The Man Who Couldn't Die

  But she was in luck. About a minute and a half later, the steel clanged again, and out the door, carrying a tidy garbage can packed with newspaper, came a neighbor Nina Alexandrovna recognized—a positive-minded woman with a very serious, judgmental face who in Nina Alexandrovna’s memory had never spoken ten words but who sometimes had knocked on her nephew’s wall so that crumbs sprinkled down under the wallpaper and the cheap clock that hadn’t been drunk away skipped a beat and stopped. Holding the squealing door for Nina Alexandrovna, the neighbor drilled an intense look into her—but at the last moment her look shifted so that the woman ended up greeting not Nina Alexandrovna but the twiggy bushes poking up out of the snowdrift. As she ascended in the shuddering elevator, whose buttons had turned into black ulcers long ago, Nina Alexandrovna thought that the neighbor simply didn’t know how to get along with people without erecting a wall between herself and them. But a nasty presentiment dogged her; next to a radiator where she had once found a treasure—a drunken woman in a man’s jacket with a medal “For Courageous Labor”—there now sat a healthy kitty spotted like a cow: its round little head tilted back, it had chewed off a piece of bloody innards that had stuck to the tile, and the spot made around the kitty’s meal was stamped with partial boot prints.

  The apartment door had been replaced, naturally. Instead of the old leatherette wretchedness, which had occasionally dropped rusted-through wallpaper nails, like rotten teeth, there was sturdy insulation covered in figured lath and equipped with a clean, purple peephole the size of a good shot glass. Nina Alexandrovna pressed the sugar-white bell and heard way back in the apartment a musical intro like when a magic box opens in movie fairytales. Nothing followed, though. After listening to its melodious summons a good fifteen times, Nina Alexandrovna suddenly had the feeling that someone was standing behind her. Turning around, she saw a pale creature approximately Marina’s age. The creature’s pinched face reminded her of an autumn puddle frozen over with icy splinters. Her bloodless emaciation didn’t connect with her huge pregnant belly, where her shaggy rabbit-fur coat—with brown spots exactly like that kitty, which now seemed to have gone missing—wouldn’t close. “Who are you looking for?” the pregnant woman, evidently the apartment’s owner, asked in a vibrating little voice. Her keys played nervously in her hand and under Nina Alexandrovna’s gaze were hastily put back in her pocket. Calmly, trying not to scare off the mistrustful creature (suppressing a strange desire to pat her coat, that soft childish fur, the cheap, crunchy fell), Nina Alexandrovna explained about her nephew and gave his name. “I don’t know anything. I bought the apartment through an agency,” the pregnant woman said quickly, mixing the keys in her pocket with some kind of soft trash; her blunt little boots, which looked orthopedic due to the slenderness of her legs contrasted to the size of her belly, took tentative steps right and left.

  Not knowing what to say to that, Nina Alexandrovna smiled reassuringly and held out her hand to touch the pregnant woman, who nearly fell down shying away and backing into the scratched-up wall. Her coat flapped open comically, like chicken wings: evidently, she’d been squeezing her fists in her jangling pockets. Nina Alexandrovna’s heart suddenly melted. She thought about how incredibly comic she herself would have looked to a stranger when she was pregnant and tried to hang herself—like a cuckoo stuck in a cuckoo clock. “Don’t you smile. I really did buy the apartment,” the woman said challengingly, shaking out her hem. “Later they told me why it was so cheap. A man was hacked to death with an ax here.” “What man? What ax?” Nina Alexandrovna said gently, amazed at her pregnant fantasies and with no intention of budging. “I’m telling you, this is my nephew’s former apartment, and he’s definitely alive. I received a money order from him a few days ago.” At that moment, the mooring elevator groaned. The neighbor, holding the emptied bucket with its stuck-on snow-sole away from her body, slipped past, and her angrily pursed lips looked like neat sutures made with gray thread. “Gulya Kerimovna!” Nina Alexandrovna called out to the neighbor, suddenly remembering her name, as if someone had whispered it in her ear. But the neighbor (who had in very timely fashion brought in realtors to draw up and backdate a power of attorney for selling the apartment and who now kept the dollars she’d earned in one of her four—she didn’t remember exactly which one—well-worn armchairs) didn’t even turn around; hiding behind her cornflower blue back, she turned her keys in the locks as if she were drilling into her own door and trying to pass right through it. It really did seem to Nina Alexandrovna that the neighbor, rather than enter the half-cracked door, passed through the wood and steel: after turning into a surprisingly slender and undulating silhouette, she broke up into dynamic blue spots that quickly vanished from the wood’s surface the way the fog of human breath vanishes from a mirror’s. Nina Alexandrovna suddenly thought she’d been given a graphic illustration of how to forget someone: as if he’d gone through a wall and what lingered for a few seconds in your eyes was like a Chinese hieroglyph drawn with a quick brush.

