The Man Who Couldn't Die

  Once this had happened, Nina Alexandrovna could help Alexei Afanasievich when he was drenched from exertion with the old-man sweat, cloudy like moonshine, that burned his sheets. It would have taken Nina Alexandrovna, who was divinely nimble and light compared with the paralyzed man as she hovered over him in the apartment’s rectangular heavens, mere minutes to reproduce on the blanket the well-studied bowel of death, to make all the pulls and turns and offer her spouse the ready-made noose, like the hole from a world-size bagel. But Nina Alexandrovna understood that she, as a woman, had to make sure she didn’t touch that with her hands, that no matter how much beyond his strength it was for him to do that terribly slow, winding work, Alexei Afanasievich would never allow her to do anything improper. Basically, Nina Alexandrovna still didn’t dare speak with the paralyzed man about his attempts to contrive death’s universal monogram. Although Alexei Afanasievich couldn’t shut her mouth with a pneumatic palm fat with pumped-up air as he once had, she well sensed the inappropriateness of any discussion—and no outside listener, had he snuck up from the dark hallway, would have caught anything at all suspicious in the comments of the wife reporting as she tended to him about the weather, burned pancakes, and the doctor’s imminent arrival.

  Meanwhile, her spirits fortified, Nina Alexandrovna soon became convinced that the paralyzed man, who was coming very close to a result, could never cross the invisible line. Not because Alexei Afanasievich lacked decisiveness or the frenzied soldier’s obstinacy: it was just that a rubber wall kept bouncing him back. Rather than contemplate the nature of this mystical boundary, Nina Alexandrovna decided to trust in fate: simply not to want anything for herself and to accept the possibility of any turn of family events. One fine quiet night, when the lines of the glowing landscape softened for the first time under a cloak of new snow and its reliefs began to smile under the streetlamps’ sparking light, Nina Alexandrovna suddenly realized she didn’t have to fear death. No more did she cut off the bed the results of Alexei Afanasievich’s labors; each subsequent knot, as intricate as a small animal’s brain, took up minimal space on the bed lattice, but now the reflecting gold of the lattice branches barely peeked through the tangled fringe. The wonderful trophy bed had come to look like a hothouse for cucumbers. Raggedy plaits bestrewed it, and standing out like a tubular flower was the same gilded tie—she had no idea whose—as well as a few cords of quite obscure origin, unusually filthy and stringy, smelling for some reason of sweetish ash and giving the impression of last year’s dried stems. The hothouse had not borne fruit, though. The hollow-bodied fruits (in essence, the loops, shapeless and devoid of content, were embodied nothingness) did not germinate or grow. Only a couple of times, while straightening Alexei Afanasievich’s beaten-down pillows for him, did Nina Alexandrovna find behind them pathetic seed buds, tiny and stuck together, like failed cucumbers, which resembled, in turn, collapsed balloons with a curved nipple at the tip. Evidently, Alexei Afanasievich was putting the rigging not so much on himself as on his own death, but the beast would not be caught, although it was undoubtedly clawing at and consuming his soul. To judge from the opening in the loops she found, death was the size of a field mouse.

  For the visit from Evgenia Markovna, the doctor, all this unattractive activity was curtained off by the caked navy blanket that had once covered the marital bed: in the depths of its permanent folds, like the powder left over in a pharmaceutical pack, a new blue remained, better preserved than in memory. Unaware of the paralyzed man’s successes with death macramé, cautiously, not trusting her own words, the doctor gave a positive prognosis, specifically: the toes on Alexei Afanasievich’s left foot had started to move, the red webbing had stretched between them, like on a duck, and the battered big toe wagged back and forth, like a lever being tested by a mechanic. As to the fingers on his working hand, they were no longer mitten-like but moved independently, and this movement had made them surprisingly long, and their tendons apparently functioned all the way up to his elbow. One day Nina Alexandrovna caught her husband with his index finger firmly aimed at the ceiling—and this decisive gesture was strikingly different from his usual wayward movements. At first she tried to figure out what Alexei Afanasievich was trying to say or, maybe, ask for, but then she realized that for the paralyzed man what was important was the vertical, plain and simple—a finger-length vertical, negligible compared to his mighty size, yet a victory over the incorporeality of his recumbent body, a ten-centimeter measure of his real existence, a successful attempt to skewer nonexistence.

