Vita Nostra

by Sergey

  First years ran into door frames trying to enter their rooms. To onlookers they looked preposterous and creepy.

  Sasha wrote down her assignments in a separate notebook to avoid making mistakes. To avoid accidentally going further than necessary. Portnov still didn’t let her work with the glossary on her own—the only time Sasha was allowed to fall greedily upon the glossary was during their sessions, under Portnov’s supervision.

  She had long ago returned the sweater and pants to Natasha. The special stipend allowed her to shop at the local store—not exactly haute couture, but there was no longer any need to wear hand-me-downs. At the hair salon she had her hair cut into a long bob; talking with the young hairdresser, Sasha recalled Valery, the third year she met when she first appeared at the institute. “You should get a haircut, a long bob. And a brighter lipstick.” Where was Valery now, and what and with whom was he studying?

  She painted her lips with a caramel-pink lipstick and remained fairly pleased with her looks. Dima Dimych, who normally expressed reserved sympathy toward Sasha, now acted as if he saw her for the first time: in turn demanding and even shrill, then confused and displeased with himself, the gym teacher now paid more attention to Sasha than to all the other girls in her group combined.

  Sasha responded to his enthusiasm with amiable indifference.

  The landlady had a telephone on the first floor, and for a small fee Sasha could now call home whenever she felt like it; no more going to the post office and no more sitting in line.

  “Mom, hello! It’s me!”

  When Valentin picked up the phone, Sasha would hang up right away. After the first few times, Mom figured out her simple trick.

  “Are you trying to avoid speaking to Valentin?”

  “No, why?”

  “Oh stop it. Don’t talk to him if you don’t want to. It’s your business.”

  “I . . . it’s just the connection is so lousy here.”

  “Right.”

  “How are things? How’s the baby?”

  “Fine.”

  “How is everyone doing?”

  “Just fine. And you?”

  “I’m fine. Well, I’ll talk to you later.”

  “Sounds good.”

  In the beginning, Sasha felt depressed and cried after those conversations. The fact that the baby was healthy made the weight on her shoulders just a little bit lighter. But the tone that Mom used in speaking with her was utterly lethal. Detached, foreign.

  With the coming of April, Mom mellowed out. She even called the landlady’s number a few times and asked for Sasha. She called in the evenings, just when Sasha was bent over the Activator. Emerging out of her work was so difficult and so unpleasant that Sasha asked the landlady not to call her to the phone.

  “Mom, I’ll call myself. It’s very inconvenient here, you understand.”

  “That’s fine. I’ll wait for you to call.”

  Every day the weather was becoming warmer. The sun was shining in the blue sky over Torpa from morning till night. Sasha took her walks, alone and happy, and one day, on her return home, she ran into Denis Myaskovsky.

  Denis was hanging out by the entrance with the lions. He was clearly waiting for her, petting the face of the cheerful-looking stone guard.

  “Hello. Are you waiting for me?”

  “No. I have a window between two one-on-ones. I wanted to take a walk.”

  “Enjoy your stroll then.” Sasha took out the light-colored key with a heavy shaft.

  “Hold on. Just a couple of words.”

  Sasha turned to face him.

  In the last few months Denis had grown a beard, not particularly thick, but curly. The beard concealed his soft chin and made Denis appear more masculine and a bit older.

  “Kostya left Zhenya.”

  “What?”

  “He left her, and now he lives with me. Three days already. And you haven’t even noticed.”

  “Why would I notice?”

  “You haven’t been at the institute,” Denis continued as if he hadn’t heard her.

  “Really? I don’t hear anyone complaining. At least the teachers are not complaining.”

  Denis shook his head.

  “You know what I’m talking about. Zhenya is really mad—she’s managed to turn all our girls against Kostya. Lisa . . . for her, the name Kozhennikov is a verdict in itself. And you left, hid somewhere . . . as if you are not even one of us.”

  “What does it have to do with me?”

  “Everyone knows it has a lot to do with you.”

