The Hand also read poetry to them. At the beginning of every class, while they were settling into their seats and getting their notebooks out, he recited a poem from memory, never telling them who the author was. His choices seemed very idiosyncratic. One day it would be the familiar “A lonely sail is flashing white”; and the next, the enigmatic but memorable “the air is blue, like the bundle of linen of a patient just discharged from hospital.” Then, out of nowhere, he’d toss out some inspired gobbledegook, like:
Outside it was cold, Tristan was on the stage.
A wounded sea sang in the orchestra pit,
Green realm behind the bluish steam.
A heart that ceased to beat.
No one saw her enter the theater,
But there she was, seated in her box,
Like a Briullov painting.
Women so lovely live only in novels,
Or come to life on-screen …
Men steal for them, or worse.
They ambush their carriages and
Poison themselves in garrets …
Mikha’s heart leapt to his throat when he heard poems like this, though the other students were unmoved. But Mikha was the one the teacher looked at—he was almost the only one who lapped up the verses. Sanya would smile condescendingly at the teacher’s weakness: some of the poems were ones that his grandmother had read to him. The other kids forgave their teacher his curious predilection. They considered poetry an effeminate affectation for a man who had fought on the front lines during the war.
Occasionally, however, he recited something very apropos. When they began reading Taras Bulba, he came to class with something that was clearly about Gogoclass="underline"
Our own wayward riddle,
You alighted on the earth,
Our own thoughtful mockingbird
With sorrow on your brow.
Our Hamlet! Laughter mixed
With tears, inner woe,
Outer cheer, burdened by
Success, as others by ill luck.
Darling and martyr of
Fame, always gentle to you,
Drone of life, wanderer,
Struggling with an inner storm.
A ruined ascetic in spirit,
An Aristophanes on the page,
Physician and scourge of all
Our ills and wounds!
It seemed there wasn’t a single occasion in life for which he didn’t have a poem at the ready.
“We are studying literature,” he would constantly remind them, as though it were breaking news. “Literature is the finest thing humankind has created. Poetry is the beating heart of literature, the highest concentration of all that is best in the world and in people. It is the only true food for the soul. It is your own choice whether you grow up to become human beings, or remain on the intellectual level of beasts.”
Later, when he had learned all the students’ names and assigned them seats after his own idiosyncratic fashion (not in the same order as their class picture, and not alphabetically, either), after everyone had formed a bond through discussions about cunning Odysseus; the mysterious chronicler Pimen; the unfortunate son of Taras Bulba; Pushkin’s honest but slow-witted Alexei Berestov; and swarthy, clever Akulina—all part of the school curriculum, by the way—the boys started asking questions about the war: What was it like? And it immediately became clear that Victor Yulievich loved literature, and hated war. A strange bird! In those days, the entire population of young men who hadn’t had the opportunity to shoot Fascists was enamored of war.
“War is the greatest abomination ever invented by man,” the teacher told them, curbing their tongues before they could even ask: Where did you fight? How did you get wounded? How many Nazis did you kill?
One day he told them.
“I had just finished my second year of college when the war broke out. All my classmates immediately reported to the recruitment office, and all of them were sent to the front. I am the only one from my group who stayed alive. Everyone else perished, including two girls. That is why I am against war with all my heart and with both my hands.”
With that, he lifted up his left hand. He tried to raise his right half-arm in tandem, but was unable.
On Wednesdays, literature was the last class of the day. When it was over, Victor Yulievich would say, “So, shall we go for a walk?”
The first of these walks took place in October. About six of them went. Ilya had rushed home, as usual, and Sanya had skipped school that day, which he often did, with his grandmother’s permission. The Trianon was represented solely by Mikha, who later recounted word for word the stories he had heard from the teacher on the way from school to Krivokolenny Lane. Victor Yulievich had told them about Pushkin, but the way he talked about him made them wonder whether he and Pushkin hadn’t been actual classmates. It turned out that Pushkin was a card shark! And a skirt-chaser! He was a real womanizer! On top of that, he was a brawler, held grudges, was always ready to make a scene or kick up a row, to fight in duels.
“Indeed,” Victor Yulievich said, “it was this kind of behavior that led people to consider him a bretteur.”
No one asked what this foreign word meant, because it was obvious anyway: a troublemaker.
Then he led them up to the shabby building on the first corner of Krivokolenny Lane after its intersection with Kirov Street. With a broad gesture of his left hand, he said, “Just imagine what it was like here in Pushkin’s day. Of course, there wasn’t any asphalt, and the roads were paved with wooden blocks. A carriage pulls up from the direction of Myasnitskaya Street. Well, most likely not a carriage, but a small cart with a coachman. Pushkin was visiting Moscow, partly on business. He had many friends and relatives here, but he never had his own home in Moscow, or his own equipage—with the exception of the apartment he rented on the Arbat; but that was only for a little while, after his wedding. Then he moved back to St. Petersburg. He did not like Moscow. He said there were ‘too many old Aunties’ there.
“Now imagine it’s more than one hundred years after Pushkin’s death, after the Revolution. A woman is walking down this lane, and, suddenly, from the direction of Myasnitskaya, she hears, clip-clop, clip-clop: a carriage rounds the corner and stops right at this spot. Pushkin alights from the carriage, his heels clicking on the wooden pavement, and disappears inside the house. The lady gasps, and then everything disappears—the wood pavement, the carriage, the coachman, and the horses. There were rumors that this building was haunted. We’ll never know whether that’s true or not. But what happened in this very building in October 1826—a poet named Venevitinov was living here then—many eyewitnesses confirm: in the main hall of this house, Pushkin read his tragedy Boris Godunov aloud for the first time. There were about forty people present, and almost half of them wrote about the reading in letters to their relatives immediately afterward, or subsequently, in their memoirs. You’ve all read Boris Godunov, haven’t you? Who can summarize the plot for me?”
Mikha was always ready to be called upon, but this time he had forgotten some parts of the story and didn’t want to embarrass himself.
For a while, nobody said anything. Finally, Igor Chetverikov said tentatively:
“He killed Tsarevich False Dmitry.”
“Congratulations, Igor. History is a rather muddled affair. There are in fact two versions of the story. In one, Boris Godunov killed Tsarevich Dmitry. In the other, he didn’t kill him, and was really quite a decent man. Your version, charging him with the murder of another person altogether—False Dmitry—flies in the face of long-held historical beliefs. Don’t worry, though, history isn’t algebra. It’s not an exact science. In some ways, literature is a more exact science than history. What a great writer says can become a historical truth. Military historians have found many discrepancies in Tolstoy’s description of the Battle of Borodino, but the whole world imagines the event just as Tolstoy described it in War and Peace. Neither was Pushkin standing in the rear courtyard of the palace of Maria Nagaya, mother of the young Tsarevich, where the murder of Dmitry did—or did not—take place. The same principle applies to his story about Mozart. I suppose you’ve all read The Little Tragedies.”