Expulsion

by Marina Sonkina

  “What’s a cuckold?” a timid voice asked from the back row.

  “A cuckold? Well . . . Well, when a husband didn’t know that his wife was unfaithful to him and nasty people want to make fun of him in the old days, that’s what they called him. Any other questions? No? Let’s continue then. According to the conditions of the duel, the distance between Pushkin and d’Anthès was to be only ten paces. For all intents and purposes, the result would be murder.”

  A girl in the first row raised her hand: “How many meters are ten paces?”

  Inna hesitated. “I’m not really sure, but it’s very close.”

  “Five or six meters,” a boy by the window said.

  “Come on, for sure it’s less,” another boy sitting near him said, smirking.

  “Why don’t we all get up and count off ten paces? That way we’ll know,” Inna cheerfully suggested.

  The class just stared at her. The school had never allowed such a lapse in discipline. But this teacher was new and young! Barely older than her class. The girl who had asked the first question nudged a short freckled boy sitting next to her. He jumped up and stood in the aisle between the desks, looking a little lost. But almost immediately, the other students were on their feet dashing around, waving their arms, signing to each other in excitement.

  It was at that very moment that the door opened and Myrosyan walked in.

  The kids all froze and then hurried back to their seats.

  “Where’s your teacher?” His voice was gentle, almost caressing.

  There was no reply as he strode to an empty chair in the back of the room.

  Inna returned to her desk in front and stood facing the director. “We were trying to . . . to understand the conditions of Pushkin’s duel . . . and the distance is important.”

  “Crucial, I would say,” Hammurabi said with a gently mocking glint in his eyes. “Well, why did you stop? Keep going.”

  “The only reason we’re going into these details,” Inna said after finding her voice again, “is that they led to the greatest tragedy in the history of Russian literature. To the death of our beloved poet. The ‘sun of our poetry has fallen into the abyss,’ one of his friends wrote in his obituary.”

  A bumble bee flew in through the open window. Inna seemed to be the only one in the classroom who noticed. All the kids’ eyes were fixed on her.

  “We should remember,” she said, “that duels were illegal. Participants were severely punished, sometimes even sentenced to death. But Pushkin’s personal honour was more important to him than his own life. You can’t live with humiliation. But there was no disgrace in dying. That’s what our poet thought. And you know why he didn’t complain about the unfair conditions of the duel? Because he despised his enemies! Negotiating with them would have shown them respect, and he refused to do that.” Inna sighed in relief as if she had finally been able to put down a heavy bucket of water.

  “Wasn’t that irresponsible?” the same girl in the first row asked, raising her hand. “Why didn’t Pushkin think of his motherland, that if he got killed, his country would lose its greatest son! Why didn’t he realize that? I think he acted selfishly!”

  Inna glanced at Myrosyan. His face expressed detached curiosity.

  “Well,” she said, “It’s not like that in real life . . . Pushkin wasn’t a . . . How shall I put it? He wasn’t a monument. The way we see him in our squares today. For himself he was a living person, just like you and me. In his mind, the fact that he wrote beautiful poetry didn’t excuse him, I mean, it didn’t release him from the principles of honour accepted in his society.” She paused again. “Perhaps, if he’d been a coward, he wouldn’t have been a great poet.”

  After the class was over, Myrosyan patted the last child to leave on the head and then quietly shut the door behind him. Then he turned to Inna with an intent gaze. A practiced Hammurabi gaze.

  “I’m very honoured, Madame, to meet someone who knows exactly what was going on in Pushkin’s mind! A great privilege, indeed!”

  Supporting himself with the heels of his hands on the desk, he leaned toward Inna.

  “Who are you, young lady, and what are you doing in my school?”

  “I’m Inna. Inna Borisovna Tesemkina. But it was a misunderstanding. I never said that I knew . . . that I knew what was going on in Pushkin’s mind.”

