After the complex choreography of seating arrangements was over, an unpleasant incident occurred. Two ninth-graders, Maximov and Tarasov, smuggled themselves into the crowd of graduates, intending to steal a piece of a celebration they were not allowed to share. They were publicly humiliated and banished. Everyone assumed they had left the school premises.
The ceremony began. Diplomas were distributed, and speeches made. The ritual began with the announcement of medalists, recognized for exceptional academic achievement. There were four that year: three silver medalists, and one gold. Natasha Mirzoyan, an eastern beauty and champion brownnose, won the gold medal. The silver medalists were Poluyanova, Gorshkova, and Steinfeld—nicknamed “Muchable.” He had received the nickname in elementary school for his habit of saying “much obliged” instead of just “thank you.”
The Trianon never rose to scholastic heights worthy of medals. They were all serious about their studies but had never been straight-A students.
After the ceremonial portion of the event, the proceedings stalled. According to the program, a play was supposed to get under way, but for dozens of reasons, it did not. They needed at least forty minutes to tack together all the disparate scenes and acts. They turned on some music instead, but no one felt inspired to dance yet, so they all just shuffled around aimlessly. In the neighboring classroom the actors and stagehands were just stitching the last flowers to the wreaths, making up their faces, and memorizing their lines.
Victor Yulievich was standing by a window, conversing with one of the parents. He looked up to see Andrei Ivanovich gesturing to him from the doorway—Come here, quick!
It turned out that the exiled Maximov and Tarasov had not left the school premises at all, but had instead taken refuge in the attic, and had downed a bottle of port wine between the two of them. They were caught red-handed with the evidence just outside the attic, and were led down to the principal’s office. Both of them were drunk, a fact no one with eyes would have disputed.
Victor Yulievich walked into the office, and the principal turned to him theatrically, saying, “Just look at our fine students!”
They had such a pathetic, hangdog look about them that it was clear they needed to be comforted, rather than punished. Victor Yulievich reached for the empty bottle on the principal’s desk, turned it around to look at the label, and said, “This is certainly worth a reprimand. Godawful stuff.”
The principal launched into her spiel.
“Now then. Your parents have been informed, and we will discuss the matter further when they arrive. In the meantime, I want to know who else was in on this. If you don’t tell me their names, you will be expelled from school.”
They had acted alone, but Larisa Stepanovna was certain there had been a whole gang of them up there.
“Tarasov, why are you looking at me with such an insolent expression on your face? That goes for you, too, Maximov. Tell me the names of your accomplices. I want their names! And don’t think you can cover for them, and they’ll be off the hook. We’ll find them out anyway. Only it will be all the worse for you.”
“Hmm, this stuff is truly vile,” Victor Yulievich said with emphasis. “Where did you get it?”
“Bought it,” Maximov answered readily.
“Do your parents drink this at home, too?”
“No, my mother doesn’t drink at all,” Maximov lied.
This shady investigation continued until Tarasov’s father, a lieutenant colonel in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, arrived in his official car. Larisa Stepanovna told him the whole story. He stood there, shaking with fury. “We’ll sort it out,” the lieutenant colonel said darkly. It was clear that his son would pay dearly for this.
“When is your mother going to get here?” Larisa Stepanovna said. Obviously, she was getting bored with the drawn-out, fruitless interrogation. Moreover, her presence was required in the auditorium.
“My mother went to Kaluga to visit my aunt.”
Larisa Stepanovna paused. Her train of thought was etched on her face.
“I’ll take responsibility for him. When the party has ended, I’ll make sure he gets home. So that he isn’t picked up by the police, by mistake,” Victor Yulievich said, placing his left hand on Maximov’s shoulder.
“Leave,” she said, waving her hand dismissively. “And don’t come back to school without your mother, Maximov.”
This warning meant absolutely nothing, since school had already let out for the summer. It would be three months before it started again.
Victor Yulievich led poor Maximov to the auditorium, and pointed at a chair.
