That’s what I thought, says Savl who is sitting on the windowsill, warming the bare bottoms of his feet on the heat battery. When you told me about the woman who opened the door, right away I developed some unpleasant premonition. Now it’s all clear; I remember everything; it was an acquaintance of mine—more precisely, even a relative. And what took place afterwards, student so-and-so? We went back to the city, appeared at school, and told everyone what happened to us, or rather to you. All the students somehow got sad right away, the faces of many turned pale and they started crying, particularly the girls, particularly Rose. O Rose!—says Savl—poor Rose of the Wind. And then came the funeral, Savl Petrovich. You were to be buried on Thursday, you were lying in the Acting Hall, and many people came to say goodbye: all the students, all the teachers, and almost all the parents. You realize that you were much loved, particularly by us, the special students. You know what was interesting—next to the head of your coffin stood a huge globe, the largest in the entire school, and one at a time, those who were on duty in the honorary cortege rotated it—it seemed pretty and glorious. Our wind orchestra kept playing nonstop, five or six kids, two trumpets and the rest—large and small drums, can you imagine? Speeches were given; Perillo wept and swore that he would force the Ministry of Educraption to give the school a new name—Norvegov’s—and Rose (do you know?), Rose read for you an extraordinary and beautiful poem; she said that she did not sleep all night but was composing the poem. Imagine that. But I seem to dimly recall . . . remind me of at least a line. Right away, right away; it went approximately like this:
Yesterday I fell asleep to the noise of the seven winds,
Cold and sepulchral, the noise of the seven winds.
And Savl Petrovich died to the noise of the seven winds.
I cannot sleep in our house to the noise of the seven winds.
And a dog howls to the noise of the seven winds.
Someone very close walked through the snow, through winds,
Someone followed my voice, whispering something to me,
And I, trying to answer, called him by his name.
He came close to my grave
And recognized me.
O Rose, says Savl woefully, my poor girl, my gentle one, I recognized you, I did, and I am grateful to you. Student so-and-so, please, take care of her for the sake of our old friendship. Rose is very sick. And remind her, please, not to forget and to visit me; after all, she knows both the way and the address. I still live where I lived before, on that shore, where the windmills are. Tell me, is she still an excellent student? Yes, yes, straight As. And at that moment we heard how on the fourth floor and afterwards throughout the entire main stairs—from the top to the bottom—something drumrolled, yelled, and screamed: it meant that the rehearsal ended and it is running, escaping from the hall towards the street. The fools of the choreography ensemble threw themselves into the coatrooms right away in their entire idiotic mass, spitting in each other’s faces, bellowing, making faces, weaving their bodies, tripping each other, grunting and laughing loudly. When we again turned our faces to Savl Petrovich, he was no longer among us—the windowsill was empty. And the interminable thousand-legged street was walking outside the window.
What a sad story, lad, how well I understand your feelings—the feelings of a student who lost his beloved teacher. Something similar happened, by the way, in my life too. Would you believe that I did not become an academician right away, but before that I had to bury more than a dozen teachers? However, continues Akatov, you promised to tell me about some book that apparently your pedagogue gave you at that time. It completely escaped my mind, sir. He gave me that book during another meeting—earlier or later, but, if you permit me, I will tell you about it right away. Savl Petrovich again sat there, on the windowsill, warming his feet. We entered pensively: Dear mentor, you are probably aware that the feelings we have for our teacher of biology and botany Veta Arkadievna aren’t devoid of sense and foundation. Apparently our wedding is not beyond the mountain systems, so to speak. But we are absolutely naïve as far as some delicate questions are concerned. Could you—or speaking more simply—just tell us how it’s done; after all, you did have women. Women?