Fazil Iskander. Selected short fiction (tr.R.Daglish
Фазиль Искандер. Избранные рассказы (пер.на англ.Р.Дэглиша)
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Translated by Robert Daglish
Lyrical and humorous, deeply national but concerned with the human
condition at large, often about children but mainly for adults, Fazil'
Iskander's writing abounds, like his native Abkhazia, in colour and
contrasts.
It is merriment and toil that make the earth beautiful, Iskander writes
in one of his stories. These qualities are also typical of his characters,
most of them drawn from his fellow countrymen, ever a mixture of gallantry
and guile, humour and hard work.
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Something about myself
Let's just talk. Let's talk about things we don't have to talk about,
pleasant things. Let's talk about some of the amusing sides of human nature,
as embodied in people we know. There is nothing more enjoyable than
discussing certain odd habits of our acquaintances. Because, you see,
talking about them makes us aware of our own healthy normality. It implies
that we, too, could indulge in such idiosyncrasies if we liked, but we don't
like because we have no use for them. Or have we?
One of the rather amusing features of human nature is that each of us
tries to live up to an image imposed upon him by other people.
Now here is an example from my own experience.
When I was at school the whole class was one day given the task of
turning a patch of seaside wasteland into a place of cultured rest and
recreation. Strange though it may seem, we actually succeeded.
We planted out the patch with eucalyptus seedlings, using the cluster
method, which was an advanced method for those times. Admittedly, when there
were not many seedlings and too much wasteland left, we began to put only
one seedling in each hole, thus giving the new, progressive method and the
old method the chance to show their worth in free competition.
In a few years a beautiful grove of eucalyptus trees grew up on that
wasteland and it was quite impossible to tell where the clusters and where
the single seedlings had been. Then it was said that the single seedlings,
being in direct proximity to the clusters and envying them with a thoroughly
good sort of envy, had made an effort and caught up.
Be that as it may, when I come back to my hometown nowadays, I
sometimes take it easy in the shade of those now enormous trees and feel
like a sentimental patriarch. Eucalyptus grows very fast, so anyone who
wants to feel like a sentimental patriarch can plant a eucalyptus tree and
live to see its crown towering high above him, its leaves tinkling in the
breeze like the toys on a New Year tree.
But that's not the point. The point is that on that far-off day when we
were reclaiming the wasteland one of the boys drew attention to the way I
held the hand barrow we were using for carrying soil. The P. T. instructor
in charge of us also noticed the way I held the stretcher. Everyone noticed
the way I held the stretcher. Some pretext for amusement had to be found and
found it was. It turned out that I was holding the stretcher like an
Inveterate Idler.
This was the first crystal to form and it started a vigourous process
of crystallisation which I did all I could to assist, so as to become
finally crystallised in the preordained direction.
Now everything contributed to the building of my image. If I sat
through a mathematics test not troubling anyone and calmly waiting for my
neighbour to solve the problem everyone attributed this not to my stupidity
but to sheer idleness. Naturally I made no attempt to disillusion them. When
for Russian composition I would write something straight out of my head
without looking anything up in textbooks and cribs, this was taken as even
more convincing proof of my incorrigible idleness.
In order to preserve my image I deliberately neglected my duties as
monitor. Everyone soon became so used to this that when any other member of
the form forgot to perform his monitorial duties, the teacher, with the
whole form voicing its approval in the background, would make me wipe the
blackboard or carry the physics apparatus into the room.
Further development of my image compelled me to give up homework. But
to maintain the suspense of the situation I had to show reasonable results
in my schoolwork. So every day, as soon as instruction in the humanitarian
subjects began, I would lean forward on my desk and pretend to be dozing. If
the teacher protested, I would say I was ill but did not want to miss the
lesson, so as not to get left behind. In this reclining attitude I would
listen attentively to what the teacher was saying without being diverted by
any of the usual pranks, and try to remember everything he told us. After a
lesson on any new material, if there was still some time left, I would
volunteer to answer questions in advance for the next lesson.
The teachers liked this because it flattered their pedagogical vanity.
It meant that they could explain their subject so well and so clearly that
the pupils were able to take it all in without even referring to the
textbooks.
The teacher would put down a good mark for me in the register, the bell
would ring and everyone would be satisfied. And nobody but I ever realised
that the information I had just memorised was about to romp out of my head
just as the bar romps out of the hands of the weight lifter the moment he
hears the umpire's approving "Up!"
To be perfectly accurate, I had better add that sometimes, when
reclining on my desk pretending to doze, I would actually fall into a doze,
though I could still hear the voice of the teacher. Much later on I
discovered that some people use the same, or almost the same, method for
learning languages. I believe it would not appear too immodest if I were to
say that I am the inventor of this method. I make no mention of the
occasions when I actually fell asleep because they were rare.
After a while rumours concerning this Inveterate Idler reached the ears
of our headmaster and for some reason he decided that it was I who had taken
the telescope that had disappeared six months ago from the geography room. I
don't know why he drew this conclusion. Possibly he reasoned that the very
idea of even a visual reduction of distance would appeal most of all to a
victim of sloth. I cannot think of any other explanation. Luckily, the
telescope was recovered soon afterwards, but from then on people kept an eye
on me, as if I might get up to some trick at any moment.
It soon turned out, however, that I had no such intentions, and that,
on the contrary, I was a very obedient and conscientious slacker. What was
more, slacker though I was, I seemed to be getting quite decent results.
Then they decided to apply to me a method of concentrated education
that was fashionable in those years. The essence of this method was that all
the teachers in the school would suddenly concentrate on one backward pupil
and, taking advantage of his confusion, turn him into a shining example of
scholastic attainment.
It was assumed that other backward pupils, envying him with a
thoroughly Good Envy, would make an effort to rise to his level. Just like
the singly planted eucalyptus seedlings.
The effect of the method depended on the suddenness of the mass attack.
Otherwise the pupil might succeed in slipping out of range or actually
discredit the method itself.
As a rule the experiment achieved its purpose. Before the hurly-burly
caused by the mass attack could disperse, the reformed pupil would take his
place with the best in the class, impudently wearing the smile of a
despoiled virgin.
When this happened, the teachers, envying one another with perhaps not
quite such a Good Envy, would zealously follow his progress in their
markbook, and, of course, each teacher would try to ensure that the
victorious upward curve of scholastic attainment was not broken within the
limits of his subject.
Well, either they piled into me too enthusiastically, or else they
forgot what my own fairly respectable level had been before they started but
when they began to analyse the results of their experiment it turned out
that they had trained me up to the level of a potential medal-winner.
"You could pull off a silver," my class-mistress announced rather
dazedly.
The potential medal-winners were a small ambitious caste of
untouchables. Even the teachers were somewhat afraid of them. It would be
their duty to defend the honour of the school, and to damage the reputation
of a potential medal-winner was equivalent to threatening the honour of the
school. Every potential medal-winner had at some time by his own efforts
achieved distinction in one of the basic subjects and had then been coached
to the necessary degree of perfection in all the rest.
So, with my school diploma sewn into my jacket pocket together with my
money I got into a train and set off for Moscow. At that time the train
journey from Abkhazia to Moscow took three days. I had plenty of time to
think things over, and of all the possible variants for my future education
I chose the philosophical faculty of the university. My choice may have been
decided by the following circumstance.
About two years before this I had exchanged some books with a friend of
mine. I had given him Conan Doyle's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and
he had given me an odd volume of Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics. I had
already been told that Hegel was simultaneously both a philosopher and a
genius and that, in those far-off years, was a strong enough recommendation
for me.
Since I had not yet heard that Hegel was a difficult author to read, I
understood nearly everything I read. If I came across a paragraph with long,
incomprehensible words, I simply skipped it because the meaning was clear
enough without it. Later on, when studying at the institute, I learned that
besides their rational kernel the works of Hegel contained quite a lot of
idealistic husk. I guessed that just those paragraphs I had skipped were the
husk. My way of reading him had been to open the book at some verse
quotation from Schiller or Goethe, and then read round it, trying to keep as
near to the quotation as possible, like a camel on the edge of an oasis.
Some of Hegel's thoughts surprised me by their high probability of truth.
For instance, he called the fable a servile genre, which sounded true
enough, and I made a point of remembering this so as to avoid that genre in
the future.
Eventually, for some unknown reason I gave up reading that volume.
Perhaps I had used up all the quotations or perhaps it was something else. I
decided that I had far too much time ahead of me and that one day I would
read all the volumes in their proper order. But I still haven't started on
them.
It may well be that this random reading of mine and also a certain lack
of clarity in the actions of mankind on the road to a bright future were
responsible for my choice of the philosophical faculty.
In Moscow, after certain adventures that I shall not relate because I
need them as plots for my stories, I entered not the university but the
Library Institute. When I had been studying there for three years, it dawned
on me that it would be more interesting and more profitable to write one's
own books than deal with other people's, and so I moved to the Literary
Institute, where they teach you how to write.
Since then I have been writing, although, as I now realise, my true
vocation is inventing. In recent years I have felt that people are beginning
to impose on me the role of humourist and involuntarily somehow I am trying
to live up to this imposed image.
No sooner do I make a start on something serious than I see before me
the disappointed face of a reader waiting for me to have done with the
official part, so to speak, and get on with something funny. This means that
I have to change horses in midstream and pretend that I only started by
talking seriously to make it seem all the funnier later on.
Every day, except for the days when I do something else, I shut myself
up in my room, put a sheet of paper into my voracious little "Kolibri" and
write, or pretend to be writing.
Usually my typewriter gives a few desultory taps and then lapses into a
long silence. My family try to look as if they are creating conditions for
my work and I try to look as if I am working. As a matter of fact, while
sitting over my typewriter I am actually inventing something and at the same
time listening for the telephone in the next room so that I can be the first
to run and answer it.
The reason for this is that my daughter is also listening for the
telephone to ring and, if she gets there first, she will cut off the caller
with a blow of her little fist. She thinks this is a kind of game, and she
is not altogether wrong.
