The Man Who Couldn't Die, Page 22

  Yes, it was all perfectly clear to her now—and highlighted even more clearly than ever was the fact that Alexei Afanasievich’s suicide would lead to the loss of much more than simply a man’s life. Not because the emotion would be gone, but because it would be as if there had never been any. That different time—that ideal stagnation, when a natural ending was impossible by definition—had become a trap, and Alexei Afanasievich could now go only by betraying his wife with his death, which he had taken, like a woman, into his cold bed. Because Alexei Afanasievich himself preferred the other’s eternal company, Nina Alexandrovna, who now spent her time in the kitchen scraping dishes under the hot faucet, which smelled like a foul mouth, suffered such attacks of jealousy that the fist under her shoulder blade was a joke by comparison. More than anything in the world, Nina Alexandrovna would have liked right now to see her rival face-to-face and see whether she was that pretty. She didn’t realize just how blasphemous and dangerous her thoughts were; her hot wet hand wiped away her cloudy tears, which had scummed over as if with chlorine, and she wiped her hand on the dish towel for a long time, as if searching for pockets in it. Had Nina Alexandrovna been offered the chance to die that minute and see the fateful hooded lady and reclaim her husband, who had been summoning that lady for so long and at such incredible effort, Nina Alexandrovna would have agreed. She was so upset, she had even forgotten about the pension. She had completely lost sight of the fact that she needed to throw the blue blanket over the rope workshop before Klumba’s arrival.

  Meanwhile, a disheveled Klumba, who was now quite prepared to play her benevolent and salutary role in the Kharitonov family’s history, approached the veteran’s residence even more quickly than usual.

  That day, the city, lit from a distance at an unusual and harsh angle, looked like an assemblage of improbable staircases, twisted ledges, and stepped pyramids, and because all that was left of the streets and buildings in this parallel time was a fan of ruins and caked ashes breathing radiation, if you looked closely through the soapy, frosty air, they created a striking yet defenseless dramatic effect. Everything seemed slightly inauthentic. Because they had already ceased to be the day’s top news story, the deceived voters’ scattered picket lines looked like clusters of arrivals from the provinces, and their main dance in front of the provincial authorities’ ribbed tower, which looked like it was squinting from a jolt of sun, might have been a talent show.

  Klumba, though, her attention averted from public activism to performing her direct responsibilities for the benefits office, did not feel the struggle’s decline. Feverish excitement drove her from address to address nearly at a run. The firm snow chipped and grated under her sturdy heels, and her short shadow raced across the snowdrifts like a hyper little dog. At every pensioner apartment she descended upon, stamping loudly from the cold, she was awaited by yet more eloquent proof of Krugal’s baseness; the poverty and germs that had gone hog wild and spilled out everywhere like flickering sand worked her into a state of morbid amazement over and over again. She didn’t understand how she could have been so outplayed. Two hundred forty-eight disabled people, all with documents, had received zero and had not played their proper role; they had simply been ignored. Nonetheless, they had pushed their candidate through, a mangy artist with a crooked jaw that made his face resemble a left boot. Today’s pensioner rounds were for Klumba a way of reinforcing her own sense of correctness. Once again, she was convinced of the reality of her team of invalids: the trembling, open-ended scrawls endlessly drawn by the eighteen-year-old girl idiot and the pathetic kitchen utensils of the lonely old men touched her as never before. For some reason, for the first time in her benefits career, it broke her heart in two. Klumba was almost certain that this highly unexpected turn in voter affairs concealed some especially crafty machinations. She couldn’t wait to get to the apartment of this Marina Borisovna, who had run the headquarters for Klumba’s foe and was probably complicit in her candidate’s behind-the-scenes machinations. Klumba hoped to discover some major evidence of foul play there.

  Meanwhile, Marina was once again languishing in the waiting room, which over the past few days she had studied better than during all her years of working at Studio A. Demoralized to the nth degree such that even she found herself repulsive, she couldn’t take her eyes off the director’s door and kept wiping her damp palms stealthily on her synthetic skirt, which only made the stiff fabric greasy. Finally, the voices in the office got louder as they rose from their seats, and when the beaming director ran out on his short legs, which seemed to slip a little and lag behind his body as he saw his visitors out, Marina leaped up. She immediately became unbearably ashamed, but it would have been stupid to sit back down on her disagreeably warm chair. The director, today wearing a striped, sharply waisted suit, in which the upper part of his massive body dominated quite a bit over his lower, turned his eyebrows, which looked like they’d been mowed with a razor, toward her. For a while he busied himself some more with the tall blonde, who was vaguely familiar to Marina, reminding her of the dissolute literary circle at the Krasnokurinsk Worker—while the blonde’s companion, a good-looking gentleman with an amazingly fresh face and ruddy bags under his eyes, kept trying to wedge his face between them, like a forty-minute program, ingratiatingly touching the director’s massive shoulder. At last the blonde, smiling, her delicate, protruding ears as red as fruit in syrup, waved to the director from the hall, and her companion scurried after her, dragging her grandiose fur coat made of fiery tufts of fox. Then the director, stepping back a little from his office door, made Marina a reluctant sign of invitation.

