The Big Green Tent

THE NEW TEACHER

In the sixth grade, Victor Yulievich Shengeli, a literature teacher, replaced the Russian teacher whose name no one could remember.

From the very first day he captured the attention of the entire school: he walked briskly down the hallway, with the right sleeve of his gray-striped blazer pinned shut just below the elbow, his half-arm dangling inside. In his left hand he carried an old briefcase with two copper locks—far older than the teacher himself, from the looks of it. And, by the end of that first week, he already had a nickname: the Hand.

He was fairly young, with a handsome face, almost like a film star, but excessively animated. He was in the habit of smiling for no discernible reason, then breaking into a frown, then twitching his nose or lips. He was improbably polite, addressing everyone with the formal “you”; but he could also be very caustic.

For starters, when Ilya was wending his way through the rows of desks with his unsteady gait, the teacher said: “Why are you waddling about like a duck?” Ilya took an instant dislike to him. Then the teacher picked up the attendance book to call roll. When he got to the surname Svinin (someone did have that unfortunate name, which sounded so much like “swine”), he stopped, peered closely at Svinin’s small face, then said in a strange tone that could have been either respectful or mocking: “Nice name.” The class erupted in guffaws, and Senka Svinin turned red as a beet. The teacher raised his eyebrows quizzically.

“Why are you laughing? It’s a very distinguished name. There was an ancient clan of boyars called the Svinins. Peter the Great himself sent a Svinin, I don’t recall his first name, to Holland to study. You’ve never read The Silver Knight? The Svinins are mentioned in it. It’s a fascinating book, by the way.”

Within three months, all of them, including Ilya, Senka Svinin, and, in particular, Mikha, thought the teacher could do no wrong. They clung to his every word, twitching their lips and furrowing their brows in perfect imitation of him.

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 Gogol:

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.”

“Yes, of course! Evil and true genius are incompatible,” Mikha said.

“I hold the same view. There is no definitive proof that Salieri poisoned Mozart. This is just historical speculation. Pushkin’s work, however, is what one could call undiluted fact. A great fact of Russian literature. History may find proof that Salieri never poisoned Mozart, but there will still be no gainsaying The Little Tragedies. Pushkin expressed a great idea: a man cannot be both evil and a true genius.”

It was getting dark. Victor Yulievich said good night to the students, and they all scattered to their homes in various parts of Kitai-Gorod.

This first literary walking tour led to the foundation of a club, which by the end of the year had settled on a name for itself: LORL, the Lovers of Russian Literature.

After finding out about the first excursion, Ilya never missed a single one of these “nature walks”—what Victor Yulievich called their Wednesday afternoon literary wanderings. Ilya would compile reports on their meetings; he was the recording secretary, and a conscientious one, at that. He stored the LORL protocols, together with his photographs, in the bookcase of his sacred space, the closet darkroom.

While they were being initiated into the mysteries of nineteenth-century Russian literature, the LORLs also learned, piece by piece, about the war experiences of their teacher.

With his nostrils and cheeks twitching (which they now knew was the result of an injury), Victor Yulievich told them about how he and his classmates had reported to the recruitment office the day after war broke out.

They sent him to a field artillery school in Tula. The boys wanted concrete details—battle, advance, retreat, wounds. What kind of weaponry? What kind of ammunition? What about the Germans, what were they armed with?

The teacher’s answers were brief and to the point. Remembering was painful for him.

Training at the Tula program was accelerated, but the German advance still outpaced it. By the end of October, the Germans forces had already pushed as far as Tula. The trainees were thrown into battle to defend the city. Each of them was given a platoon of militiamen, and the gun emplacements were manned by student commanders and rank-and-file volunteers. This would have resembled “playing war” as kids, if they had not all been cut down within twelve hours by enemy fire. Victor was saved by his politeness—the first time good manners ever saved anyone’s life in any circumstance. He ordered a soldier, whose name he couldn’t recall, to fetch a box of shells. The fleshy older man cursed the young commander, saying, “Who do you think you are, ordering me around? I’m fifty and you’re only eighteen. You lug the boxes.”

Victor, who was in fact nineteen at the time, ran to fetch the shells without a word. He ran a hundred yards there, empty-handed, and a hundred back, carrying a hundred-pound crate. But when he returned, the panting and winded student commander couldn’t find the gun crew anywhere—there was just a giant smoking crater in the spot where the gun had been set up. None of the crew survived.

There wasn’t even anyone to bury. It had been a direct hit. The trainee sat down on the box, his mind empty, feeling like he was the scorched earth itself, a blast of searing metal, boiling blood, and burning rags. Then, abandoning his useless box, he left, amid the whistles and explosions that he no longer heard.

