“Do you know why I had asked you to come in, Comrade Bolt?” Popova asked.
“Her poor performance in your class obviously needed to be . . .”
“That’s only half of it,” she said, interrupting. “I asked you to come because of her morals. Your daughter’s morals have become a matter of serious concern to me, and you and your wife needed to be informed of that.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Your daughter has proven herself to be an inveterate liar, and that simply will not be tolerated in my classroom.”
“I’m afraid I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said. “But let me return to the main issue of her math performance and be completely clear about it, since it’s a matter of the utmost mutual concern. I looked through her exercise book and I think, well, it’s my own personal opinion, obviously, but I think . . . I think . . . she should be given less homework rather than more. Inundating her with impossible amounts of work would seem to be counterproductive. And in fact, a basic principle of pedagogy is that it’s better to look at a smaller segment of the material in depth than to . . . Well, it could be that teaching logarithms and calculus at her grade level is premature . . .”
Popova briefly shuffled some papers on her desk. When she lifted her head, Professor Bolt saw that her face was covered with red blotches. “Are you a mathematician, Comrade Bolt?” she asked. “A teacher? So that you think nothing of telling me what and how to teach my class?”
“I’m sorry. I certainly didn’t mean to criticize your methods. I was merely asking you to consider a possibility. But tell me, if you will, what you think our daughter’s problem is in comparison with the other children.”
“I’ve already indicated that, but I’ll do so again. There are many, and I do mean many, things wrong with your daughter. She has no interest in mathematics. It makes not difference to her whether I say minus or plus in an equation. But that’s only half the trouble. I can work with children who lack natural talent, but I cannot and will not tolerate hypocrisy and lies, yes, lies! You daughter is a cunning manipulator. She plays the innocent very well and tries to garner pity with tears and whining whenever it suits her.”
“What do you suggest we do?” Professor Bolt asked, completely dumbfounded.
“At this point, I have no suggestions. You might try a tutor, but I doubt, with your daughter’s other serious problems, that anything will help at this point. Things have just gone too far.”
•
All of a sudden the Bolts found themselves completely adrift on an ice floe, cut off from the familiar solidity of their lives. No other concerns could compare with the news of their daughter’s impending failure in math and with it her automatic expulsion from School No. 1. What made things even more painful was that they were entirely alone and without recourse in their private tragedy. Friends merely shrugged their shoulders, as the matter obviously couldn’t be dealt with by taking it to the school principal with an appropriate gift. And because Professor Bolt had himself gone for a conference with the math teacher, he regarded the whole affair as a personal failure. Why had he allowed that woman to intimidate him? Why hadn’t he told her what he meant to: about his experiments in cognitive development? Contrary to standard Marxist dogma, he believed that nature, that is, genes and not class, shaped personality, but that nurture, that is, a benevolent, caring environment, could modify the genetic foundation. Give a weaker student additional time, stay after class with her, if need be (it was your obligation as a teacher), and you’ll see improvement. But he was a gentleman and found it impossible to argue with any woman, whether a teacher or his own wife.
10
To her father’s surprise, Alex accepted the decision to cancel voice lessons with indifference. He had suggested that they go for a “good vigorous walk,” as he called it, though really meaning a private chat with nobody else around. But a raw, hard wind was blowing and it was too cold to walk, so they sat down on an icy bench in the courtyard of their building. When he asked Alex about her situation at school, she shrugged her shoulders: there was nothing new to report. She kept moving the tip of her boot back and forth in the snow with a vacant expression on her face, hands thrust in her pockets, so that her father couldn’t really tell if she was listening. His prominent eyes started to water in the wind and he looked away. She knew she was being rude but couldn’t help it and felt ashamed. If only she could throw her arms around him and beg for his help and tell him that she had stolen money from him and would do it again, and plead with him to do something, to lock her up, if necessary, but keep her from going to that man again! He could do none of those things, she knew that. She was alone and no one else could help her.
She suddenly felt very tired, as if she had aged immeasurably, and she said that she was cold and wanted to go inside. While they were waiting for the elevator, she finally broke her silence. Looking at the wet toes of her boots, she murmured that she would try to apply herself, that she would do her best to keep from being expelled, a promised that she knew he wanted to hear.
Her unspoken confession tormented Alex, but when the day was finally over and she was able to crawl into bed and hide her head under her blanket, it occurred to her that she didn’t need her father to rescue her from her troubles, that she could do so herself. All it would take was not going to the pipe ever again. The idea came as a revelation. Just not go! But then she wondered if that wouldn’t be cowardly. She felt hot and pulled the blanket away from her head. No, she would have to see the Gypsy one last time to say good-bye. After that, she would turn a completely new leaf.
11
The snow on the sidewalks, not cleared over the long months of winter, was hard packed and slippery. Though Alex’s visits to the pipe had changed everything and she was no longer a child, she remembered how she liked to run and slide across the snow. And now she resumed that childish fun as if reclaiming her earlier freedom. Balancing first on both feet and then on one seemed to give her infusions of courage. It was snowing and the snow quickly covered the tracks left by her run and slide. She brushed the snowflakes off her sleeves and collar and laughed to conceal her anxiety about the task ahead: removing the burden of the pipe from her life, for she knew she was on her way to the bird market for the last time.
