A School for Fools

by Sasha Sokolov

  And you followed her through a long hallway lit by lightbulbs without shades and smelling of real post office: wax, glue, paper, twine, ink, stearin, casein, overripe pears, honey, squeaking shoes, crème brûlée, cheap comfort, smoked vobla, bamboo shoots, rat droppings, and tears of the office manager. At the end of the hallway was a small room that sort of crowned it: a lake crowns a river running into it in the same way. In the room on shelves were packages and parcels addressed here and there; the window was barred, and in the middle of the room on the table shone a silver electric teakettle with a striped cord ending in a plug. The woman put the plug into the socket, sat down on a chair while you sat on another—and both of you started waiting for the water to boil. I know you well: by nature you are impulsive, you don’t have enough patience at school and at home, you’re still too young and for that reason you cannot tolerate a long silence, prolonged pauses in conversations; they make you uneasy, you’re not yourself, in other words, you cannot stand passivity, idleness, and silence. Now, if you were alone in that postal room, you’d fill it with your shout exactly like how in your spare time you fill the empty school auditoriums, bathroom spaces, and hallways. But here you are not alone and even though you’re being torn apart by the indescribable scream ripening in the depths of your being, getting ready to escape to the surface at any moment and make you burst and open up like a bud in early April and turn completely into your own shout: I am Nymphaea Nymphaea Nymphaea ea-ea-ea-a-a-a-a-a—you can’t, you don’t have the right to scare that young considerate woman. Because if you shout, she’ll chase you away and will not cancel your Goatsucker, so don’t shout for any reason here, at the post office, otherwise you’ll have no collection about which you’ve been dreaming for so long, a collection consisting of one canceled stamp. Or label. Control yourself, distract yourself, think about something unfamiliar, mysterious, or start a noncommittal conversation with the woman, even more so because, if I understand correctly, you liked her right away. Fine, but how should I begin, with what words; I suddenly forgot how one should begin conversations that are absolutely noncommittal. Very simply, ask her whether you can ask her a question. Thanks, thanks, right away. Can I ask you a question? Of course, boy, of course. Well, and now, what should I say next? Now ask her about the postal pigeons or about her work, inquire how things are going for her. Yes, exactly: I would like to know how things are going at your posh office, no, I mean post office, post station poster postscript posture postmark? What-what, at the post office? Very well, boy, very well, but why are you interested in this? You probably keep postal pigeons, right? No, why would we? Well, where else can the postal pigeons live, if not at the posture? No, we don’t keep them, we have postmen. In that case you know the postman Mikheev or Medvedev: he resembles Pavlov and also rides a bicycle, but don’t expect to see him outside your window, he doesn’t ride here, in the city, he works outside of the city, in the dacha settlement, he has a beard—nobody introduced you to him yet? No, boy. What a pity, otherwise we would have a pleasant conversation about him and you wouldn’t be bored with me. But I’m not bored at all, replies the woman. That’s great, this means you also like me a little, I think I have something to discuss with you: I did plan to get acquainted with you, and even more than that, my name is so-and-so, and yours? How funny he is, says the woman, really funny. Don’t laugh—I’ll tell you the entire truth—the way it is; you see, my fate is sealed: I’m getting married, very soon, perhaps in a couple or three weeks. But the woman I want to become my wife is extraordinarily decent, you understand what I mean? And she’ll never agree before the wedding. And I need it very badly, it is essential to me, otherwise my superhuman shout will pour out of me like blood. Dr. Zauze calls this nervous condition postal and for that reason I decided to ask you to help me, do me a favor, a service, it would be quite kind of you, after all—you are a woman, I suppose you also want to shout at your nervous post office, so why couldn’t we satisfy our postures, don’t you like me even a little? I tried so hard to be liked! You cannot imagine how I’ll miss you, when we’ll steam off the label and you’ll cancel it and I’ll go back to the house of my father and won’t find comfort in anything or anywhere. But perhaps you already have someone with whom you satisfy your postures? Goodness gracious, it’s not your business, says the woman, how rude he is, simply awful. In that case I’m ready to prove at once I’m better than he is in all respects, however, you already realized that. Isn’t it clear that my mind is the epitome of flexibility and logic, isn’t it a fact that if a future engineering genius exists somewhere on earth—it’s none other than I. And none other than I will immediately tell you a story, yes, something that will convince you not to resist anymore. That’s it. Let me retell for you in my own words a composition that I submitted to our Cafeteria last week. I’ll begin at the very beginning.

