Vita Nostra

by Sergey

  What should she do with them? Throw them away?

  The doorbell made her jump. One coin slid off her palm and rolled underneath the cot. Nervous, Sasha found it on the dusty rug, threw on Mom’s cotton housecoat, and stepped into the dark hallway.

  “Who is it?”

  Theoretically, it could be her mother, forgetting her keys. Or a postman. Or . . .

  “It’s me. Open the door.”

  Sasha staggered back.

  The apartment was empty—the neighbors were at the beach. The door was locked. A flimsy door, made of pressed wood shavings, covered with cheap faux leather.

  The coins stuck to her sweaty palm. Holding them in one hand, Sasha used the other hand to open the door—a difficult task that took a while.

  “Good day to you,” the man in dark sunglasses stepped over the threshold. “I’ll just be a minute. Let’s go to the kitchen.”

  He led the way down the corridor, as if he’d been to this apartment many times before, as if he were its actual owner. Of course, the building was standard enough.

  Sasha followed him like a dog on a leash.

  “Sit.” The man pushed a chair toward the middle of the kitchen. Sasha fell onto the chair—her legs gave out from under her. The dark man sat down in front of her. “Coins?”

  Sasha opened her fist. Three gold disks lay on her red palm, moist, covered with drops of sweat.

  “Very good. Keep them. Please retain all of them, all that you will get. Don’t bother with the swimsuit—you must enter the water naked, it’s not dangerous, no one is watching you. Continue swimming, don’t be late, and don’t miss any days. Tomorrow. The day after tomorrow. And the day after that.”

  “I’m leaving on August second,” Sasha said, and was surprised by how thin and pitiful her voice sounded. “I . . . we have train tickets. I don’t live here, I . . .”

  She was convinced that the dark guest would command her to move to this small town forever and ever, and enter the sea at four in the morning in January, and in February, and until death do us part.

  “Didn’t I say that I won’t be asking for the impossible?” He stretched his lips slowly, and Sasha realized that he was smiling. “On August second you will go for a swim in the morning as usual, and you can leave after breakfast.”

  “I can?”

  “You can.” The man got up. “Remember: Don’t oversleep.”

  He walked over to the door.

  “Why do you need this?” Sasha whispered.

  The only answer was the closing door.

  “Where are you going?” Mom sat up in bed.

  “For a swim.”

  “Have you lost your mind? Get back to bed!”

  Sasha took a deep breath.

  “Mom, I really need to do this. I’m . . . building character.”

  “You’re what?”

  “You know, building character! I’m building up stamina. In the mornings . . . Sorry, I’m late.”

  Gasping for air, she stepped onto the beach. Nervously, she looked behind her—not a soul; even all the windows in the nearby hotels were dark. She took off her sundress, pulled off her underwear, threw herself in the water, and swam, broad front crawl strokes, as if trying to swim out of her own skin.

  She was having difficulty breathing. Sasha switched to an easy “beach” breaststroke, scooping up water with her feet, holding her chin high above the water.

  Swimming made her happy. She’d had no previous experience of skinny-dipping and had no idea how good it felt. Cold water prickled her skin, warmed up her body, and seemed to be getting warmer with every stroke. With both hands, Sasha grabbed the buoy and kept still, swaying gently, invisible from the shore.

  Perhaps she didn’t have to go back at all. She could just keep swimming, across the entire sea, toward Turkey . . .

  Sasha shook her head at that. She flipped onto her back and, lazily moving her arms, swam toward the shore. Sparse morning stars dissolved slowly, like sugar crystals in cold water.

  In the changing cabin, Sasha rubbed herself dry with a towel and got dressed. She stepped outside and listened to herself—nothing was happening. She walked toward the beach entrance; the spasms started when she reached the little shack where the lounge chairs were kept under a barn lock. Coughing, sputtering, and holding her throat, Sasha vomited four gold coins.

  On the third morning of swimming exercises, she threw up back in the apartment, in the bathroom. The coins clanked into the iron tub. Sasha gathered them up, her hands shaking—the coins were exactly the same, all with the round three-dimensional symbol. Worth zero point zero kopecks. She smirked at her reflection in the mirror, pocketed the coins, washed up, and left the bathroom.

