Vita Nostra

by Sergey

  “Selfish bunch, all they want is to listen to their music,” said an old woman who was sitting on the bench.

  Sasha remained standing, breathing on her frozen fingers. Then she sighed, straightened her shoulders, and realized that her wings had disappeared.

  Every day she went to the store with a grocery list. She ironed swaddling blankets. Helped her mother with the baby’s feedings: her brother was on formula, and Mom was heartbroken over it, while Sasha did not quite understand all the fuss about it. So her mother didn’t have any milk, so what. All the hustle and bustle with the bottles and nipples was annoying, but then anyone could feed the baby. For example, Valentin. Or even she, Sasha.

  Her brother elicited absolutely no feelings in Sasha. No tenderness, no aggravation. She learned to sleep through his crying, while Mom and Valentin took turns getting up—and the baby required them to get up every three to four hours. This was a world that revolved around one single heavenly body, it was completely subordinate to the baby. Mom, not entirely healthy, still noticeably weak, could think only of the baby. Valentin sank into household duties up to his chin, and was forgoing sleep and rest for the sake of the evening bath time. The neighbors said that a woman could only dream of a husband like Valentin.

  Sasha felt like an asteroid in a temporary orbit. She still took walks with the baby in the carriage, catching curious glances from the passing women, old dames, and, rarely, men. She boiled the bottles, cooked and cleaned, occasionally changed diapers. Once or twice her brother smiled at her: it was a meaningless, albeit very sweet, almost human smile. Once, on a very sunny day, Sasha took the risk and brought the carriage into the familiar park. There, walking in circles over the clean paths sprinkled with salt, she thought, for the first time since the exams, of Farit Kozhennikov. And about what could have happened had she, Sasha, failed her Specialty test.

  Her brother slept under his down blanket, swaddled like a tiny grain in a thick shell. He may not have happened at all. Everything alive was so fragile. “There is absolutely no way of negotiating with you, is there?” Sasha asked at the riverbank, watching autumn leaves swim by. And he answered: “Sasha, the world is full of entities that people cannot negotiate with. But somehow people survive, don’t they?”

  But how fragile was their chance of survival!

  Snow was melting under her feet. Spring was coming. Grandmothers with grandchildren and mommies with carriages strolled around the park. A worn, scratched piece of ice remained in place on the ice rink, and three boys were playing hockey—only one of them wore skates, and he kept losing.

  The baby stirred. Worried, Sasha rocked the carriage. It was time to go home. Too late, though: baby Valentin started crying during their walk, and shrieked nonstop all the way home—Sasha ran wild-eyed, scaring the passersby, cursing herself for going so far away from the apartment.

  The baby smacked his lips and quieted down. Sasha took a deep breath, turned the carriage around, and almost immediately ran into Ivan Konev.

  It was too late to pretend not to have seen or recognized each other. Sasha was the first one to regain self-control.

  “Hey.” She rocked the carriage nonchalantly.

  “Hey,” mumbled Konev and nodded at the carriage. “Yours?”

  “Uh-huh,” Sasha replied before she had a chance to think about it.

  “Congratulations . . . A boy?”

  “Yes.” Sasha smiled beatifically. “And how are things with you?”

  “Fine.” Ivan licked his lips, not the smartest thing to do in the winter.

  “Well, see you around,” Sasha said indifferently. “Time to feed him.”

  “See you.”

  Sasha marched toward the entrance to the park without a backward glance.

  The night before leaving for Torpa Sasha did not sleep at all. She lay in the dark listening to the ticking of the all the clocks in the apartment. The baby woke up, cried, then quieted down. He cried again. Sasha listened to her mother murmuring a lullaby in the next room. She suddenly recognized the song, or rather a singsongy recitative: it was a piece of her own babyhood. A small slice of information. A word blown away by the draft.

  The baby fell asleep. Mom must have passed out right away; Valentin tossed and turned, then all was quiet again. The clock was ticking.

  Sasha got up and stumbled over her half-packed suitcase. The glow of the streetlights peeked into the room through a gap between the curtains. A car drove by, its headlights passing over the ceiling.