—Savl Petrovich makes sure—yes, if I remember correctly, I had women, but there is a problem. You know, I’m unable to explain anything clearly, right now even I don’t know precisely how it’s done. As soon as it’s over, one forgets everything. I don’t remember a single woman out of all those I had. That is, I just remember their names, faces, the clothes they wore, their particular expressions, smiles, tears, and their anger, but in regard to the topic you are asking about I cannot say anything—I don’t remember, I don’t. All this is based more on feelings than on senses and, of course, not on reason. And somehow feelings pass rather quickly. I will mention just this: It happens every time exactly as before, but at the same time very differently, in a new way. And nothing resembles the first time, the unique time with the first woman. But I won’t say even a word about the first time because it absolutely cannot be compared to anything else and we haven’t yet invented a word that we could use for it if we wanted to be precise. Jubilantly. With the smile of a person dreaming about the impossible. However, I have here a book for you, continued Norvegov, pulling out a book from his bosom; I brought it by chance, it isn’t mine, it was given to me just for a few days, so take it, read it, and perhaps you’ll find something there for you. We said thank you and, reading, we went to do some reading. Sir, it was a brilliant, translated booklet written by a German professor; it was about family and marriage, and as soon as I opened it, I immediately understood everything. I read only one page, opened randomly, approximately such-and-such—and right away returned the book to Savl, since I understood everything. What precisely, lad? I understood exactly how our life with Veta Arkadievna will be arranged, what its foundations will be. Everything was written there. I memorized the entire page. It said: For several days, he (that is, I, sir) was away. He missed her and she (that is Veta Arkadievna) missed him. Should they (that is, we) hide this from each other, as often happens as a result of wrong upbringing? No. He returns home and sees that everything is very nicely picked up (Arkadii Arkadievich, you will definitely hang in our living room or rather your waist-length portrait will, and that evening it’ll be decorated with flowers). Relaxed, she says casually: The bath is waiting. I already made the bed. I already washed. (Can you imagine, sir?) How wonderful it is that she’s happy and in anticipation of love she has already prepared everything that is required. Not only he desires her but she desires him and without false shyness she clearly lets him understand that. . . . Do you understand, sir? Desires me, Veta desires, desires, without false. . . . I understand, lad, I understand. But you didn’t catch my drift correctly. I had in mind something else, I hinted not as much at the spiritual or physiological foundations of your relationship as at the material ones. On what funds, bluntly speaking, are you going to live, on what resources, what is your income? Let’s assume that Veta soon agrees to marry you, but what then? What are you going to do—work or study? Ha! That’s what you are talking about, sir; by the way, I was aware that you’d be asking about this too. But you see, apparently I’m going to finish our special school as an extern very soon. And right away I’ll enter one of the departments of a certain engineering establishment; I, like all my classmates, dream about becoming an engineer. Quickly, not to say headlong, I become an engineer, buy a car, and so on. Therefore don’t worry, I would appreciate it if you considered me at least a potential student. Wait, wait, but then how do you explain all your opinions about butterflies? You informed me about a large collection; I was convinced that in front of me stands a promising young colleague, and now it appears that a full hour flew by while I was dealing with an engineer of the future. Oh, I made a mistake; the dreams of becoming an engineer belong to the other one who is not here now, although he may drop in at any moment. But I—never, it would be better to sell caramel roosters on a stick, to be an
itinerant cobbler’s apprentice or an elderly black man, but not an engineer— no, for no amount of money, please don’t even ask. I’m firmly decided: I’ll be primarily a biologist and basically one specializing in butterflies. I have a small surprise for you, Arkadii Arkadievich; in a few days I’m planning to send to the academic competition of entomologists my collection, several thousand butterflies. I’ve already written the letter. I dare to hope that success will not be long in coming and I’m convinced that you too aren’t indifferent to my future accomplishments and you’ll enjoy them with me. Sir, just imagine, this is the morning, one of the first mornings that finds me and Veta together. Somewhere here, at the dacha—it’s not important whether at yours or ours. The morning, full of hopes and happy premonitions, the morning that will become memorable by its news about me receiving the academic prize. The morning that we’ll never forget because—well, I don’t have to explain to you why exactly: What scientist could ever forget the moment of tasting fame! One of the mornings.
Student so-and-so, permit me, the author, to interrupt you and describe how I envision the moment when you receive the long-awaited letter from the academy; I, like you, have a pretty good imagination; I think I can. Of course, describe it, says student so-and-so.
