The first thing that struck him was the ceiling.
The vaulted iron arches of the Vitebsky station, black-latticed and sweating cold, hung above the tracks like a cathedral for trains. Sunlight diffused through the high glass, turning the steam into something holy. Beneath it, the crowd pulsed. Shoes struck marble. Wheels clicked over tile. Announcements echoed and bled into each other, voices bending around syllables as if the air refused to hold onto any one meaning for long.
Misha froze on the platform, his bag a dead weight against his shoulder. He blinked.
There were so many coats. Black, brown, gray. A single flash of red, vanishing like a fish in dark water. Nobody bumped into anyone. Nobody looked up.
A porter wheeled a cart past, shouting something that sounded like a warning and a prayer. A child cried. Somewhere close, a brass samovar hissed behind a kiosk, and the scent of tea and machine oil struck Misha in the gut like a memory.
He forced himself forward, boots clicking on the floor. His steps felt wrong—rural, untrained, like a boy who grew up walking on dirt paths and now found himself in a city that measured people by the angle of their elbows.
The tram took him south toward Vasileostrovsky District. A kind man gave up his seat. Misha declined, then sat anyway when the man insisted a second time. He stared out the window, watching the city fold open: gray buildings with sharp columns, silent statues, laundry lines swaying between flats like they belonged to a separate world overhead. A woman fed pigeons in the square outside the Kazan Cathedral. A man in uniform read a newspaper without moving a muscle in his face.
By the time the tram stopped near the Medical Institute, Misha's fingers had gone numb from gripping the strap of his satchel.
The building loomed behind wrought-iron gates—tall, ordered, with clean-cut stonework and windows arranged with military precision. A placard read Pediatric Medical Institute, Ministry of Health, USSR. Below it, in neat script, someone had scratched a phrase in pencil: study or perish.
Misha adjusted his coat and stepped inside.
The dormitory smelled of varnish, boiled potatoes, and disinfectant. The corridor had the echo of old schools, the kind where even your thoughts got trapped between floorboards. Cork boards lined the walls—half-covered in medical diagrams, half in bulletins of news and upcoming events, some student doodles here and there. Someone had drawn a large, anatomically incorrect heart, shaded in red pencil, labeled Kolya's Love Life: Incurable.
At the end of the hall, a matron in a thick sweater sat behind a desk, not looking up as he approached.
"Petrov," he said.
She flipped through a register without greeting. "Room twelve."
"Thank you."
She pointed with her pen. "Stairs. Third floor. Left. Don't forget your linen ticket."
He took the ticket and nodded, but she was already scribbling something else. He climbed the stairs slowly, passing a boy halfway down the landing balancing a kettle with one hand and a textbook with the other. They didn't speak. Misha offered a half-smile. The boy didn't notice.
The corridor on the third floor was warmer, narrower, and much louder. Somewhere down the hall, someone was playing a harmonica badly. Laughter burst from one door, then was cut off by a barked "shut up" and the slam of something heavy. It was more alive than he'd expected. He'd imagined order, quiet, a sacred hush like in the old clinic in Bolotny. This was closer to a barn with better lighting.
He paused in front of door twelve, shifted his bag, then knocked once before pushing it open.
The room was already occupied.
Three boys turned to look at him at once, then immediately resumed what they were doing—as if he were just one more part of the noise.
The room had four narrow beds, four mismatched desks, and precisely one window, jammed slightly open to let the smoke out. A half-drunk bottle of kvas stood next to a stack of textbooks. A pair of boots dangled from the top bunk. Someone had hung a small banner of Lenin above the radiator like a saint.
"Hi," Misha said.
No one replied right away.
The one nearest the window, dark-haired and broad-shouldered, exhaled a slow stream of smoke without turning. Another, rail-thin with sharp cheekbones, nodded once and returned to his writing. The third—curly-haired, lounging shirtless on his bed with the dramatic flair of someone who thought of himself as fascinating—grinned.
