Vita Nostra

by Marina Dyachenko

  “Very funny,” Portnov said in a hollow voice.

  The door opened without a knock. Sterkh walked in and immediately locked the door. He was very pale, his ash-colored hair was tangled as if Nikolay Valerievich had taken a long stroll in windy weather. The hump on his back was more pronounced that usual.

  Sasha unbuttoned her jacket and dropped it on the floor. Pulled off her sweater over her head, then pulled off another one, leaving only a dark blue t-shirt. She glanced at her forearms and shoulders; her skin had a bluish tint, was uneven and in some placed covered with purple feathers.

  Portnov whistled and took off his glasses. His face had a different expression. If Sasha did not know Portnov as well, she would have thought it was fear.

  “Are you pleased?” Sasha asked Sterkh. “Did I do a good job?”

  “Yes, I am pleased.”

  Sterkh looked nothing like himself. Where was the delicate, slightly absent-minded Nikolay Valerievich? The hunchback stood in a predatory stance, watching Sasha the same way a whale hunter watches his trophy prey. And Sasha had no eyes to respond to this stare with dignity.

  “Thank you,” Sasha said. “You have achieved your goal. You turned me into this.”

  The auditorium swam. Sasha watched it through her itchy skin, saw the wall behind her back, a key in the keyhole, a round tag with the number “38,” a nick on the door handle. The Institute of Special Technologies reprocessed her, digested her as it desired.

  “That’s it,” Sasha whispered. “I’m done. I can’t do this anymore.”

  The hunchback caught her mid-fall. He held her close. It was so unexpected and so bizarre that she froze, afraid to struggle.

  “I was right, Oleg. You see, I even underestimated her. You are a gift, Sasha. A talent. You broke out of your shell, you hatched… Have you ever seen baby chicks? They need time to get comfortable, to get acquainted with the new world and their place in that world… Stop, my dear. Everything is fine. You have broken through to the main road, now you will walk along it, step by step, you will study and you will learn. And you will understand everything. But what a gift!”

  And Sasha, who was watching the hunchback through the skin of her cheeks, saw tears in his eyes.

  ***

  He escorted her down the corridor, and students parted to let them through. Sasha, in her jacket with the hood pulled down low, in dark sunglasses and woolen gloves, walked under escort, cringing, eyes low to the ground. Sterkh held her elbow—to prevent her from falling, or from escaping. Quite possibly from both.

  They reached the first steps of the staircase that led to the administration wing, when Kostya ran out from underneath the bronze hooves of the equestrian statue.

  Sasha struggled to get free. Sterkh caught her by the hood.

  “Kostya!” Sasha shouted. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t come to English!”

  Kostya stopped, looking from Sasha to the hunchback and back.

  “What have you done to her?”

  “Tomorrow,” Sterkh suggested smiling. “You will meet tomorrow and discuss everything you want. I apologize, Kostya, we are very pressed for time.”

  And he led, almost pulled Sasha downstairs, into his office. She wanted to tell Kostya “Thanks.”

  But she couldn’t say it.

  ***

  By eleven thirty that night she was back at the dorm, barely alive, but at least she once again looked human. Sharp flashes still ran along her skin, and her spine was still sore, but her eyes once again had pupils and irises, and her arms, while still oddly white, ceased to resemble prosthetic devices.

  Sterkh spent a long time with her; she thought it would never end. She sat at the table wearing headphones, a ream of paper in front of her, and a pencil in her gnarled hand. Sterkh drew symbols, one after another, complex and unfamiliar signs that at first sight appeared to be completely random, and Sasha was supposed to insert missing lines, and the silence pressed on her eardrums, and Sasha, giving into the unavoidable, somehow knew what was missing, and pushed her pencil over the paper, and the stack of pages covered by her writing grew in front of her. Sterkh himself would replace the CDs in the player and change the tracks.

