Vita Nostra

by Marina Dyachenko

  “Are you cold?”

  “Why, Farit? What did I do wrong? Did I break any rules? Why?”

  “You could not solve the problem on your own. I agree, it is not your fault, or at least not entirely. But remember, the baby did not swallow the pills, he only played with them. It’s only fear, Sasha. Fear the General. Fear the Emperor that shapes the reality. You should buckle up.”

  The car rode onto the highway surrounded on both sides by the forest. The road signs flashed in the lights and rushed backwards, like smeared spots of white fire.

  “Fear is a projection of danger, genuine or imagined. The thing you wear around your neck is a phantom fear, the kind you get used to… kind of like a familiar sprain. Nothing happened. But you believe in trouble, and that is why you lived through these minutes as if through a real tragedy.”

  “You taught me to be afraid,” Sasha gripped the phone.

  “No. You knew how to be afraid without me. Everyone knows that. I simply directed your fear, like an arrow toward the target.”

  “And you have achieved your goal?”

  “Yes.”

  Sasha turned her head. Kozhennikov watched the road, the speedometer arrow inching toward one hundred and twenty.

  “The first years,” Sasha said slowly. “Do you select them somehow?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t you feel sorry for them?”

  “No. They are Words, they must realize their preordained purpose.”

  “And other people? They…”

  “They are different. Prepositions, conjunctions, interjections… expletives,” Kozhennikov smiled. “Every man carries a shadow of a word, but only Word in its entirety, firmly imprinted into the fabric of the material world, can return to its beginning and grow from a pale projection to an original entity.”

  “And your instrument is fear?”

  “Sasha,” Kozhennikov slowed down at the turn of the road. “For a while now you have been working hard not because somebody forces you to, but because you are interested in it. You have tasted the honey of that knowledge. To be Word—do you understand what it means?”

  Sasha was silent until they reached Torpa; finally the Sacco and Vanzetti cobblestones clattered under the tires. The car stopped near the porch guarded by the stone lions. The streetlights were on, but none of the windows were lit.

  “Thank you,” Sasha said in a strained voice. “Good bye.”

  She opened the car door.

  “Sasha?”

  She froze.

  “Give me the phone.”

  Sasha turned to face him. A streetlight reflected in Kozhennikov’s glasses made it look as if two burning white eyes stared at her.

  With difficulty she pulled the pink cord off her neck. Kozhennikov weighed the phone in his hand.

  “Do you understand what it means to be Word? The verb in the imperative mood? Do you know what it is?”

  Sasha was silent, having lost the gift of speech.

  “Good,” Kozhennikov carelessly dropped the phone into the glove compartment. “Good night, Sasha.”

  He drove away.

  ***

  “Yegor, may I speak with you for a minute?”

  The dining hall was full of noisy conversations and the clanking of the dishes. Students carried hot borsch, in which floated white commas of sour cream. Sasha waited until Yegor finished eating; when he was walking out with a bunch of his classmates, pulling his cigarettes on the way, she placed herself in his path with determination but without theatrics.

  “I’ll catch up with you,” Yegor said to his classmates.

  They went up to the hall. First years sat in the row near the bronze equestrian’s hooves. Sasha led Yegor a bit further—toward the deep window niche.

  “Here’s the thing. Are you having problems with Applied Science?”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way… I mean, everyone is having some issues, and so am I, but…”

  “I don’t care about ‘everyone,’” Sasha’s voice was harsh. “You are a verb in the subjunctive mood, and that makes you special. If you don’t study hard, then… Do you have any idea what could happen?”

  Yegor stared at her with empty, static eyes.

  “Don’t you understand what I’m saying?”

  “I understand. They say this to us in every class. If you don’t tie your shoelaces, you will fall down. If you don’t eat your oatmeal, you will grow up a loser.”

  “Yegor…”

  Sasha stopped herself short. Yegor was clearly at the most complicated stage of the informational reconstruction: he had almost completed his deconstruction period as a person, and he had not yet formed himself as a word. She remembered herself a year ago: they met around the same time, and back then Yegor was a confident, strong and kind man. Yegor pulled his classmate Stepan out of the water; back then Sasha would freeze in the middle of a movement, staring at a point in the distance, and she was convinced that she was going to fail the Applied Science exam…

  She held Yegor’s hand. One more second—and she would have claimed him, making him a part of herself.

