Vita Nostra (53 page)

Mom handed her ticket to a fat uniformed train attendant, who nodded: “Come in… Seat number fifteen.”

Sasha stepped inside with Mom. For one minute she dove into the smell, the life, the temporary nature of the train—but this time the train was somebody else’s, it was transitory, this ghostly, dream-like way of life was about to take off, and Sasha would remain here…

They went back onto the platform and stopped not knowing what else to say.

“Departing in one minute,” the train attendant rushed them. “Take your places.”

Then Sasha hugged Mom’s neck just like she did when she was a little girl:

“Mommy, I really, really love you.”

The cursed pink phone, stuck between them, cut into Sasha’s chest.

“The train is departing! Go back on the train!”

They did not let go of each other’s hands. They could not let go.

“Ma’am! The train is leaving.”

“I love you,” Sasha whispered choking on her tears. “I love you… Good bye…”

The train started moving. Sasha ran alongside it, waving, and for a long time she kept up with the train. Mom waved out of the open window in the corridor, and Sasha saw her hair flowing in the wind. The train gathered speed, Sasha ran faster, Mom leaned further out of the window, and kept waving, and shouted: “Good bye!”

And then the platform ended.

The windows of the moving train merged with the faces. The roaring was replaced by a distant noise. Sasha watched the train until she could no longer see the last of its lights.

Then she walked over, moving her aching feet and sat down on the tracks.

***

“Sasha?”

The moon was high up in the sky. Farit Kozhennikov stood over Sasha.

“It’s late. You have classes tomorrow. Shall we?”

“Please, Farit… Leave me alone.”

“You need to control yourself. You have to get back to town somehow, it’s very late and very cold. Let’s go.”

He spoke so calmly and with such authority that Sasha could not resist. She got up and followed Farit, dragging her feet slightly. The heels of her shoes broke, the heel taps were lost. The shoes would have to be thrown away. No matter.

Kozhennikov opened the door of his white Nissan for her. Sasha shrunk on the seat as usual.

“Are you cold?”

“Why, Farit? What did I do wrong? Did I break any rules? Why?”

“You could not solve the problem on your own. I agree, it is not your fault, or at least not entirely. But remember, the baby did not swallow the pills, he only played with them. It’s only fear, Sasha. Fear the General. Fear the Emperor that shapes the reality. You should buckle up.”

The car rode onto the highway surrounded on both sides by the forest. The road signs flashed in the lights and rushed backwards, like smeared spots of white fire.

“Fear is a projection of danger, genuine or imagined. The thing you wear around your neck is a phantom fear, the kind you get used to… kind of like a familiar sprain. Nothing happened. But you believe in trouble, and that is why you lived through these minutes as if through a real tragedy.”

“You taught me to be afraid,” Sasha gripped the phone.

“No. You knew how to be afraid without me. Everyone knows that. I simply directed your fear, like an arrow toward the target.”

“And you have achieved your goal?”

“Yes.”

Sasha turned her head. Kozhennikov watched the road, the speedometer arrow inching toward one hundred and twenty.

“The first years,” Sasha said slowly. “Do you select them somehow?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you feel sorry for them?”

“No. They are Words, they must realize their preordained purpose.”

“And other people? They…”

“They are different. Prepositions, conjunctions, interjections… expletives,” Kozhennikov smiled. “Every man carries a shadow of a word, but only Word in its entirety, firmly imprinted into the fabric of the material world, can return to its beginning and grow from a pale projection to an original entity.”

“And your instrument is fear?”

“Sasha,” Kozhennikov slowed down at the turn of the road. “For a while now you have been working hard not because somebody forces you to, but because you are interested in it. You have tasted the honey of that knowledge. To be Word—do you understand what it means?”

Sasha was silent until they reached Torpa; finally the Sacco and Vanzetti cobblestones clattered under the tires. The car stopped near the porch guarded by the stone lions. The streetlights were on, but none of the windows were lit.

“Thank you,” Sasha said in a strained voice. “Good bye.”

She opened the car door.

“Sasha?”

She froze.

“Give me the phone.”

