Vita Nostra

by Marina Dyachenko

  A flash of light slashed her eyes—the reflection from the metal bracelet. Sasha squinted.

  “Sasha, open your eyes and look at me. Yes. I do apologize for hitting you. But you needed it. I would beat you up more if I could. Last night you nearly completed a transition from the basic biological state into an intermediary, unstable one. You have a colossal internal mobility. Right now you’re ahead of the program by at least a whole semester. Stabilization is planned for the fourth year, before the summer exams. If I have to deal with your tricks for two and a half more years, I will not survive, Alexandra. I will retire.”

  He smiled, as if expecting Sasha to appreciate the joke.

  “Have you turned nineteen yet?”

  “No. In May.”

  “In May… you’re a child. Your professional development is running ahead of your physiological abilities—with a terrifying tempo. And there is no way to slow down the process artificially… Yes, Sasha, as they say, you are a disaster and a gift in one little bottle.”

  “Will I pass the exam?”

  “Don’t make me laugh. You will pass with flying colors. If you don’t stop studying, of course.”

  “Zakhar Ivanov,” Sasha’s voice trembled, “did not pass.”

  “He did not,” Sterkh stopped smiling. “Another thing that is bothering you… He did not pass. I feel a great deal of pity for Zakhar, Sasha. It’s a disaster. Why do you think Oleg Borisovich and I keep repeating like broken records: study! Study, prepare for the exam! Do you think we’re kidding? No….”

  He patted her on the head like a little girl.

  “Study hard, Sasha. You have enough determination, but not enough restraint and discipline. Everything will be fine. And you really should thank Farit; all of you hate him, but without him you wouldn’t survive even the first semester. So, are we still friends?”

  Sasha lifted her eyes. Sterkh looked down at her with a hint of a smile.

  “Th…thank you,” she said, stuttering. “You helped… with the baby. I would have died. There and then.”

  “There is no need to die… Admit it, Sasha—you enjoy learning, don’t you?”

  “I do,” she took a deep breath. “Very much.”

  ***

  She had no more decent clothes left. She stepped outside in her waterlogged jogging suit and was surprised not to feel the freezing temperature.

  She ran back to the dorm, took a shower and sat in front of the open suitcase baffled at the lack of clothing options. Forty minutes remained until her individual session with Portnov.

  Wrapped in a towel like a Roman patrician, Sasha entered the kitchen; two first years sat by the window, her former roommate Lena and another girl, a very pale redhead with lots of freckles.

  “Hey,” said Sasha and took a good appraising look at both of them.

  Lena was much heavier and wider in the shoulders than Sasha. But the redhead…

  “What’s your name?”

  “Irina.”

  “Stand up, please.”

  The girl stood up fearfully. Sasha swept her eyes over the girl: her height and general proportion satisfied Sasha completely.

  “Please lend me your jeans and the sweater, Right now.”

  The girl swallowed.

  “These? The ones I’m wearing?”

  “Those, or some other ones. But quickly.”

  “Uh, huh,” Irina breathed and swiftly left the kitchen. Petrified Lena remained sitting over a cup of tea.

  “It’s temporary,” Sasha said carelessly. “A friendly loan. And don’t look at me like that.”

  ***

  She showed up at Portnov’s door right on time wearing black woolen slacks and a bright yellow hand-knitted ornate sweater. Frightened Irina sacrificed her best clothes for the menacing Samokhina.

  “Pretty,” said Portnov instead of a greeting. “I’ve seen these flowers somewhere before… Are you ready for this class?”

  “I’m ready.”

  “Go ahead. One through ten, but not in succession, rather in the order that I suggest. Start with number three.”

  Sasha felt lost for a second. She was used to doing the exercises based on the “snowball” method: the second came out of the first, third out of the second, etc.

  Portnov sprawled over his chair. He stared at Sasha through the lenses, his eyes utterly pitiless, fish-like:

  “Are you going to take a while? Will you need to warm up?”

  He was openly sarcastic.

