Vita Nostra

by Marina Dyachenko

  The world that she now knew was Love.

  Dark glasses concealed Kozhennikov’s eyes. His invisible but easily sensed gaze was directed at Sasha—just as it was back in July at a seaside town, on the Street That Led to the Sea, but ended up leading her to the Institute of Special Technologies.

  Sasha looked down.

  “Lessons completed without permission,” Sterkh continued in a soft colorless voice. “Intentional metamorphosis. Experiments with manifestation of entities. All this I would call a blatant violation of academic regulations.”

  The room was once again eerily quiet. And in this quiet room Kozhennikov’s voice was heard for the first time:

  “Nikolay, there is one nuance.”

  “Yes?”

  “I promised the girl not to ask anything impossible of her.”

  Sterkh raised his eyebrows:

  “What precisely on my list would you consider impossible?”

  “Her development actualizes her identity,” the lamps were reflected in Kozhennikov’s lenses. “She cannot stop if the disk contains several tracks in a row. Give her one track per disk, it’s not complicated, is it?”

  A pause lingered in the air. Sterkh’s countenance changed; his wings twitched under his jacket, as if trying to unfold immediately.

  Sasha shrunk in her chair, wishing for the earth to swallow her up.

  “It’s not complicated,” Sterkh’s voice sounded hollow. “It is… It lacks precedent. I have never had students who were capable of processing ten tracks one after the other. I have used the standard learning materials.”

  “But shall we presume that we are dealing with a non-standard case?” Kozhennikov inquired delicately.

  “You are right,” said Sterkh after a short pause.

  “Then it’s settled,” Kozhennikov nodded. “As far as the manifestation of entities… Sasha, do you realize what you have done?”

  “It was not on purpose. I didn’t mean to.”

  Portnov choked on his smoke.

  “So are you not aware?”

  “Why not. I am aware,” Sasha said quietly.

  Sterkh raised his eyes up to the ceiling.

  “Why did you do it?” Kozhennikov continued his inquiry.

  “By accident.”

  “What prompted you to do it? What were you thinking about before you picked up the pencil?”

  Sasha swallowed.

  “It is important,” Kozhennikov nodded. “What were you thinking about? Or whom?”

  “About Kostya,” Sasha said. “About Konstantin Kozhennikov.”

  And she bravely met her own reflection in his dark lenses.

  “And feeling emotional, you decided to play with meanings?” Portnov cut in.

  Sasha turned to face him:

  “Not to play, Oleg Borisovich. I believe it was you who taught me to add symbols. It was you who praised me when everything came together. Have you ever warned me that it was forbidden?”

  “I’d forbid you to run over the ceiling if I had known you were capable of that!”

  “I didn’t know either. I simply lived… existed, positioned myself in space, functioned, acted, continued, lasted…”

  She caught herself monotonously listing words—each one of them had a fraction of the meaning she needed so desperately, but not a single one of them fit her purpose.

  “Actually, that is exactly what I meant,” Kozhennikov said softly.

  “So then you are telling me,” Portnov spoke sharply, almost aggressively, “that we cannot expect this girl to cease her games with the informational universe? Just because it means we’re asking for the impossible?”

  “No,” a slight smile touched Kozhennikov’s lips. “Now, when we specified a few things, our problem became a bit clearer, and it will now be solved. Don’t worry.”

  He turned to Sasha.

  “Sasha, I would like to speak to you today. What time will you be done with your classes?”

  ***

  She came to her senses at the long table in a large auditorium, where general educational lectures were usually held. In front of her was a sheet of paper torn out of a notebook, and Sasha was writing down the following: “At this time esthetic experience is considered as an experience in value, and is treated within the limits of the philosophy of value.” The auditorium was not full, and the professor kept giving Sasha strange looks.

  Sasha leaned back on her chair. She loved to learn; lectures, even the most boring ones, and formulaic definitions, no matter how confusing, returned her to reality…

  To reality in the sense that Sasha understood it.

  The bell rang.

