A School for Fools

by Sasha Sokolov

  I know: You, like I—we never loved the school, particularly from the day when our principal, Nikolai Gorimirovich Perillo, introduced the slipper system. If you don’t remember, this was the name of the arrangement that forced the students to bring slippers to school, but the slippers needed to be carried not simply in their hands or in briefcases but in specially made cloth sacks. That’s right, in small white sacks with straps, and on every sack the name of the student to whom the sack belonged was written in Chinese ink. One had to write: Student so-and-so, class X; and just below but in larger letters: Slippers. And even lower, but in even larger letters: The Special School. Of course, I remember this time well; it started right away, one day. During one of our lessons, N.G. Perillo came to our classroom; he came gloomily. He always used to come gloomily because, as our father explained, the principal’s salary wasn’t large and he drank a lot. Perillo lived in a one-story building in the school-yard, and if you want I’ll describe both the building and the yard. Describe just the yard and the school; I remember the building. Our school, built from red brick, was surrounded by a wall made of the same red brick. An asphalt alley led from the gate to the front door and some kind of trees were growing on either side; there were also flower beds. In front, you could see some sculptures: in the middle stood two small old men made of chalk, one in a cap and one in a military hat. The old men stood with their backs to the school and with their faces toward you, as you ran down the alley during the second break, and both had one hand stretched forward, as if they were pointing to something important occurring there, on the stony wastes in front of the school, where once a month we were forced to run fortifying cross-country races. To the left of the old men, a sculpture of a girl with a small doe was passing time. Both the girl and the doe also shone white, like pure chalk, and also gazed at the wastes. And on the right side of the old men stood a bugle boy; he wanted to play his bugle, he knew how to play, he could play everything, even extracurricular czardas, but unfortunately he did not have his bugle, someone had knocked the bugle out of his hands; most likely the bugle was made of white plaster of paris and broke during transport and just the stem of the bugle, a piece of rusty wire, stuck out from the boy’s mouth. Allow me to correct you; as far as I remember, the white girl really stood in the school yard, but it was a girl with a dog, not a doe, a chalk girl with a simple dog; when we rode our bicycle from point A to point B, this girl in a short dress and with a dandelion in her hair was going for a swim; you are telling me the chalk girl in front of our school is standing (stood) and looking (looked) at the wastes, where we are running (ran) fortifying cross-country races, and I’m telling you she’s looking at the pond, where she will start bathing soon. You’re telling me she’s petting her doe and I’m telling you the girl is petting her simple dog. And about the white boy you also didn’t tell the truth: He doesn’t stand and doesn’t play the bugle and, even though it’s true that some piece of metal sticks out from his mouth, he doesn’t know how to play the bugle; I don’t know what this piece of metal is; perhaps it’s a needle with which he is sewing up his mouth in order not to eat his mother’s sandwiches, wrapped in his father’s newspapers. But the main thing is this: I claim the white boy doesn’t stand but sits—it’s a dark boy sitting on the background of white dawn, book after book, on the grass, it’s a boy-engineer, for whom a car is waiting and he’s sitting on his pedestal exactly the same way as Savl Petrovich sat on the windowsill in the restroom, warming the bottoms of his feet, while we came and entered angrily, carrying entomological notes, plans for the reconstruction of time, and the multicolored nets for catching snowy butterflies in our briefcases. The long, almost two-meter-long handles of these wonderful traps stick out from our briefcases and scratch the corners and self-satisfied portraits of scientists on the walls. We enter angrily: Dear Savl Petrovich, it’s no longer possible to study in our horrible school, there’s a lot of homework, almost all the teachers are fools, they’re not at all smarter than us, you understand, something needs to be done, some decisive step is necessary—perhaps letters here and there, perhaps boycotts and hunger strikes, barricades and barracudas, drums and tambourines, burning of journals and diaries, an auto-da-fé on the scale of all special schools of the world; look, here, in our briefcases, we have