The Man Who Couldn't Die

  Marina slept through Monday, which the observers had been given off. The news of the victory, which she received over the phone from Shishkov personally, filled her weary mind with blissful lead. On Tuesday morning, unable to get through to the professor, who was either out of the service zone or had turned off his mobile, she set off for headquarters, feeling a need and a duty to go to work—expecting to enter into her new activity and new life from there. As she approached the basement, but still across the icy street where rickety tin streetcars were going in both directions, she could tell that the courtyard in front of headquarters was full of people, who had spilled over into the adjoining courtyards. All the snowdrifts looked like coastal cliffs in bird nesting areas, occupied by the slanting figures of line-standers, who were not paying each other the slightest attention but seemed to be searching for the same thing in the flickering of white dots that from a distance formed a powerful white swell and altered the perspective; adding to the picture, above the courtyard, twittering mobs of sparrows soared up, switching positions, and dropped, as if a net had been tossed into the cloudy sky, while the black hearts of the trees, bared due to their total lack of leaves and visible now in their interweaving of vessels, were ravens.

  There really was no way to avoid the canvassers—who were even standing in the sandbox—as she passed through the courtyard. The old windows of the five-story buildings whose inhabitants—to a man apparently—were also registered for the bonus were taking part in the event the way lists and posters hanging on walls take part in a meeting. A low-slung woman in a round-shouldered mouton coat overtook the delayed Marina, whom no one had recognized yet; moving at a forced run, as if kicking an elusive piece of ice in front of her, the woman headed for the basement, and Marina, picking up her pace, hurried after her. Out of the corner of her eye, Marina noticed that the people in the courtyard weren’t just standing there. The separate groups of people waiting were standing in some subtle order, and if someone stepped away from his trampled spot, he made sure to point this out to his neighbors, with a businesslike nod—while some even left a lumpy bundle on the ground with their pancake-shaped tracks, like on a taken chair. Meanwhile, the woman had already pushed through to the basement stairs. Standing on tiptoe, she was obsequiously dictating something to a woman from the group—Marina recognized her by her round steel glasses, in which an angry blind fire always burned in one or the other lens. The woman was recording the conveyed information in a notebook, which she lifted above the petitioner’s upturned mushroom nose—and only now did Marina notice that the group’s notebooks were exactly the same as the ones the registrars always used: with black leatherette covers and embossing that always reminded Marina of the silk lining of some beloved coat from long ago. Finally, the activist finished writing, and the woman, hastily pulling off her knit mitten, which was as big as a bast sandal, held out her surprisingly tiny white hand; the activist licked her indelible pencil on her striped tongue and began drawing on the extended palm—as neatly and efficiently as if she were slicing bread. Then she commandingly waved her hand, and the woman wandered off in the indicated direction, time and again holding out her hand with the freshly drawn number to the surrounding canvassers, who showed her their palms in turn and waved her on—to where the last in line poked up on the snowdrifts, smoking match-sized cigarettes.

  “Hello,” Marina said politely, trying to maneuver around the group and feeling in her pocket for the crude, burr-edged key to the half basement. “Oh! Well, finally! You’ve shown up!” the activist exclaimed, and the glare in her glasses passed from left to right and right to left. “We waited for you all day yesterday. At least someone could have come!” “We had the day off after the election,” Marina tried to explain, her frozen face smiling. Now she saw that the group was almost completely blocking the basement door. Naturally, the painter was here, over the last month having acclimated to the cold, like a northern deer. His cheap cigarette was smoking corrosively, like a soldering iron, and instead of his black leather he was flaunting a grimy beige sheepskin coat with a waist like the perimeter of a packing case, torn in spots and patched with tape, which made the artist glint at unexpected moments. For some reason, Klumba was absent, which Marina took as a good sign. However, her place had obviously been taken by a short, solid gentleman with a surprisingly ruddy face that looked like white plumbing stained by rusty water. This man obviously enjoyed some authority, but he was sluggish. His fur boots, which were stamping only the very edge of the soft new snow, looked like they’d been outlined on paper with a dull pencil, and his shaggy cap, tall and airily covered in snow, reminded her of a dandelion. “Excuse me, may I get through?” Marina raised her voice, but it came out more plaintive than angry. “Just a minute,” the activist said in a police tone and grabbed Marina firmly by the arm. “When’re you gettin’ uth our money?” a creature with what looked like a dirty sock on his narrow head and a mouth as toothless as a pocket suddenly popped up and coughed out in a hoarse lisp. Marina recognized the lucky bottle collector, who even now was dragging behind him a cloth sack with his slow-churning glass loot. “Just a minute,” the activist repeated, upping her sternness, and she dragged Marina, who tripped, away from the basement. “We all congratulate our candidate Krugal on his victory in the election,” she said officially and with a proper smile that slightly skewed her glasses, which flashed like ambulance lights. “We would like to hear from you, as a supervisor, when the payments to our voters are going to begin. Right here”—the activist meaningfully shook the almost completely filled notebook—“right here we have the order for payments registered in the order of the actual line. Not only that”—here the activist confidingly lowered her voice and winked her visible left eye, which looked like a slimy onion in a rotted brown skin—“we’ve registered another 420 in the district for advance payment. Those people never got the money they were supposed to due to your workers’ poor work, and it’s not their fault, and they need to be compensated for moral damages. There is also the matter of invalids, whom Krugal ignored, preferring to distribute charity to healthy citizens, and he rejected the public’s proposal—” “Just a minute!” Marina interrupted, feeling some semiliquid ball-shaped weight dipping and seeking balance in her head like in a Johnny-jump-up. “Right now I have nothing to tell you. I have to make a call.” “This bureaucracy and red tape of yours again!” the activist said indignantly, and her face, netted with purple veins, started to look like a hot beet simmering in borscht. “You’re the one holding me up!” Marina suddenly blurted out an idiotic phrase from some satirical newspaper that was unexpectedly effective. The group stepped aside, letting her get to the steel doors, which were covered in colorful, 3-D obscenities: someone had been hard at work on Monday.