  Not looking at anyone, not speaking with anyone, she returned to her loft. The ashes from the burnt paper still lay in the wastebasket. She tidied up the room, gathered the yellow strips of foam off the floor and took out the trash. She sat by the window; for a long time she watched the green linden trees on Sacco and Vanzetti.

  Whose love was it that she so stupidly, accidentally manifested? Once it became tangible, this love gained a carrier and an object of application… An object and a subject…. When Sasha burned it, what happened to these people?

  Her hands fidgeted, searching for something to do. She picked up a pencil, found a pencil sharpener in the desk drawer, and pulled a clean sheet of paper closer to avoid making a mess. She inserted the dull pencil snout into the sharpener, turned it once and again. The wood shavings fell onto the paper, making a pattern.

  Sasha gathered the shavings into her hand and shook them off into the wastebasket. She’s not going to draw anything: she has been forbidden to manifest entities. She is not going to, no, no, no, she’s only going to open the conceptual activator for just a minute.

  Yellow paper, diagrams, columns, numbers: Sasha closed her eyes. A magnificent anthill of meanings with all its levels and associations, vectors, derivatives of multiple degrees, loops, figure eights, lines leading into infinity… No, no. Just watch. Just be amazed. Harmony…

  The pencil slid out of the sharpener by itself, pointed as a needle. Will. Creation. Word. What am I doing, Sasha thought in panic, while her entire being, commanding and supple, strengthened and developed by assignments and exercises, loved—existed, positioned itself in space, functioned, acted, continued, lasted…

  And then her thoughts ended as well. A jump was completed to the next level, impossible to express in familiar terms. The pencil glided without a break, depicting symbols with an enclosed fourth dimension. Patches of sunlight on the water, a small oar—yellow, bright-yellow, plastic. It is not yet Love; it is a premonition, a forewarning…

  The doorbell clang like a fire alarm.

  Sasha has never had visitors in her loft, and she’d never even heard that deafening ringing; her hand jerked. The pencil broke. In terror Sasha stared at the sheet of paper with a glimmering, nearly completed symbol.

  The door bell insisted on ringing. Sasha looked out of the window and saw downstairs, at the lion-guarded entrance, Kozhennikov, but not Farit, no. It was Kostya.

  ***

  “Oh, you scared me.”

  “Why should you be scared,” Kostya looked around with suspicion and inhaled. “Did you burn something?”

  “Ah, stuff… old papers. Have a seat.”

  Kostya sat down on the edge of a stool. He took another look around, this time more attentively.

  “Nice place. Very different from our rathole.”

  “Are you fighting with your wife?” Sasha blurted out.

  “You’ve been told?” Kostya avoided her eyes.

  “It’s not hard to figure out,” Sasha sighed. “I’m not offering you tea, sorry about that, I’m out of tea leaves. What did you want to tell me?”

  Kostya swayed back and forth, suddenly looking so much like Farit Kozhennikov that Sasha cringed inside.

  “What did they want from you? Why did they want to see you? I saw him—he was there too.”

  Sasha sighed. Actually, Kostya was the only perso
n with whom she could share everything; well, almost everything. Aside from a few details.

  So she told him. Kostya listened, anxiously leaning forward, unconsciously playing with a broken pencil.

  “Are you telling me he stood up for you?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what it looked like.”

  “‘I’m not asking for the impossible.’ When he sent Lisa out on the street corner, he also was not asking for the impossible.”

  “You know about that?!”

  “Everyone does. When he killed my grandmother… he also was not asking for the impossible, was he?”

  “He was not. You could have passed the test on the first try. You passed it on the second.”

  Kostya’s eyes turned into glass.

  “But you did pass it,” Sasha mumbled apologetically.

  “You’ve changed a lot,” Kostya said. “Sometimes I think you’ve become very much like him.”

  “But you could have passed on the first try,” Sasha could feel his growing antagonism, and it made her speak fast and commandingly, as if pressing her chest against the hurricane force wind. “It’s true, Kostya, it is unpleasant and sad, but it’s true. You could. But you did not pass. You are his son, and you hate him. But perhaps he’s not the worst father. He’s rational. Strict. Effective.”

