Vita Nostra

by Sergey

  “You didn’t show up at Specialty today. What happened?”

  “I am sick of explaining it to everyone.” Sasha used a dessert spoon to lift the egg out of the pan. “Portnov let me skip today’s class.”

  “Portnov did?”

  “I don’t see anything weird about that. I’m the best student in the whole class; I can take an occasional break. Why shouldn’t I?”

  She thumped the spoon violently on the top of the egg and peeled off the shell like an enemy’s scalp.

  “What do they want from you?” Kostya asked gently. “What have they done to you now?”

  Sasha raised her eyes. The radio was on at full volume, a warm spell was expected tomorrow, then snow and gusty wind. Sasha thought how wonderful it must be to have “tomorrow.” To listen to the weather forecast. Follow a schedule. Rip off pages of a calendar. Tons of people lived that way—and none of them realized their own happiness.

  “I’m in a loop,” she told Kostya, surprising herself. “This day keeps repeating. They did this . . . he did this to make me learn . . . to allow me to do this assignment for Sterkh. And I can’t.”

  Kostya sat down as if his legs could no longer hold him.

  “That’s why Portnov let me miss today’s class. Because for me it’s always today.”

  Kostya was silent for a long time. “But then,” he said finally, “if I go to class tomorrow . . . won’t you be there? Tomorrow?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not like you can jump a day ahead, then come back, and let me know what happens.”

  The egg on her plate was getting cold. Sasha lowered her chin onto her interlaced palms.

  “I am telling you all this because tomorrow, I mean, this morning, you won’t remember anything anyway.”

  Kostya shook his head, as if refusing to accept such a possibility, but she shook her head in response.

  “I’m right. It all starts again. You will be surprised that I’m not in class. You might even ask me about it again. And I will think of some other explanation. I don’t feel like explaining everything over and over again, to infinity . . .”

  Kostya used both hands to ruffle his short hair, then rubbed his nose hard with his hand.

  “What are you supposed to do for Sterkh?”

  “It’s a long story. At first, he gave me a CD with . . . tracks. That did not work. Then he gave me an album, with black pages. So now I’m fiddling with this album. It feels as if this something is knocking, knocking, trying to enter . . . and I’m not letting it in.”

  “And this something wants to break the door,” Kostya added softly.

  “This happened to you too?”

  “Yes.” Kostya looked around. The kitchen was noisy, filled with the smoke and laughter of the first years. There were no empty stools left. “Let’s go someplace quiet.”

  They set off for the very end of the corridor, hid behind the wide-open door of the shower room, and hopped onto the windowsill side by side.

  “Sterkh gave me a printout,” Kostya said. “On this long roll of paper, like a parchment scroll. Told me to read vertically, by columns. I started to . . . and the same thing happened. As if something alien were trying to break in. I closed up. And this thing—bam!—broke my door. Or whatever is in there instead of a door. So that’s what happened. Then the disgusting sensation went away. I heard music—it was even kind of nice. Sterkh is pleased with me . . .” Kostya trailed off. “It’s all because I have weak willpower, though. And yours is strong. It cannot be broken easily.”

  “He told me I was special,” Sasha murmured. “And later he said he made a mistake, and I was ordinary. Did he say anything like that to you?”

  “No. You know his honey tongue. ‘Very good, Kostya, for tomorrow please do this column, I marked it in red . . .’”

  Kostya’s impression of Sterkh was excellent. Sasha smiled sadly.

  “How can I help you?” Kostya asked.

  “Come over tomorrow, I mean, today, just like you did. And ask me again how come I missed the class.”

  Kostya turned to face her. By the expression on his face Sasha understood—he thought she was making fun of him.

  “I am serious.” She looked down. “I . . . I have no one to talk to.”

  “What about Yegor?”

  Sasha was thoughtful for a while. She wasn’t thinking about Yegor. Right now, on this cold windowsill in the drafty corridor, she realized for the first time that no one but she would remember this rough draft of a day . . . aside, perhaps, from Sterkh and Portnov, but they were not here right now, and they did not care about Sasha’s personal life. This meant that she could tell Kostya anything she wanted. Everything would be erased. All would be deleted. Tomorrow morning Kostya would be surprised and anxious about Sasha’s missing Specialty.

