Vita Nostra (32 page)

“No, I’m trying! Honestly! I’m doing everything I’m supposed to.”

Snow fell gracefully on the naked branches of the linden trees. Below, a truck drove along Sacco and Vanzetti.

“Sasha, please have a seat.”

She sat down at her desk by the window. Tremulous air rose above the radiator, and a cold draft curled around the cracks in the windows. Between the window frames, a large dead fly whiled away eternity.

“When I saw you for the first time, I was simply numb with happiness,” the hunchback confessed. “I thought you had this gift… a rare, precious gift. The gift of an astounding clarity and strength. And now I don’t know what to do with you. The test is only half the problem. The test you can retake, if worse comes to worst. But the placement exam!”

Sasha shook her head violently.

“I can’t do any make-up tests! My…”

She stopped short. The hunchback held up his hand:

“I know you don’t like make-up tests. None of you do. But the difficulty of the placement exam is that you may not retake it. You have to pass it on the first try. Only one try. And you have a little over a year before that exam, Sasha. Ah, what hopes I had for you…”

“If I’m that hopeless,” Sasha whispered, “maybe you don’t need me here in Torpa? Maybe I don’t belong here? Maybe you made a mistake accepting me, and now you can…”

She fell silent, afraid to continue. Against her will, she saw herself being released from the Institute, while Yegor stayed behind. She could forget Torpa, like a scary dream, and along with Torpa, she would forget Yegor…

Sterkh bent further over the teacher’s desk, making his hump seem even bigger. Sasha thought he now looked at her with certain interest. As if the idea, offered by the student, was not all that stupid.

“Listen, Sasha. At six o’clock tonight please meet me in the teachers’ lounge. We have something to discuss.”

***

“Let’s get married,” Yegor suggested.

They sat in the gym on a pile of wrestling mats. Yegor just finished helping Dima Dimych fix the ping-pong tables; the first-year girls took over the paddles and the gym was filled with the cheerful sound of ping-pong balls flying from wall to wall.

Sasha went on as if she did not hear him. And only when he was about to feel really insulted—usually people have some reaction to this sort of suggestions—only then did she turn and look into Yegor’s eyes very attentively:

“Why? Aren’t we happy right now?”

Yegor was taken aback.

“Well, what do you mean, ‘Why?’ Why do people get married?”

The ping-pong balls knocked about, a celluloid rain.

“I am supposed to meet Sterkh at six o’clock in the teachers’ lounge.”

“So what?”

Sasha took a deep breath, and exhaled again. Her hope wasn’t based on anything serious. She simply desperately wanted to have this hope. If I get out of here, I will certainly get Yegor out as well, Sasha thought. I just need to get out. Let them say we made a mistake; you have no talent for our profession, go home.

In her mind Sasha pictured the hunchback sadly shaking his head and saying these words. She saw Portnov cleaning his glasses with the hem of his shirt. She saw herself pretending she was extremely upset, and then going and packing her things, and returning home….

“And after that?” Yegor asked.

Sasha flinched as if he read her mind.

“What about after that?”

Yegor put his hand on her shoulder.

“Sasha. I love you. I… Will you be free after six?”

Automatically Sasha pulled up the sleeve of her jacket. The smiley face was bright-red, as if ashamed. Sasha pulled the sleeve back over her wrist. She felt chilly.

“Yegor, I really don’t know right now. Let’s decide… later.”

***

At six sharp she knocked on the faux-leather door with the sign “Teachers’ Lounge.” She pulled the handle toward herself and peeked inside.

She’d only been here once before. Long couches were still placed along the walls, a coat hanger with several jackets still stood in the corner, but the nude mannequin was missing. Portnov and Sterkh were talking; Portnov was smoking what definitely was not his first cigarette: blue threads of smoke stretched up to the ceiling.

“Samokhina, wait,” Portnov said curtly.

Sasha left. She hugged her shoulders.

She simply could not control her imagination. Sterkh is trying to talk Portnov into releasing Sasha. Into admitting that she’s professionally inadequate and letting her go. She’s going to walk in, and they will tell her to write a resignation letter.

