Vita Nostra (28 page)

***

Denis Myaskovsky was waiting for his individual session with Portnov, eating chips out of a plastic bag. Sasha hopped on the windowsill next to him.

“Denis, I have a serious question for you.”

“Shoot.”

“Liliya Popova—who is she?”

Denis choked. Potato chips first got stuck in his throat, then flew out of his mouth in a fan of crumbs.

“Ugh,” Myaskovsky coughed.

Sasha knocked him on the back. Myaskovsky fought to control his breathing.

“Did you put a lot of thought into this?” he sounded offended.

“I need to know,” Sasha said. “I am failing Introduction to Applied Science.”

Denis gaped at her.

“You?!”

“Yes. I am going to fail for sure. I need to know, I want… Maybe it’s possible to change advisors? What do you think?”

“You have Kozhennikov,” Denis said slowly.

“Yes,” Sasha rubbed her palms together nervously.

“I don’t envy you. Lisa, for instance—if anybody mentions Kozhennikov’s name in front of her, she goes white and starts shaking and then she starts punching you. And then, your face beaten into a bloody pulp, take a long time explaining to her that you actually meant Kostya, who is a perfectly normal guy and is himself suffering in the clutches of his father…”

“And Popova?” Sasha asked greedily. “Have you tried negotiating with her?”

Denis looked grim.

“Actually, you know… she wears velvet gloves… But there is definitely an iron fist. And really, I was just talking to some guys here, and all the advisors are the same. It’s just that some drop F-bombs, and some don’t.”

Denis smirked, pleased with his own joke, and was about to say something else, but at this moment the door of the auditorium thirty-eight opened, and out came Zhenya Toporko, looking very pale and solemn.

She met Sasha’s eyes. Zhenya suddenly went red, raised her chin up in the air and walked by without a single word.

“What is up with her?” Denis murmured, grabbing his bag. “Well, wish me luck.”

At that point Portnov himself appeared in the doorway, an unlit cigarette stuck behind his ear.

“Come in, Myaskovsky, and open the window. Samokhina, is this your time slot? What are you doing here?”

“She is wondering whether it’s allowed to change advisors,” reported guileless Denis. Sasha froze.

Portnov gave her a sharp glance.

“It is not allowed,” he said curtly. “Myaskovsky, open the window, I am going to smoke. Samokhina, good-bye.”

***

The next day the sun came up, clear and even warm, surrounded by an insubstantial escort of diminutive transparent clouds. Sasha skipped the first block, gym class. When her roommates finally left for their Specialty lecture, she opened the dresser and there, in the crowded jumble of her own and someone else’s clothes, she found her old winter jacket.

She stuck her hand into the right pocket. Empty.

She tried the left pocket. Also empty, aside from some loose change.

For some reason she thought of the day when, out of the blue, Lisa Pavlenko accused her of stealing a hundred dollars. She remembered figuring out that the bill fell behind the pocket lining. Sasha remembered
seeing
the bill for a split second. She’d never experienced anything like that afterwards. Almost never.

Almost without hope she put her hand back into the right pocket and there, behind the thin synthetic lining, she found a paper rectangle.

Impatiently, she made the hole in the pocket bigger and pulled out a business card, along with some crumbs and pieces of thread—a single phone number, no name. A cell phone, even though here in Torpa cell phones were still a rare commodity.

The alley that led to Sacco and Vanzetti smelled of leaves and decay. Yesterday’s rainwater stood in deep puddles—the brown mass of leaves filled up the drains. Sasha stood for a while near the corner phone booth, lifting her head to the warm sun.

The she picked up the receiver and dialed the number referring to the business card.

“Hello,” said a very distant male voice.

“Hello,” Sasha croaked. “It’s me, Samokhina.”

“Hello, Sasha. Is anything wrong?”

“Not yet. But it soon will be.”

“You’re scaring me,” said Farit Kozhennikov.

“Did Sterkh… Has he said anything to you about me?”

He was silent.

“Sterkh wouldn’t say anything, Sasha. At least before the test. What happened?”

Sasha paused, not knowing how to explain.

“Sasha? Can you hear me?”

“I am going to fail the test,” Sasha said. “I won’t pass this exam, not the first time, and not the second. This is it, this is the end.”

