A curious state of affairs, mused Victor Yulievich. Just as in Pushkin’s time, notes in verse are passing from hand to hand. What next? Will they stop sending people to labor camps?
The nation, once paralyzed with fear, began to revive. It whispered more boldly, tuned into “enemy” broadcasts, typed, retyped, photographed, and rephotographed. Samizdat spread around the whole country. Although this underground form of reading was still not established as the new social phenomenon it would become in the next decade, the rustling of typewritten pages at night in the hands of bold and eager readers was already audible.
Khrushchev had so effectively unmasked Stalin’s cult of personality that something inchoate and uncertain had overtaken the previous state of clarity. Everyone was frozen in expectation. And the fate of the literature teacher, who had married his student and produced a child not quite according to schedule, was still hanging in the balance, despite the efforts of the school officials to resolve it as they saw fit.
At long last Victor Yulievich’s case was reviewed. The school board judged him more severely than the district Party committee. It was agreed that he should be fired, but with the proviso that he should first see his students through to graduation. So as not to alarm the teacher about the planned dismissal, they decided not to inform him about the decision at all. If he were to leave in the middle of the year, who would replace him? Victor Yulievich got wind of all sorts of unpleasant rumors, but he had already made up his mind to resign at the end of the school year, anyway.
In the spring of 1957, the LORL meetings were transformed into review sessions in preparation for the matriculation examination—a good three-fourths of the class planned to enter the philology department. Mikha attended these sessions regularly, though he was already first in his class in literature. He knew that the philology department at Moscow State University didn’t accept Jews. He also knew that it was the only place he wanted to study.
His older cousin Marlen teased him, offering to help him get admitted to the Fishery Institute, insisting that fish were a far more solid profession for a Jew than Russian literature. This incensed Mikha, naturally.
By spring, the rumor that Victor Yulievich was going to be fired reached the ears of the tenth-graders. It was said that the teachers had incriminated him on the basis of a clause regarding marriage with a former student. The young people were prepared to go to any lengths, to appeal to any authority, to defend their favorite teacher. He finally managed to convince them that he himself wished to leave the school, that he had long wished to engage in his own scholarly activity, to write books. He said that they should be able to understand how sick he was of school notebooks, meddling old biddies, political information meetings and other such nonsense, and that it was only because of them, his beloved LORLs, that he hadn’t left immediately after his marriage.
“Moreover,” he said, “I’ve already ensured that I’ll have replacements. You know yourselves how many literature teachers our school will have turned out a few years hence.”
This was true. Since he had begun teaching at the school, half of every graduating class had entered a philology department—some at Moscow State University, others at the pedagogical university. Girls who were not quite up to the mark went on to library school, to the Archival Institute, or the Institute of Arts and Culture. A small but mighty army of young people had learned the art of reading Pushkin and Tolstoy. Victor Yulievich was certain that his students were thus inoculated against the ills and evils of existence, both petty and grand. In this he was, perhaps, mistaken.
* * *
The LORLs were far more preoccupied with getting ready for their graduation party than for their matriculation exam. They were planning a spectacular event. It had been announced beforehand that alcohol would be forbidden. On the one hand, there were ways to get around this ban quite easily; on the other hand, no one was particularly upset by the ban on alcohol, anyway. The main thing, which everyone understood very well, was that they would be saying good-bye to Victor Yulievich. It would be a double good-bye, since Victor Yulievich would be taking leave of the school, along with his graduating class.
The students kept their preparations under wraps, but Victor Yulievich guessed at the scale of the event. News had reached him that several of the boys were spending day and night in the art studio of the sculptor Lozovsky, who happened to be Volodya Lozovsky’s father, instead of studying for their examination. They were said to be building something truly magnificent.
Ilya was blowing up photographs and making shadow pictures that he projected onto a wall. This was an unprecedented kind of set design, which he had conceived all on his own.
Mikha, laying his textbooks aside, had begun working on a play in verse. The characters numbered in the millions—from Aristophanes to Ivan the Fool, from Homer to Ehrenburg.
When the matriculation exams were at last over and had all been passed, it was time for the graduation ball. This annual celebration had its own long-standing traditions. The girls had fancy new dresses made, even white ones. Elaborate hairdos were whipped up for them at the hairdresser’s. The girls wore mascara, and were even allowed to put on nylon stockings.
This was the dress rehearsal for the first ball of the future, which for most of them would never take place. It was the false promise of a 24/7 holiday that never arrived. And it was a parting of the ways with school, which was for each of them without exception a happy event, but which was bemoaned with maudlin insincerity.
Row upon row of chairs had been set up in the auditorium to accommodate the parents, primarily mothers, who were also dressed up, and no less excited than their children.
After the complex choreography of seating arrangements was over, an unpleasant incident occurred. Two ninth-graders, Maximov and Tarasov, smuggled themselves into the crowd of graduates, intending to steal a piece of a celebration they were not allowed to share. They were publicly humiliated and banished. Everyone assumed they had left the school premises.
The ceremony began. Diplomas were distributed, and speeches made. The ritual began with the announcement of medalists, recognized for exceptional academic achievement. There were four that year: three silver medalists, and one gold. Natasha Mirzoyan, an eastern beauty and champion brownnose, won the gold medal. The silver medalists were Poluyanova, Gorshkova, and Steinfeld—nicknamed “Muchable.” He had received the nickname in elementary school for his habit of saying “much obliged” instead of just “thank you.”
The Trianon never rose to scholastic heights worthy of medals. They were all serious about their studies but had never been straight-A students.
After the ceremonial portion of the event, the proceedings stalled. According to the program, a play was supposed to get under way, but for dozens of reasons, it did not. They needed at least forty minutes to tack together all the disparate scenes and acts. They turned on some music instead, but no one felt inspired to dance yet, so they all just shuffled around aimlessly. In the neighboring classroom the actors and stagehands were just stitching the last flowers to the wreaths, making up their faces, and memorizing their lines.
Victor Yulievich was standing by a window, conversing with one of the parents. He looked up to see Andrei Ivanovich gesturing to him from the doorway—Come here, quick!
It turned out that the exiled Maximov and Tarasov had not left the school premises at all, but had instead taken refuge in the attic, and had downed a bottle of port wine between the two of them. They were caught red-handed with the evidence just outside the attic, and were led down to the principal’s office. Both of them were drunk, a fact no one with eyes would have disputed.