  Bare feet on the ice-cold floor, Sasha stepped into the next room.

  The room was cramped. The baby’s crib was pushed right against the big bed so that Mom could reach the baby without getting up. At that moment Mom slept, a hand under her cheek, her face pressed against the side of the crib.

  Trying not to look at the sleeping Valentin, Sasha came closer to the crib. A ray of light from the outside crossed the blanket in a diagonal streak. The baby lay on his back. Miniature fists lay on the pillow above his head, eyelashes stuck together, tiny mouth half-opened.

  He also was a word. A resonance. A material personification of someone’s curt demand. Sasha had no idea how she knew this; she took another step and took the baby out of his crib.

  His head dangled; Sasha managed to support it. The baby was a half-formed willpower, a mobile cluster of information; he was a part of Sasha. A part of her world. He was hers.

  Two words merged into one sound.

  The baby opened his sleepy blue eyes. He seemed to be getting ready to scream. The clock was ticking. Mom’s breathing was shallow and uneven, tortured by the constant lack of sleep.

  Sasha stared at herself. And again she stared at herself; it was similar to two mirrors facing each other. The baby, now integral to her essence, was quiet. His eyes darkened slowly. His stare was gaining comprehension.

  Sasha barely contained her scream.

  Just as silently, holding the baby to her chest, she went into the kitchen. Still not comprehending what had actually happened, she was already drenched in cold sweat from head to foot. She placed the baby on the kitchen table, then bent double, pressing her hand to her mouth. She vomited gold coins, for the first time in many months. The coins jingled, rolling on the floor, and every sound, every minuscule noise, could awaken light-sleeping Mom.

  Unmoving, the boy lay on the table. His fists kept opening and closing. His eyes, now deep brown, stared intently, steadily. The meaning—a sum of meanings that this human being was comprised of—now dissolved inside Sasha as rapidly as soap in water. The lullaby linked them like shared skin.

  Sasha struggled, trying the break the link. Trying to separate the baby into his own specific “informational packet.” At some point she thought that she could understand and control everything: both their bodies as reflections of two similar meanings, two spoken words, one of which is a request, a demand, a clump of will . . .

  That clump broke out of control. It absorbed the baby’s absence of will as a large drop of mercury sucks up a small one.

  The baby relaxed his limbs tiredly. He closed his eyes. At the same moment the bedsprings squeaked—Mom was stirring. In a second she would reach through the sides of the crib, and instead of her sleeping son she would find a cold sheet . . .

  Keeping her eyes on the baby, Sasha moved to the door. She closed it; locked it. Thankfully, the kitchen door had a latch, in case of cold drafts.

  Her hands shaking, she picked up the receiver. She dialed a cell phone number; this number was registered in her mind as something so extreme, something for an emergency only to be remembered in dire circumstances, as if it were written in scarlet letters on a concrete wall.

  The clock showed half past three.

  “The telephone subscriber you are trying to reach is currently out of range.”

  It cannot be! Sasha bit her lip and dialed the number again. Answer! Please!

  Beeps.

  “Hello,” a calm voice answered. It did not sound sleepy. It was unlikely
that this person was woken up in the middle of the night.

  “Farit,” Sasha murmured, using his first name for the first time. “I did something . . . something like . . . please help me reach Nikolay Valerievich!”

  “What did you do?”

  “I don’t understand. Something with the baby. Please, help me!”

  “Hold on,” Kozhennikov said. A long pause followed. Sasha heard steps in the corridor and Mom’s uncertain voice.

  “Sasha? Did you take the baby?”

  “Yes,” Sasha said, watching the lifeless child on the kitchen table. “Go back to sleep. Don’t worry. I’m rocking him to sleep.”

  The door gave a jolt.

  “Sasha, did you lock the door? Open up!”

  “Go to sleep,” Sasha repeated, pressing the receiver to her ear. “Don’t worry. I am watching him.”

  “What is going on? Open the door! Why did you lock it up?”

  “I’ll open it. Go back to sleep.”