  Mom was putting her hair up in curlers. There was absolutely no point to it, since the curls would dissipate in the water, but nowadays Mom spent a lot of time doing her hair, putting on makeup, and ironing her outfits.

  “Would you mind if Valentin and I go to a café tomorrow night? Just the two of us?” As Mom asked the question, she carefully avoided Sasha’s eyes. “You can go to the movies,” she continued. “What’s playing right now, in that theater on the wharf?”

  “I don’t know.” Sasha fingered the coins in her pocket. “Go ahead. I’ll stay home and read.”

  “But what to do about the keys?” Sasha’s compliance clearly took a load off Mom’s shoulders. “In case I’m late . . . I don’t want to wake you up. But if I take the keys—what if you want to go for a walk?”

  “Take the keys. I’ll read,” Sasha repeated.

  “But what about fresh air?”

  “I’ll sit outside on the balcony. With a table lamp.”

  “But tomorrow, maybe tomorrow you will want to go to a club?”

  “No.”

  The next day Valentin took them out to lunch. He seemed like a nice person, with a sense of humor, with a certain charm; Sasha watched her mom’s happiness and counted the days in her head, the twenty-seventh, twenty-eighth. Five days remained. Actually, only four, on the fifth day they were leaving. And it would be all over. She would forget everything. Only five more times . . .

  She swam the next morning, and the morning after.

  And then she overslept.

  The sun woke her up. It beat into the window that had been left ajar, and Mom’s bed was empty; the alarm clock had twisted from underneath her pillow and lay on the rug.

  Refusing to believe, Sasha picked it up. The yellow hand stood on half past three. The coil was disengaged. Why didn’t it ring?

  “Mom! Did you touch my alarm clock?”

  Mom, content, benevolent, and fresh after her shower, brought in coffee on a tray.

  “I did not. It fell down; I didn’t pick it up. I don’t want the landlady to think I broke it. Don’t worry about it, you got practically no sleep in the last few days, and you need rest—you’re on vacation, after all. What is it with you?”

  Sasha slumped at the edge of the cot, laden with the firm conviction that something terrible had just happened. Something unidentifiable, inexplicable, some unknown threat—and thus, her terror grew in a geometric progression.

  The dark man stood next to the tourist booth, studying a photo of the Swallow’s Nest. Sasha slowed her step. Mom turned to her.

  “Go ahead,” Sasha said. “I’ll catch up.”

  Under different circumstances, Mom would argue and start asking questions. But by now, Valentin must have already reserved their lounge chairs; Mom nodded, told Sasha not to dawdle, and walked down to the shore.

  The asphalt had softened under the morning sun. The tires of passing cars and trucks pressed over a puddle of spilled motor oil and left fancy tracks on the road.

  “My alarm did not go off,” Sasha said, not knowing what she was apologizing for, or to whom. “It fell . . .”

  His eyes could not be seen through the dark glasses. The lenses reflected nothing, as if they were made of velvet. The dark man was silent.

  “My alarm did not go o
ff!”

  Sasha burst into tears right there, on the street, from fear, from the unknown, from the emotional strain of the past few days. The passersby turned their heads, staring at the weeping girl. Sasha felt as if she’d dived deep into the sea and was watching a school of pale fish through a thick layer of water.

  “It’s very bad, but not terrible,” the man in the dark glasses said finally. “As a matter of fact, it’s even good for you—it’ll teach you some discipline. The second such blunder will cost you a lot more, and don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  He turned and departed, leaving Sasha sobbing and vigorously shaking her head to all the questions from the sympathetic passersby. Hiding in a park alley—deserted at this hour—and pulling a handkerchief out of her bag, she was finally able to clean up her tears and snot. Still, she did not manage to calm herself down.

  Her own dark sunglasses, the ones she’d had for over a year, with a thin frame, hid the redness of her eyes and her swollen lids. Pushing her hat low on her forehead, Sasha walked down the street, avoiding looking at people, keeping her eyes from the pavement. In front of her, a girl of about four stomped her red sandals on the ground, holding her mother’s hand.