"You must be the country one," the curly-haired one said. "Petrov, yes?"
Misha blinked. "Yes."
The boy sat up. "Kolya. Nikolai Dmitrievich. Second year. I called the bottom bunk by the wall. You'll want the one next to Danya. Don't let the flag scare you. He only bites revisionists."
"I'm Daniil Vostrikov," the thin one said, not looking up. "And I do not bite."
"Not physically," Kolya added.
The smoker nodded toward the empty bed. "Viktor Malkin."
Misha set his bag down quietly. The mattress creaked like it resented him.
"So," Kolya continued, flopping back dramatically, "what scandal landed you here? Bribery? Nepotism? Clerical error?"
Misha opened his mouth, closed it, then tried again. "I was admitted."
"Terrifying," Kolya said. "Truly. Danya got in through sheer ideological purity. Vitya built a working stethoscope out of scrap metal. I seduced a dean's niece. What was your method?"
Misha flushed. "I... studied."
Kolya made a theatrical gasp. "Unheard of!"
Danya, still writing, said mildly, "He's teasing you. He does that to everyone."
"I don't—" Misha hesitated. "I don't mind."
He minded a little.
But Kolya seemed satisfied and offered a mock salute. "Welcome to Room Twelve. You're late. We've already fought over the best desk and declared three unofficial republics. You'll be annexed by morning."
Misha smiled, a little, and began unpacking his clothes. Folded shirts, two pairs of trousers, his mother's embroidery stitched into the hem of his towel. A photograph of his parents. His textbook, now with a bruised spine. The room smelled like men and dust and cold radiator pipes.
By the time he sat down on the edge of the bed, the sun was a pale smear across the rooftops. Someone had started the harmonica again. In the corner, Kolya was monologuing about a girl named Tamara whom Misha wasn't sure existed. Danya had begun logging something in his little brown notebook. Vitya hadn't moved.
Misha stared at the cracks in the ceiling plaster and tried not to count how many days were left in the semester.
He was tired. A little embarrassed. But alive in a way he hadn't felt before.
He was here.
The room had settled around him like a coat a size too big—something he hadn't grown into yet, but was expected to wear anyway.
Misha sat on the edge of his narrow bed, fiddling with the tag on his linen packet. The mattress gave an occasional tired sigh under his weight. Around him, the other boys moved with the unconscious ownership of people who had long since declared the place theirs. There were sounds everywhere: the scratch of a pen, the clatter of a spoon against a chipped mug, Kolya's humming of some god-awful love song rewritten with deeply unromantic lyrics involving tubercular nurses and state rations.
Misha hadn't said much since he arrived. He wasn't sure how to say things yet—not with ease, not in this new language the others spoke, made up of inside jokes and half-hummed refrains and the kind of familiarity that had clearly taken root weeks before his train even left the platform.
He unfolded the bed linen slowly. It smelled like starch and the ghosts of old soap. He hesitated, then started tucking the corners the way his mother had taught him—tight, careful, like pleating a church shirt.
"Military tuck," Kolya said behind him, watching from his bed. "You from a barracks or just incredibly well raised?"
Misha hesitated, then offered, "My mother was a nurse."
"Say no more. All discipline, no sleep, and hands that can slap through a coat." Kolya raised a finger in solemn tribute. "A toast to the maternal iron fist."
Vitya, still in his place by the window, exhaled a long, thin stream of smoke.
"Too early for a toast," he said.
"Vitya says that because he once toasted a professor and then accidentally handed in a blank exam," Kolya replied.
"It was the correct bluebook. Just blank," Vitya said, deadpan.
Danya, without looking up from his notebook, murmured, "He wrote a very poetic apology. The faculty committee was touched."
"It rhymed," Vitya added.
Misha managed a small smile, unsure whether to laugh or stay quiet. He settled for nodding, then glanced at his still-packed satchel. The corner of his anatomy textbook peeked out, like it had followed him here to keep watch.
He stood again. "I should unpack."
