Vita Nostra (4 page)

He turned and departed, leaving Sasha sobbing and vigorously shaking her head no to all the questions from the sympathetic passersby. Hiding in a park alley—deserted at this hour— and pulling a handkerchief out of her bag, she was finally able to clean up her tears and snot, but did not manage to calm herself down.

Her own dark sunglasses, the ones she’s had for over a year, with a thin frame, hid the redness of her eyes and her swollen lids. Pushing her hat low on her forehead, Sasha walked down the street, avoiding looking at people, not lifting her eyes from the pavement. In front of her, a girl of about four stomped her red sandals on the ground, holding her mother’s hand.

An ambulance stood in front of the beach entrance. Sasha stopped, and her shoes stuck to the softened asphalt.

Almost immediately, she saw her mother. Mom wobbled on the gravel, a towel thrown over her shoulders, holding onto a stretcher. A very pale man lying on the stretcher vaguely resembled a cheerful, sanguine Valentin.

Sasha sat down on the balustrade.

The stretcher was loaded into the ambulance. The doctor said something to Mom, she nodded several times and asked something in return. The doctor shook his head and climbed into the ambulance. The car beeped at the crowd, pulled back, reversed on a small parking lot into front of the hotel and drove up The Street That Leads to the Sea.

“Very bad, but not terrible.”

“What happened to him, Mom?”

Mom turned around. Panic and grief swam in her eyes.

“Hospital Number Six,” she chanted, like an incantation. “I’m just… I need to change, and then I’ll go. It’s a heart attack, Sasha. A heart attack. Oh god, oh god…”

Like a blind person, she moved through the throng of intrigued beachgoers.

***

Mom spent the night at the local hospital. Almost all of their cash went to the doctors and nurses, and Mom had to go to the post office and call one of her coworkers who promised to wire them some more money. Sasha spent a sleepless night alone in their room. The alarm clock was no longer reliable.

At three in the morning she left the house. Somewhere the night clubs were still going strong, and the cafés were still lit. Sasha walked down to the dark sea and sat down on the gravel at the water’s edge.

Far away, a ship appeared on the horizon. Cicadas shrieked in the gardens behind Sasha’s back. The sea licked the beach, stole tiny rocks and brought them back, polished them, rubbing together their surfaces. The sea had time. And patience enough for two.

At quarter to four, Sasha pulled off her clothes and stepped into the water, shivering. She swam, constantly looking back as if expecting a monster in dark glasses to rear its ugly head out of the waves.

She slapped the buoy and looked up at the sky: the sun was rising. She glanced into the depth of the sea and saw the barely distinguishable metal anchor chain.

She returned to the shore and, barely managing to throw a towel over her shoulders, retched painfully. Five coins flew out one after another, leaving a sharp pain in her throat and diminishing spasms in her stomach. The coins rolled on the gravel, hiding between the rocks.

***

Mom came back in the afternoon, exhausted and very focused. Valentin felt better—it was not a heart attack, the ambulance came quickly, and the patient was in no danger.

“Everything will be fine,” Mom repeated with an air of detachment. “I am so sleepy, Sasha, I can’t tell you how sleepy I am. If you want, go to the beach by yourself, I’m going to sleep.”

“How is he, anyway?” Sasha asked. “Should we send a telegram? To his relatives or whatever?”

“The relatives are here already,” Mom informed her with the same air of detachment. “His wife flew in from Moscow. Everything will be just fine. Just go now, please?”

Sasha took her swimsuit off the balcony and left the apartment. She did not feel like going to the beach, and she strolled aimlessly around the park, meager and dusty, but still offering a minimum of shade.

“Very bad, but not terrible.” Fear, stress, ruined vacation… On the other hand, who is Valentin, anyway? Only a week ago he was simply Mom’s chance acquaintance. Of course, Mom seemed so happy, but their relationship was doomed from the beginning. It was just a summer fling, a beach affair…

Sasha sat down on a bench. Black acacia pods littered the narrow alley. Bitterness and resentment on behalf of her mother ate at Sasha like acid. A summer fling, such a cliché. What was he thinking? And why would he bother with a nice respectable woman, when he could have had any of those girls—a navel ring, jeans cut off right up to the butt cheeks.

