Vita Nostra

by Sergey

  “Why are you playing hard to get?”

  The whisper eventually grew into a low male voice.

  “Why are you acting like a virgin? On Friday . . . in Vlad’s room . . . that wasn’t you, was it, huh?”

  “Leave me alone.” Sasha recognized Lisa Pavlenko’s voice.

  “C’mon, kitten . . .”

  “Go to hell, you moron!”

  Sasha stumbled on an empty bottle. The bottle clinked on the pavement; the voices ceased.

  “Who’s there?” the man asked.

  Sasha could not answer. She turned around and, staggering on the rocks, exited the alley.

  The key for room 21 hung on the board downstairs. Sasha grabbed it, jogged up to the second floor, made a short visit to the bathroom, and quickly brushed her teeth before climbing into bed.

  Oksana was the first to return. She rustled her plastic bags (where did she get all that crackling plastic?), then settled in with great big sighs, turned a few pages of her textbook, clicked off the lamp, and went to sleep. Sasha lay in the dark, listening to anonymous laughing, shrieking, singing in the kitchen, the banging of dishes; Oksana slept undisturbed, but Sasha could not close her eyes.

  “Sunlight speaks to you . . .”

  Why did Sasha feel so happy when a meaningful sentence swam, all of its own accord, out of a sequence of letters? These words were familiar and grammatically correct, but an actual meaning was still missing—sunlight does not speak. Sunlight is a stream of photons characterized by a wave-particle duality . . .

  One cannot imagine it anyway. It’s the same thing as seeing a closed door from both sides simultaneously. By being both on the inside and the outside.

  It’s so incredibly stuffy in this room . . .

  She tossed and turned, and then finally got up, opened the window, and gulped some fresh air. A streetlight burned outside, and its bright artificial rays poured over the windowsill with its many layers of white paint. A makeshift ashtray—a mayonnaise jar—stood in the corner of the window, and somebody’s philosophy textbook lay forgotten.

  Almost without thinking, Sasha opened the book in the middle. The first page she came across stated:

  “According to Nominalism, universals are names of names, but not of absolute reality or notion . . .”

  This phrase, too, has no meaning, Sasha thought in disappointment. And really, if one repeats the same word over and over again—“meaning, meaning, meaning”—it disintegrates into sounds, and becomes just as informative as the tinkling of water in a fountain, and . . .

  She held her head. Something is happening to me, she admitted. Perhaps I am losing my mind. After all, second and third years look pretty much insane. All their idiosyncrasies. The occasional physical deformities. The way they come to a standstill, staring at some invisible point in space, or the way they overshoot for the door when they enter the kitchen, or how they “get stuck” in the middle of a simple movement, like rusty old machines . . .

  Sometimes, of course, they seem fairly intelligent; they demonstrate a sharp sense of humor, occasionally they even sing fairly well . . .

  “Nominalism dates back to antiquity. Its first representatives in early antiquity are Antisthenes of Athens and Diogenes of Sinope, both of whom opposed Plato’s theory of ‘the world of ideas . . .’”

  Heavy steps sounded in the hall; before Sasha had a chance to jump into her bed, the door opened.

  The light was on in the corridor, and their room was dark, so Sasha saw only a black cutout silhouette of a disheveled, ruffled girl. And Lisa—Sasha knew—saw a ghost in a flannel nightgown, awkwardly frozen in the middle of the room on the way to her bed.

  “You are not asleep,” Lisa stated.

  Sasha could not speak, but neither did she want to. She got into bed and put a wall of blankets between herself and Lisa. She heard the door shut. Oksana sniffled in her sleep, but did not wake up.

  The key turned in the lock. Taking tentative steps, Lisa walked over to the window. Sasha heard the click of a lighter.

