He led his boys down the paths of little Nikolay Irteniev, Peter Kropotkin, Sasha Herzen, even Alesha Peshkov—through orphanhood, humiliation, cruelty, and loneliness, to their acceptance of things that he himself considered absolutely basic: the sense of good and evil, and the understanding that love is the supreme value.
His boys responded to his call, and learned to identify important episodes in the books on their own—Garin’s descriptions of Tema descending into the darkness of a slimy well, as though into the underworld, to rescue the dog that had fallen down it; the triumph over fear; the cat, killed by the house caretaker before the very eyes of Alesha Peshkov; and on, and on … The execution of the Decembrists, which so deeply affected Sasha Herzen. Some kind of change was under way. They were becoming more conscious and conscientious—or did it just seem so?
Victor Yulievich himself, who had to remain within the confines of the school curriculum, continually sought what he termed a “strategy of awakening.”
To this end, he gave everything he had. Those were, in essence, simple things—honor, fairness and justice, contempt for baseness and greed. He grounded them in what he considered the absolute pinnacle of classical Russian literature—he opened the door to the room, in Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter, where the fifteen-year-old adolescent, seduced by the breadth and quality of paper that had been used for a geography map, affixed a bast tail to the Cape of Good Hope while Monsieur Beaupré slept his drunken slumber, and his aristocratic father sent the worthless teacher packing, to the delight of the boy’s servant, the peasant Savelich.
And Petrusha Grinev, enduring the cruelest forms of torture, preserved his honor and dignity, which became more valuable to him than life.
Still, there was one strange feature in this whole magnificent body of literature: it was all written by men, about boys. For boys. It was all about honor, about bravery, about duty. As though Russian childhood were solely a male affair. And what about the childhood of girls? What a paltry role they played! Natasha Rostova dances and sings exquisitely, Kitty can skate, Masha Mironova fends off the unwanted advances of a scoundrel. All the young cousins and their girlfriends, with whom the boys are so smitten, are admired for their curls and frills. All the rest are hapless victims: from Anna Karenina and Katyusha Maslova to Sonya Marmeladova. Very curious. What is their story? Are they only the objects of male interest? Where is their childhood? Do they undergo the same inner transformation that boys experience? Can it be just a mere function of physiology? Of biology?
In September 1954, a monumental event took place: separate education was abolished. Girls were admitted to their school, and thereafter began to appear in Ilya’s photographic archive.
Everyone lost their senses, most notably the teachers of long standing, who were accustomed to their boys and believed that girls put them in grave moral danger.
The girls troubled everyone. And it wasn’t these girls in particular, so much as what they represented—an attractive and rather frightening elemental force. The Trianon boys didn’t deign to broach the subject, most likely because of Sanya, who couldn’t bear “impropriety.” This included a variety of things: physical uncleanliness, dirty words, lies, and disproportionate curiosity. Ilya, who allowed himself to indulge in bad language and crude jokes around others, kept himself in check in Sanya’s presence. They did not permit themselves to talk about the girls precisely because their classmates did—and their conversation was always tinged with unseemliness. But a cloud of silence hung above the heads of these three, prefiguring a still unknown rule of thumb: self-respecting men do not discuss women.
The small fry—first- and second-graders—were not fazed in the least by the girls, but the eighth-graders went nuts. The very idea of a girl was enough to unhinge them. Girls were indecent by definition. They wore stockings, held up by elastic bands; the hems of their uniforms would sometimes ride up and reveal glimpses of bare flesh, and something pinkish or blue. Even the least attractive girl had noticeable breasts hidden under her black pinafore, though it wasn’t as if the boys hadn’t known this all before. They knew, of course, but now it was all unbearably close to them. And gym class! They had a girls’ changing room where they undressed. Maybe even completely.
Excitement hung in the air like dust on a playground. All of them, boys and girls, gave off an electrical current, and all of them were love-struck.
