Sergey Dyachenko - Vita Nostra

“Victor, what happened to your hands?” Sasha asked in passing.

Victor looked down at his hands hidden by the gloves. He wiggled his fingers.

“Ah, you know… The winter finals are coming, girls, the winter finals. Must survive the winter finals, that’s the thing.”

“Must survive the finals,” Sasha echoed.

Victor’s dark glasses turned to her:

“What are you worried about, you are only first years, have fun and play games. Celebrate New Year’s Eve. For third years there is a placement exam this winter, ladies.”

Oksana turned off the teakettle. She turned to him, wiping her hands on an already wet dish towel:

“Is it difficult?”

Victor inclined his head:

“I guess you can put it that way…. Difficult. After this exam we are moving to another location. Whoever passes it, obviously.”

“It might be easier at the other location,” Sasha suggested without a hint of conviction.

None of the first years had any clue about where the “other location” actually was, and what exactly it entailed. Some people said it was a very advanced institute, equipped with extremely sophisticated technology, with a dormitory recently renovated according to the contemporary European standards, with a computer on each desk. Others said the place was hidden underground, in deep catacombs. It was also said that the other location was in another city.

Some students—Sasha heard it herself—believed that the other location happened to be on another planet.

Once Sasha suggested to Kostya that the “other location” for the upperclassmen was a mysterious region beyond the grave that no one knows anything about, because no one ever returns from that place. Kostya had a strange reaction to her joke: he went pale and asked her not to make this kind of a joke ever again.

“It might be easier,” Victor agreed melancholically. “What can I say, girls. I really meant to be a merchant marine…”

Sasha plopped a teabag into an enamel mug and poured steaming boiling water over it.

“Sugar?”

“Two teaspoons. No, three.”

Sasha placed the mug on the edge of the table. Victor picked it up with both hands—awkwardly because of the leather gloves—and poured the boiling tea into his mouth, like water.

Sasha stopped breathing. Victor put his empty cup on the table, smiled and licked his lips.

“Thanks.”

“Isn’t it too hot?” Sasha asked softly.

He shook his head.

“Nah… Well, girls, I should go study. Thanks, remember me kindly.”

He left the kitchen.

Sasha stepped into her room, a textbook stuck under her arm. The room was dimly lit by a desk lamp and a few burning cigarette ends. Faces were hard to distinguish in the thick smoky air. Lisa sat on the desk next to a stereo system, and about ten people, first and second years, perched wherever they could find a place. Two people sat on Sasha’s bed—a sturdy girl whom Sasha had seen around was making out with her boyfriend. Her name was Irina; his, Slava.

“Lights out,” Sasha said. “Eleven o’clock. Everybody out.”

No one heard or listened to her. She approached the desk and threw the stereo system onto the floor.

The top broke off. A tape fell out. Conversation died.

“Are you nuts, Samokhina?” Olga from room 32 asked in complete silence.

Sasha switched on the light. Everyone squinted; Sasha’s eyes were wide open, even slightly bulging.

Just a few minutes ago, accompanied by laughter and voices, she finished Exercise number twenty-five.

Even though Portnov only gave her numbers thirteen through seventeen.

It just so happened that after she completed number seventeen, Sasha read the next one, out of curiosity—and understood absolutely nothing.

Instead of simply closing the book, she read it one more time. The words were familiar. The images were more or less clear. However, she could not imagine what she was supposed to do with them, and how it was meant to be done.

And that is when the bee in Sasha’s bonnet resurfaced. Perhaps it had something to do with her personality of a straight A student. Perhaps, her investigative instincts had kicked in. But she pulled a thread from number seventeen to number eighteen, followed it into utter darkness, and a few minutes later she stumbled upon what she thought of as a “contour” of the exercise.

Here it was.

Truly happy, she started gently kneading number eighteen. From that one, she sensed threads stretching to number nineteen, and then to number twenty. And then Sasha felt an epiphanal illumination of truth, and she threw herself into the exercises, one after another, and the light was becoming brighter, until finally, on Exercise number twenty-five, she went blind.

The inner light flashed brilliantly and then faded. Sasha rubbed her eyes; she couldn’t see the kitchen or her textbook. For a second she thought she was inside the exercise. She was a dark contour in a space without upper or lower limits; she did not have a chance to get scared. She heard the door slam, felt a cold draft, heard the refrigerator door open.

“Bitches! Who ate my herring?”

“Idiot, did you leave it in the common fridge?”

“I can’t keep it in my room! It stinks!”

“Should have eaten it right away.”

“Morons… Whose sausage is this? I’m going to eat the whole bloody thing.”

“Don’t, the sausage is Elena’s, it’s spoiled. It was already going bad when she got it.”

Sasha heard the voices very near her. She sensed the draft on her face, perceived smells. And saw nothing.

She felt the textbook sliding off her lap. She managed to catch it. There was no fear: didn’t Portnov say something about this, that vision may change…

What if her vision was lost forever?

Sasha swallowed her terrified howl. She rubbed her eyes, as if trying to gouge them out, and a few second later she could discern the white blur of the fridge. And one more minute later she detected the head of a herring on the tiled floor, somebody’s feet in slippers, fragments of a broken cup…

Her vision returned.

Reeling, Sasha shuffled off to her room. Something was happening to her. Something serious. She could not—and did not wish to—stop it. She flung open the door, became aware of the burning ends of cigarettes and a necking couple sitting on her bed; she did not think about anything and acted on pure instinct.

“Everybody out. Are you deaf?”

“Too much studying, sweetheart?” the guy on her bed asked her softly.

He looked into her eyes.

It seemed to her that only a few seconds had passed. In reality, when she came to, the clock showed half past eleven, and she was alone in the room. Cigarette butts lay on the floor. The tobacco smoke made her nauseous: she moved to the window, ripped off the paper she and Oksana had taped on the frame, plucked out the foam and threw open a panel, gulping the icy November air.

“You know, I am getting to be quite scared of you,” Kostya said. “Sometimes you have this look on your face…”

They sat on the windowsill in the corridor near auditorium thirty-eight. Kostya had come out of his individual session ten minutes ago, Sasha had five minutes to wait before hers.

“Sasha… what exactly did happen? Something happened, and none of them would admit it, as if they were ashamed.”

“Nothing,” Sasha waved her hand without much enthusiasm. “I told them to go to hell.”

“You have changed,” Kostya said.

“We’re all changing.”

“Yes, but you… Maybe you are a genius. Or something worse than that?” Kostya attempted a joke.

“I gotta go,” Sasha said.

She stopped in front of auditorium thirty-eight. Actually, she still had a couple of minutes: Portnov’s voice was sharp and loud behind the door. It sounds as if he’s flogging someone, or hammering in nails. Sasha thought that today he would definitely not yell at her. Today she brought not five, but twenty-three exercises. Twenty-three… She felt anxious and happy, like when she was a little girl riding a Ferris wheel.