  “If you had a day that would never count for you, that would never be recorded anywhere, what would you do?”

  “I’d rob a bank,” Kostya murmured. “There was this movie . . .”

  “Yes, I remember . . . Mom rented it for us. And we watched it, just the two of us. Before Valentin. Back then I had no idea . . . would never have thought it would happen to me.”

  Anna Bochkova shuffled by and stopped at the entrance of the shower room. “Sasha, aren’t you afraid of Portnov? Why didn’t you come to Specialty?”

  “They let me skip it, because I’m the best student.” Sasha glanced at Kostya.

  Anna clucked disapprovingly, proceeded into the shower room, and closed the door.

  “She’ll tell Zhenya,” Sasha said.

  Kostya bristled. “Tell her what?”

  “She’ll think of something. But it doesn’t matter, because tomorrow everything will start anew, and all of this will play yet again. Listen, you say I have strong willpower. But I can’t seem to take any action. Walk around the institute naked, scare the English professor with a live rat, or drown myself in an ice hole—those are the sort of stupid thoughts I’ve been having. And none of them can be realized. Because I must continually deliver new fragments to Sterkh. He says: ‘There is a tiny bit of progress.’ Three hundred sixty-five identical days, and a ‘tiny bit of progress’ will turn into a ‘small progress.’ Ten repeated years—and I might be allowed to take the first test.”

  “Sasha,” Kostya said quietly. “I owe you. Let me help you.”

  “How?”

  Water rustled in the shower room.

  “Forgive me for saying all that stuff back then,” Sasha said. “I was . . . I was wrong.”

  Kostya did not respond.

  Sasha hopped off the windowsill clumsily.

  “Anyway, thanks for your sympathy, but if I don’t go back to work right now, tomorrow, I mean today . . .”

  “Hold on,” Kostya said. “Show me what you are doing for Sterkh.”

  At half past nine she remembered her promise to Yegor to stop by at nine. She thought about it and decided it was not worth worrying about. In the morning Yegor would not remember that she’d never shown up. They would perch on the pile of mats at the gym, and Yegor would say again: “Let’s get married.”

  A sentence that seemed to bother her more and more every time, though she couldn’t quite figure out why.

  Sasha and Kostya sat in Sasha’s room. Three white dots in the middle of a black page rushed at her like the headlights of a moving train, then shifted back like a constellation in the opaque sky. Sasha attempted to work on fragment twenty-four, but every time her concentration broke when she counted to seventy.

  “I don’t understand what is going on,” Kostya admitted. “It’s like a musical introduction that keeps repeating, but the song itself is not there. Maybe I should try it myself . . . Maybe if I look at this fragment, I’ll have some thoughts? An idea, a hint on how to help you?”

  “No,” Sasha said quickly. “We shouldn’t. It’s not your exercise. Sterkh will kill both of us.”

  “I can talk to him,” Kostya offered. “To Sterkh.”

  “Tomorrow.”
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  “Yeah, but tomorrow may be too late.” Kostya pulled lightly on his hair. “Have you thought of going back to those tracks on the CD, to the player?”

  Sasha shuddered in revulsion.

  “I think Sterkh was wrong when he gave you the album,” Kostya said.

  “You think so? Are you taking over his teaching position?”

  “Don’t laugh. He was wrong in the psychological sense. He decided the problem was the disc, and the problem is you! If he gives you a printout like mine or a notebook like Zhenya’s . . . it won’t work anyway, because you do not want it to.”

  “But you see how much I want it to! I’m climbing the walls here!”

  Kostya shook his head stubbornly.

  “You are resisting. You are fighting for yourself.”

  “Sterkh said the same thing,” Sasha remembered. “You are fighting for your own conventional image, two arms, two legs . . .”

  “Yes. And you are right—right to fight for it. I could not fight for it myself.”

