The Man Who Couldn't Die, Page 21

  This historic order in hand, the professor and the poet, who had skipped breakfast to come in earlier, had headed for Studio A—and rightly picked up twenty or so young studs in camo from a friendly security firm along the way. The resistance offered by Kukharsky’s security was perfunctory. For a little while, those men, who differed from those attacking only in the more peaty shade of their jackets and pants, secured several successive doors with their skidding bodies—but after one good jarring blow they leaped back like a popped cork and ran ahead of the enemy through the corridors, continuing to skid in their boots, which seemed to have grown heavier, as if they’d scooped up fear, and scaring the employees, who poked their heads out of their work spaces with the confusion of targets at shooting practice. The final skirmish in front of Kukharsky’s office was short and sweet. The attackers twisted the demoralized defenders’ arms and dealt with them exactly as they would folding camping furniture, also breaking a lightweight chair that got mixed up in the melee—and the highly cultured professor caught himself thinking how pleasantly exciting he found the sight of a bloodied face with a nose that looked like a used teabag in a saucer, the oofing and umphing of the brawlers, and the direct missile of an army boot knocking the stuffing out of a china cabinet whose heavenly smile over its own remains elicited a muffled groan from someone in the crowd.

  Clearly, the use of teargas was now superfluous. All those nut job directors and reporters had probably acted on the mercenaries’ nerves and were cackling like geese after the victors. In the directors’ anteroom they had attacked the fighters, dropping burning cigarette butts and pointy women’s shoes on them in the parterre. Before proceeding to Kukharsky’s office, the reporters got sprinkled: the crisscrossing streams that filled the air of the dressing room with a herring-fat dust rainbow made the employees stagger back and goggle. To the hawking and screeching of a half-strangled birdman (one person grabbed his burned throat and fell backward onto his panicked comrades, and another fell to all fours and disgorged his viscous breakfast and juice on the trampled carpet), the professor’s mercenaries burst into the holy of holies. Sensing a certain membranous rustle under his skull and trying not to inhale the offensive, sickly sweet perfume, the professor followed.

  Kukharsky, tiny behind his horseshoe desk, had his cheek pressed to the telephone receiver, as if he suddenly had a toothache—though there was obviously no one at the other end. The professor, covered on his flanks, neatly approached the desk and placed a copy of the order in front of Kukharsky. Grinning from ear to ear, so that his beard looked like a wool sock stretched while being put on, Kukharsky picked up the paper with his hairy fingers and gently ripped it into two ethereal ribbons. Then he repeated the diminishing procedure many times while snarling and looking up into the professor’s eyes until not even tiny pinches were left of the order and lofty signature. After letting him complete this tough, painstaking labor, the professor took another out of the file, like a saint who had accepted martyrdom, an even whiter copy, and suddenly—by instinct—gave his mercenaries a commander’s circular signal kind of like a compass. Immediately, the men rushed around the director’s desk and tried to extract Kukharsky from his quilted leather armchair—but ended up just rolling him around, his legs pulled up and his red maw cackling and looking like a split watermelon. For the first time since the raid began, the professor was distraught—especially as surviving employees, their faces now covered with weepy wet handkerchiefs, began to appear, one after another, in the office’s half-open doorway. Someone wrapped up like the invisible man in an entire terry towel (it was Kostik, stone-cold and lightning quick on the uptake, who subsequently earned his living selling photographs to both print media and the Internet) was shooting the sensation of the day, diving behind backs, his point-and-shoot buzzing like a model airplane—and the professor instantly understood that to an onlooker what was happening looked nothing like what it did to his agitated soul.

  Right then someone came forward who had until then held back: the Krasnokurinsk poet, physically hungry and pale but full of a primitive might. Pushing aside the sweaty fighters, who reeked of canvas and whose necks looked like they’d been rubbed with red pepper, the new director personally rolled up his sleeves. He made an abrupt tank maneuver with the heavy armchair and deposited the fleeing Kukharsky in the corner. Then, having oriented the seat smack-dab in the middle of the office and desk, he climbed, wagging his butt, into the chair’s stoutly creaking depth and stretched out his perfectly parallel arms and clenched fists in front of him. Now the newly appointed director gave his subordinates a blank stare, as if he had seized and pulled the levers of studio administration, and under the visor of his jutting brow, his eyes were like air bubbles stuck to a sunken board. Everyone quieted down instantly at the sight of this phenomenon, which imperturbably allowed itself to examine the former director with a direct challenge to all the studio’s accumulated administrative experience. Because the pretender had placed himself smack-dab in the middle of the main space, he looked like a convincing, pivotal person, and all of a sudden it seemed to the employees that a third, omniscient eye was swelling under his short, straight bangs, like a soap bubble slightly larger than the ones under his eyebrows.