When the siege of Tula was lifted, they transferred the trainees to Tomsk—those who were left alive after the onslaught, at any rate. For a long time Victor had nightmares about the perished gunners, and the fleshy man cursed him darkly—not about the box of shells, but for something far more serious. A thousand times Victor returned to the scene in his thoughts. What should he have done? How should he have acted? If he had shouted down the fleshy older man, which was his duty as a commander, that guy was the one who would still be alive today, and not he himself.

He decided that he wasn’t cut out to be a commander, only a private. He submitted a request to be assigned to active duty. It was refused—he had only six weeks until graduation. A slight transgression—that was what was called for. Not so great that he would be court-martialed or sent to a punitive battalion, but enough to get him sent to the front as a private instead of an officer.

He came up with a plan for a fitting offense. On the eve of his swearing in as an officer, he went AWOL, got drunk in the city, sneaked into the women’s dormitory, and spent the night with a girl in the recreation room. Early the next morning, at his request, she turned him in to the military patrol. It worked like a charm. He was thrown into the guardhouse for ten days, and then sent into active duty as a private. There he remained until the end of the war, which for him was in 1944, after he was wounded. He never once had to give orders, only carry them out. The task was always the same: make it from point A to point B alive. And myriad petty concerns: eating, drinking, sleeping, not getting blisters on his feet. And it would have been nice to have a good wash once in a while … They gave the order—he fired. No orders—no firing. He didn’t talk about that. He chose to keep silent.

“Where did you get wounded?” the boys asked.

“In Poland, during the invasion. Look, they took my hand.”

What happened after that, he wouldn’t tell the kids. How he learned to write left-handed—in a rounded, slanting script, not devoid of elegance. The stump of his right arm still helped him out a little, but he never wore the pink celluloid prosthesis. He figured out an easy way of donning his rucksack—with his left hand he arranged the first strap over the stump of his right arm, and then reached around behind him with his left arm, slipping it under the other strap. After he left the hospital he went to Moscow. The institute where he had studied before the war had been reorganized, and the vestiges of it had merged with the philological department. That was the place he returned to, in his military overcoat that still reeked of war, and in officer’s boots that didn’t match his rank.

The university on Mokhovaya Street! What a sweet luxury it was—for three whole years he recuperated there, regaining his health through his own efforts: he washed the blood off with Pushkin, Tolstoy, Herzen …

In 1948, shortly before graduation, he was encouraged to take up graduate studies. His academic adviser would be a marvelous medievalist and renowned scholar in the field of European literature. The subject of Victor’s research was intriguing—it examined Pushkin’s relationship to his European counterparts in a primarily Romano-Germanic context. But Victor Yulievich wavered: he also wanted to be a schoolteacher, and he felt that he now knew what he wanted to teach them. Choices, choices …

Where was that voice that prompts you at critical moments and tells you what to do? Yet it turned out he didn’t need that voice after all. The would-be academic adviser was officially reprimanded for his Western leanings and his “cosmopolitanism,” and was later sent to a prison camp.

Victor’s graduate studies ended before they began. He was assigned to teach Russian language and literature in a middle school in the village of Kalinovo, in the Vologda Oblast.

They gave him room and board at the school—one room and an entrance hall, where there was a wood-burning stove. They supplied him with wood. The local store sold hard candy and crabs from the Far East, awful wine, and vodka. Bread was delivered twice a week, and lines started forming in the early hours of the morning. The store opened at nine, when the first lesson at school was just ending. The mothers, observing time-honored village custom, would bring him eggs, cottage cheese, or homemade pies that had the remarkable quality of tasting delicious when warm, but being completely inedible once they had cooled off. From time immemorial this had been the accepted form of payment for the services of doctors, priests, and teachers. He would share these offerings with the cleaning lady Marfusha, an asocial, eccentric widow, but he always drank alone. Not too much and not too little—one bottle an evening. Before going to bed he would read the only author he never got tired of.

Besides literature, he also had to teach geography and history. The school principal taught math and physics, as well as the social sciences, which were all versions of the history of the Communist Party, only with different names. The other subjects—biology and German—were taught by an exiled Petersburg Finnish woman. Besides her nationality, she had one other blemish in her biography: before the war she had worked with Academician Vavilov, an unrepentant Weismann-Morganist, who dared insist on the validity of the theory of genetics.

Everything in Kalinovo was meager. The only thing in abundance there was virginal, unsullied nature. And the people were perhaps better than city-dwellers, because they, too, were almost untouched by spiritual dissipation.