Of all my numerous inventions I will mention here only two. An
instrument for stimulating spiritual activity (a kind of electromassage for
the soul), and also the method of "Mother-in-Law Isolation by Shock", based
entirely on Pavlov's doctrine of conditioned and unconditioned reflexes.
The instrument for stimulating spiritual activity outwardly resembles
the conventional electric shaver. The difficulty of using it lies in
determining the exact location of a given person's soul. Apparently the
whereabouts of a man's soul in the organism depends on his character and
inclinations. It may be located in the stomach, in the gall bladder, in the
blind gut and, of course, in the heel. This last fact was known to the
ancient Greeks. Hence the expression "heel of Achilles". The heel being the
part of the body furthest removed from the brain makes communication very
difficult between these two vital internal organs of the human body, that
is, between the soul and the brain, and this in the course of time leads to
an intellectual disease known as Chronic Mental Flatfootedness.
Regrettably, my instrument has not been widely adopted because the
voltages of the systems in general use are not suitable for it.
The method of "Mother-in Law Isolation by Shock" has, on the contrary,
become perhaps a little too widespread thanks to its exceptional simplicity
and practical effectiveness.
To apply this method you must, of course, have a mother-in-law and also
a child. If you have both, there can be no doubt that the upbringing and
particularly the feeding of the child will be in the hands of your
mother-in-law. And since she will put all the overflowing energy of her love
into the process, your child will quickly develop a firm dislike of food.
So, one morning when your mother-in-law seats herself formidably beside
your child and starts plying him (or her) with rice pudding or something of
the kind, you quietly sit down on the other side of the table and watch.
From time to time, in an apparent fit of absent-mindedness you imitate the
actions of your child, opening your mouth when he does and swallowing in
such a way as to emphasise the futility of the whole operation.
Your child will soon begin to notice this. Though unable to grasp their
full meaning, he will feel that your actions are directed against the common
tyrant. He (or she) will look now at you, now at the tyrant. And if your
mother-in-law keeps a stiff upper lip and pretends not to notice anything,
he will call her attention to your behaviour in no uncertain manner.
Your mother-in-law then becomes nervous and starts giving you looks in
which a Freudian hatred is as yet disguised under a mask of pedagogical
reproach. To this you respond with a sad glance and an expression of
complete submission, and also a shrug of the shoulders as if to indicate
that you are not asking for anything, you are just looking, that's all. The
atmosphere becomes tense.
Eventually, after the usual mythological threats or open blackmail,
when the most hated spoonful of all is being thrust down the child's throat,
you will say in a very quiet, uncertain voice:
"If she (or he) doesn't want it, can I finish it?"
Petrified with indignation, your mother-in-law glares at you with the
expression of Tsar Peter looking at his traitor son in the famous painting
by N. N. Ghe. But there is still time for her to stage a come-back, and you
must be ready to prevent this.
"No, only if she doesn't want it," you say, thus explaining that there
is no need for wrath. "She can eat it if she wants it."
At this point your mother-in-law faints. You pick her up quickly, and
carefully--I stress the carefully because some people are rather
rough--carry her to bed. Now you may calmly go about your own affairs until
dinner time.
I must admit that lately I have begun to repent of discovering and
popularising this method. Starkly before me rises the problem of moral
responsibility for letting loose an immature idea among the masses. The
indiscriminate repudiation of mothers-in-law can be attributed only to a
non-historical approach to the whole problem. For do not mothers in-law in
the present period of history play a most progressive role in family life?
As a matter of fact, our mother-in-law is our real wife. It is she who
cooks our meals, she who looks after the house, she who brings up our
children and simultaneously teaches us how to live our lives. And as if this
were not enough, she gives us her own daughter to provide us with all the
honey-sweet pleasures of love. Who is more noble or more self-sacrificing
than she? She is surely our true wife or, at least, the senior wife in our
small but close-knit harem.
Of my other minor discoveries I feel I can mention one. It concerns
humour. I have a number of valuable observations on this subject. I believe
that to possess a good sense of humour one must reach a state of extreme
pessimism, look down into those awful depths, convince oneself that there is
nothing there either, and make one's way quietly back again. Real humour is
the trail we leave on the way back from the abyss.
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A time of lucky finds
It was a summer evening and my uncle had guests. When they ran out of
wine, I was sent to the nearest shop for some more, which, as I now realise,
was not altogether the best thing for my upbringing. The errand, it is true,
had first been offered to my brother but he had stubbornly refused knowing
that no one in the next few hours would be likely to punish him for
refusing, and that before tomorrow came he would surely get up to some trick
which he would have to answer for anyway.
So off I went, running barefoot down the warm, unpaved street, bottle
in one hand, money in the other. I clearly remember the quite unusual
feeling of elation that came over me. It could not have been inspired by
anticipation of my forthcoming purchase because in those days I showed no
particular interest in such matters. Even now my interest is moderate
enough.
After all, what is the beauty of wine? Only its power to take the edge
out of our personal worries when we drink with friends, and fortify what we
already have in common. And even if the only thing we have in common is some
worry or trouble, then wine, like art, transforming grief, soothes us and
gives us the strength to go on living and hoping. We experience a renewed
joy in discovering one another, we feel we are all human beings and
together.
To drink with any other aim in view is simply illiterate. Solitary
boozing I would compare with smuggling or some kind of perversion. He who
drinks alone clinks glasses with the devil.
Well, as I was saying, on my way to the shop I was seized by a strange
feeling of excitement. All the time, as I ran, I kept my eyes on the ground,
and now and then I seemed to see a wad of banknotes lying there. It would
pop up in front of me and I would actually stop to make sure whether it was
there or not. I realised I was imagining things but the vision was so real
that I could not help stopping. Having made sure there was no money on the
ground, I only became even more elatedly convinced that I was just about to
find some, and on I flew.
I bounded up the wooden steps of the shop, which stood on a kind of
platform, and thrust the money and the bottle into the shopkeeper's hands.
While he was fetching the wine, I took one last look down, and there I
actually did see a wad of paper money wrapped in a pre-war thirty-ruble
note.
I picked it up, grabbed the bottle and dashed off home, half-dead with
fear and joy.
"I've found some money!" I shouted, running into the room. Our guests
jumped nervously, some of them even resentfully, to their feet. A hubbub
arose. There turned out to be more than a hundred rubles in the packet.
"I'll go as well!" my brother cried, fired belatedly by my success.
"Get going then!" Uncle Yura, a lorry-driver, shouted. "I was the one
who suggested a drink. I'm always lucky over picking things up."
"Particularly your elbow," our imperturbable Auntie Sonya put in slyly.
"Back in the old days, in Labinsk..." Uncle Pasha began. He was always
telling us about his ulcer or about the wonderful life they used to lead in
the Kuban country in the old days. Either he would start off about life on
the Kuban and finish with his ulcer, or the other way round. But Uncle Yura
shouted him down.
"It was my suggestion! I ought to get a cut!" he clamoured. Once he
started there was no stopping him.
"If it was, I didn't hear it," Uncle Pasha retorted gruffly.
"You said yourself a White Cossack slashed your ear with his sabre!"
"That was my left ear and you're sitting on my right," said Uncle
Pasha, delighted to have outwitted Uncle Yura, and with a well-practised
movement of his huge, workman's hand folded his left ear forward. Just above
it there was a cleft large enough to hold a walnut. Everyone respectfully
examined the scar left by the Cossack sabre.
"Yes, it seems only yesterday. We was stationed at Tikhoretsky..."
Uncle Pasha resumed, trying to profit by the general attention, but Uncle
Yura again interrupted him.
"If you don't believe me, let the boy say it himself." Whereupon
everyone looked at me.
In those days I was fond of Uncle Yura, and of everyone else at the
table. I wanted them all to enjoy my success, to feel they had all had a
part in it without any advantage for anyone.
"It was everybody's suggestion," I proclaimed spiritedly.
"I'm not saying it wasn't everybody's suggestion, but who suggested it
first?" Uncle Yura bawled, but his voice was drowned in a joyful burst of
clapping, by which everyone sought to show that Uncle Yura was much too fond
of stealing the limelight.
"Oh, Allah," said Uncle Alikhan, who was the mildest and most peaceable
of men because his job was selling honey-coated almonds, "the boy has found
money and they make all this noise. Wouldn't it be better to drink his
health?"
This caused an even greater hubbub because all the menfolk got up and
wanted to drink my health at once.
"I always knew he'd make a man...."
"May this little glass...."
"Our young people have an open road before them...."
"Here's wishing him a happy childhood...."
"And what a road it is! A first-class highway!"
"For this life," Uncle Fima was the last to proclaim, "we fought like
lions, and the lion's share of us was left lying on the battlefield."
"He'll be a learned man, like you," my aunt interposed, to calm him
down.
"Even more learned," Uncle Fima cried and, having elevated me to this
unprecedented height, he drained his glass. Uncle Fima was the most educated
man in our street and therefore always the first to feel the effect of
drink.
I was jubilant. I wanted to show how fond I was of everyone I wanted to
give them my word of honour as a Young Pioneer that I would find for them,
one and all, everything they had ever lost in life. I may not have thought
in exactly those words, but that was the gist of it. However, I had no time
to voice my thoughts, because mother came in and, deliberately ignoring the
general merriment, plucked me out of the room like a radish out of a
vegetable bed.
She didn't like my attending these festive gatherings at the best of
times, added to which she was offended that I should have run past my own
home with the money I had found.
"You'll be like your father, always doing your best for other people,"
she said as we went down the steps.
"I'll do my best for everyone," I replied.
"It doesn't work out like that," she said sadly, taken up with some
thought of her own.
At that moment we met my brother returning from his search. His face
showed that you can't draw the winning ticket twice over.
"Did you let them see all the money?" he asked as he went by.
"Yes," I replied proudly.
"More fool you," he snapped, and ran away.
