Vita Nostra

by Sergey

  Mom spoke easily, and her tone more than her words were intended to convince Sasha of her complete serenity, stability; it was telling Sasha gently that they were just fine without her. Sasha imagined Mom standing over the stove, holding the receiver, stirring rice cereal in a little pot, all the while smiling and talking and talking and smiling . . .

  Sasha closed her eyes. The telephone receiver warmed up with the heat of her cheek. The membrane trembled, turning her voice into a current of sound waves. A curly cable extended from the receiver, but the words stretched farther, and Sasha stretched with them—from her house to the metal telephone box, farther along the wires, into the frozen ground, under the fields and snow piles, under the roots and concrete plates, farther, farther; Sasha felt extending her arm so very far, stretching it to the point of a spasm.

  Mom was not standing over the stove. She sat in a chair, her eyes closed, clutching the armrest with her left hand. Her fingers were clenched tightly as if in pain, but Sasha, who claimed Mom at this moment, knew that there was no pain.

  Her throat felt tight. And both Mom and Sasha froze, very still, and silence reigned on both telephone receivers.

  “Mommy . . . I am doing great, too, I am studying hard, and they are feeding us well . . .”

  Like an almost-empty can of dry peas, words that meant nothing rolled around—back and forth along the wires. With every word, the distance between Sasha and her mother stretched farther and farther; they had nothing to say to each other anymore, they could not hear each other, not a single sincere word between them . . .

  “Mom!”

  The scream rolled down the telephone cable—under frozen streams. Under snowed-in meadows. Echoed in the plastic receiver.

  “Sasha? What’s wrong?”

  This is it, these were the words of the true Speech. Eide, meanings. Must manifest: “None of it is your fault, drop this weight, live and be happy.”

  But to say this in human terms, out loud, would be hideous. It would be nonsense and a lie. And nothing would change, things would only get worse.

  “Mommy . . . give the baby a kiss for me, everything is just fine.”

  “I will. Good-bye, Sasha darling, talk to you soon.”

  Short beeps.

  “Time is a grammatical concept. Is that clear, or do I need to explain?”

  “It’s clear.”

  “Before you start manipulating time, you must set up an anchor. ‘Now—Then.’ Represented graphically, it looks like this. A bobber with two poles, red and white. Don’t rush, Sasha! We’re already getting ahead of the program, and we don’t have to—”

  “I know. I do have to, though. I can feel it. Now.”

  “Good. The anchor shifts into the Then condition as soon as you change the grammatical construction. Aside from the basic vector—past-future—you must consider the overall duration of the action, the periodic nature of the action, the finality or incompleteness of the action, the relationship between the beginning and the end of the action and the Now point—Sasha, put down the pen! Don’t rush! It’s an extremely complex exercise; very few third years are brave enough to approach it, let alone master it!”

  “I am ready.”

  “I see. Well then. Let us take half of the grammatical measure, half a measure backward. Concentrate. Time is a grammatical concept. Is that clear, or do I need to explain?”

  “It’s clear.”

  “Before you start manipulating time, you must set up an anchor. Now—Then. Represented graphically, it looks like this. A bobber with two poles, red and white. Don’t rush, Sasha!”

  “Nikolay Valerievich, we’ve done this already. If we don’t shift the construction one minute back . . . I mean, half a measure back, we are going to continue moving in circles!”

  “Practice makes perfect. Relax, Sasha. Calm down. The reverse reconstruction is a little bit more complex. Now the bobber changes colors . . . Now—Then. Recognize this.”

  “I got it! I . . . will try. It was, it went on, it repeated, it ended. Ended. Now.”

  “Bravo! Want to try again?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s begin. Time is a grammatical concept. Is that clear, or do I need to explain?”

  She would go to the riverbank. She would make a snowball and press it with her hands to make sure it stayed firm. She would throw it straight up. Time after time. A janitor who was shoveling snow on Lugovaya Street probably thought she was skipping classes, openly loitering.

