In September 1954, a monumental event took place: separate education was abolished. Girls were admitted to their school, and thereafter began to appear in Ilya’s photographic archive.
Everyone lost their senses, most notably the teachers of long standing, who were accustomed to their boys and believed that girls put them in grave moral danger.
The girls troubled everyone. And it wasn’t these girls in particular, so much as what they represented—an attractive and rather frightening elemental force. The Trianon boys didn’t deign to broach the subject, most likely because of Sanya, who couldn’t bear “impropriety.” This included a variety of things: physical uncleanliness, dirty words, lies, and disproportionate curiosity. Ilya, who allowed himself to indulge in bad language and crude jokes around others, kept himself in check in Sanya’s presence. They did not permit themselves to talk about the girls precisely because their classmates did—and their conversation was always tinged with unseemliness. But a cloud of silence hung above the heads of these three, prefiguring a still unknown rule of thumb: self-respecting men do not discuss women.
The small fry—first- and second-graders—were not fazed in the least by the girls, but the eighth-graders went nuts. The very idea of a girl was enough to unhinge them. Girls were indecent by definition. They wore stockings, held up by elastic bands; the hems of their uniforms would sometimes ride up and reveal glimpses of bare flesh, and something pinkish or blue. Even the least attractive girl had noticeable breasts hidden under her black pinafore, though it wasn’t as if the boys hadn’t known this all before. They knew, of course, but now it was all unbearably close to them. And gym class! They had a girls’ changing room where they undressed. Maybe even completely.
Excitement hung in the air like dust on a playground. All of them, boys and girls, gave off an electrical current, and all of them were love-struck.
The boys were transformed externally as well. Now they wore uniforms that resembled those of pre-Revolutionary preparatory school students: dove-gray coats and dress shirts. All wore uniforms that were too big, so they could grow into them, except Sanya Steklov, whose grandmother bought him just the right size. Although he had grown a little over the summer, he was not destined to catch up to Ilya or Mikha. Strange as it may seem, however, little Sanya enjoyed the most attention from the girls. Notes flew thick and fast through the classroom, like dangerous, honey-laden bees. The only thing missing was the buzz.
By the New Year, sympathies and antipathies had formed, and the first pairs of lovebirds had emerged. Those who had so far been unsuccessful at attracting someone of the opposite sex had high hopes for New Year’s Eve.
All these hopes collapsed in the middle of December, when the whole school came down with measles. It started with the youngest pupils, then broke out among the older students, until a strict quarantine was imposed at the end of the month. Students were even forbidden to move between floors and to use the cafeteria. More than a third of the eighth-grade students came down with measles. Sanya kept waiting to get sick, checking his face every morning for signs, but the reddish rash didn’t appear.
Students were allowed out of the classroom only to go to the bathroom. During the lunch break, the nurse and the lunch lady would bring pies, beet salad, and pots of sweetened tea to their rooms. At first it was exciting, but very soon it palled. The most unpleasant consequence of the whole epidemic was the cancellation of the New Year’s party. The second quarter ended on an anticlimactic note, and they all dispersed for the winter vacation. On December 31, Sanya did come down with the measles after all, which deprived his friends of yet another celebration, their favorite one—Sanya’s birthday.
Victor Yulievich brightened the dull winter break. Usually, the LORLs’ meetings were suspended during the break, but that year they met nearly every other day. In any event, Ilya had taken many photographs during this period. Many others joined them on their walks—everyone who hadn’t gotten sick. They would walk for about three hours, and then drop in at Victor Yulievich’s home to drink tea. Those were the first of the pictures in which the two friends, Katya Zueva and Anya Filimonova, appear. They were the first girls to join their previously all-male club.
Katya had still not cut off her long braids bound with black hair ribbons, which hung over the collar of her coat. Anya Filimonova, in a ski cap with the brim overhanging her face, looked like a boy, with pimples on her forehead. She was trying to conceal them with the hat, Ilya surmised. He was also the first to notice that Katya was in love with their teacher.
When she went to school, she gathered her braids into an unattractive bun; but at the LORL sessions at Victor Yulievich’s, she unbound her mane and suddenly looked very pretty. She sat at the round table, always in the same spot, resting her chin in her palm. Her hair almost completely covered her face, and Mikha had to bend lower to catch a glimpse of it. He liked her immensely, especially outside of school. He also liked little Roza Galeeva, from the seventh grade, and Zoya Krym, who was in the other eighth-grade class.
Every time Victor Yulievich addressed Katya, she blushed so violently that only the tip of her nose remained white. Katya was shy and quiet, and even with Anya, her best friend, she didn’t share her greatest secret—that she had been head-over-heels in love with the teacher at first glance, on September 1, when she saw him standing in the school yard before the opening ceremony, surrounded by his boys, animated and laughing.
She would use any opportunity to see him, and would even follow him home (keeping her distance, of course). Sometimes she would stand by the entrance to his building in the evening, but she never ran into him. She decided to join his club, but only after she had persuaded Anya, who much preferred volleyball, to attend with her.
Closer to spring, something happened that Katya would tell her husband about, not omitting any details, only two years later. Katya managed to get hold of a ticket to Prokofiev’s ballet War and Peace. The whole of Moscow wanted desperately to see the performance, and Katya’s grandmother gave her a single ticket that she had acquired through her vast circle of connections. After the first act, Katya peeked into the theater buffet, just out of curiosity. There was a terrible crush, a noisy throng, and a long line had formed to the buffet. At the table nearest the door, Victor Yulievich was sitting. He was with a beautiful woman with slightly Asian features. A bouquet of flowers was lying on the table. They talked, and then he placed his left hand on her shoulder. Katya was overcome with nausea. She went home without staying to see the rest of the performance. She told her grandmother that she had a splitting headache.
A week later, she waylaid him in the entrance hall of his building and told him she loved him. She was terrified that he would laugh at her. He didn’t. He put his hand on her shoulder, as he had done with the beautiful woman in the buffet, and said, in all seriousness, that he had already guessed her feelings, and that he hadn’t known what to do about it.
“Never mind. It’s just that I die inside whenever I think about that woman you were with in the theater. Are you going to marry her?”