  “You know,” said Lisa thoughtfully, “I don’t really care what you think of me. What sort of thoughts swim in that tiny head of yours. I was in a dance troupe. Then he came . . . showed me a coin. Said: ‘Remember this sign, not the zero, the other one.’” A drag from the cigarette. “‘When a stranger approaches you and shows you a coin like that, you must go with him without any questions, and do everything he asks—also without any questions.’ He said, ‘I never ask for the impossible.’ And the next day my boyfriend, Lyosha, was arrested for an alleged homicide. He didn’t know the victim, he’d never even seen him, but they did a ballistics evidence test, and they had witnesses . . . Lyosha bought that gun illegally. He always said, a girl like me had to be protected. And then this random guy comes to me, forty years old, and pokes that coin at me. And I went with him, like a sheep. Next morning I threw up money. And two days after that, Lyosha was released. I don’t know if his parents bribed someone, or maybe something else happened, but the witnesses and the gun—they all disappeared. Must have been a nice bribe. I know he never used that gun for shooting, maybe only shot a few bottles in the woods for practice. But those guys . . . they came to me every month. They stuck their coins under my nose. I spread my legs for all of them, and every morning I threw up money, and Lyosha was there, and he could feel something . . .” Another puff. “I quit dancing; there was no way I could still dance. Lyosha left me. And he . . . he says: I never ask for the impossible.”

  For a long time now Sasha’s nose had been above the blanket. The room was filled with the smells of hangover breath and cigarettes. Oksana slept (or pretended to sleep), a sharp ray of light still lay on the windowsill, highlighting half of the pale face of the girl sitting on its edge.

  The red end of a cigarette darted in the dark. It made loops in the air.

  “Are you still mute? Whatever . . . is it written on my forehead? Why do they stick to me, and leave you alone?”

  Sasha was silent. She couldn’t think of anything to say even if she could.

  “I suppose I loved him,” Lisa’s voice was unexpectedly sober, harsh. “I suppose I did, if I did it for his sake. Well, it does not matter anymore. I have a little brother. I have a grandma, she’s old. There is a hook I can be caught with. Everyone has a hook . . . But why did he say: I don’t ask for the impossible? I see this sign in my sleep now.” The cigarette twitched, making circles in the air. “I began avoiding men, all of them. Lyosha went away, and did not leave me his number. And he says: ‘I don’t ask for the impossible!’ Ah, to hell with all of this!”

  And suddenly, jerking the window open, Lisa tumbled over the windowsill and disappeared.

  A wet and sticky pile of leaves lay along the front garden, reaching about five feet at its peak. Shaking the leaves off her jeans, Lisa emerged out of the rustling pile and inspected her palms. She massaged her lower back.

  Sasha was silent. She had run outside in her nightgown, barely getting a chance to stick her feet into sneakers.

  Half the windows were lit, half were dark. Two stereo systems were blaring at the same time. Someone was dancing on a table, and shadows streaked behind closed curtains. Girls flying out of windows or running around the dark streets in their nightgowns did not shock or interest anyone.

  Lisa swore through her teeth, her words pitiful and dirty. Nobody was there to laugh, be surprised or help out, and only Sasha stood there, wondering whether she should offer her classmate a hand or whether it would be considered an insult. At that moment, a sharp gust of wind flew through the unmoving linden trees, leaves fell like raindrops, and the stars vanished for a second and then lit up again.

  Sasha could have sworn that a gigantic dark shadow flew over the dorm roof. More so, the shadow descended upon the antenna and stayed there, covering Cassiopeia. Sasha’s mouth fell open . . .

  The sensation was very quick, almost instantaneous. Stars blinked and lit up once again. Lisa, staring ahead, was already limping to
ward the entrance to the dorm, and Sasha, looking back cautiously, ran after her.

  Lisa passed their room. She proceeded farther down the hall, where a door was opened, and where a battery of empty beer bottles stood by the entrance. Autumn leaves kept falling off Lisa’s jeans; Sasha caught her war cry—“Party on, boys and girls!”—and, waiting for nothing else, ducked back into her own room, into the darkness.

  Wind danced around the room; shaking and chattering her teeth, Sasha shut the rattling window. She shivered, longing for warmth, but the hot water was turned off, and making tea in the kitchen filled with all those people having so much fun simply was not an option.

  Oksana stayed immobile, blanket thrown over her head. You are awake, Sasha wanted to tell her. You are simply hiding, waiting for the finale. Good for you—tomorrow you can say with an honest look on your face that you had no idea what was happening, you can admit to sleeping soundly the entire time . . .

