Vita Nostra

by Sergey

  First years. Hysterical fits, depression. Bouts of drinking. What was that kid’s name? What if he really did drown? No, that couldn’t happen: it was too ineffective, too ostentatious . . . He knew Yegor was nearby. Perhaps he didn’t stop to think, but was simply really drunk to the point of delirium tremens, weak in the head from Portnov’s exercises?

  She fell behind somewhere along Sacco and Vanzetti. Yegor did not turn around, and when Sasha ran up the dorm steps, breathing heavily, he was nowhere in sight.

  She went to her room. Both roommates were out. The room was an unholy mess: clothes piled up on the beds, shoes lying underneath in disarray, crumbs covering the papers on the table, a dirty jam jar and used plastic dishes all over the place. Sasha felt nauseated: she was certainly not a clean freak, but the excessive disorder created by her roommates aggravated her more and more.

  She opened the window and tossed someone’s right shoe, right sneaker, and a left stiletto down on the lawn. Perhaps that would make them think twice next time.

  She changed into sweats and pulled on a pair of warm socks. She did not want to eat lunch, had absolutely no appetite. Individual sessions with Portnov were scheduled for the third and fourth blocks, but Sasha’s time slot was for four fifteen, so she had plenty of time.

  She sat down at her desk. Opened the textbook drawer and saw the CD player; immediately, memories flooded her brain. The conversation with Kozhennikov: Steal a wallet . . . I am very sorry about the way things turned out between you and Kostya . . .

  She buried the player in the depths of the drawer and picked up Textual Module 4. Paragraph thirty-six: she had read the text three times from the beginning to the end when she heard a knock on the door.

  “Come in,” Sasha said without turning around.

  The door creaked.

  “I’m sorry . . . Are you studying?”

  Yegor stood in the doorway. He’d changed into a thick warm sweater and a pair of dark blue sweatpants. In his hands were a left stiletto and a right shoe.

  “Sorry . . . these were lying under your window. Were they supposed to be there?”

  “Yes,” Sasha said. She got up, took the shoes from Yegor, and tossed them back out the window. She wiped her hands. “I am working on some pedagogical character building with your classmates,” she explained to the surprised Yegor. “See what they have done to my room?”

  She pointed to the mess in the room with a wide sweep of her arm. Yegor’s embarrassment over a display of women’s panties on the beds was obvious.

  “Don’t be angry with them. You see, the first years . . .”

  “You don’t think I was a first year once?” Sasha narrowed her eyes.

  “Was it the same thing with you?”

  “Of course. And as you can see, we’re still alive.”

  Yegor sighed.

  “I wanted to talk to you . . . Sasha.”

  “Sure.” Sasha smiled. “Do you want me to make some tea? Let’s go to the kitchen, at least there is no loose underwear kicking about . . .”

  She followed Yegor out of the room, locked the door, and put the key in her pocket. Let the silly goats scamper around looking for the key.

  “I gathered some linden blossoms on Sacco and Vanzetti this summer,” Sasha said. “Have you ever seen linden trees in bloom? Bees go crazy for them . . . they get so loud. And the smell of them . . . All over the street, and your room smells of linden blossoms when you leave the windows open . . .”

  “Didn’t you go home for the summer vacation?”

  “I did for two weeks. The rest of the time we had summer internships. Nothing really special, we harvested cherries.” Sasha spoke easily; at this moment it seemed to her that last summer, with its linden blossoms and the cherries, had been simple and carefree, a true summer vacation for a college student. “I couldn’t even look at cherries afterward. And I have an entire tin of dried linden blossoms. It’s just what you need after the cold water.”

  She put the teakettle on.

  “What were you doing by the river?” Yegor asked, wiping the oilcloth-covered table with a dishrag.

  “Just walking,” Sasha said curtly. She lifted the top of a large tin can and inhaled the scent of blossoms. “I saw you two flopping about in the water. How did that blind drunk goofball manage to get up on the bridge, anyway?”

  “He wasn’t all that drunk,” Yegor said. “It’s just . . . Well, you understand.”

