Vita Nostra

by Dyachenko, Marina

  ***

  Valentin met her on the platform, thin and cheerful. He had a cellular phone, which he demonstrated to Sasha with a great deal of pride:

  “We now have a twenty-four seven communication line! After all Olya is home along with the baby, you never know what she may need. Why are you so hunched over? Don’t slouch, stand straight!”

  “I’m tired,” Sasha said not exactly to the point. “The exams were difficult. And the train was too hot.”

  “Fair heat breaks no bones, as they say… I had a business trip back in November, that, I tell you, is when I was really cold…”

  Valentin talked and talked, dragging Sasha’s suitcase toward the metro. Sasha was no longer used to such crowds; standing on the escalator, she felt dizzy. Thankfully, she managed to regain control, and Valentin noticed nothing.

  The wings did not disappear.

  It does not mean anything, Sasha kept telling herself. It had happened before that Sterkh’s “rehabilitation” disk did not work right away. She remembered how once she grew spikes down the length of her spine, not particularly sharp, not long, made out of bone matter. They stuck out until that evening, and then drew back in by themselves. Chances are, this time the same thing will happen. There was only one problem: among the throngs of normal people that crowded the morning metro, Sasha, with her sweaty wings sticking to her back, felt awful.

  The desperate shriek of a newborn baby greeted them at the entrance of their apartment. Mom, wearing a bathrobe, stood in the doorway of her room, joyful and bewildered at the same time:

  “He’s not sleeping… I’ve been at it for two hours… Sasha, finally! Look, this is your brother!”

  Sasha stretched her neck. A red-faced baby in a white diaper was writhing in Mom’s arms, sobbing his heart out. He shrieked, moving around senseless blue eyes.

  The “introduction” lasted about one second: Valentin mumbled something about draughts and germs, Mom closed the bedroom door. Valentin stuck his feet into his slippers and ran to wash his hands, and Sasha remained in the entryway, leaning on the door.

  The wings itched and ached. Sasha moved her shoulders as if her back hurt, and, pressing the toes of her right foot onto her left heel, began to take off her boots.

  ***

  “Why are you slouching? Straighten your back!”

  The three of them were sitting at the kitchen table. The baby finally fell asleep; Mom looked exhausted, Valentin, fatigued. Sasha kept on her thick knitted cardigan, even though the kitchen was warm, even hot.

  “I caught a draught on the train. Something aches… probably pulled a muscle.”

  “We should rub it with the ointment,” Mom said. “I forgot what it’s called… that one with the bee venom. Valentin, do we have any in the medicine chest?”

  “There is no need,” Sasha said. “It’ll go away on its own.”

  “I don’t like the way you look,” Mom said. “Do you have a fever?”

  She placed her hand on Sasha’s forehead in a very familiar, natural gesture.

  “Doesn’t feel warm… You’re all sweaty. Take off your sweater, why are you wrapped up like that?”

  The wings, stuck to her back, twitched. Sensing something, Mom reached for her shoulder—but at this moment Sasha’s brother started bawling his head off, and Mom got distracted and hurried into the bedroom.

  “The first month is the hardest, it’s going to get better from now on,” Valentin murmured. “By the way, you should learn how to change diapers—you’ll need it soon enough!”

  He smiled, a friendly, sincere smile—but Sasha did not smile back.

  ***

  The pattern on the steamy tiles in the bathroom was familiar to her up to the tiniest detail; she remembered it since her childhood—since a gloomy mustachioed contractor installed the tiles. He did a good job, the tiles still looked good after almost eight years, and Sasha, again finding herself in the world of familiar things, felt lost for a second.

  She stood in her own bathtub, in the stream of hot water, she, Sasha Samokhina, who had returned home. This bathtub remembered all her days; here she sleepily brushed her teeth, getting ready for school. Here she cried because of a chance ‘C.’ Here she dreamed for Ivan Konev to call her…

  She closed her eyes and directed the shower head right on the top of her head. She thought of Konev, of their only run together in the park at five in the morning. Everything could be different… If then, a year ago, she hadn’t rushed to help a stranger… and had not mutilated three enormous men…

  And if Konev had not run away, upon seeing that battle.

  Could she blame him? Would any guy stay with her? Who would maintain that friendship, or at least ask for an explanation?

  Warm water streamed down her face. Tiny feathers, black and gray, went down the drain. There were only a few, but Sasha was still worried of clogging the drain. She tried to catch them, but they slipped out of her fingers and down the drain, and Sasha was thinking apathetic thoughts of buying some unclogging household chemical and cleaning the pipes in advance…

  She did not know how to clean the wings. Underneath the thin feathers, tender pink skin collected into folds. The wings were totally useless. They could not be used for flying. White steam filled the bathroom, the mirror was sweaty. What truly bothered and tortured Sasha was not even the very presence of the wings, but this paradox: her bathtub, her home. She was ordinary. And then—everything that happened, and what still lay ahead. The placement exam next winter…

  Mom knocked on the door:

  “Sasha, are you going to be long? The baby just pooped, I need to wash him!”

