Vita Nostra

by Sergey

  She showed up at the Specialty exam, along with the entire class, on January 2, at ten in the morning. Portnov required everyone to be present in the classroom for the duration of the test.

  “Good morning, Group A.” Portnov slid his glasses to the tip of his nose and glanced at the rows of students. “Samokhina, hand me your grade book.”

  She approached his desk and watched him write “A” in the row marked “Specialty.”

  “This is a graded test—everyone remembers that, correct? Prefect, please collect the grade books and place them on my desk.”

  Head hanging low, Kostya started down the aisle. Sasha stepped from one foot to the other.

  “Samokhina, you are dismissed, free to go. Thank you, Kozhennikov. Who’s going first, do we have any volunteers? Samokhina, did you hear me?”

  Avoiding eye contact, Sasha collected her bag and left the classroom, shutting the door behind her.

  “You are dismissed, free to go.”

  Go where? She has not been free for many months now, as a man at gunpoint is never free. Crossing the yard on her way to the dorm, she asked herself whether she would ever, perhaps in her old age, be able to escape Farit Kozhennikov’s power.

  In a trance, Oksana hunched over her books. Group B had the exam scheduled for noon. Even knowing that she could not make up for lost time, Oksana still tried desperately to squeeze in numbers 106 to number 115. Sasha knew it was impossible, but hoped that Oksana’s honest efforts on 105 exercises would earn her at least a C.

  She lay down on her bed and stared at the ceiling. Two exams remained, History and Philosophy, on January 8 and 12. That meant she could get a ticket for the evening of the twelfth and go home for winter vacation.

  She’d never thought of that before. She hadn’t allowed herself—she was scared to entertain the idea. And now she had no more classes. No Specialty. She could go home. Home.

  Oksana froze over the book, staring into space. Perhaps she was beginning to understand the exercises. Sasha counted what money she still had and left the dorm without looking back.

  She returned by lunchtime, a train ticket in her side pocket. The train stopped at the Torpa station for two minutes, from zero twenty-three to zero twenty-five in the morning. On her way home from the station, Sasha stopped at the post office, got hold of Mom, and told her she would arrive on the thirteenth, just in time for the Old New Year’s Eve.* The burst of joy on the other end of the line served as her reward for the long queue.

  When Sasha got back to her room, Oksana was sitting under the improvised tree engrossed in her knitting; her permanent smile told Sasha that at least in this case she had nothing to worry about.

  “What did you get?”

  “A B!” Oksana could not stifle a giggle. “It was my hangover, Sasha, I swear, it caused enlightenment. There are no As in our group at all, half got Bs, half Cs. And three people failed.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “Nope. And three people failed in your group, too. That moron Lisa is one.” Oksana sighed. “I’m worried about her. Plus Denis Myaskovsky and Kozhennikov . . . Zhenya got a C. I am telling you, Kozhennikov’s hanky-panky cost him . . . Are you feeling sorry for him? You?”

  “What’s going to happen now?” Sasha asked after a pause.

  “All six people have a makeup test on the thirteenth.”

  “And . . .” But Sasha faltered. Finally she asked, “And where is Pavlenko?”

  “I don’t know. She came back after the test, looked like hell, and then she left right away. You know, she should have studied more, instead of running around with all those guys. She asked for it.”

  Sasha woke up in the middle of the night to complete silence. It was never that quiet in the dorm.

  She got up and put on her bathrobe. Oksana was asleep, but Lisa’s bed remained empty. Sasha went out into the corridor; the clock showed half past two. Under the ceiling lights the linoleum floor had a morbid sheen.

  Without any reason, Sasha went downstairs to the first floor. Someone was there, in the kitchen at the end of the hall.

  She stopped at the door.

  Kostya was weeping noiselessly, kneeling on the floor, stuffing the hem of his blue T-shirt into his mouth. On the table, among dirty dishes, lay a crumpled piece of yellow paper—a telegram.

  Sasha already knew what had happened. She just could not believe it.

  “Grandma,” Kostya managed through the tears. “I won’t forgive . . . never . . . Grandma!”

