Sergey Dyachenko - Vita Nostra

Zhenya Toporko left the auditorium, strangely hunched over, holding back tears. Probably deserved it, Sasha thought without pity. She entered the auditorium.

“Good morning, Samokhina. Have you finished?”

Sasha nodded. She leaned over the straight-backed chair and began the mental process starting from Exercise number thirteen.

She lost it on number fourteen and began again. Made a mistake on number fifteen and went back to the beginning. Portnov watched her, his lips pursed skeptically. Ready to panic, Sasha started again and lost it on number thirteen. Portnov was silent.

“Give me a minute, I just need to concentrate.”

“Then concentrate.”

“I…”

Sasha stumbled. She remembered last night. Oksana and her dishes. Victor and his gloves. “Haven’t you slept with him yet?” Scalding tea… Flashes of cigarettes in the dark.

She started number thirteen—and felt the exercises glide . One after another. Like the links of a chain. Like familiar thoughts. Insane. Alien.

She passed number sixteen. Seventeen. Immediately merged into number eighteen. Nineteen. Her heart asphyxiated; Sasha felt like a tightrope walker, dancing on a wire over a screaming crowd, she could almost hear their ecstatic shrieks—although in reality the auditorium was quiet, somewhere in the hallway students spoke to each other, and she stood grasping the back of the chair, staring into space, and across from her Portnov sat and watched her, and somehow—how?—he knew and saw her dance on the wire, and he was her only spectator.. Or listener? Accomplice? What was happening to her, and how could he sense it? And what exactly about her thoughts and exercises did he see?

Right after the twenty-fifth exercise she went blind. Just like last night in the kitchen. A flash of light—and darkness, like a closed container. Obscurity.

And stillness. Portnov did not move.

“Sit down.”

Holding onto the chair, she walked around it and sat down. The seat squeaked.

“Which numbers were you supposed to study?”

“Thirteen through eighteen.”

“Then why the hell did you touch the twenty-fifth?”

Sasha swallowed.

“Answer me!”

“I wanted to.”

“What??”

“I wanted to!” Sasha was ready to snap and talk back at him. Had she still had her eyes, she would get up and leave, and slam the door behind her. However, she was blind and afraid to appear ridiculous by running into the door frame on her way out.

“What can you see?” Portnov asked an octave lower.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing at all?”

Sasha blinked a few times.

“Nothing,” her voice was barely audible. “The same thing happened last night. But it went away almost immediately.”

“How many times did you do number twenty-five?”

“Twice. Last night and this morning.”

She heard Portnov get up and approach her. She rose; Portnov took hold of her chin and sharply, almost cruelly jerked her face up. There was a flash of light; Sasha blinked.

Right in front of her eyes was Portnov’s ring. Its green light dimmed little by little.

Portnov removed his glasses. He looked at Sasha—perhaps for the first time in her life, he looked not above his lenses, but straight at her. His pupils were tiny, like poppy seeds. They reminded Sasha of the eyes of the hunchback, Nikolay Valerievich, who once treated Sasha to a restaurant dinner of sandwiches and porkchops.

“Listen to me, girl. If I say something, that means you have to do it exactly as I say. You may not do less. You may not… should not do more. If you want to do more, come to me first and ask. And here is something else: you have two exams coming up. You are missing a lot of classes. I checked attendance—you’ve missed almost as many classes as Pavlenko. Have you made peace with her yet?”

Sasha was silent for a moment. The last question caught her off-guard.

“I didn’t… didn’t fight with her.”

“If you kill someone, you will go to prison. Have you turned eighteen yet?”

“No… what do you mean, if I kill someone?”

Someone knocked on the door. Sasha’s individual session ended two minutes ago; previously, Portnov never made anyone wait.

“Wait!” Portnov yelled with irritation. He turned to Sasha again.

“Your aggression levels are over the limit. It’s just a stage. But in your particular case, it’s over the roof.”

“In my case?!”

“Yes. Think about it. That’s it, you are dismissed.”

Sasha departed, making way for Andrey Korotkov. Almost right away she bumped into Kostya.

“I thought he killed you.”

“Listen, am I aggressive?”

Kostya did not say anything for so long that Sasha got really worried:

“But I never… Just the opposite, I…”

“You are strange,” Kostya said after a long pause. “Tell me, what are you doing tomorrow?”

They spent Sunday strolling around town and doing absolutely nothing. Kostya took Sasha to a café; they had ice cream and watched sparrows huddling near the kitchen’s air vent for warmth. Sasha kept thinking that Kostya expected something of her. It was in the way he gazed at her, and in the way a minute pause accompanied each of his words, as if he wanted Sasha to interrupt him.

His expectant manner made her feel uncomfortable.

“Do you want to go to the post office with me? I have to call my mother.”

Mom insisted on knowing every detail about Sasha’s studies. Sasha told her how she was praised for her work, and how she was now the best student in her class; Mom promised her a “nice little gift” to celebrate after the finals. Then Kostya talked to his family, his mother and grandmother. By the time they paid for the phone calls and left the post office, dusk turned to darkness, and it started to snow.

“…Well, don’t you think it’s beastly to smoke in the room when you have been repeatedly asked not to smoke? What does it have to do with her personal issues? I’ve always been nice to her… I understand she has issues, and Kozhennikov drives her insane…”

Sasha faltered. Kostya walked by her side, hunched over, hands stuck in his pockets.

“Maybe I should change my last name,” he commented bitterly. “Take my mother’s.”

Sasha did not know what to say. Snow fell, draping over the black twigs of the linden trees, the wrought iron benches, stucco corners and tin awnings. Here and there steam rose over the roofs, white steam on the black sky. It was beautiful.

They continued to walk in silence. Sasha felt Kostya’s tension, as if he were a member of the audience in the dress circle, and Sasha had just appeared in the limelight and was holding a theatrical pause. But if Kostya bought his ticket, then wasn’t she obligated to say or do something?

“Let’s walk back to the dorm,” Sasha said. And added, after hesitating for a second: “Don’t you need to work on the exercises?”

Kostya turned sharply to face her:

“Is it all you talk about? The exercises?”

“Not all the time… I…”

She faltered. Then stopped walking. Kostya stood in front of her with so much disappointment and reproach that Sasha felt utterly lost.

“Do you really think that I…”

And again she could not find the right words.

“Don’t you understand that I…”

Then she felt deeply offended. Her throat felt tight.

“And in any case, that’s not my business!” she screamed and walked away very quickly, slipping and stumbling on the wet pavement.

Kostya caught up and held her in his arms.

They kissed in the foyers. The town of Torpa had plenty of dim, echoing, empty foyers. The foyers of some buildings smelled of cats, some of perfume or wet plaster. Some smelled of nothing. Old mailboxes, ficus trees in planters painted so many times that they looked monumental, a child’s sled, perambulators, a disassembled kid’s bike—the annals of the town were opening up to them, lobby after lobby, and Sasha learned to kiss properly on the brink of her eighteenth birthday.