  An ambulance stood in front of the beach entrance. Sasha stopped, and her shoes stuck to the softened asphalt.

  Almost immediately, she saw her mother. Mom wobbled on the gravel, a towel thrown over her shoulders, holding on to a stretcher. The very pale man lying on the stretcher vaguely resembled a cheerful, sanguine Valentin.

  Sasha sat down on the balustrade.

  The stretcher was loaded into the ambulance. The medic said something to Mom; she nodded several times and asked something in return. The medic shook his head and climbed into the ambulance. The ambulance beeped at the crowd, pulled back, reversed in a small parking lot in front of the hotel, and drove up the Street That Leads to the Sea.

  His words echoed in her head.

  “Very bad, but not terrible.”

  “What happened to him, Mom?”

  Mom turned around. Panic and grief swam in her eyes.

  “Hospital Number Six,” she chanted, like an incantation. “I’m just . . . I need to change, and then I’ll go. It’s a heart attack, Sasha. A heart attack. Oh god, oh god . . .”

  Like a blind person, she moved through the throng of intrigued beachgoers. Sasha watched for a second, and then followed.

  Mom spent the night at the local hospital. Almost all of their cash went to the doctors and nurses, and Mom had to go to the post office and call one of her coworkers, who promised to wire them some more money. Sasha spent a sleepless night alone in their room. The alarm clock was no longer reliable.

  At three in the morning she left the house. Somewhere the nightclubs were still going strong, and the cafés were still lit. Sasha walked down to the dark sea and sat down on the gravel at the water’s edge.

  Far away, a ship appeared on the horizon. Cicadas shrieked in the gardens behind Sasha’s back. The sea licked the beach, stole tiny rocks and brought them back, polished them, rubbing together their surfaces. The sea had time. And patience enough for two.

  At quarter to four, Sasha pulled off her clothes and stepped into the water, shivering. She swam, constantly looking back as if expecting a monster in dark glasses to rear its ugly head out of the waves.

  She slapped the buoy and looked up at the sky: the sun was rising. She glanced into the depth of the sea and saw the barely distinguishable metal anchor chain.

  She returned to the shore and, barely managing to throw a towel over her shoulders, doubled over retching. Five coins flew out one after another, leaving a sharp pain in her throat and diminishing spasms in her stomach. The coins rolled on the gravel, hiding between the rocks.

  Mom came back in the afternoon, exhausted and very focused. Valentin felt better—it was not a heart attack, the ambulance had come quickly, and the patient was in no danger.

  “Everything will be fine,” Mom repeated with an air of detachment. “I am so sleepy, Sasha, I can’t tell you how sleepy I am. If you want, go to the beach by yourself, I’m going to sleep.”

  “How is he, anyway?” Sasha asked. “Should we send a telegram? To his relatives or whatever?”

  “The relatives are here already,” Mom informed her with the same air of detachment. “His wife flew in from Moscow. Everything will be just fine. Just go now, please?”

  His wife . . .

  Sasha took her swimsuit off the balcony and left the apartment. She did not feel like going to the beach, so she strolled aimlessly around the park, meager and dusty, but still offering a minimum of shade.

  “Very bad, but not terrible.”

  Fear, stress, ruined vacation . . .

  On the other hand, who is Valentin, anyway? Only a week ago he was simply Mom’s chance acquaintance. Of course, Mom seemed so happy, but their relationship was doomed from the beginning. It was just a summer fling, a beach affair . . .

  Sasha sat down on a bench. Black acacia pods littered the narrow alley. Bitterness and resentment on behalf of her mother ate at Sasha like acid. A summer fling, such a cliché. What was he thinking? And why would he bother with a nice respectable woman, when he could have had any of those girls—a navel ring, jeans cut off right up to the butt cheeks.

  “It would be better if he were dead,” Sasha thought glumly.

  “Very bad, but not terrible.”

