Little Zinnobers

Chapter 7

A DARK VELVET ROSE

I suppose it is only now that I can fully appreciate the reckless courage of the official who first invented the unwieldy name: “Middle School Teaching a Range of Subjects in a Foreign Language.” No doubt he himself spoke no other language but Russian, so, for him, all other languages were in fact not ‘other’ but precisely foreign. Those spoken in other countries. Maybe he dreamt of visiting that other world, that world beyond the borders, beyond the limits, taking the First Moscow Festival of Youth as its blithely thought-up model. Or maybe always, for as long as he could remember, he had been dreaming of learning to speak another – any other – language, just as the quietest children secretly dream of becoming cosmonauts. He dreamt, but had no faith in his dream. Well, OK then, maybe not him, but someone else, someone like him, dressed differently, maybe, moving his lips in a manner never seen before, gulping sounds understood not by everyone, but only by those select few like himself. Or maybe his dear child arrived at the seven-year threshold4 and he took the risk of laying his own unfulfilled hopes on this child. But what range of subjects did he have in mind? Why was he not afraid to announce his dream in such a cumbersome fashion? Didn’t he know that – in a roundabout way – words come true? Who can say?

But this time he put all his energy into it. Personally, not delegating to anyone else, he unfurled the map, scrutinised his Oktobersky raion neighbourhood, and made his choice – right at the edge, almost in the water. Only one street separates the school from the River Neva, and well, that’s just Galley Street. Called it ‘Red,’ of course: old names are tantamount to foreign ones. On the other side – New Holland – an island behind a strong wall and poplars. Blockade bomb raids left a gap between the old houses. At the beginning of the sixties it became a stain on urban development: they filled the gash with the school. Once a year, on September the first, classes were lined up down below, around the perimeter of the schoolyard. Ten pairs of ‘a’ and ‘b.’ The form teachers beat down the noise, and almost six hundred pupils swelled the ranks for Maman’s entrance. She would appear on the balcony above in a long, lowcut velvet dress that reached down to the floor. Two men strode behind her, keeping a respectful half-step from those velvety shoulders. They were the heads of the English and Russian departments, now and forever. The head of English Language Studies, Boris Grigoryevich Katz, to the left, forty-fivish, a Jew and a diplomat, the embodiment of tact, as we witnessed once in his tears of love for us, and often in his restrained concern for the school, and once and once only in fear for himself. To Maman’s right, the head of Russian Language Studies, Sergei Ivanovich Belikov –forty-fivish, Russian, owner of a long auburn fringe he would toss from his forehead with an elegant, Yesenin-like gesture, who loved and spoilt us, and whose knowledge of Russian literature was only as broad as the school curriculum. In the far reaches of the balcony, a place was kept for the Secretary of the Party Committee. Or Dame Secretary, to be precise. Three came and went during my watch: one plump and soft, the two others scrawny but not tough.

And even further back, right against the brick wall, hung the school standard. Or waved, depending on the weather, with the guard of honour standing beside the pole. A velvet standard behind velvet shoulders. In some way, that standard was a relic of other times, times we had not caught. In and of itself, it would have been an ordinary and almost unnoticeable element of the school ritual. The low-cut dress, however, a relic from even more remote times, could not go unnoticed. What’s more, the standard’s recent past – precisely because it was unremarkable – was defeated by the dress’s remote past, although for us, standing way below the balconies, the dress served as more than a compelling symbol of far-off times, whose distance was underlined by the standard’s velvet. Doubled, duplicated and yet compromising itself, that velvet introduced a clear ambiguity into this ritual repeated year after year. To our young eyes, this ambiguity seemed fancifully incongruous, yet we sensed it could hide depths still unclear and, as such, premature.

I no longer hear the words of the speech gushing down from on high, repeating year after year. They were not even words at all, since even as they were being spoken, they were devoid of any meaning worthy of the full and undivided attention of six hundred pairs of ears. That is why, listening and not listening, the flock amused themselves on the quiet. A light estrangement, the result of our three-month summer break, meant we could throw sidelong glances at our neighbours – glances laden with promise. Maman probably did not notice the flippant rustling in our ranks. From on high, she could see the rather wide schoolyard planted with wilted little trees that bloomed for an hour with the little white and red flowers of our pinafores, shirts and ties. Ephemeral flowerbeds destined to disperse with the first school bell. Their brightness could not fail to gladden her teacherly, almost motherly, eyes. It was an autumnal garden, and she – a dark velvet rose – towered above it majestically and ambiguously, and her voice was sweet as honey.