Sasha turned to face him. A streetlight reflected in Kozhennikov’s glasses made it look as if two burning white eyes stared at her.

With difficulty she pulled the pink cord off her neck. Kozhennikov weighed the phone in his hand.

“Do you understand what it means to be Word? The verb in the imperative mood? Do you know what it is?”

Sasha was silent, having lost the gift of speech.

“Good,” Kozhennikov carelessly dropped the phone into the glove compartment. “Good night, Sasha.”

He drove away.

***

“Yegor, may I speak with you for a minute?”

The dining hall was full of noisy conversations and the clanking of the dishes. Students carried hot borsch, in which floated white commas of sour cream. Sasha waited until Yegor finished eating; when he was walking out with a bunch of his classmates, pulling his cigarettes on the way, she placed herself in his path with determination but without theatrics.

“I’ll catch up with you,” Yegor said to his classmates.

They went up to the hall. First years sat in the row near the bronze equestrian’s hooves. Sasha led Yegor a bit further—toward the deep window niche.

“Here’s the thing. Are you having problems with Applied Science?”

“I wouldn’t put it that way… I mean, everyone is having some issues, and so am I, but…”

“I don’t care about ‘everyone,’” Sasha’s voice was harsh. “You are a verb in the subjunctive mood, and that makes you special.
If
you don’t study hard,
then…
Do you have any idea what could happen?”

Yegor stared at her with empty, static eyes.

“Don’t you understand what I’m saying?”

“I understand. They say this to us in every class. If you don’t tie your shoelaces, you will fall down. If you don’t eat your oatmeal, you will grow up a loser.”

“Yegor…”

Sasha stopped herself short. Yegor was clearly at the most complicated stage of the informational reconstruction: he had almost completed his deconstruction period as a person, and he had not yet formed himself as a word. She remembered herself a year ago: they met around the same time, and back then Yegor was a confident, strong and kind man. Yegor pulled his classmate Stepan out of the water; back then Sasha would freeze in the middle of a movement, staring at a point in the distance, and she was convinced that she was going to fail the Applied Science exam…

She held Yegor’s hand. One more second—and she would have
claimed
him, making him a part of herself.

She restrained herself, remembering her tragic experience.

***

She carried a tray of dirty dishes to the sink. Kostya pushed aside a stack of plates, freeing up some space on the long zinc white table. Sasha nodded gratefully.

“You can’t help him,” Kostya said. “And stop thinking about it; it’s their business, let them work at it. Like we had to work.”

“We helped each other,” Sasha said softly.

“We are classmates. And they—he won’t understand you. It’s not time yet.”

Kostya went toward the exit, and Sasha thought that he was right. Certain things could not be explained; isn’t it what Portnov and Sterkh had been saying from the very beginning?

***

Fall came suddenly in the middle of September, and it became very cold very fast. The rain continued up until the arrival of the first snow. Sasha made a fire in her tiny fireplace using coals from a paper bag and wood that she bought at the market. The kindling crackled, sending sparks flying; Sasha spent hours in front of the fireplace with a book in her lap. She went to bed covering herself with a sheet, in the middle of the night she would pull a blanket over, and in the morning she would wake up because the room would get cold, and, yawning convulsively and wearing a jacket over her nightgown, she would make another fire in the fireplace.

Smoke rose over the roof. The first snow fell softly, landing on the heads of the stone lions, burying the town of Torpa.

***

“Mom?”

The landlady’s phone stood on a shelf on the first floor near the front door. An antique telephone apparatus with tall ‘horns’ for the receiver. Sasha leaned over the brick whitewashed wall.

“Hello! Mommy! Can you hear me?”

“Hello, Sasha darling. I’m so glad you called…”

A distant voice. A deliberate vivacity, even vigor.

“How’s the baby?”

“He’s well. He’s coughing a little. In the summer we tried to strengthen him a bit, but it’s not working all that well. It’s one obstacle after another. But everything else is fine. We want to change the wallpaper in your room, the old wallpaper is simply atrocious. I might go back to work, just part-time. Not yet, of course, in about six months or so. I miss working. We may get a nanny; pay her by the hour...”

