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It happened so often—beautiful things had stupid names, and the other way around.
The street twisted. The sidewalk was almost entirely blocked by advertisements for tourist attractions—the Swallow’s Nest, Massandra, Nikitsky Botanical Garden, Alupka Palace . . . The din of video games filled the air.
Pink blossoms swayed on the “peacock” trees. Farther down, in the bushes, something else blooming and aromatic was trying to attract bees.
Autumn came in October, suddenly and irrevocably. Red maple leaves stuck to the wet asphalt like flat starfish.
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.
The lenses in his glasses were smoky rather than dark, but the dusk of an autumn evening made them completely impenetrable.
To her, existence consisted of days, and each day seemed to run like a circular ribbon—or, better yet, a bike chain, moving evenly over the cogs. Click—another change of speed, days became a little different, but they still flowed, still repeated, and that very monotony concealed the meaning of life . . .
Dust floated around in huge echoing rooms, the air smelled of old libraries, and outside it was hot, a real scorcher. Sasha did not care. She felt translucent and indifferent, like a Christmas ornament.
She’d spent the entire night in a twilight zone between sleeping and waking, and only just recently managed to fall asleep. The train was old and shaky, and somewhere a teaspoon jingled in an empty glass.
Again, they were left alone. The old lady, the woman with a shovel—even the suspicious guys—were all gone.
Vita nostra . . . “Our life is brief, / It will shortly end; / Death comes quickly.”
A large pink stone diffracted the light of the bulb, became bright blue, then green; Sasha held her breath. She felt dizzy, took a step, trying to maintain equilibrium . . . “Hold it.” She blinked. The ring was no longer there. Portnov stood beside her, holding her shoulders.
“Look. This is a word that has never been pronounced. And it never will be.” Kozhennikov flipped the coin; it flew up and landed back on his palm. “Do you understand?”
She felt like a blimp filled with soap bubbles. The bubbles—her unspoken words—rose up in her throat and crawled out, hung on her tongue, like clumsy acrobats on a trampoline. Then they popped, leaving a bitter aftertaste. Not a single word was strong enough to conquer the barrier, escape, and fly away.
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 . . .” *
“. . . that makes its way down the corridor and then everything in the world gains the gift of speech; and the sunlight speaks to you . . .”
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,
“According to Nominalism, universals are names of names, but not of absolute reality or notion . . .” This phrase, too, has no meaning, Sasha thought in disappointment. And really, if one repeats the same word over and over again—“meaning, meaning, meaning”—it disintegrates into sounds, and becomes just as informative as the tinkling of water in a fountain, and . . . She held her head. Something is happening to me, she admitted.
On the third hand—and there was a third hand—she was aggravated and deeply offended by Portnov.
Hitching up his left sleeve, the hunchback uncovered a bracelet on his wrist. It was not a watch, as Sasha thought at first. It was a convex metal badge on a leather band. Its instantaneous burst of light flashed into Sasha’s eyes and made her squint.
In a cloudy broth of insomnia she was beginning to feel that she was thinking somebody else’s thoughts. The thoughts felt so foreign to her that they didn’t even fit in her head. Sasha imagined that processing these thoughts was just as difficult as picking up a pen with a horse’s hoof.
She felt like a crystal: transparent, fragile, and perfectly calm. Like a dangling icicle. Like an apathetic chunk of glass.
“I wanted to!” Sasha was ready to snap and talk back at him. Had she still had her eyes, she would get up and leave, and slam the door behind her. However, she was blind and afraid to appear ridiculous by running into the door frame on her way out.
Sasha thought of the lengthy definitions as baby dragons curled into a ball. All she had to do was find its tail, and then carefully unwind the entire thing: the question led her, like a thread, along the creature’s spine. From tail to the heads, and there may be several of those.
the white snow that sparkled blue under the glow of distant streetlights. And immediately—a stream, a fountain. Stars were smeared before her eyes in the ripped fabric of storm clouds; a sudden chill cut her like sandpaper.
She felt about for her slippers. She registered: “These are slippers. They protect me from cold floors.”
She would move in a crowd of first years, greeting them, nodding, occasionally even smiling. These are people. Must speak with them.
“At the very first glance through the glass door the bloodred petals had attracted his attention, and it seemed to him that from this moment it was perfectly clear what in particular he was called upon to perform on earth.”
“In this brilliant red flower was collected all the evil existent on earth . . . all evil. It flourished on all innocent bloodshed (which was why it was so red), on all tears, and all human venom.”
Every second the world around her altered. Some connections strained and grew, others broke. The process resembled convulsions. Every now and then Sasha would stand still, listening to herself: inside, an invisible thread would tauten, cutting and rehashing, weakening and twitching again.
And felt: warmth, light wind, her palms touching the tree bark, cherries caressing her face.
She was caught and pulled up like a kite, while her body on the grass remained inert. A thread that connected her to this anchor helped her soar, yet also kept her close. She felt the trees as her arms, and the grass as her hair. Lightning struck, torn leaves flew by, and Sasha laughed with pure joy.
She used the first years as a mirror. She saw her own reflection in their eyes: broken, twisted, and fully submerged into herself. Occasionally freezing mid-action. With an intense, terrifying stare. They watched her, unable to hide their fear—and sometimes their revulsion.
The brown check mark insects seemed to wait until Sasha opened the page and focused on fragment seventeen. Fidgeting and jerking their legs, they attacked her eyes. Sasha screamed;
“You didn’t understand what I meant! It’s just a temporary loop, a perfectly ordinary thing, one may even say routine. Today is December sixteenth, and tomorrow for you will be December sixteenth, and the day after tomorrow . . . you will stay in this day as long as you need to complete the work.
sternum. Her body lost its outline; it distended and was barely contained by the bed; her body tried to escape its frame as rising dough escapes from a bowl. She endured it, grinding her teeth; the sequence of eighteen tracks repeated over and over, hours passed . . . She was not aware of falling asleep. She slept deeply and serenely, still wearing her headphones.
“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?”
Sasha wanted to sing. She also wanted to own all of this. This pearly sky. This cold, helpless land. These seeds hidden deep under the melting snow. These hills . . .
“Life.” Each root waiting for warmth. Each drop of moisture. Life, the center of all in the universe.