  MY MORNING: A COMPOSITION

  The whistle of the shunting locomotive, like a cuckoo, sings at dawn: a shepherd’s pipe, flute, cornet-à-piston, crying of a child, doodeleedey. I wake up, sit on the bed, look at my bare legs, and then look out the window. I see the bridge, it is completely empty, it is illuminated by green mercury lamps and the lampposts have swan necks. I see only the top part of the bridge, but as soon as I step out on the balcony, the whole bridge appears, its entire viaduct—the back of a frightened cat. I live with Mama and Papa, but sometimes it happens that I live alone, while my neighbor—the old Trachtenberg, but most likely Tinbergen—lived with us in the old apartment or will live in the new one. I don’t know the names of the remaining parts of the bridge. The railroad line, or rather several lines, several transport tracks lead under the bridge, a certain number of identical tracks, tracks of identical width. In the mornings the witch Tinbergen dances (danced, will be dancing) in the hall, singing a song about Trifon Petrovich, the cat and the excavator operator. She dances on the mahogany containers, on their upper surfaces, under the ceiling, and next to them too. I did not see it but I heard it. Under the ceiling. And on the tracks—hither and thither—goes the cuckoo, shaking on the switches. Tra-ta-ta. She beats out the rhythm on maracas. She pushes and pulls brown freight cars. I hate this shaggy old hag. Having wrapped herself in rags, having grown long talon-like nails, having furrowed her face with painful wrinkles of the centuries, clubfooted, she scares me and my patient mother during the day and at night. At dawn she starts to sing—and then I wake up. I love that whistle. Doodelee-dey?—it asks. And, after waiting a moment, it answers itself: Ye-ye-ye, doodelee-dey. It was she who poisoned Iakov, the poor man, a man and a pharmacist, a man and a chemist, and it is she who works in our school as a director of curriculum, a curricular director. Thus, to finish the description of my morning, one can say it gets filled with the shouts of the cuckoo, with the sound of the railroad, the ring railroad. When one looks at the map of our city, where the river, streets, and highways are marked, it appears that the ring railroad is strangling the city like a steel noose and if, after asking the constrictor’s permission, we were to get on the train passing by our house, that freight train would make a full circle and a day later would return to the same place, to the place where we boarded it. The trains that pass our house are moving along a closed—therefore endless—loop around our city and that’s why it’s virtually impossible to get out of our city. Only two trains are working on the ring railroad: one goes clockwise and the other, counterclockwise. Consequently, they sort of destroy each other and simultaneously they destroy movement and time. This is how my morning passes. Tinbergen gradually stops trampling the young bamboo groves and her song, blossoming, self-satisfied, and merciless like old age itself, dies away in the distance beyond coral lagoons and only the horns, tambourines, and drums of the cars speeding across the bridge violate—but only rarely—the silence of our apartment. It’ll vanish—melt away.