“It would be better if he were dead,” Sasha thought glumly.

“Very bad, but not terrible.” And Sasha did believe that something awful would happen to her mother; her premonition was tangible. That fear… From the first moment she saw the man in the dark glasses, fear gripped her and held her in its fist, just like she herself held her gold coins. It would let go for a minute—and squeeze again. “This will teach you some discipline.” That’s for sure. From now on she would get up without any alarm clocks, and always at half past three. Or maybe she just wouldn’t sleep at all. Because at the moment when she saw the ambulance in front of the main beach entrance, she had a feeling that all in the world was lost forever, all of it…

She took a deep breath. Tomorrow morning she would swim out to the buoy, and the day after tomorrow, right before their departure, she would do the same. And then she would return home and forget everything. School, routine, senior year of high school, college entrance exams…

She sat on the bench, staring at the handful of coins in her hands. Twenty-nine disks, with the same round symbol, with a zero on the reverse side. Heavy and small, their diameter was the same as the old Soviet kopeks.

***

On the train, Sasha spilled the coins on the floor.

She was lying on the top berth staring out of the window. The pocket of her denim shorts must have been unbuttoned; the coins spilled out and rolled around the entire carriage, clanking joyfully on the floor. Sasha flew off her berth in a split second.

“Wow!” said a little girl from the compartment across from Sasha’s. “Look, money!”

Kneeling, Sasha gathered the gold disks, picking them from underneath somebody’s suitcases, and nearly collided with the train attendant who was carrying a tray of tea.

“Careful there!”

The little girl picked up one of the disks and examined it with interest.

“Mommy, is it gold?”

“No,” answered her mother still staring at her book. “It’s some kind of an alloy. Give it back.”

Sasha was already standing there with her hand outstretched. The little girl returned the toy reluctantly. Facing the window, Sasha counted the coins; she was supposed to have thirty-seven, but had only thirty-six.

“Excuse me, have you seen any of these coins?”

People in the neighboring compartments shook their heads. Sasha ran up and down the carriage, again nearly collided with the attendant; a man in a red warm-up suit sat at the very end of the carriage, right near the exit, studying the round symbol on the missing disk. Staring at the symbol long enough made it seem three-dimensional.

“It’s mine,” Sasha stretched out her palm. “I dropped it.”

The man lifted his head and gave Sasha an estimating glance. He looked back at the coin.

“What is it?”

“A souvenir. Please give it back.”

“Interesting.” The man was in no hurry. “Where did you get it?”

“It was a gift.”

The man smirked.

“Listen, I want to buy it from you. Is ten dollars enough?”

“No, it’s not for sale.”

“Twenty dollars?”

Sasha was nervous. A woman sitting right next to them was listening to the conversation.

“It’s my coin,” Sasha made her voice sound determined and hard. “Give it back to me, please.”

“I had a friend,” the man glanced from Sasha to the coin and back. “He was a tomb raider. He did some illegal stuff. Dug up some things in the Crimea. And then someone stabbed him. You see, he probably dug up something he wasn’t supposed to.”

“I didn’t dig anything up,” Sasha stared at his hand. “It was a gift. It’s mine.”

They stared at each other. The man wanted to say something, in the same measured and patronizing manner, but he bit his tongue. At this point, Sasha was ready to fight for her coin, sob, scream, and shriek, scratch his face; this readiness of hers must have been obvious in her stare.

“As you wish.”

The gold disk fell into her hand. Sasha clamped her fingers shut and, holding her breath, walked back to her mother.

Mom sat in the same spot, staring out of the window, having noticed nothing.

***

The autumn came in October, suddenly and irrevocably. Red maple leaves stuck to the wet asphalt like flat starfish. Sasha existed between school and preparatory courses at the university: there was tons of homework, essays, reports, tests. She had no time for anything else, even Sundays were filled with work, but Sasha did not mind. She discovered that her brain, overburdened by studies, flatly refused to believe in mysterious strangers and their tasks, in gold coins vomited out by one’s stomach. And even the sea, the kind summer sea with a swaying red buoy, seemed surreal, and everything that happened there, by the seaside, seemed just as surreal.

