While Nina Alexandrovna was standing on that snowdrift, fighting the wind-gasping newspaper, while Alexei Afanasievich, having constructed a rather crooked noose from his most successful cord, was trying on death like a hat (at the same point in inside time, a nuclear warhead had reached its target and swelled and burst, and a city had flown off the face of the earth like a tattered wrapper)—at that very same time, Marina was nervously loitering in the corridor of Studio A, where the faint narcotic smell of the teargas used the night before had yet to air out. The studio had broadcast a bloc of ads as if nothing had happened (in inside time the nuclear explosion, which glowed like a quickly growing, outrageously transparent disc, very much like the ad for dishwashing liquid in which a finger touches a greasy plate, cleaning it all the way to the edges), but any outsider who found himself in the corridor would immediately have noted the traces of disorder. The doors to all the editorial offices were flung wide, and frantic employees were sitting inside like animals in a zoo where the cages had suddenly been opened. Some were cautiously making their way to freedom, actually, and Kostik the computer wizard, who had recently become the anchor on the morning show “Hi, Everybody!” was pacing near the waiting room, sniffing predatorily, touching the slanting sideburns he’d let grow (for his image) with the tips of his fingers, as if to make them stick better. Small windows had been opened to air out the teargas, and drafts were dragging cold, inflated papers around, restless papers, like paper boats released on a pond. Studio A had been ravaged and turned inside out; for some reason, prehistoric mannequins had been put on display in the corridor: women’s torsos swathed in pink and nude stocking fabric that had shredded and laddered. The towheaded security guard posted by the waiting room kept shooting sideways glances at the mannequins, especially the most extensible one, a kind of woman-cloud, which for some reason had been set on a polished dowel.
Marina had been wandering around for two hours. She needed Professor Shishkov like crazy. Everyone said several hellos to Marina, but the forced tone of their greetings attested to the fact that she was just as much an occupier as the guy in the baggy camo with the ugly flushed face, white and pink, like a radish, who just yesterday had showered the employees with an oily, smothering stream from a gas canister. Each time she passed the makeup room—which was open like all the studio’s spaces—where two girls in dollish robes sat at a worktable heaped with makeup and cotton balls, Marina felt a hostile curiosity emanating from there. Even the mirror opposite the door wouldn’t accept her reflection; something seemed to get stuck there, and instead of Marina, an intense streak crossed it, like static on a screen. The whole scene in the studio corridor would have looked like it had been staged for a made-for-television movie if the truth hadn’t seeped through the semblance. No one there today was looking through the full-length windows that were much too big for the office cells and that, due to their cold size, always made up a substantial portion of the editorial reality. There were always smokers smoking along the corridor windows, staring at the sloping industrial landscape, which resembled a sorting station comprised of various structures, and anyone thinking at his computer would dissolve creatively in the raven skies outlined by the old frames, but today not a soul had a thought to going out; the employees were afraid to leave the studio even mentally and kept away from the windows, the way people keep away from the edge of a roof or a construction site. Everyone was united by a concealed alarm. Everyone was sitting and wandering as if tagged—and when the swift figure of Professor Shishkov moved away from the elevators, bouncing slightly, it was immediately obvious that this man was not entangled, like the others, in that sticky web of anticipation of God knew what, that quite to the contrary, he didn’t have ten minutes to spare. “Sergei Sergeich!” Marina rushed to intercept him but only pinched the dry fabric of the professorial sleeve. Breaking free of her fingers, like a huge strong insect abruptly smelling of some crude perfume, simply ablaze with this cologne smell, the professor muttered, “Later, later,” and flew toward the waiting room doors, where he disappeared, nearly snagging his jacket wing. Trying to slip in behind him, Marina encountered the official gaze of Lyudochka, who was sitting in the secretary’s place as if she’d always sat there. “There’s been no decision on your matter, Marina Borisovna,” Lyudochka said in a gentle voice, glancing sideways at her own hands, where a fresh, golden-caramel manicure was additionally decorated with a large new ring in a setting of diamond chips: the precious lump, which obviously wouldn’t fit into any glove, played on her long ring finger in a multitude of sharp reflecting sparks. “Fine. I’ll wait,” Marina said dully, and she sat down on a stiff office chair, pushing it out of line a little.