  “Shame,” Sasha said sharply, thinking that only a few minutes before the incident on the river she was considering that bridge herself. Hot water bubbled in the teacups, the linden blossoms began to expand, and a lovely smell drifted over the kitchen.

  “That’s awesome.” Yegor sniffed, his nostrils twitching. “Sasha . . . Why did you take off your sneakers? There, by the river?”

  Sasha put the teakettle back on the stove and took a sugar bowl with a broken handle off the shelf.

  “To tell you the truth . . . I don’t know. But what else was I supposed to do? I think I was going to dive in after you. To rescue you.” She twisted her face into a smile, avoiding Yegor’s eyes.

  “Thanks,” Yegor said after a pause.

  “What for?”

  Yegor moved the teacup closer and held its warmth between his palms.

  “It’s Stepan. He is killing me with his hysterics. Every day he packs his suitcase and says he’s going home. And then every morning he unpacks it again. He sent a telegram once to his mother . . . She must have been nervous, thinking about him, probably got distracted crossing the street, got run over by a car, and now she’s at the hospital with a concussion. Stepan has an older brother—I spoke with him on the phone. He says that Stepan has been throwing fits since childhood, scaring his mother. When he was at a summer camp, he sent a letter telling her they got rat meat for dinner . . . He’s like that. His brother thinks that Stepan is playing games again, making things up, that he just does not want to be independent, wants to crawl back under Mommy’s skirts. And I, you see, Sasha, I was listening to Stepan’s brother . . . and I was playing along! I told him, yeah, we have this great institute, terrific living conditions . . . Obviously, living in a dorm is not the same as living at home . . . And then I said to Stepan, ‘What are you doing, you idiot? Don’t you at least feel sorry for your mother?’ And he . . . see what he did then?”

  “I see,” Sasha said. “Is he doing his work?”

  “Are you kidding? Our Specialty professor, Irina Anatolievna, yells at him every single class, threatens to send a report to his advisor.”

  “She threatens him . . . ,” Sasha repeated bitterly. “I missed one class, by mistake, and Portnov wrote a report right away. And then . . .” Sasha sighed. “Tell this moron that if he does not pass the winter exams . . .” She hesitated, not wanting to say out loud what was on the tip of her tongue. So instead she said, “I was really impressed with how you got him out.” She smiled, changing the subject. “And your CPR skills are better than any ambulance technician. Where did you learn all that?”

  They stayed in the kitchen for two and a half hours. Yegor skipped Philosophy and Math. People came in, left, smoked, laughed. The kitchen smelled of burned milk; Yegor assured her that only the linden blossoms could possibly save him from an imminent cold, so they had another cup, and then another, and then another.

  Both his parents were emergency medical technicians. He was going to become a doctor himself. He even went to medical school for two years, but then Liliya Popova appeared and crossed out all his plans for the future.

  Sasha listened and nodded. According to Yegor, it sounded as if Popova was not any better than Kozhennikov. Over the course of a single summer she’d managed to convince a mature, confident Yegor that the world is structured very differently from what he thought. And that he had no other choice but to drop out of medical school, where he had been a straight-A student for two years, and go to an unknown town and enroll as a freshman at an odd institute.

  “My parents we
re in shock. But there was this one thing: my father has this project. If everything works out, he will have his own private clinic. He’s in Germany right now—he left back in August—and they are trying to figure out the financing. It’s almost settled. It’s his dream, you know. And now it’s like he’s got other priorities, like I don’t matter as much. Whatever has happened to me—he thinks of it as childish antics. Like I was just acting out.”

  “My mother got married,” Sasha said. “She’s having a baby.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Uh-huh.” She looked down. “You know what I think? Our families get some sort of an advance payment when we get here. Good luck . . . happiness. They stop caring as much.”

  Yegor did not respond for a long time.

  “Well,” he said finally. “I put so much effort into making sure they didn’t figure it out, so I can’t say that my parents don’t care about me!”

  “Of course,” Sasha said in a reconciliatory tone. “Same thing with my mom.”

  Zhenya Toporko walked into the kitchen. She gave Sasha and Yegor a very distrustful look, took two glasses off a shelf, and left with a backward glance.