  The unseated Kukharsky—distinctly superfluous to the side of the midline that the new director had almost physically set out across the desk and the thick of the people crowding in—smiled crookedly and shrugged, his entire body catching the magpie gaze of the now absent camera like a ray of saving sun. Actually, all he had to do was leave and come back. But he couldn’t get out, having just overcome an obstacle in the form of a solidly ensconced rival who had no intention of abandoning his newly won position. Dragging out the first few badly fastened files he came across from under the pretender’s elbow (the pretender paid no attention, merely pressing his short legs harder into the desk crosspiece), Kukharsky tried to squeeze through. This wild climax lasted a few minutes. Kukharsky climbed, smirking and muttering something as if into his own ear, crawled and stood on tiptoe. His forehead was sprinkled with beads of moisture, and the loose papers pressed under his elbows quietly slipped down his belly. The midline that the employees now saw even on the wall, apparently, barely let the former director through and distorted his solid figure like a funhouse mirror. Observing this villainous scene, some people began to realize that in the eyes of the pretender—the only geometrically regular, properly seated creature—even they would look like fluid dispositions and that for all the seriousness of the newly arrived ogre (the keenest of them guessed that the collective would never see a hint of a smile on this three-eyed face), he saw the seized studio as one big house of mirrors created for his directorial pleasure. Finally, the tormented Kukharsky, nearly straddling the tall back of the unshakeable armchair (which the pretender, all puffed up with his sweeping force, leaned all the way back at the last moment), found himself on the other side; the papers in his grip immediately lost whatever cohesion they had left and spread out on the floor with a silent sigh. “You may pick them up,” the triumphant professor said sarcastically, drumming his white, as if chalk-rubbed, unmusical fingers on the solid directorial desktop. In response, the beet-red Kukharsky flung the empty manila folders on the papers and shaking his head like a bull, pulled his hopelessly ruined jacket down as if it were a shoulder bag. “You’re not going to get away with this so easily,” he said in a reedy voice squeezed at the top, and his shaking hands threw his jacket lapels back over his tattered shirt, providing a glimpse of the hairy fold of his belly and his surprisingly small navel, as downcast as a faded rose. “You’ll answer for this in court!” The employees parted for the outcast like funeral mourners. For a while, they could hear Kukharsky walking away, a scuff of lime down his back, over the black scuffs left by his security detail’s boots, skidding on the light parquet floor, and shouting tragic threats into space. Not idle threats.

  Actually, ninety minutes after his victorious seizure of the studio, the professor understood full
well that Apofeozov’s lawyers were already preparing their lawsuits and cursing excitedly. For instance, they could seize on the formal circumstance that the official period defined by law between a shareholders’ announcement and its implementation (which consisted, basically, in the investor signing previously prepared documents) had not passed. No matter what headaches his opponent tried to cause for Shishkov and his team, though, the basic facts were now irreversible. The new director, who had not had dinner and was now scarfing down a huge sandwich brought by the secretary, holding down the ham with his index finger, had only to solve a few small technical problems. “Let’s say I’m prepared to look into the question of an apartment for your assistant,” the professor began warily as he sat down with his visitors. “A modest, one-room apartment, naturally, and not downtown, well, you get the idea. In return, though, I would like a favor in the form of…How can I put it?” the professor faltered, feeling a pleasant sentimental warmth in his chest. “A certain young someone helped me greatly during the campaign but lately has become rather…unmanageable. I would like to make modest arrangements for her further fate. Her name is Marina Borisovna, and she’s a fine television journalist. Here’s what happened with Marina Borisovna. Basically…”

