Vita Nostra

  She did not have a lighter, but a box of matches lay on the mantel. With shaking hands Sasha crumpled the piece of paper with the depicted sign, threw it into an empty pan and lit it on fire.

  The paper went up in flames. Yellow flashes danced on the walls. A black-orange flower blossomed, writhed and went out. The drawing turned to ashes.

  Sasha bit her lip. Let them never find out about it. Sterkh must never know about this; formally Sasha did not break any rules, but assuming—assuming just for one second!—that she did in fact do this….

  She imagined the entire universe burning, rolling into black petals. And she cried—for the first time in many days.

  ***

  She woke up in the middle of the night. Or was it morning? The clock delicately chimed three. Sasha had been sleeping at her desk for four hours, her head buried in her arms.

  She rubbed her eyes. Looked around: a burned piece of paper lay in the frying pan.

  Nonsense, Sasha said to herself. It was just my imagination running wild, because I am tired… and because I had been thinking of Kostya. As Farit would say, let’s consider it a dream. It was just a dream.

  She threw the ashes into the trash. Yawning, she stretched and sat down at her desk. She was supposed to complete two tracks by ten, which left her five hours of solid work.

  I know how to do this, Sasha said to herself entering the number seventeen on the display. I have done it before many times. And I have been praised for it. I am talented. And that means that right now I will listen to the track, think it through… feel it through, or how should I phrase it?

  She pressed “Play.”

  ***

  The clock struck five. By itself this sound could not attract Sasha’s attention, but after the last stroke the clock wheezed and stopped. Sasha thought it was time to wind it up….

  And in the next second she sat up sharply.

  Something had changed. Something had happened. The number “56” blinked on the CD player’s display, but Sasha could not comprehend its meaning.

  She looked around. The room appeared to her a lot smaller than it really was. A box rather than a room. It was hard to breathe.

  She moved toward the window and yanked it open. The glass rattled. Yellow strips of foam fell on the floor. Cold spring air burst into the room; only two hours remained until the sunrise. Not thinking of anything, just wanting to breathe, move, live, Sasha climbed onto the windowsill. She squeezed through the narrow frame, stepped on the sprouts in the flowerbox, pushed off—and soared upward.

  The stars veiled with a thin layer of lacy clouds opened up to her. Below lay the lights of Torpa. Straight as an arrow, Sasha flew over the tiled roofs. She brushed an old weathervane with her wing, loop-the-looped, descended a bit, and flew right above the pavement, easily steering clear of trees and streetlights.

  She rose higher and hung there, spreading her wings like a heraldic eagle. Here she had plenty of air. Sasha observed and sensed it as a gleaming soap bubble that embraced the semicircle of the horizon. She laughed; to her right and left, in her peripheral vision would come into view and disappear again two wings the color of burnished steel. Not those chicken wings that were so difficult to towel dry. Two gigantic wings, the size of Sasha herself.

  She folded them unreflecting, like an umbrella, and dove down. She swept above the heads of two chatting street-cleaners; they raised their anxious eyes up to the sky long after Sasha vanished into the thin air.

  She made a circle over the central square and noticed a bus stop and a group of grim people waiting for the first trip. She rose higher and settled on the roof of a seven story building—the town’s skyscraper.

  The cold air sobered her up. Moving her wings slightly, Sasha attempted to figure out what she was going to do now, and where her adventure might actually lead. The speed she could reach in the air was quite impressive: Sasha recalled her long-time dream of leaving Torpa. Perhaps she could fly out of there?

  The wind picked up. The clouds careened across the sky, flat and ragged. High above the clouds the trace of a jet stretched across the sky, but Sasha could see that it was actually an opening—a narrow crack that resembled a smile. The crack opened wide, then closed up again into a thin thread. Behind the opening, on the other side of the sky, warm lights sparkled festively.