  The understanding that the range of possibilities was increasing, that the options for the future were growing farther and farther apart, made Nina Alexandrovna feel strangely empty and free to act. Now it was not out of the question that Alexei Afanasievich, after so many years of immobility, might by some miracle get back on his feet and forget about his attempts to hang himself; it might also be that thanks to his astonishing improvements he might actually carry out his plan. Also likely was that nothing in his usual life would change and the stagnation sealed up in that room, a stagnation sprinkled with a white sleeping powder, would retain its unique qualities and the dead would remain alive here forever. Never before had Nina Alexandrovna had such a broad range of options. Her movement from past to future had always followed the sole possible line, as if through a schematic tunnel where the inhabited cubicle “today” shifted continuously into the waiting “tomorrow:” if something altered the direction of this curve, then that “something” (Alexei Afanasievich’s stroke, the introduction of free prices, the ruble’s fall) immediately found itself in the past, and the more unexpected the turn, the stiffer that shift. Now Nina Alexandrovna’s fate had slipped off that line like beads off a thread. Suddenly, she found herself in the middle of a big white patch without guidelines; the future no longer stood up ahead in the form of an unfilled shop window, and there was no point peering into it. From here, from the vantage of her new freedom, Nina Alexandrovna was surprised to note that it was the suicide attempt that had given the impetus to Alexei Afanasievich’s recovery. That attempt had yielded an effect that medicines could not have achieved. The more furious the veteran’s efforts to hang himself on one of his hardened, odd-smelling cords, the more actively his organism’s restoration proceeded. His left leg had already started quietly to bend, and the veteran’s knee poked up out of its horizontal nonexistence like a calloused tree root out of the earth; a crooked yawn had suddenly begun coming over Alexei Afanasievich, too, nearly ripping his half-dead facial muscles, and his face seemed to express the torments of Tantalus trying to take a bite out of some invisible fruit. Having lain all those years at death’s side, a few millimeters from its sovereign boundary, Alexei Afanasievich, in his attempt to breach this final gap, had been thrown back into life by death, had bounced back from its unreached line, like a ball from a wall, and now his efforts were yielding an inversely proportional result.

  Amazingly enough, Alexei Afanasievich’s death and recovery posed identical practical problems for Nina Alexandrovna, including moving furniture, which now was divided into lifeless stationary objects and objects that due to the crowding kept having to be dragged around to turn the room into its nighttime version with the cot. Nina Alexandrovna tried to gauge the best way to pull and drag apart the awkward furniture jam that had formed over the years beside the paralyzed man’s bed in light of his capabilities and convenience of care; she also wished she could replace the wallpaper, which was greasy from age and was pulling away from the walls in puffy yellowed folds. One day she stopped by the nearby hardware store, which had once smelled like a shed and toxic new pressed-wood furniture; nowadays the fragrant store was filled with fantastic, graceful plumbing fixtures that looked like cases for marvelous musical instruments, and Nina Alexandrovna thought she could sew an evening gown out of the wallpaper there if it hadn’t been paper.