  Wonderful, wonderful, a wonderful composition, says Savl. We hear his muffled, murky, pedagogical voice, the voice of the leading geographer of the region, the voice of a farsig
hted guide, a fighter for purity, truth, and filled-up spaces, the voice of a defender of all insulted and bloodied. We are here like before—in the unwashed men’s bathroom, where it’s often so cold and lonely that mist escapes from our blue lips—a sign of breathing, a sign of life, a positive sign that we still exist or that we have gone into eternity, but, like Savl, we will return to realize or finalize the great deeds begun on earth, to wit: receipt of all kinds of various academic prizes, auto-da-fé on the scale of all special schools, acquisition of a used car, marriage to the teacher Vetka, thrashing of all the idiots of the world with the handles of the butterfly nets, improving selective memory, cracking the skulls of the chalky old men and women like Tinbergen, capturing the unique winter butterflies, cutting the stitches on all mouths sewn shut, founding newspapers of a new type—newspapers in which not even one word would be written—abolishing fortifying cross-country races, and also free distribution of bicycles and dachas along all the points from A to Z; besides that—resurrecting from the dead all those whose mouths uttered the truth, including the complete resurrection of our mentor Savl up to his reinstatement at work in his field. A wonderful composition—he says, sitting on the windowsill, warming the bottoms of his feet on the steam-heat radiator—how late we learn about our pupils, what a pity that I didn’t notice earlier a literary talent in you, I would have persuaded Perillo to excuse you from literature classes and in the free time thus created you could have occupied yourself with anything you wanted—do you understand, anything you wanted. Yes, you could have tirelessly collected stamps with the picture of the Goatsucker and other flying birds. You could have rowed and swum, ran and jumped, played paper-rock-scissors and snap the whip, gotten tempered like steel, written verses, drawn on the asphalt, played forfeits, muttering the delightful and incomparable: Black with white do not display, yes and no don’t try to say, immediately followed by: Will you come to the ball? Or sitting in the forest on a tree felled by a storm, hurriedly and in a low voice, without having anyone or anything in mind, repeat to yourself the never-aging counting rhymes: One, two, three, four, five, once I caught a fish alive; or: One, two, buckle my shoe, three, four, shut the door. But even more beautiful: Once three men lived in Japan—Yak, Yak-Tsidrak, Yak-Tsidrak-Tsidroni; and three women lived nearby—Tsipa, Tsipa-Dripa, Tsipa-Dripa-Limpomponi; they all got married to each other: Yak to Tsipa, Yak-Tsidrak to Tsipa-Dripa, and Yak-Tsidrak-Tsidroni to Tsipa-Dripa-Limpomponi. Oh, how much is to be done on earth, my young comrade, how many things one could do instead of the dimwitted writing during our literature classes! With regrets about the impossible and the lost. With sadness. With the face of a man who never was, is, or will be. But, student so-and-so, I’m afraid you can’t avoid these classes and you’ll have to memorize in excruciating pain parts and portions of the works that here are called literature. You will read with repulsion our filthy and mendacious monsters of the pen and from time to time you won’t be able to take it, but in exchange, after going through the crucible of this misfortune, you’ll grow up, you’ll rise from your own ashes like the firebird, and you’ll understand—you’ll understand everything. But, dear teacher, we object, didn’t the composition, retold in our own words to the woman at the posture, convince you that regardless of what you said we did understand it long ago and that we really don’t need to go through any literary crucibles? Absolutely, answers the mentor, I realized it after your initial phrases; you really don’t need the crucibles. I was talking about their necessity—for you, apparently, unnecessary—just to comfort you in your thoughts about the impossibility of being excused from classes devoted to the earlier-mentioned topic. Would you believe, not long ago I had no difficulty convincing Perillo basically to give you open access to all classes; you probably know what kind of authority your humble servant enjoyed in the teaching circles—in our school and in the Department of People’s Educraption. But from the moment when something happened to me—what exactly, I don’t fully comprehend yet—I lost everything: flowers, food, and tobacco (have you noticed I quit smoking?), women, a ticket to ride (the constrictor assures me the document has expired long ago, but I don’t have an opportunity to buy a new one, since I lost my salary too), amusements, but mainly—authority. I simply cannot imagine how this is possible: nobody is listening to me—neither the teachers during teachers’ conferences, nor the parents during my meetings with them, nor the students during class—nobody. I am not even being quoted like before. Everything is happening as if I, Norvegov, was no more, as if I had died. And here Savl Petrovich filled the bathroom with quiet sparkling laughter. Yes, I am laughing—he said— but through tears. Dear student and pal, Nymphaea, something definitely happened to me. Before, not long ago, I knew what exactly, but now it seems that I forgot. My memory, to use your expression, became selective and I am particularly glad we met here, at point M because I am counting on your help. Help me, help me recall what happened. I asked many people about it, but nobody could—or wanted to?—explain anything to me. Some people honestly did not know the truth, some knew but concealed it, taking evasive actions and lying, while some simply mocked me openly. And you, as far as I know, will never lie to me about anything; you don’t know how to lie.