  Sasha jumped up, pushed off the tiles with her bare feet, and moving her wings as fast as she could, she charged upward. The smile of the crack became closer, and Sasha thought that behind it she could see a massive expanse lit by millions of lanterns. One more leap; the ragged clouds stayed far below, Sasha spread her wings, sizing up the best way to squeeze into the opening, and at that moment a blinding light flashed from the other side of the sky. Sasha shut her eyes. For a second she imagined standing in the fourteenth auditorium in front of Sterkh, and him slashing her eyes with the white light reflected by the metal plate…

  In this surgically bright light, a dark winged body rushed at Sasha from the opening.

  Sasha turned upside down and lost her balance. Falling, she flew through the clouds, tumbled onto the sloped roof, rolled over hurting her wing, managed to break her fall at the very edge by digging her toes into the drainpipe, flattening herself over the tiles. Directly in front of her—between her and the weathervane—a black shadow with ash-colored hair plummeted from the sky.

  He stood a few feet away from her. In place of a hump, two colossal black wings spread behind his back. They blocked out the sky.

  Sasha made a jerky movement trying to get up from the tiled roof. She slipped, turned over in the air, threw open her arms, legs, wings—and caught her balance right above the cobblestones. She folded her wings and, moving only the tips, streamed away—along the black precipice of the street, up, down, under the arch, smashing icicles; the black silhouette did not fall behind, just the opposite, with each sharp turn Sasha saw it closer.

  The thunder roared. Every now and then the sky lit up and crackled, ripped apart by the sudden storm. Flinching from the flashes, Sasha flew on, rushed by a narrow gateway like a pipe, made a sharp turn avoiding a theatre poster board… And then her entire body collided with an old chestnut tree.

  She turned upside down and collapsed.

  The thunder roared for the last time and went hush in the distance. The sky darkened, and the windows were unlit. An old lantern swayed on its chain, making a rasping sound. Once again, silence prevailed on Sacco and Vanzetti, and only somewhere around the corner a street-cleaner’s shovel made a hesitant scraping sound.

  Sasha lay motionless on the cobblestones. She pretended to be dead, like a tiny insect.

  ***

  “What did the symbol look like?”

  “I can’t repeat it. ‘Creation’ combined with ‘affection.’ I can’t.”

  “Perhaps, it was this?” Sterkh waved his hand. Right in front of Sasha’s eyes the symbol in question wove itself in the air—and immediately disintegrated into a multitude of sparks, the symbol that existed in time and lived by its own commandments.

  “Something like that.”

  “Something like that, or is that it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “How many times did it double before you burned it?”

  “Three… or four.”

  “Three or four?”

  Sasha sniffled:

  “Four.”

  The sun was rising. Torpa’s streetlights went off. Sasha sat on an iron bench, bent over, hugging her shoulders with both arms. Sterkh stood across from her, not bothering with the hunchback charade. His relaxed wings brushed against the moist pavement.

  “What happened then?”

  “I began listening to the track. Number seventeen. And eighteen.”

  “How many tracks did you listen to?”

  “Nikolay Valerievich,” Sasha said. “It was an accident. I short-circuited.”

  “Did it happen ‘all by itself?’”

  Sasha hid her face in her hands.

  “I’
m listening: how many tracks did you manage to work through?”

  “Up to f-fifty six… Forty altogether.”

  A long black feather caught in the wind made a circle over the pavement and got tangled in the thick shrubbery. Sterkh moved his shoulders; his wings unfolded to the full extent, tinted blue, shimmering and twitching slightly in the wind. They slowly folded over, pressing against his back, in the shape of a small hump.

  “My office, today at noon.”

  ***

  She showed up to English class wearing a pant suit, meticulously coiffed hair, face made up, overall well-groomed and silent, as if she once again had lost her ability to speak. By the professor’s request, she wrote down several sentences with irregular verbs on the black board, and did not make a single mistake.

  The class ended at eleven. Kostya and Zhenya left the auditorium avoiding each other’s eyes and moved in different directions. Sasha went down to the dining hall, got a glass of apple juice and sat at an unoccupied table. She opened the textual module and started reading from the beginning, from Paragraph one. Repetition is the master of skill. No one said she could not repeat things.