From her very first day as head, Maman treasured the “school’s honour.” For her, this honour was not just a matter of overall academic prowess but also of how the school adhered to traditions. Some of these traditions had already been introduced by the previous head – a plain but authoritative woman who died in 1964. In other words, in our very first winter. Rumours that Palina Ivanovna was murdered by the ambulance crew filtered down even to us first years. It was said that the doctor mistook a heart attack for poisoning and pumped her stomach, and it killed her on the spot. Incidentally, nobody bothered to ask why the headmistress should suffer a heart attack. It was while Palina Ivanovna was head that a custom – unheard of at that time – was introduced. I am referring to the appraisal interview procedure for entering our school, as a result of which both our classes, ‘a’ and ‘b,’ were the first selected classes. Later, she introduced another strange custom, observed meticulously during Maman’s early years, too: half an hour before classes began, the headmistress herself and one of the heads would stand in the archway separating the vestibule from the long school corridor. Each pupil had to stop and make a light bow (for boys) or curtsey (girls), and could only proceed once he or she had received a gracious nod from both sides. This traditional bow was also expected of us when we ran into any adult. It was, however, not always without mishap. Once, in my second year, running down the stairs, I bumped into the whole trinity: Maman, flanked left and right. They were processing towards me and, trying to curtsey as I ran, I tumbled down the stairs head over heels, followed by three dumbfounded pairs of eyes. As I was picking myself up, Maman stared at me in dumb fright, rooted to the spot. This custom later dwindled to the habit of saying ‘hello’ to all adults, and it was funny to observe some hapless parent wandering along the never-ending school corridor as the crowd pouring towards him shouted greetings in chorus, and he nodded at them from side to side, flabbergasted, like a discombobulated van'ka-vstan'ka.5 Truth be told, on the whole, parents were not much liked in our school. They were met with exceptional politeness, of course, the teachers kept them in the loop as they say, but this loop lay beyond our hallowed ground; when it came to business, the gates would shut, as if someone proclaimed: “Be gone, non-believers!”

THRESHOLD

Now it is time for me to get down to business, to my tale of what actually happened to her, to us, to our world. To our little world, if you will. Don’t be deceived by my use of this epithet. I belonged to a world which commands my immutable respect, cancelling out my use of the epithet I used. This respect is linked with a quality our world embodied to the full, a quality the big world cannot boast of: integrity. Those belonging to the big world only know of integrity from hearsay, or from books, and maybe that is why they always seek to discredit it. I don’t have the strength to fight them.

Having briefly mentioned our little world’s integrity, I must also note that in no way did this mean uniformity. Our class was never a tightly knit unit. It was made up of three groups, clans or castes which co-existed without overlapping. Membership was determined firstly by the parents’ social standing, and secondly by our own individual talents and luck. The groups were spontaneous aggregates. Children of the intelligentsia in the highest, technical kids in the middle, and in the lowest, those whose social standing was irrelevant since everyone saw they were dolts and fools. Now I think that those in the higher group recognized one another through particular words and phrases drawn from the abstract conversations of their parents – conversations which had nothing to do with day to day work or domestic affairs. These particular expressions were like scraps of paper, their jagged contours matching as soon as they are brought side by side – or put together. A kind of pass. Or password. But there were no such conversations in our families – I mean in mine or in Ira Eisner’s; she was my closest friend.

For the sake of fairness, I don’t want to exaggerate the predetermined nature of our divisions. Yes, the groups did form in the lower forms, but right from the beginning, the barriers between them were not impenetrable. In other words, theoretically at least, it was possible to gain entry to a higher group, although there was no well-trodden path for such unlawful entry. Anything could happen. For instance, one girl whose birth right determined she belonged to the second group, immediately entered the first when her mother went to Yugoslavia and returned with cheap but unbelievably beautiful women’s boots and dresses. Her best friend rose through the ranks behind her because she was the same height; they were the tallest girls in the class.

Now, looking back, I must admit that I, too, had such a chance once, but I blew it. I had the best handwriting in the class, and, as it transpired much later, one of the girls in the highest group was rather in awe of it. Taken by my calligraphy, she attempted to lift me to her heights. This attempt was made in our first year, and coincided with the most important event in my life. Or, perhaps, this most important event actually became some kind of detonator for the explosion which never followed. You see, before then, I used to wear thick cotton stockings which hooked onto my belt by means of metal fasteners hung on rubber. The stockings were short, so bare legs and fasteners flashed from under my dress. That summer of 1967 my father went to Czechoslovakia on an assignment, and brought me back several pairs of nylon tights – blue, green, red, and sea-green. And one more dark blue pair for me to grow into. On the first of September, I arrived wearing these tights, and that clinched it. Before the month was out, Larissa Yurchenko came to me in the break with an entry question, the reply to which would have been obvious to any ‘higher’ girl, but which had me completely baffled. “What would you choose, a French fur coat or a sheepskin jacket?” I had no idea what a ‘sheepskin jacket’ was, so I mumbled miserably: “French fur coat.” And thus, I was decisively sifted out of the candidature. That year, any fool ‘insider’ knew you had to choose the sheepskin jacket.

These divisions, which had hardened by the sixth year, did not apply to copying homework, slipping answers in class, or taking others’ questions in tests. There were no star pupils in the higher group. Their attitude to studying was tainted by a gentry-style laziness, while the rest of us never allowed ourselves to let down our guard, hoping perhaps to compensate this social inadequacy with a pleb’s diligence. Our time was exam time, when the eyes of higher and lower alike begged us for help.