  “What do they want from us?” Yegor asked softly. “What are they teaching us, do you know?”

  “I don’t,” Sasha said. “Last year I also thought that second years must know that. But we don’t. And third years don’t know either. At least until the placement exam. And then they leave, and there is no one left to ask.”

  Yegor smiled suddenly. “You are not at all scary.”

  Sasha choked on her tea. “Me? Why would you think I was scary?”

  “Do you know that our girls are terrified of you?”

  “Of me?”

  “Of course. Sometimes you just look at people, and if looks could kill . . .” He shrugged. “In the beginning Vika and Lena were afraid of sleeping in the same room with you.”

  Sasha giggled. “They should be afraid. They are probably walking around the lawn just about now, foraging for their shoes . . .”

  They were laughing uproariously over their cups of cool tea when Kostya, grim-faced, walked into the kitchen.

  He left immediately, without saying a word.

  At four o’clock Sasha finally remembered her individual session with Portnov. She said a harried good-bye to Yegor, pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweater, grabbed her bag, and ran to the auditorium. Portnov listened to the gibberish memorized by Sasha, shone his ring into her eyes, and gave her a harsh dressing-down: he did not think that Sasha spent enough time reading the paragraph, she did not memorize it well enough, so for the next session she would have to complete three additional penalty exercises on top of the regular material.

  Sasha agreed silently. The exercises did not frighten her any longer, and Portnov was right—in her excitement over the linden blossom tea she obviously had not studied enough. On the other hand, if she failed Sterkh’s exam, what good would her success with Portnov be?

  “By the way, Samokhina, what does Nikolay Valerievich think of your progress?”

  The question caught her on the way out, as if he had read her mind. She turned back reluctantly: Portnov sat behind the teacher’s desk, the daylight lamp reflected in his narrow glasses.

  “It’s all good,” she said through gritted teeth.

  It was nearly dark now. As soon as she left the room, the entire weight of the day pressed on Sasha’s shoulders. Tomorrow she had another session with Sterkh: tomorrow she would have to make excuses, mumble, and listen to the revolting silence and struggle against it, knowing that fighting it was forbidden . . . and knowing she couldn’t do anything but resist.

  “Sasha, your roommates were looking for you.” Oksana was carrying a pan with a hissing omelet down the corridor. “Vika and Lena. Did you hide the room key from them?”

  “Sure did.” Sasha unlocked the door.

  “What are you doing, hazing them?” Oksana laughed. Sasha did not answer; she closed the door, but decided not to lock it. Gathering all her willpower, she took out the player. She set the first track on an automatic loop, gritted her teeth, put on the headphones, and fell on the bed.

  Silence came.

  Half an hour later the door flew open: Vika and Lena burst in, a shoe, a stiletto, and a sneaker in their arms like weapons. Sasha watched their lipsticked mouths open mid-scream, even saw fillings in their teeth. They were shouting, perhaps even threatening. Sasha looked through them and listened to the silence.

  A few seconds later her roommates stepped back. They may have gotten frightened. They left the room. The room was now empty.

  So was the silence. It was vast. It was devastating. It meant nonexistence. Sasha did not dare to blink: only the ceiling covered with tiny cracks, a spiderweb in the corner, and the iron headboard tied her to the existing world. “Nothing corporeal has any significant value. Anything that is truly valuable is beyond material substance . . .”

  But what about a warm hand? And smell? And the linden tea?!

  The silence went on and looped onto itself. Sasha lost track of time. Outside the windows the darkness was now absolute. Her roommates came back, turned on the light and turned it back off, somebody else came in and left; the silence bore down on her ears.

  Midnight came—like the distant beat of a drum.

  Sasha got up. She stuck the CD player in her pocket. The headphones now felt like an integral part of her head; the dormitory was wide awake, lights were on everywhere, people listened to music and sang, perhaps they laughed.

  But Sasha heard nothing.

  Yegor lived in room 12 on the first floor. Sasha knocked on the door with one crooked finger. Then she used her fist. Then she pulled the door open—it was unlocked.