  He doubled up and touched his forehead to the floor.

  Several times during the last eighteen months Sasha had heard the crackling sound with which the threads that held together the familiar world ripped apart. She thought she was used to it.

  The catastrophe that happened to Kostya once again reminded Sasha that all these months she’d walked along the edge of a precipice. All her cramming, the dusty textbooks, the endless little everyday things—they all added up and formed a razor’s edge, upon which Sasha was balancing . . . and keeping that balance. So far.

  Others clearly weren’t, though.

  On January 3 Kostya departed for the funeral. Half of Group A went to the train station to say good-bye. Sasha did not go.

  Lisa did not go either.

  Denis Myaskovsky, with whom Sasha had never been friendly, sat on a bench in the middle of the yard, blindly doodling in the snow with a twig. In response to Sasha’s questioning glance, he shook his head and said, “Nothing terrible. Could be worse.”

  Denis’s advisor was Liliya Popova; that night Sasha thought that Denis was lucky.

  In the evening Lisa went somewhere. Before she left, Sasha asked timidly whether she could be of any help, and Lisa gave her such a look that Sasha’s lips froze in mid-sentence. Lisa had her own relationship with Farit Kozhennikov, and fainthearted Sasha preferred not to know how exactly Lisa was going to pay for the failed exam. Meanwhile, the winter finals continued; Sasha overheard one second year telling another: “Did you hear, the little ’uns had a lot of casualties . . .”

  “It’s not like they weren’t forewarned,” his companion reasoned.

  Sasha was having trouble sleeping again. She went to bed, stared at the ceiling, tossed and turned, then rose and went to the kitchen to make tea. Oksana slept soundly; Lisa sat over the exercise book. Sasha could imagine her fear. Portnov was capable of failing her again; he wasn’t likely to show mercy. This institution of higher education had no such concept as mercy.

  “Vita nostra brevis est . . .”

  Sasha thought of her mother. There, far away, existed a normal world and a normal life. People worked, laughed, watched television. Soon Sasha would appear there—but not for long. Only for a month. And then she would have to return to the institute, work on the exercises and read the paragraphs, and feel the iron choker tighten around her neck, spikes on the inside. It was a harsh collar, very cruel. She went where she was led. She was changing, fading internally, thinking somebody else’s thoughts. And she could not escape.

  The entire first-year class, both Groups A and B, sank into their studies. Kostya came back on the seventh, on Orthodox Christmas Day, before the Philosophy exam.

  Sasha volunteered to be the first and waived her right to prepare her answers. She rattled off her facts about Aristotle and Kant. Smiling genially, the professor gave her an A.

  “Please,” Sasha said softly, “don’t fail Kozhennikov. There is a tragedy in his family. His grandmother just died.”

  The Philosophy professor gazed at her in surprise. She did not say anything, just gave Sasha back her grade book.

  Kostya got a C, even though, according to eyewitnesses, he never uttered a single word.

  January 12 was approaching, the day of the last exam and everyone’s departure. The frightened hush that reigned among the first years after the Specialty exam was slowly disintegrating. Already people laughed, kissed, already they furtively—under their jackets—carried vodka and red wine into the kitchen;
people seemed happy about their Philosophy grades and hoped that the History professor would be just as lenient.

  Kostya did not talk to anyone, though. He did not seem to notice Zhenya Toporko, who followed him everywhere. He also—Sasha understood that, and her terror rose higher and higher—stopped studying, stopped working on the exercises. He moved—no, rolled—down a sharp slope, toward his second failure.

  “Don’t feel sorry for him,” Oksana advised. “I heard he and Zhenya broke a bed in room 19, with all their humping. They ended up propping it up with a brick.”

  Sasha did not respond.

  “He’s your advisor’s son, after all. Family matters.”

  “Yeah, I’ve noticed.”

  “Well,” Oksana hesitated. “How old was his grandmother? Seventy-six? Not exactly a spring chicken, was she?”