His interactions with rural children had undone all the illusions of his student years. His notions of “the good, the eternal” had not changed, of course; but the circumstances of everyday life here were so coarse, so very difficult. The young girls, wrapped in their patched and mended kerchiefs, who managed to care for the farm animals and their younger siblings before school, and the boys, who already did the work of men in the summer—what use were these cultural values to them? What was the point of studying on an empty stomach and wasting time on knowledge they would never need under any circumstances?

Their childhood was already over long ago. They were simply underdeveloped men and women. Even the ones whose mothers eagerly sent them off to school, by far the minority, seemed to feel awkward, as though they were busy with trifling pastimes rather than serious work. This caused the young teacher to feel uncertain about his role as well—and, really, wasn’t he distracting them from the fundamental concerns of life by exposing them to superfluous luxuries? What did Radishchev mean to them? Or Gogol? Or even Pushkin, for that matter? Teach them to read, and send them home to work as soon as possible. That’s all the students really wanted themselves.

This was when he first started thinking about the phenomenon of childhood. When it began wasn’t the issue; but when did it end? Where was the boundary beyond which a human being became an adult? It was obvious that childhood ended earlier in the country than it did in the city.

The northern countryside had always lived hand to mouth, but after the war the poverty was profound. The women and children did the lion’s share of the work. Of the thirty local men who had gone to the front to fight, only two had returned: one with only one leg, the other with tuberculosis. He died a year later. The children, miniature peasants, shouldered the burden of labor early, and their childhoods were stolen from them.

And, truly, how was one to reckon it, to weigh the losses? Some had had their childhoods stolen from them, others their youths, still others their freedom. Victor Yulievich himself had lost the most insignificant thing of all: his graduate studies.

After his three-year term of quasi-exile—after all, he was living in the same part of the country to which clever young people like himself, with a sense of their own dignity and self-worth, had been sent during tsarist times—his seventh-graders graduated, and he returned to Moscow to live with his mother on Bolshevik Lane, in the building with the knight standing in a niche above the entranceway.

By some stroke of luck, the first place he was offered a teaching job in Moscow was only a ten-minute walk from his home, near the History Library. The library held a strong attraction for him. He had felt starved of literary culture and missed it more than theaters and museums when he was away.

He tried to reestablish his university connections, seeking companionship. He got together with Lena Kurzer, who had spent the war as a military interpreter, but they couldn’t really communicate. He found two more of his former classmates, but again nothing clicked. The mood of the time was taciturn, disinclined to frankness. People started to open up and talk only several years later. Of the three classmates who had survived the war, one of them embarked on a career in the Party and a second taught school. His first and last meeting with them was limited to splitting a bottle of vodka. The third, Stas Komarnitsky, was out of reach: he had been sent to prison, either for telling a joke or just for talking. The only one of his friends he was always happy to see was Mishka Kolesnik, his former neighbor. They made for an amusing postwar pair: Mishka was missing a leg, and Victor an arm, so they called themselves “Three arms, three legs.”

Mishka had meanwhile become a biologist and was married to a nice girl, also from their neighborhood, but younger.

She was a doctor and worked in the municipal hospital. She was desperate to marry Victor off, and kept trying to hook him up with one of her unmarried colleagues. But Victor had no intentions of marrying. After he returned from Kalinovo, he had fallen in love with two beauties at the same time. One he had met in the library, and the other had approached him in a museum, where he had taken his students on a field trip. Mishka joked, “It’s your good fortune that the dames flock to you in pairs, Vic. If there were only one of them, she’d collar you for sure.”

But it was, in fact, work that “collared” Victor. It turned out that teaching his thirteen-year-olds was the most fascinating experience in his life. These Moscow youths had nothing whatsoever in common with their country counterparts. They didn’t plow the land, didn’t sow, didn’t repair the horses’ harnesses, and had none of the peasant’s sense of responsibility for family.

They were ordinary kids—in class, they cut up, threw paper wads and spitballs, sprayed one another with water, hid one another’s book satchels and notebooks, and grabbed and pushed and shoved like puppies. Then they would suddenly freeze in wonder, and ask him real questions. Unlike the country lads, they had had a real childhood, which they were now leaving behind once and for all. Besides pimples, there were other signs, in a higher register, of their maturing: they asked the “accursed questions,” agonized over the injustices in the world, and listened to poetry. A few of them even wrote something that vaguely resembled it. The first one to bring the teacher a neatly copied page of verse was Mikha Melamid.

“Yes, I see,” Victor Yulievich said out loud, smiling. Jewish boys are particularly sensitive readers and writers of Russian literature, he mused.

