Vita Nostra (47 page)

“Alexandra, yesterday you made yet another jump in your development. An impossible jump judging by my experience… our experience, mine and Oleg Borisovich’s. You were extremely lucky not to perish. But now, now that you have survived, we have to deal with another issue…”

Sterkh halted. His usually pale cheeks flushed. The eyes with tiny pupils stared into Sasha’s face:

“What the hell made you do this? What are we supposed to do with you now? What are we going to do, you are completely unmanageable! You are a monkey with a grenade! It is impossible for a biological human being to have access to
manifestation
—before the transformation, before the exam! And you are human, and you behave like a human! Like a silly girl! Like a stupid, infantile, irresponsible…”

He made a visible effort to cut himself off; placed his hands behind his back and began pacing back and forth along his office. The silence was disturbed only by the sound of his steps, and a bell that rung in the distance, somewhere deep inside the institute building.

‘Why am I unmanageable?” Sasha spoke, trying with all her might to control the trembling in her voice. “Explain to me, I will understand. Here you are insulting me, and you are not even trying to explain. You treat us like animals, like incompetent idiots…”

“Because that is what you are,” Portnov said.

Kozhennikov remained silent; he gazed at Sasha with a hint of interest.

“Well,” Sterkh began, his soft voice clearly spelling disaster. “Now regarding explanations. Have I told you, Alexandra, that uncontrolled experiments are dangerous and forbidden?”

“But...”

“Have I, or have I not told you that?”

“You have!”

“You appeared to understand and gave me your word not to do anything above your given assignments. Is this true?”

“Nikolay Valerievich…”

“Have you given me your word? Or not?”

“Yes! But I did not understand…”

“You will understand now,” Sterkh promised her ominously. “Oleg Borisovich, this is an exceptional situation. Your ideas?”

Portnov clicked his lighter, took a drag, exhaled a stream of smoke, and immediately squashed the cigarette into the ashtray. He fished his glasses out of his pocket, placed them on his nose, and gazed at Sasha above his lenses:

“I know one thing: this girl is not leaving this office until we find a method of controlling her.”

“And unfortunately this method must be rather radical,” Sterkh muttered. “Alexandra, we had no choice but to invite your advisor to join us.”

Kozhennikov sat unmoving, and the direction of his gaze was concealed by his glasses, Sasha cringed.

“Farit Georgievich,” Sterkh spoke with exaggerated decorum. “The first-year student management is requesting a guarantee that student Alexandra Samokhina abides by the academic rules and regulations of this Institute.”

The silence, long and sonorous, hung in the air. Sasha knew perfectly well that begging was out of question. The only thing she could do at this point was to maintain her dignity as much as was humanly possible.

She gathered her remaining strength and straightened her spine. She was wearing her best suit, and not a single tear spoiled her makeup. For a second she saw herself through their eyes and suddenly recalled the embryonic world writhing in the fire…

The world that she now knew was Love.

Dark glasses concealed Kozhennikov’s eyes. His invisible but easily sensed gaze was directed at Sasha—just as it was back in July at a seaside town, on the Street That Led to the Sea, but ended up leading her to the Institute of Special Technologies.

Sasha looked down.

“Lessons completed without permission,” Sterkh continued in a soft colorless voice. “Intentional metamorphosis. Experiments with
manifestation
of entities. All this I would call a blatant violation of academic regulations.”

The room was once again eerily quiet. And in this quiet room Kozhennikov’s voice was heard for the first time:

“Nikolay, there is one nuance.”

“Yes?”

“I promised the girl not to ask anything impossible of her.”

Sterkh raised his eyebrows:

“What precisely on my list would you consider impossible?”

“Her development actualizes her identity,” the lamps were reflected in Kozhennikov’s lenses. “She cannot stop if the disk contains several tracks in a row. Give her one track per disk, it’s not complicated, is it?”

A pause lingered in the air. Sterkh’s countenance changed; his wings twitched under his jacket, as if trying to unfold immediately.

Sasha shrunk in her chair, wishing for the earth to swallow her up.

