Vita Nostra

by Sergey

  Upon her return from the wedding, she had spent the rest of the night hunched over Sterkh’s album. Yegor’s words “Let’s run away” rang in her ears, in turn loud and soft; they abated and came back, like an echo in an empty well. Yegor was only a first year; he had not lived through a single exam, he still did not understand anything. Even if his advisor was Liliya Popova, and she might be kinder than Farit Kozhennikov—if one could use the word “kinder” in this case—he simply did not grasp what exactly he was offering to Sasha, shuffling alongside her under the same umbrella.

  It certainly wasn’t freedom.

  The brown check mark insects seemed to wait until Sasha opened the page and focused on fragment seventeen. Fidgeting and jerking their legs, they attacked her eyes. Sasha screamed; Vika and Lena woke up. Lena cried in fear, and Vika picked up her pillow and blanket and went to sleep in the kitchen, on chairs stacked next to each other.

  “Sasha, what was your assignment for today? Fragment twenty-one? Did you work on it?”

  It was yet another Monday. The day before, as usual, Sasha had called home and spoke with Valentin. Mom split her time between home and the hospital; her due date was January 12. The ultrasound showed a boy, a big one. Valentin sounded high-strung and happy; he informed Sasha that he would go shopping for a stroller, a crib, and all the other necessary things only after everything went well.

  “That’s superstition,” Sasha told him.

  “It’s tradition!” Valentin’s laughter sounded false. “How have you been? Will you come home for the winter break to see your brother?”

  Sasha promised.

  And this morning, the schedule for the winter exams had been posted. And Sasha found out that the Introduction to Applied Science exam for the second years in Group A was scheduled for the eleventh. January 11.

  The day before her mother was to give birth.

  It was snowing.

  “I worked on it,” Sasha said dully. “Nikolay Valerievich, I worked hard, honestly, I am doing everything the way you tell me to. I . . .”

  Sasha stopped talking. Sterkh hitched up his sleeve: on his wrist, held by a leather band, instead of a watch, was a round metal reflector.

  “Let us take a look at the condition of your, hmm, inner world . . .”

  A sharp ray of light deflected by the metal made Sasha blink. The hunchback frowned, pulled his sleeve over the bracelet, and pushed his palm over his long gray hair. His face, usually pale, now seemed gray.

  “Not very good. Not quite. Something is not right, Sasha. I am under the impression that you are using your uncommon willpower to resist my subject.”

  “No, I’m trying! Honestly! I’m doing everything I’m supposed to.”

  Snow fell gracefully on the naked branches of the linden trees. Below, a truck drove along Sacco and Vanzetti.

  “Sasha, please have a seat.”

  She sat down at her desk by the window. Tremulous air rose above the radiator, and a cold draft curled around the cracks in the windows. Between the window frames, a large dead fly whiled away eternity.

  “When I saw you for the first time, I was simply numb with happiness,” the hunchback confessed. “I thought you had this gift . . . a rare, precious gift. The gift of an astounding clarity and strength. And now I don’t know what to do with you. The test is only half the problem. The test you can retake, if worse comes to worst. But the placement exam!”

  Sasha shook her head violently.

  “I can’t do any makeup tests! My . . .”

  She stopped short. The hunchback held up his hand.

  “I know you don’t like makeup tests. None of you do. But the difficulty of the placement exam is that you may not retake it. You have to pass it on the first try. Only one try. And you have a little over a year before that exam, Sasha. Ah, what hopes I had for you . . .”

  “If I’m that hopeless,” Sasha whispered, “maybe you don’t need me here in Torpa? Maybe I don’t belong here? Maybe you made a mistake accepting me, and now you can . . .”

  She fell silent, afraid to continue. Against her will, she saw herself being released from the institute, while Yegor stayed behind. She could forget Torpa, like a scary dream, and along with Torpa, she would forget Yegor . . .

  Sterkh bent farther over the teacher’s desk, making his hump seem even bigger. Sasha thought he now looked at her with certain interest. As if the idea, offered by the student, was not all that stupid.

  “Listen, Sasha. At six o’clock tonight please meet me in the teachers’ lounge. We have something to discuss.”

