Vita Nostra

by Sergey

  “Now what?” her mother said.

  “There he is again, he’s watching me . . .”

  She wasn’t quick enough to stop her mother, who turned and crossed the street. She walked right up to the dark man and asked him something; the man answered, still staring at Sasha. Yet at the same time his face was turned toward her mother, and his mouth looked natural and quite friendly . . . if there were such a thing as a friendly mouth.

  Mom returned, simultaneously pleased and annoyed.

  “Relax; he’s on vacation, just like you and me. I don’t know what your problem is. He’s from Nizhnevartovsk. He’s allergic to direct sun rays.”

  Sasha was silent. It made sense . . . and yet it didn’t. Why does he follow me, then? And why doesn’t Mom care?

  At lunchtime, coming back from the shore, they stopped at the market, and Sasha took great care to make sure they didn’t forget anything. They returned to the empty apartment, heated up water, and took turns with an improvised bucket shower (water was scarce during the day), and started making their lunch.

  That’s when they realized they were out of salt.

  The dark man was sitting on the bench in the courtyard. Sasha saw him as soon as she poked her head out of the building.

  She withdrew her head.

  An orange cat with a damaged ear was lapping up cream in a small bowl left by some nice person. The cat slurped and licked its chops. Its yellow eye stared at Sasha; the cat continued licking the bowl.

  Sasha did not know what to do. Turn back? Proceed as if nothing was wrong? It was crazy . . .

  The hallway darkened. The man in the blue cap stood in the doorway blocking the light.

  “Alexandra.”

  She jerked as if shocked by electricity.

  “We need to talk. You can run from me forever, but there is no joy or point in it.”

  “Who are you? How do you know my name?”

  Immediately, she thought of all those times her mother called her by her name, on the street, on the beach, everywhere. There was nothing surprising about him knowing her name. It wasn’t really difficult.

  “Let us sit down and talk.”

  “I am not . . . if you don’t stop following me, I will . . . I will call the police.”

  “Sasha, I am not a thief or a murderer. We need to have a serious discussion, which will influence your entire life. It will be better for you to listen to me.”

  “I am not going to. Leave me alone!”

  She turned and ran up the stairs. Toward the black faux leather door numbered 25.

  All the doors on the second floor were dark brown. The numbers on the small glass plates were completely different. Sasha froze.

  Behind her back, unhurried steps were getting closer. The dark man moved up the stairs.

  “I want it to be a dream!” Sasha screamed.

  She woke up.

  “Mom, what’s today’s date?”

  “The twenty-fourth. Why?”

  “But yesterday was the twenty-fourth!”

  “Yesterday was the twenty-third. It always happens on vacation—the dates get all mixed up, days of the week slide by . . .”

  They came down into the courtyard, into the windless and fragrant white-as-milk morning. The “peacock” trees stood still like two pink mountains covered with apricots. A happy multitude of beachgoers poured down the Street That Leads to the Sea. Sasha walked on, more or less convinced it was yet another dream. A young married couple stood by the kiosk studying the routes and prices. Their little boy—bubble-gum-filled mouth, knees painted by disinfectant—was trying on scuba-diving goggles. The dark man was nowhere in sight, but she still felt the presence of a dream.

  Sasha and her mother bought a few ears of corn. Sasha held the warm corn while her mother pulled their beach chair out of the hut and placed it on the rocks. The soft yellow ear of corn tasted salty, delicate kernels melted on their tongues. Sasha placed the trash into a plastic bag and carried it to the bin near the beach entrance.

  The dark man stood far away, in the midst of the crowd. Even in the distance, though, he looked only at Sasha through the impenetrable glasses.

  “I want it to be a dream,” she said out loud.

  She woke up in bed.

  “Mom, let’s go home today.”

  Shocked, her mother nearly dropped a plate.

  “What? Where?”

  “Home.”

  “But you were so anxious to get to the beach . . . Don’t you like it here?”

  “I just want to go home.”

  Mom touched Sasha’s forehead to check for fever.

  “Are you serious? Why?”

  Sasha shrugged.