  “So you’re Marina Borisovna,” he said, informing himself, and slipped nimbly into his chair, rolling to the very middle of his polished, seriously empty desk. Marina, who had taken the small little rolling chair at one side, keenly felt the humiliation of her place on the side, which, according to the logic of position the director had created, was beneath his notice. “You know what, I’m going to be frank with you,” the director suddenly said in a freer voice, leaning back and throwing his short arm behind his head, revealing his jacket’s worn armpit and a loose thread. “I’m a plainspoken man, anyone will tell you that, and anyone who doesn’t know me will find out. I know you were promised the job of my deputy, but here’s the thing. That position has now been taken by someone else who is close and important to me in both the sexual and the spiritual sense, I won’t hide that.” “I see,” Marina mumbled politely, having known in advance that this was approximately what was going to be said. Nonetheless, her heart felt as if it had been wiped with a cold cotton ball before an injection. “Basically, Sergei Sergeich, well, you know Sergei Sergeich, he asked me to give you a job at the studio,” the director went on, giving his cropped head a hard jerk, which sent his hacked bang rearing back. “Actually, I’m prepared to take you on your former terms, which I know. You could even start today.”

  “On contract?” Marina asked quietly, not trusting her own voice, which was shaking treacherously. The day before, she had glimpsed her old desk moved over to the wall and covered with dirty mugs that had the iridescent remains of some sweet tar, two rock-hard sugar balls, and some defiled greasy napkins under a mound of cafeteria meat patties that looked like something from a kiddie sandbox. “Well, yes,” the director confirmed, fondly stroking his round nape. “For you that would be an option. Sergei Sergeich said you’re a good commentator, but I asked your coworkers, and they said something different. Actually, I could be wrong. But if I am, you’ll easily find a job at another TV studio, so what do you need this contract for?” The new director may not yet have known that, under relentless pressure from graduates of the school of journalism, vacancies at any decent media outlet didn’t last ten days; however, he couldn’t help but understand that Marina, with her current political dowry, could work only for her own people, that none of the more advanced TV companies (which had far outdistanced freelance Studio A in the quality of their highly varied and decently
paid projects) would take her on. Nonetheless, the director looked straight ahead with his perfectly calm, quietly shining little eyes, the color of damp coffee grounds. “As I already said, I’m a plainspoken man,” he repeated, abruptly reorienting his impressive pose toward and looking straight at the central, business point on his desk. “I will say that I would rather not hire you. Your presence would upset the person close to me, a person I respect and treasure. All of you who live here can find jobs somewhere through acquaintances. But I understand the meaning of compromise. I am warning you honestly that you won’t be getting promoted because my person has to be shielded from you. You yourself may leave eventually. Then you’ll write your resignation. That’s all.”

  At these last words from the focused director, who had been tapping a few pencils against the table, Marina figured out what had been bothering her the past few days. A contrived Party spirit, which had accumulated much more power over her than had been in evidence at the beginning of this strictly in-house game, now assumed her incomprehensible but incontestable guilt before the Party—and Professor Shishkov’s total absence of guilt before her, to say nothing of that actor Krugal’s. Marina could stick to her guns and put her symbolic Party ticket on the desk of one of her benefactors. Doing so—in the absence of Klimov, who could never be discounted—meant such intense loneliness that its perfection almost entranced Marina, who had one sole talent: striving for the absolute. However, fear, garden-variety fear, held her at the edge of the abyss and the chair she was on, and with her hands pressed between her knees, she started rocking mechanically. Actually, rather than detain the director, she ought to slide over the old piece of paper he’d pulled out from somewhere, which looked singed along the edges, write her resignation, and go clean out her desk. But Marina’s hands were so damp, she was afraid of leaving greasy spots on the paper, like from those disgusting brown meat patties, and worst of all she was afraid of making grammatical mistakes, which would serve as the first proof of her poor qualifications. In her mind, this resignation, which would now be nothing but an obvious demonstration of her shameful weakness, set out on a blank sheet of paper, got mixed up with the work contract, which evidently would have to be signed separately. The director was silently, mockingly patient, smiling with just his cheeks, where his unshaven, splintery stubble had become noticeable. It was her self-loathing, and not just the simple thought that she had essentially nothing to fear given her stepfather’s pension, that decided Marina’s fate. Intuitively, she realized what should not under any circumstances be done in this office and knew that this was exactly what she was about to do.

  Still on her rolling chair, Marina pushed off from the carpeting with her boots, her sharp heel crackling as it caught, and abruptly found herself directly facing the director—who hadn’t even thought to put his short legs and shoeless feet under his desk and was gripping the crosspiece like an ape. Marina was blocking the door, so that now they seemed to have suddenly switched places. Moreover, the office’s owner and situation were suddenly pushed against the wall and drawn on it as distinctly as on a cinema screen. “What kind of tête-à-tête is this?” the director, who did not like this new situation one bit, said irritably. “You and I aren’t in some café now.” “I’m not interested in your contract,” Marina said. It felt to her that the office and all its contents were slowly tipping on their side, toward the tall window that had pulled the sunshine slantwise across the gray carpet. “Are you going to run to Shishkov and complain?” the director asked, slamming his hand down on the slipping piece of paper and rolling the chattering faceted pencil. “You can tell the professor,” Marina said distinctly, feeling a smooth tilt in her head, “that I’m sick of covering his respected ass. He can use your close friend now. I don’t care. You can tell him he’s a punk and a scoundrel.”