Let’s assume that on one such morning—let’s assume a Saturday morning in July—the mailman named Mikheev or perhaps Medvedev (he is quite old, apparently no less than seventy; he lives on his retirement pay and in addition receives from the post office a half-wage salary as the carrier of telegrams and various notifications that he, by the way, carries not in an ordinary mailman’s bag but in an extraordinary mailman’s bag—an ordinary grocery bag made from black leatherette and not a bag with a strap across the shoulder but with typical bag handles hanging from the bicycle’s handlebars), and so, on a Saturday morning in July the mailman Mikheev stops his bicycle next to your house and after jumping off it like an old man, awkwardly, like a retiree, into the road dust, yellow road dust, into the light and volatile dust of the road, he pushes the rusty lever of the bicycle bell. The bell tries to make a sound, but the sound almost doesn’t come out because the bell almost died, since many of its necessary gears inside got extraordinarily worn out, ate each other during their long service, and the hammer attached to the cog is almost immobile from the rust. Nevertheless, sitting that morning on the open veranda, surrounded by the merry twittering garden of your father, you hear the wheezing of the dying bell; more precisely, you don’t hear but feel it. You go down the steps of the veranda, walk through the merry garden full of bees, open the gate, see Mikheev, and say hello to him: Hello, mailman Mikheev (Medvedev). Hello, says he, I brought you a letter from the academy. Give it to me, thanks, you say, smiling, even though no good will come from your smile because your smile will change nothing either in your everyday relationship or in the fate of the old country mailman, since it was not changed by thousands of other smiles, equally non-obliging to anything, smiles that greeted him every day at the dacha and non-dacha gates, doors, entrances, and gaps in fences. And you cannot disagree with me, you understand all this perfectly well, but the habit of polite behavior that was instilled in you from childhood at school and at home works by itself, independently of your consciousness: saying to Mikheev, Give it to me, thanks, you take from his elderly venous hand the yellow envelope and you smile. At one point in your short meeting, in your traditional, that is, unnecessary to either of you and yet inescapable dialogue (Hello, mailman Mikheev; Hello, I brought you a letter from the academy; Give it to me, thanks), at the point in his and your life, at the moment of the existence of the blue garden birds singing behind your back, at the time when the merry blue boats, sliding down the river Lethe invisible from here and down the other invisible rivers, his blue hand, spotted from old age and ugly from birth, gives you the yellow envelope and barely touches yours—young, suntanned, and in essence without wrinkles. Is it possible, you think at that moment, is it possible that my hand will also become like his someday? But you calm yourself right away: No, no, it won’t, after all, I run fortifying cross-country races at school and Mikheev doesn’t. That’s why he has such hands— you conclude, smiling. Give it to me, thanks. You’re welcome—indistinctly and without a smile says Mikheev (Medvedev), a country distributor of letters and telegrams, a deliverer of notices and newspapers, an old man, a retired mailman, a joyless bicycle rider with an extraordinarily ordinary bag on the handlebars, a dreaming, gloomy, drinking man. Right now, without looking back either at you or at the garden full of blue birds, right now, as clumsily as he got off the bicycle a minute ago, he gets on the bicycle and, pedaling awkwardly, drives his, more precisely, someone else’s letters in the direction of the resort and the water tower, in the direction of the outer edges of the settlement, the blooming meadows, butterflies, and silver hazelnut groves. He has a slight hangover; perhaps he should distribute the remaining letters and epistles as quickly as possible, even if they were all wrong, and afterwards go home and dilute some grain alcohol with water—his old woman works as a nurse in the local hospital and in their home there’s always plenty of this treasure—and then, after having some pickled tomatoes from an oak barrel (the cellar, where it stands, is cool and there are spiders, sprouting potatoes, and the smell of mold), drive somewhere to the pines, rowan trees, or the aforementioned hazelnut groves beyond the water tower and take a nap in the shade while the sun is blazing. When a mailman is over seventy, it’s not good for him to ride the entire day in such heat; he should find time to rest. But in his bag there are a few more letters: Someone writes to someone; someone is not lazy and answers, each time borrowing an envelope from the neighbors, buying a stamp, recalling the address, and walking in the heat looking for the mailbox. Yes, more letters remain and they need to be delivered. And so he is riding now in the direction of the water tower. The path, barely discernible in the uncut grass, ascends, and Mikheev’s feet, dressed in black shoes with high, almost women’s heels, from time to time slip off the pedals and then the handlebars stop obeying the letter carrier; the front wheel tries to stand cross-wise to the movement of the other parts of this uncomplicated machine, the wheel skids, and, as it happens, its spokes cut the heads of dandelions—the white parachutes of the seeds fly up and slowly land on Mikheev (Medvedev), pour over the old postman as if they were planning to inseminate his felt hat and his thick woolen black shirt, probably very hot in such weather. The parachutes also land on his stretchy trousers, with one leg—the right one—clamped above Mikheev’s ankle by a