  “Our tickets are for the second,” said Mom. “I had to reserve it a month in advance. And this place is all paid until the second. Sasha, I don’t get it, you were so happy.”

  She looked so confused, so upset and helpless, that Sasha felt ashamed.

  “Never mind,” she mumbled. “It’s just . . . nothing.”

  They came down into the courtyard. The “peacock” trees spread their scent over the sandbox and benches, over somebody’s old car. Down the Street That Leads to the Sea the beachgoers marched heavily, carrying their inflatable devices. The tranquil, scorching, unhurried summer morning of the twenty-fourth of July continued.

  The tourist booth was deserted. At a nearby café, under the sickly palms, a group of teenagers drank beer and argued over their next trip. All of them were tanned and long-legged, both boys and girls. All wore shorts. All carried half-full backpacks. Sasha wanted to leave with them. She wanted to throw on a backpack, lace up a pair of sneakers, and hitch rides along the dusty Crimean roads.

  Sasha and her mother walked by the teenagers. They bought some pies, placed their beach chair on the rocks, and sat on it sideways. The sea was a little choppy, the red buoy jumped in the waves, and water scooters’ motors sputtered in the distance. Sasha chewed her pie, not really tasting it. Perhaps everything will turn out fine, and the dark man will never appear again, and tomorrow will finally be the twenty-fifth of July?

  After lunch, Mom lay down for a nap. The room felt stuffy, the sun leaning west shot right through the closed curtains that used to be green and were now sun-bleached into something vaguely pistachio-colored. The neighbors came home; they chatted happily in the kitchen, there was a sound of poured water and tinkling dishes. Sasha held a book in her lap, stared at the gray symbols, and understood nothing.

  The metal alarm clock on the bedside table ticked deafeningly, counting seconds.

  “So, shall we talk, Sasha?”

  Evening. Mom leaned on the balustrade, chatting with a man of about forty, fair-haired and pale, clearly a new arrival. Mom smiled, and her cheeks dimpled. It was a special smile. Sasha was used to a different one from her mother.

  Sasha was waiting on the bench under the acacia tree. A second ago the dark man sat down between her and a street artist at the other end of the bench. Even the southern twilight did not force him to lose his dark glasses. Sasha sensed his stare from beneath the black lenses. Out of complete darkness.

  She could probably call for her mother. She could simply cry for help. She could tell herself it was just a dream. And it would be a dream. A never-ending dream. She needed the dream to end.

  “What . . . What do you want from me?”

  “I want to give you a task to perform. It’s not hard. I never ask for the impossible.”

  “How . . . What does it have to . . . ?”

  “Here is the task. Every day, at four in the morning, you must go to the beach. You will undress, go into the water, swim one hundred meters, and touch the buoy. At four in the morning the beach is empty, there won’t be anyone to hide from.”

  Sasha felt as if someone had hit her on the head. Was he crazy? Were they both crazy?

  “What if I won’t do it? Why would I . . . ?”

  The black lenses hung in front of her like two black holes leading nowhere.

/>   “You will, Sasha. You will. Because the world around you is very fragile. Every day people fall down, break their bones, die under the wheels of a car, drown, get hepatitis or tuberculosis. I really don’t want to tell you all this. But it is in your best interest to simply do everything I ask of you. It’s not complicated.”

  Near the balustrade, Mom was laughing. She turned, waved, and said something to her companion—they may have been talking about her, about Sasha.

  “Are you a pervert?” asked Sasha hopefully. A pervert she could understand.

  The black glasses tilted.

  “No. Let’s just settle this right away before we incapacitate ourselves here: you’re healthy, and I’m not a pervert. You have a choice: dangle forever between a scary dream and a real nightmare. Or you can pull yourself together, calmly perform the task that is asked of you, and continue living normally. You can say ‘This is a dream,’ and wake up again. And then we’ll meet once more, with certain variations. But why would you want to?”

  People strolled along the boardwalk. Mom exclaimed: “Look! Dolphins!” and pointed toward the sea, her companion broke into a series of excited interjections, passersby stopped and looked for something in the blue cloth of the shore, and Sasha, too, saw the distant black bodies that looked like upside-down parentheses, flying over the sea and disappearing again.