“It’s not complicated,” Sterkh’s voice sounded hollow. “It is… It lacks precedent. I have never had students who were capable of processing ten tracks one after the other. I have used the standard learning materials.”

“But shall we presume that we are dealing with a non-standard case?” Kozhennikov inquired delicately.

“You are right,” said Sterkh after a short pause.

“Then it’s settled,” Kozhennikov nodded. “As far as the manifestation of entities… Sasha, do you realize what you have done?”

“It was not on purpose. I didn’t mean to.”

Portnov choked on his smoke.

“So are you not aware?”

“Why not. I am aware,” Sasha said quietly.

Sterkh raised his eyes up to the ceiling.

“Why did you do it?” Kozhennikov continued his inquiry.

“By accident.”

“What prompted you to do it? What were you thinking about before you picked up the pencil?”

Sasha swallowed.

“It is important,” Kozhennikov nodded. “What were you thinking about? Or whom?”

“About Kostya,” Sasha said. “About Konstantin Kozhennikov.”

And she bravely met her own reflection in his dark lenses.

“And feeling emotional, you decided to play with meanings?” Portnov cut in.

Sasha turned to face him:

“Not to play, Oleg Borisovich. I believe it was you who taught me to add symbols. It was you who praised me when everything came together. Have you ever warned me that it was forbidden?”

“I’d forbid you to run over the ceiling if I had known you were capable of that!”

“I didn’t know either. I simply lived… existed, positioned myself in space, functioned, acted, continued, lasted…”

She caught herself monotonously listing words—each one of them had a fraction of the meaning she needed so desperately, but not a single one of them fit her purpose.

“Actually, that is exactly what I meant,” Kozhennikov said softly.

“So then you are telling me,” Portnov spoke sharply, almost aggressively, “that we cannot expect this girl to cease her games with the informational universe? Just because it means we’re asking for the impossible?”

“No,” a slight smile touched Kozhennikov’s lips. “Now, when we specified a few things, our problem became a bit clearer, and it will now be solved. Don’t worry.”

He turned to Sasha.

“Sasha, I would like to speak to you today. What time will you be done with your classes?”

***

She came to her senses at the long table in a large auditorium, where general educational lectures were usually held. In front of her was a sheet of paper torn out of a notebook, and Sasha was writing down the following: “At this time esthetic experience is considered as an experience in value, and is treated within the limits of the philosophy of value.” The auditorium was not full, and the professor kept giving Sasha strange looks.

Sasha leaned back on her chair. She loved to learn; lectures, even the most boring ones, and formulaic definitions, no matter how confusing, returned her to reality…

To reality in the sense that Sasha understood it.

The bell rang.

Not looking at anyone, not speaking with anyone, she returned to her loft. The ashes from the burnt paper still lay in the wastebasket. She tidied up the room, gathered the yellow strips of foam off the floor and took out the trash. She sat by the window; for a long time she watched the green linden trees on Sacco and Vanzetti.

Whose love was it that she so stupidly, accidentally
manifested
? Once it became tangible, this love gained a carrier and an object of application… An object and a subject…. When Sasha burned it, what happened to these people?

Her hands fidgeted, searching for something to do. She picked up a pencil, found a pencil sharpener in the desk drawer, and pulled a clean sheet of paper closer to avoid making a mess. She inserted the dull pencil snout into the sharpener, turned it once and again. The wood shavings fell onto the paper, making a pattern.

Sasha gathered the shavings into her hand and shook them off into the wastebasket. She’s not going to draw anything: she has been forbidden to manifest entities. She is not going to, no, no, no, she’s only going to open the conceptual activator for just a minute.

Yellow paper, diagrams, columns, numbers: Sasha closed her eyes. A magnificent anthill of meanings with all its levels and associations, vectors, derivatives of multiple degrees, loops, figure eights, lines leading into infinity… No, no. Just watch. Just be amazed. Harmony…

The pencil slid out of the sharpener by itself, pointed as a needle. Will. Creation. Word. What am I doing, Sasha thought in panic, while her entire being, commanding and supple, strengthened and developed by assignments and exercises, loved—existed, positioned itself in space, functioned, acted, continued, lasted…

And then her thoughts ended as well. A jump was completed to the next level, impossible to express in familiar terms. The pencil glided without a break, depicting symbols with an enclosed fourth dimension. Patches of sunlight on the water, a small oar—yellow, bright-yellow, plastic. It is not yet Love; it is a premonition, a forewarning…

The doorbell clang like a fire alarm.