  “Yes, but you have a normal life, and I . . .”

  “I have a normal life?”

  His words made them very quiet, and the silence continued for fifteen long minutes. Sasha did not dare to speak: Kostya, son of his father, grandson of his dead grandmother, husband of Zhenya Toporko (who refused to take his last name to avoid being Zhenya Kozhennikov)—Kostya, second-year student of the Torpa Institute of Special Technologies . . .

  “Forgive me,” Sasha said.

  “I’m sorry, too.” Kostya slumped. “I want to help you, but I don’t have enough anger in me. I’d beat you up”—he gave her a crooked smile—“but I can’t hit you. I guess he is right.”

  “Who?” Sasha asked, already aware of the answer.

  “He,” Kostya repeated. “He has a very low opinion of me, you know. I tried to get my mother to open up. To talk about him. How did it even happen that he is my father?” Kostya slapped the windowsill in frustration. “How did I manage to be his son? Who is he, anyway?”

  “What did your mom say?”

  “Nothing. She does not want to talk about him at all. She starts crying hysterically—after all these years!”

  “Then how did she allow you to go to Torpa?”

  “How did your mother allow you to go? I am sure she had her reasons. My mother, as far back as I can remember, has always been paranoid about the army. I think a Gypsy told her that if I were drafted, I’d certainly be killed. Whenever she saw me playing with a wooden pistol, all hell would break loose!” Kostya sighed.

  “He used her fear,” Sasha said.

  Kostya looked up at her. “Yeah. He uses everyone’s fear. Yours. Mine.”

  Sasha did not answer. They sat next to each other, their heads hanging low and almost touching.

  “Someday, Sasha, I would love to get up—and realize that I’m not afraid of anything. I am tired.”

  “Of being afraid?”

  “Yes. Every second . . .”

  “Even now?”

  “I feel afraid even now.”

  “What are you afraid of now?”

  “Of going to class tomorrow. What’s the first block, English? And you won’t be there. You won’t exist at all, because you will have stayed . . .”

  Kostya did not finish. With an almost maternal instinct, Sasha placed her hand on his shoulder.

  “Don’t be afraid. I will try. Tomorrow you will come to class, and I will thank you . . .”

  Steps rang out in the corridor, and the door flew open. It was not Vika, and not Lena—Zhenya stood at the threshold, red as a tomato, wearing a bathrobe, eyes white with hatred.

  The town of Torpa was dusted with snow. Buildings were covered with light-colored hoods pulled down low onto the tin awnings; the air was moist and warm. Sasha remembered that a warm spell was expected tomorrow. Warm spell, then gusty winds.

  She bought some batteries at a kiosk near the post office. All the batteries they had. A hundred of them; the salesperson had to run down to the storeroom to get more, and Sasha spent every single coin she had left after the last stipend.

  She went back to her room. Put on the headphones. Placed the pack of batteries under her bed. Pulled out the dusty envelope with the golden disc, clicked the CD player shut, and started the first track.

  Then the second track.

  Eighteen tracks of different lengths. Eighteen fragments of unfamiliar silence. Oppressing. Indifferent. Detached. Eighteen varieties of quiet. A musical score of complete silence.

  Dead batteries fell on the floor. Sasha replaced them with new ones; the silence was growing denser. Her ears popped. Sasha stared into the darkness.

  In the middle of the night she was convinced she now had three arms. The third one grew somewhere around her sternum. Her body lost its outline; it distended and was barely contained by the bed; her body tried to escape its frame as rising dough escapes from a bowl. She endured it, grinding her teeth; the sequence of eighteen tracks repeated over and over, hours passed . . .

  She was not aware of falling asleep. She slept deeply and serenely, still wearing her headphones.

  Sunlight beat into the curtainless window and fell onto the dusty linoleum floor. The sheet looked like an old sail made out of tiny squares of intertwined threads. The blanket slipped; the square opening of the duvet made it look like an ace of diamonds. Sasha was surprised at how much she could observe at the same time.

