisted chair into its extreme position, as if shifting a system of levers, and proceeded to faint.
Some, unable to withstand the pressure from the soggy line that kept coming in from the street—pressure that mounted, pistonlike—would sit for hours in the headquarters’ back room, but even from there they could hear the line, which no one was waiting on but which, obeying its inherent direction, would automatically take a small step every ten minutes—like dozens of shovels driving higgledy-piggledy into a blunt heap of immovable earth. Sharp-witted Lyudochka was the first to notice that the expression “standing in line” was a misnomer because in fact no one was standing: no sooner did people line up single file than they immediately got the impulse to forge ahead, as if the line could become humanity’s long-sought means for passing through walls. Even in the absence of a registrar, the body of the line, pressed forward and cut off at the tail (those who had joined last and who had gone off on errands comprised a kind of extensible cloud impregnated with a very fine frozen rain) continued to function: dozens of feet shifted, scuffed, and kicked at bags, and some adjusted their fogged-up glasses on the shoulders of those standing in front of them. In order to stand and also rest a little, they had to step to the side and find a spot by the wall; there, shirking the common efforts and rubbing their somber coats against the dirty pink, unusually corrosive chalk, there were always individualists hanging around with their noses in books. How they were able to read under the bare, low-wattage bulbs, which rather than spread light seemed to suck it up and collect it from the whole corridor, a thimbleful for each, was anyone’s guess, as was why the district’s inhabitants kept streaming into headquarters for their pathetic fifty rubles with a doggedness worthy of some better application. Most likely, they were driven here by a sense of fairness that demanded the equal distribution of free stuff, just for the signing.
Some applicants, in no way discouraged by the delay getting to the dispensing tables, came several times each. The line’s stamp on them did not come down just to yesterday’s and the day before’s traces of corridor chalk but was expressed in the particular ways of habitués. Doubtless they had taken a fancy to the quaint playground opposite headquarters for their drinking, a playground that vaguely resembled a circus ring with props for small trained animals. In the evenings, the workers would sit for a while after closing and then emerge into the dark courtyard, where a thick layer of wet leaves lay like tea at the bottom of a teapot, and they would notice on the playground an untoward, residual presence: stooping figures whose stirrings the eye picked up against the small plaster statue of a Young Pioneer that had been shoved into a bush. Their volumes collided neatly, and sometimes their out-of-control shouts sent a maddened cat flying across the lawn like a sudden missile. Marina, who had not been singled out by any specific assignment but who had come to a feel an almost maternal responsibility for the staff’s well-being, understood full well that if the residents of the surrounding pensioner apartment buildings had still not complained to the newspapers or the police, it was only because they themselves, to a man, had taken canvasser money and had hopes for even more. After the workers separated and ran off to wherever, and the professor’s old heap, having fallen into a sneezed puddle, turned onto the avenue, Marina, overcoming her chemically complex fear of men and the dark, attempted to get closer to the picnic herself to ascertain whether it did or didn’t have anything to do with their headquarters. In reality, she only managed to take three or four hesitant steps over the slick leaves in that direction. If anything could be seen more clearly from that compromise distance, then it was the abandoned Pioneer hero with his smashed tie and scary little face, like plaster dough. Several times on the playground she saw a mellow fire sputtering in the drizzle; in its little red cloud you could see pink hands in thick gloves occasionally tossing cardboard scraps on the fire—but even in this dim light Marina was able to identify the faces of two or three half-basement acquaintances, which for some reason seemed very old-mannish and shimmered with a fleeting heat, like cracked coals. Ever since then, this inevitable discovery had weighed on Marina with a presentiment of disaster.
