The Big Green Tent

THE LAST BALL

These were Victor Yulievich’s best years: a meaningful job, the adoration of his students, and a happy marriage—at least for now. He even earned a little extra on the side—two evenings a week, he gave private lessons.

He worked very hard, but the LORLs still gathered at his home on Wednesdays. The graduating class of ’57 was his favorite—he had been their class adviser since the sixth grade, knew all their mamas and papas, grannies and grandpas, and siblings. The fifteen-year age gap became less and less palpable. The boys were growing into young men, and the marriage of their teacher to one of their classmates made the gap in their ages still less significant.

At the end of 1956 they announced the birth of a daughter. On December 1, in her eighth month of pregnancy, Katya had given birth to a fine four-and-a-half-pound girl. They named her Ksenia, after her grandmother. But even this diplomatic gesture could not soothe the hurt Ksenia Nikolayevna had suffered after her son’s marriage. She couldn’t bear the thought that another woman would make Vika his breakfast, talk with him in the evenings, wait for him after school, and wake him up in the morning. Moreover, she felt a particular antagonism toward Katya—relations between a mother-in-law and her son’s wife are a chemical reaction in the blood. She believed that the underage girl had seduced him, perverted him, lured him with her wiles. In short, she had roped him into marriage.

Victor Yulievich’s colleagues at school took a different view of the matter. The teachers’ lounge was rife with backbiting rumors and gossip, which were especially ruthless and damning among the female teachers. When the little girl was born, the entire teaching staff experienced a thrill of malicious pleasure. Vera Lvovna, the mathematics teacher, counted off the months on her fingers, incontestably demonstrating that Zueva would have had to conceive in the third quarter of the school year to give birth in December.

Rybkina, the local Party organizer, who was also the head teacher, consulted with the higher-ups on the school board, as well as the regional committee of the Party, about how to deal with a criminal in their midst. The case was clear: the teacher was guilty of the corruption of a minor. On the other hand, the underage girl had come of age in the months that followed, and at the same time the transgressor of the law had made her his legal wife. But could he go unpunished?

The teachers maintained a unanimous tense silence whenever Victor Yulievich entered the room. The school administrators—the holy trinity of principal, Party organizer, and labor union organizer—had initially wanted to convene a faculty meeting to discuss the issue. But Larisa Stepanovna preferred to launch a probe with the authorities first. Reports were sent to the school board and the regional committee of the Party.

* * *

It was during this last winter of school that Victor Yulievich began writing the book he had been mulling over for several years. The title had already suggested itself: Russian Childhood. He wasn’t sure about the genre—whether it would become a collection of essays or a monograph.

He laid no claim to any discoveries. He was distinctly aware that his interests partook of a variety of disciplines: developmental psychology, pedagogy, and anthropology in the broadest sense of the word. At the same time, the logic of his thoughts developed according to the terms deployed by medical doctors and biologists. The influence of his friend Kolesnik was undeniable.

He was at pains to describe the moral awakening of the adolescent, which is as fundamental and necessary as cutting teeth, babbling, and the first steps the baby attempts during the early months of development. In other words, it was the whole thrilling yet routine growth pattern that he was observing in his own child:

Thus it begins. At two or so they rush

From breasts into the dark of melody,

They chirp, they crow, they warble—then words

Appear already by the age of three …

The lyrical model that Pasternak outlined was far more obvious to him than all the tenets and premises of developmental psychology. Moral maturation seemed to be as valid a dimension of human development as the biological processes that unfolded in tandem with it. But moral awakening occurs in different ways, and the framework within which it takes place varies according to the individual cast of mind, and other contingencies. Moral awakening, or “moral initiation,” as he called it, occurs in boys between eleven and fourteen years of age, most often spurred by unfavorable circumstances—an unhappy or difficult family situation, an assault on one’s sense of self-worth and dignity (or the dignity of those one holds dear), or the loss of a loved one. In short, an internal upheaval that calls the soul to life.

Every person has his “sore spots,” and this is where the inner revolution of the personality begins. According to Victor Yulievich’s notions, the presence of a catalyst or “initiator” is almost a sine qua non of this process, whether it be a teacher, a guardian, an older friend, or even a relative (usually a fairly distant one). As in baptism, a child’s parents rarely assume the role of godparents (unless, for example, the child’s life is in some sort of danger). In exceptional circumstances, even a book that falls into a child’s hands at the right moment can serve as an “initiator.”

Following a comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon, the author went on to describe several cases of initiation derived from classical Russian literature, examining the maturation of contemporary adolescents and analyzing the reasons for their tardy development. He also discussed the most alarming phenomenon of all: “initiation avoidance.”

It also occurred to Victor Yulievich that at just this age, Lutherans and Anglicans undergo the process of Confirmation, conscious acceptance of the faith; Jewish boys celebrate their bar mitzvahs, in which they are inducted into the adult community; and Muslims are circumcised. Thus, it seems that communities of believers attach particular significance to this transition from childhood to adulthood, whereas the atheist world has completely foregone this crucial mechanism. Becoming a Pioneer or a Komsomol member could hardly be considered a serious replacement for this practice.