  During these hours Sasha learned a lot about silence. The silence of a two-thousand year old tomb differed from the vacuum of an ice desert in a distant galaxy. Sasha stopped feeling pain and time—she was suspended like a fly in amber—and only a sharp ray of light from Sterkh’s mother-of-pearl mirror made her regain consciousness.

  “All right, please look at me… Terrific. Now that is a completely different ball game. I am truly blown away by how much can be done here, and what kind of work lies ahead of us… You have a rare gift. An extraordinary one.”

  Behind the small door was a tiny bathroom with a full-length mirror. Sasha looked at herself and saw a haggard-looking girl, disheveled, with terror-filled eyes, but absolutely normal. She saw a human being.

  “Are you chilly? Put on your sweater. So here it is, Sasha—from now on, you will work according to a special schedule, you and I will meet every day except for Saturday and Sunday. You have a propensity for an indiscriminate metamorphosis, and we’re going to deal with it first. Are you hungry? Would you care for some tea? Easy, Sasha, easy, this is your victory day, it is a cause for celebration. I know you must be tired.”

  She staggered back to her room holding onto walls. Of course, Lena and Vika were still awake over their textbooks.

  “Where were you?”

  “I had a one-on-one.”

  “They are really tough with you second years,” Lena said with sympathy.

  “Like they are so gentle with us,” Vika grumbled. “And so much to look forward to…”

  Both bent over their textual modules; Sasha got into her bed and passed out.

  ***

  She woke up early, around five in the morning, because it was time to get up and go for a run. She sat up in bed, utterly confused, shook her head and only then realized that she was no longer required to run in the mornings, that she is a student at the Torpa Institute of Special Technologies, and that yesterday she turned into a monster….

  She remembered about offending Yegor. She promised to stop by—and never showed up. He asked her to let him in—she did not open the door. And then there was the scene with Zhenya, which by now was surely part of the dorm’s folklore.

  Her roommates breathed heavily in their troubled sleep. Sasha got up, switched on the desk lamp and only then noticed that her wrists were covered with scales, and so was her neck.

  She found a mirror. Yes: pinkish, tinted mother-of-pearl, soft, but growing harder every minute, scales.

  She took the CD player out of the bag. She hoped the batteries still worked; she inserted the disk given to her last night by the hunchback. She sat still for three minutes, absorbing the silence like a sponge absorbing water.

  The scales morphed into skin, rough, windblown. Everything was going according to Sterkh’s predictions: “Remember: relapses are possible, especially in the mornings. When you are sleeping, your body may get out of control in its unconscious state. Don’t be alarmed: I am giving you this disk, it will not affect your development, and its only task is to stabilize you in your human body. When you get up in the morning, when you use the bathroom, brush your teeth—listen to the disk. Even if you feel perfectly well and everything seems normal, listen to the disk. And don’t be afraid, Sasha, the worst is already behind you!”

  Sasha rubbed her neck, massaged her wrists, lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling.

  Time to take stock. She broke out of the loop requested by her teachers and set up by Farit Kozhennikov. She had her human appearance back. She felt normal, even well: she was wide awake, clear-headed, and able-bodied, she could easily go for a run right this minute. Now what?

  Yegor. Sasha felt obligated to atone for her involuntary crime. She had to explain what happened. Although…

  Sasha bit her tongue.

  If Yegor finds out that
his marriage proposal sounded to Sasha like a broken record...

  And she never told him about the recurrent day.

  But he never asked! Kostya had noticed that something was wrong, but Yegor…

  Yegor had other priorities. He needed to concentrate, to focus before saying: “Let’s get married.” Or did he just blurt it out?

  The only thing that was crystal clear: if Yegor finds out that yesterday was only a duplicate for Sasha, one of many identical days, he will feel like a complete idiot, and there would be absolutely no chance of maintaining a decent relationship. That meant she had to keep quiet. She would have to ask Kostya not to say anything. It was in his interests as well as hers.

  Sasha took a deep breath and lowered her eyelids. She listened to her body: everything seemed normal. She was a little hungry. Here were her arms, her toes… She could move the toes… here was the bed…

  Sasha opened her eyes widely.