  The main thing, though, was employment. Nina Alexandrovna thought she might work as an aide in an old folks’ home.
After fourteen years of caring for a paralyzed man, she didn’t have a drop of squeamishness for old people’s turbid organisms or the musty mushroom smell of their gnarled excretions. In their dilapidated corporality, old people seemed closer to nature than young people were, and therefore purer. Merely imagining replacing Alexei Afanasievich with some other “granddad” was just as hard as it was impossible to imagine another daughter replacing Marina, some stranger who wore red lipstick and drank fruit kefir in the kitchen. Be that as it may, Nina Alexandrovna knew she could handle the work. Right now she was physically stronger than she’d been at twenty-five and thirty. Her hands—now twice as thick and flabby on their backs but covered with a rough, chitinous armor—dragged and flipped over something that would have been unthinkable for her even to have attempted in her student years. Of course, Nina Alexandrovna’s own health had been badly rattled. The feeling of a fist under her shoulder blade would linger for hours, and even gripping a knife as she cut vegetables she could feel it in the back of her head, where a solid air bubble throbbed right under the bone. The combination of physical strength and the unreliable fine mechanics poorly installed in her crude muscular mechanism made Nina Alexandrovna acutely aware of her own transience and each moment’s insecurity. Sometimes she felt as though she could barely think. Whatever she drilled her gaze into became an insurmountable obstacle to thought, and if she succumbed to temptation and physically moved the impediment out of the way, then she couldn’t stop herself from cleaning, as if demonstrating to herself how much simpler and more natural it was to move things than to mentally picture them having lately become free-flowing.

  She did need to worry about the future, after all, and prepare for it in some real way. The only person Nina Alexandrovna could go to for advice and help was her now sober nephew. When Nina Alexandrovna finally realized that her son-in-law Seryozha was gone and wasn’t coming back to their suddenly very quiet apartment (Marina’s shuffling steps, which Nina Alexandrovna continued to listen to closely, did not fill the silence, which prickled from the fine ticking of the clock), she decided, no matter what, to seek out the sole male relative capable of heading up the family at a critical time. Having no idea how to go about this properly, or whether the information bureau was still functioning, Nina Alexandrovna decided to start by inquiring at her nephew’s old apartment, where she had gone regularly before his new spouse came on the scene. There was a time when she would drag bags of rotten garbage out of that den and defrost the aging refrigerator, which suffered from incontinence and barely endured its huge wet ice blocks for the sake of one frozen bag of faded hake; then Nina Alexandrovna would wash the impossible floors down to their pale, etched out spots and in the bathtub wash the gray sheets, which had started to ferment like mash. Now things in her nephew’s apartment were very different, of course, and so as not to embarrass herself in front of her newly rich relative, Nina Alexandrovna prepared for her visit. She pulled out of the closet a half-forgotten, minutely moth-eaten bouclé suit, which was now so snug that her figure looked like a sheep’s carcass; she searched for her fake Czech pearl beads, which had peeled like an old manicure (Alexei Afanasievich had never understood her tender attachment to all these baubles, which for her were like cheap caramels, her favorite candies, were for her sweet tooth—anything but symbols of wealthy diamonds, which were unattainable and therefore unreal). Finally, after finding that her old evening bag was too small for the rough, deposit-laden daytime city, Nina Alexandrovna borrowed Marina’s leather bag, which was hanging idle—perhaps too young for her, but decorative and obviously recently purchased. Bags like this, made of pieces exquisitely selected according to the radial laws of avian plumage, hung in the best shops in the clothing section of the wholesale market, where the customers were fashionistas with money; this one, practically unused, with its comfortable broad strap, had a design that reminded her of a grouse. You could even see the wing’s curve. Removing some loose papers that scattered staples behind them, papers that had been stuffed inside so the bag wouldn’t lose its shape, Nina Alexandrovna first shoved the papers into the trash can, where they stood straight up, and then, frightened that someone might still need the unintelligible lists speckled with coded comments, she shook the limp chicken innards off the pages and laid them out to dry on the kitchen windowsill.