  After slamming the psychedelic folk art masterpiece behind her, Marina felt as though she was being smothered in the pink and brown corridor, where the fragmentary wooden row of numbered chairs reminded her of a dinosaur’s skeletal remains. Another five or six people turned out to be hiding in the basement. In the back room, Marina discovered a gathering of pale shadows reluctantly drinking yellow tea brewed from leaves already used three or four times. They were thrilled to see her. They jumped up, offered several pulled-back chairs at once, and also poured her a full, tarry mug of the collective beverage, barely warm, so that sugar didn’t dissolve in it but just hung suspended, like a teary cloud, picking up the sweepings. The first thing Marina did, though, after getting out of her coat, which dropped wet snowy husks on piled up bags, was to pick up the phone. As usual, the antediluvian equipment with a receiver like a two-kilo dumbbell honked like a formidable, almost automotive horn, but no matter how many times Marina dialed the professor’s iambically rhythmic number, the result was the same. “The subscriber is temporarily unavailable…. Please call later….” an impersonally polite, ignorant voice repeated, as if a train station were talking, and the other numbers she knew gave her hopeless busy signals. Right then, several arms and legs st
arted banging on the outside door at once, probably rubbing the chalk graffiti to thin patches, and the steel rumble seemed to rattle the black spider webs growing in every corner of the basement like armpit hair. Marina shuddered. The registrars set their knocking mugs aside at once and looked at her with frightened round eyes that held identical points of light. But right then, out of the blue, the professor’s office called back. “I can’t tell you anything definite,” the professor’s not unkind secretary said hoarsely, and from her whistling, intermittent snuffles, Marina guessed she was blowing her nose in her hankie. “He promised to come by before twelve, so try calling back.”

  Now they could only wait until twelve. The people who’d been pounding on the door had probably given up and left. The registrars, with heavy, upturned faces, as if to keep their features from spilling like wet compressed sand from a mold, had wandered away from the common table to lounge around the basement. Some pulled tattered, glossy-covered books from their bags. Observing them, Marina saw that the women were still caught up in delaying, which possibly wasn’t just a trace or habit that would pass but a kind of fibrous fabric that had been implanted in their being. It was as if their circulatory and nervous systems had been stretched out by red tape and were now much longer and more tangled, that now these poor ladies, who hadn’t been paid their November salary either, were inwardly imagining more or less the same thing the wild painter from the group had been trying to depict on his nacreous canvases: a twisted, convoluted organism with remarkable superfluities sending blood and nerve impulses wandering through labyrinths.

  To keep busy, Marina removed the registration notebooks, now imbued with a languid chill and disconcertingly heavier, from the safe. After separating the bonus lists from the lists of payments made, she took to the calculator. Half of its buttons were stiff or stuck, so that it would suddenly spit out long figures. Marina got caught up in the work while resolutely battling this defect and tried not to listen to the people in line bombarding the fatigued steel over and over again. Actually, the attackers now tired fairly quickly, and their infrequent blows sounded like they were wrapped in cotton wool. The figures, rechecked many times, kept mounting in a column that got fatter and fatter. No matter how the frightened Marina tried to fool herself (unconsciously resorting to delay and rummaging through the foul-smelling notebooks), she couldn’t keep the sums from mounting. Apparently, the numbers were multiplying on their own, like fruit flies or something, and the preliminary results that Marina entered onto the stained piece of paper that came to hand were like fly eggs from which new generations of unpaid rubles were going to hatch.