The community sinks below the level of a moral minimum when the number of people who have not undergone this process of initiation in early youth exceeds half the population—this was the view that Victor Yulievich held at that time.

He and the late Vygotsky had serious differences of opinion about the formation and displacement of cultural interests, but that hardly mattered, since developmental psychology was a “closed” subject, forbidden, along with genetics and cybernetics. In truth, Victor Yulievich did not hold out any hopes that his future book might be published. But these kinds of pragmatic considerations could gain no toehold amid the heady pace of his life, which gave him every happiness he could ever have wished for—creative work, a marvelous young wife holding up that very diaper with the yellowish stain, a diminutive miracle with wonderful tiny fingers and lips and eyes, a little creature that grew more human by the day, and students whose enthusiasm raised him to heights hitherto unknown. He smiled in his sleep, and he smiled upon waking.

* * *

The country was, meanwhile, in the throes of its own mad existence. After the unseen wrangling at Dzhugashvili’s coffin, the hidden struggle for power, after the return of the first thousands of people from the prison camps and from exile, after the inexplicable, unanticipated Twentieth Party Congress, the uprising in Hungary began and ended.

Victor Yulievich, steeped in the affairs of his own life, was only half-aware of these events. His “inner” life during this period seemed more important than the “outer.”

In September, during the first days of school, Tasya Vorobieva, a pretty student who took night classes at the pedagogical institute and with whom Victor Yulievich was on good terms, slipped him a packet of faded pages with Khrushchev’s address to the Twentieth Party Congress typed on them. Although half a year had already passed since that event, it had still not been published anywhere. This address, full of cautious half-truths, was distributed only among the highest echelons of the Party. Rank and file Party members were informed about it during closed meetings, and only orally. The top of the document was marked “For Official Use Only”—thus, not for ordinary people. This was the run-of-the-mill Soviet phantasmagoria: a secret report for one sector of the populace, which it was required to keep secret from the other. A government with an impaired faculty of reason.

Victor Yulievich also read Khrushchev’s address, which so many people were talking about. It was, indeed, very interesting. History was unfolding before their very eyes. The tyrant had fallen, and three years later the whole pack dared raise its voice against him. Where were you before, all you clever ones? The document, which had momentous consequences, was in equal measure terrifying and revelatory for the Party bosses. This typewritten report, which was continually reproduced and passed from hand to hand, was the first underground samizdat, which in those years had not yet received its name.

While this domestic typing and dissemination of Khrushchev’s report was already under way in Moscow, Doctor Zhivago’s hour had not yet arrived. The poems from the novel, however, had already begun to circulate through these clandestine channels.

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.

Victor Yulievich walked into the office, and the principal turned to him theatrically, saying, “Just look at our fine students!”

They had such a pathetic, hangdog look about them that it was clear they needed to be comforted, rather than punished. Victor Yulievich reached for the empty bottle on the principal’s desk, turned it around to look at the label, and said, “This is certainly worth a reprimand. Godawful stuff.”

The principal launched into her spiel.

“Now then. Your parents have been informed, and we will discuss the matter further when they arrive. In the meantime, I want to know who else was in on this. If you don’t tell me their names, you will be expelled from school.”

They had acted alone, but Larisa Stepanovna was certain there had been a whole gang of them up there.

“Tarasov, why are you looking at me with such an insolent expression on your face? That goes for you, too, Maximov. Tell me the names of your accomplices. I want their names! And don’t think you can cover for them, and they’ll be off the hook. We’ll find them out anyway. Only it will be all the worse for you.”

“Hmm, this stuff is truly vile,” Victor Yulievich said with emphasis. “Where did you get it?”

“Bought it,” Maximov answered readily.

“Do your parents drink this at home, too?”

“No, my mother doesn’t drink at all,” Maximov lied.

This shady investigation continued until Tarasov’s father, a lieutenant colonel in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, arrived in his official car. Larisa Stepanovna told him the whole story. He stood there, shaking with fury. “We’ll sort it out,” the lieutenant colonel said darkly. It was clear that his son would pay dearly for this.

“When is your mother going to get here?” Larisa Stepanovna said. Obviously, she was getting bored with the drawn-out, fruitless interrogation. Moreover, her presence was required in the auditorium.

“My mother went to Kaluga to visit my aunt.”

Larisa Stepanovna paused. Her train of thought was etched on her face.

“I’ll take responsibility for him. When the party has ended, I’ll make sure he gets home. So that he isn’t picked up by the police, by mistake,” Victor Yulievich said, placing his left hand on Maximov’s shoulder.

“Leave,” she said, waving her hand dismissively. “And don’t come back to school without your mother, Maximov.”

This warning meant absolutely nothing, since school had already let out for the summer. It would be three months before it started again.

Victor Yulievich led poor Maximov to the auditorium, and pointed at a chair.

“Sit down, Maximov. Be quiet, and try not to attract attention.”

