Vita Nostra

by Sergey

  “Yes, Kozhennikov?”

  Kostya got up, nervously clicking his pen. “I have an announcement.”

  “For me?” Portnov inquired. “Or for the entire group?”

  “For you and for the group.” Kostya was visibly nervous. “Zhenya and I’ve decided to get married. We applied for the marriage license at the local town hall. Anyway, we are going to have a wedding and I . . . we wanted to invite everyone.”

  Someone’s whistle made the windowpane tremble. Somebody applauded. The auditorium filled with surprised and encouraging noise. Sasha caught a few openly curious glances.

  Her back very straight, her face scarlet, Zhenya stared at Portnov; Sasha detected a hint of pride and audacity in her stare. Sasha herself looked at Portnov, thinking, What if he forbids them to get married?

  The hum died down slowly. The bell rang, but no one moved. Portnov stood by the blackboard, his hands in his pockets, gazing at Kostya and Zhenya curiously, almost serenely.

  A familiar silence descended upon the students.

  “Thank you for making us aware of the situation,” Portnov said benevolently. “May you live happily ever after, in sickness and in health, and all that. The only nuance I must warn you about is the following: any student who gets pregnant before graduation will end up having an abortion based on medical grounds, because any child conceived during the program will have grave birth defects and a life expectancy of zero. And I am not even going to explain all the problems a pregnant student would have with her advisor. Is this clear, newlyweds?”

  Now Zhenya’s face was beet red, and her eyes filled with tears. Sasha caught herself with a fleeting sense of satisfaction.

  “Class dismissed,” Portnov said unenthusiastically. “Samokhina, stay for a minute.”

  “But why?” Sasha shouted matter-of-factly, unexpectedly, very loudly, and almost hysterically.

  Portnov’s glance—and the surprised stares of her classmates—made her come to her senses and regain self-control as soon as possible.

  “Because I need to tell you something,” he informed her just as matter-of-factly. “Group A, hurry up, you’ll be late for the gym.”

  The door was flung open. Outside in the hallway Sasha saw Yegor waiting for her. He’d be waiting even after the bell and the start of the next block; nervously gripping the handle of her bag, Sasha watched her classmates pile out of the auditorium.

  Korotkov, the last one out, closed the door behind him.

  “Come here,” said Portnov.

  She approached the teacher’s desk, mentally shuffling through all the reasons and problems that could prompt Portnov to have a conversation with her.

  “Listen, Samokhina . . . You do know how silly girls get in trouble?”

  Sasha drew in air like a broken water spigot. “Why? What business is that of yours?”

  “Who else would give you advice? Mommy? Daddy? Give me your hand.”

  His hard fingers found Sasha’s wrist, hitched up her sleeve, and pressed a temporary tattoo on the back of her arm, just below her elbow, a cheap kind usually sold on the beach—a smiling face the size of a small coin.

  Sasha jerked her hand away. She stared at the tattoo—it stuck to her skin like it was glued on. The little face, transparent just a few seconds ago, now filled with a carroty-orange color.

  “It’s a very simple test. On your safe days, it is green and yellow. When it turns red, you are absolutely not allowed to—and don’t complain later that you weren’t warned.”

  Sasha looked at Portnov. He leaned back on the chair and wiped his glasses with the hem of his shirt.

  “You are dismissed, Samokhina. Go—your boy is waiting for you.” Portnov bared his teeth in a smirk.

  On her way out, Sasha allowed herself to slam the door. She lost her nerve at the very last moment, but the door did slam just a little bit.

  In gym class, running laps, doing push-ups and sit-ups, throwing the ball into the hoop, Sasha managed to return to a certain mental equilibrium. Kostya is marrying Zhenya Toporko? That’s terrific, and wasn’t it she, Sasha, who gave him this wonderful advice? May you live happily ever after, as Portnov said.

  Even in the gym class she continued wearing Yegor’s green shirt. Under her sleeve, she barely felt the temporary tattoo on her right arm. Working on her passing skills under Dima Dimych’s direction, Sasha admitted to herself that Portnov was right. Being eighteen years old, she was still inexcusably infantile when it came to “female business.” Mom was too far away, and it’s not like she would discuss it with Lisa!