  “Listen,” Sasha said, immediately on the defensive, “Since I was a little girl I was raised not to meddle with other people’s personal affairs. Tell Kostya that lovers’ quarrels are easily mended.”

  She stepped up to the porch and recalled—it was right here, he stood right on this porch!—Farit Kozhennikov’s words: “You and I better than anyone know the value of words, don’t we.”

  “Denis, wait . . . I said something I shouldn’t have said.”

  Denis, who by then had walked away, stopped again. “Do you really think it was him who sent me?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “It’s just that he’s . . . he’s miserable. Zhenya is feeding on her own anger like a spider. And Kostya found himself in such a mess. So you see how it is.”

  “I see.” Sasha weighted the key on her palm. “But I cannot help him right now. You need to understand that.”

  Denis shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

  “I see,” he said bitterly, but she wasn’t sure he did. “Are you coming to English tomorrow?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Right. Well, I’m going.”

  “See you.”

  Sasha went upstairs to her room, and before making her usual tea, even before taking off her raincoat, she put on her headphones. She sat by the window and started Sterkh’s latest disc. The player was plugged into a wall socket—Sasha had gotten tired of dealing with the batteries, and had invested in a charge cord.

  In her assignment notebook, numbers seventeen and eighteen were written against today’s date. Sasha steepled her fingers, leaned onto the back of her chair, and closed her eyes. And for the first time in many days, she realized that the silence—and whatever entered her consciousness along with the silence—was now beating at the glass wall.

  Damn that Denis with his news! Even with her eyes tightly closed, Sasha still saw the flower box with the green sprouts, and Sacco and Vanzetti Street, and the streetlights newly emerging in the dusk.

  If they hadn’t been classmates, they would have forgotten about each other a long time ago. At least Sasha would try to forget about Kostya’s existence as firmly as one can forget a man whose life one saved. It’s not like she could dance all her life around the same vulgar story: a boy loved a girl, and the girl would not put out . . .

  They’ll kiss and make up, Sasha thought almost sympathetically. And then they will continue carrying the yoke of their incidental marriage. There are so many couples who live like that.

  The seventeenth track ended and started again. And again. The streetlights burned brighter, the steps and muffled conversations outside abated, and the windows in the building across the street went dark. Sasha sat like a bump on a log wearing headphones, and grew consistently convinced that the next day she was going to show up in Sterkh’s class unprepared for the first time in quite a while.

  A boy loved a girl . . .

  Sasha felt a long-forgotten nausea. She went to the bathroom and bent over the sink, but the nausea retracted as suddenly as it appeared. Did it mean that all unspoken words had not yet been turned into gold? Did it mean that Sasha still had a chance?

  Stop.

  She turned off the player, took off the headphones, and sat at the table. She placed a sheet of paper in front of her. From memory, without peeking at the Activator, she drew the symbol for “affection.” Above, without taking her hand off the paper, she sketched “creation.” Por
tnov was teaching her how to recognize and combine symbols; Sterkh had hinted that in the future, possibly during her fourth year, Sasha would learn how to manifest symbols, and that would bring her face-to-face with her professional pinnacle . . .

  The symbol on the paper in front of her existed in three dimensions—while being drawn on a flat surface!—and this symbol was evolving in time. This was the second time in Sasha’s life she’d managed to create this picture. But today’s symbol was not enclosed in a circle, like “Word,” which she produced a while ago by Portnov’s request. This symbol lived and developed in a linear fashion, as far as Sasha could see.

  She looked closer. The symbol was growing more complex. It doubled. Then doubled again. And there was something else: Sasha almost blacked out when she realized what it reminded her of. The division of embryonated cells?

  The birth of the world?

  She did not have a lighter, but a box of matches lay on the mantel. With shaking hands, Sasha crumpled the piece of paper with the depicted symbol, threw it into an empty pan, and lit it on fire.

  The paper went up in flames. Yellow flashes danced on the walls. A black-orange flower blossomed, writhed, and went out. The drawing turned to ashes.