  “On the contrary, Comrade Tesemkina! That’s exactly what you said. That art didn’t relieve the poet from the duty of either murder or suicide, which is ultimately what a duel was. You had to commit either one or the other.”

  “I meant that the duel was unavoidable according to . . . the rules of that society.”

  “If you were Pushkin, Inna Borisovna, would you, or rather should you, challenge somebody like d’Anthès to a duel? Knowing you have all those unfinished manuscripts sitting on your desk, not to mention a whole pile of new ideas?”

  “No, I wouldn’t. I mean I shouldn’t.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. I mean, no.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad, Inna Borisovna.”

  Hammurabi stepped back. “That betrays a certain lack of principle on your part, not to say cowardice. If I were you, or rather Pushkin, I certainly would have challenged him. Though of course, there wouldn’t have been any duel in the first place, if Natalie had rebuffed the Frenchman’s advances. But she didn’t. I think they flattered her vanity. When d’Anthès married her sister, she was jealous.”

  “But Pushkin firmly believed in his wife’s innocence!”

  “How can you be so naïve, Inna Borisovna? What has that got to do with anything? Do you know what Prince Vyazemsky said? ‘I avert my eyes from the sordidness of Pushkin’s home.’”

  Hammurabi went around to the other side of the desk.

  “But you never answered my question, Inna Borisovna. How is it that I find you here in my school first thing in the morning talking about Pushkin?”

  “I’m substituting for Olga Turina,” Inna said, quavering.

  “Why wasn’t I informed?”

  “It’s not her fault, sir. I was hoping for an opportunity to teach at your famous school. She offered me a chance.”

  Hammurabi squeezed himself behind one of the student desks. He covered his eyes with fingers and rocked his head back and forth.

  “You may be a good teacher, Comrade Tesemkina, but you are a bad liar. Nobody would offer you so much as a peek into one of Myrosyan’s classrooms without Myrosyan’s permission.”

  “I’m sorry . . .” Inna said.

  “As indeed you should be. I was going to hire you, but you spoiled everything.”

  “Hire me?”

  “Yes!” Hammurabi got up, producing something like a groan. “I like people with spunk, so to speak. People who dare to think differently. People like you! Even though you did lie to me . . . I’m sure you had noble intentions. To cover up for your friend, for example. Am I right?”

  Inna lowered her eyes.

  “Let all that be between your conscience and your friend,” Hammurabi said. “But here’s a question for you, Comrade Tesemkina. Are you sure your friend will repay you in the same currency? That’s often a problem between people. Who pays with what?” Hammurabi came over to her. She could smell his expensive cologne.

  “But tell me why Olga Ivanovna isn’t here.”

  “Her son got sick.”

  “That happens, of course.”

  Inna sighed with relief.

  “Are you married? Any kids? I suppose you’re too young for that.”

  “Yes, I’m married, but no children.”

  “Planning on any?”

  “Well, not right away.”

  “Hmm. That’s a good sign. Prefers literature to procreation. By the way, did you know that the descendants of Pushkin and D’Anthès are related? A great irony o
f history. The murderer and the murdered.”

  “Of course. D’Anthès was married to Natalie’s sister.”

  “And do you know what happened to d’Anthès after he killed our beloved poet?”

  “No.”

  “I suppose that isn’t part of teacher training curriculum. Well, I once met a descendant of d’Anthès, his great-great-granddaughter, in a café on the rue de Varenne in Paris. She told me about him. After the duel, he was expelled from Russia. Back in France he put together quite a career for himself and was even elected to the Senate. He died peacefully at 83, surrounded by his children and grandchildren. It seems unfair, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, very.”

  “That’s why in this country” — Hammurabi rapped his knuckles on the black desk top — “we defend fairness and the principles of justice. If evil can’t always be punished, at least goodness can and should be rewarded. Would you like to come work at Myrosyan’s school?”

  “But . . . but I don’t have any training with special-needs children. I was just filling in . . .”

