Vita Nostra (39 page)

Object and its projection had a reciprocated bond. That’s what Portnov said some time ago. He spoke—”tossed at them,” to use his own expression—words and sentences that sometimes lacked all meaning, and sometimes seemed like banal clichés, or were simply incomprehensible, and Sasha listened to and immediately forgot those words...

And now, for a split second, she sensed simultaneously—incorporated, made an integral part of herself—all her projections.

Her classmate still remembered words that, in the heat of an argument, Sasha threw at her at the end of the seventh grade.

The tree she planted four years ago had grown a little.

An impression of her shoe lingered in the hardened concrete near the new construction site.

She was reflected in Mom, in Valentin, in another hundred of people: she was reflected—surprisingly sharp—in Kostya. She was Ivan Konev’s nightmarish dream. She was reflected in the fate of a distant stranger—her father, who lived on the other end of town.

And she herself was a reflection. This realization made Sasha disintegrate into minute pieces, and then rebuild anew; when she opened her eyes, Valentin stood in front of her, his coat unbuttoned, and he looked bewildered and angry.

Sasha took off her headphones.

“It’s been forty minutes! Do you expect me to run looking for you? He needs to eat!”

The baby was still sleeping soundly, pink nose peeking from the pile of blankets. Valentin took the carriage from Sasha and pushed it toward the entrance, so quickly that water splashed from underneath the wheels.

“Selfish bunch, all they want is to listen to their music,” said an old woman who was sitting on the bench.

Sasha remained standing, breathing on her frozen fingers. Then she sighed, straightened her shoulders and realized that her wings had disappeared.

***

Every day she went to the store with a grocery list. She ironed swaddling blankets. Helped her mother with the baby’s feedings: her brother was on formula, and Mom was heart-broken over it, while Sasha did not quite understand all the fuss over it. So she didn’t have any milk, so what. All the hustle and bustle with the bottles and nipples was annoying, but then anyone could feed the baby. For example, Valentin. Or even she, Sasha.

Her brother elicited absolutely no feelings in Sasha. No tenderness, no aggravation. She learned to sleep through his crying: Mom and Valentin took turns getting up, and the baby required them to get up every three to four hours. This was the world that revolved around one single heavenly body, it was completely subordinate to the baby. Mom, not entirely healthy, still noticeably weak, could think only of the baby. Valentin sunk into household duties up to the top of his head, forgoing sleep and rest for the sake of the evening bath time. The neighbors said that a woman could only dream of a husband like Valentin.

Sasha felt like an asteroid in a temporary orbit. She still took walks with the baby in the carriage, catching curious glances from the passing women, old dames and, rarely, men. She boiled the bottles, cooked and cleaned, occasionally changed diapers. Once or twice her brother smiled at her: it was a meaningless, albeit very sweet, almost human smile. Once, on a very sunny day, Sasha took the risk and brought the carriage into the familiar park. There, walking in circles over the clean alleys sprinkled with salt, she thought, for the first time since the exams, of Farit Kozhennikov. And about what could have happened had she, Sasha, failed her Specialty test.

Her brother slept under his down blanket, swaddled like a tiny grain in a thick shell. He may not have happened at all. Everything alive was so fragile. “There is absolutely no way of negotiating with you, is there?” Sasha asked at the riverbank, watching autumn leaves swim by. And he answered: “Sasha, the world is full of entities that people
cannot
negotiate with. But somehow people survive, don’t they?”

But how fragile was their chance of survival!

Snow was melting under her feet. Spring was coming. Grandmothers with grandchildren and mommies with carriages strolled around the park. A worn, scratched piece of ice remained in place on the ice rink, and three boys were playing hockey—only one of them wore skates, and he kept losing.

The baby stirred. Worried, Sasha rocked the carriage: it was time to go home. Once baby Valentin started crying during their walk, and shrieked non-stop all the way home—Sasha ran wild-eyed, scaring the passersby, cursing herself for going so far away from home…

The baby smacked his lips and quieted down. Sasha took a deep breath, turned the carriage around and almost immediately ran into Ivan Konev.

It was too late to pretend not to have seen or recognized each other. Sasha was the first one to regain self-control:

“Hey,” she rocked the carriage nonchalantly.

