A School for Fools

by Sasha Sokolov

  The hundred-watt lightbulb is burning; the room smells of sealing wax, string, and paper. Outside the window are rusted siding rails, tiny flowers, rain, and the sounds of a junction station. Cast of characters: Supervisor so-and-so—a man facing possible promotion. Semen Nikolaev—a smart-faced man. Fedor Muromtsev—a man with an ordinary face. These and Other Railroad Workers are sitting at the common table, drinking tea and eating soft pretzels. Those Who Came are standing by the door. Supervisor so-and-so says: Nikolaev, Those Who Came came, they’d like to hear the poetry or prose of Japanese classics. S. Nikolaev, opening a book: I have here with me absolutely by chance Yasunari Kawabata, who wrote: Is it really so cold here? You’re all heavily bundled up. Yes, sir. We’re all wearing winter clothes already. It gets particularly frigid in the evenings, when clear weather comes after the snowfall. Right now it’s probably below zero. Already below zero? Yes—yes, it’s freezing. Everything you touch is cold. Last year we also had strong cold spells. Temperatures would reach more than twenty degrees below. And was there a lot of snow? On the average the snow cover was between seven and eight shaku, but during a strong snowfall more than one jo. It will probably begin to snow now. Yes, now is exactly the time for snowfall, we’re waiting. To tell the truth, it snowed not long ago; snow covered the ground but later melted a little, shrunk by almost a shaku. Is it actually melting right now? Yes, but now fresh snow is coming again. F. Muromtsev: There’s a tale for you, Semen Danilovich, there’s a story. S. Nikolaev: It’s not a story, Fedor; it’s a fragment of a novel. Supervisor so-and-so: Nikolaev, Those Who Came would like to hear more. S. Nikolaev: Please, at random: The girl sat, beating her drum. I saw her back. It seemed she was quite close—in the next room. My heart started to beat in the rhythm of the drum. How a drum enlivens a mealtime!—said a forty-year-old woman who was also looking at the dancer. F. Muromtsev: How about that, eh? S. Nikolaev: I will read something else; this is a verse by the Japanese Zen poet Dogen. F. Muromtsev: Zen? That’s clear, Semen Danilovich, but you did not give the dates of his birth and death; do so, if it’s not a secret. S. Nikolaev: Forgive me, I’ll recall them right away, here they are: 1200–1253. Supervisor so-and-so: Only fifty-three years? S. Nikolaev: But what kind of years! F. Muromtsev: What kind? S. Nikolaev, rising from his stool: In the spring, cherry blossoms, in the summer, the cuckoo. In autumn the moon and in winter the snow, clear and cold. (Sits down.) That’s all. F. Muromtsev: That’s all? S. Nikolaev: That’s all. F. Muromtsev: Somehow that’s not much, Semen Danilovich, eh? Not much. Perhaps there was something else, perhaps it got cut off? S. Nikolaev: No, that’s all, this is a special form of verse; there are long verses, for example poems, there are shorter verses, and there are the shortest, with a few or even just a single line. F. Muromtsev: But why, what for? S. Nikolaev: Well, how can I explain it—it’s laconism. F. Muromtsev: Ah, that’s how things are, that means, as I understand it, if we were to make a comparison: The trains are going over distances—are they going or not? S. Nikolaev: Well, they are. F. Muromtsev: Nevertheless, they’re also different. There are such long trains one can hardly wait for them to end to cross the tracks, and there are the short ones with (he counts on his fingers) one, two, three, four, five, yes, let’s say five cars or platforms—does it make sense? Isn’t this also laconism? S. Nikolaev: In general, yes. F. Muromtsev: Well, we figured it out. What did you say: In winter the snow, clear and cold? S. Nikolaev: In winter. F. Muromtsev: That’s for sure, Tsuneo Danilovich, in winter there’s always enough snow here; in January no less than nine shaku, and at the end of the season it reaches almost two jo. Ts. Nikolaev: Not really two, but one and a half precisely. F. Muromatsu: Where did you get one and a half, Tsuneosan, when it’s a solid two. Ts. Nakamura: How should I put it, it depends where, if at the wind-ward side of the embankment, then of course. But in the field it’s much less, one and a half. F. Muromatsu: Well, if one and a half then one and a half, Tsuneosan, no need to argue. Ts. Nakamura: Look, the rain isn’t stopping. F. Muromatsu: Yes, it keeps