One more pause.

“Where are you calling from?”

“I’m on the street corner. In the phone booth. The thing is, my mom is having a baby…”

“I understand. Meet me in half an hour, in front of the Institute.”

***

“She’s due right before the winter exams.”

“And?”

They walked slowly along Sacco and Vanzetti. Past a street sweeper gathering leaves, past a girl with a dachshund. The stucco moldings of an old building dampened with rainwater, the pale faces of caryatides stared blindly and dispassionately.

Sasha avoided Kozhennikov’s eyes. She gazed up and ahead, where blue sky peeked through the balding tree tops.

“I want... I want her to be healthy, and the baby, too.”

‘That’s a perfectly natural wish. So?”

Sasha stopped in her tracks and turned to face him. Saw her own reflection in the dark lenses.

“I want to make a deal with you. Pay whatever I can. I can do a hundred exercises in one night. I can...” She stumbled. “I can do anything. Except for those... those CD tracks. I physically cannot. And mentally... I cannot. You can chop off my hand if you want...”

“And what would I do with your hand?”

“What do you do with all of this?” Sasha shouted in a whisper. “Why do you need this Institute? Why force us do these things... all of this? What have we done to deserve this?”

She forced herself to shut up. The town of Torpa led an unhurried, picturesque existence; steam rose out of several chimneys. Smoke-blue and black pigeons stomped about in a puddle, swallowed, throwing their heads back, allowing water to slide down their throats. Dew drops sparkled on the withered grass of the boulevard.

Kozhennikov stood, leaning his head to one side. Sasha saw two reflections of herself in his dark mirrored glasses.

“There is absolutely no way of negotiating with you, is there?” she said, her voice as low as a whisper. Her lips felt numb.

“Sasha,” he answered in the same manner, almost whispering and almost friendly. “The world is full of entities that people cannot negotiate with. But somehow people survive, don’t they?”

“Some do,” Sasha’s toes froze inside her sneakers. “Some die.”

“That has nothing to do with you,” Kozhennikov said even softer. “And nothing to do with your family. I know you can do it. There is no reason why you couldn’t pass this test with excellent results.
No reason at all
.”

“I can’t,” she shook her head. “I cannot do what he wants me to!”

Kozhennikov took off his glasses. He did this so rarely that Sasha forgot what his eyes looked like: brown, common, even ordinary. With normal pupils.

“I once said that I would never ask you to do anything impossible. It is true. But think about it: everything you’ve ever done for me has been based on an overcoming an obstacle—a small step over an internal limit. It was difficult. But it could be done, Sasha. It can be done now.”

Sasha shook her head in despair.

“Think of Kostya, think about him passing the winter exams,” Kozhennikov continued softly. “Do you remember—he had given up, washed his hands. He could have died and brought others to destruction. While it was absolutely feasible—possible!—to pass the exam and survive. There was an exit—and you proved it to him. I’m very sorry that Kostya is not able to pay you back for that act of grace. He can’t help you now, he doesn’t have enough… Although that is not important.”

‘Tell me,” Sasha said with effort. “Kostya’s grandmother… You were related to her, did you know her? And how did you kill her, tell me, please? By yourself? Or did you have help?”

Kozhennikov’s eyes remained undisturbed.

“What makes you think I killed her? She was very sick and bed-ridden most of the time. Sasha, the average life span around here is sixty-seven years. Seventy-six is a stroke of luck.”

“And if Kostya had passed the exam the first time?”

“People are mortal. All of them.”

A cat slunk out of the doorway, pale-orange, almost pink. The pigeons simultaneously flapped their wings and flew up, circling Sacco and Vanzetti and disappearing over the tiled roofs.

“I am very sorry about the way things worked out between you and Kostya,” Kozhennikov said.

Sasha looked away. The conversation was over, Kozhennikov could continue chatting, or he could be quiet, it did not make any difference. None whatsoever.

“Listen,” Kozhennikov put his glasses back on and pushed them up with an index finger. “I believe I know how to help you.”

“How?”

“Break through the impossible. Simply a mechanical gesture. Steal a wallet at the market. Break a window with a naked fist. Do something that you consider impossible. It will loosen your rock-hard stability and will help you to burst through to the next level. Do you understand?”

“Doubtful,” Sasha said.