  Her hands grasping the back of a squeaky chair, Sasha took a full chest of air and visualized a long chain of interdependent concepts that have never existed, but were now recreated by her imagination…. Or by something else.

  Concepts… immaterial entities, which Sasha envisioned as drops of grayish jelly, were measured by numbers and expressed by symbols. These numbers could not be written down, and the symbols could not be imagined; Sasha’s consciousness operated in these substances, forced them to form chains, and the chains to interweave so that separate fragments would merge and form more and more new entities. And then she “unbraided” the chains imprinted upon each other, mentally, without moving her lips, feeling her right eye lid twitch from the tension.

  “Seven! From this point on. Stop! Half a measure back! From that point—number seven, begin!”

  Sasha’s efforts made her nauseous. The world recreated in several minutes leaned on its side. As if someone upended a beehive, an unhappy hum rose up; Sasha wove new chains of associations and meanings out of nowhere, made them into loops, and broke the circles, and her eyelid twitched stronger and stronger.

  ‘Ten.”

  A new jump. Sasha has never performed the exercises out of sync, but her very being was part of an internal mechanism that had by now warmed up and started working in full force, fed by her stubbornness and hatred toward Portnov. Is he trying to humiliate her? Let’s see who wins!

  “Second!”

  Sasha swayed. Regained her balance. She touched the tips of her fingers to her face, felt the surface of a rough fabric, as if someone had put a canvas sack over her head. Exercise two… almost from the very beginning, but where is the starting point? Which junction should she choose?

  “Will you ever talk back again?”

  The voice sounded from far away. Sasha saw Portnov’s face as if through a multitude of interwoven fibers, shiny like silk.

  “Stop, Samokhina. Stop. I am asking you: will you ever give me lip again? Will you ever be late for my class?”

  “I won’t,” Sasha muttered through her teeth.

  “I’ll believe you for the last time,” Portnov smirked. “For tomorrow, work on the diagram on page three of the activator. A little extra effort would be for your own benefit.”

  ***

  She stepped outside, but instead of walking out to the yard she went down Sacco and Vanzetti. The pavement glistened as if rubbed with oil. Sasha stopped under a large lantern stylized to look antique… or perhaps it truly was antique. Its flame swayed behind the matte glass, the yellow dot of its reflection mirroring in each cobblestone.

  The door of a café on the opposite side of the street opened. Out came a woman dressed inappropriately for the season: a short light-colored coat and a frivolous cap with a checkered visor. When she stepped onto the pavement, Sasha’s eyes widened: how could one walk over the cobblestones in those extremely high needle-thin stilettos?

  Denis Myaskovsky climbed out of the café following the woman. Limping, he shuffled next to the woman, or rather slightly behind her—like a lap dog. Intrigued, Sasha observed the couple: something tense, dangerously explosive was happening between these two entirely different, unsuitable people.

  She retreated. Semi-darkness reigned only a few steps away from the lantern. Sasha stood at the dark half-circle of the alley entrance.

  “It could be worse, as you can understand,” the woman said in a hoarse, almost boyish voice.

  “It could not,” said Denis.

  He stood there
in an unbuttoned coat, a white scarf hanging low to the ground like a twisted rope.

  “It’s just the beginning of this semester,” Denis’s voice trembled. “It’s so far from the test… it’s the very beginning of the semester!”

  “The further it is, the harder it’s going to be,” the woman said.

  Denis stepped forward. Sasha froze: he grabbed the woman by her collar and jerked her up, thin stilettos flying up in the air; he was a head taller than the woman and twice as heavy, the woman seemed completely helpless in his arms, but she did not even try to resist.

  A second passed. Sasha did not get a chance to scream. With a strange sound, Denis put the woman back onto the pavement. Regaining her balance, she managed to get her heel stuck between the cobblestones.

  “Forgive me,” Denis’s voice was hollow. “I…”

  And he suddenly sunk before her, fell on his knees, and Sasha felt fear ten times stronger than a moment ago.