Half of the class did not quite understand what the literature teacher wanted from them. The other half clung to his every word. Victor Yulievich tried to treat everyone equally, but he did have his favorites—Mikha, emotionally intense and sensitive to a fault; Ilya, energetic and capable; and Sanya, polite and self-contained. The inseparable trio.

He had belonged to just such a triumvirate at one time, and he often thought about his college chums, Zhenya and Mark, who had died in the first days of the war. They were still just boys, really, who hadn’t completely outgrown childhood. Full of overblown romanticism, with their infantile verses—“Brigantine! Brigantine!”—who would they have become now, had they lived? The red-haired Mikha could have been their younger brother, and if you looked closely you could read his complicated future on his face. Not that Victor claimed any sort of clairvoyance; he was just concerned.

It was 1953, not yet March, and the anti-Semitic campaign was raging. In those rotten times, the eighth of him that was Jewish moaned in horror, and the fourth of him that was Georgian burned with shame.

Victor Yulievich was a man of mixed ancestry. He had a Georgian name, he was registered as Russian, but he in fact had very little Russian blood. His Georgian grandfather had been married to a German woman; they had studied together in Switzerland, and Victor’s father, Julius, had been born there. The ancestry of Ksenia Nikolayevna, Victor’s mother, was no less exotic. Her father, the product of the union of an exiled Pole and a Jewish girl, one of the first females to become a trained field doctor, had married a priest’s daughter. This ecclesiastical blood was the sole source of Victor’s Russianness.

From his Georgian grandfather he inherited his musical talent. From his German grandmother, who carefully concealed her origins and with prudent foresight registered herself as Swiss upon her arrival in Tiflis in 1912, he inherited his rational cast of mind and his prodigious memory. His Jewish grandmother gave him her thick hair and small bones; and from his Vologda grandmother, he got his light-gray northern eyes.

Ksenia Nikolayevna, who was early widowed, was the only surviving descendant of two family lines that had gone extinct during the Revolution. She would carefully wipe dust from bookshelves, battle clothes moths, and water the orange marigolds that bloomed nearly year-round on her windowsill.

She had two favorite things in life: taking care of her son, and painting silk handkerchiefs to sell. She was also good at frying meat patties and making French toast. After Vika (that was what she called him—almost like a girl) returned from the front, she quickly learned to do things for him he couldn’t manage with just one hand: slice bread, butter it when butter was to be had. In the mornings, she would make shaving lather for him out of soap.

The one thing that was categorically absent in Victor Yulievich was a proud sense of belonging to some particular people or ethnic group. He felt like an outcast and a blue blood, in equal measure. The Jew-baiting that was endemic to the times was anathema to him primarily on aesthetic grounds: ugly people dressed in ugly clothing whose behavior was ugly, too. Life outside the bounds of literature was harsh and abusive, but the world of books offered living thought, and feeling, and learning. It was impossible to bridge these two realms, and he retreated farther and farther into literature. Only the children he taught could make the nauseating reality outside of books bearable.

And also women. He loved beautiful women. They flashed through his life like brief festivities, often in succession, sometimes even parallel to one another, and all of them were equally beautiful to him.

It must be said that women liked him, too. He was handsome, and even his physical defect (this took him some time to realize) was attractive in its own way. Beautiful women would fall for him not just for the obvious reason that there were fewer men than necessary for the purposes of reproduction, as a veterinarian might put it. What made him especially attractive to women was their mistaken assumption that he would belong to them completely, now and forever, because of his disability.

They were wrong. He had no intention of handing over exclusive rights to himself to anyone, which marriage implied.

In the early twentieth century, Bunin, Kuprin, and Chekhov, in his “Lady with a Dog,” all wrote about “profane” love, a still largely unexplored territory in Russian literature: the sudden blooming of desire, adultery, sexual relations—all that the nineteenth century had deemed “vulgar.”

Not one of these writers was aware of the primary problem of our postwar era, however: the problem of territory, which preoccupied the devotees of divine love, and lovers with the most primitive longings and aspirations, alike. Where? Where could a person who lived in a single room with his mother arrange a lovers’ tryst? Where, in a city without hotels, could one experience mutual “sunstroke”* with a lady friend? There wasn’t even a narrow berth to be had for such purposes. Well, perhaps in summer, en plein air; but summers are so brief in our latitudes.

Bringing a girl home and entertaining her behind the tapestry curtain that divided the male, filial half of the room from the female half occupied by his mother was unthinkable. Renting a room just for trysts was both distasteful and expensive. Borrowing the key to the room of one of his single friends was awkward. Fastidiousness stood guard over Victor Yulievich’s morality.