Marina’s intuition told her that the local populace’s persistence was a legitimate part of the general campaign madness. Evidently, the romantic determination to get rich inspired by Apofeozov’s person wouldn’t let the voters pass up even the very small chance his nominal opponent’s headquarters offered. It was also likely that the bonus promised to canvassers in the event of Krugal’s victory—even though it was a known and modest quantity—was in some way linked in their bewitched minds to all the fantastic promises that that unrecognized artist had made in his two low-budget videos. Despite the fact that an inspired Krugal, appearing on the backdrop of a streaming state flag, spoke about local improvements, in particular about the now notorious natural gas scheme for the private sector, the viewer got the feeling he was talking about some small town in Latin America; whereas when Fyodor Ignatovich, shot on a backdrop of the district’s real scrap heaps and characteristic semi-ruins, which were oriented, like anthills, from north to south, replaced the deplorable landscapes with computer pictures with the wave of an illusionist’s hand, the voter’s native clay soil slipped out from under his feet altogether. Perhaps because the sun in the pictures was unusually intense, lending the white architectural mirages’ surfaces the vividness of film screens, the resident had the vague feeling that they meant to relocate him to Rio de Janeiro; he probably imagined that his post-election bonus would simultaneously be a share in those fairytale tropical hotels that this large-browed man in the light, loose trench coat with all kinds of compartments and big buttons like electric outlets was somehow going to build in place of their potholes and damp hovels.
Although she’d written the scripts for both videos, even Marina couldn’t figure out why on paper the district sounded fictional—despite the fact that she now felt a strange tenderness for District 18, as if it were her little homeland whose presence so close to hand she hadn’t had so much as an inkling of before the elections. Previously, her life had always extended from home to the right—toward downtown, where with each intersection everything got fancier and cleaner, where a third-rate town was gradually replaced by a second-rate one. But now she had turned left, toward the poor, muddled place that Marina in the last four months had come to know better than in all the years before, when the district sloping to the horizon had been just a boring view out her window. Now that the traitor Klimov had left her altogether for his Asian girlfriend, Marina discovered that she was more at ease in her district than anywhere else. She liked to say hello on the street to people she half knew. She was surprisingly mollified by the landscape’s slope and its pallid colors, the prone poses of every part of the undulating relief, the black wooden dampness of the weather-beaten fences, and the old-people scent of damp nettles full of water, rot, and strong, rubbery spiderwebs. All this was real—unlike the situation in the “right” part of town, which Marina had for too long depicted as the place for her life going forward, without Klimov, b
ut now, finding herself in this new life, she couldn’t convince herself of the reality of those streets, which moved a little too fast, like sped-up film.
Here, in District 18, even shaded by the waist-length portrait of her waterproof foe, everything coincided gratifyingly with the rhythm of leisurely steps and unhurried thoughts; everything here was pedestrian, and the remains of the leaflets about hiring canvassers, which had disintegrated in the wet and lingered the way a butterfly leaves patterned dust, nothing but a fluffy scrap of letters, evoked waves of nostalgia. Obviously, no one had read these old papers—pasted up in the dark and as if spoiled by the light of the many passing days—in quite a while. Not only that, it was gratifying to observe a tall blonde in a worn green coat and black bell-bottoms, which looked like two whale’s tails, trying to read, with a childlike curiosity, the chilled notice half stuck into a fence’s cracks. At the sight of this simplehearted child tall enough for basketball licking a melting ice cream bar with her milky tongue, Marina felt that life had a sentimental value independent of Klimov’s presence or the invented Communist Party membership that no longer warmed or inspired her in any way. Her paralyzed stepfather, papered over with skin that was already thinned and run through with frozen veins, resided in the ocean-bottom depths of old age’s oblivion. For him, all the objects in his room, including the Brezhnev portrait Marina had stolen from the university’s Theory and Practice of the Press department, were nothing