  “Do we have a deal, Sasha?”

  Mom chatted, watching the dolphins, and her companion listened attentively, nodding. Mom’s teeth sparkled, her eyes shone, and Sasha suddenly saw how young she still was. And how—at that moment in time—happy.

  “Tomorrow is your first official takeoff.” The dark man smiled. “But remember: every day, at four in the morning. Make sure you set the alarm. It’s crucial for you not to oversleep and not to be late. Try hard. Got it?”

  Sasha tossed and turned on her cot, wide awake. The curtains were pushed aside, and the songs of nightingales and sounds of a distant disco music poured into the open window. At two in the morning, the music stopped.

  A noisy gang walked by. The voices died down in the distance. Three motorbikes, one after another, roared by. A car alarm went off. Mom stirred, turned over, and fell back asleep.

  At three in the morning, Sasha dozed off. At three thirty, she jumped up as if someone had shoved her. She pulled the alarm clock from under her pillow. In twenty minutes, the short black hand would join the long yellow alarm hand.

  Sasha pressed down the button and rotated the yellow hand. The alarm clock squeaked and went limp.

  Sasha got up. She pulled on her swimsuit and a sundress, picked up her keys, and gingerly, trying not to wake up Mom, left the room. She stopped in the empty kitchen, tiptoed out to the balcony, and grabbed a still wet towel from the rope. With her keys in one hand and the towel in the other, she crawled out onto the staircase.

  A single lightbulb was on.

  Her neighbors, the blissful young couple, were coming up the stairs, shushing each other. Four bewildered eyes stared up at Sasha.

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing.” Sasha was shaking, and her teeth chattered. “I just wanted to go for a swim. See the sunrise.”

  “Wow, that’s cool!” The guy was clearly impressed.

  Sasha let them pass and hurried out of the building. It had to be a quarter to four. She was going to be late.

  Streetlights still burned on the empty street. Sasha ran—running down turned out to be easier than she thought—and she warmed up and stopped shivering. The dark sky was getting lighter. Sasha sprinted by the fence of the official town beach and reached her favorite secluded spot. The sharp white of plastic cups stood out in piles of trash. Five or six windows were lit in the hotel closest to the beach. A large clock in the front of the building showed three minutes to four.

  Sasha took off her dress. Stumbling on the gravel, she walked into the high tide. Standing neck-deep in the water, she unhooked her top and crumpled it into a ball. She pulled off the bikini bottom. Holding her swimsuit in her balled fist, she swam out to the buoy.

  In the mottled light of the sunrise, the buoy seemed gray, not red. Sasha slapped its iron side. The buoy responded with a dull echo. Sasha looked back at the shore—no one. It was utterly deserted.

  She started back. The cold water caused her to shiver again. Barely managing to reach the rocks with her feet, she rose, balancing in the waves, and realized that the ties of her wet swimsuit were hopelessly tangled.

  With a short sob, she threw the crumpled ball of faded fabric onto the shore, got on all fours, and half crawled, half ran toward her towel. She wrapped herself in it and looked around again.

  No one. Not a single soul. The sea played with her discarded swimsuit, and the sky was becoming lighter with every minute. Nightingales crooned in the park.

  Sasha picked up her bikini, sundress, and sandals. She staggered over to the blue changing cabin. She dried herself and suddenly felt well. She straightened her shoulders. Her skin glowed, becoming firm and radiant from the inside, like the skin of a ripe apple. Taking her time, Sasha got dressed, put on her sandals, and found the keys in her pocket. She squeezed water out of her swimsuit, walked out of the changing cabin . . . and almost immediately doubled over, retching.

  She fell on her knees and vomited on the gravel. It was mostly seawater, but along with it, strange yellow disks splashed out of her. Sasha coughed and tried to calm her breathing. The retching disappeared as quickly as it came.

  Three tarnished gold coins lay on the gravel.