Truth be told, she hadn’t thought events would develop so swiftly. Left behind was the trying “deceleration” of the last campaign days: when, last Saturday, at precisely noon, the registrars, half-alive, propping each other up, rose from their tables and the line let up a roar as if it were a stadium. The full extent of the remaining money was a paltry 410 rubles. You could say they’d cut it close. At least two more hours passed before the line, grumbling and retaining its legitimate numbered order, under the group’s watchful eye, left the basement nearly single file. Marina should have paid attention to the phenomenon at the time—because the order worked out over the many days of them stamping on the snow, certified by the sweaty, by now almost venomous chemical number on their left hands, represented nearly a greater value to the voters than the fifty-ruble note they’d already drunk up, since it was their sole means of fighting injustice—but she, happy that things hadn’t reached the point of scandal, hadn’t paid attention. What had she actually been thinking about at the elections as she sat there like a second-grader who’d been held back, at her cruelly cramped desk, dying to pee and covering her official notebook with identical Greek profiles, like paper clips? Secretly, for herself, she’d been hoping that Klimov, who was still registered in the district but had never voted in his life, now, changed, would show up to perform his civic duty—and this innocent meeting of strangers, like former schoolmates, this new look from afar would be the start of something unknown, something free of what had happened so recently in their failed family. Time and again, Marina mistook long-limbed men of about the right height for Klimov. Once, this turned out to be an elderly Tatar with a greasy shaved head that looked like a pile of pancakes, who responded to her look by baring yellow teeth abraded like a horse’s hoof. Despite her fear of men, which resided deep inside her, Marina was so eager for a change that she thought she could fall in love with anyone who wasn’t Klimov. In that concealed nervous agitation she’d been experiencing since early morning, she was ready to scream, she was so impatient to see her husband, and in exactly the same way she was ready to start something with anyone who paid her the slightest attention. In this regard, though, Lyudochka had the most success. Few were the voters of the opposite sex who remained indifferent to her flourishes on the chair, where she would cross and recross her legs as if she were deftly rowing with a stiff oar in a winding current—so that ultimately even Apofeozov’s assistant, the well-mannered Hitler, couldn’t take it and slipped away.
Marina held out hope up until the polling place’s closing, and in the last twenty minutes, which were utterly dead—the schoolteachers, in the total absence of voters, stood up from their papers ahead of time and performed third-grade gym class—she imagined she saw Klimov, or Klimov’s ghost, in a terrible hurry, galloping straight across the virgin snow, leaving dark blue boot-deep tracks. All hope was lost when they locked the school’s front doors and turned off the light in the lobby, where the glossy candidates aged as evening fell. The commission chair, who was also the school’s principal, a young man, much younger than his math and botany teachers, but a mournful and mournfully sleek little man, gave the signal to begin, and the contents of the ballot box gushed out on the prepared table, contents that lay on the bottom in a layer as solid as halva and took effort to knock out. The closeness with
which Marina followed the ballot counting led to her remembering almost nothing afterward. All she did remember was some ballots being inexplicably dirty and worn and the Apofeozov brunette nervously pacing behind the vote counters’ backs and sinking her teeth into the soft flesh of a ruddy, dripping pear. The sorting of ballots that took place on the table with the participation of many hands and webby shadows set off a slow calculation in Marina’s brain: several times she distinctly shuddered at her own voice counting out loud, but each time it turned out to be the voice of one of the teachers quietly exchanging croaks with the director, who had blurred like a sad blot at the far end of the table. They started tallying the results. Marina was shaken. Apofeozov’s victory by a margin of nineteen votes was so curious and disgraceful that among today’s Sunday public it seemed they could simply exclude those nineteen extra citizens who hadn’t fit their crosses and checks in the right box.
