The textbook flew into the corner, hit the dresser door, landed on the floor, and stayed there, its yellow pages splayed open. Oksana hit the desk with both fists, making the table lamp hop.
“I can’t! I am not going to study this! They are making fun of us!”
“That’s what I am thinking.” Lisa sat on the windowsill, smoking, a glass jar in front of her full of lipsticked cigarette butts.
“What will happen if we don’t learn it?” Sasha asked.
All three girls fell silent. The question that had tortured them all day was now out in the open.
It was evening. The sun was setting outside their window. Somewhere someone was strumming a guitar. Behind them was the first day of classes—Specialty, Physical Education, Philosophy, and World History. Neither the third, nor the fourth block brought any surprises. Sasha wrote down the definition of the principal point of philosophy and how materialism differs from idealism, took notes on the dwellings of primitive peoples and their customs, and received two perfectly ordinary textbooks. An excellent dinner was consumed in dead silence. First years returned to the dorm, began to study, and soon found out that the homework assigned by Portnov was an impossible task to accomplish.
One could read this nonsense, forcing oneself every step of the way. But memorizing the underlined passages—that was unfeasible. The brain refused to function, and spots swam before their exhausted eyes. Oksana was the first one to crack, and now her textbook was crumpled on the floor.
“I can’t memorize it!” Oksana sniffled. “Even if he kills me!”
Lisa looked like she wanted to say something, but at that moment someone knocked on the door.
“Come in,” Sasha said.
Kostya entered and closed the door behind him.
“Hey. I am … I need to … the schedule for tomorrow. I mean, the individual workshops, they’re during the third and fourth blocks.”
“Prefect,” said Lisa with a degree of disdain that had no equal.
“It’s not like it was his idea, you know,” Sasha snapped.
“Considering whose son he is …”
“What difference is it whose son I am?” Kostya burst out, drops of saliva flying in all directions. “What is the difference? Did I ask who your father is? Did I bother you at all?” And before anyone could answer him, he left the room, slamming the door and running down the corridor, Sasha flying behind him.
“Kostya. Wait. Don’t pay attention to her. Just wait!”
Not answering, Kostya dashed into the men’s bathroom. Sasha slowed down. She considered the situation and perched on the windowsill, prepared to wait.
A third year was walking down the corridor, taking each step carefully. He slowly turned his head, as if his neck were made of rusty metal. Now and then he would freeze, as if listening to something, and even his eyes stopped moving, fixed on some unknown point. Then he would start walking again, and this way, step after step, he approached Sasha, perched at the window.
Despite the unusually warm, sunny, and almost summery day, he wore woolen gloves. A wide knitted headband covered his forehead, and either it was a fashion statement Sasha didn’t understand or a cure for a headache.
“Hello.”
Sasha had not expected him to speak and so answered automatically:
“Hello.”
“First years? Nightmares? Hysterics?”
Sasha licked her lips. “I guess so …”
“I see,” said the third year. “Were you a straight-A student in high school?”
“Why?” Sasha frowned.
The guy took a step toward her. He stood swaying, then with an unexpected ease he hopped onto the windowsill next to her.
“You should get a haircut, bob your hair. And a brighter lipstick.”
“What’s it to you?” Sasha was deeply offended.
“I am older than you—I can give you all sorts of advice.” The guy smirked. “Valery.” He extended a gloved hand.
Sasha had to force herself to stretch her own hand in return and touch the pilling black wool.
“Alexandra …”
She took a deep breath and then began talking rapidly, quietly.
“Valery, tell me, explain to me, you must know by now … What are they teaching us here?”
“To explain is to simplify,” Valery informed her after a short pause.
Frustrated at the nonanswer, Sasha jumped off the windowsill. “See you.”
“Wait.” Something in Valery’s voice made her stop. “I am not … making fun of you. Laughing at you. Jesting. Having fun at your expense. Needling you. Taunting you … I …”
He fell silent, surprised and even confused, his own words like cockroaches running from the bright light.
Finally he said, “You see. It really is difficult to explain. The first semester is the hardest. Just survive this semester, that’s all. Then it’s going to get easier each year.”
“Do I have a choice?” Sasha asked bitterly.
Still sitting on the windowsill, Valery shrugged.
“Listen,” Sasha said drily. “Can you please go into the bathroom and tell this guy—the first year—that I’m waiting for him. Tell him to stop hiding.”
At half past midnight Sasha gave up. She closed the book and dropped it under the bed, closed her eyes, and fell asleep almost immediately.
The smell of a burning cigarette woke her up. Lisa was smoking, sitting by the window, and Oksana was not in the room.
“Ugh.” Sasha waved the thick cloud of smoke away from her face. “Can you please smoke in the bathroom?”
“Anything else?” Lisa inquired calmly.
Sasha forced herself to get up. Half an hour remained before the first block; the corridor was filled with the sounds of running, stomping, laughing, and yelling.
She took a shower in the steamy shower room, taking squeamish steps on the waterlogged wooden planks. It was too late to dry her hair. Sasha poked her nose into the kitchen—it was packed with the sound of clanking dishes and loud people waiting for their turn with the electric teakettle—and left immediately. She went back to her room, pulled on a pair of jeans and a shirt, and jogged over to the back entrance of the institute.
Group A was nearly bursting with emotion. Some people were flaunting their indifference, some balanced on the verge of hysterics, some were still trying to memorize the nonsensical text, staring at the accursed Textual Module with the abstract pattern on the faded cover. It was readily apparent that no one had managed to do as Portnov requested: the text refused to be memorized.
“It’s going to be just fine,” Andrey Korotkov crooned in basso profundo; from the first day Andrey had played the role of everyone’s older brother. “What could he possibly do to us?”
Lisa, thin and haggard looking, watched him through squinted eyes, as if through a cloud of tobacco smoke. Sasha did her best to avoid Lisa.
The first block was Mathematics, which Sasha disliked and had hoped to avoid after high school, but it was not to be: standard textbook, review of previous material, trigonometry, triangular coordinates …
Despite her initial abhorrence, Sasha found herself deeply interested in half-forgotten high school subjects. The textbook was logical, it was consistent, and each task had meaning. The thin book printed