  Slowly, meticulously, word by word—rumble, roar, meaningless noise. As if a million of beautiful songs were sung simultaneously, and their combination formed a cacophony. As if millions of declarations of love were said one over the other, and the result was a din, babbling; not a single projection of a single will would fall onto the surface of application, and no meaning would be born…

  “Between the two of them they managed to carry Sivi up through the alleys away from the harbor. Bodies were everywhere. A girl was hanging from a lemon tree. They went in through the back of a deserted house and laid him out on a couch. A trail of blood ran across the floor to a cupboard. Joe looked inside and quickly closed it.”

  The glass with the apple juice fell off the table and shattered, drops and shards flying all over the place.

  “They might weave slaughter in the streets but what was that in the end? The other weaving also never ceased, the weaving of life, and when they burned one city another was raised on the ruins. The mountain only grew higher and towered ever more majestically above the plains and the wastes and the deserts.”

  “Sasha? Sasha?!”

  She tore her eyes away from the book. Everyone in the dining hall stared at her. Behind the counter, a young server’s eyes seemed round with panic.

  “Sasha, get a hold of yourself!”

  Kostya stood next to her, broken glass gritting under the heels of his shoes. It appeared he had just let go of the lapel of Sasha’s chic jacket.

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing, it’s just that you were screaming and moaning out loud. Nothing special.”

  “Collateral damage… of the learning process,” Sasha screwed her face into a smile. “Has it ever occurred to you that we live inside a text?”

  “No,” he replied without thinking. “Wait… what did you say?!”

  ***

  She went down to the administrative wing pressing the textual module to her chest.

  The receptionist was not there, her knitting spread over the empty desk. The leather-upholstered door was slightly ajar.

  “Come in, Samokhina.”

  She entered.

  Sterkh paced around his office. Portnov smoked sitting on a low banquette in the corner of the room.

  And in front of the desk, one leg thrown over the other, sat Farit Kozhennikov. Sasha stumbled over the threshold and nearly dropped her book.

  Sterkh glanced at her over his shoulder:

  “Come in. Sit down.”

  Slowly, head held high, Sasha walked through the entire office. She sat down in a leather armchair across from Kozhennikov. She saw her own reflection in his mirrored lenses; the underground office was very, very cold.

  “How do you feel?” Sterkh asked mildly.

  Sasha lifted her chin higher:

  “What?”

  “How do you feel after everything that happened yesterday?”

  “Fine.”

  Portnov coughed as if choking on the cigarette. Two wisps of smoke escaped out of his nostrils.

  “Very well,” Sterkh nodded. “Then you must learn something about yourself, Alexandra Samokhhina. Oleg Borisovich, please go ahead.”

  Portnov put out his cigarette in the bottom of an ashtray, took off his glasses and slipped them into the breast pocket of his checkered shirt. One of the temples got stuck on a button, and everyone waited about thirty seconds while Portnov struggled to free it.

  Having wrestled down his glasses, Portnov pulled a new cigarette out of the pack and began to knead it with the tips of his fingers. It looked as if his hands trembled.

  “Without a doubt, you, Samokhina, are the strongest and most gifted student in this class. And based on that knowledge you have clearly decided that you do not have to follow rules, that laws do not apply to you, that you can assign challenges to yourself, and that whatever your professors may say to you deserves at most a condescending smirk.”

  “But I’ve never…” Sasha began.

  “Be quiet!” Portnov continued kneading his cigarette aggressively; crumbs of tobacco fell on the floor. “You are developing with an astounding speed, but you development is erratic, unmanageable and wildly out of hand. At this point your abilities and the level of your responsibility came to such a screaming contradiction that we, your professors, must make a decision… regarding you. And we will make that decision. That is all I wanted to say.”

  Under Portnov’s penetrating gaze Sasha pulled her head into her shoulders.