more than his memories. These long-ago things, covered with the finest layer of dust, made thirsty by her mother’s endless housecleaning, remained in place with the help of the same magnetism as did the weak smell of the burned match from which her stepfather probably had been intending to smoke when a small vessel in his head burst with a roar. It would be simply blasphemous to rouse this half-dead body to participation in life, even if it was an invented life and bore no relation to reality. It was wrong to taunt the old man with the television, which made the paralyzed man’s neck tense on its taut roots, where what looked like an old scar, like a dirty silk cord, appeared. The alternate reality, in which Marina really did join the Party because she properly wanted to be among responsible and progressive people, probably had come out fairly convincingly for her, but deep down Marina always guessed that it wasn’t she but her stepfather who by some incomprehensible force was maintaining his autonomous little world around him, and this force, this magnetic field, was no illusion. Now Marina just wanted to leave her stepfather in peace and save herself, her strength and blood, for feeding the spectral Klimov, whom she couldn’t forget anyway. The district Marina was used to considering her own, though it was driving her quietly mad, nonetheless did allow her to breathe. Sometimes she imagined it as a discrete small town where she could know all the inhabitants by face and name, buy food in the same little shops, graciously exchange greetings with the salesclerks, and see newly arrived strangers laid out before her—the way they confidently tromped through the streets and used the newsstands and public transport, thinking they didn’t differ in any way from the locals, while their differences became a free show for everyone. This idyll (which betrayed Marina’s secret inclination to construct self-contained, illusory worlds) was so speculative that it demanded no improvement from District 18 whatsoever. Marina found even the little river’s trampled banks, blotted with thick, sudsy garbage, beautiful. Blue stove smoke floating through the soft drizzle and smelling like wet wool was more romantic than banal gas burners, and the face, as bare as a mushroom, of the old woman gathering logs with her black canvas glove symbolized the reassuring mortality of all living things, which were under no obligation to overrule peaceful natural law.
For Marina, a loss in the elections now would be tantamount to being driven out of her own home. She could view an Apofeozov occupation only as a personal insult and a major calamity. So she patiently bore the trials of the campaign’s last few weeks and carried out Professor Shishkov’s instructions more conscientiously than anyone else. In order to work as slowly as possible, Marina counted silently, maniacally counting to as high a number as possible without losing track, even when she was recording an applicant’s passport information. If the other registrars drooped more and more under the yoke of delay, even laying their heads on their tables, then Marina was like an indefatigable windup doll with a clockwork mechanism. In response to any impatient canvasser’s trick, she would calmly shift to a tough division problem that demanded her full concentration. Sometimes the windup would last for as many as several difficult-to-pronounce thousands, and the higher the count went, the harder it became to balance the imagined number column and simultaneously manipulate the registration materials spread out below. Often, Marina would drop what she’d been carrying right in front of the people languishing in line. For minutes at a time, it seemed that if she worked not slowly but, on the contrary, incredibly fast, she could be rid of, exhaust, the wearisome uncertainty and come to the end—whatever that meant—ahead of time.
Nonetheless, the alarm bells that penetrated Marina’s days of exhaustion were not just her fraught nerves dancing. One fine day she discovered that the line, which had been a phenomenon that renewed itself daily, had become a permanent entity. This happened when one of the basement unfortunates who flashed by, easily identified by his canvas raincoat—possibly army, possibly a fisherman’s, evidently his one garment for all seasons and all life’s occasions—suddenly appeared in front of her table. Taking the filthy document, like half a smoked chicken, from the autochthon’s big hand, Marina noticed behind his thumb’s healthy haunch a tiny, painstakingly drawn number. Thus it had come to pass that the line had become something like a citizen organization and had spontaneously inherited the power of lines that had once drilled through unnourishing socialism, like roots drilled into poor soil.