  Hammurabi waved his index finger back and forth in the air like a pendulum. “Remember this once and for all. My children do not have special needs. They have only one need, common to everybody: the need for love. They need teachers who will love them and love the subjects they teach. My intuition tells me you qualify.” Myrosyan’s mouth spread into a smile. His eyes, until then looking intently at Inna’s face, moved down to her breasts and stopped there. Instinctively, Inna’s fingers followed the direction of his gaze, and then struggled to repair the disaster around the third button on her white blouse, which had somehow come undone. She blushed to the very roots of her light hair. Noticing Hammurabi smile again, she blushed even more. “If I take you on, it will be on one condition. That you never violate the school’s first principle!”

  “What principle, Comrade Director?”

  Myrosyan’s hands moved in a rapid demonstration of sign language. Then he waved an admonitory finger at himself and slapped his wrist. “That isn’t allowed here. No signing! Only articulate speech.”

  3. PAINTING WITH A DONKEY’S TAIL

  And that’s how it happened that Inna’s life, purposeless before, expanded and took on meaning. Although on the surface not much had changed. There were the same lines for food, the same crowded, unheated buses, the same cooking and cleaning and washing for Vova, her husband, who had twice skipped sleeping at home and often turned up in the middle of the night. But none of that would derail Inna’s life. It would now grow sinew and the strength it needed for selfless service in Hammurabi’s great cause. Unpaid overtime, hours of decorating the literature classroom, staying after class with the students — none of it seemed a hardship.

  Hammurabi came to trust Inna. After two years of devoted toil in the service of his educational establishment, she was invited for a chat to his oak-panelled office.

  “How are you holding up, Inna Borisovna? So far so good?”

  Inna nodded.

  “Enjoying your work?”

  Inna nodded again.

  “Excellent! Not that I expected anything different from you! You’re a very conscientious worker! Diligent, reliable . . . Though sometimes scrupulous to a fault, ha-ha! But overall, you deserve some kind of a reward, don’t you think?” He watched her closely. “Should I give you the honour of preparing a transcript, I asked myself. And I concluded that you would be the best candidate for the job by far.”

  “A transcript?”

  “Yes, a transcript. The school has been assigned a very special task.” Hammurabi lifted his head and pointed toward the ceiling.

  “It’s not at all surprising, of course. We’ve earned the Party’s trust through our hard work. In a word, they’re going to show you some very important film footage. It needs to be lip read. Take the best kids from grade ten and let them do the job. The transcript should be on my desk no later than six tomorrow night.”

  •

  The days had been getting longer and warmer. Even the most self-absorbed people completely indifferent to politics could feel the fresh currents in the air. At the Twentieth Party Congress, Nikita Khrushchev had acknowledged Stalin’s blood-thirsty crimes, and the ice had not only started to melt. People were jubilant. They didn’t know (and wouldn’t have cared anyway) that that turning point in history had been partly precipitated by personal vengeance on Khrushchev’s part for the humiliation he had endured for years behind the high fence of Stalin’s dacha. Whenever Stalin got drunk, he would force Khrushchev to drink too and then dance Cossack-style, squatting and kicking his legs up. Khrushchev was short and fat and would topple over on his back. And Stalin would laugh. After his tormentor’s death, Khrushchev officially unmasked Stalin’s “cult of personality.” It was a daring move that struck artistic people more intoxicatingly than any wine. Writers began to write, painters to paint, composers to compose, and filmmakers to spin their yarns with renewed energy. On the crest of that wave somebody had the idea of inviting Nikita Sergeyevich to the first exhibition of Soviet avant-garde art. Which — as it turned out — was no less a folly than the leader’s own campaign to grow three-meter-tall corn all over Russia, even in Siberia, to compete with America. Khrushchev arrived to the exhibition and looked right and then left and then straight ahead. And then he pointed his finger. His grim retinue watched it go up and down like a broken railroad semaphore. “This is what? This is who? Where is her second eye? Are you all morphine addicts or pederasts or what? My grandson can paint better than this!”