  Yegor was alone, hunched over the Textual Module.

  “Listen,” Sasha began, but she could not hear her own voice; she fell silent. Yegor pushed the textbook aside, rushed toward Sasha, asked her something: she could not hear him. Silence pressed into her soul, and all Sasha’s energy went into preventing it from getting through.

  Then Yegor turned off the light.

  Sasha was caught off guard. Not being able to hear and see simultaneously—it was too much; she wanted to rip off her headphones, but they were now pressed so close to her ears that she could not say where the foam ended and her own ears began.

  At that moment Yegor took her into his arms.

  The world reduced itself to touch.

  Sasha froze. Yegor breathed heavily; she felt his ribs move, go up and down. Perhaps he was sick, had a fever, or maybe that’s just the way he was, hot, burning hot like a radiator. It didn’t matter. They pressed against each other, stuck together like two figures made of Play-Doh. The player dangled between them, but somehow it continued to work, pouring silence over Sasha. Yegor embraced her, enveloped her, she felt his weight, his strength, and the silence ended abruptly—with a sigh, a moan, someone’s off-key voice accompanied by a guitar, the distant chime of broken glass . . .

  The batteries in the CD player had run out of juice.

  The next morning, at seven o’clock, Sasha stood under the hot shower in the echoing second-floor bathroom. Heavy drops of condensed steam fell on the floor. Water flowed into the drain and carried away the soapy bubbles, whirling like a tornado. Sasha smiled, then scowled, then licked her tears off her chin.

  Yegor and Sasha made their appearance at the first block clutching each other’s hands. Sasha was wearing a man’s green shirt that smelled of Yegor’s cologne. In the hallway, watched by everyone around them, they hugged, kissed, and proceeded to their classrooms: Yegor to Irina Anatolievna’s for a Specialty lecture, Sasha to Sterkh’s, for her individual session.

  The hunchback regarded her attentively. Sasha tensed up, expecting him to say something; Sterkh said his usual friendly hello and asked Sasha to put on the headphones.

  The alien silence rose, drowning Sasha first up to her neck, and then completely over her head. Breathing became difficult. T
he hunchback moved his lips without a sound. Sasha watched him while a cold shiver ran down her spine and her hair stood on end.

  The first track ended. Sasha quickly pressed the Stop button. Nikolay Valerievich strolled around the auditorium and stopped at the window where raindrops fell again.

  “I can see you tried, Sasha. And I can see that you are truly having difficulties. Well, my girl. You have given me quite a problem.”

  He seemed uneasy and sad.

  “Congratulations,” said Lisa Pavlenko. She was having a cigarette in the women’s bathroom, shaking the ashes into the sink.

  “Thanks,” Sasha replied automatically, thinking of the hunchback and his exam.

  “Was it dictated by the heart? Or required for academic success?”

  Sasha froze for a second, then slowly looked at Lisa over her shoulder.

  “What do you mean?” she asked very slowly and very coldly.

  Lisa blew a puff of smoke up to the ceiling, as if trying to reach the yellowing plaster, covered by water spots.

  “No need to be embarrassed. You’re not the only one with that sort of problem. Yulia Goldman has been looking for someone to deflower her for a while now. Of course, she’s not the star student here, she has time . . .”

  “Isn’t it nice that you don’t have that problem?” Sasha said, looking at Lisa in the mirror.

  Their eyes met somewhere on the blurry edge between glass and reality. Lisa’s eyes looked red and inflamed—probably because of the smoke.

  “Group A, everyone close your books and look at me. ‘Everyone’ includes you, Kovtun. Just so, thank you. Considering that half of this group has not been able to accomplish their goals with the Textual Module, additional individual sessions have been scheduled. Those students whose names I call will attend the individual sessions, and must come prepared, with memorized paragraphs. Tomorrow, Saturday, I am meeting with Biryukov, Onishhenko, Bochkova, Myaskovsky. Thirty seconds before the bell—does anybody have any questions?”

  Kostya raised his hand. Zhenya Toporko, who was sitting next to him, blushed for some reason.