  After taking a short break before the terrible final result (the registrars brought Marina a steaming slush of instant coffee, made by washing out an old Nescafé jar, and a sandwich with a piece of herring in it that looked more like a comb than human food), Marina noticed that the headquarters’ rooms had cooled off. Each of the women had pulled on her coat and tried to fold herself into a strange, cumbersome pose for autonomous heat generation—nonetheless they were freezing, like the large stacks of unlit firewood piled up here and there. The radiator, which Marina checked to make sure, was barely warming its own dust and obviously not coping with the battering wind outside, which carried loose, drifting snow into the window shafts, making it seem as though curtains were fluttering on the windows from the street side. Nonetheless, they could see the contributors up top, through the white heaving: their dark mass occasionally crouched, becoming even darker, and a crooked stick poking out of the milk would occasionally scrape insolently at the window gratings. Suddenly, someone—Marina thought it was the artist, who flickered in a gap in the wind for a second—threw a stiff, collapsed object into the shaft; stealing up to the window, Marina saw that it was a dead cat. Its wadded fur looked stuck to its flat body, and its gelatinous eye, covered with a white film like cold fat, glared at the half-basement’s occupants. After pulling the stiff curtain to hide the repulsive missile—without the slightest confidence that another wouldn’t follow it—Marina nonetheless forced herself to return to her figures, which she feared much more than all the live and dead animals in the world. Five minutes later she had the final result—an outright mockery of the headquarters’ daily campaign thrift and the pathetic hundreds of rubles they’d managed to scrimp. Leaning on her shaky elbow, which she’d moved to one side so the registrars wouldn’t accidently see the terrible sum, Marina asked herself whether Professor Shishkov understood the magnitude of his obligations. Something told her that the professor’s brain was refusing to multiply the canvasser money sucked out of the district by a factor of 2.4 because he definitely had nowhere to put his hands on a million and a half rubles. She trembled just imagining the spontaneous voter fury that would greet a default.

  Outside, meanwhile, the news spread that the main supervisor, the one with the Jewish nose and dyed collar, had gone into the basement. The amorphous mass, fat from its long idleness, slowly went into motion. The line formed. People showed their neighbors their left palms and stood single file, breathing on each other’s damp collars; some ran along the sections, calling out their number—the way the people being evacuated at train stations must have raced along in search of their family, torn away from them in the crush. Some little girl, to look at her, wearing a scanty little checked coat, clumsily wrapped up, as if wound around her head was not a scarf but an entire dress, was sniveling and trying to climb a frozen slide—but the higher she got, the less courage she had left to tear her gaze from the slippery rungs and look around. From high up, a large, glossy raven that had raised a human rumpus from its withered branch could see black scraps resembling the pecked remains of innards getting ready to reassemble into a black body, which was getting bigger—and the body coming to life as if it had been sprinkled with magic water. The line, more terrifying than any army, was stamping in the snow, and almost everywhere the trampled snow looked like a book with a yellow spine from which all or part of half the pages had been ripped out. Apparently, this was the moment District 18’s residents lost their faith in personal immortality. The example of the loser Apofeozov no longer meant anything, and the women, who were still wearing starkly flared peach and green coats for the weather from the month before last, had grown old overnight. Their faces, thickly powdered by the cold, had hardened, and their hair, escaping from their flirty mink berets, had become thin, disheveled locks.

  Nonetheless, people who no longer felt they had any grounds for resisting reality suddenly felt something like it in the space between their own souls. What united them now was more important than each of them individually. Everyone felt this immortal connection, formalized in the line, as the sole force that the district’s inhabitants could now contrast to their own fate—which meant no one was trying to creep forward or cut out inattentive neighbors. For each of them, the person ahead had become like a big brother, and the person behind like a little sister. The deceived contributors’ agitated marshal watched through a cold, wind-beaten eye as an austere young lady in black felted braids reminiscent of the Medusa Gorgon conscientiously stepped back to let in a cultured old woman in a brown cap that looked as if it had been sewn from a stuffed bear, while two scary-faced worker types, whose numbers didn’t quite fit, in their case looking like the kinds of numbers that get put on the soles of shoes being turned over for repair, were waving to a comrade hurrying toward them, a low-level boss to look at him, who was carrying his own belly plus a worn briefcase as substantial as an accordion. The contributors’ marshal recalled quite a few lines like this—gloomy demonstrations in defense of Sergei Mavrodi, who was as curly haired as the baby Lenin in the little October star pin—and recalled people registering one foggy September dawn at a firmly shut MMM center, and recalled especially clearly, for some reason, the stone banks of Park Pond, which attracted sharp floating slivers, papers, and other trash like a magnet. The swirling magnetized glints and trash stupidly signaled a suicide who had lost other people’s serious money on
MMM’s pyramid schemes and who was pulled out alive nonetheless and subsequently shown to reporters. The failed suicide’s hair remained wet, as if it had caught some watery infection, and the eyes in his gristly, eyebrowless face turned as gold as a bream. A lot happened in those informal communities called lines: meeting daily, sharing misfortunes, people became like family; some, a little younger, even got legally married, and brides, throwing back their white veils, which stuck from the wind, hurled liquidy rotten tomatoes at financial structures’ brazen windows. Life, though, which dragged all Russian riders without exception through the potholes, very quickly wiped out the lines’ ties. People stopped phoning one another, and when they happened to meet on the street, they reminisced tearfully about the good times and swore somehow to arrange a get-together of old comrades and drink a bottle of vodka near the dark blue fir in front of city hall, as usual.