  At home, she locked herself in the bathroom and studied the coins. Three identical disks, an unfamiliar symbol consisting of rounded interconnecting lines on one side—a face, or a crown. Or, perhaps, a flower: the longer Sasha stared at it, the more three-dimensional the symbol appeared, as if it were slowly rising above the surface of the coin.

  She rubbed her eyes. On the reverse side, a smooth oval resembled a zero or the letter O. Of course, there was no stamp of gold content, and Sasha was not exactly an expert on precious metals, but somehow she had no doubt that the coins were made of pure gold.

  The first beachgoers appeared on the Street That Leads to the Sea. It was about six in the morning. Hearing them, Sasha stretched on her cot, covered her head with a blanket, and squeezed the coins in her fist, thinking hard.

  Her throat felt sore, but the nausea had disappeared completely. Of course, one could assume that Sasha’s stomach couldn’t handle yesterday’s baklava, and that the coins were simply lying in the exact place on the gravel where she became sick. And that the man in the dark sunglasses was simply a pervert who used a very convoluted way of spying on naked girls on the beach. In the dark. In the wee hours of the morning.

  She squeezed her irritated eyes shut.

  No. One could not assume that.

  Sasha felt removed, thrown out of the normal world into the unreal. If one believed what one read in books, it did happen to people, and happened quite frequently.

  Or was it really a dream?

  Surprisingly, she fell asleep. And when she woke up, it was a perfectly normal morning of July 25. Mom came in from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a towel, and gave Sasha a worried look.

  “Did you go somewhere?”

  “I went for a swim.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Why?” Sasha croaked. “It was really cool. The sun was rising. There was no one in sight.”

  “It’s dangerous,” Mom said. “There are no lifeguards or anything. What if something had happened to you? And why didn’t you say something to me?”

  Sasha shrugged.

  “We should go to the beach.” Mom looked at the clock. “It’s almost nine. Let’s hurry up.”

  Sasha sucked in her breath.

  “Mom . . . Do you mind? Can I just lie down for a while? I didn’t sleep well.”

  “Are you sick?” Mom touched Sasha’s forehead in a familiar gesture of concern. “No, you don’t feel hot. You are asking for it with your ni
ght swimming. It’ll spoil the entire vacation.”

  Sasha did not reply. She squeezed the coins so hard the edges bit into her palm.

  “I boiled some eggs.” Mom seemed worried. “Mayonnaise is in the fridge. Those lovebirds, the neighbors, ate half of our mayonnaise already, but oh well. What can you do?”

  She kept wiping her perfectly dry hands.

  “I made plans to meet up with Valentin at the beach; it would be rude not to show up, you know . . . I promised we’d be there today.”

  Sasha thought of yesterday. Valentin was the name of Mom’s new acquaintance, the light-skinned, fair-haired man who seemed so interested in the dolphins. Sasha remembered how Mom had introduced her by her full name: “This is Alexandra.” Mom’s voice had a special note of importance, but Sasha did not pay any attention to it yesterday. This was before the dark man rose and left, leaving behind a task for Sasha to perform—and fear. Sasha had felt chilly in the middle of a warm stuffy evening. The flower beds smelled sweet; Valentin’s cologne was pleasantly woodsy and fresh. Sasha remembered the scent, but could not think of his face.

  “Sure, go ahead.” Sasha pulled the blanket up to her face. “I’ll just stay in bed for a little, and then I’ll join you guys.”

  “We’ll be in the same place,” Mom said quickly. “The eggs are on the table. I’m off.”

  She grabbed her beach bag and hurried to the door. At the threshold, she stopped and looked back.

  “Don’t forget your swimsuit when you leave. It’s on the balcony, drying off.”

  She left.

  The second time Sasha woke up, the metal clock showed half past eleven. At that time of the day, the sun was scorching, and the sea was boiling with the mass of swimming bodies, like matzo ball soup. It was too late to go to the beach, or maybe it was too early. It depended on one’s point of view. Maybe around four o’clock.

  Sasha was shocked by her own mundane thought process. She stared at the coins in her hand. She’d never loosened her fist in her sleep—the moist skin kept the outline of the round coins. Sasha gingerly moved them from her right hand to her left.