  “Now listen to me, Alexandra,” Sterkh began. “Yesterday, for lack of anything better to do, you manifested a highly intricate informational complex… it was—ab ovo—Love, as you understand it. You actualized it, transported it into the state of active projection and then you burned it.”

  “No,” Sasha mumbled. “I… I didn’t know!”

  “But even that was not enough for you. You decided to try my track one after another, and in one hour you have worked through the path of development designed for a half a year! You are the first student in my experience who managed something like that. However, if you had worked through fifty-eight tracks rather than fifty-six, you would have been turned inside out. Literally, it would lead to a mutiny of the matter. Intestines on the outside! Clothes, skin, hair—in a tiny clump. Have you ever turned inside out a dirty sock?!”

  “I did not know! You never explained it to me!”

  “You were told enough!” Portnov barked. “You have enough information to draw conclusions!”

  “Don’t yell at me,” Sasha said softly.

  Portnov narrowed furious eyes. Sterkh stopped for a minute, picked up a glass of water from the table, shook it, watching a fly lifelessly floating on its surface.

  “Alexandra, yesterday you made yet another jump in your development. An impossible jump judging by my experience… our experience, mine and Oleg Borisovich’s. You were extremely lucky not to perish. But now, now that you have survived, we have to deal with another issue…”

  Sterkh halted. His usually pale cheeks flushed. The eyes with tiny pupils stared into Sasha’s face:

  “What the hell made you do this? What are we supposed to do with you now? What are we going to do, you are completely unmanageable! You are a monkey with a grenade! It is impossible for a biological human being to have access to manifestation—before the transformation, before the exam! And you are human, and you behave like a human! Like a silly girl! Like a stupid, infantile, irresponsible…”

  He made a visible effort to cut himself off; placed his hands behind his back and began pacing back and forth along his office. The silence was disturbed only by the sound of his steps, and a bell that rung in the distance, somewhere deep inside the institute building.

  ‘Why am I unmanageable?” Sasha spoke, trying with all her might to control the trembling in her voice. “Explain to me, I will un
derstand. Here you are insulting me, and you are not even trying to explain. You treat us like animals, like incompetent idiots…”

  “Because that is what you are,” Portnov said.

  Kozhennikov remained silent; he gazed at Sasha with a hint of interest.

  “Well,” Sterkh began, his soft voice clearly spelling disaster. “Now regarding explanations. Have I told you, Alexandra, that uncontrolled experiments are dangerous and forbidden?”

  “But...”

  “Have I, or have I not told you that?”

  “You have!”

  “You appeared to understand and gave me your word not to do anything above your given assignments. Is this true?”

  “Nikolay Valerievich…”

  “Have you given me your word? Or not?”

  “Yes! But I did not understand…”

  “You will understand now,” Sterkh promised her ominously. “Oleg Borisovich, this is an exceptional situation. Your ideas?”

  Portnov clicked his lighter, took a drag, exhaled a stream of smoke, and immediately squashed the cigarette into the ashtray. He fished his glasses out of his pocket, placed them on his nose, and gazed at Sasha above his lenses:

  “I know one thing: this girl is not leaving this office until we find a method of controlling her.”

  “And unfortunately this method must be rather radical,” Sterkh muttered. “Alexandra, we had no choice but to invite your advisor to join us.”

  Kozhennikov sat unmoving, and the direction of his gaze was concealed by his glasses, Sasha cringed.

  “Farit Georgievich,” Sterkh spoke with exaggerated decorum. “The first-year student management is requesting a guarantee that student Alexandra Samokhina abides by the academic rules and regulations of this Institute.”

  The silence, long and sonorous, hung in the air. Sasha knew perfectly well that begging was out of question. The only thing she could do at this point was to maintain her dignity as much as was humanly possible.

  She gathered her remaining strength and straightened her spine. She was wearing her best suit, and not a single tear spoiled her makeup. For a second she saw herself through their eyes and suddenly recalled the embryonic world writhing in the fire…