  And Sasha did believe that something awful would happen to her mother; her premonition was tangible. From the first moment she saw the man in the dark glasses, fear had gripped her and held her in its fist, just like she herself held her gold coins. It would let go for a minute—only to squeeze again. “This will teach you some discipline.” That’s for sure. From now on she would get up without any alarm clocks, and always at half past three. Or maybe she just wouldn’t sleep at all. Because at the moment when she saw the ambulance in front of the main beach entrance, she’d had a feeling that all in the world was lost forever, all of it . . .

  She took a deep breath. Tomorrow morning she would swim out to the buoy, and the day after tomorrow, right before their departure, she would do the same. And then she would return home and forget everything. School, routine, senior year of high school, college entrance exams . . .

  She sat on the bench, staring at the handful of coins in her hands. Twenty-nine disks, with the same round symbol, with a zero on the reverse side. Heavy and small, their diameter was the same as the old Soviet kopecks.

  On the train, Sasha spilled the coins on the floor.

  She was lying on the top berth staring out the window. The pocket of her denim shorts must have been unbuttoned; the coins spilled out and rolled around the entire carriage, clanking joyfully on the floor. Sasha flew off her berth in a split second.

  “Wow!” said a little girl from the compartment across from Sasha’s. “Look, money!”

  Kneeling, Sasha gathered the gold disks, picking them up from underneath somebody’s suitcases, and nearly collided with the train attendant, who was carrying a tray of tea.

  “Careful there!”

  The little girl picked up one of the disks and examined it with interest.

  “Mommy, is it gold?”

  “No,” answered her mother, still staring at her book. “It’s some kind of an alloy. Give it back.”

  Sasha was already standing there with her hand outstretched. The little girl returned the coin reluctantly. Facing the window, Sasha counted the coins; she was supposed to have thirty-seven, but had only thirty-six.

  “Excuse me, have you seen any of these coins?”

  People in the neighboring compartments shook their heads. Sasha ran up and down the carriage, and again nearly collided with the attendant; a man in a red warm-up suit sat at the very end of the carriage, right near the exit, studying the round symbol on the missing disk. She knew that staring at the symbol long enough made it seem three-dimensional—she wondered if that’s what he saw.

  “It�
�s mine.” Sasha stretched out her palm. “I dropped it.”

  The man lifted his head and gave Sasha an estimating glance. He looked back at the coin.

  “What is it?”

  “A souvenir. Please give it back.”

  “Interesting.” The man was in no hurry. “Where did you get it?”

  “It was a gift.”

  The man smirked.

  “Listen, I want to buy it from you. Is ten dollars enough?”

  “No, it’s not for sale.”

  “Twenty dollars?”

  Sasha was nervous. A woman sitting right next to them was listening to the conversation.

  “It’s my coin.” Sasha made her voice sound determined and hard. “Give it back to me, please.”

  “I had a friend.” The man glanced from Sasha to the coin and back. “He was a tomb raider. He did some illegal stuff. Dug up some things in the Crimea. And then someone stabbed him. You see, he probably dug up something he wasn’t supposed to.”

  “I didn’t dig anything up.” Sasha stared at his hand. “It was a gift. It’s mine.”

  They stared at each other. The man wanted to say something, in the same measured and patronizing manner, but he bit his tongue. At this point, Sasha was ready to fight—sob, scream, shriek, scratch his face—for her coin; this readiness of hers must have been obvious in her stare.

  “As you wish.”

  The gold disk fell into her hand. Sasha clamped her fingers shut and, holding her breath, walked back to her mother.

  Mom sat in the same spot, staring out the window, having noticed nothing.

  Autumn came in October, suddenly and irrevocably. Red maple leaves stuck to the wet asphalt like flat starfish. Sasha existed between school and preparatory courses at the university: there were tons of homework, essays, reports, tests. She had no time for anything else—even Sundays were filled with work—but Sasha did not mind. She discovered that her brain, overburdened by studies, flatly refused to believe in mysterious strangers and their tasks, in gold coins produced by one’s stomach. And even the sea, the kind summer sea with a swaying red buoy, seemed surreal, and everything that happened there, by the seaside, seemed just as surreal.