None of these minor setbacks, however, could damp the new flame that
burned within me. Already I had decided that nothing would ever go wrong or
get lost in our house any more. If I could find so much money without even
trying, what should I find when I was really on the look-out? The world was
full of treasures, above and below ground; all you had to do was keep your
eyes open and not be too lazy to pick them up.
The next morning, with the money I had found my family bought me a fine
sailor's jacket with an anchor on the sleeve, which I was to wear for many
years to come, and before the day was out the news of my find had spread
round our yard and far beyond its borders. People dropped in to congratulate
us and learn the details of this joyful event. The women eyed me with a
housewife's curiosity, and their glances showed that they would not have
minded adopting me as their own son or, at least, borrowing me for a while.
I told the story of my discovery dozens of times, not forgetting to
mention the sense of anticipation that had preceded it.
"I felt it was going to happen," I would say. "I kept looking at the
ground and saw money lying there."
"Do you feel that now?"
"No, not now," I confessed honestly.
It really was a minor miracle. Now my theory is that the money had been
dropped by some profiteering driver, one of the kind who often stopped at
that shop for a quick drink. When he got on the road again, he must have
realised his loss, and his anxious signals had been correctly decoded by my
excited brain.
That very same day a woman came round from next door and congratulated
my mother, then said she had lost one of her hens.
"Well, what do you expect me to do?" my mother asked severely.
"Ask your son to look for it," said the woman.
"Oh, go along, for goodness sake," mother replied. "The boy found some
money for once and now we shall never have any peace."
They were talking in the corridor and I could hear them through the
door. Overcome by impatience, I opened it.
"I'll find your hen," I said, peeping out cheerfully from behind
mother's back. A day or two before this my ball had rolled into our
neighbour's cellar. When I went to fetch it I had noticed a hen there and,
since no one in our yard had complained of losing a hen, I now realised that
this must be hers. "I feel it's in the cellar next door," I said after a
moment's thought.
"There's no hen down there," came the unexpected retort from the owner
of the cellar. She had been listening to our conversation while hanging out
her washing in the yard.
"It must be," I said.
"No need to go rummaging in there, knocking down the firewood. You'll
only start a fire or something," she blustered.
I took a box of matches and dashed over to the cellar. The door was
locked but there was a hole in the wall on the other side, through which I
crawled.
It was dark inside except for a faint glimmer of light from the hole,
and I had to bend down all the time.
"What's he doing in there?" came a voice from outside.
"Looking for treasure," Sonka, my scatter-brained girlfriend of those
days, replied. "He's found a million."
Striking matches carefully and peering round, I reached the spot where
I had seen the hen before, and there she was again. She had half risen and
was craning her neck, blinking dazedly in my direction. I realised she must
be sitting on some eggs. Townbred fowls usually find a hidden nook to lay
their eggs. It was not difficult to catch her in the darkness. I groped in
the nest she had made for herself with a few wisps of hay, and put the warm
eggs into my pockets. Then I made my way back, not lighting any more matches
because I was now heading for the daylight.
At the sight of the hen, its mistress started clucking with joy, just
like her bird.
"That's not all," I said as I handed it over.
"What else is there?" she asked.
"Here you are," I replied, and started taking the eggs out of my
pockets. For some reason the hen got annoyed at the sight of the eggs,
though I had made no secret of taking them from the cellar. Perhaps she
hadn't noticed what I was doing in the dark. Her mistress put the eggs in
her apron and, tucking the hen under her arm, walked out of the yard.
"Come and see us when the figs are ripe," she shouted from the gate.
From then on I was always on the look-out and often made some quite
unexpected discoveries, with the result that I became known as a kind of
domestic bloodhound. I remember a rather eccentric relative of ours who had
lost his goat and wanted to take me off to his village, so that I could make
a thorough search for it. I was sure of finding the goat, but mother
wouldn't let me go because she was afraid I might get lost in the woods
myself.
I found many other things because I was always searching and because
everyone believed in my powers of detection. At home I would find chips of
wood baked in with the bread, needles left sticking in cushions by our
absent-minded womenfolk, old tax receipts and bonds of the new state loan.
One of our neighbours often lost her spectacles and would call me in to
look for them. I soon found them, if she had not had time to sweep them out
of the room with the litter. But even then I would retrieve them from the
rubbish bin because they were the one thing the cats prowling round it never
touched. But soon she began to lose her spectacles too often and in the end
I advised her to buy a spare pair so that, having lost one pair, she could
look for it with the other. She followed my advice and for a time all went
well, but then she started losing the spare pair, too, so I had twice as
much work to do and was compelled to keep the spare pair hidden in
readiness.
I enjoyed presenting the people around me with things they had lost. I
worked out my own system of search, based on the principle of first seeking
the lost object in the place where it had been, and then in places where it
had not been and never could have been. Much later in life I learned that
this is called the dialectical unity of opposites.
If the people around me stopped losing things I sometimes had to
contrive my discoveries artificially.
In the evenings I would patrol the yard like a warden and hide things
that had been left lying about. Often it was some washing hanging forgotten
on the line. I would toss it up into the branches of a tree and the next
day, when appealed to for help, after a certain amount of thinking and
asking questions about what had been hanging where, as though I were solving
an equation based on the speed and direction of the wind, I would point out
the lost linen to the astonished housewives and recover it from the tree
myself. Of course, I was not so silly as to repeat this trick too often.
Besides, there were far more real losses requiring my attention.
In all this time only one of my finds failed to please its owner. It
happened like this.
There was a girl living in our yard who had recently come of age. Her
name was Lyuba. Nearly all day long she would sit at the window and smile
into the street, arranging her hair this way and that with a little gilded
hair-comb, which I at the time mistakenly took for a gold one. At her elbow
stood a gramophone with its horn turned towards the street, almost always
playing one and the same tune:
Lyuba, Lyuba, Lyuba, my love....
The gramophone was like the looking-glass in Pushkin's fairy-tale; it
talked all the time of its mistress. I was sure of this anyway, and so,
judging by Lyuba's smiling face, was she.
One day that summer, in the rather overgrown little garden by our house
I found Lyuba's comb lying in the grass. I was sure it was her comb because
I had never seen another like it. The same evening I paced about the yard,
waiting for sounds of panic and for someone to come out and ask me to
conduct a search. But Lyuba was not to be seen and there was no sign of
alarm. The next morning I was even more surprised to find no messenger at my
bedside. I could only conclude that someone else must have lost the golden
comb, but I had to make sure that Lyuba's was still in its place. As luck
would have it, she stayed away from the window all day and appeared only in
the evening. And now the gramophone was playing quite a different tune.
I didn't know what song it was but I understood that the gramophone was
no longer talking about her. It was a sad song and, when Lyuba turned her
back to the window, I saw that there was no comb in her hair and realised
that she and the gramophone together were mourning its loss.
Her mother and father were standing at another window leaning
comfortably on the sill.
"Lyuba," I asked, when the song was over, "you haven't lost something,
have you?"
"No," she said with a start of fright, and touched her hair in the very
place where the comb had been before. And for some reason, she blushed so
violently that I could see she knew what I was talking about. The only thing
I didn't know was why she was concealing her loss.
"Didn't you lose this?" I said, and with the air of a conjurer who had
grown rather tired of being gaped at by everyone I produced the golden comb
from my pocket.
"Nasty little spy," she shouted quite unexpectedly and, snatching the
comb away from me, ran into the room. This was a quite meaningless and
foolish insult.
"Silly fool!" I shouted through the window, trying to pursue her with
my voice. "You have to read books to know what a spy is."
I turned to go away but her father called me over. Now he was at the
window alone, Lyuba's mother having run after her daughter into the room.
"What's this all about?" he asked, leaning out of the window.
"She lost her comb herself in the garden, and now she's cross about
it," I said, and took myself off, still not realising what it was all about.
That evening Lyuba got into hot water.
Later on an air force man appeared in their house, and a new record
called "Dear Hometown" began to play.
A week later the air force man left and took Lyuba with him and now her
mother would sit sadly at the window with the gramophone whimpering like a
big faithful dog for its mistress, "Lyuba, Lyuba, my love...."
I continued my quest, venturing further and further into unexplored
territory.
It was particularly rewarding to search the beach after a storm. At
various times I found there a sailor's belt with a buckle, a buckle without
a belt, live cartridges dating from the time of the civil war, sea shells of
all shapes and sizes, and even a dead dolphin. One day I discovered a bottle
tossed up by a storm, but for some reason there was no message in it and I
took it back to the shop.
Quite near town, on the bank of the River Kelasuri I found a whole
creek of gold-bearing sand and spent all day standing knee-deep in the cold
paleblue water, panning for gold. I would scoop up a double handful of sand
and water, then tilt my cupped hands and watch the water run away. Little
golden sparks flashed in my palms, the water tickled my toes, big blobs of
sunlight quivered on the crystal clear bottom of the creek, and I had never
been happier in my whole life.
Later I was told that this was not gold but mica, but the feel of that
cold mountain water, the hot sun, the clear bottom of the creek and the
quiet happiness of the prospector is with me still. One day I made yet
another discovery that I want to describe in more detail.
We used to play a game of seeing who could dive deepest. We would start
at a depth of about two meters and go deeper and deeper until our breath was
spent.
On the day I am speaking of another boy and I were competing in this
way on the Dogs' Beach. The beach still has this name, either because it is
strictly forbidden to let a dog bathe there, or because that is exactly what
people do there with their dogs. Well, anyway, I made my last dive, reached
the bottom, tried to scoop a handful of sand and nearly bumped my nose on a
big square slab, on which I glimpsed what looked like a picture of two
people.
"Ancient stone with a picture on it!" I shouted wildly as I reached the
surface.
"You're kidding," the other boy said, swimming over to me and looking
into my eyes.
"Word of honour!" I insisted. "It's a huge slab with prehistoric
figures on it."
We began diving in turns and nearly every time we saw in the dim
submarine light that white slab with its two blurred figures. Then we dived
together and tried to move it, but it wouldn't budge an inch.
Eventually the cold drove us out of the water, but not before I had
taken careful note of the place where we had been diving. It was exactly
halfway between a buoy and an old pile sticking up out of the sea.
