Vita Nostra (13 page)

Why does she have to be silent? What can she possibly learn that way? What sort of “emerging processes?”

At first she planned on skipping Philosophy as well, but did not want to miss anything important. Her notes were becoming so logical, so harmonious, that she did not want to leave a gap in Plato’s place. She went to class.

General lectures were attended by both A and B groups. As usual, Kostya sat on one side of Sasha. Oksana settled on the other side.

“Congratulations,” she whispered into Sasha’s ear.

Sasha raised an eyebrow.

“The world of ideas (eidos) exists outside of time and space. This world has a certain hierarchy, on top of which is the idea of Good…”

“Portnov was heaping praises on you,” Oksana babbled. “He says no one in our group even comes close to you…”

Sasha sighed.

“In the allegory of the cave, Good is portrayed as the Sun, and ideas symbolize the creatures and objects that pass in front of the Cave, and the Cave itself is a symbol of the material world with its illusions…”

“And the objects themselves, are they shadows of ideas?” Kostya asked out loud. “Projections?”

The professor began explaining. Sasha turned away—and caught Lisa staring at her from the opposite corner of the lecture hall.

***

“To a certain degree, this solves the problem. If Samokhina shuts up, living here is actually a possibility.”

Sasha was silent. Lisa couldn’t relax; she wandered between the beds in her underwear, picked something up from the floor and dropped it again, opened the dresser, and went through her suitcase.

“You were going to rent a place,” Oksana scowled. “And get the hell out of here.”

“I am getting out. I just don’t have the time to deal with it. I’m leaving at some point, don’t you worry.”

“I am not worried.”

“Well, you shouldn’t!”

Oksana was the type who gets excited about other people’s exclusivity, even the most minor kind, and who looks to befriend such a person. Lisa was one of those people who long for their own exclusivity and are offended to find themselves overshadowed.

Sasha could have said: there is no reason to envy, and no reason to be angry. You said yourself that this was not education and not any kind of science, but instead a clear case of Shamanism, hypnosis, psychosis, and whatever else. So what should I be proud of—my accomplishments in psychosis?!

But Sasha was silent. Her only attempt at speaking—last night, with Kostya, when she completely forgot about her ordeal—ended in grunting and spitting. Thinking of it made her feel ashamed.

Lisa opened the window wider. The cold September night smelled of dead grass and moisture. Lisa lit up demonstratively.

“We asked you not to smoke,” said Oksana.

“Go to hell.”

Sasha closed her eyes.

***

Meaningless sentences rotated in her brain like tank caterpillar tracks. Sasha was reading Section 20. It was the second week of her muteness, and it seemed as if the world around her was slowly descending into silence.

She felt like a blimp filled with soap bubbles. The bubbles—her unspoken words—rose up in her throat and crawled out, hung on her tongue, like clumsy acrobats on a trampoline. Then they popped, leaving a bitter aftertaste. Not a single word was strong enough to conquer the barrier, escape and fly away.

“Your words are trash, garbage…” Portnov was right, Sasha thought. Words did not matter. Glance, inflection, voice—all these thin threads, the antennae pointing into space, informed people of indifference or empathy, of calmness, anxiety, of love… Not words. But without the words it was much harder.

She read gibberish, she memorized complete nonsense. All in vain: it was a Sisyphean task, the desperate efforts of the Danaides. An Indian summer followed the cold September days. Lisa Pavlenko never found an apartment. She continued smoking just as much, but by now Sasha was used to the constant smell of smoke. She had to write a paper for the philosophy class. Sasha chose Plato and went to the library, for some reason bringing her copy of the textual module. It was forbidden to talk in the tiny, confined reading room cramped with bookcases. Sasha was happy about it: nowhere else had she felt as mute as she did in a noisy crowd.

She strolled along the bookcases, then chose a seat by the window and opened the “Module,” purely automatically, unaware of her own intentions.

Only a few pages of the book remained unread. Sasha started the familiar process of scraping through the nonsensical combinations of letters. She kept reading until, suddenly, the words broke through the rasping in her brain:

“…
the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain…
“

Sasha jerked her head.