raining; the weather is lousy. Ts. Nakamura: The entire station is wet, nothing but puddles all over; who knows when it’ll dry up. F. Muromatsu: In such foul weather you shouldn’t go outside without an umbrella— you’ll get soaked through. Ts. Nakamura: Last year at this time the weather was exactly like this; the roof in my house started to leak, all the tatami got wet and there was no way to hang them in the yard to dry. F. Muromatsu: Bad luck, Tsuneosan, such rain isn’t good for anyone; it only gets in the way. To be honest, people say it’s very good for rice, but for a man, particularly a city dweller, such rain brings only troubles. Ts. Nakamura: Because of this rain my neighbor has been in bed for a week; he’s sick, has a cough. The doctor said if the downpour continues, my neighbor will have to be taken to the hospital; otherwise he will never get better. F. Muromatsu: For a sick person there’s nothing more harmful than rain; the air becomes damp and the illness gets worse. Ts. Nakamura: This morning my wife wanted to go to the store without shoes, but I asked her to put on her geta; after all, no amount of money can buy health, and there’s nothing easier than to get sick. F. Muromatsu: Right, sir, the rain is cold, so don’t even think about going out without footwear; nowadays we all need to protect ourselves. Ts. Nakamura: A bit of sake wouldn’t hurt, what do you think? F. Muromatsu: Yes, but very little, one or two portions; it would enliven the mealtime no less than the drum. Supervisor so-and-so: Those Who Came are interested in the fate of certain containers. S. Nikolaev: Which ones exactly? Supervisor so-and-so: Sheina Trachtenberg’s. F. Muromtsev: They arrived, we’re anxious, we need to write a postcard, they’re standing outside, it’s raining, they’ll get soaked, we need to write to her; here’s the form, here’s the address. Semen Danilovich, write.

  Esteemed Sheina Solomonovna,—I read, standing in the hallway that seemed at that time huge because the containers weren’t there yet—Esteemed Sheina Solomonovna, we, the workers of the rail-road post office have the pleasure to inform You that our entire town and its surrounding areas are affected by a lingering preautumnal rain. It is wet everywhere; the settlement’s roads are squishy, the leaves of the trees got drenched in moisture and turned yellow, and the wheels of the locomotives, railroad cars, and handcarts rusted significantly. Such days are difficult for everyone, particularly for us, the railroad people. Nevertheless, we decided not to veer from our good working rhythm; we carry out our plan and try to adhere strictly to our usual schedule. And the results are evident: Despite the fact that the depth of some puddles at our station reached two or three shaku, we recently dispatched no fewer letters and parcels than in the same period last year. In conclusion, we hurry to notify You that the two containers addressed to You arrived at the station and we ask You to arrange their removal from the yard of our office as soon as possible. Respectfully. Why did you tell me about it; I wouldn’t want to think you were capable of reading someone’s letters; you upset me; tell me the truth, perhaps you invented this; after all, I know you like to make up various stories; in conversations with you I also invent many things. There, in the hospital, Zauze laughed horribly at us because we were such dreamers. Patient so-and-so, he laughed, speaking honestly, I never met a person healthier than you, but your problem lies in the following: You are an unbelievable dreamer. And then we answered him: In that case you can’t keep us here for so long, we demand the earliest possible release from the here entrusted to you. Then he immediately became serious and asked: Well, all right, let’s suppose I release you tomorrow, what are your plans, what will you do, will you go to work or return to school? And we answered: To school? Oh no, we’ll go to the country because we have a dacha, more precisely, we don’t have it as much as our parents do; it is unbelievably wonderful there; one twenty, waiting for the wind, sand and heather, river and boat, spring and summer, reading in the grass, light breakfast, skittles, and a deafening multitude of birds. Then comes autumn—the entire settlement is bathing in a haze but, contrary to what you’re thinking, not in fog and not in smoke but