But he lucked out. All his girlfriends had places at their disposal. Lidochka, a divorcee he saw sometimes, with an elegant neck and beautiful breasts, had her own room. Then there was Tanya the tomboy, who was diminutive and seemed to be walking on springs. Her husband worked as an actor in Saratov, and she rented a room on Sretenka Street within walking distance of Victor’s place. There was also Verochka, a well-educated translator of French, who would take him to her parents’ empty dacha.

He never took a single one of these women home with him to meet his mother. Ksenia Nikolayevna couldn’t abide other women. Mother and son lived peacefully together, and Victor Yulievich wasn’t trying to change that arrangement.

On the morning of March 2, they were eating breakfast—French toast, soft and tender on the inside, crisp on the outside. Ksenia Nikolayevna had cut it up into small pieces for her Vika. This kind of meticulous care, sometimes quite gratuitous, took her back to the days when Vika was still a small boy, she was still young and pretty, and her husband was still alive.

She made the tea strong, just as her late husband had preferred it. Their peaceful breakfast was suddenly interrupted by an official announcement informing the nation of Stalin’s illness. Ksenia Nikolayevna threw her hands up, and Victor’s face jerked. He was silent for a moment, then said, “I swear he kicked the bucket. They’ll try to pull the wool over our eyes for a week, then they’ll admit it.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Why impossible? It’s happened before. When Alexander the First died in Taganrog, a courier was sent to Petersburg with news of his death, and even after the courier had made it as far as Moscow, Golitsyn ordered bulletins to be made up and distributed about the state of the Tsar’s health. For a whole week the city police spread this disinformation.”

“Oh, come now! Wherever did you hear such a thing?”

“I first came upon it in the notes of Prince Kropotkin, he wrote about these very bulletins. Later, in the History Library, I found the bulletins themselves. Compose your face, madame, and simulate grief. Change is on the way.”

“I’m scared,” she whispered. “Vika, I’m scared.”

“Don’t worry. Things can’t get any worse.”

And he left for school. A tense silence gripped the teachers’ lounge. No one spoke louder than a whisper, if at all. He greeted the others, took up his attendance book, and went to see his boys.

As he opened the door to his classroom, the Hand began to recite, and the din died away.

Some say a cavalry corps,

some infantry, some again

will maintain that the swift oars

of our fleet are the finest

sight on dark earth; but I say

that whatever one loves, is.

This is easily proved: did

not Helen—she who had scanned

the flower of the world’s manhood—

choose as first among men one

who laid Troy’s honor in ruin?

warped to his will, forgetting

love due her own blood, her own

child, she wandered far with him …*

“Now, who can tell me what a lyric is?” the teacher said, when the lids of the desks had all closed with a thump and it had gone quiet.

The class was rapt with attention. Victor Yulievich savored the moment—he had learned how to create this meditative silence.

“It’s about love,” a brave soul piped up.

“Correct, but that’s not all. A lyric is about human experience, about the inner life of a human being. And that includes, of course, love. And sadness, and loneliness, and parting from the beloved. And the beloved doesn’t necessarily have to be a person. There is a famous poem, written long before our time, about the death of a sparrow. I’m not joking.

“All ye gentle powers above,

Venus, and thou god of love;

All ye gentle souls below,

That can melt at others’ woe,

Lesbia’s loss with tears deplore,

Lesbia’s sparrow is no more:

Late she wont her bird to prize

Dearer than her own bright eyes.

Sweet it was, and lovely too,

And its mistress well it knew.

Nectar from her lips it sipt,

Here it hopt, and there it skipt:

Oft it wanton’d in the air,

Chirping only to the fair:

Oft it lull’d its head to rest

On the pillow of her breast.

Now, alas! it chirps no more:

All its blandishments are o’er:

Death has summon’d it to go

Pensive to the shades below;

Dismal regions! from whose bourn

No pale travelers return …*

“This is also a lyric.

“We’ve already discussed Homer, read a bit of the Iliad. We know about Odysseus. We learned what an epic poem is. Scholars claim that the epic preceded the lyric. The first poem I recited to you was written in the seventh century BC and mentions Helen. Did anyone guess that this was the same Helen who, according to legend, was the cause of the Trojan War? The speaker in that poem compares the beloved to her. Even today we come across this ‘beautiful Helen,’ wife of King Menelaus, who was abducted by Paris. In this way she migrated from the epic to the lyric—an image of a beauty who captivates mens’ hearts.