She was the only person in the reading room. The day outside the window approached nighttime. Through an open window she could smell a distant fire.

She tried to reread the paragraph, but nothing worked. She returned to the beginning: having forgotten about Plato and his eidos, about her paper, and the closing time of the reading room, she pored over Textual Module 1. Her headache grew: she felt as if a hundred metal spoons banged on iron pans behind a thin wall, but she kept reading and she could not stop, like a barrel tumbling down a hill.

“… and the shape of the clouds… it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight…”

The librarian who showed up to lock the room found Sasha prostrated over the open book.

***

She went to the post office and bought three graphed notepads. A picture was on the back of the cover—a rippled mass of dots and squiggles. If one did not stare directly at the ripples, but instead unfocused and looked through the paper as if through glass, eventually the ripples gave way to a seemingly three-dimensional image: one notebook had an Egyptian pyramid, the other, a horse, and the third one, a fir tree. Some time ago, her physics teacher explained the principle of creating pictures like that, but Sasha had forgotten.

She walked down the street, notebooks under her arm. She could say: that which we are forced to learn has meaning. We do not comprehend it. But it is not just brainwashing, not just cramming: meaning seeps in through this sluggish mess just like a three-dimensional image rises out of dots and squiggles; it is not a “horse,” and definitely not a “fir tree” Chances are this science cannot be described by a single word. Or even two words. Perhaps, words that describe this science, this process, do not even exist. Not a single second year, not to mention the third years, had ever deemed it possible to even hint at what we are being taught here. Maybe Portnov—or some other teacher—made them silent? Maybe. Or, perhaps, they don’t know that either.

Victor, the one-eyed third year, told her that after the winter finals his entire group would be going to “another location,” where the fourth years and the graduates reside. Sasha thought of the third year of school, especially the winter finals, as something unbelievably distant, and she did not even feel any curiosity regarding where this “other location” was, or why the older students had to be separated…

Darkness came early now. The tops of the linden trees on Sacco and Vanzetti, just yesterday so thick and opaque, now let through the shine of the distant streetlights. The unseasonable warmth did not allow one to believe in the yellow leaves underfoot, or the upcoming winter. Sasha stood for a while, taking deep breaths and watching the stars over the tiled roofs of the town of Torpa. She had two choices: walk through the school building, or through the narrow alleyway that led directly to the dorm. Having considered both options, Sasha decided to take the shortcut.

“… Why are you playing hard-to-get?”

The whisper occasionally grew into a low male voice.

“Why are you acting like a virgin? On Friday… in Vlad’s room... that wasn’t you, was it, huh?”

“Leave me alone,” Sasha recognized Lisa Pavlenko’s voice.

“C’mon, kitten…”

“Go to hell, you moron!”

Sasha stumbled on an empty bottle. The bottle clinked on the pavement; the voices ceased.

“Who’s there?” the man asked.

Sasha could not answer. She turned around and, staggering on the rocks, exited the alley.

***

The key for Room 21 hung on the board downstairs. Sasha jogged up to the second floor, made a short visit to the bathroom, quickly brushed her teeth and climbed into bed.

Oksana was the first to return. She rustled her plastic bags (where did she get all this crackling plastic?!), then settled in with great big sighs, turned a few pages of her textbook, clicked off the lamp and went to sleep. Sasha lay in the dark, listening to anonymous laughing, shrieking, singing in the kitchen, the banging of the dishes; Oksana slept undisturbed—Sasha could not close her eyes.

“A word spoken by the sunlight…” Why did Sasha feel so happy when a meaningful sentence swam, all of its own accord, out of a sequence of letters? These words were familiar and grammatically correct, but an actual meaning was still missing… Sunlight does not speak. Sunlight is a stream of photons characterized by a wave-particle duality…

One cannot imagine it anyway. It’s the same thing as seeing a closed door from both sides simultaneously. By being both on the inside and the outside. It’s so incredibly stuffy in this room…

She tossed and turned, and then finally got up, opened the window, and gulped some fresh air. A streetlight burned outside, and its bright artificial rays poured over the windowsill with its many layers of white paint. A makeshift ashtray—a mayonnaise jar—stood in the corner of the window, and somebody’s philosophy textbook lay forgotten.

