A School for Fools

by Sasha Sokolov

  ●

  Finally you, our good mentor, having heard our signals about the disaster, finally, you look. But it’s too late, teacher; the shadow, which, starting at a certain moment—neither nails nor boards— worried our minds, does not sit anymore on the railing of the fire escape and does not lie on the lectern—and it is not a shadow, and not the Goatsucker, and not a shadow of the Goatsucker. It is the director Tinbergen, hanging on that side of the window opened onto the sky. In rags, bought cheaply from a Gypsy at the station, in the old woman’s knitted cap, with shortly trimmed Gorgon’s snakes that shimmer platinum gray sticking out from under it, she is hanging on the other side of the window as if she were hanging from a string, but in reality she is hanging without the help of any external forces and objects, simply using her witch’s powers; she is hanging, like a full length portrait—occupying the entire window frame, the entire opening, she is hanging because she wants to hang suspended. And not coming into our class and not even stepping on the windowsill, she is yelling to us, incomparable Savl Petrovich, tactlessly and not as an educator should, not wishing to notice us, who are frozen and chalk-like from anxiety; she’s yelling, showing her rotten metal teeth: Mutiny, mutiny! And then she vanishes. Mentor Savl, are you crying, you, with a rag and a piece of chalk in your hand, you, standing there, by the wooden panel named in English blekbord? They were eavesdropping, they were eavesdropping, and now they’ll fire you at your own request, but really on what grounds? We will write a petition! Oh my God—you, Norvegov, say this—do you think I am afraid to lose my job? I’ll survive, somehow I will live to the end, I don’t have long to go. But I feel excruciating pain, my friends, parting with you, girls and boys of the grand epoch of engineering and literary endeavors, with you, the future and the past, with Those Who Came and will go away, taking with them the glorious law to judge without being judged. Dear mentor, if you think that we, those who came to judge you, will ever forget your steps dissipating in the corridor and later on the stairs, you are mistaken— we will not forget them. Almost soundless, the bare bottoms of your feet got fixed in our brains and froze there forever as if imprinted into the melting asphalt after performing on it a triumphant march of the Julian calendar. Sir, it’s sad to recall this story; I’d like us not to talk for a while in your garden. May I sit in this wicker chair so I don’t trample the grass needlessly? Just give me a minute, I’ll continue soon. When I return.