School began a few days later and I told our form-master about my
discovery. He used to take us for geography and history. He was a powerfully
built man with withered legs. A Hercules on crutches. His whole presence
breathed mental vigour and spiritual integrity. In anger he was terrible. We
loved him not only because he had such an interesting way of telling us
about everything, but also because he treated us seriously, without that
casual air of condescension in which youth always detects indifference.
"It must be an ancient Greek stella," he said, after listening
attentively to my story. "That's a splendid discovery."
It was decided that we should go down to the beach after school and, if
possible, lift the stone out of the water. "A stella," I kept repeating to
myself with delight, and the rest of the day's lessons passed in joyful
anticipation of the expedition.
So off we went down to the sea. Our P.T. instructor was sent with us as
labour power. He hadn't wanted to go at first but the headmaster had managed
to talk him into it. There was no one in the school that the P.T. instructor
was afraid of because, as he often told us himself, he could take a job as a
boxing coach any day. We believed that he could knock out the whole
pedagogical council at one blow. Perhaps this was why his face always wore a
somewhat contemptuous expression, which seemed to be aimed at everything
that was done at school, as though he lived in expectation of the day when
his one fatal blow would have to be delivered.
If anyone disobeyed him during a P.T. lesson, he could administer a
mighty finger flick on the forehead, equal in impact to a jump from the
sports ground wall on to the well-trodden school yard. This we all knew from
experience.
We undressed and charged pell-mell into the sea. Only our form-master
was left on the beach. He stood there leaning on his crutches in his
immaculate white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and waited.
There had been a storm the day before and I was afraid the water would
be hazy but it was just as clear and still as before.
Reaching the spot first, I dived to the bottom and saw nothing. This
didn't worry me much because I might not have got my bearings quite right. I
plunged again, and again saw nothing. All round me the whole form was
snorting, squealing and splashing. Most of them were simply playing about,
but some must have been diving to the bottom because they brought up
handfuls of sand and threw them at each other. No one reported sighting any
stone. I swam over to the buoy to see whether it had come adrift, but it was
still firmly anchored in its place.
Soon the P.T. instructor appeared on the scene. He had been slightly
delayed by the need to put on bathing trunks.
"Well, where's the statue?" he asked, puffing as if the water was too
hot for him.
"It should be here," I said, pointing.
He took a deep breath and, executing a powerful somersault, shot into
the depths like a torpedo. He could certainly swim and dive, you had to give
him that. He stayed under for a long time and at last came up, as if
propelled by an underwater explosion.
"You've made the bottom all muddy," he said, snorting loudly and
shaking his head. "Now then, you young skeletons, off you go from here!" he
bawled and, striking the water with the flat of his hand, sent a great jet
of water at the other boys.
"You're not making this up, are you?" he asked me severely, still
puffing and blowing as if the water was too hot for him.
"Do you think I'm crazy?" I said.
"How should I know?" he replied, surveying the surface of the water as
though seeking a suitable hole to dive through. At last he found one and,
having taken a deep breath, plunged again.
This time he reappeared with a chunk of rusty iron from the pile.
"Is this it?" he asked, eyes bulging from the strain.
"Do you think I'm crazy?" I said. "I saw a stone slab with people on
it."
"How should I know?" he repeated and, tossing away the chunk of iron,
made yet another plunge.
Left to myself, I began to think it was time to make for the beach, but
anticipation of the shame I should endure in front of my form-master was
stronger than fear. After all, I had seen it here. It couldn't have floated
away!
This time the P.T. instructor came to the surface, spluttering with
fright.
"What's happened?" I asked, frightened myself, thinking he had been
stung by a sea-horse or something.
"What happened! I forgot to take a deep breath--that's what," he
snorted, mimicking me wrathfully.
"So you forgot and I'm to blame," I said, offended by his tone.
The P.T. instructor was about to retort but before he could do so a
girl's voice said, "What are you looking for?"
I glanced round. A strange girl was swimming cautiously towards us.
"Yesterday," the P.T. instructor began crossly, but he soon melted when
he turned his head. "Well, an ancient Greek statue actually... Perhaps you'd
like to dive with us?"
"I don't know how to dive," she said with a silly smile, as though
inviting him to teach her. Her hair was tied up in a red scarf. The P.T.
instructor gazed at this scarf in silent admiration, as if trying to puzzle
out where she had got it.
"And where are you from yourself?" he asked irrelevantly, having
apparently established where the headscarf had come from.
"From Moscow. Why?" the girl replied, and glanced towards the shore,
striving to make up her mind whether it was dangerous to talk to strange men
at such a depth.
"You're in luck," the P.T. instructor said. "I'll teach you how to
dive."
This time she smiled more boldly. "No, I'd rather watch you."
"Well, if I don't come up again you can consider yourself responsible,"
he said, intercepting her smile with a smile of his own that he enlarged to
positively brazen dimensions.
He did a particularly impressive somersault and plummeted into the
depths. I realised that now he had started gallivanting he wouldn't have any
more time for my stone.
"Did you really see a statue?" the girl asked and, lifting her hand out
of the water, tucked a straying lock of hair under the scarf with her little
finger, which in her foolishness she took to be less wet than the others.
"Not a statue but a stella," I corrected her, watching her shameless
attempts to pretty herself up for the P.T. instructor.
"What is that?" she asked, calmly continuing her efforts.
I decided to take action before the P.T. instructor came up again.
"Don't interfere," I said. "Isn't the sea big enough for you? Go and
swim somewhere else."
"Don't be rude, boy," she said haughtily, as though speaking to me from
an upstairs window of her own house. How quick they were to sense which way
the wind was blowing! She knew the P.T. instructor would appear sooner or
later and take her side.
He surfaced noisily, like a dancer bursting into a ring of onlookers.
He had been a very long time under water but it had been a wasted dive,
because he had done it not for us but for her.
"Well, did you see it?" she asked him, as though she had been with him
all along, and even swam a little closer to him.
"They're just a lot of day-dreamers!" he said, when he had got his
breath back. This was his pet name for anyone he considered a weakling or
good-for-nothing. "Let's have a swim instead."
"All right, but not too far," she consented, perhaps just to spite me.
"What about the stone?" I said, mournfully reminding him of duty.
"You'll get such a clump in a minute you'll be lying under that stone
of yours," he explained calmly, and they swam away, his dark head with its
broad sunburnt neck bobbing beside her red kerchief.
I looked at the beach. Many of the other boys were already lying on the
sand, warming themselves. Our form-master was still there, leaning on his
crutches, waiting for me to find the stone. Had I not seen my friend only
the day before, I would have decided the whole thing had been just a dream.
I dived another ten times or so, combing the bottom all the way from
the pile to the buoy. But the wretched stone had vanished. Meanwhile our
form-master had called me several times but as I could not hear him very
well I pretended not to have heard him at all. I felt too ashamed to come
out of the water. I didn't know what I should say to him.
I was very tired, cold and had swallowed a lot of sea-water. It was
becoming harder and harder to dive and I no longer went right to the bottom
but merely ducked below the surface to avoid being seen. Many of the other
boys had dressed by now and some had gone home, but my form-master still
stood there waiting.
The P.T. instructor and the girl had gone ashore. He had carried his
clothes over to her place and they were sitting together, talking and
throwing pebbles into the sea.
I was hoping they would all go away soon and let me get out of the
water. But my form-master was still there, so I went on diving.
The P.T. instructor had now tied the girl's scarf round his own head.
While I was wondering why he had done this, he suddenly did a hand-stand and
she started timing him with his watch. He stood on his hands for a long time
and actually talked to her in this position, which she, of course, found
very amusing.
I admired him mournfully for a moment, and just then my form-master
shouted to me very loudly and startled me into looking at him. Our eyes met
and now there was nothing I could do but swim ashore.
"You must be frozen," he shouted, when I swam nearer.
"You don't believe me, do you?" I said through chattering teeth, and
crawled out of the water.
"Why shouldn't I believe you?" he said severely, leaning forward and
gripping his crutches tightly with his gladiator's hands. "But you've been
bathing far too long. Lie down at once!"
"There was a boy with me," I said in the whining voice of the failure.
"I'll point him out to you tomorrow."
"Lie down!" he commanded and took a step towards me. But I stood my
ground because I felt it would be hard enough for me to argue with them
standing, let alone lying down.
"Perhaps that boy has pulled it out already?" one of our lads asked.
That was a tempting suggestion. I looked at my form-master and realised from
his glance that he was expecting only the truth, and that what I was going
to say would be the truth, and so I just couldn't lie. I was too proud of
the trust he had placed in me.
"No," I said, regretting, as always in such cases, that I was not
lying, "I saw him yesterday and he would have told me."
"Perhaps a fish found it and carried it away," the same lad added,
hopping about with his head on one side to get the water out of his ear.
That was the first jibe and I knew there were more to come, but our
form-master put a stop to all that with a glance, and said, "If I didn't
believe you I should never have come here in the first place." He looked
thoughtfully at the sea and added, "It must have been dragged down into the
sand or carried away by the storm."
But fifteen years later the stella was found, not very far from the
spot where I had seen it. And the person who found it, incidentally, was my
friend's brother. So I was in on that too.
The experts say it is a rare and valuable work of art--a stella with a
gentle and sorrowful bas-relief that had once marked a grave.
I remember our form-master with affection and pride, his thick curly
hair and fine aquiline features, the face of a Greek god, a god with
crippled legs.
Our seas have no tides, but the land of childhood is like a beach, wet
and mysterious after the tide has gone out, where one may find the most
unexpected things.
I was always out there searching and perhaps it made me a little
absent-minded. Later on, when I grew up, that is, when I had something to
lose, I realised that all the lucky finds of childhood are the secret loans
granted to us by fate, which afterwards, as adults, we must redeem. And
justly so.
And another thing I came to understand was that everything that is lost
may be found--even love, even youth. The one thing that can never be found
again is a lost conscience.
