Everything Begins In Childhood

Chapter 14. The First School Bell

Finally, it was Sunday night. It lasted too long and didn’t want to make way for the long-awaited tomorrow. It would be the next day, September 1^st, when the most important event would happen – I would go to school. Something utterly unimaginable was happening in my head, so nervous was I.

Any events that interrupt the usual course of life provoke nervousness in me, almost as if I were sick. My heart was beating as if it wanted to burst out of my chest. My cheeks were on fire. My fingers would always move by themselves, but I had never been so nervous as this time.

One thing that helped me cope with it, to some extent, was carefully organizing my school gear, all those new things I needed for class that I had received over the summer.

I decided that I should check one more time whether everything was all right. I wouldn’t have any time to do it in the morning. I picked up my new shirt and began to examine it. It was a nice pale-blue cotton shirt. Mama and I had spent so much time looking for a shirt. We had also spent time buying everything else – textbooks, notebooks, a briefcase. In Chirchik, just as in every other town, stores were very seldom supplied with goods. Everything sold out fast. Customers waited for the next delivery, lying in wait for weeks for the things they needed. Lines looked like huge earthworms, and people would run up to them like restless ants with questions: “What was delivered today? What are they selling?”

It’s difficult to imagine anything drearier than store shelves in between deliveries. We stopped at the bookstore and saw that it mostly carried newspapers and brochures with boring covers. As for the newspapers, they were all like members of one big family: Pravda (Truth), Komsomol Pravda, Pravda Vostoka (Truth of the East). We visited the bookstore over and over again, until finally we were rewarded – we were able to buy an ABC book. It was new and smelled pleasantly of paper, paint and glue.

After much effort, we also obtained a briefcase. I scrutinized and admired it endlessly. It smelled like a real leather briefcase. It was unimaginably shiny, and I loved the way it squeaked. It had three compartments – for textbooks, notebooks, and rulers, and a pen case. No words could express how wonderful its lock was. It clicked like a gun trigger. Hey, you out there, beware!

All the objects I had in the briefcase were splendid, particularly the white porcelain inkpot with its blue trim on the top, known as nevilevaika (non-spilling), because ink wouldn’t spill out of its cone-shaped opening, even if you turned it upside down.

Extra pen nibs in a special section of the pen case gleamed like little mirrors. I would soon have a chance to learn that their behavior could be treacherous. You would dip your pen into the inkpot and begin to write without wiping it on the edge of the opening, and… plop! You’d have an inkblot, an ugly navy-blue spider on a clean sheet of paper. There was no way to erase it with an eraser. You would only make a hole. But those treacherous pen nibs squeaked so wonderfully.

After placing all my treasures in the briefcase, I finally went to bed, but my impatience and anxiety kept me from falling asleep for a long time.

Mama and I approached the school early on the morning of that sunny and cloudless day.

Construction of P.S. 24 had been completed by the time we arrived in Chirchik. It was located next to Pinocchio Kindergarten, which I had attended before. There was a short fence and a pedestrian path between them, the path that I was now symbolically crossing. By the way, I was crossing it prematurely. One was supposed to be seven to start school, and I was six. But my father had carried out an offensive operation to secure my enrollment in school ahead of time, and he had been successful.

The four-story school building glittered in its whiteness. The posters and banners seemed especially bright against the white walls. The large portrait of Lenin, with his arm outstretched, calling upon arriving students to study diligently, had been placed above the door where it was impossible to miss. The square in front of the school was filled with adults and children carrying bunches of flowers in their hands. I was glad to see familiar faces, my kindergarten friends – tall skinny Zhenya Gaag, stout Sergey Zhiltsov, and the Doronin twins, Alla and Oksana. My nervousness eased a bit when a muted but frightening voice echoed through the air: “Dear parents… you and your children… today…” I didn’t realize at first that the words were being spoken by a tall man in a dark suit standing at a microphone. He was the school principal, Vladimir Petrovich Obyedkov. He spoke for a long time. I calmed down and became distracted. Then I saw that the tall man held a pair of scissors, with which he cut a pink ribbon stretched across the entrance to the lobby. An orchestra struck up a tune. The copper of the trumpets gleamed. We were all invited to enter the school. The corridor on the ground floor, along which we were ushered to our classroom, was so long that it seemed endless. At every door I thought, my heart skipping a beat, “This one must be ours.” But the door of our classroom was the very last one.

We were seated. My seat was at the first desk in the middle row, right across from the teacher’s desk. I had to turn my head very fast not to lose sight of Mama and not to turn away from the teacher for too long. Besides, I had someone to look at sitting at my desk. I shared the desk with Larisa Sarbash, my secret kindergarten love. She was tall and thin with light hair and wonderful freckles sprinkled over her little nose. Shy Larisa didn’t look at me. She sat staring at the blackboard so intently one would have thought it was a movie screen. But I cast glances at her now and then and admired her braids with big white bows that were so fluffy I wanted to grab and squeeze them.

Our teacher, Yekaterina Ivanovna, not very tall and somewhat plump, with short chestnut hair, had a tender singsongy voice and a kind gaze. She said she would be our teacher for three years and that in first grade we would begin studying arithmetic, reading and writing, and we would need to bring to school… At this point, she turned to the blackboard, and for the first time in my life I heard the magic sounds that would later become so familiar: Took-took-sh-sh-sh, took took-sh-sh-sh-sh… And white, straight, beautiful lines began to appear, one after another, with incomprehensible swiftness on the blackboard. I already knew printed letters, but these characters were quite mysterious.

How unexpectedly, how loudly the bell rang in the corridor. It was rhythmic and distinct. It was very special. It wasn’t just a bell but the melodious trill of an unfamiliar bird. The bird seemed to be with us in the classroom, hiding among the desks, and when our first school day was over, it sang out loudly, with joy, as if saying, “Toodle-loo! Congratulations! You’ve become school students! And now you may run home! Toodle-loo!”