The boys were transformed externally as well. Now they wore uniforms that resembled those of pre-Revolutionary preparatory school students: dove-gray coats and dress shirts. All wore uniforms that were too big, so they could grow into them, except Sanya Steklov, whose grandmother bought him just the right size. Although he had grown a little over the summer, he was not destined to catch up to Ilya or Mikha. Strange as it may seem, however, little Sanya enjoyed the most attention from the girls. Notes flew thick and fast through the classroom, like dangerous, honey-laden bees. The only thing missing was the buzz.
By the New Year, sympathies and antipathies had formed, and the first pairs of lovebirds had emerged. Those who had so far been unsuccessful at attracting someone of the opposite sex had high hopes for New Year’s Eve.
All these hopes collapsed in the middle of December, when the whole school came down with measles. It started with the youngest pupils, then broke out among the older students, until a strict quarantine was imposed at the end of the month. Students were even forbidden to move between floors and to use the cafeteria. More than a third of the eighth-grade students came down with measles. Sanya kept waiting to get sick, checking his face every morning for signs, but the reddish rash didn’t appear.
Students were allowed out of the classroom only to go to the bathroom. During the lunch break, the nurse and the lunch lady would bring pies, beet salad, and pots of sweetened tea to their rooms. At first it was exciting, but very soon it palled. The most unpleasant consequence of the whole epidemic was the cancellation of the New Year’s party. The second quarter ended on an anticlimactic note, and they all dispersed for the winter vacation. On December 31, Sanya did come down with the measles after all, which deprived his friends of yet another celebration, their favorite one—Sanya’s birthday.
Victor Yulievich brightened the dull winter break. Usually, the LORLs’ meetings were suspended during the break, but that year they met nearly every other day. In any event, Ilya had taken many photographs during this period. Many others joined them on their walks—everyone who hadn’t gotten sick. They would walk for about three hours, and then drop in at Victor Yulievich’s home to drink tea. Those were the first of the pictures in which the two friends, Katya Zueva and Anya Filimonova, appear. They were the first girls to join their previously all-male club.
Katya had still not cut off her long braids bound with black hair ribbons, which hung over the collar of her coat. Anya Filimonova, in a ski cap with the brim overhanging her face, looked like a boy, with pimples on her forehead. She was trying to conceal them with the hat, Ilya surmised. He was also the first to notice that Katya was in love with their teacher.
When she went to school, she gathered her braids into an unattractive bun; but at the LORL sessions at Victor Yulievich’s, she unbound her mane and suddenly looked very pretty. She sat at the round table, always in the same spot, resting her chin in her palm. Her hair almost completely covered her face, and Mikha had to bend lower to catch a glimpse of it. He liked her immensely, especially outside of school. He also liked little Roza Galeeva, from the seventh grade, and Zoya Krym, who was in the other eighth-grade class.
Every time Victor Yulievich addressed Katya, she blushed so violently that only the tip of her nose remained white. Katya was shy and quiet, and even with Anya, her best friend, she didn’t share her greatest secret—that she had been head-over-heels in love with the teacher at first glance, on September 1, when she saw him standing in the school yard before the opening ceremony, surrounded by his boys, animated and laughing.
She would use any opportunity to see him, an
d would even follow him home (keeping her distance, of course). Sometimes she would stand by the entrance to his building in the evening, but she never ran into him. She decided to join his club, but only after she had persuaded Anya, who much preferred volleyball, to attend with her.
Closer to spring, something happened that Katya would tell her husband about, not omitting any details, only two years later. Katya managed to get hold of a ticket to Prokofiev’s ballet War and Peace. The whole of Moscow wanted desperately to see the performance, and Katya’s grandmother gave her a single ticket that she had acquired through her vast circle of connections. After the first act, Katya peeked into the theater buffet, just out of curiosity. There was a terrible crush, a noisy throng, and a long line had formed to the buffet. At the table nearest the door, Victor Yulievich was sitting. He was with a beautiful woman with slightly Asian features. A bouquet of flowers was lying on the table. They talked, and then he placed his left hand on her shoulder. Katya was overcome with nausea. She went home without staying to see the rest of the performance. She told her grandmother that she had a splitting headache.
A week later, she waylaid him in the entrance hall of his building and told him she loved him. She was terrified that he would laugh at her. He didn’t. He put his hand on her shoulder, as he had done with the beautiful woman in the buffet, and said, in all seriousness, that he had already guessed her feelings, and that he hadn’t known what to do about it.