nets for catching butterflies. We’ll break the handles off our nets, we’ll catch all the true dimwits and put these nets on their heads like jesters’ caps, and we’ll beat them with the handles on their despicable faces. We’ll organize a grandiose mass civil execution and make all those who tormented us for so long in our idiotic special schools run fortifying cross-country races on the stony wastes and solve problems about bicycle riders, while we former students, freed from the slavery to ink and chalk, we’ll get on our dacha bicycles and dash down the roads and streets; on our way from time to time we’ll greet familiar girls in short skirts and girls with simple dogs, we’ll become the suburban bicyclists of points A, B, and C, and we’ll make these damned fools, these darned fools solve problems about us and instead of us, the bicyclists. We’ll be the bicyclists and postmen like Mikheev (Medvedev) or like the one whom you, Savl Petrovich, call the Sender. We all, former idiots, will become the Senders and it’ll be wonderful. You remember, you asked us one time if we believe in that man and we said we didn’t even know what to think about it, but now, when the incinerating summer has been replaced by the dank fall and the passersby, hiding their heads in their collars, dream about changing into birds, now we hasten to inform you personally, dear Savl Petrovich, and all other progressive pedagogues, that we have no doubts about the existence of the Sender, and we don’t have any doubts that the future—full of bicycles and bicyclosenders—is coming. And from here, from our revolting men’s restroom with paint-splashed windows and never-drying floors, we’re shouting to-day to the whole world: Long live the Sender of the Wind! Angrily.

  Meanwhile, our thin and barefooted teacher Savl, sitting on the windowsill and looking at us, is moved by our enormous oration, and after its last echo rolls through the empty rooms and corridors still stinky after classes and escapes onto the autumn streets, the teacher Savl will take out little scissors from the breast pocket of his cowboy shirt, trim his toenails, look at the doors of the stalls, inscribed all over with obscene words and scribbled with idiotic drawings, and he’ll say: How much vulgarity, how much ugliness we see in our restroom; oh, God, he’ll announce, how inadequate are our feelings for women, how cynical we are, people of the special school. Why can’t we select lofty, powerful, tender words instead of those— alien and disgusting? Oh, people, teachers and students, how irrational and filthy are your intentions and actions! But are we guilty of our idiocy and animal lust, did our hands scribble all over the doors of the stalls? No, no—he’ll shout—we are just weak and helpless servants and minions of our principal Kolya Perillo; it was he who tolerated our depravity and our feeblemindedness, and his hands guided ours when we drew here on the walls, and he is guilty of our idiocy and lust. Oh, disgusting Perillo—Savl will say—how loath-some you are to me! And he’ll start crying. And we’ll be standing there confused, not knowing what to say, how to calm down our genius of a teacher and of a man. We’ll stand on the tile floor, shifting from foot to foot, and the thin sludge left by the second shift will squelch under our feet and slowly and completely inconspicuously begin to seep into our tarpaulin slippers, to buy which our poor suffering mother stood so long in line. Once in the evening of one of the days: Mama, today Perillo came to our class gloomily. He erased from the blackboard everything that our teacher had written; he erased it with a rag. Attention—he, the principal, said in the ensuing silence—from such-and-such date this special school with all its chemicals, Faraday lamps, volleyballs, inkwells, blackboards, chalk-boards, maps, piroshki, and other dances-shmances is declared to be the Nationally Recognized Mathematician Lobachevsky’s Model Record-Setting Special School and switches to the slipper system. The class got noisier and noisier, and one boy—I don’t remem
