Sergey Dyachenko - Vita Nostra

Lisa swore through her teeth, her words pitiful and dirty. Nobody was there to laugh, be surprised or help out, and only Sasha stood there, wondering whether she should offer her classmate a hand, or whether it would be considered an insult. At that moment, a sharp gust of wind flew through the unmoving linden trees, leaves fell like raindrops, the stars vanished for a second and then lit up again.

Sasha could have sworn that a gigantic dark shadow flew over the dorm roof. More so, the shadow descended upon the antenna and stayed there, covering Cassiopeia. Sasha’s mouth fell open…

The sensation was very quick, almost instantaneous. Stars blinked and lit up once again. Lisa, staring ahead, was already limping toward the entrance to the dorm, and Sasha, looking back cautiously, ran after her.

Lisa passed Room number 21. She proceeded further down the hall, where a door was opened, and where a battery of empty beer bottles stood by the entrance. Autumn leaves kept falling off of Lisa’s jeans; Sasha caught her war cry: “Party on, boys and girls!” and, waiting for nothing else, ducked into her room, into the darkness.

Wind danced around the room; shaking and chattering her teeth, Sasha shut the rattling window. She shivered and longed for warmth, but the hot water was turned off, and making tea in the kitchen filled with all those people having so much fun simply was not an option.

Oksana stayed immobile, blanket thrown over her head. You are awake, Sasha wanted to tell her. You are simply hiding, waiting for the finale. Good for you—tomorrow you can say with an honest look on your face that you have no idea what was happening, you can admit to sleeping soundly the entire time…

Words bubbled up to her throat and, suddenly, without warning, flooded out. Bent over, Sasha fell onto the dirty linoleum and, with a fit of coughing, vomited the remains of her supper, along with a handful of dull gold coins.

That night the Indian summer ended as if finished off with a single hammer blow, and cold windy autumn took its place. Windows were now shut tightly, but the ceiling lamp swung in the cold drafty air, and wind howled under the door as if traveling through a chimney.

Oksana begged the superintendent for two reams of paper for winterizing the windows and a roll of foam that resembled an octopus with its weak yellowish tentacles. While Sasha untangled the octopus and pushed the foam into cracks and crevices in the window frames, clever Oksana managed to score some flour and prepare a thick paste that looked like gray snot with a starchy smell. They did not have any brushes, but Sasha thought of using a piece of the foam to smear the flour paste onto the paper ribbons. The paper lost its cheerful white color and starchy density, becoming limp, sticky and pliable. The paper becomes just like us, thought Sasha, taping up the windows.

“Don’t tape over the side pane,” Oksana ordered. “We need it to air out the room.”

Sasha touched the cold radiator. The heating season was nowhere in sight.

…Last night she spent a long time collecting the coins that rolled all over the room. She wiped up the floor, then washed it. She wrapped the coins in the first plastic bag she found and buried them in the suitcase under her bed. Lisa stayed in bed for the first two blocks, recuperating, but did not have enough courage to skip Specialty.

It was a very difficult day, two blocks of Specialty, third and fourth. The class was reading sections of Textual Module 1; Portnov always knew whether a student was reading or studying a bug crawling over the page. The silence in the auditorium was occasionally broken by a sharp bark:

“Korotkov, work. Kovtun, pay attention!”

Sasha worked hard, waiting for the words—the other ones, the meaningful ones—to materialize out of the white noise, as they did in the library. Nothing happened. She was exhausted, developed a headache, and was now convinced that her experience in the reading room was just a figment of her imagination.

“Samokhina, how’s the thumb twiddling going?”

She did not even notice how her attention had wandered, how she concentrated on the corner of the page. She thought she noticed a faint mark of a nail. Who read this book before her? One-eyed Victor? Or Zakhar, Kostya’s roommate? Who entered any door only on the third try? Who put the note into the storage unit at the train station? What good could this note do?

“Samokhina,” Portnov was standing next to her. “I am not pleased with your reading. You are goofing off, Samokhina, I did not expect it from you. Have you thought of a word worth saying out loud yet?”

Sasha was silent.

“Samokhina, you will remain silent until you realize why you need a secondary signaling system. Simians manage with having only the primary system, don’t they?”

Sasha was silent.

“For tomorrow’s one-on-one session,” Portnov took a few steps in front of the class, “repeat all the underlined paragraphs. Memorize them. Tag, you are it.” He smirked. “Prefect, schedule Samokhina for the last time slot.”

Sasha kept asking herself over and over again: what if Kozhennikov had the same “assignment” for her as he did for Lisa? For Sasha, for whom even skinny-dipping in the wee hours of the morning, when no one was watching, was a colossal task…

“I don’t ask for the impossible.”

Lisa’s hatred, then, toward Kostya was not surprising. Even though it had nothing to do with Kostya.

Sasha’s classmates took turns entering Auditorium number 38. Upon exiting, their faces were different, some angry, some anxious, some girls were clearly crying. That was Portnov for you, yes. He knew how to make your blood boil.

Sasha was the last one to enter. The fourth block ended, the fifth just began. At the third floor gym a table tennis class was about to start.

“You are losing steam,” Portnov stated dryly. “You are not working as hard as before. Look at me.”

The ring he wore only for the one-on-one sessions approached Sasha’s face. She blinked at the sharp flash of blue light.

“Keep looking, don’t turn your face… I see. Sit down.”

Only a few chairs fit in the small auditorium. Sasha lowered herself gingerly onto the wooden chair nearest her, the one with a dangerously twisted leg.

“Do you feel yourself changing on the inside?” Portnov asked softly.

Sasha nodded.

“Good. That is what should be happening. Any change—vision, hearing, memory—should not alarm you. I’m going to give you one more book, a set of exercises. You’ll have to work harder, don’t worry, your back will not break. You will do five exercises for me each week. They must be done mentally, only mentally, one after another, without any mistakes. I will be checking, Samokhina, checking every one of them very carefully, and if you twiddle your thumbs like you did yesterday—you are taking the risk of remaining an invalid for the rest of your life, your life, not mine. Is that clear?”

Someone knocked on the door. Sasha still had five minutes left, and she was surprised at the interruption.

It was Kostya. He was anxious to the point of losing all his instincts for self-preservation.

“Oleg Borisovich… There… Phone at the front desk… Samokhina got a phone call. It’s a long distance call, her mother is calling…”

Sasha froze. She looked at Portnov. He shifted his glasses further down his nose and glanced at Kostya who slightly hunched over under his stare.

“It’s her mother. I thought… Something may have happened…”

“You are dismissed,” Portnov’s voice was full of ice. “Samokhina, take the book.”

Out of his desk drawer he pulled out a fat volume, bright red, with the familiar pattern of blocks on its cover.