Vita Nostra

by Marina Dyachenko

  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 dryly 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 rang off.

  The rest of the night was spent in interrogations. Mom took Valerian root, Phenobarbitals, 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… and 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,” the man 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 the 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 goodbyes. 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 did not notice 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 made an internal effort compared to which all her school load seemed child’s play. Again she 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 under foot; 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 did she pick up a sleeping child in the middle of the night?

  Why did she think that she and the child are one and the same? Why did she want to possess him, make him a part of herself? Why was it so easy for her to accomplish?

  And why didn’t she listen 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 is February
fourteenth. Beginning of the second semester. Portnov is going to gather them in Auditorium 1, distribute the new books and exercise sets. Sterkh…

  Sasha sat up in bed at the thought of what Sterkh would say to her. Last night they did not say hello or goodbye: a second before Mom and Valentin stormed into the kitchen, Sasha managed to whisper that the baby regained consciousness, and Sterkh simply hung up the phone. She was well aware of the fact that the hunchback’s reaction to her crime was 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 will return to Torpa. Accept punishment from Sterkh. If he decides to punish her. And then she’ll again bury herself in the books. In the exercises. With time she will completely cease to be human, and then she probably will no longer care…

  But why should she return to Torpa?

  She stopped breathing. In the last few years she got so used to the idea that she could never get out of Torpa, that she was doomed to study until she gets her diploma, that she was facing the placement exam during her third year, and that her entire life depended on Portnov, on Sterkh… depended on Kozhennikov. Who for the past two and a half years does whatever he wants 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 got a chance to collect them… perhaps only some of them. Valentin asked what they were, and Sasha dispersed her habitual lie about the game tokens, the copper alloy… Mom had other concerns. Mom was scampering around with baby Valentin in her arms, and Sasha 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. Nothing good ever came out of those coins.

  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.

  The train attendant brought in the sheets. Sasha sloppily set up the mattress and lay down again, covering herself with a sheet. The train would arrive at the station “Town of Torpa” at four thirty in the morning. She had plenty of time.

  ***

  At two in the morning everyone was asleep.

  Coals smoldered under a barrel of hot water.

  On the table in the staff compartment lay a set of keys. The train attendant carelessly dozed off, leaving the door slightly ajar.

  Sasha walked out on the platform between the carriages and closed the door behind her. Outside the barred windows, poles and pines rushed by.

  She opened the door and choked on the wind. The warm spell did not reach that far from the city: sharp clumps of snowflakes fell from the sky, white and motionless, frozen-looking stars peeked through the ripped clouds.

  She tiptoed back to the carriage and put the keys back on the table. After all, it was not the attendant’s fault.

  She stood in the doorway feeling the harsh wind on her face. Her skin burned and her eyes teared up—a normal, quite human sensation.

  She stretched out her hand. Gold coins scattered and disappeared.

  Sasha stood for a few moments, breathing with all her might, filling up her lungs. Then she unclenched her fingers, let go of the railing and stepped forward. At least she imagined taking a step…

  She imploded.

  A gust of wind tore off her jacket, threw it over Sasha’s head. Her sweater disintegrated into threads, the tee-shirt ripped apart. To the right and left of her spine, a couple of inches above her bra clasp, two hot jet-pipes burst open.

  Sasha thought she saw the train from a distance, watching its long back with short pipes through which smoke rose in various stages of concentration. She saw all of it, realizing how dark it was outside; she sensed the air currents. She trailed along, shifted in space, or perhaps she glided as the shadow of an aircraft slides over the land.

  Shadow knows no obstacles. Over water, land, snow; shadow easily falls into precipices and just as easily climbs back to the surface. Clouds hung in two lacy layers, one above the other. Above the clouds was a pearly-white layer of stars. And underneath was the dark forest, full of life. The unhurried snake of the train broke into the open space, into a field darkened by thawing patches. Water stood still under a tender coat of ice in a deep ditch. The ground was still sound asleep, still wintery, but already pregnant with spring.

  Sasha wanted to sing.

  She also wanted to own all of this. This pearly sky. This cold, helpless land. These seeds hidden deep under the melting snow. These hills…

  She opened her arms. Every invisible seed in the frozen soil appealed to her as the shadow of a large, unbearably enormous word, “Life.” Each root waiting for warmth. Each drop of moisture. Life, the center of all in the universe.

  The only thing that has meaning.

  “Mine!” Sasha shouted.

  She was tossed like a woodchip in a whirlpool. Gray haze bore down on her. Sasha could no longer see the train, the sky and the forest. She pushed upward, but the haze thickened. Then, hugging her knees with both arms, she fell downward, broke through into the light, saw half of the sun rising over the smooth horizon and did not recognize that landscape.