ber or perhaps simply don’t understand what his name was or maybe I was that boy—the boy screamed, for some reason screamed loudly, like this: A-a-a-a-a-a-a-a! Excuse me, Mama, I understand it’s not necessary at all to show exactly how the boy was screaming, particularly because Papa is resting, it’s enough to simply say one boy screamed, let’s say, screamed very loudly and unexpectedly, and it’s not necessary to show he screamed like this: A-a-a-a-a-a-a! Doing so, he opened his mouth completely and stuck out his tongue and it appeared to me he had an unusually red tongue; the boy is probably sick and he’s having an attack—that was what I thought. I should note, Mama, that this boy really has a very red and long tongue, with purple spots and veins as if he was drinking ink; it’s simply amazing. The scene resembled a visit to an ear, nose, and throat doctor, with the doctor asking the boy to say “ah” and the boy opening his mouth and carefully saying or rather screaming: A-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a! He was screaming for a whole minute and everyone was looking at him, and then he stopped screaming and turning to the principal very quietly asked: And what does this mean? And then everybody remembered that the boy stuttered and sometimes it was difficult for him to switch from a vowel to a consonant and then he got stuck on the vowel and screamed because he was embarrassed. And so today he screamed: A-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a! He wanted to ask the principal: And what does this mean—nothing else. And when he finally forced it out, the principal Perillo answered through his teeth: The slipper system is an arrangement in which every student buys slippers and brings them to school in a special little sack with drawstrings. After arriving, the student takes off his ordinary footwear, puts on the slippers he brought, fills the empty sack with the ordinary footwear, and leaves it in the cloakroom with his coat and hat. Am I explaining it clearly?—asked the principal and looked gloomily in all the directions of the world. And then the boy screamed horribly again, but this time it was a different sound: O-o-o-o-o-o-o! I won’t do it again, Mama, I don’t know how I could’ve forgotten that Papa is taking a nap in his office with a newspaper in his hand; he probably got tired, he has such a difficult job, so many things to do, so many ruined fates, poor Papa, I won’t do it again, Mama, I’ll just finish. Well, so the boy suddenly screamed: O-o-o-o-o-o-o!— and then finally said: Oh, pleased to meet you. Perillo was already getting ready to leave when we, that is I and he, the other, stood up and announced: Nikolai Gorimirovich, we are turning to you personally and through your open and honest person to the entire administration with a request to allow us to carry one sack for two because it’ll be twice as hard for our mother to sew two sacks than one. In response, exchanging looks with the teacher as if they both knew something unknown to anyone else, as if they knew more than we did, our principal answered: Every student of the Nationally Recognized Mathematician Lobachevsky’s Model Record-Setting Special School is required to have his own sack with drawstrings —one sack for every student. And as long as you believe there are two of you, you should have two sacks—no more and no less. However, if you think there are ten of you, you need to have ten sacks. To hell with it!—we said loudly and angrily—it would be better if we didn’t exist at all; you wouldn’t pester us with your accursed sacks and slippers; poor Mother, you’ll have to sew two sacks, sitting up until late at night, the entire night long, at the sewing machine— tra-ta-ta, tra-ta-ta, from end to end, through the heart; and it would be better if we turned forever into a lily, into a Nymphaea alba, like then, on the river, but forever, to the end of our life. Angrily. Principal Perillo took from the inside pocket of his jacket a crumpled handkerchief and thoroughly wiped his freckled, red bald spot impressed on his pate. He did it to cover up his confusion; he became confused; he didn’t expect that in his school were such angry students. And he said gloomily: Student so-and-so, I didn’t suspect there were people capable of losing my trust in them to such a degree as you did right now. And if you don’t want me to expel you from school and send your documents over there, then sit down at once and write an explanatory note about the lost trust; you have to explain to me everything, but first of all your stupid pseudoscientific theory about turning into a lily. Having said this, Perillo turned around, clicked his heels in a military manner—according to school rumors, the principal had served in the army with Kuzutov himself —and went out, slamming the door. Furiously. The entire class looked in our direction, stuck out its poisonous red tongue, took aim with its slingshot, and giggled because that whole class, like everybody else in the special school, was stupid and unruly. It is they, the idiots, who hang cats on the fire escape, it is they who spit in each other’s faces during the long recess and steal each other’s piroshki with jam, it is they who pee unnoticed in each other’s pockets and trip each other, it is they who twist each other’s hands and gang up against others, and it is they, the idiots, who have scribbled all over the doors to the stalls.