“Hey,” mumbled Konev and nodded at the carriage: ‘Yours?”

“Uh-huh,” Sasha replied before she had a chance to think about it.

“Congratulations… A boy?”

“Yes,” Sasha smiled beatifically. “And how are things with you?”

“Fine,” Ivan licked his lips, not the smartest thing to do in the winter.

“Well, see you around,” Sasha said indifferently. “Time to feed him.”

“See you.”

Sasha marched toward the entrance to the park without a backward glance.

***

The night before leaving for Torpa she did not sleep at all. She lay in the dark listening to the ticking of the all the clocks in the apartment. The baby woke up, cried, then quieted down. He cried again. Sasha listened to her mother murmuring a lullaby in the next room. She suddenly recognized the song, or rather a sing-song recitative: it was a piece of her own babyhood. A small slice of information. A word blown away by the draught.

The baby fell asleep. Mom must have passed out right away; Valentin tossed and turned, then all was quiet again. The clock was ticking.

Sasha got up and stumbled over the half-packed suitcase. The glow of the street lights peeked into the room through the gap between the curtains. A car drove by, its headlights passing over the ceiling.

Bare feet on the ice-cold floor, Sasha stepped into the next room.

The room was cramped. The baby’s crib was pushed right against the big bed so that Mom could reach the baby without getting up. At that moment Mom slept, a hand under her cheek, her face pressed against the side of the crib.

Trying not to look at the sleeping Valentin, Sasha came closer to the crib. The ray of light from the outside crossed the blanket in a diagonal streak. The baby lay on his back. Miniature fists lay on the pillow above his head, eyelashes stuck together, tiny mouth half-opened.

He also was a word. A resonance. A material personification of someone’s curt demand. Sasha had no idea how she knew this; she took another step and took the baby out of his crib.

His head dangled; Sasha managed to support it. The baby was a half-formed willpower, a mobile cluster of information; he was a part of Sasha. A part of her world. He was
hers
.

Two words merged into one sound.

The baby opened his sleepy blue eyes. He seemed to be getting ready to scream. The clock was ticking. Mom’s breathing was shallow and uneven, tortured by the constant lack of sleep.

Sasha stared at herself. And again she stared at herself; it was similar to two mirrors facing each other. The baby, now integral to her essence, was quiet. His eyes darkened slowly. His stare was gaining comprehension.

Sasha barely contained her scream.

Just as silently, holding the baby to her chest, she went into the kitchen. Still not comprehending what had actually happened, but already drenched in cold sweat from head to foot. She placed the baby on the kitchen table; bent double, pressing her hand to her mouth. She vomited gold coins, for the first time in many months. The coins jingled, rolling on the floor, and every sound, every miniscule noise could awaken light-sleeping Mom.

Unmoving, the boy lay on the table. His fists kept opening and closing. His eyes, now deep brown, stared intently, steadily. The meaning—a sum of meanings that this human being was comprised of—now dissolved inside Sasha as rapidly as soap in water. The lullaby linked them like shared skin.

Sasha struggled, trying the break the link. Trying to separate the baby into his own specific “informational packet.” At some point she thought that she could understand and control everything: both their bodies as reflections of two similar meanings, two spoken words, one of which is a request, a demand, a clump of will…

That clump broke out of control. It absorbed the baby’s absence of will as a large drop of mercury sucks up a small one.

The baby relaxed his limbs tiredly. He closed his eyes. At the same moment the bedsprings squeaked—Mom was stirring. In a second she would reach through the sides of the crib, and instead of her sleeping son she would find a cold sheet….

Keeping her eyes on the baby, Sasha moved to the door. She closed it; locked it. Thankfully, the kitchen door had a latch, in case of cold draughts.

Her hands shaking, she picked up the receiver. She dialed a cellular phone number; this number was registered in her mind as something so extreme, something for an emergency only that she only remembered it in dire circumstances, as if it were written in scarlet letters on a concrete wall.

The clock showed half past three.

“The telephone subscriber you are trying to reach is currently out of range.”

It cannot be! Sasha bit her lip and dialed the number again. Answer! Please!

Beeps.