Sasha has never had visitors in her loft, and she’d never even heard that deafening ringing; her hand jerked. The pencil broke. In terror Sasha stared at the sheet of paper with a glimmering, nearly completed symbol.

The door bell insisted on ringing. Sasha looked out of the window and saw downstairs, at the lion-guarded entrance, Kozhennikov, but not Farit, no. It was Kostya.

***

“Oh, you scared me.”

“Why should you be scared,” Kostya looked around with suspicion and inhaled. “Did you burn something?”

“Ah, stuff… old papers. Have a seat.”

Kostya sat down on the edge of a stool. He took another look around, this time more attentively.

“Nice place. Very different from our rathole.”

“Are you fighting with your wife?” Sasha blurted out.

“You’ve been told?” Kostya avoided her eyes.

“It’s not hard to figure out,” Sasha sighed. “I’m not offering you tea, sorry about that, I’m out of tea leaves. What did you want to tell me?”

Kostya swayed back and forth, suddenly looking so much like Farit Kozhennikov that Sasha cringed inside.

“What did they want from you? Why did they want to see you? I saw
him—he
was there too.”

Sasha sighed. Actually, Kostya was the only person with whom she could share everything; well, almost everything. Aside from a few details.

So she told him. Kostya listened, anxiously leaning forward, unconsciously playing with a broken pencil.

“Are you telling me
he
stood up for you?”

“I don’t know. That’s what it looked like.”

“‘I’m not asking for the impossible.’ When he sent Lisa out on the street corner, he also was not asking for the impossible.”

“You know about that?!”

“Everyone does. When he killed my grandmother… he also was not asking for the impossible, was he?”

“He was not. You could have passed the test on the first try. You passed it on the second.”

Kostya’s eyes turned into glass.

“But you did pass it,” Sasha mumbled apologetically.

“You’ve changed a lot,” Kostya said. “Sometimes I think you’ve become very much like
him.
”

“But you could have passed on the first try,” Sasha could feel his growing antagonism, and it made her speak fast and commandingly, as if pressing her chest against the hurricane force wind. “It’s true, Kostya, it is unpleasant and sad, but it’s true. You could. But you did not pass. You are his son, and you hate him. But perhaps he’s not the worst father. He’s rational. Strict. Effective.”

“What?!”

“Perhaps he even loves you. In his own way… Perhaps all the fathers in the world are projections of one single entity. It’s just that their method of transformation is different. A ballerina’s shadow is a monster with a tiny head and massive legs… Can you imagine how badly any entity can be distorted by an intricate type of projection? If this pile of muck is a projection of a blooming garden onto an infinite timeframe, onto rain and cold… If my father who left my Mom with a baby in her arms—if he’s a projection of a magnanimous and loving man, but the sun went down, and the shadow got distorted…”

Sasha spoke, realizing to her wonder that she no longer thought in words. Words—only later, but in the beginning—supple and firm… images? Pictures? Live creatures? The necessity of converting these thoughts-sensations into the familiar verbal form was becoming a burden to her.

Kostya held her hand like an attentive nurse:

“Sasha…. Are you all right?”

“Me? Oh yes. Poor Juliet was mistaken. Remember? ‘’Tis but thy name that is my enemy. Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot, Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!’ This is a common misconception, not unlike the “world is flat” belief. ‘And whatever your ship is named, that is how it will sail.’—Yes, that’s it. That is exactly right.”

“Sasha…” Kostya seemed nervous.

“Listen,” she closed her eyes to avoid seeing Kostya and her room, in order to feel the full extent of the strokes and trills of her new thoughts, thought-images, thought-creatures. “I can… construct… materialize… actualize… objectify… depict for you and Zhenya this Love, the same as Romeo and Juliet’s. You will feel, live, experience, burn with… this Love, the only one in the whole universe… I will
manifest
it for you…”