“Never mind. It’s just that I die inside whenever I think about that woman you were with in the theater. Are you going to marry her?”
“No, Katya. I’m not going to marry her. She’s already married,” he said somberly.
“Then you’re going to marry me!” And she left.
“When you finish school!” he shouted after her.
The front door slammed behind her. He smiled, shook his head, and, pulling out his metal cigarette case, extracted one from it nimbly. He could do many things with the use of just one hand—he flicked the lighter and started to smoke. He stood for a while, smoking and smiling to himself. When he had lost his hand, he immediately vowed never to marry, never to put himself in a position of humiliating dependence on a woman. For more than ten years already he had managed to evade marriage and turn his back—timidly, decisively, sometimes cruelly, sometimes kindly—as soon as the idea of a permanent family bond cropped up.
But now he smiled: the girl was enchanting, in love with him in a way at once passionate and childlike. She seemed to pose no danger to him. He could never have imagined that he would indeed marry her as soon as she finished school.
* * *
All the next year the ninth-graders were steeped in the nineteenth century. From afar, it appeared very attractive. Ordinary conversations, just as in Zinaida Volkonskaya’s salon, “revolved around literature.” And “history.” As Colonel Bibikov’s report had revealed.
The Decembrists—the beating heart of Russian history, its finest legend—appealed strongly to everyone. Ilya even collected his own portrait gallery of the Decembrists (yet another collection he began, then abandoned to the whims of fate), and rephotographed their portraits from books, thus becoming very handy in the art of reproduction. Once Sanya, while he was examining Ilya’s amateur reproductions, pointed at a certain mustached and rather shaggy-haired fellow, and, as if it were the most ordinary piece of information in the world, said, “This Lunin was a brother of one of my great-great-grandmothers. Grandmother says he was without fear and reproach. We’re related to two Decembrists, in fact. The other one was my grandfather Steklov’s great-great-something. You should ask Nuta about it. She’ll tell you. She even has some of his letters.”
Mikha and Ilya were astounded: Could this be true? And they rushed off to ask Anna Alexandrovna.
Anna Alexandrovna gestured vaguely with her hand, a cigarette between her fingers, and frowned. “Yes, we’re related to them.”
Like all people of that generation, she avoided talking about the past, even a past as distant as this one. Nevertheless, the boys peppered her with questions. She answered tersely. Yes, Mikhail Sergeevich Lunin was her great-grandmother’s brother. And Sanya’s late father, Stepan Yurievich Steklov, was a descendant of Sergei Petrovich Trubetskoy. Sergei Petrovich’s son lived on Bolshaya Nikitinskaya Street. There had been many Trubetskoys; it was a real clan. This very house belonged to one of them about a hundred years ago. The first owner was Dmitry Yurievich, but that was a different line—not the line related to the Decembrist. She herself was not directly related to Trubetskoy, but Sanya was a descendant through the matrilineal line.
Here Mikha grew indignant. “And you never told us, Sanya?”
“Why should I go spreading it around?” Sanya said uncomfortably.
“Oh, come on! Most people would be proud.” Mikha seemed to see Sanya in a different light now. “That poem, you know the one—‘In the depths of the Siberian mines…’ and all that. That’s about them!”
Such rapturous admiration was written all over Mikha’s reddish face that Sanya had to pull the rug out from under him. He bent down close to his ear, and, quietly, so that Anna Alexandrovna couldn’t hear, said, “Yep! In the depths of the Siberian mines, two men sit to take a shit. Their sad labors won’t be lost—their shit makes the best compost!”
Anna Alexandrovna had raised him on these stories of his ancestry, but he was indifferent to the birthright of his ancestral roots.
Ilya either overheard or guessed what Sanya had said, and he let out a long peal of laughter. Mikha’s expression of shocked dismay thoroughly amused him. Batting his long, childish eyelashes, Mikha said, his voice trembling, “How dare you? How do you dare? I should challenge you to a duel for such words.”