“Hello,” a calm voice answered. It did not sound sleepy. It was unlikely that this person was woken up in the middle of the night.

“Farit,” Sasha murmured, using his first name for the first time. “I did something… something like… please help me reach Nikolay Valerievich!”

“What did you do?”

“I don’t understand. Something with the baby… Please, help me!”

“Hold on,” Kozhennikov said. A long pause followed. Sasha heard steps in the corridor and Mom’s uncertain voice:

“Sasha? Did you take the baby?”

“Yes,” Sasha said, watching the lifeless child on the kitchen table. “Go back to sleep. Don’t worry. I’m rocking him to sleep.”

The door gave a jolt.

“Sasha, did you lock the door? Open up!”

“Go to sleep,” Sasha repeated, pressing the receiver to her ear. “Don’t worry. I am watching him.”

“What is going on? Open the door! Why did you lock it up?”

“I’ll open it. Go back to sleep.”

“Alexandra!”

Mom was fully awake. Now her voice contained anger—and fear. Something was going on, something was happening, there was trouble, she could feel it—but she could not recognize the nature of the danger.

“Sasha,” Kozhennikov said very dryly on the phone. “Check whether the baby is alive.”

“What?” Sasha babbled.

“Check his pulse.”

“Open the door immediately!” Mom punched the door with her fist. “Valentin! Valentin!”

Sasha grabbed the baby’s wrist. It was so tiny it was impossible to take his pulse; already sure the child was dead, Sasha suddenly remembered Dima Dimych’s lessons (“Count the pulse in six seconds, multiply by ten”) and pressed her fingers to the baby’s small neck.

The neck was warm. The pulse was there.

“He’s alive,” Sasha rustled into the receiver.

“Open the door!” Valentin roared, trying to take the door off its hinges.

“Just wait!” Sasha shouted, tears in her voice. “What are you yelling about? Why are you screaming? I’ll open in a minute!”

“Hang up the phone,” Kozhennikov said. “Sterkh will call you back.”

The screaming outside the door ceased for a second. Mom was crying, Valentin was trying to calm her down.

“No need for hysterics… What exactly happened, I don’t understand…. It’ll be fine… just wait… Alexandra, open up immediately. I am counting to three. One…”

The phone rang.

“Hello!”

“Listen,” Sterkh said without any introduction. “And work, work hard, focus, you have three minutes for the reverse transition. Go!”

And then silence drowned everything out.

***

The latch gave up first—little screws became loose, the wooden plank fell apart, and Mom and Valentin stormed into the kitchen.

By then their neighbors, awakened by all the noise, were already pounding on the walls and the radiators. Some genius had called the police. The yellow car with a blue stripe drove up to the building a full hour after the beginning of the incident.

Sasha sat in front of the kitchen table on which the sleeping child lay. He slept soundly, snoring, almost touching his face with tiny hands. Sasha was drenched in sweat, white-faced, disheveled, her hand clutching the phone.

The receiver emitted short beeps—Sterkh rang off.

The rest of the night was spent in interrogations. Mom took Valerian root, Phenobarbitals, Valium. In the heat of the moment, Valentin slapped Sasha in the face—and was then deeply uncomfortable. The baby was taken to his crib, and there he slept until seven in the morning; Sasha’s heart faltered when she heard his hesitant whimper. Mom fed him, he ate, smiled, clearly in a very good mood, and again closed his blue eyes. Mom calmed down just a little.

“Can. You. Explain to us. Why. Did. You. Do. This?”

‘I didn’t do anything,” Sasha lied and looked away. “I thought… It’s my last night… and who knows when I’ll see him next time…”

“What do you mean—who knows?!”

“I just held him,” Sasha repeated stubbornly. “I just wanted to… sit with him. Why were you trying to break the door, what am I, a murderer?”

Mom and Valentin exchanged glances.

“You acted strangely,” the man said curtly. “Why did you lock the door? Who were you talking to on the phone? At half past three in the morning?”

“It was the wrong number,” Sasha was tired. She no longer cared, she just wanted to get away, stop this questioning, lie on the berth in the moving train and sleep until they got to Torpa.

They exchanged chilly goodbyes. Sasha picked up her suitcase, rolled it onto the street all by herself and walked—alone—to the metro station.