Expulsion

by Marina Sonkina

  “There, there, Ira,” Alexandra’s father murmured.

  With a slight twist of her shoulder, her mother evaded his comforting hand. Didn’t he realize that she was entitled to her suffering? And then the phone rang. “It’s probably Kozlov from the committee,” her father said, anxiously chewing on his lower lip.

  “You’re not going to answer it,” Alexandra’s mother said in a monotone. The phone went on ringing.

  With each commemoration, Alexandra’s unspoken resentment of her brother took deeper root. He had been dead for many years, and yet her mother still yearned for him, while Alexandra was alive and neglected. It’s true she had none of his talents, and she looked too much like her mother had when she was a girl: the same chubby body and puffy face with high cheekbones leaving little space for her eyes, and the same mousy hair and slightly raised upper lip that left her teeth exposed, so that more than anything else she looked like a bewildered fish.

  Alexandra’s mother, however, had managed to compensate for her unremarkable looks and, with the help of makeup and lipstick and carefully cut and styled hair, she had made herself into a pleasingly plump and even impressive lady. Alexandra, on the other hand, still showed no signs of remission. But her father seemed to have an abstract, distant affection for her, even so.

  As she lifted a tasty dumpling from her bowl of broth, Alexandra stole a glance at her parents. Yes, it was mean-spirited of her to envy her brother’s talents. Especially since he couldn’t use them anyway, being dead for so long. And it wasn’t his fault that she didn’t know what to do with the life given her to live day after day. Katya shopped for groceries and cooked, played cards with the maid of another family on the fifth floor, and secretly read a prayer book. Alexandra’s father made his discoveries about the nature of the human psyche, while her Mother chaired the local committee of Soviet Women for Peace. Alexandra’s schoolmates competed for high marks and after class worked on new issues of the school’s wall newspaper. Everyone in the world knew some trick for a smooth and purposeful ride. Everyone but Alexandra, that is.

  After her son’s death, Alexandra’s mother started to call her just Alex. She didn’t feel like an Alex, let alone a boy, but the name stuck anyway.

  2

  The second disaster for her parents after the death of their son was Alex’s looming expulsion from Special School No. 1. Not that the awful word was ever said out loud, since that could have backfired, but the idea skulked in the same corner of their minds where the Swiss defectors also lurked — two time bombs now instead of one. School No. 1 was the only one like it in all of Moscow, just as its name unequivocally attested. Established for the sons of diplomats and Politburo members, it had opened its doors to girls the same year that Alexandra took her entrance exams at the age of seven. Although she could read well by then and even recite Pushkin by heart, she fell down on her multiplication tables. But since they couldn’t turn away the daughter of the famous Professor Bolt, they admitted her anyway.

  The school was proud of its exclusivity. It employed native speakers of German to teach German until, after the war, that language was replaced by English. A special program exposed the students to English very early on. A third of all their subjects, including history, literature, and physics were taught in English. By grade seven, girls — with little white bows in their braids and frills on their starched white aprons of the kind that servants wear in respectable households — could recite Beowulf in Old English, Chaucer in Middle English, and Alexander Pope for astonished foreigners, mostly Communists from Great Britain and America.

  But the school’s ambition went far beyond even Alexander Pope. Advanced algebra and solid geometry was considered essential for the development of young minds. And to establish an experimental math class in those subjects, a new teacher was hired. Her name was Vera Ivanovna Popova, or “VIP,” as the students immediately nicknamed her, combining her initials.

  Coming as they did from privileged backgrounds, all the students at School No. 1 were gifted by definition. Even so, Alex’s family found it hard to keep up with the bluebloods of the Politburo, whose children were driven to school in black Volga sedans, whereas Alex, until she was old enough to go by herself, was taken to school by Katya on the streetcar.