  On the other hand, Portnov . . .

  How did he know? Why did he care about Sasha’s personal life?

  Yet maybe it wasn’t too hard to figure out. Lisa knew. And Sasha and Yegor were not hiding anything. On the contrary—they had flaunted their love to everyone in plain sight.

  All of a sudden she felt uncomfortable in Yegor’s green shirt.

  Kostya and Zhenya sat on the bench like two sparrows on a telegraph wire. Anna Bochkova sat down next to them, chatting, laughing. Sasha wondered if they were talking about her. About Yegor.

  With a hollow sound, the ball hit the board, rolled over the rim of the hoop, and fell out. Kostya had chosen his fate, and she, Sasha, had also chosen hers.

  And all this seemed utterly nonsensical considering that the winter exams were only three months away.

  Her next session with Sterkh turned into a nightmare. Sasha could not handle the tension; the alien silence crept into her soul, and the hunchback sided with that silent, clammy, heavy beast. Sasha no longer tried to let it in, neither did she try to force it out—she simply hung between the two chasms, as if writhing in a seizure. It seemed as if the session lasted many, many days.

  Finally, Sterkh shook his head and removed her headphones.

  “Sasha . . . It will be all right, don’t get discouraged. Do not lose your heart.”

  It was her mind she was worried about, though.

  For a long time he sat silently behind his desk. Sasha, sweaty and barely alive, stared out the window that faced Sacco and Vanzetti Street, but could see only her own reflection. It was already dark outside; Sterkh always put her name last in the schedule of individual sessions.

  “Perhaps . . . No, I must consult someone. Let us go, Sasha.”

  One-on-ones with Portnov had not yet ended. When Sterkh opened the door of auditorium 38, Sasha saw Laura Onishhenko, who stood in the middle of the auditorium, staring fixedly at the opposite wall. Laura did not react to their emergence: tense, with her eyes nearly popping out of her head, she appeared both ridiculous and terrifying. Sasha looked away.

  Sterkh nodded to Portnov. The latter motioned for them to wait. Laura inhaled with a hiss and coughed.

  “We will do it one more time,” Portnov promised coldly. “Get ready.”

  “I worked on it . . .”

  “I am still hoping to see the result of that effort. You have one minute. Leave the room and try to concentrate.”

  Laura left, eyes lowered to the ground. Portnov looked from Sasha to Sterkh and back.

  “I need a consultation,” the hunchback said curtly.

  Portnov cleaned his ring with the hem of his sweater and nodded to Sasha. She came closer. A sharp ray of light—harsher that usual—whipped across her eyes.

  “Not happening,” Portnov said. “I really don’t think so.”

  Sterkh sighed.

  “Fine . . . Let’s assume you are right.”

  “You can play with it for another week or so,” Portnov murmured as if considering different options. “But I would restructure right away.”

  “I see,” the hunchback said. “Sasha, please wait for me in auditorium 14, I’ll be right up.”

  The fourth-floor corridor was almost dark. Sasha located the light switch, entered the auditorium, sat down, and leaned her head against the wall. After what seemed like only a second, she jerked awake.

  “Taking a nap? Of course, you must not be gettin
g enough sleep. Never mind. Sasha, I made a mistake in your professional profile. You have a different nature, a different destiny, and I lied to myself and confused you. It is a shame. But let us not talk about that. Let’s do this: put away the CD player, you will not need it anymore. We’re going to try another approach, radically different.”

  The slightly open window let in the scent of rain and the rustle of the remaining leaves. In the space over the streetlight the leaves lived a little longer. Sasha had noticed it sometime last year.

  Nikolay Valerievich rummaged through his black briefcase. “I am going to give you this study guide.”

  He pulled out a softcover album, the size of a glossy magazine, but completely black, and placed it on the desk.

  “Shall we try right now? We still have a few minutes. Take it, Sasha, and open to the first page.”