in beautiful flowing gossamer. In the morning, there’s dew on the pages of a book left in the garden and a walk to the station to get kerosene. But, doctor, we give you our word of honor we won’t drink beer in the green kiosk by the pond, where the levee is. No, doctor, we don’t like beer. You know, we thought about you too, you probably could take a leave of absence and stay there for several days. We’ll talk to our father and he won’t refuse. And so, you’ll come on the seven o’clock train and we’ll meet you on a special bicycle with a sidecar. You understand—an old bicycle with an attached sidecar from a small motorcycle. But most likely there will be no sidecar: I don’t know yet how to get such a sidecar. But a bicycle is there. It is standing in the shed, where there is one barrel with kerosene and two empty ones; sometimes we shout into them. There are also boards, various garden instrumentaria and our grandma’s armchair, that is, no, forgive me, the other way, Father always asked us to say it the other way: the armchair of our grandmother. It is more respectful this way, he used to explain. One day he was sitting in that very armchair while we sat nearby, on the grass, and read various books; yes, doctor, you are aware we have difficulties reading one book for a long time; we read first one page of one book and then one page of another. After that it is possible to take the third book and also read one page, and only then return to the first. This is easier, less tiring. And so we were sitting on the grass with various books and something was written in one of them; at first we did not understand at all what it was about because the book was quite old; today nobody writes in language like that, so we said: Papa, explain to us, please, we don’t understand what is written here. And then Father stopped reading his newspaper and asked: Well, what have you got there, some kind of nonsense again? And then we read aloud: Satan begged for and received from God the radiant Russia, to redden it with martyrs’ blood. You devised it well, devil, and to suffer for the sake of Christ, our light, pleases us too. For some reason we remembered these words; usually our memory is bad, you know, but if we like something, we memorize it right away. But our father did not like it. He jumped up from his armchair, took the book away from us, and yelled: Where, where did you get it, darn it, what kind of idiotic rubbish is this? And we answered: Yesterday we went to the other side; our teacher lives there and he inquired what we were doing and what we were reading. We told him you gave us several volumes of some contemporary classic. The teacher started laughing and ran towards the river. Later he came back and water was dripping from his large freckled ears. Pavel Petrovich told us: Dear colleague, how glorious it is that the name you pronounced not more than a minute ago dissolved, dissipated in the air like road dust, and the one whom we call the Sender won’t hear these sounds; how good it is, dear colleague, don’t you think so, otherwise what would have happened to this wonderful old man; probably, enraged, he would have fallen off his bicycle and afterwards he would have razed our respectable settlements completely, and to be honest, he would have done the right thing because it’s time. And as far as my wet ears that you are studying so carefully are concerned, they are wet because I washed them in the waters of the reservoir you are looking at in order to clean from them the filth of the name you mentioned and to meet the approaching nonexistence with a clean soul, body, intentions, tongue, and ears. My young friend, student, and comrade, the teacher told us, whether in the bitter wells of folk wisdom, in sweet maxims and axioms, in the dust of outsiders and mistrust of insiders, in wanderers’ totes and Judas’s totals, in the movement from and the standing over, in the lies of the cheated and in the truth of the deceived, in war and peace, in tinted glasses and tall grasses, in studios and studies, in shame and suffering, in darkness and light, in hate and compassion, in life and beyond it—we need to make good sense out of all these and other things—there’s something in it, perhaps not much, but something. Here and there, there and here something happened; we can’t say for sure what exactly, since so far we don’t know either the nature or the name of the phenomenon, but, dear student and comrade so-and-so, when we explain and discuss this together, explain the