  After getting on the bridge, put your hand on the balustrade: it is cold and slippery. And the stars are flying. And the stars. Streetcars are frozen, yellow, and unearthly. The electric trains below will ask the slow freight trains for the right-of-way. Walk down the stairs to the platform; buy a ticket to some train station where you can find a buffet, cold wooden benches, and snow. Several drunk men sit at the tables in the buffet, drinking nonstop and reading verses to each other. This will be a winter of cold drafts and illnesses and this buffet at the station on the second half of a December day—also will be. Wild and throaty singing will be heard from the inside. Drink your tea, my dear sir, or it’ ll get cold. About weather. But mainly, about the dusk. In the winter and in the dusk, while you are little. And now it’s coming. It’s impossible to live and it’s impossible to walk away from the window. Homework for tomorrow in any of the known subjects isn’t done. A fairy tale. It’s twilight outside; the snow is the color of dark blue ash or the wing of a pigeon. Homework isn’t done. Dreamy emptiness in the heart, in the solar plexus. Sadness of the entire man. You are little. But you know, you already know. Mother said: This will also pass. Childhood will pass like a clanking orange streetcar—across the bridge, spreading almost unreal sparks of flame. A tie, a watch, a briefcase. Like Father’s. But there will be a girl sleeping on the sand by the river—simple, with straight eyelashes and in clean tight swimsuit bottoms. Very beautiful. Almost beautiful. Almost not beautiful, dreaming about wildflowers. In a sleeveless top. On the hot sand. It’ll cool down when it comes. In the evening. Hearing the horn of an occasional steamboat, the straight eyelashes will move—she’ll wake up. But you still don’t know whether this is the one. Full of lights, leaving reassuring foam in the care of the night. But it’s not night yet. The violet waves come rushing. It’s deep near the shore because of the springs. One can drink this water bending over. The lips of the beloved, the tender one. The steamboat’s horn, the splashing, and the flickering fade away. Someone on the other shore, talking to a friend, starts a fire to make tea. They laugh. One can hear the striking of matches. I don’t know who you are. Mosquitoes spend the night in the tops of pine trees, in tree crowns. It’s the middle of July. After that they descend to the water. It smells of grass. It’s very warm. This is happiness, but you don’t know it. You don’t know it yet. The bird is a land rail. The night ebbs and flows, tenderly turning the millstone of the heavenly mill. What is this river called? The river is called. And the night is called. What will be in the dream? Nothing will be in the dream. A land rail and a goatsucker will be in the dream. But you still don’t know it. Almost not beautiful. But incomparable because the first. A wet salty cheek and the silence invisible at night. My dear, how imperceptible you are in the distance. Yes, you’ll know, you will. The song of the years, the melody of life. Everything else—is not you, all others are strangers. And you yourself, who are you? You don’t know. You’ll get to know it later, when you string the beads of memory. When you consist of memories. When you turn entirely into memory. You’ll be what is most endearing, most cruel, and most eternal. Throughout your entire life you’ll try to remove pain from the inter-twined vessels of the solar plexus. But the intertwined branches of willows and the girl sleeping on the hot sand approximately on the fifteenth of July of the irreversible year, that girl will remain. Don’t shake the leaves, don’t rustle. She’s sleeping. It’s morning. Lonely and lost, like a church I stood in the wind. You came and said that golden birds live there. Morning. The dew is dying under my feet. A brittle willow. The noise of the bucket carried towards the river and the silence of the bucket carried back from the river. The ash of the silver dew. The day acquiring a face. The day in its full body. People love day more than night. Smile, try not to move, we’ll have a photo-graph. A natural photograph; it’ll remain after everything that happens. But so far you don’t know. Then—a few years in a row—life. What is it called? It’s called life. A warm pedestrian sidewalk. Or, on the contrary, a sidewalk covered with snow. It’s called city. You fly out from the entranceway on your clicking high heels. You are slender, bright, wearing perfume and a halo of a Parisian hat. Clicking. The children and birds begin to sing. It’s about seven. Saturday. I see you. You I see. Clicking all around the courtyard, all around the boulevard with lilac trees that do not bloom yet. But they’ll bloom. Mother said so. Nothing else. Only that. Although something else too. But now you know. You can write letters. Or simply shout, crazed by a dream. But this will also pass. No, Mama, no, this will remain. On high heels. Is this the one? Yes, this. Is this the one? Yes, this. Is this the one? Yes, this. Tra-ta-ta: All over. The entire city bathes in that perfume. And it’s too late to talk when you’re burning. But it’s possible to write letters, putting each time at the end: forgive me. My dear, if I die from troubles, insanity and sadness, if I die before the date determined for me by fate, if I cannot look at you enough, if I cannot enjoy the ancient windmills that live on the emerald wormwood hills, if I cannot drink the pure water from your eternal hands, if I don’t have time to finish my walk, if I don’t say everything I wanted to say about you and about me, if one day I die without saying goodbye—forgive me. I would like to say before the very long parting as much as I can about the thing that you, of course, have already known for a long time or you are just guessing. All of us are guessing. I want to say that we were once acquainted on this earth, you probably remember. Because the river is called. And so we came again, we returned to meet again. We—Those Who Came. Now you know. She’s called Veta. That’s her name. The same.