  Intimate, home-style meals organized by the Parents’ Council were another sign of social standing. Unlike ordinary children, the students of School No. 1 didn’t have to gather in a crowded cafeteria for their lunch break. The wives of the Soviet elite, freed from responsibilities outside the home, took turns serving brioches on white napkins and pouring tea into mugs decorated with the happy faces of Snow White and the seven dwarves. The dignified confidence of her mother as she carried these trays before her ample bosom embarrassed Alex. Everybody on the Parent’s Council knew that the new math teacher’s arrival had put Alex’s place at the school in jeopardy. In view of that, her mother’s confidence seemed false.

  Chewing on a buttered brioche, Alex stared at the dreamy face of Snow White on her tea mug. She vaguely envied the fairytale girl in her daisy-bedecked apron for her power over all those little men in pointed red caps and for their undisguised admiration of her. Even the dwarves’ diminutive size was enviable. They could squeeze into any cranny and, if need be, disappear completely.

  Before advanced math struck with full force, Alex’s marks were still tolerable. She dragged her fragile 3’s from class to class — upstairs to the zoology room with its stuffed crocodile, parrot, and bear, and then all the way back downstairs to the woodshop in the basement. The mediocre marks stood at the ready as Alex struggled with a coping saw over a piece of plywood that was supposed to be turned into a cutting board for her mother on March 8, International Women’s Day. Alex’s last woodshop assignment, a kitchen stool, still staggered on rickety legs like a newborn calf.

  “How did you manage to make each leg a different length, Bolt?” the woodshop instructor asked her. He too gave her a mediocre 3 and advised her not to come back, since the materials were precious.

  “The earth is full of hidden riches,” said the geography teacher, Pyotr Petrovich Shugaev, a pot-bellied giant with a black beard bisecting his chest, as he walked between the rows of desks. Using his pointer, he made sure that coal, gas, iron, and diamond deposits were identified with appropriate symbols on the students’ contour maps: triangles for iron ore, squares for diamond deposits, and so on. Ocean depths were represented in darker and lighter shades of blue, while tectonic plates wavered between a yellowish and dark brown.

  But Pyotr Petrovich’s real passion was meteorology. Twice a day, seven mornings and evenings a week, the students were expected to record meteorological phenomena in ruled notebooks. Clouds formations were to be identified by type, an anemometer was to be checked for wind direction and velocity, the air temperature was to be indicated, and, after dark, the movement of constellations across the night sky was to be noted.

  “Suppose you get lost in the woods at night, Bolt. How will you find your way if you don’t understand the night sky?”

  Alex’s gaze fell on his baggy pants smudged with chalk around the fly. “He went to the lavatory during recess,” she observed to herself, her fear of getting lost in the woods thereby considerably reduced.

  When the technical-drawing teacher put an old internal combustion engine in the centre of the classroom, Alex closed her eyes until she felt the reassuring touch of her friend Nina’s hand on her hip. In the lavatory, always safely empty during class, Alex placed Nina’s drawing against the window pane and traced its contours onto her own paper.

  At the start of her seventh year at School No. 1, Alex fell in love with the narrowed eyes of the technical translation teacher, a war veteran of about 35 with an empty sleeve tucked into his belt. She spent hours in front of the mirror stuffing cotton wool into her bra, for her a totally useless article at the time. But as hard as she would try, technical translation had no more a
ppeal than three-legged stools or internal combustion engines. But the mixture of awe and adoration that gripped her whenever her idol entered the classroom forced her through the pages of their big technical dictionary. She expected another “swan,” that is, a 2, at the end of the semester, but when she got a 4 instead, the generosity of her idol’s heart shook her to the core and she was unable to sleep that night.