"Only a couple weeks late." Kolya muttered.
"Let the boy breathe, Kolya," Danya said without looking up.
"I am letting him breathe," Kolya said. "This is what breathing sounds like."
"No, that's what suffocation with commentary sounds like."
Kolya turned to Misha, eyes sparkling. "You see? The dialectic at work."
Misha knelt by the satchel, tugging out his carefully folded stack of clothes. Shirts, slacks, undergarments in a cloth bundle, a tin of buttons and a pair of socks his aunt had knitted with too-tight heels. He tried to be quiet about it, arranging things in the half-empty drawer next to his bed, but the room amplified every movement.
From the window, the city outside ticked on. A tram bell. A barking dog. Voices echoing off stone like the city was arguing with itself.
He reached into the bag again and paused.
At the bottom was the small cloth pouch his mother had pressed into his hand at the train station. Inside was a tiny icon of St. Luke—patron of physicians—and a square of wax paper wrapped around four sugar cubes. "For tea," she'd said, "and for kindness."
He glanced over his shoulder.
Danya had taken off his shoes and was perched cross-legged on the bed, nose deep in a paperback edition of Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-criticism. Vitya still hadn't moved, except to flick ash into a chipped saucer. Kolya was balancing a spoon on his nose.
Misha slipped the pouch into his pillowcase.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________
They ate in the common hall. The canteen downstairs smelled of kasha, wet floor cloths, and someone's idea of borscht. The queue was long, full of students arguing quietly.
"This meat is a lie," Danya said philosophically. "It's all turnip and dye."
"I still believe," Kolya said, holding his tray like a relic. "Faith is all we have."
The dining hall was loud—benches clattering, bowls scraping, voices like gulls in a storm. Misha followed the others, sitting between Danya and Kolya, and tried not to flinch at the chaos. He stirred his soup slowly. It was a reddish color, vaguely tomato-scented, and tasted of salt and soapy cilantro.
No one noticed when he didn't finish.
Back upstairs, the hallway smelled like smoke and wet wool. Misha returned to the room with the others and perched on the end of his bed like a house guest waiting to be excused.
Kolya was playing a record—some half-banned jazz number with a brass section that blared like an argument. Danya had taken out his notebook and was filling it in with a freshly sharpened pencil. Vitya stared out the window.
No one had told Misha what to do next.
He stood, hesitated, then pulled his textbook from the satchel and sat at the desk. The chair creaked. He opened to a page at random. The liver. He stared at a cross-section that made no sense, trying to will the words into meaning. His eyes refused to cooperate. The letters slipped sideways. His chest itched with anxiety and exhaustion.
Kolya came up behind him, reading over his shoulder.
"Ah," he said. "The humble liver. Filtration organ of the proletariat."
Misha looked up. "I thought that was the kidney."
"The kidney is bourgeois," Kolya said. "Too delicate. Too demanding. The liver will drink with you and still wake up to work."
Vitya, behind them, murmured, "Unless it fails."
Kolya held a finger aloft. "As all systems eventually do."
Misha gave up on the page and let it fall shut.
By ten o'clock, the others had begun to wind down. Danya unrolled a mat and performed a precise series of stretches by his bunk. Kolya attempted a headstand and fell into his wardrobe. Vitya brushed his teeth in silence and spat out the window.
Misha changed into his nightshirt, folded his trousers over the back of his chair, and slid beneath the coarse blanket. The sheets itched. The springs jabbed. A moth fluttered once across the ceiling and vanished. Someone laughed in a room down the hall. Someone else slammed a door.
His mind would not slow. He thought of everything he hadn't said. Everything he should have done. Every word he'd chosen wrong. He thought of how small he'd felt walking through the city, how his boots had squeaked against the tile of the institute's front hall.
He thought of the train and the trees and his mother's sugar cubes.
Eventually, somewhere between the sound of Kolya snoring and Vitya lighting another cigarette, sleep took him by the throat and didn't ask permission.