  And he summoned all those so-called painters and sculptors, and writers too, to the Palace of Congresses for a “cordial conversation.” Like all events of that kind, the “conversation” was to be filmed. But when the sound man heard what the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had to say, he turned off the microphone, since the way he said it was not for public ears. The decision created havoc. Snippets of the footage had to be included in the newsreel shown before every movie in every theatre of the vast country. You would see the Chairman pounding his fists but hear no words. Myrosyan got a special assignment from the Party to decipher the missing parts of Khrushchev’s philippics. Inna instructed the five best students to lip read the Chairman very carefully and to write down every word he said.

  “Inna Borisovna, there’s this word I don’t understand, something beginning with a ‘f’,” Petya, a winner of the Mathematics Olympics, reverently whispered in her ear, though nobody could hear them in the dark room.

  “What is he saying?” Inna turned off her voice, trying to articulate clearly in the semi-darkness.

  “He’s saying: ‘How can you paint like this? This is dog shit, not art! A donkey could paint better with his tail!’” Petya giggled. “And then there is . . . this f-word. He’s asking: are you real men or faggots that you paint like this?”

  “Well,” Inna covered her mouth to muffle the giggle, “you go ahead and write down exactly what you think his actual words are! What else have you got there?”

  “He’s saying: ‘Ten years in prison, that’s what faggots like you will get in our country! All of you, all of you! To the camps — to fell trees!’”

  “Anything else?”

  Petya spoke rapidly with surprising accuracy. “‘You’ve sold your souls to the stinking capitalists! Good riddance! Go then! There’s no room in our country for capitalist ass-lickers! The people doesn’t need your art. Go, we’ll give you free tickets as far as our borders!’”

  In her office, next to Hammurabi’s, Inna stared at the transcript on her desk the way one might stare at a tarantula, hoping it will eventually crawl away on its own. But the transcript wasn’t about to crawl anywhere, and at ten to six she knocked on Hammurabi’s door.

  He leafed through the document, looked up at Inna, and then leafed through the document again.

  “I always took you for a
n intelligent woman, Inna Borisovna. You don’t actually suppose that I could hand this over to them, do you?” And he pointed at the ceiling, his handsome brows coming into a triangular.

  “But they’re Comrade Khrushchev’s own words. Transcribed verbatim, sir.”

  “Wonderful! And if I tell you to jump from the 15th floor, will you do that verbatim too? Give you enough rope and you would hang yourself.” He tapped the middle of his forehead with his finger. And he swivelled his chair 180 degrees.

  For the next three weeks she walked through the school corridors as if they were mine fields. If Hammurabi had turned away from her every time their paths crossed, she would have considered it fair punishment. But he stared through her as if she were made of air. Which was much worse. At the end of the month she was on the point of nervous collapse. That’s when he called her into his office. Greeting her with a smile.

  “Do you like my chair?” he asked, getting up.

  “Yes, of course . . .” Inna said, not knowing how else to reply.

  “Would you like to try it out? Go ahead, don’t be afraid.”

  Inna sat down on the edge of the chair. Hammurabi gently placed his hands on her shoulders.

  “Don’t be afraid. Make yourself comfortable.” He rotated the chair several degrees.

  “How does that feel?”

  “Very nice,” Inna said, trying not to tremble.

  “Here’s the situation, Inna Borisovna. Krapivina has applied for maternity leave. Which will obviously be no surprise to anybody. What is a surprise, however, is that she expects to return to her current position as deputy director for curriculum. A strange delusion on her part. She may come back as a rank-and-file teacher — that’s possible — but as my deputy? I’m sure you would be a much better choice. And don’t tell me this time that you don’t have the necessary qualifications or skills.” He raised his eyebrows. “Shall I order another swivel chair for you?”