  “Let’s get married,” Yegor suggested.

  They were sitting in the gym on a pile of wrestling mats. Yegor had just finished helping Dima Dimych fix the Ping-Pong tables; the first-year girls took over the paddles and the gym was filled with the cheerful sound of Ping-Pong balls flying from wall to wall.

  Sasha went on as if she had not heard him. And only when he was about to feel really insulted—usually people have some reaction to this sort of suggestion—only then did she turn and look into Yegor’s eyes very attentively.

  “Why? Aren’t we happy right now?”

  Yegor was taken aback.

  “Well, what do you mean, ‘Why?’ Why do people get married?”

  The Ping-Pong balls knocked about, a celluloid rain.

  “I am supposed to meet Sterkh at six o’clock in the teachers’ lounge.”

  “So what?”

  Sasha took a deep breath and exhaled again. Her hope wasn’t based on anything serious. She simply desperately wanted to have this hope. If I get out of here, I will certainly get Yegor out as well, Sasha thought. I just need to get out. Let them say we made a mistake; you have no talent for our profession, go home.

  In her mind Sasha pictured the hunchback sadly shaking his head and saying these words. She saw Portnov cleaning his glasses with the hem of his shirt. She saw herself pretending she was extremely upset, and then going and packing her things, and returning home . . .

  “And after that?” Yegor asked.

  Sasha flinched as if he had read her mind.

  “What about after that?”

  Yegor put his hand on her shoulder.

  “Sasha. I love you. I . . . Will you be free after six?”

  Automatically Sasha pulled up the sleeve of her jacket. The smiley face was bright red, as if ashamed. Sasha pulled the sleeve back over her wrist. She felt chilly.

  “Yegor, I really don’t know right now. Let’s decide . . . later.”

  At six sharp she knocked on the faux-leather door with the teachers’ lounge sign. She pulled the handle toward herself and peeked inside.

  She’d been here only once before. Long couches were still placed along the walls, a coat hanger with several jackets still stood in the corner, but the nude mannequin was missing. Portnov and Sterkh were talking; Portnov was smoking what definitely was not his first cigarette: blue threads of smoke stretched up to the ceiling.

  “Samokhina, wait,” Portnov said curtly.

  Sasha left. She hugged her shoulders.

  She simply could not control her imagination. Sterkh was trying to talk Portnov into releasing Sasha. Into admitting that she was professionally inadequate and letting her go. She was going to walk in, and they would tell her to write a resignation letter.

  On the first day of school Portnov had said that no one left the institute voluntarily. But there is no rule without exceptions. There is no such thing! They had had such expectations of Sasha, and here she was—a total blunder. Of course, it was not fun to admit one’s own mistakes, but it wasn’t fun being that mistake, either.

  Time went on, and she still had not been called inside. The scene in which Portnov and Sterkh released her went through her head like a movie, five or six times—and then it became insipid, faded, lost its credibility. Were they stupid enough to lose control over her, give her freedom, when at least half of her had been changed? And if she did leave, could she even change back?

 
Yes—she had to.

  She believed in the impossible. Like a child believes that on New Year’s Eve he will be given a real pony. Chances were those two were arguing over what to do with Sasha, how to utilize this worthless material.

  The underground corridor disappeared in the dark. Doors stretched to the right and the left, some covered with leatherette, some with real leather. Perhaps under the corridor there was another one, and one more; perhaps after the winter exams, third years—and fourth years, and the graduates—lived and studied underground?

  And maybe, just maybe, she thought, there is no such thing as the fourth and fifth year? Maybe the placement exam is a sacrificial offering? Appropriately primed victims enter the assembly hall—and never come out again . . .

  She imagined a conveyor, like a subway escalator that pulled third years onto the altar, one after another. Everyone held a grade book in his or her hand; rhythmically, a spiked wooden club rose and fell down again. Still alive, bones broken, students rolled from the altar down into a meat grinder, and the bloodstains on the pages of the grade books transformed into words: “Passed. C. Passed. A.”

  The door to the teachers’ lounge flew open.