“In the depths of antiquity, when human culture was just beginning to emerge, the word was much more intimately connected to music. Verses were recited aloud, to the accompaniment of a musical instrument called the lyre. This is the origin of the term ‘lyric.’ Two and a half thousand years later, a great deal has changed: it is rare for poetry to be accompanied by music, although new genres have appeared in which music and words are intrinsic to each other. Any examples?”

The bell rang, but none of them stirred, as though transfixed by his words. Why didn’t they slam the lids of their desks shut, tear out of their seats, and hurl themselves toward the door with leaps and wild yelps, blocking up the exit with their jostling bodies—move it! Come on, hurry up! Into the hallway, down to the coatroom, out onto the street!

Why did they listen to him? Why did he feel it was so urgent to stuff their heads with things they didn’t need to know? And he was moved by a sense of very subtle power—they were learning to think and feel. What an oasis amid the general dull and meaningless chaos!

Three days later, Stalin’s death was announced, and Victor Yulievich felt a small sense of satisfaction—he had predicted it before anyone else. Moreover, he belonged to the absolute minority of people who did not intend to mourn the loss. When he was growing up, his parents had sent him to Georgia for the summers. The last time they had all been to Tbilisi as a family was shortly before his father’s death, in 1933.

He knew from his father how much his Georgian relatives all despised and feared Dzhugashvili.

The tyrant was no more. The titan was no more. A loathsome creature that had crawled out of the underworld, ancient and tenacious, with a hundred arms and a hundred heads. And a mustache.

* * *

Classes were canceled, and the kids were rounded up for an assembly. Victor Yulievich led his sixth-graders, lined up in pairs, to the auditorium on the fourth floor. Mikha hovered around him, then thrust a piece of paper covered with large lilac handwriting into his hand. It was a poem.

A black frame at the top enclosed the words “Stalin’s Death.”

Weep, people, living here and yon,

Weep, doctors, typists, workers galore.

Our Stalin is dead, and never will one

Such as he return. Nay, nevermore.

Well, hello there, Catullus, Victor thought, stifling his amusement. Then he said quietly, “Well, ‘doctors’ makes sense. But why ‘typists’?”

“My aunt Genya was a typist. All right, let it be ‘typers’ then,” Mikha said on the fly. “Maybe I could recite it?”

Nothing good could come of this ready enthusiasm.

“No, Mikha, I wouldn’t advise it. In fact, I categorically advise against it.”

Mikha wanted to take back the paper, but the teacher folded it deftly in half, pressing it to his chest.

“May I keep it as a memento?”

“Sure!” Mikha said, beaming.

The auditorium was full. Beethoven was playing on the radio. Damp-eyed teachers arranged themselves around a plaster bust. The scarlet velvet of the school banner draped its folds onto the floor. Victor Yulievich stood at the back with a grim look on his face. Borya Rakhmanov, an eighth-grader, was pinned up against a windowsill by the crowd of students. The windowsill was digging painfully into his right side, but there was no room to wriggle free from the torment. This was a light dress rehearsal for what would happen to him only three days later.

After the solemn assembly, with copious sobbing—the teachers provided the example of sincere grief, and the children emulated them, struggling to reach the tragic note—they dispersed and returned to their classrooms. The principal tried to call the school board to find out whether school should be canceled, and for how many days, but the line was always busy. Only at one o’clock was it announced that students should be dismissed and sent home for public mourning. Later they would announce when school was to resume.

When he was sending his students home, Victor Yulievich asked the children to remain there, at home, and to stay off the streets. The best thing of all would be for them to read some good books!

Sanya Steklov was glad to follow his teacher’s advice. He was, it seemed, the only one who had the collected works of Tolstoy on his bookshelf at home, and during the four days of official mourning Sanya devoured all four volumes of War and Peace (though, it’s true, he did skip some of the passages). After he had read the first volume, he gave it to Mikha, but Mikha didn’t so much as open it; he had other problems. Aunt Genya had collapsed from a minor heart attack; Minna was having stomach trouble, which happened whenever the going got rough; and Mikha was run ragged, catering to his woeful aunt’s every whim for three whole days (although her mad grief was somewhat overblown).

Ilya didn’t give a hoot about his teacher’s advice or his mother’s pleas. The alarming significance of the event lured him down into the streets. Early in the morning on March 7 he grabbed his camera and left home with the confidence of a hunter anticipating a run of luck.

For three days Victor Yulievich never left the house, and forbade his mother to go outside as well. The bread had run out, but he said, “Bread? What are you talking about? We don’t even have any vodka.”

Indeed, on the evening of the fifth he had drunk the bottle his mother kept on hand for special occasions. He had decided that until the moment the Leader was taken away and safely buried, he would stay right where he was.