“Sit down, Maximov. Be quiet, and try not to attract attention.”
Maximov nodded gratefully. His mother wasn’t in Kaluga at all. Her boyfriend from Alexandrov had arrived, and the two were at home getting drunk.
* * *
When he was writing his play, Mikha tried to capture in rhyme the whole of his vast knowledge of literature. The actors also took a creative view of Mikha’s masterpiece and made their own contributions to it. In the end, the script had ballooned to two hundred pages.
Two weeks before the graduation party, when exams were already in progress and everyone was cramming for algebra and chemistry, Ilya took Mikha’s script, cut it up into chunks and bits, then reshuffled them until a plot—at first impossible to discern—emerged. The story described the journey of a group of dimwits, all recognizable by their real names, who would just be on the verge of misfortune or catastrophe, when the higher powers—an incarnation of Victor Yulievich, from Zeus to the policeman—would intervene to save the day.
Victor Yulievich was played by Senya Svinin, the best actor in the class—he was going to enroll in the theater academy. He wore a papier-mâché mask that bore a passing resemblance to Victor Yulievich. His right arm was not in the sleeve of his jacket. Instead, they had folded up the sleeve halfway and pinned it.
It was all terribly silly and terribly funny. A statue of Zeus toppled over and smashed into bits, and Svinin-Shengeli, shaking the dust off, crawled out. Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin searched high and low for some lost object. In the end it turned out that he had been looking for a dainty little foot. About fifty mannequin legs, their stocking feet aloft, floated out onto the stage. Chekhov’s gun, in the guise of a child’s toy wooden rifle, ended up in the hands of one of Turgenev’s hunters, and fired a shot—after which a seagull made out of an old rag plummeted down with a hideous screech.
The whole phantasmagorical drama centered on dear Victor Yulievich, of course.
Sanya Steklov, in a curly wig and a velvet robe, sat at the piano and played to perfection in the spots where the text faltered a bit.
Then, raising their voices in unison, they sang an anthem, also written by Mikha, which it would be a crime to omit.
Both many-armed and many-eyed,
He faced our death, and death defied
(For each of us one time he tried)
And that is why our time we bide
To tell his story far and wide.
Yes, Yulievich, we’re on your side!
You showed the truth, you never lied—
That we have noble blood inside.
At your command, it is our pride
To rally to your call, not hide,
And follow in your footsteps, ride
The waves, or fly, to keep in stride
With Victor Yulievich, our sun,
Who’ll light our way for years to come.
When the song was over, there was not a single teacher left in the auditorium. All of them had escaped to the teachers’ lounge, fuming in indignation. They had been scorned! For this reason they hadn’t even seen the end of the play, when the actors gathered in a circle on the stage to discuss what to give their beloved teacher as parting gift. They entertained, and dismissed, several highly comical suggestions before deciding that the gift had to be something unparalleled, something invaluable, something that “wouldn’t run out” (that is, it c
ouldn’t be eaten or drunk). And it had to be useful! And bring joy! At last, they dragged onto the stage an enormous box, the size of a person. They removed the top lid and revealed a plaster statue inside: a slender young girl in a tunic. She stood there quite naturally in a Classical pose, until they commanded: “Forward!”
The statue came to life. It was Katya Zueva, covered in whitewash. It must be said that it hadn’t been easy to talk her into playing the role.
Then she walked through the auditorium amid rousing applause, and kneeled down at Victor Shengeli’s feet.
* * *
After it was all over, they removed the extra chairs from the auditorium and set up tables. The teachers were nowhere to be seen. Victor Yulievich went to the teachers’ lounge to negotiate for the strikers to pick up their tools again.
They were waiting for him. Larisa Stepanovna was the first to speak.
“On behalf of the teachers’ collective, Victor Yulievich, I am obliged to inform you…” the principal began with a triumphal air.