***

Kozhennikov got behind the wheel of his milky-white Nissan, waved to Sasha and drove away. She remained standing in the middle of the street, watching the pink cat lapping up autumn water from a puddle. Blink—and the cat turned emerald-green in her eyes, and the water became carmine-red; Sasha rubbed her face with her fists.

The town market was only ten minutes away, if she walked slowly. Steal a wallet?

The window of the bakery was conveniently located at the level of Sasha’s chest. Slam her fist into it? What could she possibly do to “cross the threshold,” to stop being herself?

Or maybe buy a ticket and leave Torpa. Forever.

She walked without purpose, not toward the market, but away from the center of town. She passed the Institute; two first-year girls teetered out of a ground-level café. Both were absolutely smashed; holding onto each other, they crossed the street and disappeared into the alley. What are their parents thinking? Sasha wondered. Doesn’t anyone care about the fate of the children who left the family home to study in an unfamiliar town?

What is my mother thinking?

Mom is thinking of her new, yet unborn baby. Of a creature, whose right to live has not yet been officially authorized. Of course, medical science has been developed and all that, and women over forty are giving birth…

Sasha stumbled and stuck her foot into a puddle. She stomped her foot, shaking off the water, and remembered that under her bed was a box with a pair of fall shoes. She brought them to school after vacation—she bought them with Mom at a store sale, a good, sturdy pair of shoes….

She missed Mom. She missed her so much that her eyes filled with tears. She was thrown out, banished, forcefully ejected from the normal world, where Mom was always near, where she could hug her any time she wanted to, where the door could be open when Mom came home from the office. A normal human world…

It was entirely possible that the parents of all the students in the Institute were dealing with the most crucial life problems right now. Some may be going through a divorce. Some fight a grave illness. Somebody is in the middle of a custody battle, somebody is expecting a child. And all of them prefer to think that their grown children are getting an education at a decent, albeit provincial, institution of higher learning. And no one suspects that the success of their endeavors, their health and even their very lives depend on the academic performance of their forgotten children, abandoned in Torpa. It was a vicious circle…

Sasha had not noticed reaching the end of Sacco and Vanzetti; following what looked like a country road, she arrived at the riverbank. Yellow and brown leaves floated down the river; some flattened themselves upon the surface, trying to merge with their own reflections. The others bowed like sails, as if trying to fly away. Some chickens pattered around. And the log, on which Sasha and Kostya sat a long time ago, and on which Sasha spent her New Year’s Eve—that very log was still there.

Sasha sat down and stretched her legs.

Five minutes passed, then ten, then half an hour. Sasha was now missing the second block, English; leaves continued to float in the river, an endless, solemn, unhurried caravan. Gazing at the black mirrored water, Sasha thought for the first time in two years—for the first time in her life, if she were absolutely honest—that, perhaps, it did make some sense to jump into this blackness from the wooden bridge that crossed the river a few hundred feet away from her. Jump, splash, break that mirror along with the sky reflected in the water.

She rose, still considering. Was it deep enough? Or would it only reach up to her waist? On the other hand, people drown in bathtubs that are certainly not made with suicide in mind…

Leaving footprints on the wet sand, she approached the water. The grass on the southern tip of the hill was still summery green and dotted here and there with wild asters. Sasha moved along the bank, circling the swampy parts, looking at the water and flowers on the hill. A yellow curtain of willow branches hung in front of her; yesterday, when she was working on one of Portnov’s paragraphs, something about the willow tangle sounded in her head, and she was trying to recollect that sentence, when she heard a splash, immediately followed by a scream, and then another splash.

Sasha was not the first one to think of jumping off the bridge. Somebody more courageous—or less intelligent—had just jumped, and now two people were carried off by the stream.

Sasha’s mouth dropped open.

Both were fighting the current, one was shouting. The other one was trying to reach him, taking large wide strokes. The water carried both of them past Sasha, and she finally came to her senses and dashed after them along the stream. She tore through the willow branches and burst into a sandy horse-shoe shaped beach. Here the river changed direction slightly; the opposite bank was pretty high, with easily discernible swift nests. Under the steep bank whirlpools were visible, and there, into the vortex, the current now carried the two people. One was still shouting, choking, coughing, and shouting again.