  Then she disintegrated into letters. Into short simple thoughts. A hundred years had passed, and a hundred more, and Sasha merged again—back into herself.

  She lay facedown on the roof of a moving train.

  She wore a sweater ripped into rags and an old pair of black jeans.

  ***

  “Excuse me, which carriage is this?”

  A short red-eyed man who was smoking on the platform between two carriages staggered back and almost fell. A girl hanging upside down looked at him through the slightly open window—on the outside.

  “Which carriage?...”

  “Get thee gone!” shouted the little man, and Sasha realized that he’d drunk a lot last night. And perhaps the night before as well.

  The carriage doors were closed. The railings were covered with frost. Sasha’s palms flattened against the metal, stuck and anchored her to the metal, but it hurt to tear them off. She found carriage number seven; the door suddenly gave in and opened, for a second Sasha hovered over the entrance like a curtain, and then dove into the warmth—directly onto the wet dirty floor.

  The corridor was stuffy. A striped neutral carpet stretched along the carriage and looked long like an airplane runway. The passengers were asleep.

  Sasha slipped into the bathroom, looked at herself in the mirror—and started crying.

  ***

  “Miss! Miss, we reach Torpa in fifteen minutes…”

  Sasha only pretended to be asleep.

  Last night she gutted her suitcase and put on everything she owned. All her sweaters and cardigans. A warm jacket. Hat and gloves. She wrapped a scarf around her face. Put on dark glasses.

  It was dark when the train attendant let her out onto the Torpa platform—the train stopped for one minute.

  When the train started moving again, Sasha sat down on her suitcase. She did not feel the cold. Her entire body was covered with a stiff crust, reddish-brown like polished wood. Chitin plates rubbed onto each other, cracked and squeaked with each movement.

  The clock registered ten minutes to five. February snow drifted along the platform, and the next bus to Torpa was not coming for another two and a half hours.

  Sasha took out the CD player. She put on her headphones, pressed a button—and closed her eyes.

  ***

  “Samokhina, this class started ten minutes ago.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s very bad that you know and still allow yourself to
be tardy. I just informed your group that our first testing session is tomorrow at five thirty, according to a separate schedule. Sit down, numbers one through eight on page five must be completed by tomorrow. Kozhennikov, hand her the textbooks.”

  Sasha shuffled over to her usual spot.

  She almost decided not to go to Specialty. Almost. On the bus people stared at her like at a leper, and no one was brave enough to sit next to her. She kept her headphones on the entire way, and by the time she turned the key in the lock of Room 21, she’d regained her human likeness.

  She had to throw away her tights— they were cut up by the chitin plates. The jeans squeaked in her hands, covered with disgusting dust particles that resembled brown starch. Half naked, wrapped only in a towel, Sasha proceeded into the shower room, shocking first years with her appearance. In the shower room she found someone’s forgotten cake of soap and used it all up until it became a thin wafer. Still wrapped only in a towel, she returned to her room and pulled on her one intact outfit—a jogging suit.

  Then she got into her bed, looked at the clock and swore to herself that she would skip Specialty. Let them do what they want.

  With a minute left before the class began, she cracked. She thought of Mom. She thought of baby Valentin—those minutes when he smiled at her. She got up, carelessly brushed her hair and, as she was, in a stretchy jogging suit, she shuffled off to class.

  “Now, second years, Group A, listen carefully.”

  Portnov’s straight hair had grown even longer in the last few months. His blond ponytail now reached the middle of his back.

  “What we call integral consciousness has done enough work for you during the previous semesters; now we require from you an intricate execution, but also a deep understanding of fairly complex concepts. Kozhennikov, am I supposed to wait for you?”

  Kostya stood in front of Sasha’s desk with a thin stack of books in his hands. It seemed as if he couldn’t decide which books to hand to Sasha, and which to keep for himself.

  “Whatever you want to say to Samokhina, you can say after the class. Give her the Textual Module, the set of exercises and the Conceptual Activator, that one, with the yellow cover.”

  Slightly turning her head, Sasha noticed that Zhenya Toporko had gained some weight. Not a lot, but already visible. She shouldn’t have worn that blouse today, it was too tight. Lisa, on the other hand, had slimmed down; she wore a severe black sweater and wide-legged trousers, a silver pendant sparkled on her chest—she looked stylish. Sasha suddenly realized that she was sitting in the auditorium in a wrinkled jogging suit, with her hair barely brushed, with no makeup on. And that everyone saw her looking like this, when she came in late.