Вадим Бабенко - The Place of Quarantine

“Well, all right then,” I say and begin to examine the room. For a quarter of an hour, I investigate every corner and feel all the surfaces, like I did in my bedroom. This elicits some interest from Elsa – she watches me for a while and then says with a laugh, “Sherlock! Yes, I also found traces of dust but, on the whole, they do the cleaning quite well here. No worse than I would have done myself.”

“Cleaning?” I ask, surprised.

“Yeah,” Elsa replies and explains patiently, “There’s got to be a maid, right? She must come in when we’re asleep or go out for a walk – like a magic fairy.”

I’m a little irritated; she seems to be teasing me. “A fairy…” I mutter angrily. “What nonsense!” Then I go up to the couch and sit on the floor in front of her. Elsa continues to sew without looking at me.

“Listen!” I say. “Can you give me a serious answer? What do you think about all this – the other life, Quarantine? What have you managed to work out these last three days – I’m sure you’ve been thinking about it nonstop.”

Elsa snorts, “There’s no need to be rude.” Then she puts her embroidery aside, rests her hands on her knees and says, glancing down at me, “Not quite. I have thought about it, but only a little – because I’ve been trying my best not to think. To, you know, not lose my mind – you should try sitting here all on your own!”

I don’t say anything, just look away. Elsa continues, “When I woke up and went to the apartment, I sat on the sofa for almost half a day with an empty head waiting for something to happen. As if I’d woken up after a very deep sleep and for a while couldn’t find a way back to reality. Then, little by little, I began to ask myself questions and provide answers to them. “Where am I? – I don’t know. Am I ill? Apparently not. Was I asleep? Apparently yes, but I don’t remember where… Only after I’d convinced myself I was capable of thinking straight, I got up, had a look around, found that laminated printout and remembered about the helicopter. And then I spoke to Nestor – he calmed me down.”

“Do you believe in all this?” I ask, sharply sensing the irrelevance of the question.

“Do I have a choice?” Elsa sniffs. “Of course, I felt uncertain to start off – suspecting someone had drugged me and was playing games with me. Or that I was in a coma, and everything around me was a hallucination. But Nestor somehow convinced me…

“By the way,” she lowers her voice. “Initially, I thought I was being observed the whole time – by secret cameras, like in a reality show. I tried to be reserved and withdrawn and not betray any emotions – but then I got bored. Now I don’t think about it at all.”

“‘To die would be an awfully big adventure,’” I murmur. “I’m sure I’ve read that somewhere.”

“Yes, yes,” Elsa nods. “I’ve also read it. And so I decided: since it’s already happened, all I can do is just see how things turn out. If not in the second life itself – which I still assumed might be a joke – then at least in this specific place, in Quarantine. After all, some events take place here as well: there are the conversations with Nestor, changes in the weather – and I was also waiting for my roommate to arrive. It’ll be interesting, I thought; who will he turn out to be? Poor thing – he’s got such a shock waiting for him…”

She picks up the tablecloth again, spreads it on her knees and examines the embroidery critically. Stitched onto it is the word “Good,” with the final letter slightly higher than the others.

“It’s not straight,” Elsa acknowledges, “but that makes it even funnier. Let it remain like that – in a kind of semicircle.”

I get up and walk around the living room. Her lightheartedness still rankles me slightly – or maybe I’m just a little envious?

“It’s remarkable,” I say, stopping next to the window. “You immediately take everything as a given and endow it with rational meaning. Do you have any doubts, ever?”

“Oh, yes,” Elsa looks mockingly. “Torturing yourself with doubts is so typical of you men! Be thankful that I’m not some crazy neurotic. I could be acting quite differently – I can just imagine how my mother would have been in my place! She would have given everyone in Quarantine a hard time – telling them how to behave and what they need to do. Nestor’s nerves would be in shreds by now…”

She gets up and beckons me over, “Let’s try it out.”

We go up to the table. Elsa spreads the tablecloth, then straightens it and nods contentedly, “It’s just right. What do you think – it’s not too small, is it?”

“Just right,” I assure her and ask, “Did you have a husband back there before the helicopter crash?”

Elsa shakes her head, “No. At least, I don’t remember a husband. As I said, I didn’t have anyone close to me – blood relatives don’t count. It’s a good thing I died young: when you get older, only those close to you can still really love you. They could have never appeared in my life, but a time when it’d be impossible to love me would have been inevitable. It would have been a very sad life!”

Leaning over, she scrutinizes her embroidery. I ask her what the entire inscription is going to be. Elsa giggles, “I’ll tell you if you want. I remembered it this morning – it’s a funny story…”

She straightens the tablecloth again and continues, “I was only a child when I heard for the first time that I might go to heaven… By the way, my Nestor mentioned today that this, in a sense, is true. Or at least a rough approximation of it, he said – okay, I know myself that that isn’t completely so. But the main thing has been proven: after the helicopter crash and the explosion, I’m sitting here and talking to you, and I even understand who I am.”

“It seems your Nestor is a lot nicer than mine,” I grin, but Elsa interrupts me, “Look. Later on, the other words will go here and here…”

I examine the tablecloth and even trace it with my fingers. Then I turn toward the window – there are cliffs behind it. Huge outcrops of rock with sharp edges. Perhaps, they are similar to the ones below Elsa’s helicopter when her first life came to an untimely end. My memory is still bad – I can’t produce a single coherent recollection. If, of course, you don’t count the Lagrangian, which is perfectly self-sufficient in its own right.

“It happened in my early teens,” says Elsa, sitting down again on the couch. “I was feckless and pretty stupid and didn’t know who and what to believe. And then my older sister came back for the holidays from her college and brought me a T-shirt that said: Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go to LA . It changed my life completely!

“Yes, it really did!” she exclaims, spreading the embroidery on her knees. “It sounds strange, but it’s true. What I mean is, I suddenly understood that I had a chance – of really getting there. The chance, when offered, is always very important. I even said as much to Nancy – that’s my sister’s name – but she just laughed and said I was an idiot. Actually, she laughed at me all the way through my childhood – because she was taller and prettier, and all the guys would just ogle at her legs.”

“Your legs are very beautiful, Elsa,” I tell her quite sincerely. “They were the first thing I seriously took notice of in this new life.”

“Ah, come on,” she says, embarrassed a bit, but I can see she is secretly pleased. “Well, as a matter of fact, you aren’t so bad yourself; you have nice shoulders and a strong forehead, and cheekbones… None of my men were like you – that is, none of the ones I can remember. I didn’t have many men, to tell the truth – mostly because of that T-shirt.