>   Lad, what’s wrong? Are you asleep? What? No, how could I be, I just retreated into myself a little bit, but now I’m back; don’t worry, Dr. Zauze calls this a dissolution in one’s environment; it’s quite common. A person dissolves as if he were placed in a bathtub filled with sulfuric acid. One of my schoolmates—we are in the same class—says he got a whole barrel of acid somewhere, but maybe he’s lying—I don’t know. In any case, he’s planning to dissolve parents in it. No, not parents in general but only his own. I think he doesn’t like his parents. Well, sir, I assume they are gathering the fruits of their own labor and it is not up to us or to you to decide who is right. Yes, lad, yes, not up to you or me. Shaking his head, clicking his tongue, buttoning and immediately unbuttoning his duster, stooping, wooden and dry. But let’s return to the numskulls, sir. One day during the same amazing month, the special school heard a rumor that you, Savl Petrovich, had been fired from your job as by the will of the pike. Then we sat down and wrote a petition. Laconic and severe in style, it said: To the school’s principal N.G. Perillo. A petition. In connection with the firing of the pedagogue-geographer P.P. Norvegov on his own request but in fact—not, we demand an immediate deportation under escort of the responsible parties. And the signatures: Respectfully, student so-and-so and student so-and-so. We appeared together, knocking and banging, slamming all the doors in the world. We appeared in anger, while Perillo sat in his armchair, relaxed and gloomy, despite the fact that it was still just a morning of his middle age, a morning not exhausted yet, cheerful, full of hopes and planktons for the future. In Perillo’s office the clock with a gilded pendulum kept systematically fragmenting the nonexistent time. Well, have you written it?—the principal asked us. You and I—we began searching for the petition in our pockets, but we could not find anything for a long time, and then you—precisely you, not I—extracted from some place in your bosom a crumpled piece of paper and put it on the glass in front of the principal. But this wasn’t the petition; I immediately realized it wasn’t the petition because we wrote the petition on a different kind of paper, on beautiful paper with a crest, with watermarks, and with several special seals, on paper for petitions. In contrast, the sheet that was now lying on the glass of Perillo’s desk—the glass reflected the safe, the barred window, the disorderly foliage of the trees outside, the street going about its business, and the sky—was ordinary ruled notebook paper, and what you had written on the sheet—since it was precisely you who wrote it—was not a petition but that explanatory note about the lost trust, the note I managed to forget a hundred years ago; I would never have written it if it hadn’t been for you. That is, I hasten to underline that you wrote it and I did not have anything to do with it. Woe unto us, Savl, the third one had betrayed us, everything is lost: the petition vanished and we’ll never be able to recreate its text; we’ve forgotten everything already. We only remember that at the time—after he started reading the explanatory note—the face of Nikolai Gorimirovich became somehow different. Of course it continued to be gloomy inasmuch as it couldn’t be otherwise, but it also became something more. It acquired a hue. A shade. Or this: A light wind blew across the face of the principal. The wind did not carry anything away but only added something new. A kind of special dust. We probably wouldn’t be wrong if we said that Perillo’s face became gloomy and special. Correct, it was now a special face. But in this case what was Perillo reading, Savl will inquire, what had you dreamed up, my friends? I don’t know; ask him; it was he, the other one, who wrote it. I’ll describe it right away. Here’s what was there: As your humble correspondent had already informed the Italian artist Leonardo, I was sitting in the boat, having dropped the oars. On one of the shores the cuckoo was counting my years. I asked myself questions, several questions, and was getting ready to answer them but couldn’t. I was surprised and then something happened inside me—in my heart and head. As if I had been turned off. And I felt at that moment that I had disappeared, but at first I decided not to believe it. I did not want to. And I said to myself: It’s not true, it just looks like it, you are a little tired; it’s very hot today. Take the rowing blades and row home, to Syracuse, to list the ships of Tauris. And I tried to take the oars and stretched my hands out to them. But it didn’t work. I saw the handles but didn’t feel them with my palms. The wood of the oars poured through my fingers like sand, like air, like nonexistent time. Or the other way: My former palms were washed over by wood as if it were water. The boat came ashore in a deserted spot. I took a certain number of steps down the beach and looked back: nothing resembling my tracks was left in the sand and in the boat there was a white river lily, called by the Romans Nymphaea alba, that is—a white lily. And then I understood that I had turned into it and from now on I belonged neither to myself nor to the school nor to you personally, Nikolai Gorimirovich—to no one in the world. From now on I belonged to the dacha river Lethe that rushes against its own current because it so desires. So—long live the Sender of the Wind! And as far as two slipper sacks are concerned, ask my mama, she knows everything. She will say: This will also pass. She knows.