Almost without thinking, Sasha opened the book in the middle. The first page she came across stated: “
According to Nominalism, universals are names of names, but not of absolute reality or notion
…”

This phrase, too, has no meaning, Sasha thought in disappointment. And really, if one repeats the same word over and over again—“meaning, meaning, meaning”—it disintegrates into sounds, and becomes just as informative as the tinkling of water in a fountain, and…

She held her head. Something is happening to me, she admitted. Perhaps I am losing my mind. After all, second and third years look pretty much insane. All their idiosyncrasies… and occasional physical deformities…the way they come to a standstill, staring at some invisible point in space, or the way they overshoot for the door when they enter the kitchen, or how they “get stuck” in the middle of a simple movement, like rusty old machines…

Sometimes, of course, they seem fairly intelligent; they demonstrate a sharp sense of humor, occasionally they even sing fairly well…

“
Nominalism dates back to antiquity. Its first representatives in early antiquity are Antisthenes
of Athens and Diogenes of Sinope, both of whom opposed Plato’s theory of ‘the world of ideas
…’”

Heavy steps sounded in the hall; before Sasha had a chance to jump into her bed, the door opened.

The light was on in the corridor, and their room was dark, so Sasha saw only a black cut-out silhouette of a disheveled, ruffled girl. And Lisa—Sasha knew that—Lisa saw a ghost in a flannel nightgown, awkwardly frozen in the middle of the room on the way to her bed.

“You are not asleep,” Lisa stated.

Sasha could not speak, and did not want to. She snuck into bed and put a wall of blankets between herself and Lisa. She heard the door shut. Oksana sniffled in her sleep, but did not wake up.

The key turned in the lock. Taking tentative steps, Lisa walked over to the window. Sasha heard the click of a lighter.

“You know,” said Lisa thoughtfully, “I don’t really care what you think of me. What sort of thoughts swim in that tiny head of yours. I was in a dance troupe… Then
he
came… showed me a coin. Said: remember this sign, not the zero, the other one. When a stranger approaches you and shows you a coin like that, you must come with him without any questions, and do everything he asks. Also without any questions. He said, I never ask for the impossible. And the next day my boyfriend, Lyosha, was arrested for an alleged homicide. He didn’t even know that guy, he’s never even seen him, and they did a ballistics evidence test, and they had witnesses… Lyosha bought that gun illegally. He always said, a girl like me had to be protected. And then this dude comes to me, forty years old, and pokes that sign at me. And I went with him, like a sheep. Next morning I threw up money. And two more days later Lyosha was released. I don’t know if his parents bribed someone, or maybe something else happened, but the witnesses and the gun—they all disappeared. Must have been a nice bribe. I know he never used that gun for shooting, maybe only shot a few bottles in the woods for practice. But those guys… they came to me every month. They stuck their signs under my nose. I spread my legs for all of them, and every morning I threw up money, and Lyosha was there, and he could feel something…. I quit dancing; there was no way I could still dance. Lyosha left me. And
he
… he says: I never ask for the impossible…”

For a long time now Sasha’s nose was above the blanket. The room was filled with the smells of hangover breath and cigarettes. Oksana slept (or pretended to sleep), a sharp ray of light still lay on the windowsill, highlighting half of the pale face of the girl sitting on its edge.

The red end of a cigarette darted in the dark. It made loops in the air.

“Are you still speechless? Whatever… Is it written on my forehead? Why do they stick to me, and leave you alone?”

Sasha was silent.

“I suppose I loved him,” Lisa’s voice was unexpectedly sober, harsh. “I suppose I did, if I did it for his sake… Well, it does not matter anymore. I have a little brother. I have a grandma, she’s old. There is a hook I can be caught with. Everyone has a hook… But why did he say: I don’t ask for the impossible? I see this sign in my sleep now,” the cigarette twitched, making circles in the air. “I began avoiding men, all of them. Lyosha went away, and did not leave me his number… And he says: “I don’t ask for the impossible!” Ah, to hell with all of this!”