The line had given rise to its own activists. A few dyed ladies kept permanent guard at the basement door. One, taking new arrivals by the arm with the professionalism of a lab nurse, wrote a number on their palm, while the other recorded the line-standers in a tattered notebook that looked like a twisted, unfastened umbrella. She discovered the painter who, not coughing softly now but hacking and screeching like a rooster getting its throat slit, wouldn’t leave the courtyard, which was already sprinkled with groats and glassy broken ice. His job was to escort out imposters who had stood in line since morning but didn’t have their ink mark from yesterday, half-eaten by sweat, on their hand—which the painter did by grabbing the retracted arms, like big balky fish caught on a spinning rod, and stomping on dropped caps with his heavy army boots. He also stayed at his post when the soap opera was on television and the courtyard turned into a quickly whitening frame, where in people’s wake their icy footprints disappeared as well on the increasingly pixilated, also disappearing ground, and the thin cornices were like hourglasses spilling a fine white flour. All the rest of the time, the painter engaged in commerce: he placed on the steps, under the overhang, not his own paintings, in the pathologo-anatomical genre, but bundles of decorated clay bells and little hollow ceramic birds that hooted instead of whistling, and offered them to potential customers—a painful reminder for Marina of the departed Klimov. Evidently, having slashed prices to sell, the painter was asking fifty rubles for each piece of craftsmanship—and making no sales whatsoever. When people made their way out of the dim hell with their hard-earned fifty rubles, they had no desire to trade their share of justice right there, at the door, for hollow rubbish and instead hurried to the nearest store, where they were awaited by full sealed containers whose muteness promised a depth of sensation, a clarity of conversation, an infinite multiplication of essences, and an iridescent layering of ordinary objects.
Most dangerous of all, though, was that the community brigade was in the charge of the energetic Klumba, whose head was crowned by a new mink hat as hairy as a coconut and on whose feet gleamed new boots with fashionably turned-up toes, in which Klumba braked cautiously as she stepped, as if she were constantly going downhill. The p
ensioner ladies around her, already wearing their dark red and navy winter coats edged in molting dog or cat fur, treated their basement elder respectfully and with a certain trepidation. No sooner did Klumba appear and begin talking to the group than they all crept away from the apartment entryways, which looked like wooden outhouses, to catch every word—although they listened as if they were always expecting bad news from her.
In charge at the headquarters entrance and personally driving off the local lush, who was nearly blind he was so bloated but who knew how to extract empty bottles from any human assemblage, Klumba squeezed through sideways, arousing agitation and a sympathetic murmur, into the registrars’ room—to yell at them. Surfacing in front of the tables with her hat askew and her raspberry red lipstick smeared from ear to ear, Klumba began denouncing the red tape in bouts of speech that resembled texts by Mayakovsky in their rhymes and meter. All work came to a standstill. The registrars, taught by experience, quietly carried the money to the portable safe, and the agitation behind Klumba’s back rolled to the corridor and reverberated there in a metallic echo, like when a semitruck stops short. Finally pulling out of the living human crampedness the practical bag Marina knew so well, Klumba demanded whoever was in charge of handing out the subsidies so they could coordinate measures.
A couple of times, unable to reach Shishkov, who had gone missing from time and space, Marina herself attempted to play a supervisory role. Klumba recognized her, but in stages. At first a suspicion dawned in her awareness and in her symmetric eyes burning on either side of her nose that instead of a supervisor they were foisting on her something she knew well that had nothing to do with supervisors, and as soon as she remembered who in fact this tightly belted Young Communist with the pinecone hairdo was, she would immediately expose the deception. Then, provocatively following Marina into the headquarters’ back room, immediately clearing out the alarmed staff, who abandoned their unsweetened tea-drinking, Klumba softened a little, and her speech, still labored, as if by a stammer, an involuntarily galloping rhyming (a side effect of visiting the North Hotel), became increasingly confiding. She accepted boiling water and a steeping teabag in one of the relatively clean mugs and took from her bag a securely bound file, and out of the file—stapled sets of documents: raggedly torn-out notebook pages covered in large, old people’s handwriting; statements addressed to Krugal enumerating medals, illnesses, and hardships; yellowed certificates attested to by old seals as pale as traces from glasses; diplomas falling apart at the folds into two richly soiled pieces; and archival excerpts as frail and flat as ironed rags. Occasionally even small photographs fell out of paper clips, in ones and twos. Time had stiffened the paper so that it curved like an uncut fingernail. Watching closely to see that nothing got lost or mixed up in Marina’s hands, Klumba pulled out the principal summary document: a list of District 18 residents, non-able-bodied invalids and veterans of war and labor who needed subsidies more than anyone but who for health reasons couldn’t stand in a line or even go outside. Their basement leader suggested home visits made by the community, which was prepared to work selflessly simply for the right to get them and their family members their subsidy without having to stand in line.