But Victor Yulievich quickly realized what she was going to say. He did the first thing that came to mind—he took a glasses case out of his jacket pocket, removed a pair of old-fashioned steel-rimmed glasses, perched them on his long, regularly formed nose. Then he went up to Larisa Stepanovna. He leaned down to peer at her infamous butterfly brooch pinned to the collar of her blouse, and said in a saccharine tone, “Oh my, how charming! What a dear little piglet it is!”
“Get out!” Larisa Stepanovna shouted. In a voice scarlet with fury, the literature teacher thought.
Strains of music sounded from the auditorium.
“Why are you all so on edge? Let’s go drink some lemonade and dance. The kids are waiting for you!”
He smiled his disarming smile, while thinking to himself: What a pompous son of a gun I was. I shouldn’t have behaved like that. Why did I have to humiliate them? And poor Larisa Stepanovna, the corners of her mouth turned down, like a hurt little girl. She looked like she might start sobbing. What bad kids they were … But what can I do about it now? Surely not ask their forgiveness.
The notice of termination was lying on Larisa Stepanovna’s desk. She had intended to hand it to him at the end of the evening, but now was the perfect time. Her hand trembling, she shoved the fateful document across the table.
“You’re fired!”
There was a knock at the door. The LORLs were looking for their teacher. They had something to give him. And it wasn’t bad port, but very good Georgian wine.
FRIENDSHIP OF THE PEOPLES
It was 1957. Moscow was aflutter with anticipation: The International Youth and Student Festival was about to open. The recent high-school graduates were preparing for entrance exams to the university. In passing from the category of ordinary young person to the category of student, they also got a dispensation from compulsory military service, along with the advantages of an education. They all sweated it out from morning till night, and Victor Yulievich coached the aspiring college students. In addition to his regular private students, he tutored several of his “own” without charge.
Conscription posed no threat to the Trianon. Ilya possessed the unique gift of having flat feet, Mikha was nearsighted, and Sanya, with his crooked fingers, was unfit for handling a weapon. In short, they all had minor defects or shortcomings that disqualified them from their military obligations. Ilya studied perfunctorily. Sanya, who had applied to the Institute of Foreign Languages on the advice of his grandmother, didn’t study at all, but lolled on the divan listening to music and reading books (even foreign ones). Mikha’s position was the most vexed. Jews were barred from entering the philology department, and he had decided once and for all that it was the only place he wanted to study. As if that weren’t problem enough, he was also the only one of them who needed a scholarship to be able to study. His relatives had pledged to help him only until he finished high school. Of course, as a last resort he could go to night school, but he so desperately wanted to experience the authentic life of a student.
“I can’t understand your passion for the humanities. It’s one thing to read books, to try to figure out what they mean, to enjoy them—but why do you want to make a profession out of it?” Ilya would say. He spurned philology, and made the independent decision to enroll in LIKI, the Leningrad Institute of Cinema Engineering.
Ilya had an uncle in Leningrad who had sought him out soon after his father’s death. He invited Ilya to come to Leningrad to live with him until he started college. After Ilya received his high school diploma, he immediately took off for Leningrad. He had saved a considerable sum of money, earned through illicit means—fifteen hundred rubles. This was three times his mother’s salary. He also intended to live it up before the semester began.
That year in Moscow, the dates of the entrance exams were shuffled around so the aspiring students wouldn’t arrive all at the same time and thus inconvenience the guests in the city for the festival.
Ilya liked the Institute of Cinema Engineering immensely. His uncle Efim Semenovich said that Ilya’s father had worked there before the war, and that some people might still remember him. He began to call around to various numbers; but, unfortunately, those who remembered Isay Semenovich weren’t there anymore, and those who were there didn’t remember him after all.
Ilya left Leningrad abruptly on the day he found out that the entrance exams would coincide with the first day of the festival. He wouldn’t miss that great event for the world. He grabbed his camera and returned to Moscow, clutching his passport. He was required to show it five times, from the time he bought the one-way ticket at Moskovsky train station in Leningrad until the moment he made it home: to policemen, conductors, volunteer patrolmen, and to other random officials who demanded to see his documents. Only Muscovites were permitted entry into Moscow.
