Vita Nostra. Julia Meitov Hersey

unread. Sasha started the familiar process of scraping through the nonsensical combinations of letters. She kept reading until, suddenly, the words broke through the rasping in her brain:

       “… as enthralling as daylight; she perceived thoughts as a ray of sun …”¹

      Sasha jerked her head.

      She was the only person in the reading room. The day outside the window approached nighttime. Through an open window she could smell a distant fire.

      She tried to reread the paragraph, but nothing worked. She returned to the beginning—having forgotten about Plato and his eidos, about her paper, and the closing time of the reading room, she pored over Textual Module 1. Her headache grew. She felt as if a hundred metal spoons banged on iron pans behind a thin wall, but she kept reading and she could not stop, like a barrel tumbling down a hill.

       “… that makes its way down the corridor and then everything in the world gains the gift of speech; and the sunlight speaks to you …”

      The librarian who showed up to lock the room found Sasha prostrate over the open book.

      She went to the post office and bought three graphed notebooks. A picture was on the back of the cover—a rippled mass of dots and squiggles. If one did not stare directly at the ripples, but instead unfocused and looked through the paper as if through glass, eventually the ripples gave way to a seemingly three-dimensional image: one notebook had an Egyptian pyramid, the other, a horse, and the third one, a fir tree. Some time ago, her physics teacher explained the principle of creating pictures like that, but Sasha had forgotten.

      She walked down the street, notebooks under her arm. Something niggled at her—something about the very nature of her time at the institute. What it came down to, Sasha thought, was this: That which we are forced to learn has meaning. We do not comprehend it. But it is not just brainwashing, not just cramming: meaning seeps in through this sluggish mess just like a three-dimensional image rises out of dots and squiggles; it is not a “horse,” and definitely not a “fir tree.” Chances are this science cannot be described by a single word. Or even two words. Perhaps words that describe this science, this process, do not even exist. Not a single second year, not to mention the third years, had ever deemed it possible to even hint at what we are being taught here. Maybe Portnov—or some other teacher—made them silent? Maybe. Or, perhaps, they don’t know that either.

      Victor, the one-eyed third year, told her that after the winter finals his entire group would be going to “another location,” where the fourth years and the graduates reside. Sasha thought of the third year of school, especially the winter finals, as something unbelievably distant, and she did not even feel any curiosity regarding where this “other location” was, or why the older students had to be separated …

      Darkness came early now. The tops of the linden trees on Sacco and Vanzetti, just yesterday so thick and opaque, now let through the glow of the distant streetlights. Yet the unseasonable warmth did not allow one to believe in the yellow leaves underfoot or the upcoming winter. Sasha stood for a while, taking deep breaths and watching the stars over the tiled roofs of the town of Torpa. Eventually, though, she had to go inside. She had two choices: walk through the school building or through the narrow alleyway that led directly to the dorm. Having considered both options, Sasha decided to take the shortcut.

      “Why are you playing hard to get?”

      The whisper eventually grew into a low male voice.

      “Why are you acting like a virgin? On Friday … in Vlad’s room … that wasn’t you, was it, huh?”

      “Leave me alone.” Sasha recognized Lisa Pavlenko’s voice.

      “C’mon, kitten …”

      “Go to hell, you moron!”

      Sasha stumbled on an empty bottle. The bottle clinked on the pavement; the voices ceased.

      “Who’s there?” the man asked.

      Sasha could not answer. She turned around and, staggering on the rocks, exited the alley.

      The key for room 21 hung on the board downstairs. Sasha grabbed it, jogged up to the second floor, made a short visit to the bathroom, and quickly brushed her teeth before climbing into bed.

      Oksana was the first to return. She rustled her plastic bags (where did she get all that crackling plastic?), then settled in with great big sighs, turned a few pages of her textbook, clicked off the lamp, and went to sleep. Sasha lay in the dark, listening to anonymous laughing, shrieking, singing in the kitchen, the banging of dishes; Oksana slept undisturbed, but Sasha could not close her eyes.

       “Sunlight speaks to you …”

      Why did Sasha feel so happy when a meaningful sentence swam, all of its own accord, out of a sequence of letters? These words were familiar and grammatically correct, but an actual meaning was still missing—sunlight does not speak. Sunlight is a stream of photons characterized by a wave-particle duality …

      One cannot imagine it anyway. It’s the same thing as seeing a closed door from both sides simultaneously. By being both on the inside and the outside.

      It’s so incredibly stuffy in this room …

      She tossed and turned, and then finally got up, opened the window, and gulped some fresh air. A streetlight burned outside, and its bright artificial rays poured over the windowsill with its many layers of white paint. A makeshift ashtray—a mayonnaise jar—stood in the corner of the window, and somebody’s philosophy textbook lay forgotten.