  The bed was now a part of her body. The mattress itched—it should have been washed a long time ago. The metal feet felt the linoleum; it turned out pliable and even warm. Sasha swallowed; several feet of the floor under her bed were now also incorporated into her body. That part of her was a little rough, not particularly clean, but spacious and hard. It was becoming more and more spacious.

  Sasha gasped and pressed her fists to her chest. Here was her body. The bed existed separately from her. The room existed separately. And separate was Sasha herself.

  A minute passed in total silence. A car drove along Sacco and Vanzetti.

  I’m not going to try that again, Sasha said to herself. And was immediately surprised: why not? Was it unpleasant? Was there any shame in it?

  She relaxed a little and again possessed the bed. A little bit of the floor. The entire floor in the room. The walls. She became the room. She lightly shook the white dorm lampshade, wrinkled her nose because of the dust. She banged the window pane, as if slapping her knee with the palm of her hand.

  A shard of glass fell on the floor. Sasha flinched with unexpected pain; the sensation was similar to breaking a nail. The sound of broken glass woke up Vika, who sat up in bed:

  “Dammit… what is it? Did the wind break the glass? Damn, I remember shutting it last night!”

  Sasha did not respond. Once again she returned into herself, two arms, two legs, sweat on her upper lip, and heart beating wildly. Silently, Lena helped Vika stuff a pillow into the empty window frame.

  “Holy cow… Now what are we going to do… use cardboard? It will be impossible to get them to replace the glass… And it’s so windy… oh well, it’s only half past five, let’s go back to sleep.”

  Again the room was silent. Sasha lay barely breathing and the bed under her was just a bed, nothing else.

  What else can she do?

  What will she be able to do when she finishes her education? The hunchback keeps talking about brilliant prospects, wondrous discoveries… about Sasha having a phenomenal talent…

  The alarm clock tick-tocked gently. At the very edge of her desk, hidden under a stack of notepads, lay the hunchback’s album. The one Sasha could not deal with before. Kostya was right. The problem was not in the disk or the album, the problem was in Sasha herself. She managed to conquer the disk.

  She wondered whether she could now conquer the album.

  Sterkh did not say anything about that. He was too busy with other things.

  With determination, Sasha pulled the blanket over herself and turned over on the other side. She will return the album to the hunchback tomorrow. She will not open the “fragments,” she will absolutely not ever again stare at the damned “anchor…”

  She was curious. It was like doing exercises for Portnov—unbearable at first, and then fascinating. Now, having stepped over the invisible line, what would Sasha see in the black album?

  What exactly would she find?

  The paroxysm of curiosity was similar to a sharp sensation of hunger. Sasha tossed and turned, wrinkling the sheets, and then got up. Unlike the feet of the bed, her own feet did not find the linoleum warm. She pushed her feet into slippers and approached the desk. She glanced at her English glossary, her notes for the constitution class, some other papers…

  And then there was the album.

  The black oily squares of the fragments glistened. An anchor of three dots gleamed in the middle of each square, like a white constellation.

  Sasha opened the very last page. She focused her eyes on the white triangle in the middle and held her breath.

  The three dots disappeared. For a few seconds Sasha was suspended in the blackness, as absolute as the silence in Sterkh’s headphones. And then out of the blackness came—seeped through, developed—a city surrounded by an enormous wall that reached up to the sky.

  Now Sasha saw the city in minute detail, all of it meticulous and very real. The city was the color of coal, of carbon. Bearing a slight resemblance to Torpa, it was truly perfect. Wearing slippers and standing on a linoleum floor, Sasha felt marble under her bare feet, she experienced wafts of air, both warm and cold, on her face. The smell of smoke rising from the burning pine in the fireplace. Cool stone and warm stone, smooth and rough, soaring walls, slender windows, spires rising into the sky…

  Sasha felt happy. She threw her head back and looked around; she wanted to possess this city. She wanted to absorb it into herself, make it a part of her. She threw herself open and began to grow, rise, expand and inhale outlines, smells, and the texture of the stone… In those places where Sasha stretched enough to reach the city, it ceased being carbon-black and became softly-gray, like an antique photograph.