The brunette, however, had smiled with her beady little teeth too soon and had accepted in vain the congratulations of the principal, who held her dry little hand in both of his with such a tender look, it was as if most of all he would have liked to put this dear little thing in his gaping pocket. There was more of the same at the other polling places. Throughout this lovely, idyllic day, with its golden crust of snow, the odds had fluctuated in the air. Serving as a barometer had been the exhausted Krugal. Early that morning he’d arrived in his hulking 1978 BMW at Professor Shishkov’s now quiet, amber sunlight filled office. Strangely resembling a colorized black-and-white photograph, with floods of pink on his soft gray cheeks, the candidate had perched like an orphan in the professor’s waiting room, sucking down the innumerable cups of coffee served by the frightened secretary. The professor turned up a little later, fully pumped with medicines, to discover Fyodor Ignatovich on the edge of his monumental couch, where the candidate was sitting sideways, looking like a bent cigarette stuck to a protruding lip. Evidently, the failed actor, who had never won anything in his life and now dreamed of victory with all the powers of his bantam soul, had acquired a hypersensitivity to the atmosphere in which the likelihoods of various election outcomes not only swayed but rocked. From time to time, Krugal smiled agitatedly, massaging his heart, but a minute later he would sink and turn pale. Tousled, a blind spot on his glowing brow, Krugal walked and ran in zigzags around the crowded furniture, occasionally turning into Shishkov’s wide-open office—where the professor, who seemed starched by medicines but who had grasped something, regarded his partner closely, the way an antique portrait painted in dark oils might regard a visitor. Probably, some secret part of Krugal was unconsciously registering the most minute events, which were constantly altering the correlation of forces. His blood seemed to have extra beads running through it, like the beads in those clever toys you can rock to the very top of a twisted pyramid—and you could tell from the candidate how his success was being wrecked, success practically guaranteed by the rousing of some big drunken family or a water main breaking, as a result of which Sovetskaya Street was awash in smoking, watery grease and dozens of women who hadn’t finished their washing had decided against going to vote. The patient secretary, who had left her two boys at home unsupervised inventing TNT, had been run ragged looking after Krugal; through the window she could see the Executive Сommittee building dial, which looked like a bicycle wheel, though sometimes her eyes saw a gray rainbow of invisible spokes turning, nonetheless she could still register the main events of the day. At twelve-fifteen, Krugal’s spirits improved, and he even ate the hot pelmeni brought up from the cafeteria downstairs—after bringing his plate to a state of total chaos and piggery in the first minutes of his movable feast, a characteristic Krugal trait. At three, he went back to wandering and going missing, turning into other people’s offices, which were countless in this building. He was discovered nearly in the attic sitting on a stool splotched with either maintenance paint or pigeon droppings. Krugal, who hadn’t smoked since he was a kid, was greedily smothering himself with some nasty cigarette he’d bummed off someone and sneezing so that he sounded like a nasty rag being torn up. They brought him back, shook him off, and sat him back down on the couch. At about five, a ravenous appetite awoke in him. At five-thirty, something else happened, and Krugal’s features shuddered and suddenly became as plain as a Roman numeral. Forty minutes later, he seemed to wake up and looked at the secretary with a moist, human gaze. “So that’s how it is. I have nothing more to say,” he said unusually distinctly, but what this referred to was a mystery. Finally, at 6:08, not waiting for the polling places to close, Krugal became blissfully bored and yawned, gulping down the waiting room’s rather stuffy air, and a minute later was sleeping, restlessly, in the cozy depth of the couch, his smashed cheek sticking to the brown leather armrest. Right then, Professor Shishkov, who had taken no part in anything all day, emerged from his office and stood over his creation, thoughtfully rocking on his feet, touching cheap, crude-smelling brandy to his penicillin-ish lips.