On the first day of school Portnov said that no one leaves the Institute voluntarily. But there is no rule without exceptions. There is no such thing! They had such expectations of Sasha, and here they were—a total blunder. Of course, it is not fun to admit one’s own mistakes…

Time went on, and she still had not been called inside. The scene in which Portnov and Sterkh release her went through her head like a movie, five or six times—and then it became insipid, faded, lost its credibility. Are they stupid enough to lose control over her, give her freedom, when at least half of her has been changed?

She believed in the impossible. Like a child believes that on New Year’s Eve he will be given a real pony. Chances are these two were arguing over what to do with Sasha, how to utilize this worthless material.

The underground corridor disappeared in the dark. Doors stretched to the right and the left, some covered with leatherette, some with real leather. Perhaps under the corridor there was another one, and one more; perhaps after the winter exams, third years—and fourth years, and the graduates—live and study underground?

And maybe, just maybe, she thought, there is no such thing as the fourth and fifth year? Maybe the placement exam is a sacrificial offering? Appropriately primed victims enter the assembly hall—and never come out again…

She imagined a conveyor, like a subway escalator that pulls third years onto the altar, one after another. Everyone holds a grade book in his hand; rhythmically, a spiked wooden club rises and falls down again. Still alive, bones broken, students roll from the altar down into the meat grinder, and the blood stains on the pages of the grade books transform into words: “Passed. ‘C.’” ‘Passed. ‘A.’”

The door to the teachers’ lounge flew open.

“Come in, Samokhina,” Portnov said, stepping into the corridor, a cigarette in hand.

Adding no further information, he disappeared into the darkness.

Sasha stood by the door, motionless. These two have made a decision: perhaps she, Sasha, would be asked to take the placement exam right now.

“Sasha,” Sterkh said from the inside, “Come in, please. It’s already a quarter past six.”

Sasha entered.

The hunchback closed the door behind her. He seemed even more melancholy and pale than usual. His hump must have felt really uncomfortable; strolling around the long narrow auditorium, the hunchback kept moving his shoulders.

Sasha stood still by the door. The hunchback, taking one last stroll to the window and back, stopped as well.

“So, Sasha. I just spoke on the phone with Farit Kozhennikov… Don’t be scared, we are only discussing how we can help you. You are not making the required progress, the exams are coming, and time is against you. Farit will set you up with a loop, that’s the only way to stimulate you… Encourage you, I suppose. But in reality, everything depends solely on your determination and perseverance. What’s wrong?”

Sasha was silent. She found it hard to breathe.

“Sasha,” the hunchback came closer, anxiously looking into her eyes. “What happened? Are you… scared?”

He was two heads taller than Sasha. A really tall man. His black suit set off his pale face. Sasha took a step back.

“You didn’t understand what I meant! It’s just a temporary loop, a perfectly ordinary thing, one may even say, routine. Today is December sixteenth, and tomorrow for you will be December sixteenth, and the day after tomorrow… you will stay in this day as long as you need to complete the work. I spoke with Oleg Borisovich—you don’t have to work on the module or the exercises that day. Only Applied Science. Only our session. What’s so frightening about that?”

“But I don’t want to,” Sasha panicked. “I… what if I never… I don’t even know what you want from me! What sort of result!”

“I want your most honest effort,” the hunchback looked at her severely. “Just as any other teacher. And when you get the result—you will be the first to notice it.”

***

Yegor was not in the corridor.

Sasha dragged her feet to the main entrance of the Institute and stopped—no hat, jacket unbuttoned—inhaling frosty air and exhaling white steam.

A clean cotton strip of snow lay on the molding. Sasha gathered the snow into her hands and rubbed it on her face. Two older women walked by and gave her a strange look—residents of this town think we’re drug addicts, Sasha recalled.

Her life had shrunk, turning into one difficult, absurd day. This had happened once before: back then she retained the illusion that she, Sasha, controlled the passing of time. “I want it to be a dream!”

She wished to wake up on a folding cot in the middle of the summer, two and half years ago. She wished to wake up.

“Sasha! Finally! I thought they must have killed you!”

Lit up by the white street lanterns, Yegor strode along the street, holding two pairs of skis under his arm— brand-new, narrow, without bindings.

“Check out what they had for sale at the sporting goods store! And the price was ridiculous! These are old, still made during the Soviet era, but look how cool they are! Do you know how much these things normally cost? Tomorrow I’ll buy bindings and wax…”

“Why not this morning?” Sasha whispered.

Yegor was taken aback.