  “You have been spared a lot,” the woman said, trying to pull her heel out of the deep crack.

  “Don’t!”

  “You can help them. You know how.”

  “I can’t! I can’t…”

  “Yes, you can. Your classmates can. And you can. Look at Pavlenko’s work. Look how Samokhina tears herself apart every day…”

  Sasha flinched.

  “Do you remember the test after the first semester?” the woman spoke lightly, even cheerfully. “Do you remember what you promised me then?”

  “I cannot memorize that!”

  “Kindergarten,” the woman said with a hint of disappointment. “Denis, everything depends on you. You must work hard.”

  And with the light-hearted clickety-click of her stilettos, she passed by Denis frozen on the pavement, passed by the porch, passed by the entryway. Passing by Sasha, she turned her head: she had a small white face shielded by a pair of dark glasses.

  Sasha had never seen her before. But at this moment she recognized her.

  ***

  She made a cup of tea, dissolved a bouillon cube in a mug of boiling water, carried everything back to Room 21, sat at her dusty desk and meditatively opened the yellow brochure—the conceptual activator. Page three, diagram number three. After the initial five minutes, Sasha could no longer tear her eyes away from the diagram.

  The yellow brochure printed on lousy paper was a key that joined many jigsaw pieces into one picture. It stitched together—with rough, jagged sutures—the difficult experience Sasha had endured during her time at the Institute, and her own perception of the world that became so unsteady in the last couple of years.

  There are concepts that cannot be imagined but can be named. Having received a name, they change, flow into a different entity and cease to correspond to the name, and then they can be given another, different name, and this process—the spellbinding process of creation—is infinite: this is the word that names it, and this is the word that signifies. A concept as an organism, and text as the universe.

  The fourth dimension “sewn” into the diagram wholly eliminated the concept of time. The result was word, and word was the original cause of any process; circles swam in front of Sasha’s eyes, slow bright dots that usually appear if one bends down sharply, or stands on one’s head. Sasha’s tea was now cold, the broth was covered with a film of fat, but it did not matter.

  The diagram on page three lay before her like a crystal model of a termite nest. Each fulfilling its individual task, concepts shifted, exchanged impulses, built a hierarchy and destroyed it to erect a new one. Sasha held herself by the hair; the word “harmony” disintegrated into hues like a ray of sunshine, and restructured itself—to perfection.

  “Holy cow!”

  She pushed her thumb along the fore-edge of the book. The activator did not seem very thick, it was similar to the format of an old literary catalogue Mom used to bring Sasha a long time ago. Each page had a new diagram, new but linked to the previous and to the subsequent ones, one more cell in the never-ending honeycomb of Sasha’s comprehension. The colossal field that she saw for a second had no limit and no end.

  “So beautiful,” Sasha whispered.

  The words slashed her with their inaccuracy, platitude, vulgarity. She blinked—chance tears fell off her eyelashes—and attempted to say the same thing without resorting to ordinary words.

  A gust of wind shut the windowpane. Sheets of paper covered with writing flew all over the room. Sasha shook her head as if falling out of nirvana. She wanted to close the book, but her hand trembled. Diagram number three, heart-wrenchingly perfect, pulled her back, demanded her attention; “it happened all by itself.” It comes, it drowns you, and it becomes impossible to stop…

  With a colossal effort she made herself close the activator. Library dust flew up. It was not yet time to relax. She still had the textual module to finish.

  She finished her cold tea. Moved the textual module closer and opened the first paragraph. She glanced at the page filled with nonsensical symbols. She closed her eyes in fear and anticipation.

  The tickle of expectation. Now it will begin. Now.

  And Sasha bit into the text.

  She was used to focusing her attention, used to daily hard labor, and it made a difference. Sasha swam, the senseless text parting before her, and she had a lucid sensation that the illumination of truth, the breakthrough was just around the corner. Just a little bit more…

  “Silently they passed a three-story building made out of pink bricks, and went up to the porch seated between two stone lions—their faces faded from frequent caresses, but the right one seemed melancholy, and the left one—ironic, even cheerful. The lions rigidly stared at Orion.”