Dressed in his striped pajamas, he lay down on the divan behind the tapestry curtain with a pile of books beside him. The ultimate happiness.

At ten o’clock on March 9, the body was ceremoniously removed from the Hall of Columns, where it had been lying in state. It was carried out by squat people in heavy overcoats with astrakhan collars.

That was when Victor finally left the house—to get bread and vodka. The streets were almost deserted. Trucks were still lined up. The scene that greeted him was reminiscent of the aftermath of St. Petersburg’s infamous flood: crushed shoes and hats, briefcases forever parted from their owners, broken lampposts, smashed-in first-floor windows. By the archway to a building, there was a wall covered in blood. A trampled dog lay in front of it. Victor recalled Pushkin:

Yevgeny—evil is his lot!—

Runs to the old familiar spot

Down the old street—and knows it not.

All, to his horror, is demolished,

Leveled or ruined or abolished.*

He recited The Bronze Horseman to himself from start to finish:

Upon the threshold, they had found

My crazy hero. In the ground

His poor cold body there they hurried,

And left it to God’s mercy, buried.

Just there, on a lane a good distance from his home, Victor found a little shop that was open. The stairs led down into what was nearly a cellar. Several women were talking with the proprietor in hushed voices, but fell silent when Victor entered.

It’s as though they’ve been talking about me, Victor Yulievich said to himself, amused.

One of the women recognized him as the teacher, and peppered him with questions.

“Victor Yurievich, what happened? People are saying that the Jews were behind the stampede, that they organized it. Is this true? Maybe you’ve heard something yourself? Do you know anything about it?”

She was the mother of a tenth-grader, but he couldn’t remember which one. Unsophisticated women often called him by the more common name Yurievich, rather than Yulievich, and this usually annoyed him. But now he was overcome with a strange feeling of humility, uncharacteristic of him.

“No, sweetheart, I haven’t heard anything like that. We’ll down a glass or two this evening for the repose of the soul and then get on with our lives. Why single out the Jews? They’re people just like us. Two bottles of vodka, please, a loaf of white bread, and half a loaf of dark. Oh, and two packages of dumplings.”

He took his groceries, paid, and went out, leaving the women behind in a state of confusion: maybe it wasn’t the Jews after all, but someone else. It could have been anyone, they were surrounded by enemies. Everyone envies us, everyone is afraid of us. And their conversation shifted to another key, prouder and bolder.

* * *

Victor and his mother sat at the round table dotted with burn marks, a carafe between them. Ksenia Nikolayevna brought in the dumplings, overcooked as usual. She placed the pot on an iron trivet. Victor poured them each a glass. Suddenly, the doorbell rang in the hallway. Three rings—that meant they were calling on the Shengelis, not the neighbors.

Victor went out to open the door and beheld a strange vision standing in the doorway. Wrapped up in a black lace shawl draped over a fur hat, wearing a man’s coat with a raccoon-fur collar reeking of mothballs and cats, odors harking back to a distant past, was Nino, his dead father’s cousin. She was an aquiline-nosed beauty, a singer, embroiderer, and nun manquée, who radiated warmth and laughter.

“Is it really you?”

The last time he had seen her was twenty years earlier. As a child he had stayed in her Tbilisi home, but an aura of doubt clung to this memory: Did that house really exist, or had he just dreamed it? But here she was, the same dear Nino, darling Niniko. She had hardly aged at all.

“Vika, my boy, you haven’t changed a bit! I’d have recognized you anywhere.”

“My goodness, Nino, how are you? How did you get here?”

“Well, invite me in, don’t leave me standing here on the threshold!”

They exchanged kisses, stroked each other’s hair, pushed away from each other to get a better look, and then kissed again.

Ksenia Nikolayevna stood at the door to their room wondering indignantly—who could Vika be kissing out there? Good Lord, it’s Nino! The Georgian cousin, her dearly departed’s favorite! It was like she had just stepped out of the distant past. How is it possible? Come in! Sit down, sit down! But wash your hands first!

“By all means! Coming back from the graveyard, the first thing you do is wash your hands,” she said. Her Georgian accent was thicker than it had been before. Her voice was rich with celebratory laughter.

She washed her hands, used the facilities, and washed them again. Ksenia Nikolayevna had already set the table for three. All their plates were old, chipped and cracked all over.

Victor poured out the vodka.

“First, let’s drink to our liberation! It’s like the forty years in the desert. He’s croaked, but we’ve survived!” she said, flouting the protocol at table that was strictly observed in Georgia. A woman—especially a guest—never spoke first!