  Words bubbled up to her throat and, suddenly, without warning, flooded out. Bent over, Sasha fell onto the dirty linoleum and, with a fit of coughing, vomited the remains of her supper . . .

  Along with a handful of dull gold coins.

  That night the Indian summer ended as if finished off with a single hammer blow, and cold windy autumn took its place. Windows were now shut tightly, but the ceiling lamp swung in the cold, drafty air, and wind howled under the door as if traveling through a chimney.

  The next day, Oksana begged the superintendent for two reams of paper for winterizing the windows and a roll of foam that resembled an octopus with its weak yellowish tentacles. While Sasha untangled the octopus and pushed the foam into cracks and crevices in the window frames, clever Oksana managed to score some flour and prepared a thick paste that looked like gray snot with a starchy smell. They did not have any brushes, but Sasha thought of using a piece of the foam to smear the flour paste onto paper ribbons. The paper lost its cheerful white color and starchy density, becoming limp, sticky, and pliable. The paper becomes just like us, thought Sasha, taping up the windows.

  “Don’t tape over the side pane,” Oksana ordered. “We need it to air out the room.”

  Sasha touched the cold radiator. The heating season was nowhere in sight, and it reminded her of just how cold it could be, like when she stood here, last night, shivering. She had spent a long time collecting the coins, which had rolled all over the room. She’d wiped up the floor, then washed it. She’d then wrapped the coins in the first plastic bag she found and buried them in the suitcase under her bed before finally falling asleep. When they’d woken up to go to class, Lisa was in her bed, and she had stayed there for the first two blocks, recuperating, getting up only to attend Specialty.

  It was a very difficult day: two blocks of Specialty, third and fourth. The class was reading sections of Textual Module 1. Somehow Portnov always knew whether a student was reading or studying a bug crawling over the page. The silence in the auditorium was occasionally broken by a sharp bark:

  “Korotkov, work. Kovtun, pay attention!”

  Sasha worked hard, waiting for the words—the other ones, the meaningful ones—to materialize out of the white noise, as they did in the library. But nothing happened. She was exhausted, developed a headache, and was now convinced that her experience in the reading room was just a figment of her imagination.

  “Samokhina, how’s the thumb twiddling going?”

  She did not even notice how her attention had wandered, how she concentrated on a corner of the page. She thought she noticed a faint mark of a nail. Who’d read this book before her? One-eyed Victor? Or Zakhar, Kostya’s roommate? Who entered any door only on the third try? Who’d put the note into the storage unit at the train station? What good could the note do?

  “Samokhina.” Portnov was standing next to her. “I am not pleased with your reading. You are goofing off—I did not expect it from you. Have you thought of a word worth saying out loud yet?”

  Sasha was silent.

  “Samokhina, you will remain silent until you realize why you need a secondary signaling system. Simians manage with having only the primary system, don’t they?”

  Sasha was silent.

  “For tomorrow’s one-on-one session”—Portnov took a few steps in front of the class—“repeat all the underlined paragraphs. Memorize them. Tag, you are it.” He smirked. “Prefect, schedule Samokhina for the last time slot.”

  Sasha kept asking herself over and over again: What if Kozhennikov had given the same assignment to her as he had given to Lisa? Considering that for Sasha even skinny-dipping in the wee hours of the morning—when no one was watching—was a colossal ordeal . . .

  “I don’t ask for the impossible.”

  Lisa’s hatred, then, toward Kostya was not surprising. Even though it had nothing to do with Kostya. The very name of Kozhennikov made Sasha’s own skin crawl.

  Sasha’s classmates took turns entering auditorium 38. Upon exiting, their faces were different: some angry, some anxious, some girls were clearly crying. That was Portnov for you, yes. He knew how to make your blood boil.

  Sasha was the last one to enter. The fourth block had ended, the fifth just begun. In the third-floor gym a table tennis class was about to start.

  “You are losing steam,” Portnov stated drily. “You are not working as hard as before. Look at me.”

  The ring he wore only for the one-on-one sessions approached Sasha’s face. She blinked at the sharp flash of blue light.