  The pleasure Professor Shishkov derived from his own beneficence was not so important as to distract him from his top priorities, however. After being summoned to the studio for ten and not having first caught sight of the professor until noon or so, Marina sat there in the poorly tidied, nauseating waiting room examining either the glowing Lyudochka, who was rehearsing new smiles into her compact, or the large china shard with the surviving handle that had fallen under the secretary’s desk. People she did and didn’t know zipped by her, as did the focused, utterly unstoppable professor, who, like a deranged theorem, was made up of only acute angles. The hubbub’s epicenter was the director’s office, where, when the door opened, she observed the new boss’s static figure within, like a picture in a flip-book. The more modest office across the way, which Marina in her naïve old dreams had seen as hers, had still not acquired an owner or status, but a tall woman wearing a hideous jacket with shoulders lined like house slippers kept looming up there. The woman’s legs were indeed quite fine. When she walked into the waiting room, playing up this beauty, Lyudochka would rise from her secretary’s chair as if randomly and they would vie for the best walk, traipsing back and forth over the crunching china crumbs. No fewer than four hours passed before Lyudochka, hearing the intercom’s expectorating mumble, laid on another smile, and snapping it into her gleaming compact, like a coupon in an elegant wallet, headed off with her notebook to answer her boss’s summons. Returning shortly thereafter (without the notebook and with a pink cocktail spill on her clothes), she announced in a delicate official voice, “Marina Borisovna, the director is busy today, unfortunately. He’ll see you tomorrow at twelve-thirty.”

  Marina was so weary from her hours of sitting on the edge of a chair and from her exhausting idleness amid the feverish activity of Studio A’s new masters that she barely dragged herself home and, ignoring her mother, who was following her around with an enormous tattered newspaper in her dangling hand, fell lifeless on her bed. As she plunged into a droning doze, she remembered that tomorrow was the twentieth—pension day—and instead of the usual pleasant anticipation for which Klumba was forgiven the fact of her existence, Marina felt a spiritual heartburn. What the joy from getting that money—those large, starched hundreds that allowed them to eke out another month of life—had turned into was spoiled, drunkenly astray, and inexpressively vile. As she drifted off, Marina knew she hated the twentieth. Somehow this boded nothing good for her at the studio tomorrow.

  That night, Marina’s sleep was heavy and troubled. She kept butting heads with the pillow and couldn’t seem to get warm in her bed, whose deep pockets had accumulated enough damp and snowy cold, you could scratch it off. Unlike Marina, Nina Alexandrovna smiled in her sleep, and on her lips lay a spot of light of unknown origin. What was so good that she was thinking about it as she fell asleep? What was it—more important than the newspaper with those horrid photos printed not with ink but with street filth, more important even than the state in which Marina had come home from work yesterday, frightening Nina Alexandrovna with her complete unresponsiveness and total personal absence? What on earth was she dreaming? Something strange, piquant, and springlike: the thawing earth, felt-like from last year’s grass, tiny little flowers that didn’t yet look real, touchingly white like toes in the holes of an old sock. As she washed up in front of the bathroom mirror, which Marina had splashed with dirty water and toothpaste, as usual, Nina Alexandrovna tried to remember. Something stepped closer and closer, more and more confidently, promising to decipher her happiness.

  Lit by the morning sun, Alexei Afanasievich lay under his Chinese blanket, which was a little short for him, and his left, wide-open eye was perfectly transparent and as if pricked, like light green glass. Looking at her husband, Nina Alexandrovna noticed that the sun today was unusual, the way it can be in airplanes: harsh, slightly iridescent, perpetual. This astronomical light, which seemed not to know cloud cover, allowed her to see something stretched over the veteran: the light haze of nonbeing, probably consisting of that light dust of immortality against which brushes and rags were powerless. After her usual morning routine with Alexei Afanasievich, Nina Alexandrovna noticed that the haze, while retaining the dissipating trace of her labor, was slowly changing outline, so that any ruptures in the oh-so-delicate whiteness oddly lost their human meaning. The little workshop on the headboard, between the two gold, sun-stung balls, was ready for his morning labors: a few long strings freed from bast and rid of pesky nubbins lay on the pillow to the left and right of the veteran’s head—and Nina Alexandrovna, having removed these preparations during the washing-up, restored his rag bench to order. Alexei Afanasievich was in no hurry, though. It was surprising, but today he was silent the whole time. Even the turning from side to side and the cotton wool touching his thoroughly baked bedsores, which always aroused a guttural protest in the paralyzed man, today passed without a murmur. Perhaps the puzzling celebration in her soul had something to do with it, but Alexei Afanasievich emerged from Nina Alexandrovna’s hand particularly well-groomed and handsome. The wide-toothed comb had laid his transparent gray hair out hair to hair, and his scraped cheeks were like sugared honey. She couldn’t imagine that the paralyzed man had any interest in his appearance. Lying in the same place for so long excluded any ability he might have to see himself from the outside. Today, though, Alexei Afanasievich seemed to have some sense of his good looks and was pleased; his raised index finger, which made the veteran thumb-size but a man nonetheless, touched the invisible vertical like a taut string. This quiet bass vibration, echoed somewhere very high up, must have been the spectral sound to which Alexei Afanasievich listened so intently. Suddenly Nina Alexandrovna realized how to decipher her dream.

