Besides literature, he also had to teach geography and history. The school principal taught math and physics, as well as the social sciences, which were all versions of the history of the Communist Party, only with different names. The other subjects—biology and German—were taught by an exiled Petersburg Finnish woman. Besides her nationality, she had one other blemish in her biography: before the war she had worked with Academician Vavilov, an unrepentant Weismann-Morganist, who dared insist on the validity of the theory of genetics.
Everything in Kalinovo was meager. The only thing in abundance there was virginal, unsullied nature. And the people were perhaps better than city-dwellers, because they, too, were almost untouched by spiritual dissipation.
His interactions with rural children had undone all the illusions of his student years. His notions of “the good, the eternal” had not changed, of course; but the circumstances of everyday life here were so coarse, so very difficult. The young girls, wrapped in their patched and mended kerchiefs, who managed to care for the farm animals and their younger siblings before school, and the boys, who already did the work of men in the summer—what use were these cultural values to them? What was the point of studying on an empty stomach and wasting time on knowledge they would never need under any circumstances?
Their childhood was already over long ago. They were simply underdeveloped men and women. Even the ones whose mothers eagerly sent them off to school, by far the minority, seemed to feel awkward, as though they were busy with trifling pastimes rather than serious work. This caused the young teacher to feel uncertain about his role as well—and, really, wasn’t he distracting them from the fundamental concerns of life by exposing them to superfluous luxuries? What did Radishchev mean to them? Or Gogol? Or even Pushkin, for that matter? Teach them to read, and send them home to work as soon as possible. That’s all the students really wanted themselves.
This was when he first started thinking about the phenomenon of childhood. When it began wasn’t the issue; but when did it end? Where was the boundary beyond which a human being became an adult? It was obvious that childhood ended earlier in the country than it did in the city.
The northern countryside had always lived hand to mouth, but after the war the poverty was profound. The women and children did the lion’s share of the work. Of the thirty local men who had gone to the front to fight, only two had returned: one with only one leg, the other with tuberculosis. He died a year later. The children, miniature peasants, shouldered the burden of labor early, and their childhoods were stolen from them.
And, truly, how was one to reckon it, to weigh the losses? Some had had their childhoods stolen from them, others their youths, still others their freedom. Victor Yulievich himself had lost the most insignificant thing of alclass="underline" his graduate studies.
After his three-year term of quasi-exile—after all, he was living in the same part of the country to which clever young people like himself, with a sense of their own dignity and self-worth, had been sent during tsarist times—his seventh-graders graduated, and he returned to Moscow to live with his mother on Bolshevik Lane, in the building with the knight standing in a niche above the entranceway.
By some stroke of luck, the first place he was offered a teaching job in Moscow was only a ten-minute walk from his home, near the History Library. The library held a strong attraction for him. He had felt starved of literary culture and missed it more than theaters and museums when he was away.
He tried to reestablish his university connections, seeking companionship. He got together with Lena Kurzer, who had spent the war as a military interpreter, but they couldn’t really communicate. He found two more of his former classmates, but again nothing clicked. The mood of the time was taciturn, disinclined to frankness. People started to open up and talk only several years later. Of the three classmates who had survived the war, one of them embarked on a career in the Party and a second taught school. His first and last meeting with them was limited to splitting a bottle of vodka. The third, Stas Komarnitsky, was out of reach: he had been sent to prison, either for telling a joke or just for talking. The only one of his friends he was always happy to see was Mishka Kolesnik, his former neighbor. They made for an amusing postwar pair: Mishka was missing a leg, and Victor an arm, so they called themselves “Three arms, three legs.”
Mishka had meanwhile become a biologist and was married to a nice girl, also from their neighborhood, but younger.
She was a doctor and worked in the municipal hospital. She was desperate to marry Victor off, and kept trying to hook him up with one of her unmarried colleagues. But Victor had no intentions of marrying. After he returned from Kalinovo, he had fallen in love with two beauties at the same time. One he had met in the library, and the other had approached him in a museum, where he had taken his students on a field trip. Mishka joked, “It’s your good fortune that the dames flock to you in pairs, Vic. If there were only one of them, she’d collar you for sure.”
But it was, in fact, work that “collared” Victor. It turned out that teaching his thirteen-year-olds was the most fascinating experience in his life. These Moscow youths had nothing whatsoever in common with their country counterparts. They didn’t plow the land, didn’t sow, didn’t repair the horses’ harnesses, and had none of the peasant’s sense of responsibility for family.
They were ordinary kids—in class, they cut up, threw paper wads and spitballs, sprayed one another with water, hid one another’s book satchels and notebooks, and grabbed and pushed and shoved like puppies. Then they would suddenly freeze in wonder, and ask him real questions. Unlike the country lads, they had had a real childhood, which they were now leaving behind once and for all. Besides pimples, there were other signs, in a higher register, of their maturing: they asked the “accursed questions,” agonized over the injustices in the world, and listened to poetry. A few of them even wrote something that vaguely resembled it. The first one to bring the teacher a neatly copied page of verse was Mikha Melamid.
“Yes, I see,” Victor Yulievich said out loud, smiling. Jewish boys are particularly sensitive readers and writers of Russian literature, he mused.
Half of the class did not quite understand what the literature teacher wanted from them. The other half clung to his every word. Victor Yulievich tried to treat everyone equally, but he did have his favorites—Mikha, emotionally intense and sensitive to a fault; Ilya, energetic and capable; and Sanya, polite and self-contained. The inseparable trio.
He had belonged to just such a triumvirate at one time, and he often thought about his college chums, Zhenya and Mark, who had died in the first days of the war. They were still just boys, really, who hadn’t completely outgrown childhood. Full of overblown romanticism, with their infantile verses—“Brigantine! Brigantine!”—who would they have become now, had they lived? The red-haired Mikha could have been their younger brother, and if you looked closely you could read his complicated future on his face. Not that Victor claimed any sort of clairvoyance; he was just concerned.