And Mom was back to normal. With the end of summer came the end of her depression, especially considering that her office was very busy, as usual. Both of them, locked in the vicious cycle of everyday routine, forbade themselves from thinking of the surreal—each had her own reasons. And up to a certain moment they both succeeded.

Then the letter came from Moscow. Mom took it out of the mailbox, aimlessly played with it for a few minutes before opening it, and then she did open and read it.

“Valentin divorced his wife,” she addressed their television set.

“So what?” Sasha said, not exactly polite.

Mom folded the letter and went to her room. Sasha turned off the TV and sat down with a history textbook; she reread the same paragraph about ten times, without understanding anything. Polabian Slavs, Polabian-Pomeranian… They must have studied them in fifth grade, and here we go again, they are back in the program.

Maybe it’ll still work out? People have all sorts of issues in their relationships. Of course, his divorce is not a good thing. And it is even worse that he’s writing to Mom about it.

The phone rang. Trying to think about the ancient Slavic tribes, Sasha picked up the receiver.

“Hello?”

“Good evening, Sasha. It’s me.”

The desk lamp was on. It was raining outside. A textbook lay open. Everything was so normal, so real. And—that voice on the phone.

“No,” said Sasha softly. “You…”

She almost let “You don’t exist” slide off her tongue, but she stopped just in time.

“How many coins?”

“Thirty-seven.”

“And how many were there?”

“Thirty-seven, honestly.”

“I’m waiting downstairs near the entrance. Come down for a minute.”

She heard the short beeps in the receiver.

She kept the coins in an old wallet, in the depths of her desk, behind a stack of books and notepads. Sasha unzipped the wallet and poured the contents onto her desk. She counted them again—still thirty-seven.

She put the wallet into the pocket of her raincoat and slid her feet into a pair of old rain boots. She put the raincoat right over her bathrobe. She grabbed an umbrella, still wet, and picked up her keys.

The door to her mother’s room remained closed.

“I’ll be right back,” Sasha said to no one in particular. “I’m… I’m going to get the mail.”

She walked down the steps without waiting for the elevator. The neighbor from the fifth floor was entering the hall, all wet, with a huge wet dog on a leash.

“Hi,” said Sasha.

The neighbor nodded. The dog shook its mane, drenching everything with rainwater.

Sasha went outside in the rain. It was dark already, the windows in the neighboring houses were lit, and maple leaves lay on the black asphalt like colored patches.

A man in a dark blue raincoat, similar to Sasha’s and shiny with rain, sat on a wet bench. The lenses in his glasses were smoky rather than dark, but the dusk of an autumn evening made them completely impenetrable.

“Hello, Sasha. Are you frightened?”

She did not expect this friendly, joking inflection. She swallowed. Cold wind crawled underneath her clothes, licked her naked knees.

“Give me the coins.”

She handed him the wallet with the coins. He weighed the wallet in his hand and nodded, putting the wallet away.

“Good. I have a task for you to perform.”

Sasha opened her mouth.

“It’s a simple task. Very simple. Every morning, at five o’clock, you will go to the park for a jog. Run as much as you can—two circles in the alleys, three circles. When you’ve jogged enough, find thick bushes and urinate on the ground. It’s better if you drink enough water beforehand to avoid any sort of issues. Every morning at five o’clock.”

“Why?” Sasha whispered. “Why do you need this?”

Rain slid down her cheeks, mixing with tears. The dark man did not answer. Drops of rain hung on his glasses, reflecting the distant streetlights, which made his eyes seem multi-faceted.

“Once a month you can have some time off during your period. Four days… is four days enough?”

Sasha was silent.

“Watch the alarm clock. Missing a day or being late at least once is a tremendously bad idea. The sequence of actions cannot be altered: plan ahead, drink enough water.”

“For the rest of my life?” Sasha burst out suddenly.

“What?”

“Do I have to run… for the rest of my life?”

“No.” The man seemed surprised. “I’ll tell you when to stop. Well, now go home, you’re freezing.”

Sasha was shaking.

“Come on,” her companion said softly. “Everything will be just fine… Of course, as long as you demonstrate enough discipline.”

***

A lone streetlight burned near the park entrance. Under the iron pole where a long time ago hung a town clock, an old man with a dog lingered, the first and only passersby at this time of day. His eyes slid indifferently over Sasha.