They ate cake and drank tea. Nora put another piece of cake on Vitya’s plate. He ate it impassively, if rather quickly. Nora took Yurik by his little hand and led him to the table. The boy looked cautiously at Vitya, but Vitya paid no attention to him. Varvara began to get nervous: This wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen. They shouldn’t have come. And she shouldn’t have let Vitya come. But she still hoped that the boy would be able to penetrate Vitya’s leaden indifference. Alas, it was no use.
For almost the first time in her life, Nora was thinking the same thing as her mother-in-law. How Vitya had changed! He was, of course, a genius—but he was a sick one. This could not be denied. What guarantee was there that her son had inherited his genius and not his illness? Or both at the same time? But what could she do? It hadn’t happened with Tengiz, and with Vitya it had happened at the drop of a hat, without any grueling, long-term practice.
Vitya finished all his cake. By now, Yurik had taken an interest in Vitya’s shoe and was trying to drive the fire engine along it. Varvara pushed the plate with the cake on it away from her son. He didn’t take the hint.
Varvara began to get ready to leave. She thanked Nora, and praised the little one: “He’s a fine baby.”
When they were descending the stairs, she repeated it, to her son this time.
“He’s a fine baby. Too bad he’s not ours.”
“What do you mean by that?” Vitya asked.
“Well, just that Nora has a fine baby, but it isn’t yours.”
After a long pause, Vitya said, “What difference does that make, Mama?”
Varvara stood still, astonished. “What do you mean, what difference does it make?”
“Theoretically speaking, it doesn’t matter to me. Practically speaking, there are methods of determining paternity nowadays.”
And Vitya didn’t say another word until they reached home. As they were entering the building, he said, “I liked the cake.”
10 A Froebel Miss
(1907–1910)
Marusya didn’t look back. She completely forgot those two sad years when she had sat in the watchmaker’s shop near her father, reading chaotically, unsystematically, and longing for real life—which kept eluding her—to begin. Finally, it did. Now she woke up early and performed her morning ablutions—in cold water, in the Swiss manner. She dressed in the working clothes, somewhat resembling a nurse’s uniform, that all the employees of the kindergarten for the children of poor domestics and wage laborers were required to wear. Then she dashed off to work.
This daytime shelter had been established, and was now run, by fine ladies who were, for the most part, no longer young. They were the wives and daughters of the wealthy exploiters of the same poor workers. The head inspector of this shelter was Madame Leroux, sent by the Lord God to minister to the needs of proletarian children, and to set Marusya’s fate to rights. Marusya really did do everything at a run, since the children arrived at seven in the morning, and it was her duty to greet them. In addition, when she finished her singing lessons with the youngest and lunched on bread and soup in the small dining room for employees, she took to her heels again—to her classes in the Higher Froebel Courses.
She had been accepted to the Courses solely thanks to the influence of Madame Leroux—Jacqueline Osipovna, as the employees called the Swiss lady. She was an important figure. She had been sent by the Froebel Society to organize their affairs in Kiev. For five years, she had worked tirelessly and was held in high esteem by the local government heads and their wives. Marusya passed the required examinations without exceptional distinction, but satisfactorily. Most of the other prospective students were preparatory-school graduates, and Marusya had a hard time keeping up with them. There was, in fact, very little real competition; they accepted almost everyone who wished to attend, and who could pay the tuition fees. The fees were not insignificant: fifty rubles a year. Marusya’s brother Mark sent her the necessary sum. The money arrived by a circuitous route—“Jewish” post, as it was called. Some friends of relatives or relatives of friends delivered the money, too late, by which time Marusya was already sick to death of her poverty and of her unhappy fate. On the very day she received the money, she went to the bursar of the Froebel Society, Varvara Mikhailovna Bulgakov, who kindly accepted the money even though classes had already begun.
Varvara Mikhailovna—a perspicacious woman, a widow with a family of her own, seven children and two nieces, and a paltry pension from her husband—never tired of telling her children, among whom was a future writer, that she could not leave them an inheritance; the only thing she could provide them with was an education. It was not only considerations of a higher order—promoting the education of women—that inspired her to take a job as bursar of the Froebel Society, but also material privation.
Now Marusya no longer envied either the Petersburg successes of her brother Mikhail, or Ivan Belousov, who had been expelled from the History of Philology Department and had devoted himself completely to illegal revolutionary activity. He sent her subtle hints, vague suggestions, that she should follow the only true path, but she was not tempted. She already had what she had dreamed about—the opportunity to study.
Her health, never very strong, was restored not by the sanatoriums her parents had wanted to send her to, but by the intensely busy life that she herself had chosen. The migraines, nervous attacks, and minor ailments she had been prone to disappeared of their own accord. The rest of her life confirmed that her health always suffered when she was idle, and instantly improved as soon as she busied herself with a grandiose scheme, such as improving humanity.
Her studies in the Froebel Courses afforded her such pleasure that the difficulties of daily existence seemed insignificant to her. Many years later, she recalled this time as the happiest in her life. That random, chaotic reading she had engaged in before she entered the Courses proved to be very usefuclass="underline" all the book knowledge she had gleaned from the wonderful encyclopedia or from reading literature found its proper application in the new disciplines. And what disciplines they were! Marusya went to lectures every day: the history of literature, philosophy, psychology, diction and declamation, as well as physiology, zoology, and botany. There was even a class in gymnastic exercises for children. The lectures were read by the best professors, whose names Marusya would recall with pride, or with horror, or be afraid to mention at all, for the rest of her life—but not one of them would she ever forget.
This information, which she hardly managed to digest, had no value in and of itself, however. It was only valuable insofar as it served a larger purpose, a greater goal—the education of a marvelous, free, new human being. Madame Leroux did not abandon her protégée. Now and then she invited Marusya to her home, questioned her about the teachers, and shared her own plans with her. Several times, she invited her to the theater, to concerts. She gave her books to read on pedagogy, the most novel and recent trends from Switzerland and Italy. It never occurred to Marusya that Madame Leroux was grooming her to become her assistant.
Meanwhile, Marusya was becoming ever more interested and involved in her work in the kindergarten. Now she was not only teaching singing, but also putting on little plays with the older children. Jacqueline Osipovna encouraged her in these activities. Marusya had no more doubt that pedagogy was the only worthy undertaking; the revolutionary ideas of her elder brother Joseph, who was stuck in Siberia, were no longer so attractive to her. The ills of society would wither away and disappear by themselves if children were given, according to their abilities, moral guidance and a proper education.