The Man Who Couldn't Die by Marian Schwartz

Author:Marian Schwartz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC019000, Fiction/Literary, LCO014000, Literary Collections/Russian & Former Soviet Union
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2018-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

In fact, the true predator to loom up like Godzilla over District 18’s primitive urban landscape was Valery Petrovich Apofeozov. One relatively beautiful, sun-yellow Sunday, a brigade of Turks who did not speak Russian unfurled his portrait many meters high on the side of a twelve-story apartment building that was not one of the best but that stood on a hill and was visible at that moment from nearly every point of the engraved district, which gleamed like a ruble. Unfurled over some outdated mosaic figures whose hands were lifting a satellite and whose legs seemed to be wearing brown, black, and nude stockings, the painfully vivid portrait of the people’s leader billowed slightly, and from time to time folds stretched over it, making it seem as though the leader was chewing on a rusted balcony bit off the nearest wall and was just about to take a step forward to wade waist-deep through the smoking ruins like a swimmer through waves. At the same time, the viewer couldn’t shake the distinct impression that everything here was here thanks to him. Given such intent and loving care, the district seemed to acquire a self-awareness and even a semblance of sovereignty. It was hard to believe in its daily diffusion and dissolution without visible borders in the soaked urban tracts, which in turn dissolved from the cloudy rain and the industrial waste that fed the soil and air, just as it was hard to believe in the flat areas, which were scarcely nature and were more like half-green economic wastelands where nature did not get the solitude it needed to weave its private secret even between three birch trunks. The voting district’s residents, who had absolutely no choice about declining the printed campaign materials, knew, as any citizen does, the shape of their state, the outlines of their electoral district, which on maps looked like a woman’s hand with short, bent fingers. Moreover, the graphically legible lifeline, the role of which was performed by a dead little stream, turned out to be so long that in and of itself it inspired groundless but for this reason contagious optimism.

The optimism epidemic set off by Apofeozov’s life-affirming persona took on truly fantastic forms. Several residents whose faces had become hollow-cheeked and gray from long years of poverty, like that cheap eviscerated fish they bought in frozen slabs from wholesale shops, suddenly yielded to the illusion that a car and bank account were possible in their lifetime, too. Under the influence of strange, iridescent fluids, unemployed Igor P., still a decent man in cracked glasses and clean clothing that looked like hospital pajamas they were so old, showed up one day in broad daylight at the supermarket, chaotically collected in his cart a mountain of items that fell to the floor, pushed his load up to the checkout line, and instead of paying, demanded cash. A dreamy smile wandered across the assailant’s intelligent face, and an ax-like item that looked to the cashier like

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