Sergey Dyachenko - Vita Nostra

“Makeup exam is the day after tomorrow,” he stared straight ahead. “But I cannot. I cannot.”

Now. Then.

Again Sasha sat by the hooves of the bronze horse. She must have done something wrong with the concept of “activity:” perhaps whatever was happening to Yegor was more intricate than a regular exam with a starting point of ten o’clock in the morning and an estimated ending point at two o’clock in the afternoon. Or perhaps Sasha simply lacked the experience and skill: returning to the past again and again, she kept showing up in front of a closed door.

“Sasha, what are you doing?”

Sterkh came in through the front entrance. The tails of his long black coat were whitened by the snow. Sasha was well aware that Sterkh was not present in her initial “tests.”

Did that mean that the false hunchback lives—exists—outside of general time limits?

“Sasha, I did not teach you to operate grammatical tenses just so that you could float like a flower in the ice hole…. Please take that into consideration: no independent acts during the exam. Do only what is written on your examination sheet. Are you guarding this boy, Yegor Dorofeev?”

“Yes. He…”

“Verbs in the subjunctive mood often suffer from a weak will power,” Sterkh looked concerned. “And in our line of work lack of will is a death sentence.”

“Nikolay Valerievich,” constant time iterations made Sasha dizzy. “Can you help him? Right now? Just let him pass this test? Just this one?”

“A verb in a subjunctive mood is a possibility,” Sterkh unbuttoned his coat, and drops of melted snow fell on the dark parquet floor. “Occasionally a brilliant possibility. But more often than not it is a lost possibility, Sasha. I wanted to tell you before… but—I just didn’t have the heart to upset you.”

Sterkh left. Sasha watched him walking away.

She already knew what she had to do. Up to the minute detail; the pink phone on her neck probably would have prevented her. However, Farit Kozhennikov took away her phone, thus letting her loose.

She flipped over a page in the half-filled notepad. And one more empty page. A white field.

This is where she made a mistake. She should not have considered an “activity” equal to taking the exam; an activity was a lot less obvious, intermittent, a dashed line…. It was fractioned and simultaneously viscous. And that was not called love, not at all; this activity had its own verb, its own symbol, and its own notation.

As long as the pencil did not break.

Now. Then.

In the morning, around half past seven Sasha looked out of the window and saw Yegor sitting right on her porch, between the stone lions.

He was just as still and white as the sculptures. Two white piles of snow lay on his shoulders.

“What’s wrong?” Sasha opened the door; the drifting snow licked her fur-lined slippers….

For the first time in her life she stepped that far into the past. A few hours. She felt a little frightened.

She let Yegor into her apartment, opened the fireplace, placed an old crumpled newspaper onto the coals:

“We’ll take care of everything. Don’t worry.”

She put a couple of dry logs onto the newspaper and lit a match:

“We’ll get warm in a minute. Just wait.”

She picked up her bag that was left on the coat hanger overnight. For a second she was confused: it was the same notepad, only the page that was supposed to be covered by signs and symbols, was still white and empty…

She should sharpen her pencil to make sure it does not break.

“Yegor, don’t be surprised, promise? I know what you want to tell me. I know you will pass this exam. I know how you will pass it. Look at me. Look at me…”

She placed a piece of paper on the table. Don’t forget to sharpen the pencil… So. “Will.” One of the essential symbols with multiple meanings, everything depends on the nuances, on the added meanings. In five dimensions, plus an occasional glimpse of the sixth. Perfect.

“Sasha…”

“Be quiet and keep your mouth closed. I am working on something important, just be quiet…”

Projection of will onto the identity: will-dash, plus Yegor’s own will power, which she must take into account, will-two dashes…

The symbol glimmered unfolding in time. She planted the fourth dimension within the time loop—no one had ever taught her that, she’d never even heard of this complicated paradox, but now it was too late to back out, no matter what the side effects would be.

The clock’s tick-tock slowed down. The pendulum hung for a second, then swayed again. Sasha smiled happily.

She could .

Taking Yegor’s hands she claimed him, merged with him. He was such a nice, strong, kind man. This is what the Institute has done with him; Sasha fought a sudden and unnecessary feeling of pity. On the way to becoming a carved sculpture wood goes through the esthetically displeasing stage of being a stump; half-finished work is not usually displayed in front of half-wits, but lately Sasha was anything but a half-wit.

Here is the second-year Dorofeev. And here is his folded-in entity. Like a letter in an envelope. Receive and sign for it.

Yegor’s hands twitched in her own:

“Sasha…”

“Don’t be afraid,” she said softly. “Let’s go, it’s time. It’s already half past nine… Time went so quickly! And the same two logs are still burning… Let’s go, do not worry. It is my imperative. It is my command.”

An hour passed since the door closed. Then another hour. Students came out one or two at a time, some immediately lit up a cigarette, others threw their arms around their friends, somebody was laughing hysterically; gradually the corridor became noisy, second years chased in around the hallway: ““What are the sparrows singing on this last day of chill? We live, we breathe, we made it, and we are living still!”

Yegor was the last one to come out. He staggered. Grabbed onto the wall with his hand.

“Well?!”

He stepped forward and embraced her. He staggered holding onto Sasha like a drunk holding onto a tree. Sasha gritted her teeth and re-planted her feet firmly on the ground.

“How did you do it? How did you manage? How?!”

Tears rolled down his unshaven hollow cheeks.

“You did it… You… thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”

Yegor’s classmates slowly tightened the circle around them. Sasha’s “anchor”—the one she planted in “now”—was approaching with every minute, and she suddenly realized with dread that she had no idea how to get out of the loop. Time is a grammatical concept; in a few minutes Sasha will again look out of the window and will see Yegor sitting on the steps between the stone lions. And everything will repeat itself again, only this time Sasha, burnt-out and frazzled, will not be able to replicate her heroic deed, and Yegor will fail yet again… And fail again… and again.

“Everything is fine,” she whispered. “You need to rest. Go, wash up…”

Her gentle voice exuded power over Yegor. He straightened up and, squeezing Sasha’s hand one more time, shuffled through the crowd of his classmates towards the men’s bathroom. Sasha did not have to look at her watch to sense the “anchor” drawing closer.

The front door opened. Sterkh stepped into the hall; snow melted on the long tails of his black coat.

“Hello, Nikolay Valerievich.”

“Hello, Alexandra. Congratulations, you are in the loop with variations. In the old times it was used as a punishment for disobedient slaves.”

Sasha was silent. Everything that had happened in the last few hours (or minutes?) took so much of her strength that she was now ready to fall down—or burst out crying.