But even that is not so sad a thought as it may appear if one remembers
that it cannot be lost simply through absent-mindedness.
--------
The cock
As a boy I was much disliked by all farmyard cocks. I don't remember
what started it, but if a warlike cock appeared in the neighbourhood there
was bound to be bloodshed.
One summer I was staying with my relatives in one of the mountain
villages of Abkhazia. The whole family--the mother, two grown-up daughters,
two grown-up sons-- went off to work early in the morning to weed maize or
pick tobacco. I was left behind in the house alone. My duties were pleasant
and easy to perform. I had to feed the goats (one good bundle of rustling
hazelnut branches), draw fresh water from the stream for the midday break
and in general keep an eye on the house. There was nothing special to keep
an eye on, but now and then I had to give a shout to make the hawks feel
there was a man in the vicinity and refrain from attacking our chickens. In
return for this I, as a representative of the feeble urban branch of the
family, was allowed to suck a pair of fresh eggs straight from the nest,
which I did both gladly and conscientiously.
Fixed along the outside wall of the kitchen there were some baskets in
which the hens laid their eggs. How they knew they were supposed to lay them
there was always a mystery to me. I would stand on tip-toe and grope about
until I found an egg. Feeling simultaneously like a successful pearl diver
and the thief of Baghdad, I would break the top by tapping it on the wall
and suck the egg dry at once. Somewhere nearby the hens would be clucking
mournfully. Life seemed significant and full of wonder. The air was healthy,
the food was healthy, and I swelled with juice like a pumpkin on a
well-manured allotment.
In the house I found two books: Mayne Reid's The Headless Horseman and
The Tragedies and Comedies of William Shakespeare. The first book swept me
off my feet. The very names of the characters were music to my ears: Maurice
the Mustanger, Louise Pointdexter, Captain Cassius Calhoun, El Coyote, and
the magnificent Doña Isidora Covarubio de los Llanos.
"'My pistol is at your head! I have one shot left--an apology, or you
die!'...
"'It's the mirage!' the Captain exclaimed with the addition of an oath
to give vent to his chagrin."
I read that book from beginning to end, then from the end to the
beginning, and skipped through it twice.
Shakespeare's tragedies seemed to me muddled and pointless. On the
other hand, the comedies fully justified the author's efforts at
composition. I realised that it was not the jesters who depended on the
royal courts but the royal courts that depended on the jesters.
The house we lived in stood on a hill and the winds blew round it and
through it twenty-four hours a day. It was as dry and sturdy as a veteran
mountaineer.
The eaves of the small veranda were tufted with swallows' nests. The
swallows dived swiftly and accurately into the veranda and hovered with
fluttering wings at a nest, where their greedy, vociferous young waited
open-beaked, almost falling out in their eagerness. Their gluttony was
matched only by the tireless energy of their parents. Sometimes having fed
its young, the father would hang for a few moments leaning back from the
edge of the nest, its arrow-shaped body motionless and only the head turning
warily this way and that. One more instant and it would drop like a stone,
then deftly level out and soar away from the veranda.
The chickens foraged peacefully in the yard, the sparrows and chicks
twittered. But the demons of rebellion were not slumbering. Despite my
preventive shouts, a hawk came over nearly every day. In a diving or
low-level attack, it would snatch up a chicken and with mighty sweeps of its
burdened wings make off in the direction of the forest. It was a
breath-taking sight and I would sometimes let it get away on purpose and
shout later just to soothe my conscience. The captured chicken hung in an
attitude of terror and foolish submission. If I made enough noise in time,
the hawk would either miss its prey or drop it in flight. In such cases we
would find the chicken somewhere in the bushes, glassy-eyed and paralysed
with fright.
"She's a goner," one of my cousins would say, cheerfully chopping off
its head and marching away to the kitchen with the carcass.
The chief of this barnyard kingdom was a huge red-feathered cock, rich
in plumage and cunning as an Oriental despot. Within a few days of my
arrival it became obvious that he hated me and was only looking for a
pretext to come openly to blows. Perhaps he had noticed that I was eating a
lot of eggs and this offended his male vanity? Or was he infuriated by my
half-heartedness during the hawk attacks? I think both these things had
their effect on him but his chief grudge was that someone was challenging
his power over the hens. Like any other despot, this he would not tolerate.
I realised that dual power could not last long and, in preparation for
the forthcoming battle, kept him under close observation.
No one could deny the cock his share of personal bravery. During the
hawk attacks, when the hens and chickens would flutter clucking and
squawking in all directions, he alone would remain in the yard and, gobbling
fiercely, try to restore order in his timid harem. He would even take a few
resolute steps in the direction of the swooping foe, but since nothing that
runs can overtake that which flies, this made an impression of mere bravado.
Usually he would forage in the yard or the kitchen garden accompanied
by two or three of his favourite hens but without losing sight of the
others. Now and then he would crane his neck and look up at the sky in
search of danger.
As soon as the shadow of a gliding hawk passed over the yard or the
cawing of a crow was heard, he would throw up his head belligerently and
signal his charges to be on the alert. The hens would listen in a scared
fashion and sometimes scuttle away for cover. More often than not it was a
false alarm, but by keeping his numerous mistresses in a state of nervous
tension he crushed their will and achieved complete submission.
As he scratched the ground with his horny claws he would sometimes
discover a delicate morsel and summon the hens with loud cries to join in
the feast.
While the hen that got there first was pecking his find, he would
circle round her a few times, dragging his wing exuberantly and apparently
choking with delight. This operation usually ended in rape. The hen would
shake herself bemusedly, trying to recover her senses and grasp what had
happened, while he looked round in victorious satisfaction.
If the wrong hen ran up in response to his call, he would guard his
find or drive her away while continuing to summon his new beloved with loud
grunting noises. His favourite was a neat white hen, as slim as a pullet.
She would approach him cautiously, stretch out her neck, cleverly scoop up
the morsel and run away as hard as she could, showing no signs of gratitude
whatever.
He would pound after her humiliatedly, trying to keep up appearances
though well aware of the indignity of his position. Usually he failed to
catch her and would eventually come to a halt, breathing heavily and trying
to look at me as though nothing had happened and his little trot had been
entirely for his own pleasure.
Actually the invitations to a feast were quite often sheer deception.
He had nothing worth eating and the hens knew it, but they were betrayed by
their eternal feminine curiosity.
As the days went by he grew more and more insolent. If I happened to be
crossing the yard he would run after me for a short distance just to test my
courage. Despite the shivers going down my spine I would nevertheless stop
and wait to see what would follow. He would stop, too, and wait. But the
storm was bound to break and break it did.
One day, when I was eating in the kitchen, he marched in and planted
himself in the doorway. I threw him a few pieces of hominy but to no avail.
He pecked up my offering but I could see he had no intention of making
peace.
There was nothing for it. I brandished a half-burnt log at him but he
merely gave a little jump, stuck out his neck like a gander and stared at me
with hate-filled eyes. Then I threw the log. It fell beside him. He jumped
even higher and flung himself at me, belching a stream of barnyard abuse. A
flaming red ball of hate came flying towards me. I managed to shield myself
with a stool. He flew straight into it and collapsed on the floor like a
slain dragon. While he was getting up, his wings beat on the earthen floor,
raising spurts of dust and chilling my legs with the wind of battle.
I managed to change my position and retreat towards the door,
protecting myself with the stool like a Roman legionary with his shield.
As I was crossing the yard he charged several times. Whenever he came
at me I felt as if he was going to peck my eyes out. I made good use of the
stool and he bounced off it regularly on to the ground. My hands were
scratched and bleeding and the heavy stool was becoming ever harder to hold.
But it was my only means of protection.
One more attack. With a mighty sweep of his wings the cock flew up and,
instead of colliding with my shield unexpectedly perched on top of it.
I threw the stool down and in a few bounds reached the veranda, and
from there darted into the room slamming the door behind me.
My chest was humming like a telegraph pole and my hands were streaming
with blood. I stood and listened. I was sure that the wretched cock was
lurking at the door. And so he was. After a while he moved away a little and
began to march up and down the veranda, his iron claws clacking loudly on
the floor. He was calling me out to do battle but I preferred to lie low in
my stronghold. At length he grew tired of waiting and, perched on the
railing, gave vent to a victorious cock-a-doodle-doo.
When my cousins learnt of my affray with the cock, they started holding
daily tournaments. Neither of us gained any decisive advantage and we all
went about with scratches and bruises.
The fleshy, tomato-like comb of my opponent bore several marks of the
stick and his glorious fountain of a tail showed signs of drying up, but far
from losing any of his self-assurance he had become all the more insolent.
He had acquired an annoying habit of crowing from a perch on the rail
of the veranda, just under the window of the room where I slept. Evidently
he regarded the veranda as occupied territory.
Our battles were held in all kinds of places, in the yard, in the
kitchen garden, in the orchard. If I climbed a tree for figs or for apples,
he would stand and wait for me patiently beneath.
To cure him of some of his arrogance I resorted to various stratagems.
I started treating the hens to extra food. He would fly into a rage when I
called them but they treacherously deserted him all the same. Persuasion was
useless. Here, as in any other field, abstract propaganda was easily
deflated by the reality of profit. The handfuls of maize that I tossed out
of the window conquered the tribal loyalty and family traditions of the
valourous egg-layers. In the end the pasha himself would appear. He would
reproach them indignantly but they, merely pretending to be ashamed of their
weakness, went on pecking up the maize.
One day, when my aunt and her sons were working in the kitchen garden,
we had another encounter. By this time I was an experienced and cold-blooded
warrior. I found a forked stick and, using it like a trident, after a few
unsuccessful attempts pinned the cock to the ground. His powerful body
writhed frantically and its vibrations came up the stick like an electric
current.
I was inspired by the madness of the brave. Without letting go of the
stick or releasing its pressure, I bent down and, seizing my chance, pounced
on the cock like a goal-keeper on a ball and managed to seize him by the
throat. He writhed vigourously and dealt me such a blow on the head with his
wing that I went deaf in one ear. Fear reinforced my courage. I squeezed his
throat even tighter. Hard and sinewy, it jerked and twisted in my hand and I
felt as if I were holding a snake. With the other hand I grasped his legs.