They drank. Nino broke off a small piece of a single dumpling with her fork, and popped it daintily into her slightly opened mouth. Victor recalled how she had taught him to eat, to drink, to sit down properly, and to greet people. He had clean forgotten all of it. Yet he still did everything just as she had instructed him to back then, without being aware of it.

* * *

“How did you manage to end up here, Ninochka?”

She leaned against the back of the chair, clasped her hands behind her head, and broke into merry, youthful laughter. Then she stopped smiling abruptly, removed the black lace shawl from her shoulders, wrapped it around her head, and stood up. She raised her exquisite, ageless hands above her head and let out a long, ascending wail. When the sound reached its apex, it came crashing down, nearly wordless, because it was mourning the dead. It was an ancient keening beyond the need for words, a howl of despair filled with great pain, and longing, and solemnity.

Nino completed this ancient, wordless utterance and broke into wild laughter again.

She’s inebriated, poor thing, Ksenia Nikolayevna thought.

When her laughing fit was over, Nino told a story that for years afterward would be a favorite among close friends and family.

On March 5, before they had formally announced the death of Stalin, two NKVD officers came to fetch her and take her away. They wanted to take her sister Manana, too, but she had gone to Kutaisi the week before and hadn’t yet returned.

“Mama starts to gather my things, she’s crying, and she whispers under her breath, ‘He just won’t leave us alone, the devil!’

“But the officer, watching Mama pack, understood her, and said, ‘Your daughter will be back home in three days, five at the most. I give you my word.’

“You remember Mama, don’t you, Vika? Ksenia remembers, of course! She’s ninety years old. Even when she was young she was absolutely fearless; and what is there for her to be afraid of now?

“‘Well, maybe your word is golden. But your hands are like iron!’ she says.

“‘There’s no need to insult us, Lamara Noevna,’ one of the creeps says to her. ‘This is a great honor for your daughter.’

“They took me to the local Party headquarters. What an honor, indeed! The lights are always on there, people rushing to and fro like it’s Rustaveli Avenue on a holiday. They take me into a large hall. The hall is full of women—every shape and size. There are village women—but also Veriko, and Tamara, and the Menabde sisters, singers.

“Two men come out—the first one says something like: the world has lost a great leader, the people are inconsolable, grief abounds. And I’m thinking, This is what they brought me here to tell me? Then the second one says, we’ve brought you here because according to ancient Georgian custom women lament the deceased. Only women can do this. We’ve brought you here to carry out a proper lamentation.

“My goodness, right then and there I wanted to sing, ‘Halleluja! God shall arise, and his enemies be scattered!’

“‘We know all about you,’ this dirty little spy says. ‘We know you have sung at funerals and know the Georgian laments. We’ve gotten word from Moscow that they want you to keen for the Great Leader.’

“I don’t know the first thing about it, of course. I’ve sung at many funerals, but Christians don’t sing these pagan laments. It’s just wailing, not true song. Well, never mind, I think, I’ll go anyway! How could I deny myself the pleasure?

“It’s impossible to say how many of us there were altogether. Enough to fill an airplane, at any rate. Some of the others were weeping, some were proud, but all of us were shaking with fear. I admit, I’d never been on a plane before, and I’d never agree to do it except in that kind of situation.

“We landed in Moscow at night, and they took us in buses to some sort of hotel outside the city. They didn’t let us sleep our fill; some Georgian comes to fetch us. A musician, he tells us. He’d be directing us. His face looked familiar, I felt like I’d seen him somewhere before. I stare and stare, and he calls me over and whispers: ‘I’m Mikeladze’s brother.’ Oh, that Satan, how many died at his hands!

“So we wail and lament all day, wail and lament all night, wail and lament all the next day. I’m already sick of it. And we’re only just rehearsing!

“On the evening of the eighth, they announce that plans had changed, there would be no keening. Why they wanted it in the first place, then stopped wanting it, God only knows! Then they loaded everyone into the buses and took us to some godforsaken place. And I lie in bed, screaming to beat the band, ‘Oh, lord! The pain is unbearable! I’m having some kind of attack, oh, the pain!’ I’m thinking there’s no way I’m going back home until I see the two of you. Some bigwig tells me, ‘You’ll have to buy your own ticket, then.’ ‘Owwww!’ I cry. ‘The pain is too much for me to bear! I’ll buy my own ticket.’

“Pour me another glass, Vika. This is the first time in my life I’ve drunk vodka, the first time in my life I’ve ever lied, and the first time in my life we’ve buried a great villain.”

“Not so loud, Nino,” Ksenia Nikolayevna said, touching her shoulder.

Nino nodded and placed her lovely hands over her lips. Victor took her right hand in his left one and kissed it. Something in life was changing. For the better.