Yurik was already walking, tottering around, and falling down on his little bottom.
6 Classmates
(1955–1963)
They were supposed to beat up Vitya Chebotarev. It wasn’t a choice; it was an obligation. But he was lucky—they beat up Grisha Lieber instead. And they didn’t mess him up too much—just enough to display their contempt for the wunderkind Jew. They were both wunderkinder, in fact, but Grisha was a half-pint Jewish kid, chubby and pink, whereas Vitya was a strapping lad who disarmed people by his obliviousness to society’s dissatisfaction with him. Vitya’s upper lip protruded slightly, the consequence of too many tightly packed teeth, and this gave him a good-natured expression. He was somewhat autistic—“a bit odd,” as his mother, Varvara Vasilievna, described him. She was from the country, unpretentious but smart. She had worked her way up the ladder from housekeeper to administrator in the Housing Maintenance Committee.
Even before he started school, she sought advice about her little Vitya from an elderly professor, an acquaintance from her former housekeeping days, who told her that the boy was in no sense a moron, more likely even a genius, but one with peculiarities. Such children were what you might call rarities, and must be handled with care. With proper nurturing, children like this could grow up to become great scientists; otherwise, they could end up on the margins of society. Varvara received this news with delight, and she never so much as laid a hand on him, but protected him and expected great things of him. She was someone who had raised herself high above the place where she had begun in life. Working for good employers, she was able to graduate from primary school, then trade school for housing-maintenance workers, and finally to get assigned a private room for herself. Afterward, when she was already working at the HMC, she became eligible for a separate apartment in the city center—albeit on the ground floor, as they deferentially called the cellar of the building, located in close proximity to Gogol’s last apartment.
Such was the career of Varvara Vasilievna; it was as though she had made the transition from plumber to academician in a single leap. Thus, she had high hopes for her son, born of a not entirely successful union. And her maternal hopes were not disappointed. Varvara stoically endured the first years of Vitya’s education, when the teacher complained about his inattentiveness, his absentmindedness and inability to blend in with the other children and take part in their activities. But in the fifth grade, when simple arithmetic was replaced by algebra and geometry, Vitya blossomed. The math teacher immediately singled him out from the other students, and began sending him to the Math Olympiad, where he excelled and enjoyed his first faint glimmers of fame.
The elderly professor had been right. Vitya was inattentive to what didn’t interest him, but when something engaged his mental capacities, he was quick, sharp, and hungry for knowledge. Despite his unusual memory and his innate abilities in logical thought, he was emotionally rather backward, and had not an iota of a sense of humor. There seemed to be some sort of short circuit in his head that allowed him to exist happily in the most abstract realms of mathematics, whereas any literary text, from “Little Red Riding Hood” to King Lear, which he read as an adolescent, filled him with indignation at the lack of logic, the contrivances, and the flouting of causal connections and motives in the behavior of both characters and authors.
His classmates, with their soccer and their paper airplanes, did not interest him; only Grisha Lieber proved to be a satisfactory interlocutor. They made a funny pair: little Grisha, who was much shorter than his classmates but far exceeded most of them in weight, rolled around the rangy, lanky Vitya like a ball, constantly trying to prove a point to him. Vitya would listen silently, nodding and scratching his prominent forehead. He received a great deal of interesting information from Grisha, whose father was a physicist and discussed such matters with his son. Grisha was by nature sociable and talkative, so they were an odd couple—a garrulous little ball and a taciturn beanpole. When the classmates had to read Don Quixote, they started calling Grisha Sancho Panza. And he did indeed play the same role. Thanks to Grisha, Vitya finally even got to know some of their other classmates, who up until then had been so unimportant to him he didn’t even know many of them by name.
In the fifth grade, the boys’ and girls’ schools joined together, but even this momentous event went practically unnoticed by Vitya. The girls paid no attention to him, either, it must be said. The only girl he sometimes talked to was Nora, and their relations were not spontaneous, but thanks to the promptings of the literature teacher and class adviser, Vera Alexeyevna. She appointed Nora (a book lover with an innate grasp of grammar) to help Vitya bring up his grades in that subject. During their sessions, they didn’t become friends, but they did at least get to know each other. And Nora helped him pull up his grades until the ninth grade. He intrigued Nora with his critical reading of any work put in front of him, which he analyzed with unwavering precision, pointing out the glaring inadequacy of any metaphor taken on its own merits, and the fundamental logical inconsistency and lack of rigor of the humanities as a whole. His grades never rose above a C in Russian language and literature, but the teachers were quick to pardon this star of the Math Olympiad for many years running.
Vitya was not popular with his classmates, and the girls dismissed him because they thought he was a smarty-pants who imagined himself to be more intelligent than everyone else. In fact, he imagined no such thing, since his imagination was restricted to very specific tasks and orders of knowledge where girls rarely ventured, so there was barely a whiff of them around him.
In the seventh grade, they were laid low by an epidemic, something akin to chicken pox: everyone fell in love. The girls quarreled and wept, the boys got into fights more often than usual, and a weak electric charge hovered in the air. Vitya himself never fought. Nor did he express any interest in girls.
A cloud of tension grew thick around Nina Knyazeva, a budding beauty, and Masha Nersesyan, who had developed early and was already in full bloom at fourteen. There were a few other pretty girls who turned the boys’ heads, but not as dramatically. Nora was not one of them. She did have one admirer, however—funny, sweet Grisha. Nora ignored Grisha entirely. Though she had been independent and idiosyncratic from an early age, this time she traveled the general route.
Nikita Tregubsky was the embodiment of all the girls’ notions of masculine perfection. He moved confidently, had a nice smile, and was affectionate and impudent, both at once. He had virtually no rivals. The other boys had not achieved enough manliness to meet with any kind of success. At the very sight of Nikita, half the girls in the class went into preservation-of-the-species mode. Nora was not spared this fate. She fell desperately in love with Nikita in the sixth grade, and in the eighth, she fearlessly, without shame, offered him her love in the most literal sense. Nora was taken by surprise at the wondrous world that awaited her between the sheets, and she happily explored it at every opportunity over the course of several months. Later, Nikita would stay overnight at Nora’s, to the silent consternation of Amalia.