  “Come in, Samokhina,” Portnov said, stepping into the corridor, a cigarette in his hand. Adding no further information, he disappeared down the hallway, into the darkness.

  Sasha stood by the door, motionless. They had made a decision; perhaps she, Sasha, would be asked to take the placement exam right now.

  “Sasha,” Sterkh said from inside the lounge, “come in, please. It’s already a quarter past six.”

  Sasha entered.

  The hunchback closed the door behind her. He seemed even more melancholy and paler than usual. His hump must have felt really uncomfortable; strolling around the long narrow auditorium, the hunchback kept moving his shoulders.

  Sasha stood still by the door. The hunchback, taking one last stroll to the window and back, stopped as well.

  “So, Sasha. I just spoke on the phone with Farit Kozhennikov . . . Don’t be scared, we were only discussing how we can help you. You are not making the required progress, the exams are coming, and time is against you. So Farit will set you up with a loop, that’s the only way to stimulate you. Encourage you, I suppose. But in reality, everything depends solely on your determination and perseverance. What’s wrong?”

  Sasha was silent. She found it hard to breathe.

  “Sasha.” The hunchback came closer, anxiously looking into her eyes. “What happened? Are you . . . scared?”

  He was two heads taller than Sasha. A really tall man. His black suit set off his pale face. Sasha took a step back.

  “You didn’t understand what I meant! It’s just a temporary loop, a perfectly ordinary thing, one may even say routine. Today is December sixteenth, and tomorrow for you will be December sixteenth, and the day after tomorrow . . . you will stay in this day as long as you need to complete the work. I spoke with Oleg Borisovich—you don’t have to work on the module or the exercises that day. Only Applied Science. Only our session. What’s so frightening about that?”

  “But I don’t want to,” Sasha panicked. “I . . . what if I never . . . I don’t even know what you want from me! What sort of result!”

  “I want your most honest effort,” the hunchback looked at her severely. “Just as any other teacher. And when you get the result—you will be the first to notice it.”

  Yegor was not in the corridor.

  Sasha dragged her feet to the main entrance of the institute and stopped—no hat, jacket unbuttoned—inhaling frosty air and exhaling white steam.

  A clean cotton strip of snow lay on the awning. Sasha gathered the snow into her hands and rubbed it on her face. Two older women walked by and gave her a strange look—residents of this town think we’re drug addicts, Sasha recalled. She didn’t blame them.

  Her life had shrunk, turning into one difficult, absurd day. This had happened once before, except then she had retained the illusion that she, Sasha, controlled the passing of time. “I want it to be a dream!”

  She wished she could say that now and wake up on a folding cot in the middle of the summer, two and half years ago. She wished to wake up.

  “Sasha! Finally! I thought they must have killed you!”

  Lit up by the white street lanterns, Yegor strode along the street, holding two pairs of skis under his arm—brand-new, narrow, without bindings.

  “Check out what they had for sale at the sporting goods store! And the price was ridiculous! These are old—Soviet era, I think—but look how cool they are! Do you know how much these things normally cost? Tomorrow I’ll buy bindings and wax . . .”

  “Why not this morning?” Sasha whispered.

  Yegor was taken aback.

  “Morning? What do you mean?”

  “It’s a pity you did not buy the skis this morning.”

  And she looked up at the sky, at the only star in the slit of white clouds. It could have been a real day . . . She and Yegor would go skiing, and later he, flushed, would say: “Let’s get married!” If one day must be chosen out of her entire life, why not a day like this?

  Yegor took a closer look at her. “What did he want from you? Sterkh?”

  “Can we ski today?” Sasha asked, paying no attention to his question.

  “Today?” Yegor hesitated. “No. Tomorrow. Today . . . let’s go to my place.”

  Sasha closed her eyes. She leaned into the collar of his jacket. Inhaled deeply the warm air, the steam of his breath.

  “Let’s go,” she repeated sleepily. “Let’s go, Yegor.”

  In the morning she woke up in her bed, barely alive, wiped out, and immediately asked Vika, who was busy setting her hair with a curling iron, what date it was.