  “Keep looking, don’t turn your face . . . I see. Sit down.”

  Only a few chairs fit in the small auditorium. Sasha lowered herself gingerly onto the wooden chair nearest her, which had a dangerously twisted leg.

  “Do you feel yourself changing on the inside?” Portnov asked softly.

  Sasha nodded.

  “Good. That is what should be happening. Any change—vision, hearing, memory—should not alarm you. I’m going to give you one more book, a set of exercises. You’ll have to work harder”—at that, she started, but he quickly continued—“don’t worry, your back will not break. You will do five exercises for me each week. They must be done mentally, only mentally, one after another, without any mistakes. I will be checking, Samokhina, checking every one of them very carefully. And if you twiddle your thumbs like you did yesterday—well, you are taking the risk of remaining an invalid for the rest of your life. Your life, not mine. Is that clear?”

  Someone knocked on the door. Sasha still had five minutes left, and she was surprised at the interruption.

  It was Kostya. He was anxious to the point of losing all his instincts for self-preservation.

  “Oleg Borisovich . . . There . . . Phone at the front desk . . . Samokhina got a phone call. It’s a long-distance call, her mother is calling . . .”

  Sasha froze. She looked at Portnov. He shifted his glasses farther down his nose and glanced at Kostya, who hunched over under his stare.

  “It’s her mother. I thought . . . Something may have happened . . .”

  “You are dismissed,” Portnov’s voice was full of ice. “Samokhina, take the book.”

  Out of his desk drawer he pulled a fat volume, bright red, with the familiar pattern of blocks on its cover.

  Blocking out every thought but the one about Mom, Sasha grabbed the book. She caught herself right before leaving the auditorium and nodded a curt good-bye to Portnov. She walked out; Kostya took long strides, almost running in front of her.

  “Come on, hurry up, the attendant said she’d wait. It’s a restricted office phone, actually . . .”

  Sasha was not listening.

  Here was the hallway with the gigantic equestrian statue. Here was the glass booth of the guard; here was a custodian in a blue robe, and here was the black plastic receiver next to the phone, and a spiral cable . . .

  Sasha clutched the receiver, put it next to her ear, and listened to the silence. Mom was waiting; helpless, Sasha turned to Kostya. He seized the receiver from her and yelled, for
some reason very loudly:

  “She’ll be right there! She’s fine, she is a good student—yes, the dorm rooms are heated!”

  Sasha heard Mom’s voice changed by cables and distance. Mom was saying something to Kostya, her words fast, ringing, and anxious.

  “No!” Kostya shouted. “She . . . she’s lost her voice a little. You know, I don’t think she can leave the class at the moment, we have one-on-ones right now . . . Did something happen? You can tell me, I’ll pass it along . . .”

  Mom began speaking again. She sounded high-strung and on edge; Sasha took a step forward, snatched the receiver from Kostya, and—amazingly, finally—spoke.

  “Mom, what is going on? What happened?”

  “Sasha, sweetheart, is that you? Why didn’t you call? Those telegrams of yours . . . I haven’t heard your voice in a month! Why didn’t you call, you nasty creature?”

  “So everything is good?” Sasha asked, bewildered.

  “No, it’s not good! Because you have not called! Valentin and I are going crazy! I had such a tough time reaching you . . . Are you healthy? What do you eat? What was this kid telling me about you losing your voice?”

  Kostya stood in front of her. The attendant on duty kept throwing worried glances at Kostya and Sasha.

  “I haven’t lost my voice.” Sasha tried not to cry. “Everything is fine.”

  Portnov stopped her near the back entrance. It was clearly against his rules, meeting his students in the hall; he usually did nothing more than nod curtly.

  “Samokhina, come with me.”

  “I have table tennis.”

  “You just got your speech back, and your nose is already growing.”

  Sasha lowered her eyes. She hadn’t had a chance to sign up for tennis.

  “I thought you’d still be silent for a couple of months,” Portnov murmured. “Although . . . Come on, I need someone to see you.”

  Sasha obeyed. They went to the basement, passed the dining hall—closed at this hour of the day—and then went even lower. Sasha had never been in this area of the school before.