“What I want to know,” Kostya said, anxiously rubbing his knee, “is do you really—can you really turn reality into a dream? Or is it hypnosis? Or some other trick?”
Still smiling, Kozhennikov spread his hands wide, as if saying—well, that’s just how it works.
“And do you have power over accidents?” Kostya continued. “People get sick, die, get run over by cars …”
“If one directs the sail, does he direct the wind?”
“Cheap sophistry,” Sasha interjected.
“The question is”—Kozhennikov glanced at her—“what should be considered a tragic accident, and what should be considered a happy occurrence? And this, my friends, you cannot possibly know.”
“Because you keep this knowledge from us,” Sasha cut in again.
Kostya asked, “What exactly are the coins?”
Kozhennikov absentmindedly stuck his hand into his pocket. He took out a gold disk, and Sasha saw the familiar rounded three-dimensional symbol.
“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?”
Sasha and Kostya were silent.
“Of course you don’t understand. But you will,” Kozhennikov nodded reassuringly. “Are you interested in fishing? Kostya?”
“No,” said Kozhennikov junior with disdain. “We have a lot of work for tomorrow. See you.”
Without a backward glance, he walked away from the river, and Sasha quickly followed.
Sasha could deal with the mornings and afternoons. She was busy, she had lectures, classes, all sorts of worries. But in the evenings, and especially during the nights, she cried. Every night. Turning her face to the wall.
She missed her home, longed terribly for Mom. Dozing off, she would see Mom enter the room, stand right next to her bed …
Sasha would wake up—and cry again.
She barely managed to fall asleep by the time the alarm clock went off.
Sasha had always taken pleasure in learning. Shuffling between courses and tutors, polishing the seat of her skirt at the library, poring over textbooks in advance, she never quite comprehended how lucky she was back then to be learning things that were logical, comprehensible, and elegant, like a geometry problem.
But now, when nothing she had to learn was ever logical or comprehensible, even the very sight of the Textual Module, with its pattern of blocks on the cover, made her unbearably bored.
A week passed. Then another. Every day she had to read sections, memorize, cram, and grind at snippets of nonsensical, unpleasant text. Sasha herself did not understand why this gobbledygook caused more and more revulsion with each passing day. Reading the barbaric combinations of half-familiar and alien words, she felt something brewing inside her: within her head, a wasp nest was waking up, and it droned and hummed in distress, searching in vain for an exit.
People started playing hooky in the second week of school. Andrey Korotkov stopped attending Math, claiming he used to work on problems like this in ninth grade. Lisa Pavlenko occasionally skipped History, Philosophy, English—without any explanation. Some boys skipped gym, but the girls attended Dima Dimych’s class diligently and cheerfully. Adorable, gorgeous, sweet Dima did not torture anyone with backbreaking training; instead, he dedicated most of the time to games. He gave long lectures on the human body with the goal of making the training more effective. Naïvely, he demonstrated the location of tendons, the structure of muscles—first on an educational poster, then on a live model. The live models requested more details and explanations. Dima blushed and explained again and again: here is the knee joint, here is the ankle joint, and these here are very tender ligaments, which are frequently pulled and can even tear …
Sasha liked watching the young teacher from a distance, somewhere atop a stack of gym mats. The boldness of her classmates, their audacity and cheekiness surprised and embarrassed her, but also made her a bit envious.
Truancy was fine in the other classes, but Specialty was always meticulously attended by all nineteen students of Group A. And every one of them studied the textual sections diligently. Portnov was a master of coercing. In fact, coercing seemed to be his sole teaching skill.
“Why do we need these lectures? To learn how to read?” bristled Laura Onishenko, a tall busty girl who carried a plastic bag with her knitting everywhere.
“It’s not education,” Kostya said. “It’s obedience training, in the best-case scenario. In the worst-possible-case scenario, it is brainwashing. How’s your head—does it feel normal after one-on-one sessions?”
Kostya wasn’t wrong. To a certain degree, one-on-one sessions were even worse than the lectures. Fifteen minutes twice a week. According to Portnov, he controlled their knowledge, although from Sasha’s point of view, they learned nothing, and his method of control smacked of shamanism: Portnov’s ring blinded her, made her thoughts scramble, time made a dizzying leap, and meanwhile Portnov managed to find out everything she had learned, did not quite learn, or did not learn well.
“You did not finish Section 5. Tomorrow you will do Section 6, and again Section 5.”
“That’s not enough time!”
“I am not interested.”
It appeared as if Group B was experiencing the same: rosy-cheeked Oksana looked pale and drawn, and spent all her free time at her desk. Lisa continued to smoke in the room, one cigarette after another. Sasha thought she was doing it on purpose; she seemed to enjoy watching Sasha cough and squint from the tobacco smoke.
Two weeks of classes passed by. Once, during lunch break, when everyone went to the dining hall, Sasha returned to the dorm, found a stash of cigarettes (several packs) among Lisa’s belongings, and flushed them down the toilet.
Lisa said nothing. But the next day the entire contents of Sasha’s makeup bag—powder, eye shadow, lip gloss, and an expensive lipstick, a birthday gift used rarely, only on important holidays—all of it ended up in the trash, broken, crushed, and smeared over the rusty metal sides of the garbage can.
Sasha discovered the debacle later in the morning, when Lisa had already left the room. Blind with rage, Sasha dashed to the lecture hall, intending to rip the witch’s hair out. She was too late: the first block, Specialty, had started, and a new dose of the sickening gibberish cooled down Sasha’s wrath faster than a bucket of icy water.
After all, she’d started it. She threw out Lisa’s cigarettes. But what else could she do if that witch ignored all her requests! Nothing: as far as Sasha knew, Lisa was supposed to find a rental apartment and move relatively soon. And then Sasha could breathe easier. Oksana would never be a problem.
It couldn’t come soon enough.
Five minutes remained until the end of the class. Sasha finished reading the section and wiped her moist forehead with a wet, weak palm.
“Samokhina, come over here.”
Sasha jumped. Portnov stared at her directly over his glasses.
“I said, come over here.”
Kostya threw her a worried glance. Awkwardly, Sasha climbed from behind her desk, stepping over her bag.
“Everyone, look at Samokhina.”
Eighteen pairs of eyes—indifferent, sympathetic, some even gloating—stared at her in anticipation. Sasha couldn’t stand it: she looked down.
“At this point, this girl has achieved the highest academic success. Not because of her talent—her abilities are fairly average. Some of you are significantly more