  She restrained herself, remembering her tragic experience.

  ***

  She carried a tray of dirty dishes to the sink. Kostya pushed aside a stack of plates, freeing up some space on the long zinc white table. Sasha nodded gratefully.

  “You can’t help him,” Kostya said. “And stop thinking about it; it’s their business, let them work at it. Like we had to work.”

  “We helped each other,” Sasha said softly.

  “We are classmates. And they—he won’t understand you. It’s not time yet.”

  Kostya went toward the exit, and Sasha thought that he was right. Certain things could not be explained; isn’t it what Portnov and Sterkh had been saying from the very beginning?

  ***

  Fall came suddenly in the middle of September, and it became very cold very fast. The rain continued up until the arrival of the first snow. Sasha made a fire in her tiny fireplace using coals from a paper bag and wood that she bought at the market. The kindling crackled, sending sparks flying; Sasha spent hours in front of the fireplace with a book in her lap. She went to bed covering herself with a sheet, in the middle of the night she would pull a blanket over, and in the morning she would wake up because the room would get cold, and, yawning convulsively and wearing a jacket over her nightgown, she would make another fire in the fireplace.

  Smoke rose over the roof. The first snow fell softly, landing on the heads of the stone lions, burying the town of Torpa.

  ***

  “Mom?”

  The landlady’s phone stood on a shelf on the first floor near the front door. An antique telephone apparatus with tall ‘horns’ for the receiver. Sasha leaned over the brick whitewashed wall.

  “Hello! Mommy! Can you hear me?”

  “Hello, Sasha darling. I’m so glad you called…”

  A distant voice. A deliberate vivacity, even vigor.

  “How’s the baby?”

  “He’s well. He’s coughing a little. In the summer we tried to strengthen him a bit, but it’s not working all that well. It’s one obstacle after another. But everything else is fine. We want to change the wallpaper in your room, the old wallpaper is simply atrocious. I might go back to work, just part-time. Not yet, of course, in about six months or so. I miss working. We may get a nanny; pay her by the hour...”

  Mom spoke easily, and her tone more than her words were intended to convince Sasha of her complete serenity, stability, soft estrangement. Sasha imagined Mom standing over the stove, holding the receiver, stirring rice cereal in a little pot, and smiling, and talking, and talking…

  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 wire extended from the receiver…. The words stretched further, and Sasha stretched with them—from her house to the metal telephone box, further along the wires, into
the frozen ground, under the fields and snow piles, under the roots and concrete plates, further, further; 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 arm rest 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 empty dry peas, words that meant nothing rolled around—back and forth along the wires. Good. Well. Show, shovel, chic; Sasha was her own interlocutor on different ends of the wire. She conversed with herself, and as it happens so often, she did not believe herself.

  “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, it would only get worse.

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

  “I will. Goodbye, Sasha, 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 getting ahead of the program, we don’t have to…”

  “I know. 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!”

  “I am ready.”

  “I see. Well then. Let us take a half of the grammatical measure, half a measure backwards. 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 river bank. She would make a snowball, warmed it up in her bare hands to make sure it stayed firm. She would throw it straight up. Time after time. A janitor who was shoveling snow on the Lugovaya Street probably thought the girl 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 lantern 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 projection 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 forwards, or a bit backwards…

  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 further 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… There is motion and statics. 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 non-existence, and it can send it into non-existence by a single command. All the verbs I’ve even 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 blonde hair that was beginning to go gray, glasses with narrow lenses, and cold blue eyes. He was a 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.

  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 was an “embodied function.”

  “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 grey sweater 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?” now Portnov sounded worried. “Sasha?”

  “You are not human,” Sasha whispered.

  “So? Neither are you.”

  “But I had been human. I had been a child. I remember that. I remember being lov
ed.”

  “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 best goal during the world championship. 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 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 that we know ourselves.

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

  “Are you scared? Is it unpleasant? 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 a hold of yourself. We are losing time, and this session is not made of rubber, 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 exchanged witticisms. 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 with a nervous tic. 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 recreation, 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.

  Out of 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.