  “What?!”

  “Perhaps he even loves you. In his own way… Perhaps all the fathers in the world are projections of one single entity. It’s just that their method of transformation is different. A ballerina’s shadow is a monster with a tiny head and massive legs… Can you imagine how badly any entity can be distorted by an intricate type of projection? If this pile of muck is a projection of a blooming garden onto an infinite timeframe, onto rain and cold… If my father who left my Mom with a baby in her arms—if he’s a projection of a magnanimous and loving man, but the sun went down, and the shadow got distorted…”

  Sasha spoke, realizing to her wonder that she no longer thought in words. Words—only later, but in the beginning—supple and firm… images? Pictures? Live creatures? The necessity of converting these thoughts-sensations into the familiar verbal form was becoming a burden to her.

  Kostya held her hand like an attentive nurse:

  “Sasha…. Are you all right?”

  “Me? Oh yes. Poor Juliet was mistaken. Remember? ‘’Tis but thy name that is my enemy. Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot, Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!’ This is a common misconception, not unlike the “world is flat” belief. ‘And whatever your ship is named, that is how it will sail.’—Yes, that’s it. That is exactly right.”

  “Sasha…” Kostya seemed nervous.

  “Listen,” she closed her eyes to avoid seeing Kostya and her room, in order to feel the full extent of the strokes and trills of her new thoughts, thought-images, thought-creatures. “I can… construct… materialize… actualize… objectify… depict for you and Zhenya this Love, the same as Romeo and Juliet’s. You will feel, live, experience, burn with… this Love, the only one in the whole universe… I will manifest it for you…”

  Sasha stumbled. Kostya watched her with tension growing every second. The firm shadows dancing in Sasha’s conscience slowed down, and familiar thought-words jumped out to the foreground like a teleprompter line.

  “Forgive me, I made a bad joke about love. I am talking too much. I… you see, I am continuing, flowing, swelling… I cannot stop. I am forced from inside, I am like yeasty dough, sooner or later I will crack, and then Kozhennikov… Sorry. And then he will look at me like this, over his glasses, and say: “This will teach you some discipline.” And then I shall not bear it, Kostya. I will do something terrible. I will kill. I will manifest a bullet in his heart.”

  Kostya’s pupils widened, Sasha knew something was about to happen, and it did—gritting his teeth, Kostya lightly slapped her cheek. Sasha felt Kostya’s insides twist and resonate from this slap.

  “Don’t worry, it’s fine,” she tried to smile, “no reason to worry, it did not hurt. Here’s the thing: if entities can be manifested, then they can probably be formed anew. To create something that has never before existed, rather than simply project ideas. I am a projector, a motion-picture camera, I project shadows on the screen… But can someone make entities out of nothing? What do you think, can one create something out of nothing?”

  “You need to drink some water,” Kostya was becoming pale by the minute. “They have driven you insane. Sasha, there was this one girl, a third year; she went mad… just like that.”

  “All girls are mad. Each in her own way. Listen, I think I am omnipotent. I broke out of our text and can view it from the outside. And I can see—it’s just letters. Every person is a word, simply a word. And others are punctuation marks.”

  “Listen, I can call someone… or…”

  Sasha drowned in silence. Kostya’s lips were moving, he was worried, close to despair. Sasha blinked; she saw Kostya as only half-human, and half—a shadow, a projection of something imperative, much more fundamental than the entire human race. However, Kostya was still human, while Sasha struggled, slid out of her shell, losing her form and losing the ability to think, and Sterkh’s exasperated words dangled at the edge of her dimmed—or kindling?—conscience: “Have you ever turned inside out a dirty sock?!”

  And then the door flew open, and it, which stood outside, now stepped into the room.

  ***

  “What happened to her?!”

  Kostya stood leaning over the wall. The door to the bathroom was left ajar. Water poured out of the faucet. Farit Kozhennikov’s voice answered something, but Sasha could not distinguish the words.