  “Alexandra!”

  Mom was fully awake. Now her voice contained anger—and fear. Something was going on, something was happening, there was trouble, she could feel it—but she could not recognize the nature of the danger.

  “Sasha,” Kozhennikov said very drily on the phone, “check whether the baby is alive.”

  “What?” Sasha babbled.

  “Check his pulse.”

  “Open the door immediately!” Mom punched the door with her fist. “Valentin! Valentin!”

  Sasha grabbed the baby’s wrist. It was so tiny it was impossible to take his pulse; already sure the child was dead, Sasha suddenly remembered Dima Dimych’s lessons (“Count the pulse in six seconds, multiply by ten”) and pressed her fingers to the baby’s small neck.

  The neck was warm. The pulse was there.

  “He’s alive,” Sasha rustled into the receiver.

  “Open the door!” Valentin roared, trying to take the door off its hinges.

  “Just wait!” Sasha shouted, tears in her voice. “What are you yelling about? Why are you screaming? I’ll open in a minute!”

  “Hang up the phone,” Kozhennikov said. “Sterkh will call you back.”

  The screaming outside the door ceased for a second. Mom was crying, Valentin was trying to calm her down.

  “No need for hysterics. What exactly happened, I don’t understand . . . It’ll be fine . . . just wait . . . Alexandra, open up immediately. I am counting to three. One . . .”

  The phone rang.

  “Hello!”

  “Listen,” Sterkh said without any introduction. “And work, work hard, focus, you have three minutes for the reverse transition. Go!”

  And then silence drowned everything out.

  The latch gave up first—little screws became loose, the wooden plank fell apart, and Mom and Valentin stormed into the kitchen.

  By then their neighbors, awakened by all the noise, were already pounding on the walls and the radiators. Some genius had called the police. The yellow car with a blue stripe drove up to the building a full hour after the beginning of the incident.

  Sasha sat in front of the kitchen table on which the sleeping child lay. He slept soundly, snoring, almost touching his face with tiny hands. Sasha was drenched in sweat, white-faced, disheveled, her hand clutching the phone.

  The receiver emitted short beeps—Sterkh had rung off.

  The rest of the night was spent in interrogations. Mom took valerian root, phenobarbital, Valium. In the heat of the moment, Valentin slapped Sasha in the face—and was then deeply uncomfortable. The baby was taken to his crib, and there he slept until seven in the morning; Sasha’s heart faltered when she heard his hesitant whimper. Mom fed him, he ate, smiled, clearly in a very good mood, and again closed his blue eyes. Mom calmed down just a little.

  “Can. You. Explain. To. Us. Why. Did. You. Do. This?”

  “I didn’t do anything.” Sasha lied and looked away. “I thought, ‘It’s my last night, so who knows when I’ll see him next time’ . . .”

  “What do you mean who knows?”

  “I just held him,” Sasha repeated stubbornly. “I just wanted to . . . sit with him. Why were you trying to break the door? What am I, a murderer?”

  Mom and Valentin exchanged glances.

  “You acted strangely,” Valentin said curtly. “Why did you lock the door? Who were you talking to on the phone? At half past three in the morning?”

  “It was a wrong number.” Sasha was tired. She no longer cared, she just wanted to get away, stop this questioning, lie on the berth in the moving train and sleep until they got to Torpa.

  They exchanged chilly good-byes. Sasha picked up her suitcase, rolled it onto the street all by herself, and walked—alone—to the metro station.

  It must have been similar to childbirth: that night for the first time she recognized herself as a sum of information. She found something foreign within herself, and she pushed it out, delivered it, bloody and turned nearly inside out.

  Until the last minute she hadn’t known whether the baby would be restored as the original being in his original body. Mom had not noticed anything different in his looks or behavior—at least, not in the first few minutes. Sasha had no idea what would happen later.

  She got to the station three hours before the train was scheduled to depart. They weren’t yet seating passengers. Sasha found an empty seat in the waiting room and sat down, her suitcase placed in front of her.

  She felt devastating pity for her mother. She shuddered at the thought of what could have happened to little Valentin. She knew Mom would never forgive her.