  The snowball separated from her palm. It went up into the zenith and froze for a moment. It flew down, but did not fall. Again, it went up into the zenith. Flew down. From “is” it shifted to “was,” then went into the “had been” loop, and Sasha’s heart kept repeating the same beat.

  The janitor pausing for a smoke break watched the girl juggling a snowball. The smoke from his cigarette stood motionlessly in the air, glimmering like a television screen.

  Now. Sasha did not say or think it. Sasha did it, returning herself into the previous grammatical tense, to the point of Then, where she’d set up the anchor.

  The snowball fell and drowned in a snow pile. A streetlight lit up at the corner of Lugovaya Street. It was getting dark very fast. Sasha’s hands, red and frozen, burned like fire.

  A person needs two eyes to determine the exact distance to objects. Two points of view that form an angle. That’s what Portnov was telling them during lectures: your projections onto the nearest future and your projections onto the nearest past are set closer than the eyes on your face, but they guarantee stability to your personal time frame. “Was” and “will be”—two bearings, two legs, when you walk, you can shift the center of gravity a bit forward, or a bit backward . . .

  Sasha ran over the snow—slightly ahead of herself, then slightly behind. I was! I will be! Snow flashed white sparkles; Sasha’s shadow became short and fell under her feet, then crawled forward and became longer the farther Sasha moved away from the streetlight.

  The janitor watched her run.

  “The language of creation knows no grammatical tense. It has only one mood—the imperative. The first derivative from creation uses the subjunctive mood. The second derivative uses the narrative.”

  “But does name exist in time?”

  “Yes. Realized name becomes a process.”

  “If Name is a process, then what is the connection between names and verbs?”

  “Do you remember high school physics? Remember the wave-particle duality?”

  “Well . . . in principle.”

  “Abysmal ignorance,” he said, but without rancor. “There is motion and static. Action and its object. The speed, mass, and length of a wave. Names are building blocks of creation. Verb is a command to build, a will in its purest form. An impulse. Concentrated action. Verb can pull a name out of nonexistence, and it can send it into nonexistence by a single command. All the verbs I’ve ever known were egocentric, narcissistic, and meant to succeed. Geared toward creation at any cost.”

  “I see. Then how . . .”

  Sasha looked up at Portnov and promptly forgot her question.

  Portnov wore jeans and sweaters. He had blond hair that was beginning to go gray, glasses with narrow lenses, and cold blue eyes. He was not a particularly pleasant person, he could be quite rude; Sasha never thought of him as a man, never wondered whether he had a family, a wife, a mistress, any children. Portnov was a teacher, a whip-cracker, an animal tamer. Portnov was Portnov.

  But now, it was clear that whoever was sitting in front of Sasha was not human. Moreover, it had never been human. For the first time in her life Sasha saw—recognized, understood—what exactly an “embodied function” was.

  “What happened, Samokhina?”

  Sasha stared at him, forgetting to breathe, completely in awe. A glossary? An activator? A textbook? A textbook that was given a human name?

  “Oleg Borisovich . . . ,” Sasha whispered.

  She saw him again: hair pulled into a ponytail. A gray swe
ater with blue stripes. An attentive glance over the lenses.

  “What?”

  “You . . .”

  “What about me?”

  Sasha swallowed bitter saliva.

  “You’ve just seen me?” Portnov sounded surprised. “You manifest entities, read highly complex informational structures, and you’ve only just seen me?”

  Sasha managed a shallow nod, and then shut her eyes, trying to drive the tears back into her eyes.

  “What’s the matter?” Portnov actually sounded worried. “Sasha?”

  “You are not human,” Sasha whispered.

  “So? Neither are you.”

  “But I was human. I was a child. I remember that. I remember being loved.”

  “Does it matter to you?”

  “I remember it.”