  She sat behind the writing bureau. She did not fall on the floor unconscious, as could be expected. She sat moving her pencil over the sheet of paper, and the entire paper was covered with scribbles, strokes, and spirals.

  “What is going to happen to her?” Kostya asked again.

  Again she missed the reply. The sound of water stopped. Farit Kozhennikov stepped into the room, and Sasha shut her eyes for a second. Only for a second: Farit wore light-grey glasses, almost transparent—but still opaque.

  “Should I go?” Kostya’s voice sounded hollow.

  Kozhennikov placed two washed cups on the shelf. Sasha recalled drinking kefir yesterday morning, and not having a chance to do the dishes before classes.

  “If you are not busy, son, you can run down to the corner store and get some tea, biscuits and instant coffee. That is something Sasha Samokhina truly needs right now. Can you do that?”

  “I will,” Kostya said after a short pause.

  “Here is some money,” Farit put his hand into the pocket of his leather jacket.

  “I don’t need any, I have my own money.”

  Kostya left without looking at Sasha.

  She glanced at the sheet in front of her. In its center, almost hidden by her scribbles, an unfinished symbol twitched slightly. While she watched, the symbol lost its volume, flattened, until it finally froze. Farit carefully pulled the paper from underneath Sasha’s clenched fingers and brought over his lighter. The paper went up in flames. Kozhennikov opened the screen of the tiny fireplace and put the wisp of flame onto the sooty bricks.

  He opened the window a little wider:

  “Omnipotent, are you?”

  Sasha rubbed her eyes; they burned as if from a long look at the sun. Cloudy tears poured down her face, finally washing off the meticulously applied mascara.

  ‘They worry about you,” Kozhennikov murmured. “But they don’t know everything about you. If they did—they would kill you to avoid a universal catastrophe…”

  He may have been speaking with irony. He employed a bit of sarcasm. Or maybe he didn’t.

  Sasha stared at her pencil. Kozennikov picked up a stool and sat in front of her—very close. She could have touched him if she wanted to.

  “Do you
feel like a genie fresh out of the bottle? Ready to build castles and destroy them? You can do anything, anything at all?”

  Now he seemed serious. Or, perhaps, he was making fun of her.

  “I can’t stop,” Sasha whispered. “I cannot—not be.”

  “You can,” Kozhennikov said, and the sound of his voice made Sasha flinch. “Because I demand that you remain within the academic limits of this program. That you don’t draw live pictures without your professors present. That you don’t fly like Peter Pan, and don’t try to enter all the visible openings. This is my condition, and I never—remember, never!—ask for the impossible.”

  He placed a cellular phone in a soft pink case in front of Sasha:

  “This is for you. Call your mother right now and tell her your new number.”

  Sasha swallowed.

  “Do what I said,” Kozhennikov put a plastic card with a long number on the table. “Dial eight first.”

  The phone worked. The keys sang gently when pressed.

  Beep. Beep.

  “Hello… Mom?”

  “Sasha? Sasha, hello! Where are you? I can hear you so well!”

  “Mom, I have a cell phone now. Write down the number.”

  “Seriously? Isn’t that’s something! Listen, isn’t too expensive?”

  “No… not really. Write it down.”

  Kozhennikov sat, one leg thrown over the other, and watched Sasha through a pair of smoky glasses.

  “So can I call you on this number?”

  “Well, yes. At least if you urgently need to talk to me.”

  “That’s great.”

  “Mom… sorry, I can’t talk for a long time…”

  “Bye! Good luck! We’re fine, the baby is doing well…”

  “Say hello to… Valentin. Good bye.”

  She pressed the Off button. A picture lit up on the display: a globe, or perhaps a stylized clock. Sasha took a deep breath.

  “Good,” Kozhennikov nodded. “Now look me in the eyes and listen carefully.”

  He took off his glasses. Sasha blinked; Kozhennikov’s brown eyes, ordinary, with normal pupils, stared her in the face: