Sasha was silent, her face burning. Some people’s faces reddened as well. Lisa Pavlenko was the color of a ripe tomato. Kostya went pale.
Portnov held a long, weighty pause.
“Having demonstrated an excellent result, Samokhina gets a personal hands-on assignment. Speech is silver … all of your words are trash, garbage, not worth the air spent in speaking. Silence … Silence is what, Samokhina?”
“Golden,” Sasha squeezed out.
“Golden. From this point on, Samokhina, you are to be silent. This exercise is intended to speed up certain processes, which are beginning to emerge, but are way too slow at this moment. You are not to speak a single word, neither here, nor outside. Nowhere at all. I forbid you.”
Sasha looked up in astonishment. The bell rang in the hall.
“Class dismissed,” Portnov said. “For tomorrow, Section 12, close reading, red text is to be memorized. Samokhina, that goes for you too. Study. Work hard.”
That day Sasha missed her first gym class. She simply could not remain among the crowds, even at the gym, even with such a lovely teacher as Dima Dimych.
Besides, Group A needed some time without her. They needed to discuss her in her absence. She understood perfectly well.
She went back to the dorm. Halfway there, she turned around. An empty smoke-filled room, the remains of her favorite makeup in the garbage can—chances are, all this would hardly cheer her up, so she left. Walked down the hall, and down the stairs.
Walked out of the school.
Sasha followed Sacco and Vanzetti toward the town center; she passed the post office and thought of Mom. How was she supposed to call her now?
Oddly, she never considered violating Portnov’s taboo. But she wasn’t sure she could have, anyway: her lips, tongue, and larynx ceased to obey. Forty minutes after the end of the last block she could not open her tightly clenched teeth.
It frightened her, especially when she suddenly felt incredibly thirsty. She purchased a bottle of mineral water at a grocery store, having to resort to gestures to explain to the salesperson what exactly she wanted. Only then her teeth unclenched and chattered on the glass lip of the bottle. Sasha drank the entire bottle greedily. Her stomach rumbled; she had to sit down in front of the post office.
She’d called Mom last Sunday. Mom had said that Valentin was back from Moscow, but their wedding had been postponed again. Despite everything, Mom sounded cheerful and unconcerned. They are happy without me, Sasha thought.
With that in mind, she went into the post office, gestured for one of the telegram slips, and wrote the following: “Everything fine will not be calling telephone broken.” She gave the slip to the surprised woman behind the counter, paid for the telegram, and walked out again. Relieved, a thought hit her:
So now I’m the top student.
It’s not surprising that Pavlenko blushed like that. But Sasha would give up her favorite lipstick—not just the lipstick, she’d give anything—for Pavlenko to be shown off, for her to be called the best student, despite her average talent, and forbidden to talk. And she, Sasha, would go to the gym with everybody else, and would chat about this curious episode, and tell Dima Dimych about it, and play ball, and sprawl on the stack of mats …
Why does she have to be silent? What can she possibly learn that way? What sort of “emerging processes”?
At first she planned on skipping Philosophy as well, but did not want to miss anything important. Her notes were becoming so logical, so harmonious, that she did not want to leave a gap in Plato’s place. She went to class.
General lectures were attended by both Groups A and B. As usual, Kostya sat on one side of Sasha. Oksana settled on the other side.
“Congratulations,” she whispered into Sasha’s ear.
Sasha raised an eyebrow.
“‘The world of ideas (eidos) exists outside of time and space. This world has a certain hierarchy, on top of which is the idea of Good …’”
“Portnov was heaping praises on you,” Oksana babbled. “He says no one in our group even comes close to you …”
Sasha sighed.
“‘In the allegory of the cave, Good is portrayed as the Sun, and ideas symbolize the creatures and objects that pass in front of the Cave, and the Cave itself is a symbol of the material world with its illusions …’”
“And the objects themselves—are they shadows of ideas?” Kostya asked out loud. “Projections?”
The professor began explaining. Sasha turned away—and caught Lisa staring at her from the opposite corner of the lecture hall.
“To a certain degree, this solves the problem. If Samokhina shuts up, living here is actually a possibility.”
Sasha was silent. Lisa couldn’t relax; she wandered between the beds in her underwear, picked something up from the floor and dropped it again, opened the wardrobe, and went through her suitcase.
“You were going to rent a place.” Oksana scowled. “And get the hell out of here.”
“I am getting out. I just don’t have the time to deal with it. I’m leaving at some point, don’t you worry.”
“I am not worried.”
“Well, you shouldn’t!”
Oksana was the type who gets excited about other people’s exclusivity, even the most minor kind, and who looks to befriend such a person. Lisa was one of those people who long for their own exclusivity and are offended to find themselves overshadowed.
Sasha could have said: there is no reason to envy, and no reason to be angry. Lisa herself said that this was not education and not any kind of science, but instead a clear case of shamanism, hypnosis, psychosis, and whatever else. So what should I be proud of—my accomplishments in psychosis?
But Sasha was silent. Her only attempt at speaking—last night, with Kostya, when she completely forgot about her ordeal—ended in grunting and spitting. Thinking of it made her feel ashamed.
Lisa opened the window wider. The cold September night smelled of dead grass and moisture. Lisa lit up demonstratively.
“We asked you not to smoke,” said Oksana.
“Go to hell.”
Sasha closed her eyes.
Meaningless sentences rotated in her brain like tank treads. Sasha was reading Section 20. It was the second week of her muteness, and it seemed as if the world around her was slowly descending into silence.
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.
“Your words are trash, garbage …” Portnov was right, Sasha thought. Words did not matter. Glance, inflection, voice—all these thin threads, the antennae pointing into space, informed people of indifference or empathy, calmness, anxiety, love … Words did not. And yet, without the words it was much harder.
She read words, though. Or, rather, she read gibberish, she memorized complete nonsense. All in vain: it was a Sisyphean task, the desperate efforts of the Danaides. An Indian summer followed the cold September days. Lisa Pavlenko never found an apartment. She continued smoking just as much, but by now Sasha was used to the constant smell of smoke. She had to write a paper for Philosophy class. Sasha chose Plato and went to the library, for some reason bringing her copy of the Textual Module. It was forbidden to talk in the tiny, confined reading