  Under Sasha’s glare, Oksana stopped talking and pretended to be very interested in the contents of her cooking pot. It seemed that out of the entire population of the dorm, Oksana was the only one who knew how to cook; from time to time she spoiled herself and her neighbors with some delicious homemade ragout or cabbage dumplings.

  Sasha left the kitchen, went downstairs, and knocked on the door numbered 7. Zakhar’s voice answered:

  “Come in!”

  Sasha walked in. The room was indescribably messy. Items of clothing from underwear to winter jackets were strewn on the chairs and the floor. A thick layer of textbooks, glossy nudie magazines, crumpled sheets of paper, socks, and dirty plastic plates covered the desks. The miasma of old cigarette smoke was far heavier than in Sasha’s room.

  Zakhar leaned over a book. Lenya, the third roommate, stood in the corner, holding up his hands and staring at some point in the distance. He did not blink. Had Sasha seen this earlier, in September, she would have been scared to the point of getting sick to her stomach. Now she was pretty sure that Lenya was simply going through his mental exercises.

  Kostya lay on his bed, facing the wall.

  “Eh.” Zakhar caught Sasha’s eyes. “I keep telling him, study, you moron, it’ll just get worse. But he’s had it, he’s done. We had a guy like that last year . . . The winter finals broke him.”

  “Was he expelled?” Sasha asked idiotically.

  Zakhar gave her a gloomy sneer.

  “Expelled? Yeah, they expelled him—all over the place. He went kind of crazy, and . . . Did you want something?”

  Sasha looked at Kostya.

  “Zakhar, how did you get Portnov’s glasses?”

  “I went over to him and asked.”

  “And he agreed?”

  “Of course. He said it’d be cool.”

  “Is that what he said?”

  “Well, more or less. Why?”

  “No reason . . . What will happen to us?”

  Zakhar clicked the switch of his desk lamp. “You and I will graduate. Lenya as well. That one . . . I don’t know.”

  “What will happen to us when we graduate?”

  Zakhar hesitated. Then said, “We will change. Everything will change. Our vision, hearing, our entire organisms will transform themselves. Then, during the winter finals, there will be this crucial placement test that qualifies you for moving to another level. And then . . .”

  “And then what?”

  “I don’t know. Do you think they tell the second years everything? But I think we’ll stop being human altogether.”

  “Then what are we going to become? Robots?”

  “I think it’s different for everyone. Specialization begins during the third year, after the placement exam. I guess that’s what happens.”

  “But what’s the point? What is it for? Who is it for?”

  Lenya did not blink. Whatever was happening in the room held no interest for him. Zakhar rubbed the tip of his nose and smiled uneasily, as if Sasha and her questions embarrassed him.

  But she wouldn’t give up. “Are the teachers human?”

  “The gym teacher is definitely human . . .”

  “I am not talking about the gym teacher! You know who I mean!”

  Zakhar licked his lips.

  “I know as much as you do. What color is your hair?”

  “Black,” Sasha said, puzzled. “Dark brown. Why . . . ?”

  “I keep thinking it’s purple.” Zakhar closed his tired eyes. “Everyone has yellow hair, and yours is purple. Colored spots. Portnov says it’s normal, it’s supposed to go away.”

  Sasha looked at Kostya again. He was not asleep. Sasha knew he was simply pretending.

  “Be careful on vacation,” Zakhar said. “One girl in my group went home after the winter finals, enjoyed her vacation, freedom got into her head, and she said to her parents: ‘I got into a totalitarian cult, I am being poisoned with psychedelic drugs, I’m losing my mind, save me.’ Her parents had money, so they put her into some prestigious clinic for treatment . . .”

  “What happened?”

  “When Farit brought her back a week later, she was already an orphan. She lasted one semester, failed the summer finals, and that’s when she went really mad. She’s at some nuthouse now.”

  “No way!”

  Zakhar closed his eyes. “Listen, I passed Specialty, but I still have my English exam. Did you want to tell Kostya something?”

  Sasha took a deep breath. She picked up a mug with leftover tea and upended it over Kostya’s head.

  He leapt up. Of course, he was awake; he stared at Sasha as if at an executioner.

  “What do you want? What? Just let me die! All of you, let me die!”