  Obediently, she opened the album. Inside she saw nothing except for black pages that resembled an old kind of carbon copy paper. Sasha inhaled; she thought she could hear the smell of printing ink. “In a blackest-black city, on a blackest-black street stood a blackest-black house . . .”

  Somebody might have smiled. But not Sasha.

  “Page two,” the hunchback said. “Fragment number one. You will see three white dots in the middle of the page. Can you see?”

  Sasha nodded. The picture looked like the famous painting by Malevich, tainted by three drops of white oil paint.

  “These three dots are the anchor for your sight, for the direction of your thoughts. You must look very carefully, holding your breath, slowly counting to ten . . . Do it right now, I will be watching.”

  The three dots looked like two eyes and a round mouth. Not thinking, just waiting for the session to be over, Sasha inhaled deeply and stopped breathing. “One, two, three—”

  The three dots rushed toward her, turning into the train lights in a tunnel. For a moment she glimpsed a vivid, three-dimensional landscape. Sasha saw arched bridges penetrating one another, distant jagged mountains, tunnels that looked like interlaced tendons; she longed for oxygen, wanted to inhale, but for some reason she was forbidden to breathe. Darkness was absolute, and then the auditorium came into focus in front of her eyes, followed by the teacher’s desk and the hunchback over the open briefcase.

  Sasha gulped some air, like a diver who’d just nearly drowned. She breathed, swallowing bitter saliva, and the black album lay in front of her, black pages thrown open, as an invitation to repeat the experiment.

  “Hmm,” Nikolay Valerievich said uncertainly. “It’s not exactly what I wanted, but this is a good working start, Sasha. It is a hint of future development, albeit a modest one. Please take this album and very carefully—as carefully as you can—work with fragment number one. Ideally, I would love for you to hold your breath up to two minutes. Count to one hundred and twenty.”

  “I must pass this test,” Sasha chanted out loud. “I must pass this test!”

  She opened the album given to her by the hunchback. The pages were numbered, and so were the black fields, the “fragments,” which could be distinguished by these numbers only. Each one had three white dots in its center, like three stars or three holes in dark fabric.

  “I must pass,” Sasha murmured, held her breath, and concentrated on the three white dots. “One, two, three, four . . .”

  Everything would amalgamate in front of her eyes, and then clear up again. Strange harsh outlines swam out of the darkness. Sasha saw a city, sharp roof peaks, intertwined ropes and wires; one-dimensional creatures, brown like coffee grounds, jumped over them like fleas on unwashed hair. Resembling check marks drawn with a thick brown marker on a list of groceries, they twitched their legs, wriggled, and made sudden jerky movements. Sasha would never be able to explain why she found these creatures so repulsive, but every time she shuddered at their appearance.

  “Thirty-one. Thirty-two. Thirty-three . . .”

  At “sixty,” the brown check mark insects would notice that they were being watched. They saw or felt Sasha’s presence and crawled closer, up to her very eyes, and moving her head was impossible.

  Perfectly defined graphical landscapes unfolded in the background: mountains, arches, buildings, and towers, a gorgeous and sinister city. The oily pavement glistened, like a carbon-black ear of corn. From one fragment to another the distant landscape changed, filled with details, became three-dimensional; the amount of brown check marks grew with it. They threw themselves at Sasha like a cluster of starving bedbugs. Lacking arms, unable to breathe, she chased them away the only way she had at her disposal—by concentrating. By staring. Occasionally, she moaned over the album, frightening her roommates. But she didn’t care about that.

  “I must pass this test!”

  “You don’t even look like yourself anymore,” Yegor would say softly.

  Sasha memorized his schedule. Every day she showed up at the dining hall holding his hand. She had worn every single one of his shirts and sweaters. She made out with him in front of everyone, as if it were her last chance. Shamelessly, she kicked her roommates out and made love to Yegor, the door locked and secured with a broom handle.

  Afterward, Yegor would pull on his sweatpants and go to his room, and Sasha would lay without sleep for the rest of the night.

  She had to pass this test.

  Or die.