Actually, Krugal’s victory in the overall elections was just as shaky as Apofeozov’s in Marina’s one district. The two candidates were as close as a man and his reflection in a mirror, and the decision as to which was real came down to a highly relative voting advantage. The three additional individuals in this Sunday’s spectacle had not vindicated Apofeozov’s hopes and had barely made a showing, garnering an insignificant percentage overall—and the one woman, a famous former athlete with a square, masculine haircut and sweet dimples on her chubby, angelic cheeks, had not had a single ballot cast for her, which was unprecedented. On Monday afternoon there were two press conferences and a live broadcast: in front of reporters, Krugal had the approximate look of the classic rabbit the magician pulls out of a hat, while Professor Shishkov, representing the chosen deputy as his proxy, spoke briefly, standing for just a moment, his voice flat and wooden and his entire gaunt body leaning on his spread fingers, which were trembling very slightly. The reporters, whose recorders wheezed ever so softly in front of the professor, letting their tape wind, asked boring, politically correct questions. Only the anchor for Political News—a veteran of regional TV, a still very lively and vivid lady with inappropriately delighted round eyes and a hairdo like a gold crow’s nest—was able to rouse Krugal by reminding him of some story from their shared theatrical youth spent in the town of Upper Ketlym. After this, the deputy kicked away chairs and wires to make for the TV anchor’s hand, at which he brandished his Roman nose—and all this was filmed by the dispassionate camera being carted around the studio like a motorcycle by a round-shouldered cameraman.
At the same time, other, much better attended press conferences were being held. At the Palace Hotel’s business center, which was regularly used for filming presentations by the A Fund, a monkey house of photographers was going crazy, scurrying across the floors practically on their bare knuckles in search of an impressive shot, filling the air with continuous clicking and minty dissolving spots; the several TV companies were doing a respectable job as well, including one from the capital, red lights shining above their cameras’ viewfinders. His thoroughbred face quite bloated—a heavy thought was written on his forehead, as if with a finger on velvet—Apofeozov hunched menacingly over the tailed microphones and his gray, bloodshot eyes with the sealing-wax bags tracked back and forth. To his right and left were his nephews, now called consultants, one wearing a pearl-white tie, the other a sky-blue. They were intently passing documents to each other behind their uncle’s back, tattering the pages more and more so that eventually they turned into a tall stack of compromising material in which the nephews rummaged intently, digging in them with identical Parkers, as if they were plucking commas out of the printed text. The old, preelection financial scandal retreated into the shadows; what the losing candidate said promised Krugal every possible trial and made the failed actor out to be an utter swindler, practically a second Sergei Mavrodi. The chairman of the local Union of Deceived Contributors, a short man with gray peppered through
his red hair and a shiny face almost the same color red from freckles, was in the hall at the ready, and he reacted instantly, reading out an anti-Krugal statement pulled from his antediluvian briefcase, choking on a few words—after which the very fresh, airy, extremely well-preserved and well-read page was added to the paper trash the nephews were already stuffing by the handfuls into the shiny briefcases open at their feet. All this time, in the next room, waiters—prim youths with birdlike profiles and dressed such as poor Krugal could only dream—were setting up a buffet: the most delicate salads in crisp baskets; expensive smoked meats, pale and laced with fat; amber petals of dry-smoked sausage; and all the red caviar sandwiches you could want—although they were a little soggy by the time they were bitten into by the mingling, droning, well-disposed press. Those correspondents who had already had time before this for plain mineral water with Professor Shishkov sized up the losing candidate’s refreshments: for some reason they were especially hungry and tried to glean something from all the emptied platters, if only one last stuck-on, well-fingered delicacy—and the bottles cooed like doves as Absolut was poured into tilted glasses. Even the deceived contributors’ leader, known for his principled refusal to take part in buffets and banquets, gave the noble fish assortment its due, since in the past he’d been an avid and successful fisherman; someone noticed the activist, holding on his knee the misaligned flaps of his plywood and leatherette box, neatly burying an opened but tightly closed bottle deep among his papers. In the end, a good five TV channels ran the necessary commentary on Apofeozov in the news. As for Studio A, where the shaken but not broken Kukharsky still sat, they ran all the footage, including the private scenes where the fat-nosed Apofeozov clan, imitating a tea ad, drank amber tea at a cozy round table covered in a white tablecloth spread tight as a drum and barely big enough for the multivalent family, so that some, crowded in, were only able to put an elbow on the common territory and participate in the shots with a slice of a smile—while the politician’s seven-year-old granddaughter, heaving her little chest, tightly swathed in silk, like a grown-up, played the piano, her hands meandering over the keys like little bowlegged turtles. All this was very touching—but the episodes shot on the fly near Professor Shishkov’s campaign basement aroused much greater interest among TV viewers.