  “Fine. Let’s go. I’ll show you,” the apartment’s owner said decisively, moving Nina Alexandrovna away from the nice new door. Together they entered the half-empty front hall, which seemed to Nina Alexandrovna nothing like it was before—because the light turned on not where she expected but on the other side. However, a long bare cord and moldering socket still hung from the ceiling, and Nina Alexandrovna instantly remembered how the heat of the overheated bulb, after it had gone out, felt on her forehead and raised hand if you stamped abruptly or dropped a heavy bag on the floor. There were surprisingly few things in either the hall or the room, which was oddly drafty the way only spaces in abandoned buildings through which you can see the ashberry trees and garbage in the rear courtyard can be. The new life seemed haphazardly laid out on top of the remains of the old, not destroying it, but not using it either. To the left of the front door, Nina Alexandrovna saw the familiar peeling coatrack with a single, shriveled glove on the shelf posed like a dead sparrow; to the right, a new, almost identical one had been nailed up and on it hung a very few pieces of women’s clothing—all of it with big buttons and soft shoulder pads sticking out like empty camel humps. “Now you can see for yourself, the blood hasn’t been completely washed off here,” the pregnant woman said, clumsily turning herself out of her coat and loading it onto her half. Right then Nina Alexandrovna sensed the unreality of what was happening.

  On the floor of the front hall, bare as before, with clayey tracks worn across the old floor cloths, lay the one and only rug (right then Nina Alexandrovna couldn’t come up with another definition) the size of a grave’s flower bed. The rug’s placement was off—not in front of the door, as one would expect, but slightly to one side—and not quite to the wall; on it for reliability—to press down harder on what was hidden beneath it and might somehow pop out—stood all the worn footwear there was here, plus a cart with a splattered bag. Dropping heavily first to one knee, then the other (her belly, stretched in checked fabric, looked like it was about to fall out, like a ball from a basketball net), the pregnant woman cast aside her ridiculous barricade and turned back the rug. The sense of unreality immediately vanished. Nina Alexandrovna could only wonder how she hadn’t immediately remembered about that spot—now nothing but dark red cracks between the faded planks. About four years before (no, I’m sorry, a good six!) her nephew, needing to earn a little extra on May Day, contracted to paint some structure the Communists were planning to take out on the square to hurt Yeltsin. For some reason, her nephew brought home an entire can of revolutionary oil paint and tripped, as often happened with him, on level ground, spilling the contents. Fortunately, that day Nina Alexandrovna had dropped by to clean: the thick paint tongue spilled on the floor hadn’t dried yet—it had just darkened and set a little—and Nina Alexandrovna scraped up the soft paint with a heavily greased knife, wiping the collected clods on stuck-together newspapers, while her guilty-looking nephew (she recalled especially vividly his shaking forelock with yellow dry
weeds of gray hair) fussed with gasoline, which left swaths on the rust-brown floor that looked like damp, swollen cheese. After telling the pregnant woman the whole story, Nina Alexandrovna saw with relief a new interest on her elongated little face and, simultaneously, pink dots of a delighted strawberry color. “Well, would you like me to prove to you that I’ve been in this apartment?” A newly dawned-upon Nina Alexandrovna, supporting the heavy woman by her elbow, which was swaying like a testicle, led her to the toilet, where, as in the old days, the old basin, red with rust, was making a furious noise.

  Due to some awkward gradation of the niche, the painted plywood behind the basin, which concealed the wastewater pipe, which was making very strange sounds, stood out a good ten centimeters from the wall. Slipping her hand into the tight crack—there, inside, just like in someone’s mouth, first breathing cold air, then plowing up a deep warmth—Nina Alexandrovna immediately felt a slippery glass neck, shifted it aside, and pulled it out into the light: a bottle of Stolichnaya covered with yellow slime, like a newborn babe. “Oh my!” the apartment’s owner said, clutching her flat cheeks. “Give me a rag,” Nina Alexandrovna demanded, and taking a silly scrap of lingerie with a little mother-of-pearl button, wiped off the slime along with the label, which over the years had turned into foul-smelling curdled milk. It was still filled with vodka, though. One day, having found her nephew in a state of drunken bewilderment, intent on putting on his watch, which kept slipping away like a lizard, Nina Alexandrovna decided that the unopened bottle, which her nephew didn’t see on the absurd table, cluttered as it was with so much dingy glass, was one too many that evening. Subconsciously, she was sure her nephew and his wife had long since found and partaken of their half-liter—but today the momentary inspiration, which was connected somehow to the apartment’s echoing, thoroughly visible space, which sounded like a radio tuned to an empty frequency, suggested to Nina Alexandrovna that the Stolichnaya was still behind the tank.