Ilya stopped over to see Mikha. Mikha had already been accepted as a student, it turned out. He hadn’t been accepted to Moscow University, as he had hoped, but to the less prestigious Pedagogical Institute, where (as the story went) there were eight females for every two males—one of them lame, another one cross-eyed. Self-respecting young men without such shortcomings were not eager to enroll there.
Mikha had had no trouble getting in. His gender and his thorough academic training outweighed his unfortunate ethnicity. But his triumph was made bitter by loss: on the day he found his name on the list of successful candidates for admission, poor Minna died of pneumonia. He had never even visited her in the hospital. She suffered from pneumonia at least three times a year, and he couldn’t have imagined that this bout of illness would be her last.
Now he was left alone with a dreadful secret and with the sinking feeling that this burden of guilt would stay with him until the end of his days. Slow-witted Minna was in love with him, and he had somehow become entangled in a strange sexual relationship with her. There was no other name for it, although sex in the absolute sense of the term was not what went on between them. Minna would lie in wait for him at the secluded end of the corridor, next to the WC, lure him into the corner, and press herself against him with all the warm and soft parts of her body, until he slipped away, flushed, shaking, and quite satisfied. He wanted to kill himself after every episode of fondling, and swore that next time he would push her away and flee; but he could never bring himself to refuse her. She was affectionate, soft, thrillingly hairy in places, and had a strong speech defect, a quality that protected their anonymity and guaranteed they wouldn’t be found out. He was being slowly strangled with a sense of guilt and disgust, and the thought of suicide always hovered in the back of his mind. No one dared mention the unconscious in those days.
This was the state Ilya found him in. Ilya decided not to pry, but dragged him outside to get him to relax.
* * *
Moscow was uncharacteristically clean, and fairly empty. The festival was opening the next day. Through the deserted city streets, in various directions, passed motorcades of passenger a
utomobiles, pickup trucks, some with their sides lowered, some with their sides up, old-fashioned buses—even Hungarian-made Icarus buses.
Everywhere you looked there were flags and giant paper flowers. That summer the girls were wearing full, brightly colored skirts on top of thick umbrella-like petticoats. Their waists were cinched with wide belts, and they wore their hair in “beehives.”
After they managed to get through two light cordons, the boys came out into the small park in front of the Bolshoi Theater. Quite a few people were milling around. Ilya pointed out two confused-looking and not especially pretty girls to Mikha, saying: “Come on, let’s pick them up!”
“No way,” Mikha said, offended by the suggestion, and turned to go.
“Aw, I’m sorry, Mikha. I’m a boor! Shall we go and get drunk somewhere? Come on, let’s go to the National.”
Somehow they were able to get into the National. Possibly, the doorman had gone to relieve himself and had forgotten to close the latch; or maybe he was relying on the effectiveness of his sign, which read “Closed for a Special Event.”
“We’re drinking cognac,” Ilya said confidently, and ordered doubles from the discombobulated waiter.
They drank their double cognacs with two pastries, then repeated their order. Between the first and second rounds, Mikha’s spirits visibly lifted. Just then, a young man with a Hasselblad camera on a strap came up to them. He looked Russian. He asked them whether he could join them.
“Sure, go ahead,” Mikha said, offering him a chair.
They immediately hit it off. He said his name was Petya. It turned out, though, that he wasn’t just an ordinary Russian “Petya,” but a Belgian whose real name was Pierre Zand. He was of Russian descent, a student at the University of Brussels. They split the second round three ways, then went to wander through town. On Ilya’s advice, Pierre left the camera behind in the hotel room.
They strolled through the center of Moscow, and it would have been hard to imagine a better tourist than Pierre was. He recognized all the places where he had never once set foot—the reminiscences of his mother and grandmother, and a deep familiarity with Russian literature, were coming to life for him.
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