Maximov nodded gratefully. His mother wasn’t in Kaluga at all. Her boyfriend from Alexandrov had arrived, and the two were at home getting drunk.

* * *

When he was writing his play, Mikha tried to capture in rhyme the whole of his vast knowledge of literature. The actors also took a creative view of Mikha’s masterpiece and made their own contributions to it. In the end, the script had ballooned to two hundred pages.

Two weeks before the graduation party, when exams were already in progress and everyone was cramming for algebra and chemistry, Ilya took Mikha’s script, cut it up into chunks and bits, then reshuffled them until a plot—at first impossible to discern—emerged. The story described the journey of a group of dimwits, all recognizable by their real names, who would just be on the verge of misfortune or catastrophe, when the higher powers—an incarnation of Victor Yulievich, from Zeus to the policeman—would intervene to save the day.

Victor Yulievich was played by Senya Svinin, the best actor in the class—he was going to enroll in the theater academy. He wore a papier-mâché mask that bore a passing resemblance to Victor Yulievich. His right arm was not in the sleeve of his jacket. Instead, they had folded up the sleeve halfway and pinned it.

It was all terribly silly and terribly funny. A statue of Zeus toppled over and smashed into bits, and Svinin-Shengeli, shaking the dust off, crawled out. Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin searched high and low for some lost object. In the end it turned out that he had been looking for a dainty little foot. About fifty mannequin legs, their stocking feet aloft, floated out onto the stage. Chekhov’s gun, in the guise of a child’s toy wooden rifle, ended up in the hands of one of Turgenev’s hunters, and fired a shot—after which a seagull made out of an old rag plummeted down with a hideous screech.

The whole phantasmagorical drama centered on dear Victor Yulievich, of course.

Sanya Steklov, in a curly wig and a velvet robe, sat at the piano and played to perfection in the spots where the text faltered a bit.

Then, raising their voices in unison, they sang an anthem, also written by Mikha, which it would be a crime to omit.

Both many-armed and many-eyed,

He faced our death, and death defied

(For each of us one time he tried)

And that is why our time we bide

To tell his story far and wide.

Yes, Yulievich, we’re on your side!

You showed the truth, you never lied—

That we have noble blood inside.

At your command, it is our pride

To rally to your call, not hide,

And follow in your footsteps, ride

The waves, or fly, to keep in stride

With Victor Yulievich, our sun,

Who’ll light our way for years to come.

When the song was over, there was not a single teacher left in the auditorium. All of them had escaped to the teachers’ lounge, fuming in indignation. They had been scorned! For this reason they hadn’t even seen the end of the play, when the actors gathered in a circle on the stage to discuss what to give their beloved teacher as parting gift. They entertained, and dismissed, several highly comical suggestions before deciding that the gift had to be something unparalleled, something invaluable, something that “wouldn’t run out” (that is, it couldn’t be eaten or drunk). And it had to be useful! And bring joy! At last, they dragged onto the stage an enormous box, the size of a person. They removed the top lid and revealed a plaster statue inside: a slender young girl in a tunic. She stood there quite naturally in a Classical pose, until they commanded: “Forward!”

The statue came to life. It was Katya Zueva, covered in whitewash. It must be said that it hadn’t been easy to talk her into playing the role.

Then she walked through the auditorium amid rousing applause, and kneeled down at Victor Shengeli’s feet.

* * *

After it was all over, they removed the extra chairs from the auditorium and set up tables. The teachers were nowhere to be seen. Victor Yulievich went to the teachers’ lounge to negotiate for the strikers to pick up their tools again.

They were waiting for him. Larisa Stepanovna was the first to speak.

“On behalf of the teachers’ collective, Victor Yulievich, I am obliged to inform you…” the principal began with a triumphal air.

But Victor Yulievich quickly realized what she was going to say. He did the first thing that came to mind—he took a glasses case out of his jacket pocket, removed a pair of old-fashioned steel-rimmed glasses, perched them on his long, regularly formed nose. Then he went up to Larisa Stepanovna. He leaned down to peer at her infamous butterfly brooch pinned to the collar of her blouse, and said in a saccharine tone, “Oh my, how charming! What a dear little piglet it is!”

“Get out!” Larisa Stepanovna shouted. In a voice scarlet with fury, the literature teacher thought.

Strains of music sounded from the auditorium.

“Why are you all so on edge? Let’s go drink some lemonade and dance. The kids are waiting for you!”

He smiled his disarming smile, while thinking to himself: What a pompous son of a gun I was. I shouldn’t have behaved like that. Why did I have to humiliate them? And poor Larisa Stepanovna, the corners of her mouth turned down, like a hurt little girl. She looked like she might start sobbing. What bad kids they were … But what can I do about it now? Surely not ask their forgiveness.

The notice of termination was lying on Larisa Stepanovna’s desk. She had intended to hand it to him at the end of the evening, but now was the perfect time. Her hand trembling, she shoved the fateful document across the table.

“You’re fired!”

There was a knock at the door. The LORLs were looking for their teacher. They had something to give him. And it wasn’t bad port, but very good Georgian wine.