“Morning? What do you mean?”

“It’s a pity you did not buy the skis this morning.”

And she looked up at the sky, at the only star in the slit of white clouds. It could have been a real day… She and Yegor would go skiing, and later he, flushed, would say: “Let’s get married!” If one day must be chosen out of the entire life—why not a day like this?

Yegor took a closer look at her:

“What did he want from you? Sterkh?”

“Can we ski today?” Sasha asked, paying no attention to his question.

“Today?” Yegor hesitated. “No. Tomorrow. And today… let’s go to my place.”

Sasha closed her eyes. She leaned into the collar of his jacket. Inhaled deeply the warm air—the steam of his breath.

“Let’s go,” she repeated sleepily. “Let’s go, Yegor.”

***

In the morning she woke up in her bed, barely alive, wiped out, and immediately asked Vika, who was busy setting her hair with a curling iron, what date it was.

“Monday the sixteenth,” Vika answered grimly. “And if you feel like shrieking in your sleep, make your bed in the corridor!”

“Uh-huh,” Sasha agreed.

Vika gaped at her over her shoulder. The room filled with the smell of burned hair.

The first block was Specialty. Sasha was the last one to enter the room, five seconds before Portnov’s appearance.

“Good morning, Group A. Samokhina, you are free for today. Good bye.”

Her classmates’ faces fell. Sasha gave Portnov an inquiring look: almost an entire day remained until his conversation with Sterkh. Does he already know that Sasha was “set up with a loop?”

Portnov nodded to her, answering an unasked question and simultaneously urging her to leave:

“Go, Samokhina, don’t waste your group’s study time!”

Sasha left. She went back to the dorm, took out Sterkh’s black album and focused her eyes on Fragment twenty-one.

***

“Greetings, Sasha, how is your progress?”

“There is none.”

“Please don’t be that pessimistic. If I were an eighteen-year old girl, I’d never lose heart, never despair…. Did you work with the twenty-first fragment?”

“Nikolay Valerievich,” Sasha said. “How do you do that? If today’s the sixteenth, then you don’t know yet what is going to happen tonight!”

Sterkh shook his head absent-mindedly:

“Sasha, you are a child who grew up in a beautiful cozy room, you have no idea what is going on outside its walls, you think that the tick-tock of the kitchen clock is an inherent attribute of time as a physical phenomena… Open the album and let us work on Fragment twenty-two together.”

***

“Let’s get married,” said Yegor.

Celluloid balls noisily jumped on the tables, bouncing off the dense casing of the rackets. Larisa missed a shot, lost the game and swore loudly. Dima Dimych, passing by, read her the riot act. Larisa threw the racket on the ground and went to the locker room.

“Lack of sportsmanship,” the gym teacher stated grimly. “Sasha, do you want to play?”

Sasha shook her head.

“Didn’t you hear me?” Yegor was insulted. “I said…”

“‘Let’s get married,’” Sasha continued with a heavy sigh. “Let’s.”

“One would think you get proposed to every day,” said deeply offended Yegor.

“I’m sorry,” Sasha mumbled. “It’s all Sterkh… You see…”

‘What?”

“Nothing.” Sasha pulled herself together.

“Come to my place tonight,” Yegor said. “Stepan is out, and we’ll ask Misha to take a walk…”

Sasha glanced at her arm. The temporary tattoo was bright-red, but what was there to be afraid of since tomorrow was never going to come?

“I will.”

***

She woke up in her bed, smelling burned hair. Vika overheated the curling iron and was now cursing and trying to rid the metal shaft of the sticky melted hair.

“The bell is in twenty minutes! Are you going to Specialty?”

“No,” Sasha said and closed her eyes again.

When she opened them for the second time, both Vika and Lisa stood by her bed.

“What do you want?”

“Aren’t you afraid?”

“I don’t care,” Sasha said and turned on the other side.

***

“Hello, Sasha. Did you work on the fragment? Let us take a look.”

The sharp ray of light made Sasha squint.

“There is a bit of progress,” Sterkh said soothingly. “Just a tiny bit, but still—it’s a step forward. Work hard, Sasha, don’t give up. And right now here’s what we are going to do. Let us go back to the first fragment and let’s go through them again, slowly, one after another. Make yourself comfortable, focus, concentrate on the “anchor.” We have plenty of time, no reason to rush.”