Sergey Dyachenko - Vita Nostra

Before, she’d considered kissing a useless ceremony. Now with Kostya, she finally understood the hidden meaning of this ritual; Sasha longed for one of these locked apartments to be theirs. She wanted to enter now—and remain inside for a long time. To live like that, forever holding hands.

It was snowing outside, and they ran in the snow, from one building to another. They drank coffee to warm up, and looked for another secluded nook. Once somebody, probably a street cleaner, caught them off-guard and yelled into their faces: “What do you think you’re doing here?” And they threw themselves out of the foyer like frightened children, into the snow. They ran and laughed, and knocked the snowflakes off the faces.

It must have been the happiest night of Sasha’s life.

November flew by like a commuter train. It was now December; the dormitory was cold once again. The radiators were barely warm, wind howled in the cracks.

“Verification: using empirical data or experiment to confirm the truth of theoretical scientific hypothesis by ‘returning’ to the visual level of knowledge, when the ideal nature of abstract entities is ignored, and they are ‘identified’ with the objects observed. For example, the ideal geometric objects—points, lines—are identified with their empirical images…”

Sasha thought of the lengthy definitions as baby dragons curled into a ball. All she had to do was to find its tail, and then carefully unwind the entire thing: the question led her, like a thread, along the creature’s spine. From tail to the heads, and there may be several of those… Sometimes Sasha enjoyed simply understanding the text. Sometimes she’d feel disillusioned, and think of the philosophy textbook as a brick of pre-masticated food; she learned definitions that were the result of somebody else’s inner life, but could not imagine the process that led to that result. She went to the library and requested books no one had wanted for the past few decades; she studied.

During those chilly days, the joy of learning, this heightened experience, had to compete with another newly found pleasure: kissing in dark hallways, behind the curtains in the assembly hall, in the empty classrooms. The closer the winter finals were, the more insistent Kostya became. His roommates, the second years, spent very little time in the dorm, and all they needed to do was to skip a block and lock the door from the inside, but Sasha stalled, trying to buy herself some time; her memory of their first try was still too awkward. And also—she liked that tightly stretched thread that now connected the two of them. She wanted her “kissing affair” to last forever.

New Year’s Eve was coming; the second years were preparing a celebratory roast, the town of Torpa draped itself with snow and now resembled a half-developed photograph. Black trees under the white sky, gray buildings in white muzzles of balconies, diffused contours, everything rippled and very clean. Sasha completed the book of exercises given to her by Portnov, while Kostya had barely made it to number thirty-five.

The schedule of winter finals had been posted. The amount of noise and late night parties decreased to a minimum. Sasha continued to run in the snow that fell overnight, beat her new footsteps into her own, and call home every Sunday. Mom asked when she was coming home for the winter break. Sasha did not know what to tell her.

English was their first pass-fail exam. Sasha passed easily. The gym teacher Dima Dimych gave everyone a passing grade, and for the rest of the block they played volleyball. Math required a serious effort. The Math professor had a long intricate signature: Sasha studied her report card like a work of art.

Their last exam was Specialty, scheduled for January second. “They did it on purpose,” Oksana stated gloomily. An excellent homemaker, she managed to dig up some pine branches, put them into a glass jar wrapped in aluminum foil, and decorated with tinsel. Now, in Oksana’s opinion, the room looked properly adorned.

Kostya either pranced around with sparklers and fireworks, or turned catatonic over a textbook:

“I don’t understand it, and I never will. The human brain is just not cut out for this! It cannot be imagined!”

Sasha made many attempts to help him, but every time she realized that her experience wasn’t worth a dime to Kostya. She failed to demonstrate how to move from number thirty-five to thirty-six. “Verification” proved to be of no use: Sasha gesticulated, drew pictures, talked about a bicycle chain, a spider’s web, Escher’s drawings of bees, fish and lizards. Desperate in his failure, Kostya concentrated on kissing.

“Will you just do him already,” Lisa suggested one winter evening, when Oksana lay in bed with a book, and Sasha sipped tea, about to start her new book of Exercises. “It’s painful to watch how you string him along.”

Sasha took hold of Lisa’s blond mane and gave it a sharp pull. Lisa howled. Oksana, who tended to stay neutral, hid deeper under her blanket and watched Sasha and Lisa trying to gouge each other’s eyes out.

Finally, Lisa withdrew and disappeared for the rest of the night.

On the twenty-ninth of December, a Christmas tree was erected in the assembly hall. On the thirtieth, the school filled with holiday hustle and bustle. Second years ran last-minute rehearsals; the dining hall staff moved tables, getting ready for the evening buffet. By six o’clock the assembly hall was packed; Sasha was surprised to see some of the teachers in the first rows—some she had seen before, some she’d never met. Hunchback Nikolay Valerievich was there as well—he sat next to Portnov, telling him what must have been a very amusing story. Strangely enough, Portnov was not wearing his usual glasses.

The dusty velvet curtain opened; Zakhar, Kostya’s roommate, came out wearing narrow glasses nearly identical to Portnov’s. His coordination was a little off, and he got a little tangled up in the curtain, but once establishing himself in the proscenium, he stared adamantly at the audience and, looking above his glasses in a very recognizable manner, informed them that everyone who did not pass the New Year’s Eve’s celebration on the first try would have an unpleasant conversation with their advisors. Sasha was stunned; the joke seemed way too audacious to her, but the second-year managed such a sharp and precise caricature of Portnov that only a minute later she laughed, and her laughter merged with the delight of the entire room.

Only when Zakhar was stepping off the stage, throwing ferocious looks and gestures at the audience (here he was going overboard, but the compliant crowd forgave him easily), Sasha realized that the glasses on Zakhar’s nose were real, actually belonging to and borrowed from Portnov. Shocked, she was about to mention it to Kostya, but at this moment second-year girls in very short skirts burst onto the stage accompanied by a deafening phonogram.

Never in her entire life would Sasha have imagined someone like Portnov lending his glasses to an impersonator for a better effect. But it was much harder to imagine that somewhere in this school was a person capable of actually submitting such a request to Portnov.

Sasha has never been to a real holiday roast, and this one was really well done: with a great sense of humor, reasonably loud and very colorful. The audience squealed with laughter; music roared and colored lights danced everywhere. Sasha laughed alongside Kostya, holding his hand.

“Do you think Zakhar will have to pay for this one?” she asked during a short and somewhat disorganized change of sets on stage.

Kostya shrugged.

“I don’t know. Honestly. But I wouldn’t risk that much, if I were in Zakhar’s place.”