Mom spoke easily, and her tone more than her words were intended to convince Sasha of her complete serenity, stability, soft estrangement. Sasha imagined Mom standing over the stove, holding the receiver, stirring rice cereal in a little pot, and smiling, and talking, and talking…

Sasha closed her eyes. The telephone receiver warmed up with the heat of her cheek. The membrane trembled turning her voice into a current of sound waves. A curly wire extended from the receiver…. The words stretched further, and Sasha stretched with them—from her house to the metal telephone box, further along the wires, into the frozen ground, under the fields and snow piles, under the roots and concrete plates, further, further; Sasha felt extending her arm so very far, stretching it to the point of a spasm.

Mom was not standing over the stove. She sat in a chair, her eyes closed, clutching the arm rest with her left hand. Her fingers were clenched tightly as if in pain, but Sasha, who
claimed
Mom at this moment, knew that there was no pain.

Her throat felt tight. And both Mom and Sasha froze, very still, and silence reigned on both telephone receivers.

“Mommy… I am doing great too, I am studying hard, and they are feeding us well...”

Like empty dry peas, words that meant nothing rolled around—back and forth along the wires. Good. Well. Show, shovel, chic; Sasha was her own interlocutor on different ends of the wire. She conversed with herself, and as it happens so often, she did not believe herself.

“Mom!!!”

The scream rolled down the telephone cable—under frozen streams. Under snowed-in meadows. Echoed in the plastic receiver:

“Sasha? What’s wrong?”

This is it, these were the words of the true Speech. Eide, meanings. Must
manifest
: “None of it is your fault, drop this weight, live and be happy.”

But to say this in human terms, out loud—would be hideous. It would be nonsense and a lie. And nothing would change, it would only get worse.

“Mommy… give the baby a kiss for me, everything is just fine…”

“I will. Goodbye, Sasha, talk to you soon.”

Short beeps.

***

“Time is a grammatical concept, is that clear, or do I need to explain?”

“It’s clear.”

“Before you start manipulating time, you must set up an anchor. ‘Now—Then.’ Represented graphically, it looks like this. A bobber with two poles, red and white. Don’t rush, Sasha! We’re getting ahead of the program, we don’t have to…”

“I know. I can feel it.
Now.
“

“Good. The anchor shifts into the ‘Then’ condition as soon as you change the grammatical construction. Aside from the basic vector—past-future—you must consider the overall duration of the action, the periodic nature of the action, the finality or incompleteness of the action, the relationship between the beginning and the end of the action and the ‘Now’ point… Sasha, put down the pen! Don’t rush! It’s an extremely complex exercise; very few third years are brave enough to approach it!”

“I am ready.”

“I see. Well then. Let us take a half of the grammatical measure, half a measure backwards. Concentrate. Time is a grammatical concept, is that clear, or do I need to explain?”

“It’s clear.”

“Before you start manipulating time, you must set up an anchor. ‘Now—Then.’ Represented graphically, it looks like this. A bobber with two poles, red and white. Don’t rush, Sasha!”

“Nikolay Valerievich, we’ve done this already. If we don’t shift the construction one minute back… I mean, half a measure back, we are going to continue moving in circles!”

“Practice makes perfect…Relax, Sasha. Calm down. The reverse reconstruction is a little bit more complex, now the bobber changes colors… Now—Then. Recognize this.”

“I got it! I… will try. It was, it went on, it repeated, it ended… Ended.
Now
.”

“Bravo! Want to try again?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s begin. Time is a grammatical concept, is that clear, or do I need to explain?”

***

She would go to the river bank. She would make a snowball, warmed it up in her bare hands to make sure it stayed firm. She would throw it straight up. Time after time. A janitor who was shoveling snow on the Lugovaya Street probably thought the girl was skipping classes, openly loitering.

The snowball separated from her palm. It went up into the zenith and froze for a moment. It flew down but did not fall. Again, it went up into the zenith. Flew down. From “is” it shifted to “was,” then went into the “had been” loop, and Sasha’s heart kept repeating the same beat.

The janitor pausing for a smoke break watched the girl juggling a snowball. The smoke from his cigarette stood motionlessly in the air, glimmering like a television screen.