  “Monday the sixteenth,” Vika answered grimly. “And if you feel like shrieking in your sleep, make your bed in the corridor!”

  “Uh-huh,” Sasha agreed.

  Vika gaped at her over her shoulder. The room filled with the smell of singed hair.

  The first block was Specialty. Sasha was the last one to enter the room, five seconds before Portnov’s appearance.

  “Good morning, Group A. Samokhina, you are free for today. Good-bye.”

  Her classmates’ faces fell. Sasha gave Portnov an inquiring look: almost an entire day remained until his conversation with Sterkh. Did he already know that Sasha was “set up with a loop”?

  Portnov nodded to her, answering the unasked question and simultaneously urging her to leave. When she still didn’t move, he said, sternly, “Go, Samokhina, don’t waste your group’s study time!”

  Sasha left. She went back to the dorm, took out Sterkh’s black album, and focused her eyes on fragment twenty-one.

  “Greetings, Sasha, how is your progress?”

  “There is none.”

  “Please don’t be so pessimistic. If I were an eighteen-year-old girl, I’d never lose heart, never despair. Did you work with the twenty-first fragment?”

  “Nikolay Valerievich,” Sasha said. “How do you do that? If today’s the sixteenth, then you don’t know yet what is going to happen tonight!”

  Sterkh shook his head absentmindedly. “Sasha, you are a child who grew up in a beautiful cozy room, but you have no idea what is going on outside its walls. You think that the ticktock of the kitchen clock is an inherent attribute of time as a physical phenomenon. Open the album and let us work on fragment twenty-two together.”

  “Let’s get married,” said Yegor.

  Celluloid balls noisily jumped on the tables, bouncing off the dense casing of the rackets. Larisa missed a shot, lost the game, and swore loudly. Dima Dimych, passing by, read her the riot act. Larisa threw the racket on the ground and went to the locker room.

  “Lack of sportsmanship,” the gym teacher stated grimly. “Sasha, do you want to play?”

  Sasha shook her head.

  “Didn’t you hear me?” Yegor was insulted. “I said . . .”

&n
bsp; “‘Let’s get married,’” Sasha continued with a heavy sigh. “Let’s.”

  “One would think you get proposed to every day,” said Yegor, deeply offended.

  “I’m sorry,” Sasha mumbled. “It’s all Sterkh. You see . . .”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” Sasha pulled herself together.

  “Come to my place tonight,” Yegor said. “Stepan is out, and we’ll ask Misha to take a walk . . .”

  Sasha glanced at her arm. The temporary tattoo was bright red, but what was there to be afraid of since tomorrow was never going to come?

  “I will.”

  She woke up in her bed, smelling burned hair. Vika had overheated the curling iron and was now cursing and trying to rid the metal shaft of the sticky melted hair.

  “The bell is in twenty minutes! Are you going to Specialty?”

  “No,” Sasha said and closed her eyes again.

  When she opened them for the second time, both Vika and Lisa were standing by her bed.

  “What do you want?”

  “Aren’t you afraid?”

  “I don’t care,” Sasha said and turned to the other side.

  “Hello, Sasha. Did you work on the fragment? Let us take a look.”

  The sharp ray of light made Sasha squint.

  “There is a bit of progress,” Sterkh said soothingly. “Just a tiny bit, but still—it’s a step forward. Work hard, Sasha, don’t give up. And right now, here’s what we are going to do. Let us go back to the first fragment and go through them again, slowly, one after another. Make yourself comfortable, focus, concentrate on the anchor. We have plenty of time. No reason to rush.”

  Plenty of time.

  “Just don’t tell me we should get married.”

  Yegor blinked.

  “Sasha . . . what the heck?”

  “Weren’t you going to ask me to get married?”

  “Yes, I was,” Yegor admitted softly. “But why are you angry?”

  “I am not angry,” Sasha said. To herself she thought, I’m not angry. I’m going mad.

  Kostya walked into the kitchen as she was pouring cold water on a freshly boiled egg. The kitchen was crowded—people were eating, having tea, washing dishes, or just hanging out—however, Sasha knew right away that Kostya had come looking for her. And now here he was.