  Tiny checkmark insects dashed around the edge of her vision. Now they seemed so insignificant that Sasha paid them no attention. She was capturing this life and this happiness; she inhaled the smoke, and the curve of a roof glistening in the rain, and the wisp of fog, and the majestic spire… The more she took, the more impatient she felt. She knew she would not stop until this city had become just as much a part of her as her hands, her chin, her hair…

  But when she took in the city tower, it suddenly cracked, opened like a flower, and out of its depths a monster, the likes of which she had never seen before, not even in her nightmares, stared at Sasha.

  Sasha drew back.

  The monster slowly climbed out of the broken tower. It shifted, pulsated, spilled onto the ground, but Sasha saw only its eyes. Motionless. A bit cloudy. Staring at Sasha, and no one else.

  And staring back into those eyes, Sasha realized with all her core being something that many understood before her. The creature did not care that she was loved by someone. And that she loved someone herself. And that she had a childhood, and she splashed on the sea shore; and that she had an old knit sweater with a reindeer embroidered on the front. There were plenty of people loved by someone, the ones who carried a seashell, a button, or a black and white photograph in their pockets; no one had been saved by memories, no one had been protected by words and pledges, and those loved greatly by others died too.

  Sasha was numb.

  Expanded, with half of the city now fitting inside her, she watched the blurry penetrating gaze move closer. And when only a few steps—or seconds—separated her from the monster, she remembered that she was standing in the middle of her dorm room, that she was looking at a “fragment,” and that she still had a chance to escape.

  She fell backwards and hit the back of her head strongly enough to make her head spin. The chair that she apparently was holding onto crashed to the floor; a moment later, as if hesitating, the album slipped off the table and landed on the floor, spreading its black pages.

  “Ah!”

  “God damn!”

  “What are you doing, you freak! Let us sleep!”

  Waiting for the pain to subside, Sasha raised herself onto one elbow. She saw her own slippers in different corners of the room. A layer of dust on the molding. A shard of a teacup under the bed, the cup that broke a month ago. Both Lena and V
ika shouted in harmony over her head; the neighbors thumped on the wall with something heavy.

  The clock was ticking. If one was to believe the clock, exactly one minute had passed since the moment Sasha got up to look at the black album.

  ***

  “You are a second-year student! Not a first year novice! Your actions, Alexandra—your actions leave me absolutely speechless!”

  She had never seen Sterkh so infuriated. He dashed around the Auditorium number 14, and it seemed to Sasha that he barely stopped himself from kicking the chairs.

  “But you gave me that album…”

  “I gave it to you earlier! When you were still at a different stage! Do you understand?! This album is not for you! It was my mistake; I should have taken it back immediately… But who knew you would go for the hundredth fragment?!”

  “I didn’t know I couldn’t… I’m sorry.”

  Sterkh stopped in front of her.

  “Fine. Fine, we will just assume that you and I are both equally at fault for what happened. No more amateur decisions, please! Work only on those projects assigned to you, and only at the appropriate time! No later and no earlier.”

  “Yes. I promise. But I just wanted to ask…”

  “Go ahead,” the hunchback seemed calmer. Or at least, he was now controlling his emotions.

  “That thing… that was there… What is it?”

  The hunchback sat behind the teacher’s desk:

  “That, Alexandra, is too early for you to know. No need. You will find out during your exam.”

  ***

  She was late for the constitution lecture. She knocked on the door in the middle of the class and asked permission to come in.

  “Alexandra, you missed four lectures in a row. An entire month. I’m flattered that you decided to honor me with your presence only half an hour late… But how are you going to pass the exam?”

  The word echoed in Sasha’s soul like an echo of a rock thrown into a well. It was just another euphemism for torture, along with “third degree interrogation,” or “civil law.”