  “Trust me, I can remember anything you want. I remember being a child. Being raised by monkeys. Being a girl. Working as a cabin boy. Saving a baby out of the fire, scoring the winning goal during the World Cup. Memories are projections of events, and in this case it is much less important whether the events are real or not.”

  Sasha’s tears rolled down her face, smearing her makeup, leaving black traces on her cheeks and fingers.

  Portnov took off his glasses. “Are . . . are you feeling sorry for me?”

  Sasha shook her head.

  “Are you lying because you are afraid of hurting my feelings?”

  He knows everything about me, Sasha thought. He spent so many years turning people into Words that it is possible he knows more about us than we know ourselves.

  She located a handkerchief in her bag and began to dry her eyes with so much effort, as if she were trying to rub them entirely off her face. Portnov watched her with surprise and sympathy.

  “Are you scared? Is it such an unpleasant idea? Are you simply that used to considering me a human being?”

  Sasha sniffed and shook her head.

  “Emotional memory,” Portnov murmured. “You have already become a butterfly, but are still trying to crawl. You remember being a caterpillar. Samokhina, get ahold of yourself. We are losing time, and this session has a time limit, don’t you agree?”

  First years crowded the dining hall. Their first winter exams were coming up, but the queue was animated by their laughter and lively conversations. First-year girls flirted with the boys, the boys cracked jokes. Sasha thought that any first-year student at any dining hall of any given institute would behave in the same manner.

  Second years sat hunched over their plates—some wearing gloves, some wearing glasses, some sporting nervous tics. Even in the dining hall most of them couldn’t part with their books, printouts, and headphones. These students had already lived through the destruction and re-creation, and now they faced their first exam in Introduction to Applied Science. Sasha mentally wished them luck.

  Yegor was not there. Sasha took another good look around, but it was in vain.

  From the entire lunch menu she chose fruit compote, pale pink, with a slice of apple on the bottom of the glass. She sat in the corner of the dining hall facing the entrance—to make it easier to observe the room.

  Here they are, eating and drinking. They are still almost entirely human; they have human psyches and human bodies. With time, during the learning process, they will come out of their human skin and become Words, tools of Speech, the bones and tendons of a highly complex text that is called reality. Words know no fear, and no death. Words are free and conform only to Speech. And Speech—Sasha knew this!—is the core of harmony.

  “Dear third years, I’m so used to the individual sessions with each of you that it feels a bit strange—and all the more pleasant—to see the entire group in one room. I’m glad this small auditorium fits every one of us. Am I right—is everyone here? Do we need a roll call?”

  “Everyone is here,” Kostya said with a quick glance around the room. The third years of Group A sat behind the desks, chilly air wafted through the open window, and the heat from the radiators made the air above them tremble.

  Sterkh was smiling. His sharp chin nearly touched his speckled tie, arranged in a soft romantic knot. His black suit puckered on his back. Sasha always wondered why Sterkh insisted on wearing his wings even while in his human appearance.

  Maybe it was because, unlike Portnov, Sterkh used to be human. Yet that was a very long time ago. Now he represented a combination of two concepts: two poles, two energy flows, intertwined under the direction of one will. Perhaps the wings were a nod toward his dual nature; perhaps it was too dangerous to require such a complex organism to go through an additional metamorphosis. It could be Sterkh’s personal whim. Or maybe it was something else, something way beyond Sasha’s comprehension.

  The thing that Portnov called “emotional memory” flatly refused to weaken. For some reason, Sasha was pleased to know that Sterkh used to be human. Even though whatever he was now was just as far from human nature as an electronic microscope from a tortoiseshell comb.

  “Why did I want to gather you today? Today is December thirteenth, and that means that exactly one month remains until the placement examination. This month will require all your strength. Unfortunately, there is no makeup date for this exam: you have exactly one chance.”

  Sasha sat by the window, looking askance at the snow-covered street. With the arrival of the cold weather Sterkh forbade her to fly at night; in response to her pleading that she was not at all afraid of the cold, he shrugged his shoulders in surprise: “What does it have to do with the cold, Sasha? You have so much work now, such a heavy load! Not to mention that footprints of bare feet on the snow are so aesthetically displeasing!”