His long claws worked desperately to reach my body and fasten on to some
part of it.
But the trick was done. I straightened up and the cock hung suspended
by his feet, emitting stifled squawks.
All this time my cousins and aunt had been roaring with laughter as
they watched us from behind the fence. So much the better! Great waves of
joy flowed through me. In a very short time, however, I felt rather
confused. My vanquished opponent showed no signs of giving in. He was
throbbing with a furious desire for revenge. If I let him go, he would come
at me again, and yet I couldn't go on holding him like this forever.
"Throw him over the fence," my aunt advised.
I went up to the fence and tossed him over with leaden arms.
Curse it all! He, of course, did not fly over the fence but perched on
it, spreading his massive wings. The next moment he flung himself at me.
This was too much. I made a wild dash for safety and from my breast rose the
ancient cry for help of all fleeing children:
"Mummy! "
One must be very foolish or very brave to turn one's back on an enemy.
In my case it was certainly not bravery, and I paid the price for it.
He caught me several times while I was running till at last I tripped
and fell. He sprang on top of me, he rolled on me, he gurgled with
bloodthirsty glee. He might quite easily have pecked through my spine if my
cousin had not run up and knocked him off into the bushes with his hoe. We
decided that this had killed him, but in the evening the cock came out of
the bushes, subdued and saddened.
As she bathed my wounds, my aunt said, "It doesn't look as if you two
will ever get on together. We'll roast him tomorrow."
The next day my cousin and I set about catching the cock. The poor
fellow sensed that fate had turned against him. He fled from us with the
speed of an ostrich. He flew into the kitchen garden, he hid in the bushes.
Finally he flapped into the cellar, and there we caught him. He looked
persecuted and his eyes were full of mournful reproach. He seemed to be
saying to me, "Yes, we were foes, you and I. But it was an honourable war,
between men. I never expected such treachery from you." I felt strangely
upset and turned away. A few minutes later my cousin lopped off his head.
The cock's body jerked and writhed, the wings flapped and folded as if to
cover the gushing throat. Life would be safer now but all the fun had gone
out of it
Still, he made us a fine dinner, and the spicy nut sauce that went with
it diluted the pangs of my unexpected sorrow.
Now I realise that he was really a splendid fighting cock, but born too
late. The days of cock fighting have long since passed, and fighting the
human race is a lost cause from the start.
--------
The thirteenth labour of Hercules
Nearly all the mathematicians I have ever known have been untidy, slack
and rather brilliant individuals. So the saying about the perfection of
Pythagoras's pants is probably not absolutely correct.
Pythagoras's pants may have been perfect but his disciples seem to have
forgotten the fact and pay little attention to their own appearance.
Yet, there was one teacher of mathematics at our school who differed
from all others. He was neither slack nor untidy. I don't know whether he
was brilliant or not, and that is now rather difficult to establish. I think
he probably was.
His name was Kharlampy Diogenovich. So, like Pythagoras, he was of
Greek origin. He appeared in our form at the beginning of a school year. We
had never heard of him before and had never suspected that such
mathematicians could exist.
He immediately established the rule of exemplary silence in our form.
The silence was so terrifying that our headmaster would sometimes throw open
the form-room door in alarm because he was not sure whether we were at our
desks or had all run away to the sports ground.
The sports ground bordered on the school yard and at all times,
particularly during important competitions, interfered with the pedagogical
process. Our headmaster had actually written a letter requesting that it
should be moved elsewhere. He maintained that the sports ground upset his
pupils. In fact, we were upset not by the sports ground but by the
groundsman, Uncle Vasya, who never failed to recognise us, even without our
books, and chased us out of his domain with a wrathful zeal that showed no
sign of waning with the years.
Luckily, no one listened to our headmaster and the sports ground stayed
where it was, except that the wooden fence was replaced by a brick wall. So
even those who used to watch events through the chinks in the fence now had
to climb the wall.
Nevertheless, our headmaster had no reason to be afraid of our
absenting ourselves from a mathematics lesson. This was unthinkable. It
would have been just as bad as going up to the headmaster between lessons
and silently snatching off his hat, although everyone was utterly fed up
with that hat. He went about in it all the year round, winter and summer
always the same soft felt hat, evergreen like a magnolia. And he was always
afraid of something.
To the uninitiated it might have appeared that what he feared most was
the commission of the Urban Department of Public Education, but in fact
there was no one he feared more than our director of studies, a demon of a
woman about whom I shall one day write a poem in Byronic vein. At the
moment, however, I have a different story to tell.
Of course, we could never have escaped from a mathematics lesson. If we
ever managed to miss a lesson, it was usually singing.
As soon as our Kharlampy Diogenovich entered the room, the whole form
would fall silent and remain so till the end of the lesson. True, he
sometimes made us laugh, but this was not spontaneous laughter; it was
amusement master-minded from above by the teacher himself. Far from
destroying discipline, it actually ministered to it, just as a converse
proposition assists proof in geometry.
This is how it worked. Let us suppose that a pupil was late for a
lesson and arrived, say, about half a second after the bell had rung, when
Kharlampy Diogenovich would be on the point of entering the room himself.
The wretched pupil would be wishing he could fall through the floor, and
would have done so if the teachers' common room had not been underneath.
Some teachers paid no attention to such a minor offence, others would
flare up and give you a reprimand on the spot; but not Kharlampy
Diogenovich. In such cases he would halt in the doorway, shift his register
from one hand to the other and with a gesture full of respect for his pupil
motion him towards the door.
The pupil would hesitate and his embarrassed face would express a
fervent desire to somehow creep in behind his teacher. Kharlampy
Diogenovich's face, on the other hand, would effuse a joyous hospitality
moderated only by politeness and an understanding of the peculiar demands of
the situation. He would make it felt that the mere arrival of such a pupil
was a delightful occasion for the whole form and himself personally, that
none of us had been expecting him but now that he was here no one would dare
to reproach him for being a mere fraction of a second late, least of all he,
a humble schoolmaster, who would naturally enter the form-room behind such a
splendid pupil and himself close the door after him to show that we were not
going to let our dear guest out again in a hurry.
The whole thing would last only a few seconds, at the end of which the
pupil having edged awkwardly through the door, would stumble on towards his
desk.
Kharlampy Diogenovich would watch his progress and make some splendid
comment. For example, "The Prince of Wales."
The form would roar with laughter. Though we had no idea who the Prince
of Wales was, we realised that he could not possibly appear in our form. For
one thing there would be no point in it because princes were mainly engaged
in chasing the deer. And if this particular prince had got tired of chasing
his deer and felt like visiting a school, they would be sure to take him to
School No. 1, near the power station, because it was a model school. At any
rate, if he had insisted on coming to ours, we should have been warned long
beforehand and thoroughly briefed for his arrival.
This was why we laughed, realising that our pupil could not possibly be
a prince, and certainly not any Prince of Wales.
But the moment Kharlampy Diogenovich sat down at his desk the form
would fall silent and the lesson would begin.
A shortish man with a large head, neatly dressed and carefully shaved,
he controlled his form with calm authority. Besides the form register he
kept a notebook in which he made notes after testing a boy's knowledge. I
cannot remember his ever raising his voice at anyone or urging him to work
harder or threatening to send for his parents. He had no use for such
methods.
During a test he never stalked about between the desks peering inside
or looking round vigilantly at the slightest rustle as other teachers did.
Nothing of the kind. He would sit at his own desk, reading calmly or
fingering a string of yellow beads, which looked like cat's eyes.
Cribbing during his lessons was almost useless because he never failed
to recognise something that had been copied and would hold it up to
ridicule. So we cribbed only in cases of extreme emergency, when there was
no other way out
Sometimes during a test he would relinquish his beads or book for a
moment and say:
"Sakharov, would you mind going and sitting next to Avdeyenko, please."
Sakharov would stand up and stare questioningly at Kharlampy
Diogenovich, unable to understand why he, one of the best boys in the form,
should be relegated to a place next to Avdeyenko, who was an absolute dud.
"Take pity on Avdeyenko. I'm afraid he will break his neck."
Avdeyenko would gaze stolidly at Kharlampy Diogenovich as though--or
perhaps because--he could not understand why he was in danger of breaking
his neck.
"Avdeyenko thinks he is a swan," Kharlampy Diogenovich would explain.
"A black swan," he would add a moment later, alluding perhaps to Avdeyenko's
sullen sunburnt face. "Carry on, Sakharov."
Sakharov would sit down again.
"You may carry on too," Kharlampy Diogenovich would tell Avdeyenko, but
with a perceptible change of voice which now carried a carefully measured
dose of sarcasm. "If you don't break your neck of course, Black Swan!" he
would conclude firmly, his final phrase somehow expressing the valiant hope
that Avdeyenko would acquire the ability to work on his own.
Shurik Avdeyenko would pore furiously over his exercise book,
demonstrating a great effort of mind and will directed to this end.
Kharlampy Diogenovich's chief weapon was his knack of ridicule. The
pupil who defied the school rules was not a slacker, not a dud, not a
hooligan, he was simply funny. Or rather, not simply funny--many of us would
not have minded that at all--but ridiculous. Ridiculous without realising
that he was ridiculous, or being the last to guess it.
When a teacher makes you appear ridiculous, you immediately lose the
traditional support of the rest of the form and they all laugh at you. It is
all against one. If one person laughs at you, you can usually deal with the
situation somehow. But you cannot turn the laugh against the whole form.
Once in this ridiculous position, you will go to any length to prove
yourself a little less ridiculous than you inevitably appear.
Kharlampy Diogenovich had no favourites. We were all potential victims
of his wit and I, of course, was no exception.
That day I had not solved the problem we had been set for homework. It
had been about an artillery shell flying somewhere at a certain speed for a
certain time. We had to work out how many kilometres it would have flown if
it had been travelling at a different speed and, perhaps, even in a
different direction.