  “This isn’t mine. I don’t drink vodka,” the frightened pregnant woman said in her own defense as she stepped back into the hall and allowed Nina Alexandrovna to carry out the virtually immortal product. Reassuring the woman, who obviously felt she’d been caught at something unseemly, Nina Alexandrovna told her in plain words what had happened. For some reason, she thought that the story of an alcoholic who gave up drinking and became one of the new rich would encourage the apartment’s owner, who obviously was planning to give birth without a husband. Intuition whispered to Nina Alexandrovna that the child’s father was a drinker—and the overall blue cast to the pregnant woman’s face and her overall resemblance to the most delicate and delicate-skinned toadstool on a dandelion stalk spoke to the fact that vodka was a familiar family misfortune many generations deep. In the kitchen, where the bottle naturally brought them, Nina Alexandrovna noted the well-scrubbed cleanliness—the luxury of poverty, when the happiness achieved is not the presence of things but the absence of that repulsive quality with which ungodly relatives surround a person. Now she understood that for the sake of purchasing an apartment in wild Vagonzavod, which left off in ravines and onto sad, snow-swept fields only slightly lighter than the sky, the woman was prepared to stretch herself very thin indeed. Actually, in the kitchen, next to the cracked teacups and the warped cutting boards, which looked like parts of a broken trough, there was a lovely stainless steel sink—new, like the door and bell. Evidently, the woman believed in a normal future and was buying it one piece at a time. To the pregnant woman, those expensive things, which were in striking contrast to the poverty of the one-room habitation with its faded wallpaper made nearly of ordinary paper, may well have seemed eternal.

  “You should take that. I don’t need it,” the apartment’s owner said almost hostilely when she saw Nina Alexandrovna put the bottle on the table. She, of course, had no intention of drinking it. Only now did she notice that on the bottom, disturbed after so many years of warmth and immobility, a fluffy, stirred-up sediment looked like the slippery film left after the water drains from a washing machine. Right then she thought of Marina’s story about knock-off vodka. This Stolichnaya, purchased long before that incident, nonetheless seemed dangerous, especially in proximity to the growing new life, which amazingly, like an apple on a withered branch, was ripening in that feeble body, which had focused all its feelings and bloodstream inward and so was utterly defenseless. Pointing out the suspicious growth to the pregnant woman, Nina Alexandrovna used the opener lying on the table to pull out the nastily banged-in cork, which had hardened like a fingernail. Dumping the contents down the drain proved not so simple. The vodka seemed to get stuck in the bottle’s neck, and she had to shake it in blops, turning away from the warm spirits’ copious and fleshly stink—and even a brisk cold stream couldn’t immediately wash away the alcoholic mirages that appeared in the polished sink. At last the bottle was emptied, rinsed modestly clean, and sent wet into the garbage pail. Refusing coffee (yet another of the apartment owner’s precious objects—an imported white electric kettle with a visor—gurgled and clicked off, as if saluting, while the owner cut a dry and greasy cake that crumbled like burned paper), Nina Alexandrovna hurried to leave. As she was drawn through the cracked door—by either the distant winter street or the steamed darkness—she noticed that the latch had been knocked off and was dangling freely. There were black notches on the doorjamb as well, as if hacked by some mad woodcutter who’d mistaken it for a tree. “I haven’t had time to do repairs everywhere,” the owner said in justification, lopsidedly handing Nina Alexandrovna her coat. The visitor cautiously climbed into the winding sleeves, afraid of striking the child she’d felt for a second in its bubble—as if her hand were filled not with flesh but with a tense watery stream, as if there, in that heavy, crooked vessel, a magic fluid on the verge of becoming a human being was sloshing around. “I’m going to install a telephone very soon!” the pregnant woman said, now in the doorway, and Nina Alexandrovna, knowing full well that being happy for a stranger was practically stealing, nonetheless melted at the sight of the now warm little face and crinkly smile.