  Sasha bit her lip. Let them never find out about it. Sterkh must never know about this; technically Sasha hadn’t broken any rules, but assuming—assuming just for one second!—that she did in fact do this . . .

  She imagined the entire universe burning, rolling into black petals. And she cried—for the first time in many days.

  She woke up in the middle of the night. Or was it morning? The clock delicately chimed three. Sasha had been sleeping at her desk for four hours, her head buried in her arms.

  She rubbed her eyes. Looked around: a burned piece of paper lay in the frying pan.

  Nonsense, Sasha said to herself. It was just my imagination running wild, because I am tired . . . and because I had been thinking of Kostya. As Farit would say, let’s consider it a dream. It was just a dream.

  She threw the ashes into the trash. Yawning, she stretched and sat down at her desk. She was supposed to complete two tracks by ten, which left her five hours of solid work.

  I know how to do this, Sasha said to herself, entering the number 17 on the display. I have done it before many times. And I have been praised for it. I am talented. And that means that right now I will listen to the track, think it through. Feel it through.

  She pressed Play.

  The clock struck five. By itself this sound could not attract Sasha’s attention, but after the last stroke the clock wheezed and stopped. Sasha thought it was time to wind it up . . .

  And in the next second she sat up sharply.

  Something had changed. Something had happened. The number 56 blinked on the CD player’s display, but Sasha could not comprehend its meaning.

  She looked around. The room appeared to her a lot smaller than it really was. A box rather than a room. It was hard to breathe.

  She moved toward the window and yanked it open. The glass rattled. Yellow strips of foam fell on the floor. Cold spring air burst into the room; only two hours remained until sunrise. Not thinking of anything, just wanting to breathe, move, live, Sasha climbed onto the windowsill. She squeezed through the narrow frame, stepped on the sprouts in the flower box, pushed off—and soared upward.

  The stars, veiled with a thin layer of lacy clouds, opened up to her. Below lay the lights of Torpa. Straight as an arrow, Sasha flew over the tiled roofs. She brushed an old weather vane with her wing, looped-the-loop, descended a bit, and flew right above the pavement, easily steering clear of trees and streetlights.

  She rose higher and hung there, spreading her wings like a heraldic eagle. Here she had plenty of air. Sasha observed and sensed the air as a gleaming soap bubble that embraced the semicircle of the horizon. She laughed; to her right and left, in her peripheral vision, two wings the color of burnished steel would come into view and disappear again. Not those chicken wings that were so difficult to towel dry. Two gigantic wings, the size of Sasha herself.

  She folded them, unreflecting, like an umbrella, and dove down. She swept above the heads of two chatting street cleaners; they raised their anxious eyes up to the sky long after Sasha vanished into the thin air.

  She made a circle over the central square and noticed a bus stop and a group of grim people waiting for the first trip. She rose higher and settled on the roof of a seven-story building—the town’s tallest building.

  The cold air sobered her up. Moving her wings slightly, Sasha attempted to figure out what she was going to do now, and where her adventure might actually lead. The speed she could reach in the air was quite impressive: Sasha recalled her longtime dream of leaving Torpa. Perhaps she could fly out of here?

  The wind picked up. The clouds careened across the sky, flat and ragged. High above the clouds the trace of a jet stretched across the sky, but Sasha could see that it was actually an opening—a narrow crack that resembled a smile. The crack opened wide, then closed up again into a thin thread. Behind the opening, on the other side of the sky, warm lights sparkled festively.

  Sasha jumped up, pushed off the shingles with her bare feet, and, moving her wings as fast as she could, charged upward. The smile of the crack became closer, and Sasha thought that behind it she could see a massive expanse lit by millions of lanterns. One more leap; the ragged clouds stayed far below. Sasha spread her wings, sizing up the best way to squeeze into the opening, and at that moment a blinding light flashed from the other side of the sky. Sasha shut her eyes. For a second she imagined standing in auditorium 14 in front of Sterkh, and him slashing her eyes with the white light reflected by the metal plate . . .

  In this surgically bright light, a dark winged body rushed at Sasha from the opening.