  “Hello,” said Kostya.

  Sasha looked up. Kostya Kozhennikov stood at the threshold, a slice of pizza in his hand.

  “Sorry,” Sasha said. “I need to finish the paragraph.”

  Kostya nodded. The next time Sasha tore her eyes away from the book, he sat across from her at the table, his pizza eaten by then. Kostya moved crumbs on the table top with his fingers, making patterns.

  “Sorry,” Sasha said. “I lost track of time.”

  “Yeah… everybody is working today. Everybody looks like a mouse, nose buried in their books. Portnov yelled at Myaskovsky today for the exercises… what happened to you, anyway?”

  “I am growing as a concept.”

  “As a what?”

  “I am a concept. I’m not human. You are probably a concept as well. All of us are structured fragments of information. And it turns out, I like it. I like being a concept. I am growing.”

  Kostya flicked the crumbs off the table.

  “Yegor was asking about you.”

  “Who is that?”

  “The first year you were sleeping with.”

  “And what was he asking you about me?”

  “He wasn’t asking me, he asked Lisa.”

  “Next time he asks, tell Lisa that I’m no longer human. And that is why I cannot sleep with anyone any longer. Have you ever seen statistical theory making out with Newton’s first law of motion?”

  “Sasha,” Kostya said. “Listen. Just take care of yourself. You have it harder than all of us. I think…”

  “Not at all,” Sasha smiled and immediately became serious. “Myaskovsky, on the other hand… he needs our help.”

  “He’s got Popova as his advisor. It’s a little bit easier.”

  “It’s not easier, Kostya.”

  He stared across the table at her in surprise:

  “You say it so confidently…”

  “That’s because I know. I’m sorry, I really have to study. I have tons of homework.”

  Kostya got up.

  “Actually, the reason I stopped by: I was told at the Dean’s Office that you are going to get an enhanced stipend. Since you are the best student, and all.”

  “Pavlenko will be overjoyed.”

  “Yeah,” Kostya smiled. “Sasha.”

  “What
?”

  He looked at her for almost an entire minute, wanting to say something but never managing a single word. He shook his head as if asking for forgiveness:

  “No, nothing. I’m going, see you later.”

  He opened the door—and stood face to face to Farit Kozhennikov.

  Kostya retreated, or, rather, flew back as if from a blow to his chest.

  “Hello,” offered Kozhennikov senior, with great interest looking at Kostya at the threshold and Sasha in the middle of the room. “Did you have a fight?”

  Without saying a word or looking at his father, Kostya slipped past him into the corridor. Farit’s eyes followed him. He closed the door.

  “I apologize for disturbing you.”

  The dark glasses, this time smoky opalescent, made Sasha’s advisor look like a thrill-seeking skier. He came over, tested a rickety chair and sat down folding the hem of his dark raincoat.

  “I don’t have that money,” Sasha said. “I threw it away. In the forest.”

  A stereo system was booming on the floor above them. A television set mumbled something behind the wall. A heavy-footed somebody ran along the corridor.

  “I jumped off the train,” Sasha said. “I wanted to run away. But I couldn’t, and… anyway, I don’t have the money.”

  “I’m not here for the money,” Kozhennikov said. “I don’t grow rich on you, as you can guess. It’s only words that no one has said and no one ever will.”

  The light of the table lamp reflected in his glasses.

  Sasha wiped her tears with the back of her hand. Tears of rage and relief.

  “Forgive me,” she managed through clenched teeth.

  “No, I’m the one who needs forgiveness. I showed up and took your peace of mind.”

  “I haven’t had any peace of mind in a real long time… Today I saw Liliya Popova, and here’s what I know: there is no Liliya Popova. You are Liliya Popova.”

  Kozhennikov swayed on his chair—back and forth. The desiccated wood crackled.