  On the bus, Nina Alexandrovna smiled and raised her eyebrows in amazement at the thought of the odd misconception, which, thank God, she had managed to dispel. Even the thought that she had found out nothing about her nephew didn’t spoil her mood. Nodding like a roan, the bus dragged itself from rise to rise, and the way back felt long. Nina Alexandrovna scratched the little bit of thawing ice, as thin as the foil on a can of coffee, off the window and gazed at the snow-crusted fields, fields blindingly clean and lying in crude folds, like frozen sheets taken off a winter clothesline. Tomorrow was pension day again, and Nina Alexandrovna decided that after she’d waited for Klumba, she’d take a detour on her way to the market via the train station, where the City Information Bureau had once operated so efficiently. She hadn’t had occasion to be away from home for so long in quite a while, but today she’d taken an entire journey; despite her worry about Alexei Afanasievich, who hadn’t been fed his dinner on time, Nina Alexandrovna felt restored. Getting off at her stop, she started walking, in no hurry, readjusting her paper-light bag, which kept slipping off her shoulder, making her movements not quite natural, slightly on the theatrical side. What was that she’d been thinking about war this morning, in this very spot? What foolishness! Silver dots swarmed peacefully in the gray air, and the white, delicately drawn trees were so still, they looked like glass lamps that had been turned off. Constrained by unnatural snowdrifts that yardmen and snowplows had already pushed off the pavement, drifts as angular as furniture under sheets, the pedestrians hurried along single file and peeled off into the various stores; their faces, ruddy from the freezing temperature, were like different varieties of apples.

  From a distance, all the people looked blurred and slightly translucent to Nina Alexandrovna; as a person got closer, he firmed up, acquired a flush to his cheeks, a fur coat, sometimes even a beard, at the same time losing a captivating haze, as if he’d emer
ged from the fog of his own soul. This odd effect was observed at a distance of about ten paces and came about in two indistinct stages—a right and a left—like someone taking clothing off or putting it on; Nina Alexandrovna, who had always seen this but only now realized it, thought that perhaps a human soul really could be seen at a distance—this was the gentle miracle of myopia—so all people were better far away than up close. At the end of her day’s trajectory of freedom, she lingered by a newspaper kiosk to check out the magazine covers and the young beauties dressed in what were either evening gowns or lacy lingerie; she was drawn by the sudden discovery that the depictions were blurring in her mediocre eyes not at all the way live people did. They lacked some kind of watermark certifying a creature’s authenticity. Inadvertently, Nina Alexandrovna’s gaze slipped down from the beauties to a level array of unfamiliar newspapers. There, amid unfamiliar spikes and dips of very large and very small type, she was struck by a single word printed in powerful letters and so spaced out that they had to be mentally squeezed like an accordion—but they spread out again, emitting a low, stripy sound. “WAR”—and an undulating, radioactive chill ran down Nina Alexandrovna’s spine.

  Naturally, “WAR” had nothing to do with this outside time where the shops shone as before and jingling red streetcars bunched up at a stoplight (only the souls seem to move closer). This was about inside time, for which there was now a vague but secretly anticipated endpoint. Nina Alexandrovna stood in the small, packed line for a newspaper, the coins in her freezing fingers sticking together like fruit drops. After taking her capriciously folded copy from the low window, she tried to step aside with her paper; she couldn’t wait to open up to the horrifying page. To make sure not to bother anyone, Nina Alexandrovna climbed the long, unnatural snowdrift pushed all along the thoroughfare, a snowdrift the half-toppled poplars poked out of like widely spaced teeth from a jaw. As soon as she tried to unfold the unusually thin newspaper, the wind slammed into the page, from the outside first and then the inside. The turbulent street air just wouldn’t let her turn the newspaper all the way back, allowing her to read it only firmly folded in fourths—nonetheless, Nina got the general drift of what the top headline had been saying. “WAR in Television: Crude Takeover at Studio A” announced the headline under the banner, and next to it was a grainy, as if heavily peppered photo where broad-shouldered figures in some kind of uniform berets were dragging a bearded fat man out of an armchair: his tie, dark and askew on his protruding belly, made him look like a gutted fish. Below that was a more modest headline: “Triumph of the Victors.” Next to that, a slightly more decipherable photograph depicted something like a demonstration: in the front row, a shriveled old woman with a face like a grasshopper’s and an old fellow with medals spread wide across his chest and wearing ugly felt boots that were firmly trampling the snow had unfurled a banner which, in a handsome designer font—better than the one used in the newspaper—said: “Krugal! Give us our money!” “Mr. Krugal’s election campaign was run on the voters’ money,” the article began, but before Nina Alexandrovna could get to Krugal’s pilfering of some philanthropic fund, she turned over the quarter-folded paper to find a photo of a woman wearing Marina’s knit cap. The woman, emerging from some blurry underground, had her arm raised to ward off the photographer and the arsenal of microphones thrust at her: the large-scale palm, thrown out in a helpless kind of farewell gesture, repeated with amazing precision the outline and angle of the innumerable maps of the electoral district that had been pasted up on all the neighborhood fences, garages, and posts and were now frayed as if from a cultural deficit. Nina Alexandrovna could try to fool herself all she liked, but she had knit that motley cap the color of buckwheat groats herself, and the woman blocking off the reporters with a childish gesture was Marina, who was somehow mixed up in this scandal. Inside time had definitely been annihilated from without, and the reason for this went well beyond any conceivable family circumstances.