  She was amazed at how she’d failed to remember and understand. That long-ago spring, back before they’d built buildings on the damp, dragonfly lot, had blurred in memory. She and Alexei Afanasievich were either out for a walk or coming back from the movies. Nina Alexandrovna overtook the veteran, who was working his splattered cane hard, like a lever, and began quickly climbing the warmed slope, plucking coltsfoot flowers, golden, like uniform buttons on gray army cloth. Of course, she was flirting, gathering this silly eggy bouquet, but she’d never expected Alexei Afanasievich to suddenly climb up after her, noisily poking his cane in the not-yet-dried bushes and leaving flagrant, plowed up tracks on the soft epithelia of a recent rivulet. When he stopped in front of Nina Alexandrovna with a streak of mud on his wet temple holding one defective flower, yellowed like a cheap cigarette and badly crushed, which he held out to her with an expression of pained displeasure, Nina Alexandrovna took serious fright and hurried to descend to the path, carefully holding up her husband, who was slipping in his muddied shoes over the mats o
f last year’s grass. At the time, shamed, her nose yellow, Nina Alexandrovna had taken the addition to her bouquet as an earned reproach. In exactly the same way, her husband sometimes would hand her the salt shaker forgotten on the dinner table or a knitting needle picked up from the floor. Now she suddenly guessed that Alexei Afanasievich, having crudely taken her on his trophy bed, was in the light of day shy, like a youth, and didn’t know the right way to approach the timid Nina Alexandrovna, who had always been in such a hurry to put him off through some kind of service: he never recovered the grave simplicity with which he had once taken her hand along with the watch that had come undone and nearly fallen on the floor and suggested that she move in with him.

  Which meant he had once had that simplicity. Alexei Afanasievich was authentic because his consciousness had preserved the true significance of every episode and minor incident when he had scorned Nina Alexandrovna for forgetfulness—but he couldn’t just go up to her and hand her what she had forgotten, just as he never had known how to derive symbols from everyday objects. That was why the myopic flower added to the sticky bouquet, which smelled like a chicken, meant exactly nothing other than the abandoned Alexei Afanasievich’s clumsy attempt to bring back his runaway wife. In all the decades of their life together, the Kharitonovs had never reminisced about anything together. They hadn’t accrued any symbolic property in common, such as any love, however brief, immediately tries to acquire. But Alexei Afanasievich had no need to capitalize on his emotions. Fully self-aware, he possessed not the symbols of things but the originals. The grim business of reconnaissance, when a man in camouflage disappearing locally to the dull tremor of a burning missile is required not to be, so that even a fascist’s weak brain signals can’t detect the enemy nearby—that business doubtless assumed a loss of authenticity. By rejecting his full self, the man ceased to be aware of what death was or even when he had been picked out. He merely had a better sense of his oneness with the fighting mass of his fellow countrymen. Unlike many of his heroic comrades who recklessly entrusted themselves to nonbeing, Alexei Afanasievich had refused to let go of the thread of his own existence and so had survived. Everything he did, including his quiet work with nooses and his insane lunge at a cunning submachine gun, a lunge his command knew about, took place in the clear awareness and full memory of his school’s apple orchard and his waiting wife. Holding on to this altogether was nearly impossible, but Alexei Afanasievich furiously refused to let go. After this, all the veteran ceremonies where his war had become widely accessible symbols were utterly beside the point for Alexei Afanasievich, which was why he didn’t need any of the literature that Nina Alexandrovna waited for so long and so hopelessly from her husband, not understanding that it was the absence of symbolism that signified the authenticity of his emotions. Alexei Afanasievich authenticated himself by his mere presence, and that was more than enough.