When she saw the booths in the distance, Alex’s heart started to pound. She looked hard through the blur of falling snow for the Gypsy’s lean, familiar figure, but he wasn’t there. She breathed in the cold air with relief. The wait would give her time to calm herself. By her feet two sparrows were bathing in a muddy puddle as the fresh snow fell on them. Their exuberance was a sign of approaching spring. She waited. He had always come first, and leaning against a booth with his legs crossed, immobile, would squint at her in the distance, greeting her approach with his eyes. She looked at her watch. He was half an hour late. She waited a little longer, glanced at her watch again, and then suddenly realized that he wasn’t coming at all. She recoiled into herself in dismay. To be back in their pipe amid the rotting leaves and sweet odour of decay was all she wanted now. She wiped her runny nose with the back of her mitten. The sparrows continued to take their snow bath as if nothing had happened. What was his name? She had never asked and he had never told her.
She waited a few minutes more, and then gripped by growing fear she took off at a run toward the tracks and past the chaos of the abandoned construction site. A cold gust blew off her beret. As she bent down to pick it up, she saw the frozen remains of a crushed pigeon partly covered by the snow. Averting her eyes from the sight, she stood up. And then there it was before her, their pipe, its forlorn opening now cluttered with crates and other rubbish, including a broken tricycle, one of its rear wheels suspended in the air.
Seeing it, she turned and ran as fast as she could.
When she finally reached her building and opened the door to the apartment with her key, she was confronted by her mother. They
stared at each other for a moment. Alex was the first to lower her eyes.
“I won’t ask you where you’ve been or what you were doing. I don’t want to know,” her mother said, clearly enunciating each syllable. “But I would ask you not to leave your menstrual pads in the trash bucket. The dog likes to chew on them.”
“I’m sorry,” Alex said. “I’m really sorry.”
12
In the days that followed, Alex virtually stopped eating. Lying awake in the darkness she tried to visualize the Gypsy’s face, but it was hard to remember exactly what she missed most of all about him: his touch, his kisses, his fondling hands. Toward morning she would fall into a deep sleep and hardly wake in time to go to school.
She now felt irrevocably separated from the world around her. Her classmates, especially the girls with their petty interests and quarrels and silly intrigues, seemed to her like creatures from another planet. Max was simply an aberration. How could she ever have been attracted to him? His taunting no longer had any effect on her.
The sweet and nasty secret locked inside separated her from the world around her and, at the same time, connected her no less to life’s essence, to the core of life’s delight and misery. Now she knew what desire was and what it meant to be racked by it. She had lived through a loss and suffered from it.
She was tormented by unceasing restlessness. The sensation of the Gypsy’s touch pursued her, poisoning her waking hours. Languidly, she submitted to a ghostly orgy of emotion and need that excited and exhausted her. Mostly she felt weak, but sometimes those bouts of frenzy fuelled by fasting took complete possession of her, and those were the worst days, for then she didn’t know what to do with her body and wished she no longer existed. Bitterly she entertained fantastical plans of avenging herself on the man who had so cruelly betrayed her, forgetting in those moments that she herself had meant to give him up, and that he had simply done so first.
Spring was late to arrive that year. The patches of snow on the pavement shrank slowly, gradually exposing the litter that had accumulated and then been buried over the long winter months. The trees were still bare except for a few tiny buds. An urge for movement, for fresh air began to stir in Alex. An enormous icicle dripped from the low eave of the wooden shack in their courtyard. Obeying a childish impulse, she put her shoe under it and watched it turn wet, drop by drop. Then she waited until the icicle fell to the ground and broke with a glassy sound.
Finally, the spring academic break arrived. Alex’s parents went to Leningrad for three days and Alex was left in Katya’s care. With no classes to attend, she started to feel a bit better. A strange void replaced her earlier conflict and desire. She cleared her voice and tried to sing a few notes. But they sounded false, broken, and she wanted to be done with singing and not to think about it at all.
For the first time in many months she felt like eating again. She decided to buy herself an ice-cream bar, something she never allowed herself during her intense voice training. Standing on a street corner and licking the bar’s chocolate coating from the ice cream underneath, she gazed at the people around her, most of whom had begun to shed their heavy woollen caps and coats and with that winter’s bleakness.
A woman in a warm-up jacket and pants with a tennis racket under her arm hurried past. Alex looked at her again. It was her math teacher! But almost unrecognizable. Lean and strong, VIP looked youthful and somehow more like her real self. She didn’t see her student, or perhaps just didn’t recognize her, now that Alex had lost weight. And then VIP disappeared into the crowd.
