My anger was dying down. I climbed out of the tandir, washed my hands in the neighboring storage room, shook my shirt energetically, which was useless, and sneaked sideways along the walls through the yard. On my way out, I managed to notice that more people had arrived, Grandpa Yoskhaim and Grandma Lisa among them. Here I was at the gate. I threw it open and dashed to the boys, calling to Boris. A piercing screech and the grinding of brakes were heard as an old Volga car stopped abruptly after lurching sharply, close to me. A pale, frightened man jumped out of it. “I almost ran you over,” he mumbled in Uzbek. And the fear on his face was immediately replaced with rage. “Are you crazy? Why don’t you watch where you’re going?!” he yelled loudly.
One could understand the man’s anger – another second, and I would have been lying under his car, badly injured and possibly killed. What would have become of him? But at that moment, I was incapable of thinking about it. I just couldn’t function or understand what had happened. My legs were shaky; I felt nauseous.
The man yelled, waved his hands, and there was already a crowd around us, mostly people from the yard. Someone was patting me on the head. It was Grandma Abigai.
“You must be frightened. It’s all right, it’s all right. Ah, that’s the last thing we need today. Aka Yoskhaim, take him to your place, please,” she asked Grandpa, who was nearby. “He’s so scared. I hope he won’t get sick. Let him pee, and wet his lips with urine,” Grandma remembered the old remedy to prevent a scare.
Obviously, that day was so sad that, no matter how hard I tried to make it easier for myself, it ended up in trouble.
Chapter 40. “Just Let Him Try It!”
“What do you go to school for?” Both parents and teachers ask this ridiculous question quite often, and always with a bitter intonation, or with indignation. You make noise in class – “What do you go to school for?” When you receive a D, come home with a reprimand on your report card, or with a black eye or torn pants – the same question…
Of course, we know perfectly well what kind of answer was expected from us. How could we possibly not know! And that’s particularly disgusting, because you had to lie.
To be honest, what boy, while at school, is capable of remembering all the time that he is there “to obtain knowledge,” as adults like to put it. To remember it all the time, one would have to be not a boy but some fictional character, some kind of a robot, or a model student. Such boys are not well liked by their classmates; they’re held in general contempt.
Only girls are forgiven for their diligence. Girls are a special case, though naturally, even they pretend. They find it more interesting to whisper to each other or exchange winks and messages with boys than to listen to a teacher and write down boring rules in notebooks.
Why am I remembering this? I’m remembering it because, for any student, the most wonderful time at school is the time when no one urges them to obtain knowledge, like, for example this time. The bell rang, five minutes passed, then ten, but our teacher still hadn’t shown up. In other words, our class’s head teacher, Flura Merziyevna, hadn’t yet appeared.
I would take full advantage of that golden opportunity, precisely because I had something very interesting to do.
Bending over a sheet of paper, I was deciphering a strange sentence that would have no meaning for an outsider: Kigoziini opab. This sentence made sense to me. Deciphered with the help of a secret code, it meant, “Valery, we have a hedgehog. When are you coming?”
Yura and I had been corresponding since the summer. We decided to encode our letters. You never knew who might read them in his home or mine. Our secrets were safe that way. Besides, when you added something to your parents’ letters or put a note into their envelope, you had to write long boring sentences, something like this, “Dear …, how is your health? How is the weather? Everything is all right with us. Wishing you the same.”
Coded letters liberate you from such nonsense. Parents are too lazy to ask what it all means. They just sneer condescendingly, “Are you playing some game again?”
I tore a clean page out of my notebook and was just thinking about how to answer Yura when all ideas were knocked out of my mind by a strong flick to the back of my head. “Ouch!” I exclaimed, extracting a hard wad of chewed, wet blotting paper from my hair. I had been so engrossed in deciphering the note that I hadn’t noticed the beginning of a shootout. And it was in full swing.
It was possible to have a shootout without leaving one’s desk. That was the best thing about it. We could play it when a teacher was away, like today, or even when a teacher we weren’t afraid of was in the classroom.
Crackling, crunching and rustling were heard – notebook pages were turned into peashooters. That was the weapon, though the most avid fighters even had metal tubes. The smacking of wet lips was heard – each fighter was busy making a dozen or so “bullets” by chewing blotting or some other kind of paper.
The rules of the battle had been worked out long ago. The class was divided into two groups – the right row by the window exchanged shots with the left row along the wall near the door. The middle row could exchange shots with whomever they wished.
The battle tactics… well, there were no agreed-upon tactics.
Most of the shooters sat in the back of the classroom. The backs of the heads of those who sat up front were perfect targets. Poor things – they not only couldn’t shoot back, they couldn’t even shout “ouch,” as I had just done. But it hurt when a wad of blotting paper hit you on the back of the head. And our shooters were skillful. After inhaling deeply and pressing their lips around a tube, they spit a bullet through it with all their might. Phooey! And the air, like an exploding capsule, pushed the bullet rapidly out of the paper tube.
When there was no teacher in the classroom, the battle proceeded openly, like today. The noise was deafening, though it was somewhat strange. All that could be heard was phooey! phooey! If an outsider had walked down the hall, he would have stopped in astonishment, “What are they all doing in there? Are they spitting at each other from head to toe?”
A white hail covered the classroom, but the zeal of battle began to subside. Besides, some of us were burdened by worry – why was our Flura Merziyevna so late?
We could guess why.
An incident had taken place before this class, during the long recess, about which everybody knew. And some of us, including me, had been present when it happened.
But we didn’t want to think about anything unpleasant. As soon as I began to chew a new piece of blotting paper, Gaag, who stood at the door, shouted, “She’s here!”
The class grew silent.
After opening the door, Flura Merziyevna stopped. She had a pleasant face, round, kind and somewhat sad, and she didn’t smile. Sometimes, her face looked sadder, and we knew why – Flura Merziyevna’s husband, also a teacher, who taught drawing at our school, drank a lot.
Sometimes, when Bondarev would pass by in the hall during a recess, the stench of alcohol in the air was so strong that it seemed the wind had blown it in. Bondarev’s former nickname was “Little Hedgehog” because he shaved his head, but when his addiction to alcohol became known, his nickname was changed slightly to “Little Drunk Hedgehog.” Bondarev’s two sons, Alexei and Vladimir, were in our class and surely knew about the nickname, though no one said it when they were around.
The expression on Flura Merziyevna’s face was so sad, as if Little Drunk Hedgehog had gotten drunk today worse than ever before. She looked at us, sighed, and said quietly, “Those of you who were behind the school during the long recess, stand up.”