Anna Alexandrovna savored this little scene. Her red-haired favorite, whose ancestors would never have been allowed to set foot in an aristocrat’s home, was prepared to challenge her grandson to a duel.
“You’re still just silly boys, your sprouting mustaches notwithstanding. Go put the kettle on for tea, Sanya.”
Sanya went out to the kitchen obediently. Anna Alexandrovna rummaged around in the sideboard. There was nothing special for tea today—just rusks and dried bread rings. But the scent of vanilla, and something else, something pre-Revolutionary, always wafted out when the upper door of the cabinet was opened. Mikha loved it.
They drank their tea in silence. Mikha and Ilya were mulling over what they had learned, amazed that people they had known so well, and for such a long time, were so highborn. They even sensed their proximity to the grand sweep of history in the present moment.
I’ve got to take pictures of them all, Ilya thought. Anna Alexandrovna, and Nadezhda Borisovna, and Sanya. So that the collection will be complete. Anna Alexandrovna, especially, since she’ll probably die soon.
And he already started to envision how he would make a real portrait, so that the nose with the little hump, and the bun fastened with a large brown hairpin, and the short wisps of gray curls falling behind her long ears onto her wrinkled neck would all be visible. And he imagined taking it at such an angle that her sunken cheek, and her long ear with the diamond in the lobe, would all be in the picture.
Mikha munched on rusks and wondered whether it would be proper to ask Anna Alexandrovna why Colonel Trubetskoy had not gone out onto Senate Square, and why he betrayed his comrades. But he was too shy.
Anna Alexandrovna, meanwhile, had gotten up and disappeared behind the room divider. The wardrobe door creaked, and she reemerged with a sizable box, covered with golden tapestry fabric. It contained a valuable book, published in London at Herzen’s Free Russian Press in 1862: The Notes of the Decembrists.
“Here. Wash your hands, wipe your noses, and be careful when you turn the pages. And don’t believe everything you hear or read about the Decembrists.” She seemed to have intuited Mikha’s silent question. “No matter how you look at it, the history of Russia has been rotten, but those times were not the worst imaginable. Th
ere was a place for nobility, and dignity, and a sense of honor. Now let me see your hands.”
Mikha gently removed the cat that had settled on his lap and placed it on a pillow. Then he rushed to the bathroom to wash his hands, to show the proper respect for the rare edition he was so eager to touch. When he came back, he opened the book to a random page and started reading:
“‘It was difficult to owe a debt of gratitude to a person whom one held in such low esteem.’”
“Wait a moment, give it here,” Anna Alexandrovna said. She threw a cursory glance at the open page and smiled triumphantly. “You see, this is just what I was talking about. Sergei Trubetskoy wrote this after his interrogation. On the night of the fourteenth of December, he was arrested, and His Imperial Majesty Nikolay Pavlovich himself interrogated him. The Tsar was horrified that a prince descended from the Gediminids, a more aristocratic family than the Romanovs, could have ‘gotten mixed up with this filth.’ At the end of the conversation, the Tsar said, ‘Write to your wife to tell her that your life is not in danger.’ In other words, the Tsar made the decision even before the investigation. But Trubetskoy knew he was guilty of wrongdoing, and accepted all the charges, even that of plotting to kill the Tsar, though in reality he had been vigorously opposed to it.”
“Victor Yulievich said that all the Decembrists gave testimony, admitted everything honestly, because they thought the Tsar would understand them and change his policies,” Mikha said. He was eager to be seen in a positive light in this aristocratic company.
“Yes, they told the truth. Trubetskoy repented his actions bitterly during the interrogations, but never betrayed others. They never stooped to lying. As for Sergei Petrovich, many memoirs testify to the fact that he was loved and respected in exile. As far as I know, there was only one traitor among the Decembrists: Captain Maiboroda. He informed the authorities about the planned uprising three weeks in advance. I don’t know for certain—there may have been one or two others. But there were more than three hundred involved in the plot! Read about it, the interrogation protocols have been published. Informing on others was not in fashion back then, that’s the point I want to make,” Anna Alexandrovna said with peculiar emphasis, which only Ilya picked up on.
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