As she licked the last of the ice cream bar from its stick, Alex thought about that chance encounter. A tennis racket! Just as she herself did, her teacher had a secret life. Didn’t that make them accomplices in some sense? Alex’s gaze fell on the wire fencing around some trees that had been planted next to the sidewalk. The ground inside the fencing was littered with cigarette butts, bottle caps, and pieces of broken glass. Alex added her ice-cream stick in the litter, examining as she did so the tree’s skinny trunk tied to a stake. It wasn’t so much a tree, really, as a stunted branch stuck in the earth. Without its stake, the tree would have toppled over. But the stake was stronger than the trunk of that puny tree and gave it the support it needed. That’s how it is with me and VIP, Alex thought. I’m crooked, and she’s trying to hold me up straight. She’s giving me a chance to grow. And she has to be strong to do that, to overcome my stubbornness, my lies. I was lying to everybody, and she somehow sensed it. How is it that I failed to see what is so clear to me now, Alex wondered. VIP had wished me good all along. She acted from selflessness, from generosity of heart! But I was stubbornly blind. She was waiting for me to wake up, but I refused to. And yes, she had to be strict and even unpleasant and rude, since she believed in the future of small trees, in my future.
After she got home, Alex wrote in her diary:
My eyes have finally opened!! I was corrupted from the start and VIP sensed it! We’re used to being punished for the past, but VIP punished me for my future. And I deserved it! I had no will power! I lacked principles. She was clairvoyant. She knew everything about me: Stealing from Papa, going to the pipe! She punished me for my wrongdoings without naming them, thinking that I would take her hint. Yet even while punishing me, she still cared. She called me up to the blackboard to fortify my spirit, to challenge me, so I could acquire the strength to fend off my perversity myself. But I kept rejecting her helping hand!
All the rubble, all of life’s debris: the broken glass on the pavement, the pigeon frozen in the snow, the drunks lying in the ditches in the morning, the shouting and fighting, the little girl borrowed for begging, the lie about being fire victims, the Gypsy fighting with his wife and then carrying her off right in front of her, her mother with her Women’s Peace Committee, all of it stood in front of her in a new, clear light. I took part in all that seamy underside of life, she thought. A wayward daughter inflicting herself on a respectable family.
There was only one place where that impurity was banned: the crystal kingdom of mathematics, a kingdom of order and truth, where VIP ruled. VIP invited me to partake of that purity. And I, Alexandra Bolt, refused to do so.
•
Having at last awakened to the truth, Alex now noticed things about VIP that had eluded her before. How orderly, in two neat stacks, her books lay on her desk were! How elegantly, in perfect alignment with each other, the numbers and symbols emerged on the blackboard as she quickly covered it with formulas! How intelligently her eyes gleamed behind the thick lenses of her old-fashioned glasses! And how touching was her slender, slightly bent figure, leaning forward as if trying to keep pace with the speed of her thought, and how moving her face, its grave expression conveying the clarity, immutability, and resolve of mathematical truth. Yet, she was humane too. She had a fine sense of humour. She made the whole class laugh. And she lived by her principles, unlike Alex’s parents, who always watched to see which way the wind was blowing. No, Vera Ivanovna was never afraid to speak the truth.
Alex gazed at the dust motes suspended in the shafts of sunlight coming through the window and at the way it dappled her teacher’s old-fashioned laced shoes and heavy stockings. What did it matter, the way she dressed? Geniuses are not of this world. All Alex had at her disposal was the dirty little two-cent secret of any adult. Vera Ivanovna, on the other hand, possessed true knowledge. She could calculate the moon’s phases, the path of a satellite, the slope of a bridge’s arc, the configuration of a nuclear reactor, the mass of the earth’s molten core, the spinning of atoms and galaxies. Alex understood none of those things, but Vera Ivanovna did.
To be like Vera Ivanovna wasn’t possible, but for Alex to tell her that she bore no grudge, that she had admired her all along, that’s what she wanted now more than anything else in the world.
13
Alex looked forward to International Women’s Day with particular excitement that yea
r. It was the custom to bring female teachers flowers in honour of the occasion. But Alex resolved to give her flowers to Vera Ivanovna privately, out of sight of the rest of the class.
It took Alex a few weeks to determine that VIP lived nowhere near Lenin Prospect, the neighbourhood for the privileged where she herself lived. No, VIP lived a long subway ride from the centre in a rundown old building, a hive of shabby communal apartments.
On the fourth floor, among the many names scribbled in different hands on the door plate, Alex found the cherished name: Popova Vera Ivanovna. She hesitated. And as she wavered, she smelled the delicate fragrance of the bouquet of mimosa in her hand, then wiped the tip of her nose with her sleeve, in case any pollen had rubbed off on it from the tiny flowers. As she was about to lift her hand to press the doorbell button, the door suddenly opened and VIP stood before her in old slippers and a robe with a trash bucket in her hand. They stared at each other in surprise.
“What are you doing here, Bolt?”
Speech failing her, Alex held out the bouquet of fresh mimosa to her idol. A small congratulation card had been inserted in it.
“For me? But why?”
“It’s the 8th of March and I thought . . .”
“I know what day it is. But students usually bring their flowers to school,” VIP said, looking at Alex with curiosity. “And how did you get my address, anyway?”
“The music teacher gave it to me. I just wanted to thank you for everything you’ve done for me. Please take them.” Alex held the flowers out to VIP again. But she was in no hurry to take them.
Expulsion Page 21