Vita Nostra

The man lifted his head and gave Sasha an estimating glance. He looked back at the coin.

“What is it?”

“A souvenir. Please give it back.”

“Interesting.” The man was in no hurry. “Where did you get it?”

“It was a gift.”

The man smirked.

“Listen, I want to buy it from you. Is ten dollars enough?”

“No, it’s not for sale.”

“Twenty dollars?”

Sasha was nervous. A woman sitting right next to them was listening to the conversation.

“It’s my coin.” Sasha made her voice sound determined and hard. “Give it back to me, please.”

“I had a friend.” The man glanced from Sasha to the coin and back. “He was a tomb raider. He did some illegal stuff. Dug up some things in the Crimea. And then someone stabbed him. You see, he probably dug up something he wasn’t supposed to.”

“I didn’t dig anything up.” Sasha stared at his hand. “It was a gift. It’s mine.”

They stared at each other. The man wanted to say something, in the same measured and patronizing manner, but he bit his tongue. At this point, Sasha was ready to fight—sob, scream, shriek, scratch his face—for her coin; this readiness of hers must have been obvious in her stare.

“As you wish.”

The gold disk fell into her hand. Sasha clamped her fingers shut and, holding her breath, walked back to her mother.

Mom sat in the same spot, staring out the window, having noticed nothing.

Autumn came in October, suddenly and irrevocably. Red maple leaves stuck to the wet asphalt like flat starfish. Sasha existed between school and preparatory courses at the university: there were tons of homework, essays, reports, tests. She had no time for anything else—even Sundays were filled with work—but Sasha did not mind. She discovered that her brain, overburdened by studies, flatly refused to believe in mysterious strangers and their tasks, in gold coins produced by one’s stomach. And even the sea, the kind summer sea with a swaying red buoy, seemed surreal, and everything that happened there, by the seaside, seemed just as surreal.

And Mom was back to normal. With the end of summer came the end of her depression, especially considering that her office was very busy, as usual. Both of them, locked in the vicious cycle of everyday routine, forbade themselves from thinking of the surreal—each had her own reasons. And up to a certain moment they both succeeded.

Then the letter came from Moscow. Mom took it out of the mailbox, aimlessly played with it for a few minutes, and then she opened and read it.

“Valentin divorced his wife,” she said, addressing their television set.

“So what?” Sasha said, not exactly politely.

Mom folded the letter and went to her room. Sasha turned off the TV and sat down with a history textbook; she reread the same paragraph about ten times, without understanding anything. Polabian Slavs, Polabian-Pomeranian … They must have studied them in fifth grade, and here we go again, they are back in the program.

Clearly, though, her mind was on other things.

Maybe it’ll still work out? People have all sorts of issues in their relationships. Of course, his divorce is not a good thing. And it is even worse that he’s writing to Mom about it.

The phone rang. Trying to think about the ancient Slavic tribes, Sasha picked up the receiver.

“Hello?”

“Good evening, Sasha. It’s me.”

The desk lamp was on. It was raining outside. A textbook lay open. Everything was so normal, so real. And—that voice on the phone.

“No,” said Sasha softly. “You …”

She almost let “You don’t exist” slide off her tongue, but she stopped just in time.

“How many coins?”

“Thirty-seven.”

“And how many were there?”

“Thirty-seven, honestly.”

“I’m waiting downstairs. Come down for a minute.”

She heard the short beeps in the receiver.

She kept the coins in an old wallet, in the depths of her desk, behind a stack of books and notepads. Sasha unzipped the wallet and poured the contents onto her desk. She counted them again—still thirty-seven.

She put the wallet in the pocket of her raincoat and slid her feet into a pair of old rain boots. She put the raincoat right over her bathrobe. She grabbed an umbrella, still wet, and picked up her keys.

The door to her mother’s room remained closed. With that voice … she wasn’t sure it would have mattered if her mother had been standing in front of her.

“I’ll be right back,” Sasha said to no one in particular. “I’m … I’m going to get the mail.”

She walked down the steps without waiting for the elevator. The neighbor from the fifth floor was entering the hall, all wet, with a huge wet dog on a leash.

“Hi,” said Sasha.

The neighbor nodded. The dog shook vigorously, drenching everything with rainwater.

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.

A man in a dark blue raincoat, similar to Sasha’s and shiny with rain, sat on a wet bench. The lenses in his glasses were smoky rather than dark, but the dusk of an autumn evening made them completely impenetrable.

“Hello, Sasha. Did I scare you?”

She did not expect his friendly, joking inflection. She swallowed. Cold wind crawled underneath her clothes, licked her naked knees.

“Give me the coins.”

She handed him the wallet with the coins. He weighed the wallet in his hand and nodded, putting the wallet away in a pocket.