wooden laundry clip so that the fabric, contrary to expectations, doesn’t get into the driving gear—the chain, the little sprocket connected to the back wheel with a bolt, and the big sprocket with the pedal arms welded to it—otherwise Mikheev would immediately fall into the grasses and the flowers, spilling his letters. The wind would catch them up and take them beyond the river, to the flooded meadows: such things had already happened or could have happened—therefore, sort of happened—and what would the old postman do then; he would have to borrow a boat from the ferryman and row yonder, beyond the river, to hunt and collect his, more precisely, someone else’s letters: After all, people find time to write, some of them have enough patience, but no correspondent ever thinks about the fact that this foolish scribbling, all these congratulatory postcards and so-called urgent telegrams may one beautiful morning, as soon as Mikheev falls off his bicycle into the grass, fly beyond the river, since people are trying not to fall off their own bicycles and they couldn’t care less about the old letter carrier who has known his entire life that he delivers to various houses their unfortunate jottings. What a wind—Mikheev (Medvedev) says quietly to himself—what a wind, it’s moving the tree-tops; it’s going to bring rain for sure. But it’s not true: there’s no wind at all—neither at the top nor at the bottom. And no less than a week will pass before the rain starts pouring on the settlement, and all this time it’ll be clear and windless, and the day sky will be like a deep blue glossy Whatman paper, and
the night sky like a black carnival silk with large tacky stars made of multicolored foil. And Mikheev simply deceives himself now; he’s simply tired of the heat, the letters, the bicycle, the indifferently polite addressees who always smile when greeting him at the edge of their orchards, where apples ripen and buzz and he, Mikheev, wants to find some kind of hope to change his sultry, boring, monotonous dacha life, to which he sort of belongs but in which he almost doesn’t participate, although everyone who has his own house here or beyond the river knows Mikheev personally; and when he passes by on his ancient veloc with a voiceless bell, the dacha dwellers he encounters smile at him, but Mikheev—gloomily, sadly, or dreamily, like an old man, as if he were admiring them—inspects them silently and keeps going in the direction of the station, in the direction of the cove, or like now, in the direction of the water tower. Silently. Mikheev is short-sighted, he wears rimless glasses, from time to time grows his beard and from time to time shaves it or maybe the wind pulls it out, but whether with a beard or without one, in the opinion of the dacha dwellers he represents a rare type of the elderly dreamer, an amateur of bicycle riding and a master of postal manipulations. Wind, he continues to lie to himself, towards the evening it’ll inevitably turn into a storm, into a tempest; it’ll tousle the orchards; they will be wet and tousled, while cats will be tousled and wet: they’ll hide in the attics, in the dachas’ foundations, they’ll start yowling, and the river will spill out, splash out of its banks and flood the dachas, flood all the samovars boiling on the verandas and all the smoking kerosene lamps, flood the mailboxes on the fences and all the letters that are now in his bag and that he’ll soon distribute to the mailboxes will turn into nothing, into empty pieces of paper with washed-out and no longer recognizable words, and the boats—these foolish beat-up flat-bottom boats in which the idlers from the rest home and the dacha-dwelling loafers go boating—these boats, with their bottoms up, will float with the current into the sea. Yes, dreams Mikheev, the wind will put all this orchard and samovar life upside down and will stomp the dust at least for a while. The retiree suddenly recalls something he read sometime and somewhere: A breeze fashions fast silver keels out of dust. Precisely, from dust, Mikheev analyzes, and precisely keels, that is boat keels, that is boats with keels, and not the flat-bottom boats, may they sink to the bottom! If only the wind came soon! A gale in the vale, but a breeze in the trees—again Mikheev quotes in his mind, while the path turns to the right and goes slightly up the hill. Now, as far as to the little bridge across the ravine (where the burdocks are plentiful and where, most likely, snakes live), one can leave the pedals alone and let one’s legs rest: let them hang calmly, swinging on both sides of the frame and not touching the pedals, and let the machine roll by itself—towards the wind. Sender of the Wind?—you think about Mikheev. You don’t see him anymore; as it is occasionally said, he vanished beyond the bend—melted in the dacha July haze. Completely covered with the floating seeds of dandelions, risking at each meter of the bicycle ride losing summer postcards written as a result of nothing else to do, he and his elderly venous hands now speed towards his dreams. He is full of concerns and worries; he’s been an outsider in the dacha world and he does not like it. Poor Mikheev, you think, soon, soon your pains will go away and you’ll become a metallic headwind, a mountain dandelion, a ball belonging to a six-year-old girl, a pedal of a cruiser bicycle, compulsory military service, the aluminum of airports and the ash of forest fires; you’ll become smoke, the smoke of the rhythmical food and textile factories, the squeaking of viaducts, the seashore pebble, the light of day, and the pods of thorny acacias. Or—you’ll become a road, a part of the road, a stone on the road, a roadside bush; you’ll become a shadow on the winter road, you’ll become a bamboo shoot, you’ll be eternal. Lucky Mikheev. Medvedev?
A School for Fools Page 19