  Human masses slowly shifted around the huge waiting hall. Socks and shirts, tubes of toothpaste, trousers, sweaters, books, chocolates, and toys swam around, locked inside the suitcases. All of this was material to the last thread. And all of this was only a shadow of something significant that hung overhead. Sasha was convinced that if she lifted her eyes to the ceiling, she would see an obstacle between her and the light, something enormous, throwing a complex system of shadows.

  Last night, listening to the silence in the receiver, she’d made an internal effort compared to which all her school load seemed child’s play. Again she had stepped over the line. One more step toward the world she knew nothing about. The world she was led and pushed to by force. And from where, it seemed, there was no way back.

  They finally began seating the passengers. Sasha was the first one to approach the train attendant.

  “Hold on.” The attendant, a curvy blonde of about thirty, stepped in front of her. “I need my first passenger to be male—for good luck!”

  Sasha did not reply. She stood by the carriage, staring up at the dark sky.

  Streetlights burned in official white. No more snow could be seen neither on the platform nor on the rails—stomped on by many feet, cleared up by the workers. The ground twitched underfoot; a diesel shunter was moving parallel to their platform. A round-faced youth peeked out of the window, smiled, and waved to Sasha.

  A middle-aged man with a suitcase approached the train. He presented his ticket and walked up the black open-work steps into the carriage.

  “Now you can come in,” the attendant said to Sasha.

  The train was stuffy. Sasha found her place, pushed the suitcase under the berth, hung up her jacket, and lay down.

  Why had she picked up a sleeping child in the middle of the night?

  Why did she think that she and the child were one and the same? Why had she wanted to possess him, make him a part of herself? Why had it been so easy for her to accomplish?

  And why hadn’t she listened to Sterkh when he said “I don’t recommend it”?

  The carriage was slowly filling up with people: some of them looked dense, like wooden figurines. Others seemed vague, faded, and insignificant. Sasha closed her eyes to avoid seeing.

  Tomorrow was February 14. Beginning of the second semester. Portnov was going to gather them in auditorium 1 and distribute the new books and ex
ercise sets. Sterkh . . .

  Sasha sat up in the berth at the thought of what Sterkh would say to her. Last night they had not said hello or good-bye: a second before Mom and Valentin stormed into the kitchen, Sasha had managed to whisper that the baby had regained consciousness, and Sterkh had simply hung up the phone. She was well aware of the fact that the hunchback’s reaction to her crime had been immediate and professional, and if it weren’t for him—and Farit’s brilliant work as a dispatcher—things could have turned out differently.

  Sasha tried not to imagine how differently.

  The train began to move.

  She would return to Torpa. Accept punishment from Sterkh. If he decided to punish her. And then she’d again bury herself in the books. In the exercises. With time she would completely cease to be human, and then she probably would no longer care . . .

  But why should she return to Torpa?

  She stopped breathing. In the last few years she’d gotten so used to the idea that she could never get out of Torpa, that she was doomed to study until she got her diploma, that she was facing the placement exam during her third year, and that her entire life depended on Portnov, on Sterkh, on Kozhennikov. Who for the past two and a half years had done whatever he wanted with her, all the time “not asking for the impossible.”

  But Sasha had changed!

  Her neighbors, a married middle-aged couple, were getting ready for sleep. Sasha found a handful of coins in the pocket of her jacket; last night in the kitchen she’d gotten a chance to collect them . . . perhaps only some of them. Valentin had asked what they were, and Sasha had dispersed her habitual lie about game tokens. Mom had had other concerns. Mom had been scampering around with baby Valentin in her arms, and Sasha had crawled under the table, gathering gold coins with a sign of zero, a round symbol that seemed three-dimensional when one looked at it closely. Coins that nothing good ever came from.

  The train rolled through the snow-capped forest. The light from the windows fell on the sinking, porous snow, here and there ripped by the thawing holes. Passengers ate and drank, smoked on the platform between the cars, laughed, slept. Anticipated reunion. Endured a separation. Played cards.