As if one and the same shell could possibly fly at different speeds. It
was a muddled, stupid kind of problem and my answer just wouldn't come out
right. Incidentally, the answers given at the back of some of the textbooks
in those years--it must have been sabotage--were incorrect. This did not
happen very often, of course, because by that time nearly all the saboteurs
had been caught. But apparently there were one or two still at large.
However, I was still troubled with doubts. Saboteurs may be saboteurs,
but it's no good relying on them. So, the next day I arrived at school a
whole hour before lessons started. We were in the second shift. The keenest
footballers were in the yard already. I asked one of them about the problem
and it turned out that he had not been able to get it right either. That set
my conscience completely at rest. We split up into two teams and played till
the bell rang for school.
In we went. Almost before I had got my breath back, I asked our top boy
Sakharov,
"Well, how about that problem?"
"Not so bad," he said. "I solved it." He gave a brief, meaningful nod,
indicating that there had been certain difficulties but he had surmounted
them.
"How could you? The answer in the back is wrong."
"No, it isn't," he said, nodding again, this time with such an annoying
expression of assurance on his clever, conscientious face that I at once
began to hate him for his good fortune. I was about to express a few more
doubts but he turned away, thus depriving me of the falling man's last
consolation--grabbing at air.
Apparently, at that moment Kharlampy Diogenovich had appeared in the
doorway but I had failed to notice him and continued my gesticulations,
although he was only a few feet away from me. At length I realised what had
happened closed my textbook in frightened haste and froze to my desk.
Kharlampy Diogenovich took his place by the blackboard.
I cursed myself for at first agreeing with the footballer that the
solution in the book was wrong, and afterwards agreeing with the top boy
that it was right. Now Kharlampy Diogenovich would be sure to notice my
anxiety and call me to the board first.
Next to me sat a quiet and meek member of the form whose name was Adolf
Komarov. Nowadays he called himself Alik Komarov and even wrote Alik on his
copybooks because the war had started and he did not want to be nicknamed
Hitler. It made no difference. Everyone remembered his proper name and
reminded him of it whenever they had the chance.
I liked talking in class and he liked keeping quiet. We had been put
together to exert a good influence on each other but it hadn't worked.
Neither of us had changed.
Now I noticed that even he had solved the problem. He was sitting over
his open notebook, neat, thin and quiet, and his hands lying on the blotting
paper before him made him seem even quieter. He had this stupid habit of
keeping his hands on his blotter, of which I just could not break him.
"Hitler kaput," I whispered in his direction. He made no reply, of
course, but at least he took his hands off his blotter, which was some
relief.
Meanwhile Kharlampy Diogenovich greeted the form and sat down in his
chair. He flicked back the sleeves of his jacket, slowly wiped his nose and
mouth with a handkerchief, which he examined for some reason, then put away
in his pocket. After that he removed his watch and began to thumb through
the pages of the register. It looked as if the executioner was speeding up
his preparations.
At last, however, he finished marking those absent and looked round the
room, selecting his victim. I held my breath.
"Who's the monitor?" he asked unexpectedly. I sighed with relief,
thanking him for the respite.
There turned out to be no monitor for that day and Kharlampy
Diogenovich told our form captain to wipe the board. While he was doing so,
Kharlampy Diogenovich lectured him on the duties of a form captain when
there was no monitor. I began to hope he would tell us some story connected
with the subject, or one of Aesop's fables, or something out of Greek
mythology. But he refrained from any further illustration of his lecture
because the scrape of the dry rag on the blackboard was distracting and he
was anxious for the form captain to finish his irritating task. At last the
form captain returned to his place.
We waited in suspense. But at that moment the door opened and a woman
doctor and a nurse appeared.
"Excuse me, is this 5A?" the doctor asked.
"No, it is not," Kharlampy Diogenovich replied with polite hostility,
seeing that some medical project was about to interfere with his lesson.
Although our form was nearly 5A, because it was 5B, he had answered as
firmly as if we had absolutely nothing in common. "Excuse me," the doctor
said again and, after lingering for a moment, withdrew and closed the door.
I knew they were going to inoculate us against typhus. Some of the
forms had been done already. Inoculations were never announced beforehand so
that no one could slip away or stay at home on the pretext of being ill.
I was not afraid of inoculations because I had had plenty, against
malaria, the nastiest of all.
And now the white-coated hope that had suddenly illuminated our form
had disappeared. I just could not let that happen.
"May I show them where 5A is?" I said, growing quite brazen in my fear.
There were two factors to justify the audacity of my proposal. My place
was near the door and I was often sent to the teachers' room for chalk and
other things of that kind. Besides, form 5A was situated in an annexe in the
school yard and the doctor might indeed get lost because she was permanently
attached to School No. 1 and rarely visited us.
"Yes, do," Kharlampy Diogenovich said, and raised his eyebrows
slightly.
Trying to conceal my joy, I shot out of the room.
I caught up the doctor and nurse while they were still in the corridor
on our floor.
"I'll show you where 5A is," I said, falling into step beside them.
The doctor smiled as if she was handing out sweets instead of
inoculations.
"Aren't you going to do us?" I asked.
"During the next lesson," the doctor said, still smiling.
"But we are going out to the museum for the next lesson," I said,
rather to my own surprise.
There had, in fact, been some talk of our making an organised visit to
the local museum to see the prehistoric remains on show there. But our
history mistress kept putting it off because the headmaster was afraid we
might not get there in an organised fashion.
Last year a boy in our form had stolen a dagger that had once belonged
to an Abkhazian feudal prince, because he wanted to run away to the front
with it. This had caused a great rumpus and the headmaster had decided that
it had all come about because the form had wandered down to the museum in a
crowd instead of marching there in double file.
In fact, that lad had worked everything out very carefully long
beforehand. Instead of taking the dagger at once, he had hidden it in the
thatch of an exhibit labelled Pre-revolutionary Poor Man's Hovel, and only
months later, when the fuss had died down, did he go there in a coat with a
slit in the lining and complete his theft.
"We won't let you," the doctor said cheerfully.
"But we're all going to assemble in the yard," I said, getting worried,
"and go on an organised visit to the museum."
"So it's an organised visit, is it?"
"Yes, it is," I said seriously, afraid that she, too, like our
headmaster, would doubt our ability to visit the museum in an organised
fashion.
"Well, Galochka, let's go back to 5B, just in case," the doctor said,
and stopped. I had always liked these nice clean women doctors in their
little white caps and white coats.
"But they told us to go to 5A first," that stubborn creature Galochka
protested, and looked at me severely. Anyone could see she was trying to
make herself out a grown-up.
I never gave her so much as a glance, just to show that nobody would
ever take her for one.
"What difference does it make," the doctor said, and clinched the
argument by turning round.
"So you can't wait to show us how brave you are?" she added.
"I'm a malaria sufferer," I said, dismissing the implication of
self-interest. "I've had thousands of injections."
"Well, lead on then, malaria sufferer," said the doctor, and we started
back.
Having made sure they were not going to change their minds, I ran on
ahead so as to cut out any connection between myself and their arrival.
When I entered the form-room, Shurik Avdeyenko was at the blackboard
and, although the solution to the problem was written out in three stages on
the blackboard in his beautiful handwriting, he could not explain it. He
stood there with an expression of sullen fury on his face, as though he had
known just how it went before but was now unable to recall the course of his
reasoning.
Don't worry, Shurik, I thought. You may not know it but I've saved you
already. Now I wanted to be kind and benevolent to everyone.
"Good work, Alik," I said as I took my place beside Komarov. "Fancy
solving such a difficult problem."
Alik was considered a good plodder. He was rarely reprimanded and even
more rarely praised. Now the tips of his ears blushed gratefully. He bent
over his exercise book once more and placed his hands neatly on the blotter.
Oh well, I suppose he just couldn't help it.
A few moments later the door opened and the doctor and that Galochka
kid entered the room. The doctor said the whole form had to be inoculated.
"If it must be done now," said Kharlampy Diogenovich, with a quick
glance in my direction, "how can I object? Go back to your place,
Avdeyenko," he added with a nod at Shurik.
Shurik put down the chalk and walked back to his desk, still pretending
to be engaged in a concentrated effort of recall.
A stir of excitement passed through the form but Kharlampy Diogenovich
raised his eyebrows and all was calm. He put his notepad away in his pocket,
closed the register, relinquished his place to the doctor and himself sat
down at one of the desks, looking sad and rather hurt.
The doctor and the girl opened their bags and started setting out on
the table bottles, jars and wickedly gleaming instruments.
"Well, who's the bravest boy in the form?" the doctor said, sucking
serum greedily into the syringe and holding it point upwards to prevent any
dripping out.
She spoke cheerfully but no one smiled. All eyes were on the needle.
"We'll have to call them out in alphabetical order," said Kharlampy
Diogenovich. "Everyone is a hero in this form."
He opened the register.
"Avdeyenko," he said, looking up.
The form laughed nervously, and even the doctor smiled, although she
had no idea what we were laughing at.
Avdeyenko went to the table, a tall, ungainly figure whose face clearly
revealed that he had not yet made up his mind whether it was better to get a
bad mark or be the first for inoculation.
He pulled up his shirt and stood with his back to the doctor, looking
even more ungainly and still uncertain which was better. When it was all
over and he had been inoculated, he looked just as unhappy, although he was
now envied by the whole form.
Alik Komarov grew more and more pale as his turn approached and,
although he kept his hands on the blotting paper in front of him, I could
see it was not helping at all.
I tried to cheer him up but it was no good. He grew paler and sterner
every minute, his eyes fixed unwaveringly on the doctor's needle.
"Turn your head away," I told him.
"I can't," he replied in an agonised whisper.
"It won't hurt much at first," I encouraged him. "The time it hurts
most is when the serum starts going in."
"I'm so thin," he whispered back, scarcely moving his white lips.
"It'll hurt me terribly."