  “Control yourself,” Sasha said.

  She was surprised to hear Portnov’s notes in her own voice.

  Kostya’s makeup test loomed in three days.

  “You must do this. Everything else we’ll deal with later.”

  “I can’t. I—”

  “Shut up! You’re a weakling, you’re not a man, you’re slime, impotent! You don’t know how to fight!”

  His shoulders slumped in response.

  “Listen,” Sasha said. “If we learn all this, if we get to the end of the course, we shall become just like them. And we shall speak their language. Then we’ll take revenge upon your father. I promise.”

  Kostya slowly looked up. For the first time Sasha noticed something besides grief and despair in his eyes. She pressed on.

  “And if they crush us, we won’t be able to avenge ourselves. Right now we are weak. But we’ll become different. We’ll find a way to pay them back.”

  “I just can’t,” Kostya said. “Ten exercises in three days—it’s not possible.”

  “It’s possible. I did twenty once.”

  “What?”

  “Pick up your book! Read the exercise out loud!”

  Hour followed hour. Often Sasha wanted to hit Kostya, punch him to make him focus, to make him concentrate and finish up what he’d already half completed. She could not peer inside his imagination, but managed to distinguish success from failure by his eyes and his breathing.

  When he missed a cue at the end of a long sequence of five complex exercises, she lost her patience and slapped him on the cheek. He recoiled, clutching his face.

  “What the hell?”

  “Concentrate!” Sasha screamed in his face. “Focus and do it from the beginning, or I swear, I’ll do it again!”

  Belatedly, she felt her palm burning. She was surprised at her own reaction: never in her life had she actually hit anyone. Even as a joke. And now she was ready to grab a broom with a long handle that happened to be standing in the corner of the room and beat him with that handle, thrash him, cause him pain . . .

  In the evening Kostya wanted to go to sleep, but Sasha wouldn’t allow him to. She sat up with him the entire night, and at daylight, around nine o’clock, he suddenly became aware—and understood how these exercises were to be done.

  They sat on chairs they brought into the hallway from his room. Around them things were happening—people stomped by, yelled, laughed, co
mplained about lack of sleep, asked for snacks—and it was at that moment that Kostya accepted as reality that in two days he would pass the exam.

  And only then did Sasha understand what agony he’d carried around inside him all these days.

  “Sasha! I’m so glad you called! We are getting ready to meet you tomorrow, and we have such a huge surprise for you!”

  “Mom . . . I am sorry, I won’t be able to come tomorrow.”

  Pause.

  “Sasha . . . How? What happened?”

  “This boy here is taking a makeup test. I’m helping him.”

  Another pause.

  “Who is this boy?”

  “My classmate.”

  “Oh. But we are so anxious to see you . . . It’s the Old New Year . . .”

  “I will do my best to arrive on the fourteenth,” Sasha said. “I honestly . . . I just can’t get home earlier.”

  Strangely enough, she got another A in History, considering that she did not study at all. She got very lucky: she knew the question really well, having attended the lectures and taken notes (and apparently her notes were really good), and now she could remember everything to the minutest detail.

  “I wish I had more students like you,” the History professor beamed at her. Lowering her eyes in false modesty, Sasha asked:

  “Please . . . Kozhennikov just had a death in the family . . . he’s devastated. Please give him a C, I’ll make sure he catches up.”

  The History professor tortured Kostya for nearly a full hour, got absolutely nothing out of him, wavered, and pursed her lips, but at the end gave him a C.

  That night almost all the first years departed. Only a few people stayed behind, people whose trains arrived in the morning, and those with makeup tests scheduled for the thirteenth.

  Sasha stayed.

  The third years’ placement exam—that very important one, the one that was crucial for the next level—was scheduled for the thirteenth as well. No jokes were made about the unlucky number. The dorm was half empty and oddly quiet.

  In the morning the third years congregated in the assembly hall. Lisa, Denis, and Kostya waited in auditorium 1 (the misfits from Group B were scheduled one hour later). Sasha roamed the halls; not a sound could be heard from the assembly hall. As if it were completely empty.