  Thus prepared, and knowing that Marina would be kept late at work, Nina Alexandrovna decided that the next day she would pay her visit, a weather forecast promising twenty below notwithstanding. That night, as thick ice feathers froze on the apartment windows, she dreamed of a strange, lackluster beach, a sea consisting of several long bands of silver, and above the sea, ash-gray cumulus clouds in which the sun was merely indicated, like the capital city on a map. Flat waves ran onto shore and ironed out the fine sand, and this sand—this sand held everything, both the matter of the world pulverized into atoms and the sleeping woman who kept sifting the colorful, dusty flour between her fingers but couldn’t find a single stone or shard or any remnants whatsoever of the reality that had drained into this watery sandy pit. In the morning, Nina Alexandrovna awoke with no memory of her dream and for some reason with wet eyes and her hair matted at the temples. She didn’t remember her dream until she was outside, when she saw the neon luminescence of the drifting gray snow on a sidewalk made desolate by the freezing temperature. In her dream, finely shredded foam glowed on the sluggish water that poured onto the endless sloping sand like a pancake onto a skillet—and now the lackluster landscape, singed at its white corners, was solidly covered with a volatile silver glow: people turned around and exhaled a white flame, and reflecting scraps sped after the bus that had trundled off right under Nina Alexandrovna’s nose from the congested, pointlessly stamping stop. Lining up modestly at the edge of the crowd, which kept sending frosty representatives into the thoroughfare, Nina Alexandrovna observed through her stuck eyelashes a subtle luminescent streaming on the road, which was scraped to the bare asphalt and covered in white wrinkles. Sand was sprinkling from barely noticeable rivulets of disintegrated matter, and the impersonal cold penetrated Nina Alexandrovna’s light coat like pitiless radiation, making her defenseless spine ache as if it had been lowered onto the last living thread, exactly as in her dream. At first, Nina Alexandrovna thought that if her family survived this era—which for others had stopped short at 1990, apparently—then the logical outcome would, of course, be war.

  While the heavy bus, which kept dropping on its ass, was hauling Nina Alexandrovna and the rest of its squeezed passenger load to the Vagonzavod stop, the frost abated somewhat—and continued to abate, creating the intermittent impression of the air subsiding dramatically, like a melting snowdrift. Feeling her body’s center of gravity drop, Nina Alexandrovna gingerly descended, as if climbing down a tree, over the bumpy paths, in the direction of some two-story stuccoed barracks that stood quite a bit below road level. At this point, the residential area was even lower than the humped sidewalks, which were as narrow as small berms: the lower-floor windows sealed with insulating tape looked up touchingly, and in front of them, as if in deep holes, the modest front gardens were white with smooth, untouched snow, which seemed to touch the branches, as if the bare twigs had latched on and pulled invisible threads from a fine white fabric. Right there—a stone’s throw over the fence—Nina Alexandrovna saw in the branches of a ruddy, deformed apple tree a trough made of a shipping crate with the remnants of a mailing address, and in that trough, two perfectly identical little titmice pecking at some frozen bread, and to hear it you’d think a wall clock was striking the hour on the tree.

  Far past the barracks, the standard-issue apartment buildings began on bare vacant land, without any courtyards, connected by a system of paths as intricate as a billiards game, converging and diverging at irregular angles. After well and truly wandering, Nina Alexandrovna suddenly found herself in front of the right entrance with the same slab underfoot, wobbling on the diagonal, only now the entrance was cut off from the world by
a brown steel door. The only things on its entire surface were crudely cut holes through which she could see the steel aperture of an enormous lock. Distraught, Nina Alexandrovna stepped back to look for the familiar windows, although the tenth floor left her with no hope of drawing anyone’s attention. After lifting her swaying head incorrectly, instantly making the pain squawk, she saw that at a certain height both the building and its receding windows clearly lost their connection to the ground, passing through a centimeter of invisibility to become unreal, as if made of some very flimsy material. While Nina Alexandrovna was coming back down beneath the clouds and blinking back a harsh tear, a blurry, round-shouldered person applied himself, like a spider, to the impregnable doors and gnashed an invisible key as if sawing through metal—but by the time Nina Alexandrovna, still not done blinking, reached the treacherously tottery slab, the door lock, which was the size of a bench plane, had come crashing down and the brown steel was once again shut tight. For a while she could hear the man ascending and slapping the banister and humming some repulsive march.