  At the end of November Kostya and Zhenya went through with their marital plans and had a “student” wedding at a small restaurant not far from the institute: vodka, mineral water, salami and cheese sandwiches, and endless jars of pickles. All the second years were invited; everyone was allowed to bring one guest. Sasha brought Yegor. Lisa did not show up at all.

  At the wedding Sasha saw Kostya’s mother for the first time—a prematurely aged, overweight woman, fidgety, with a shrill voice. She thought of Farit Kozhennikov, who had been married to this woman and then left her . . . Or had it been a mutual decision? She wouldn’t be surprised by either.

  That wasn’t the pressing issue, though, because a more urgent thought kept bothering her: how could Kostya’s mother not realize, not see that something was really wrong with her son’s school? Or was a quick view from the outside not enough to notice the strangeness?

  Sasha tried to imagine herself in this woman’s shoes: her only son, about to be drafted, just started his second year at a provincial college, and now he was marrying his classmate. Everything was normal. Everything was perfectly natural. Next year her son would choose his profession, and his mother in her silk dress, too tight on her spreading body, hoped he would go for economics.

  Sitting in Yegor’s lap (there was plenty of space at the table, but it was important for Sasha to sit exactly like that at Kostya’s wedding table), she was thinking that there, right in front of her, fifty young men and women were acting out an elaborate play for the sake of a single middle-aged woman. Everyone sitting at the table—second years, third years, even the first-year Yegor—knew that Kostya would never become an economist. Nevertheless, they all played out a well-known script. Toasts were proposed, music was played loudly, a pink-cheeked vociferous stand-up comedian hired as master of ceremonies told jokes (occasionally even funny ones) and sang karaoke and invited everyone else to sing along. Wine and shot glasses clinked, and Kostya’s mother kissed her brand-new daughter-in-law, wiping her tears and wishing happiness to her “sonny.”

  Kostya looked awkward and pompous in his new black suit. It seemed as if he could not wait for the wedding to be over. The long tulle veil kept getting in Zhenya’s way; behind the scenes, the girls discussed her wedding dress and declared it hopelessly low-class. Zhenya was upset.

  In the midst of all the fun, when the floor trembled under the dancers’ feet and tobacco smoke hung heavily in the air, Sasha and Yegor finally made their quiet exit. It was raining in the old park, the trees were now bare, and the fallen leaves lay under their feet like a rippled, glutinous rug.

  Sasha and Yegor took a long silent walk under the same umbrell
a.

  “I thought everyone would get really drunk,” Yegor said.

  “Portnov does not let us drink. Something to do with metabolism, I think.”

  They fell silent again. The rain thumped slyly over the membranes of their umbrella.

  “Sasha . . . let’s run away from the institute.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Let’s. Run away. Together. We’ll earn some money, or steal it. Buy airplane tickets. They won’t be able to get us.”

  Cold drops flew through the night, lit up by the ancient lanterns. Sasha walked, grasping Yegor’s elbow, considering his proposal.

  If she failed Sterkh’s exam—and it looked like she would anyway, even if she killed herself studying . . .

  What did she have to lose?

  But then she shook her head, trying to get rid of excruciating thoughts. As far as she knew, Yegor was doing just fine in his Specialty sessions, there was no reason he should not pass his exam . . .

  “Thank you for offering,” she said.

  They passed the alabaster arch and crossed from the park to Peace Street, a stone’s throw away from Sacco and Vanzetti.

  The next day, Monday, Portnov offered reserved congratulations to the newlyweds, immediately followed by the warning not to expect any leniency in their classes.

  “The honeymoon has been rescheduled for your vacation, yes? Good. By the way, where are you planning to reside? Will you be renting an apartment?”

  Kostya mumbled something incomprehensible about appealing to the dorm superintendent.

  Portnov was shaking his head, though. “You will not be getting a family unit until after the winter exams, when some space will free up. Until then—deal with it as you wish, home is where the heart is. And with that the official part is over, so everyone open your books to page sixty-three. Samokhina, you don’t look well.”

  “She was studying all night,” Lisa offered under her breath. “Practicing new positions.”

  “Yeah, that’s exactly what I was doing,” Sasha snapped. “Jealous?”