  Alex was the only student in her year, and perhaps even in the whole school, who liked music class. The lanky teacher, nicknamed “Goop” for his slick black hair combed across a shiny pate, provoked almost uncontrollable mirth from the boys whenever the girlish bow of his mouth produced a high soprano tremolo. Goop was also infamous for his fear of germs, and at every interval between classes would run to the lavatory to wash his hands. His taste in opera was, from a Soviet point of view, highly unorthodox. He omitted such obligatory examples of national art as Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov and Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin in favour of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and Beethoven’s Fidelio. Attendance was not unlike Swiss cheese. There were on any given day pockets of empty seats as students were either out sick or about come down with the flu and gone after the first break. To be sure, students were a lower form of life and Goop treated them accordingly — with a patronizing aloofness. Alex, however, was the exception. Who would have guessed that living within her thick body was a voice of such power, vibrancy, and lushness? Goop had no doubt that Alex was destined for a great future in opera and, ignoring the rest of the students, he would accompany her on the piano, while coaching her in the phrasing of one sentimental ballad or another.

  Once after class, Goop gave his favourite a rare recording of highlights from Purcell’s Baroque Dido and Aeneas. “Keep it. It will help you, Alexandra. You have a rare and precious instrument — a dramatic soprano. Cherish it.” His eyes were moist with awkward emotion. “By the way, I saw you in the schoolyard yesterday without a scarf. That was a grave mistake! Wear a warm scarf whenever it gets cold to protect your voice from the fluctuation of temperature. That’s just a little piece of advice I can give you.” He tapped the window pane, listening to the sound. “I can help you find a good voice teacher, if your parents agree. I’d love to teach you myself, but I can’t, of course. When the time comes, you’ll be taught proper breathing technique, along with many other things. But what no one can teach you is how to cultivate an inner . . . shall we say. . . serenity, tranquillity, and thoughtfulness. How to live with joy. Those you will have to teach yourself. How shall I put it? Young girls your age are prone to emotional volatility, even outbursts, but if you’re going to be serious about your art, you’ll need to master that.”

  At the beginning of the following semester, in February, Alex started taking voice lessons after school with a close friend of Goop’s, a retired professor from the famous Tchaikovsky State Conservatory.

  3

  VIP appeared for the first time toward the end of Alex’s eighth year, two months after she had begun voice lessons. A brusque nod was all the students got by way of greeting when she entered the classroom. Then their new math teacher would immediately turn to the blackboard and proceed to cover its chalk-smudged surface with the hooks, signs, and strokes of complex equations. As she paced back and forth in front of the board, the boys scrutinized her body, which was as flat as a board both fore and aft, with nothing to catch their eyes (so the verdict went) except for a hairy wart on her chin, old-fashioned laced-up brown shoes, and brown cotton stockings that rippled in accordion-like folds on her thick calves. When, with her back to the class, VIP opened her mouth for the first time, somebody whistled in surprise at how low and raspy it was. For a moment it even seemed like a man had just come into the room. But then VIP suddenly turned around and faced the class, the severe cut of her short, straight hair in keeping with her sharp, angular movements.

  “Who whistled?”

  Silence.

  VIP cleared her throat. “I’m not deaf. I heard somebody whistle. If you’re brave enough to do something like that, then you’ll also have the courage to acknowledge it.”

  A finger pointed at Bolt. It belonged to Max Nosov, the class clown.

  “She did,” he said in an ingratiating voice.

  Silence again.

  While Alex’s first and by definition unrequited love was for the war veteran technical translation teacher, her second was for the amusing Max, and though it still remained undeclared, it enjoyed at least the possibility of being returned. Not for nothing had he sent spitballs flying her way during music class or thrown wet rags at her when they shared floor-mopping duty at the end of the school day. Those pranks were, as Alex regarded them, evidence of his unspoken affection for her.

  “Was it you?” VIP said to Alex.

  “No,” she barely audibly replied.

  “You, eh . . . Nosov, you said you heard her whistle?” VIP asked, looking down at her seating chart.

  “I did,” the boy repeated.

  VIP looked sternly at Alex.

  “Bolt, is it? Stand up when a teacher is speaking to you.”

  Alex lifted the black top of her desk and clumsily stood up, knocking her eraser, exercise book, and compass onto the floor. She awkwardly bent over to pick everything up as VIP watched her.