cause and determine the effect, then our time will come, the time to say a certain word—and we’ll say it. And if it should turn out that you figure all this out first, inform me right away; you know the address: standing on the riverbank at the sunset of the day, when people bitten by snakes die, ring the bicycle bell, or better—clink the village scythe, saying at the same time: Cut, my scythe, my pet, while the grass is wet, or: Cut, cut, my dear, make the path clear, and so on, until the suntanned teacher Pavel hears and, skipping, comes out of his house, unties his boat, jumps in, takes homemade oars in his hands, paddles across the Lethe, disembarks on your shore, hugs you, kisses you, utters pleasant mysterious words, receives, no, reads the received letter, because he, your teacher, is no longer among the living, that’s a misfortune, that’s bad luck, he is not among the living, and you—live until you die, draw beer from barrels and children in strollers, breathe the air of pine forests, run across meadows and make bouquets. Oh flowers! How wondrous you are, how beautiful! Leaving this world, I wanted to see a bouquet of dandelions, but it didn’t happen. What did they bring to my house in my last hour, what did they bring? They brought silk and crepe; they dressed me in the hateful double-breasted jacket; they took away my summer hat, punctured many times by the inspector’s ticket punch; they dressed me in some slacks, worthless—don’t argue—worthless slacks costing fifty sweaty rubles; I never wore such slacks; they’re disgusting, they feel sticky, my body is not breathing, I cannot sleep; and the tie, oh! They fastened a polka-dot tie on me; take it off immediately, open me up and at least take the tie off; I am not some office rat for you, I never—do understand that—was like your, like you—I never wore ties. Foolish, foolish wretches, still alive, but sick with anemia and more dead than myself, I know you made a collection for the funeral and bought this entire clown outfit, but how dare you dress me in a vest and leather shoes with metal buckles, which I never wore when I was alive; ach, you didn’t know, you thought I was getting five hundred unworthy, unjust rubles a month and bought the same useless rags as you. No, miscreants, you weren’t able to vilify me when I was alive, and it’ll be even harder for you now, when I’m dead. No, I’m not like you; I never received more than eighty rubles, but they were different, not like yours, they were wind-chaser’s clean rubles, not stained by the lies of your base theories and dogmas; better beat me up, the dead one, but take this off, give me back my hat punctured by the constrictor’s ticket punch, return everything you took; the dead man’s allowed to have his things; give me my cowboy shirt and my sandals in the style of the Roman Empire at the time of the building of the aqueduct; I’ll put them under my balding head because it does not matter, just to spite you—even in the valleys of nonexistence—I’ll start walking barefoot, while my pants, my patched pants—you have no right, I feel hot in your rags, take your crap to a consignment shop, return the money to those who gave it, I don’t even want a kopeck from you, no, I don’t want it, and don’t force me to wear a tie, otherwise I’ll spit in your wormeaten mugs with my poisonous burning saliva; leave in peace the geography teacher Pavel Norvegov! Yes, I’m shouting and I’ll be shouting without ever falling asleep, I’m shouting about the great immortality of the great teacher Savl; I wish to be maddeningly repulsive to you, I’ll break into your dreams and your reality like a hooligan breaks into a class in session, I’ll break in with a bloodied tongue and, implacable, will shout to you about my beautiful unattainable poverty, so don’t try to appease me with gifts, I don’t need your sweaty rags and rotten rubles; and stop the music or I’ll make you crazy with the shout of the most honorable among the dead. Listen to my command, to my cry: Give me at last some dandelions and bring my clothes! And let the devil take your snotty funeral music; chase away the alcohol-saturated musicians with kicks in their butts. Stinking trash, sepulchral beetles! Strangle the devotees of wakes, stay away from my body or I’ll get up and chase every-one with the foul school pointer, I
—Pavel Petrovich, the geography teacher, the greatest spinner of the cardboard sphere, I’m leaving you to come back, let me go!