"Don't worry," I said. "You'll be all right as long as it doesn't touch
the bone.",
"I'm nothing but bones," he whispered desperately. "It's sure to touch
one."
"Relax your muscles," I said, patting him on the shoulder. "Nothing
will touch the bone then."
"I haven't got any muscles," he replied dully, "and I'm anaemic."
"Thin people are never anaemic," I retorted strictly. "Malaria
sufferers are anaemic because malaria sucks their blood."
I suffered from chronic malaria and the doctors could do nothing about
it however much they treated me. I was rather proud of my incurable malaria.
By the time they called Alik's name, he was in a real state. He hardly
knew where he was going or what for.
He stood with his back to the doctor, white-faced and glassy-eyed and
when she made the injection he suddenly went pale as death, although it had
seemed impossible for him to get any paler. He turned so pale that his face
came out in freckles. None of us had thought he was freckled before and I
decided to keep the fact of his concealed freckles in mind. It might come in
useful one day, although I had no idea what for.
After the injection he nearly collapsed but the doctor held him up and
helped him to a chair. His eyes rolled back alarmingly and we thought he was
going to die.
"Ambulance!" I shouted. "I'll go and call the ambulance!"
Kharlampy Diogenovich looked at me wrathfully and the doctor deftly put
a bottle of smelling salts under his nose--not Kharlampy Diogenovich's, of
course, but Alik's.
At first he wouldn't open his eyes, then he suddenly jumped to his feet
and marched smartly back to his place, as though it certainly was not Alik
Komarov who had been just about to die.
"Didn't feel a thing," I said, when I had my injection, though I had
felt it quite distinctly.
"Well done, malaria sufferer," said the doctor.
Her assistant dabbed my back carelessly after the injection. I could
see she was still annoyed with me for not letting them go to 5A.
"Rub harder," I said. "The serum must be made to circulate."
She finished rubbing my back with an energy born of hatred. It was
pleasant to feel the cool cotton wool soaked in surgical spirit, and even
more pleasant to know that, even though she was angry with me, she still had
to rub my back.
At last the whole thing was over. The doctor and her Galochka packed
their bags and went on their way, leaving a pleasant smell of surgical
spirit and an unpleasant smell of serum in the room. The pupils sat at their
desks, fidgeting and cautiously feeling for the effects of the injection
with their shoulder blades and talking freely to each other as a reward for
the suffering they had just endured.
"Open the window," said Kharlampy Diogenovich, resuming his seat. He
wanted this spirit of hospital freedom to depart along with the smell of
medicine.
He took out his yellow beads and flicked them thoughtfully to and fro.
There was not much of the lesson left. He usually filled in such gaps by
telling us something instructive connected with the ancient Greeks.
"As we know from Greek mythology, Hercules had to perform twelve
labours," he said, and stopped. Click-click--as two beads slid from right to
left. "But a certain young man thought he would revise Greek mythology," he
added, and stopped again. Click-click.
That fellow had too big an idea of himself, I thought, realising that
no one was allowed to revise Greek mythology. Some other God-forsaken
mythology, perhaps, might be knocked into shape, but not Greek mythology
because it had all been revised from beginning to end already and there
couldn't possibly be any mistakes in it.
"He decided to perform the thirteenth labour of Hercules," Kharlampy
Diogenovich went on. "And to some extent he succeeded."
We realised at once by his voice what a false and futile labour this
had been, because if there had been any need for Hercules to perform
thirteen labours he would have performed them himself, but since he had
stopped at twelve it meant that twelve were enough and there was no need for
anyone to mess about making corrections.
"Hercules performed his labours like a hero. But this young man
performed his labour out of cowardice." Kharlampy Diogenovich paused
thoughtfully, then added, "In a moment we shall learn just what it was that
induced him to perform this labour."
Click. This time only one bead slid from right to left, driven by a
very sharp flip of the finger. It slid rather nastily somehow. Two beads
sliding together, as they had done before, would have been better than just
one, all by itself.
I caught the scent of danger in the air. It was the sound not of a bead
sliding but of a small trap closing in Kharlampy Diogenovich's hands.
"I have a feeling that I know already what it was," he said, and looked
at me.
Something in his glance made my heart thud heavily against my spine.
"Be so kind," he said, and beckoned me to the blackboard.
"Who? Me?" I asked, feeling as if my voice was coming from the pit of
my stomach.
"Yes, you, my fearless malaria sufferer," he said.
I shambled towards the board.
"Tell us how you solved the problem," he said calmly and--click,
click--two more beads went sliding from right to left. I was in his hands.
The form looked on and waited. They were all expecting me to come to
grief, and they wanted me to do so as slowly and interestingly as possible.
I squinted at the board from the corner of my eye, trying to trace the
thread of cause and effect between the stages of the problem that were
written there, but it was no use. Then with a great show of impatience I
began rubbing it all out, as though what Shurik had written was muddling me
and preventing me from concentrating. I was still hoping for the bell to
ring and save me from execution. But the bell did not ring and it was
impossible to go on cleaning the board forever. I put down the rag to avoid
looking ridiculous before I had to.
"We are listening," Kharlampy Diogenovich said, without looking at me.
"An artillery shell..." I said brightly amid the form's jubilant
silence, and broke off.
"Continue," Kharlampy Diogenovich said, after waiting politely for some
moments.
"An artillery shell..." I repeated stubbornly, hoping that the impetus
of these correct words would carry me on to more, similarly correct words.
But something held me on a firm tether that pulled tight as soon as the
words were out of my mouth.
I concentrated fiercely, trying to imagine the course of the problem,
and then plunged forward again to break the invisible tether.
"An artillery shell..." I repeated, quivering with horror and
revulsion.
A few restrained titters came from the form. I sensed that the crucial
moment had arrived and decided not to allow myself to become ridiculous on
any account; I would rather just get a bad mark.
"Have you swallowed this artillery shell?" Kharlampy Diogenovich asked
with good-natured curiosity.
He asked the question as naturally as if he had been inquiring whether
I had swallowed a plum stone.
"Yes," I said quickly, sensing a trap and deciding to foil his plans
with an unexpected answer.
"Then you'd better ask the military instructor to come and dispose of
it for you," said Kharlampy Diogenovich, but the form was already laughing.
Sakharov was laughing, and trying to go on looking like the top boy at
the same time. Even Shurik Avdeyenko, the gloomiest boy in our form, whom I
had saved from certain disaster at the blackboard, was laughing. And Komarov
was laughing, Komarov who now called himself Alik but was really Adolf, just
as he had always been.
As I looked at him it occurred to me that if we had not had a real
gingerhead in our form he would have passed as one because his hair was fair
and the freckles that he kept hidden, like his first name, had given
themselves away during the injection. But we did have a real gingerhead in
the form and Komarov's gingerness had passed unnoticed. And it also occurred
to me that if we had not pulled the number of our form off the form-room
door a few days ago, the doctor might never have called on us in the first
place and nothing would have happened. I began to have vague presentiments
of the connection that exists between things and events.
The bell droned funereally through the form's laughter. Kharlampy
Diogenovich put a mark against my name in the register and also made a note
about me in his notebook.
From then on I took my homework more seriously and never asked the
footballers about problems I couldn't solve. Each man to his trade.
Later in life I noticed that nearly everyone is afraid of appearing
ridiculous. Particularly women and poets. Perhaps they sometimes appear
ridiculous because they are too afraid of appearing so. On the other hand,
no one can make someone else look ridiculous as skillfully as a good poet or
a good woman.
Of course, it is not very wise to be too afraid of appearing
ridiculous, but it is much less wise not to be afraid of ridicule at all.
It seems to me that ancient Rome perished because its emperors in all
their marble magnificence failed to realise how ridiculous they were. If
they had got themselves some jesters in time (you must hear the truth, if
only from a fool), they might have lasted a little longer. But they just
went on hoping that the geese would save Rome, and then the Barbarians came
and destroyed Rome, its emperors and its geese.
Not that I have any regrets about that, of course. But I do want to
express my admiration and gratitude for Kharlampy Diogenovich's method. With
the aid of laughter he tempered our sly young hearts and taught us to regard
ourselves with a strong enough sense of humour.
--------
Forbidden fruit
In accordance with Moslem custom our family never ate pork. Our parents
ate none and strictly forbade us to eat any. Although another of Mahomet's
precepts--on the subject of alcoholic beverages--was violated, as I now
realise, quite unrestrainedly, no liberalism was allowed where pork was
concerned.
The ban engendered both an ardent desire and a frigid pride. I dreamed
of tasting pork. The smell of roast pork made me dizzy to the point of
collapse. I would stand for hours outside shop windows, staring at the
glistening sausages with their wrinkled sides and spotted ends fancied
myself tearing off the skin and plunging my teeth into the succulent, tender
meat. I imagined the taste of sausage so clearly that, when I did eventually
try it, I was quite surprised to discover how accurately fancy had informed
me.
Of course, there had been opportunities of tasting pork at nursery
school or when visiting friends but I had never broken the accepted rule.
I can still remember picking the lumps of pork out of a nursery school
plov and giving them away to my friends. The pangs of appetite were overcome
by the sweetness of self-denial. I felt a kind of ideological superiority
over my comrades. It was satisfying to be something of a mystery to the
world at large, as though I had knowledge that no one else possessed. And it
made my yearning for the sinful object of desire all the more intense.
There was a nurse who lived in one of the houses in our yard. We called
her Auntie Sonya. In those days for some reason we thought of her as a
doctor. In general, as one grows up, one notices a steady decline in the
status of one's elders.
Auntie Sonya was an elderly lady with her hair cut short and a look of
permanent sorrow on her face. She always spoke in a very quiet voice. It was
as though she had long since realised that there was nothing in life worth
raising one's voice about.
During the communal battles between neighbours that were frequent
enough in our yard she scarcely raised her voice at all, which created
additional difficulties for her opponents who, having failed to hear what
she had said, would lose the thread of the quarrel and be put off their
stroke.
Our families were on good terms. Mother told me that Auntie Sonya had
saved me from certain death. When I had been struck down by some