  “One minute,” Sasha said.

  Drying the wings with a towel was painful and uncomfortable. Ideally, she should have dried it with a hairdryer, or simply spread them near a radiator, but Sasha no longer had her own room. She had no place where she could have dried her trembling wet wings without interruption. She tried to imagine what would happen if Mom or Valentin found her in the process… and could not.

  “Sasha, hurry up!”

  “I’m coming.”

  She put on her robe and put a towel around her shoulders. She came out, hunching over. The baby cried in the bedroom. Mom was smiling:

  “Come, I’ll show you how to wash him. Your nails… what happened to your nails?”

  Sasha stuck her hands under her arms.

  “Is that artificial nails?” Mom asked horrified. “But it’s so distasteful! Why black?”

  “I’ll wash it off,” Sasha said. “It’s nothing.”

  ***

  By next morning her wings remained in place and even seemed to have grown a bit. Sasha used all her willpower to suppress panic.

  Mom was not feeling well, and Sasha volunteered to take the baby for a walk. It was a warm, almost summery day, the sun was shining, and the baby was already ten days old. Half an hour, Valentin said. No more than that.

  Wet poplar branches glistened in the sunlight, dripping with melted snow. Sasha walked, pushing the carriage in front of her and marveling at the unfamiliar sensation. Her brother was buried amidst the mattresses and blankets, and only his tiny nose poked though—the pink nose of a deeply sleeping baby. The day was startlingly calm: deserted courtyard. Trees motionless in the still air. Sunshine.

  Almost reaching the place where the slaughter took place last year, Sasha turned the carriage around. Of course, there was no sign of what happened, and the new clean snow was melting slightly on the ground. Sasha took out her player and sunk into the silence.

  Anxious silence, as if in expectation of a verdict. It could last for hours, but by now Sasha knew: it was in her power to change the recording on that disk. The silence could become different. The observer influences the process of observation, as Portnov stated a while ago.

  In order to manage that force, she had to let it into herself. Make it a part of her. Own it. And only then—on her own behalf—could she weave the pattern of the Silence.

&nbs
p; The quiet before the storm. The hush of a cemetery. The silence that occurs when one runs out of words. The vacuum of a galaxy. Endless narrative; and the one who is listening is at once the narrator, the protagonist, the ear, the air, and the acoustic nerve…

  A thousand of people simultaneously held their breath. Something was bound to happen; Sasha walked slowly along the line of damp bushes, passing poplars and birches, an old willow, and a rowan tree with some leftover berries hanging on its branches. And to the right of Sasha walked her shadow clutching the shadow of the carriage, her projection onto the world of packed water crystals, and it was long, tinted blue, and the color of the sky was an integral part of it.

  Object and its projection had a reciprocated bond. That’s what Portnov said some time ago. He spoke—”tossed at them,” to use his own expression—words and sentences that sometimes lacked all meaning, and sometimes seemed like banal clichés, or were simply incomprehensible, and Sasha listened to and immediately forgot those words...

  And now, for a split second, she sensed simultaneously—incorporated, made an integral part of herself—all her projections.

  Her classmate still remembered words that, in the heat of an argument, Sasha threw at her at the end of the seventh grade.

  The tree she planted four years ago had grown a little.

  An impression of her shoe lingered in the hardened concrete near the new construction site.

  She was reflected in Mom, in Valentin, in another hundred of people: she was reflected—surprisingly sharp—in Kostya. She was Ivan Konev’s nightmarish dream. She was reflected in the fate of a distant stranger—her father, who lived on the other end of town.

  And she herself was a reflection. This realization made Sasha disintegrate into minute pieces, and then rebuild anew; when she opened her eyes, Valentin stood in front of her, his coat unbuttoned, and he looked bewildered and angry.

  Sasha took off her headphones.

  “It’s been forty minutes! Do you expect me to run looking for you? He needs to eat!”

  The baby was still sleeping soundly, pink nose peeking from the pile of blankets. Valentin took the carriage from Sasha and pushed it toward the entrance, so quickly that water splashed from underneath the wheels.

  “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 heart-broken over it, while Sasha did not quite understand all the fuss over it. So she 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: Mom and Valentin took turns getting up, and the baby required them to get up every three to four hours. This was the 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 sunk into household duties up to the top of his head, 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 alleys 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. Once baby Valentin started crying during their walk, and shrieked non-stop all the way home—Sasha ran wild-eyed, scaring the passersby, cursing herself for going so far away from home…

  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 she 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 sing-song recitative: it was a piece of her own babyhood. A small slice of information. A word blown away by the draught.

  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 the half-packed suitcase. The glow of the street lights peeked into the room through the 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. The 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, but already drenched in cold sweat from head to foot. She placed the baby on the kitchen table; 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 miniscule 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 draughts.

  Her hands shaking, she picked up the receiver. She dialed a cellular phone number; this number was registered in her mind as something so extreme, something for an emergency only that she only remembered it 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!