Вадим Бабенко - The Place of Quarantine

Leaving the bathroom, Elsa looks around my room and notes with satisfaction, “It’s just like mine. Here’s the dressing corner,” she leads me to a large full-length mirror. Next to it is a fitted wardrobe. I open the door – it is packed with clothes. Elsa giggles, “I haven’t once succeeded in getting fully naked, can you imagine?” Then she points to the coffee table, “Here’s the console. You can change anything – the wallpaper, the view, the lighting…”

I tap the glass surface. It turns on; it’s touch sensitive. I run my fingers over the buttons – everything works: the curtains move, the walls change colors. There is an indistinct, barely discernible pattern on them – I go up to it and peer at the strokes and swirls.

“Like milk dissolving into coffee,” says Elsa behind me. “Or the traces of the wind on the sand.”

“A fractal…” [1] A self-similar geometrical figure, each part of which has the same properties as the whole. I mutter, but the word has no meaning to me. “Or maybe the stone garden in Tiahuanaco.”

I am reminded of something, but only dimly. Yet I know: it was quite important! I whisper and listen to its echo: “The comprehension of one’s own mind – links of an endless chain of questions. A strange attractor [2] A pattern in a phase space toward which a nonlinear dynamical system tends to evolve. – a line in multidimensional space – a self-sufficient, self-organizing entity. The fading of consciousness – a broken fractal line. The links become shorter, shorter, but it is nevertheless infinite…”

“What, what?” Elsa asks. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, more or less,” I say pensively. “It’s just that before, it seems, I thought a lot about that – the patterns in a coffee with milk. Never mind; let’s go and have a look at your aquamarine bathroom.”

We inspect her bedroom, which is no different from mine, and then return to the living room and sit down on the sofa. “Now,” says Elsa, “get that stone garden out of your head and concentrate as best you can. This is the instruction manual for life here: they call it ‘the Brochure.’ To be honest, I’ve already shown you the most entertaining things, but my Nestor said it needs to be read. And yours did too, probably.”

In her hands she holds the Brochure, as she called it, a booklet with a black-and-white cover. “Quarantine” is printed in bold in the middle of it. “You must read it all,” Elsa tells me. “You’d be better off doing it here, with me. If you have any questions, I’ll try to explain.”

Clearly, she doesn’t want to be alone – just like me.

I open the booklet. On the first page, in the top-right corner, where an introductory quote would normally be placed, the word “ QUARANTINE ” appears again, and a little bit lower, “ Be grateful! ” The text proper begins on the next page. Point number one states, “ Everyone should remain in Quarantine until they are fully ready to leave. ” And, just below, point two, “ Once you have left, there can be no returning to Quarantine. No exceptions. ”

“So far it all seems pretty clear to me,” I mutter. “But of course I’m happy to sit here with you. Oh, look, we can take walks outside. Ah, yes, you mentioned some incident on the street…”

Elsa glances over my shoulder. I read on, “To exit the building you must use the private elevator, located inside the apartment next to the front door. Opening the front door is not recommended.”

“You should only go for walks during the daytime. Walking in the dark is not recommended.”

And further:

“Swimming in the sea without a bathing suit is not permitted. No exceptions.”

“So, there’s a sea here?” I ask Elsa.

“Oh, yes,” she replies, “very much so. And it seems very, very real to me. You can see it from the bedroom – here in the living room, there are always just images beyond the window.”

“Let’s look at it now,” I suggest. We go into Elsa’s bedroom. She confidently presses the buttons of her console and nods toward the window, “There you have it…”

Beyond the window is a fabulous ultramarine seascape stretching right out to the horizon, a bright sun and white launches and yachts. Below us is a seafront with a balustrade, full of people. Almost everyone is walking in twos – leisurely and slowly; they’re clearly not in a hurry. We are high up, and I cannot distinguish their faces. A set of concrete stairs leads from the seafront to the rocks near the water. I see several bathers, all dressed in bright yellow. Some are simply lying on the rocks, apparently sunbathing.

“Idyllic,” I grin. “Is it like this every day?”

“Well, no,” Elsa makes a denying gesture. “This is the first time I’ve seen the sun. They seem to be quite capricious about switching on the weather.”

“‘According to the schedule…’” I murmur quietly, but the words don’t register with Elsa. Perhaps her Nestor uses different terms.

“Yesterday there was a strong wind,” she says. “Wind, storm clouds, everything was very dark and gloomy. And the waves – no one dared climb into the water, although it’s probably safe here. I mean with our so-called bodies…”

She is standing right next to me. Obeying a sudden impulse, I try to put my arm around her waist, but my hand hangs in the air – Elsa avoids it, takes a step away and toward the center of the room. “Ice maiden!” I think with irritation. For some reason, there seems to be a catch about this as well, some unnecessary conceit.

Soon after, we return to the living room and sit down on the couch a little apart from each other. “I didn’t like going out alone,” Elsa confides. “Everyone – just everyone! – looks you right in your face; it’s so annoying. I complained to Nestor, but he told me it’s only natural. Everyone’s got the same thing on their mind, he said. They’re looking to meet somebody they knew back there – that’s all they’re concerned about. And for me, it’s not such a big deal. Back there , I wasn’t close to anyone.”

“Close? To anyone?” I repeat and suddenly recall Tina again. Recall the name, a bright-red streak of hair and a sense of anxiety, sucking at me from inside. My roommate notices something, moves away a little and looks at me askance. I remain silent, having nothing to say – and nothing even to think about. The flashback burns and torments me, but no threads reach out from it. My memory is helpless – how long is this going to continue?

I pick up the Brochure again. The next pages contain nothing but an endless disclaimer, informing that the administration is not responsible for anything, from the state of the infrastructure to the quarantiners’ mental health. I skim over the paragraphs of this dry bureaucratic text and have almost decided to skip a few pages when Elsa suddenly jumps up, “Oh! We’re almost late – you’d better skip to the end and read clause seven point one. Or maybe it’s seven point three…”

I read aloud, “Everyone should have two sessions every day with your friend, your mentor, your Nestor at twelve and five precisely, according to the large wall clock.”

Elsa points to the opposite wall. A round clock is hanging there whose hands have already converged on the twelve-hour mark. “We must hurry,” she says, getting up. “Bye-bye.”

“See you later,” I mumble in reply and head toward my bedroom.

“You are fifteen seconds late,” Nestor says, an acid smile on his face. “This is not acceptable. I would ask you to bear this in mind.”