  “Yes, I’m Bolt,” she said when she stood up again and looked at the teacher.

  “Did you say ‘Bolt’ or ‘Nut’?” VIP asked as she looked down at the seating chart again. “‘Ah, yes, Bolt, Alex Bolt. Is that a boy’s or a girl’s name?”

  The class exploded in laughter. Surprisingly, the dry old stick did have a sense of humour. “Well, whoever she is, one thing is obvious,” VIP continued. “She’s bored stiff in my class. Clearly, she already knows everything I’m going to say. It’s no wonder she whistled.”

  VIP’s use of the third person detached Alex from the rest of the students as if she weren’t there.

  “But I didn’t whistle,” Alex protested, her lips and tongue moving as if her mouth were full of cement.

  “Did everybody hear that? She didn’t whistle. Her classmate has falsely accused her. So, your classmate is a liar?”

  “It was her,” Max said again. “I saw her whistling.”

  It was as that moment that Alex began to sob. She couldn’t help it. She had been cursed with quick tears since early childhood.

  “Nerves!” her father would say as he watched her cry at the least thing.

  “Given the circumstances of my pregnancy, it’s no wonder,” her mother would answer in irritation. “You’re a psychologist. Do something about it.”

  VIP looked hard at Alex.

  “Where’s your integrity, your dignity, Bolt? What kind of person are you? To gain sympathy, apparently anything goes with you, even tears! Mathematics is the queen of the sciences. It requires strong, pure souls. You’re disgracing yourself with your behaviour. Come to my office immediately after class, Bolt.”

  The usual classroom bustle suddenly stopped.

  “You, Nosov, will come to my office after class as a witness.”

  “What did I do?” Max muttered. But VIP had already turned back to the blackboard to write the pages of the next day’s homework assignment.

  During the 40-minute session with VIP, Alex confessed that she had indeed whistled but hadn’t admitted her guilt from fear, which of course meant that she was a coward too. The iron logic of it flowed like water from one pool to another. It was clear to Alex that finding a way to save her skin was more important than either the truth or honour, and that if she accused her friend and betrayed him (even if he had just done the same to her), she wouldn’t ever be trusted with anything, least of all math, “the noblest of sciences.” Soiling it with impure, morally compromised hands was unthinkable, VIP had said. Didn’t Alex understand that? Unable to think of a reply, Alex nodded.

  VIP then told her that
her parents would have to be informed immediately, and handed her record book to her with the order to bring it back with their signatures by next Monday. Alex nodded again.

  In the space for “Teacher’s Comments,” VIP had printed in bold: “You are urgently summoned for a meeting with the mathematics teacher to discuss your daughter’s imminent expulsion from the class on moral grounds.” The day was Wednesday. She had until the following Monday.

  4

  The house was empty when Alex got home. Her father must have gone to his office at the Academy of Sciences, and her mother to one of her many meetings. Breathing in the familiar odours of home — of freshly ironed laundry and her father’s tobacco and her mother’s perfume — made her only more aware of her betrayal of her parents, of Katya, and even her dog, Kerry. She went to her bedroom and locked the door behind her. Still wearing her school uniform, she curled up on the daybed and pulled the coverlet over her head, wrapping her braids around her eyes to hold the tears back.

  Showing VIP’s note to her parents was out of the question. She had to come up with something better, but what? There was Chvanov, the compulsive counterfeiter from the year ahead of her, forever emending record books from love of his art. He could easily make the summons disappear. But could he erase it from VIP’s memory? Tell Goop about it? But to involve him in the trivia of her life would spoil their special relationship and lessen his regard for her. Perhaps tell her father in private? But that was unpromising too, since, unable to make decisions on his own, Professor Bolt would surely delegate the matter to her mother, which would inevitably lead to rage, door slamming, and perhaps even the end of Alex’s voice lessons, her greatest fear.