  She turned her head. Her neck felt stiff. The room twitched slightly like a reflection in the water caused by a light wind. Her roommates’ beds were empty, blankets thrown over haphazardly. First block was English.

  No, it was Specialty.

  What time was it? What day was it?

  Time, units of time, symbols. On her nightstand was an old notepad; it contained important information, binary code, time of day, four symbols, one after another . . . Individual session with Portnov in the evening . . .

  Because today was Tuesday.

  Sasha turned on her side, moved toward the nightstand—and saw her arm.

  She screamed. She managed a croak rather than a scream. Something in her throat was making her wheeze. Sasha sat up in bed; something cracked audibly. Both her arms resembled mechanical prosthetic devices made out of ivory and semitransparent, dazzling-white skin. She lifted her right palm to her face and squeezed it into a fist: gears turned, ripped through the skin, and stuck out in jagged shards. There was no pain.

  Sasha rose with difficulty. The floor did not shake under her feet, but her head felt enormous. Sasha was afraid to touch her head with her new white mechanical hands. What if she broke something?

  She couldn’t bend her knees. Her feet seemed to be made out of wood. Sasha hobbled over to the desk and found a mirror. She screamed—croaked—again.

  Her eyes no longer had pupils or irises. Only the whites with red streaks. Sasha threw aside the mirror but continued seeing herself; now she realized that she saw with something other than her eyes. She saw with the skin of her face, her elbows, neck; shaking, she pulled off her T-shirt and saw the room through the skin of her back. She pulled off the sweatpants she’d forgotten to take off last night, along with her underwear. Now each spot on her body saw the entire picture, and combined, all these pictures constituted the world-without-Sasha. Her body—white, skinny, shaking in the middle of a messy dorm room—was the only entity outside this world.

  Sparks ran along her skin. Shy little fires like rolling drops. Tiny flashes of lightning. Underneath the skin membrane, in nearly transparent places, she could see her veins, blood vessels, and tendons—a mysterious forest. Her back itched like crazy—something was going on with her spine—it crackled, it was nimble, alive, full of its own existence.

  She heard steps in the corridor and realized it was really late. The two first blocks had ended, and lunch was almost over.

  Two blocks and lunch of the new day! She broke out of the loop, she did something . . . and something was done to her.

 
Someone was approaching her door from the outside. She grabbed a broom with her white hands and stuck its handle into the door. At the same moment came a knock on the door—it was Yegor’s knock, quick, confident: knock. Knock-knock. Knock-knock.

  “Sasha?” Yegor’s voice barely contained his anxiety and concern. “Are you at home?”

  The broom lock twitched: he tried to open the door.

  “Sasha? Hello?”

  “I . . .”

  Her voice sounded eerie. Sasha cleared her throat.

  “Are you sick?”

  “Yes,” Sasha said. “I am sick. And I’m sleeping.”

  “Listen,” said Yegor, and it sounded as if he was putting his lips right next to the keyhole. “We need to talk.”

  “I can’t . . . I don’t look well.”

  “Who cares,” Yegor said impatiently. “I’ll survive. Open up.”

  “I can’t. Later.”

  Pause. Yegor was probably looking around, feeling like a complete idiot—standing there in the middle of the corridor, in front of a locked door.

  “Let me in. Why am I standing here like a moron?”

  “I can’t . . .” Sasha croaked. “I’m sleeping.”

  “With whom?” Yegor asked after a minute pause.

  She backed away from the door. She knew that right at this moment she should say something funny, make a joke in response. But she felt completely lost—and a little angry at the accusation—and couldn’t come up with anything appropriate.

  “I see,” Yegor said softly.

  She heard his steps moving away from the door.

  She wore gloves to hide her hands. She put on her most opaque pair of black tights and her thickest pair of jeans. Two sweaters, one over another. Now she saw the world only through the skin of her face, and the picture was familiar, albeit incomplete.

  Her dark glasses were not dark enough to conceal the whiteness of her eyes. She used markers to draw eyes on her eyelids. Walking around with her eyes closed was difficult and uncomfortable, but she could not come up with a better idea.