  Someone else in Marina’s place symbolically flinging down her Party ticket would have found substantially more stinging words—but for her, even this was too much. Her legs were buckling and she needed to leave the office and not be terrified. “Hey!” The obviously upset director called to her, having jumped up, to judge from the way his chair creaked. Evidently, he’d realized that this Marina Borisovna, in inflicting these outrageous words on him, words that one way or another had to be conveyed to Shishkov, had unexpectedly placed him in the way of the professor’s ambitions, whose limits the director didn’t know. Marina didn’t stop, though. She just caught her heel again, pulling some white threads from the carpet’s synthetic curls. What did this remind her of? It reminded her of the way she, as a university student, had entered an auditorium, having failed to cross paths with the divine Klimov running out of his lectures, and had seen before her a stale emptiness and faces she didn’t need. Only now Marina couldn’t go back and chase down her retreating love. The emptiness before her was infinite, and she could only wade into it further and overcome the familiar resistance of a dimension without qualities. Now she probably could not say, “My entire life is up to me.” Having failed to cross paths with her true life somehow—now time, which never went backward, was part of this movement—Marina put on her coat. At last she understood why she’d been saving up money in the battered, shell-covered box. “Marina Borisovna, are you leaving for good?” a surprised Lyudochka tore herself away from the spluttering explosions and croaking commands of her computer game.

  That very same moment, a flushed Klumba plopped her heavily sighing bag on the stool and saw the philanthropic lists on the windowsill.

  At first, when the half-unbuttoned benefits rep materialized in the front hall, sniffing and making decisive gestures, it had occurred to Nina Alexandrovna that Klumba was drunk. But she didn’t smell of alcohol, and the strong Cahors of her bordeaux flush was probably the result of the cold and walking fast. Still, Nina Alexandrovna clearly sensed something abnormal in Klumba’s behavior. As Klumba pulled off her long Turkish sheepskin coat, she sought something with feverish little eyes, as if she’d never been in the apartment before, and even secretly pinched the thick clothing that was hanging up. Nina Alexandrovna was embarrassed that the night before, after she took that trip to see her nephew, she hadn’t swept the spider web, which had collected flakes of grout, from the front hall, or the crushed eggshell in the corners. Now she thought that before giving her her money, Klumba was going to give her a good scolding.

  But what did happen was even more surprising. On her way to the kitchen, Klumba swiveled on her axis a couple of times, as if she were on a tour, and the enthusiasm on her flushed face was gradually mixed with disappointment, as if they’d watered down the wine. But suddenly her hot, catarrhish mouth opened and she stared at the well-wiped windowsill, where next to the light pyramid of washed kefir packages, the modest stack of Marina’s papers was drying out, spots faceup. Klumba looked like a woman who could not believe her own luck. And so, in fact, it was. In suggesting she take a good look around at this Marina Borisovna’s, Klumba had expected to discover new furniture, say, or an ostentatious mink coat with a fancy top button as big as the saucer in a gilt tea service. What she had found, her gaze having crashed into the familiar lines and worn comments in her own hand, exceeded her boldest speculations. In essence, Klumba had in her hands direct evidence that this Marina Borisovna had taken the invalids’ money and, moreover, had taken the database so that later she could use Klumba’s social instrument in her own interests. “Excuse me. Is that yours? Did you lose it?” Nina Alexandrovna asked, uneasy, not knowing how to take the ill-starred papers away from the benefits rep, papers on which she suddenly noticed a shriveled bit of chicken fat. “I’ll tell you what this is right now,” Klumba replied, gasping for air, and something in her exultant voice made Nina Alexandrovna turn to stone and take a seat on the stool.

  …What she heard from the benefits rep over the next quarter hour was so horrific that an awkward smile kept appearing on Nina Alexandrovna’s face, the kind of smile on polite people suffering through improbable tales. Her pale, screwed-up grimac
e, which also betrayed the pain that gripped Nina Alexandrovna under her shoulder blade harder and harder, must have enraged the already agitated Klumba. Nothing remained of her exultant mood but a scream that shook the building. Nina Alexandrovna knew that Marina wasn’t working at the TV studio anymore. The photograph in the newspaper said clearly that her daughter had gone from being a correspondent to an object of interest in a scandal sheet and had landed in some incident. But these fraudulent elections with their general subornation and thievery and their spending of philanthropic money intended for old people were much more eloquent and worse than those odd-numbered campaign-period scenes that Nina Alexandrovna had attempted to draw for herself, simultaneously relieving and feeding her alarm.