  Large snowflakes fell onto Sacco and Vanzetti.

  “Today I will tell you in detail what it is like to take the placement examination. It will help you keep it together and be prepared for the challenge at the defining moment. On January thirteenth, at noon sharp, both groups, A and B, will enter the large assembly hall and take their seats. You will be introduced to the examination committee. You will not be nervous, will not feel anxious, you will not have anything with you—under no circumstances are you to have any paper or pens. Nothing! The head of the committee will read out the names, and those called will go up to the stage, choose an examination sheet, and sign for it in the ledger. You will have three assignments: the first two are standard; the third one is individual, selected for each one of you according to your future specialization. In the process of completing this assignment you will cease being a human being and commence as Word; for the first time you will reverberate, my dears, and this is quite fundamental.”

  Sterkh surveyed the audience as if searching for expressions of rapture on the faces turned toward him. No one was smiling: everyone looked at him intently and attentively, fans watching a penalty kick going toward the favorite team’s goal.

  “You should not pay any attention to the drastic changes in your condition, time, space, and internal state. This is going to be quite a shock. It is supposed to be a shock, and you should prepare yourself for a shock. The subjective time of the examination may stretch from one minute to several hours. Don’t worry if things happen fast. Don’t be afraid if the examination seems too long. Remember: the goal of the examination committee is to help you, not to fail you. Remember also that you get only one chance.”

  Wind beat into the glass. Snowflakes rustled. It was getting dark pretty fast; Sterkh clicked the switch. The overhead light exposed a small dusty auditorium and nineteen third years silently watching their professor.

  “So.” Sterkh moved his shoulders, settling the wings in a more comfortable position on his back. “Any questions?”

  “Mommy? It’s me! Can you hear me?”

  A very distant voice. As if through a blizzard, something rustled and howled thinly in the receiver. As if from a distant galaxy, as if through a thick layer of water, as if through cotton wool.

  “Mom! I’m doing great! How are you?”

  “
Depends on the day, Sasha, but we’re hanging in, bit by bit. The baby has a cold. I have to take more time off. It’s because I did not nurse him, and his immune system is not as strong as it should be—”

  “Stop it! That’s just superstition. It is not your fault! Don’t worry, he’ll be fine!”

  “Of course,” Mom said, but she still sounded anxious and tired.

  “Mom, I’m not coming home for the winter break this year . . .”

  That’s it. It was out. It just slipped out.

  A pause.

  “That’s a shame. Such a shame. But what can you do?”

  The phone line filtered emotions like blotting paper absorbs tea leaves.

  “Mom, don’t be sad. Everything will be fine. The baby will feel better soon. And I will call you soon.”

  “That’s good. Call me, Sasha. Call me.”

  “I will. Good-bye!”

  She placed the receiver on the horned cradle. Sasha stood still for a while staring at the wall.

  Portnov called it “emotional memory.”

  One month remained until the placement exam.

  On the morning of December thirtieth, drunken first years danced in the fresh snow singing “A little tiny fir tree born in the forest!” Nearly hysterical with glee, the third years joined them in groups and one at a time. The second years wandered around, thin and quiet, like shadows.

  A poster decorated with gouache paints and tinsel invited everyone to the holiday roast. The assembly hall was filled to capacity. Vika and Lena, Sasha’s former roommates, sang racy ditties, a bit stupid, a bit vulgar, but still funny.

  Sasha sat in the assembly hall, in the very midst of a laughing audience, and close to the end of the show she suddenly thought of Zakhar. She recalled how two years ago he, a second year back then, stood at the edge of the stage wearing Portnov’s glasses spouting complete nonsense, but so courageously and confidently that Sasha, who always cringed in the presence of bad actors, did not feel any discomfort, only fear—what if Portnov mistook the quick parody for ridicule . . .