  Sasha turned upside down and lost her balance. Falling, she flew through the clouds, tumbled onto a sloped roof, rolled over—hurting her wing—and managed to break her fall at the very edge only by digging her toes into the drainpipe and flattening herself over the tiles. Directly in front of her—between her and the weather vane—a black shadow with ash-colored hair plummeted from the sky.

  He stood a few feet away from her. In place of the hump, two colossal black wings spread behind his back. They blocked out the sky.

  Sasha made a jerky movement trying to get up from the tiled roof. She slipped, turned over in the air, threw open her arms, legs, wings—and caught her balance right above the cobblestones. She folded her wings and, moving only the tips, streamed away—along the black precipice of the street: up, down, under the arch, smashing icicles. The black silhouette did not fall behind—just the opposite: with each sharp turn, Sasha saw it closer.

  Thunder roared. Every now and then the sky lit up and crackled, ripped apart by the sudden storm. Flinching from the flashes, Sasha flew on, rushed by a narrow gateway like a pipe, made a sharp turn avoiding a theater poster board—

  And then her entire body collided with an old chestnut tree.

  She turned upside down and collapsed.

  Thunder roared for the last time and hushed in the distance. The sky darkened, and the windows were unlit. An old lantern swayed on its chain, making a rasping sound. Once again, silence prevailed on Sacco and Vanzetti, and only somewhere around the corner a street cleaner’s shovel made a hesitant scraping sound.

  Sasha lay motionless on the cobblestones. She pretended to be dead, like a tiny insect.

  “What did the symbol look like?”

  “I can’t repeat it. ‘Creation’ combined with ‘affection.’ I can’t.”

  “Perhaps it was this?” Sterkh waved his hand. Right in front of Sasha’s eyes the symbol in question—the symbol that existed in time and lived by its own commandments—wove itself in the air and immediately disintegrated into a multitude of sparks.

  “Something like that.”

  “Something like that, or is that it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “H
ow many times did it double before you burned it?”

  “Three . . . or four.”

  “Was it three or was it four?”

  Sasha sniffled.

  “Four.”

  The sun was rising. Torpa’s streetlights went off. Sasha sat on an iron bench, bent over, hugging her shoulders with both arms. Sterkh stood across from her, not bothering with the hunchback charade. His relaxed wings brushed against the moist pavement.

  “What happened then?”

  “I began listening to the track. Number seventeen. And eighteen.”

  “How many tracks did you listen to?”

  “Nikolay Valerievich,” Sasha said. “It was an accident. I short-circuited.”

  “Did it happen ‘all by itself’?”

  Sasha hid her face in her hands.

  “I’m listening,” he said gently. “But I need to know: how many tracks did you manage to work through?”

  “Up to f-fifty-six . . . Forty altogether.”

  A long black feather caught in the wind, made a circle over the pavement, and got tangled in the thick shrubbery. Sterkh moved his shoulders; his wings unfolded to the full extent, tinted blue, shimmering and twitching slightly in the wind. They slowly folded over, pressing against his back, in the shape of a small hump.

  “My office, today at noon.”

  She showed up to English class wearing a pantsuit, her hair meticulously coiffed and her face made-up. She was overall well-groomed, but also silent, as if she once again had lost her ability to speak. At the professor’s request, she wrote down several sentences with irregular verbs on the blackboard, and did not make a single mistake.

  The class ended at eleven. Kostya and Zhenya left the auditorium, avoiding each other’s eyes and moving in different directions. Sasha went down to the dining hall, got a glass of apple juice, and sat at an unoccupied table. She opened the Textual Module and started reading from the beginning, from paragraph one. Repetition is the master of skill. No one had said she could not repeat things.

  Slowly, meticulously, word by word—rumble, roar, meaningless noise. As if a million beautiful songs were being sung simultaneously, and their combination formed a cacophony. As if millions of declarations of love were being said one over the other, and the result was a din, babbling; not a single projection of a single will would fall onto the surface of application, and no meaning would be born . . .