The Big Green Tent

THE LORLs

On Wednesdays, Victor Yulievich would make the rounds of Moscow with the LORLs (as they called themselves) in tow. Like some latter-day Pied Piper blowing on his flute, he would lead them out of their poor, sick time into a world where thought labored and lived, a world of freedom, and music, and the other arts. This is where it had all happened, right here, behind these very windows!

Their peregrinations through literary Moscow had a wonderfully chaotic character. On what was once called Gendrikov Lane, they looked into the courtyard of a building where Mayakovsky was rumored (mistakenly) to have shot himself. From there they walked down Dzerzhinsky Street, formerly Lubyanka, to the Sretensky Gates. This renaming of Moscow streets disturbed Victor Yulievich, and he always called them by their original names when he was with his students.

They walked down the boulevards to Pushkin Square, where their teacher showed them the house of Famusov, and they stopped at all the addresses associated with Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin: the houses of Vyazemsky and Nashchokin, and the house where Yogel’s dancing classes were held. This was where Pushkin had first seen the young Natalia, who would later become his wife.

“Tverskoy is the oldest of the boulevards. At one time it was just called the Boulevard. There was only one. They call it the Boulevard Ring, but there is no ring, and never was. It’s a semicircle. It runs down to the river. All the boulevards are built on the place where the stone walls of Bely Gorod, the White City, once stood.”

From Pushkin Square they would pick out some unfamiliar route to explore. They walked through Bogoslovsky Lane to Trekhprudny, to the house where the poet Marina Tsvetaeva had lived. Or they would take Tverskoy and Nikitsky Boulevards to the Arbat, and cross Malaya Molchanovka near the little house where Lermontov had lived. Passing through Sobachya Square they found themselves in front of Scriabin’s last apartment. This was where he played, and people still alive today attended his private recitals at home. The students asked questions, and the names stuck in their memories. They ambled through the city without any preconceived plan, and it was impossible to imagine anything better than these aimless pilgrimages of discovery.

Victor Yulievich spent long hours in the library preparing for these outings, digging through old books and scouting for rare tidbits of information. In the History Library, he discovered rich deposits of handwritten memoirs, photographs, and letters. Some of the materials, judging by the library’s records, had never before been examined. He came across a great deal of valuable and intriguing information. He was surprised to learn that many, if not all, of the notable people of the nineteenth century, while living very disparate lives, were related by blood. Certain far-flung clans were intimately intertwined by birth, like a tree with myriad branches. Letters from before the Revolution constantly witnessed to this remarkable web of kinship, and all these connections, as well as family disputes and quarrels and mésalliances, were transformed in Tolstoy’s novels into something larger, greater, than just a family chronicle. It’s like the Russian Bible, thought Victor Yulievich.

Like Gulliver in the land of the Lilliputians, Victor Yulievich was tied by every strand of hair to the ground of Russian culture, and these ties extended to the boys, who were acquiring the taste, growing accustomed to this dusty, papery, ephemeral nourishment.

With the group of boys he would walk down Gorky Street, past Eliseevsky’s, the finest grocery store in the capital, telling his LORLs about Zinaida Alexandrovna Volkonskaya, who had owned this palatial house before its reconstruction.

“She held a literary salon, famous all over Moscow, and all of Moscow’s high society would gather here. Writers, artists, musicians, and professors would all attend, among them Pushkin. Not long ago I came upon an interesting document in the library—a report from Colonel Bibikov dated 1826, in which it was spelled out in black and white: ‘I keep a close eye on the writer Pushkin, insofar as possible. The homes he visits most frequently are the homes of Princess Zinaida Volkonskaya, Prince Vyazemsky, former minister Dmitriev, and Prosecutor Zhikharev. Conversations there revolve primarily around literature.’ You understand what this means, don’t you?”

Ilya was the first to respond. “What’s there to understand? They were spying on him.”

“Precisely. Because all through the ages there have been people who want to ‘revolve primarily around literature.’ Like all of us here!” The teacher laughed. “And then there are the Colonel Bibikovs, who are charged with keeping a close eye on them. Yes, such are the times.”

He hadn’t said anything in particular, but hovered just on the brink of it. He had understood long ago that the past was no better than the present. That was as plain as day. One had to try to escape, to wrestle free from every era, so as not to be devoured by it.

“Literature is the only thing that allows us to survive, the only thing that helps us to reconcile ourselves to the time we live in,” Victor Yulievich told his charges.

Everyone agreed eagerly. Only Sanya had his doubts—what about music?

From listening closely to Mozart and Chopin, he had grasped that there was another dimension quite distinct from literature, a dimension into which his grandmother, then Liza and his music teacher, Evgenia Danilovna, had initiated him. This was the place he had escaped to every day after school, when his hand was still whole and intact. But even now, with his mangled fingers, he had not parted ways with music—he listened to it constantly, picked out melodies on occasion. How could he play, without the use of two fingers? He wasn’t going to fool himself.

For Mikha, these literary journeys were also a form of escape—from his dreary aunt Genya, with her trivial concerns—and a flight into a rarified atmosphere inhabited by noble men and beautiful women.

Ilya didn’t miss a single one of these walks through the city, either. He had set his own task—to document all the events and compile reports accompanied by photographs. Some of these reports were stored at Victor Yulievich’s home, and the others in Ilya’s closet.

* * *

More than a decade would pass before the degenerate heir of Colonel Bibikov, Colonel Chibikov (the immortal Gogol grins each time such echoes in nomenclature spring up), would get his hands on the childhood archive, and fifty more years would pass until an Institute for Central and East European Studies, in a small German town with a fairytale name, would register this archive under a seven-digit number with a forward slash, and the archive would pass into the hands of another one of the LORLs, also a student of Victor Yulievich’s, but a year younger, for safekeeping.

Getting to know these Moscow boys after his experience at the village school, Victor Yulievich again returned to his musings about childhood. He lacked knowledge of the subject, so he began reading scholarly works on the matter.

He managed to get access to semiforbidden books on child psychology, from Freud, whose books stood gathering dust on the bookshelves of the major libraries, to Vygotsky, whose books had been withdrawn from circulation and placed in restricted-access collections. Victor found almost all Vygotsky’s published works in the home of one of his friends, whose grandmother had been fired when the subject of “pedology” had come under fire from above. She had learned to knit sweaters to get by, but she guarded all of Vygotsky’s books like rare treasures, only allowing a select few to read them—and that without “borrowing rights.” Victor Yulievich came on Sunday morning and sat until evening, with a few leisurely breaks for traditional Moscow-style tea-drinking.

Everything he read was very intriguing, but put too great an emphasis on “scholarliness.” Matters that were self-evident, like the well-known fact that adolescent boys stop respecting their parents, become irritable and argumentative, experience heightened sexual curiosity, and that all of this is the result of the hormonal storm assaulting the body, were presented as discoveries. The author’s explanations and interpretations sometimes seemed to Victor Yulievich to be purely speculative and unfounded.

He didn’t find what he was seeking. He had come across a very important notion in his reading of Tolstoy, who called this tormented period “the wilderness of adolescence.” Tolstoy came closest of all to describing what he saw in his agitated, disheveled students. There came a moment when they seemed to lose everything that had accumulated in them until that time, and life seemed to start anew. But not all of them were able to find a way out of the wilderness; a significant number of them remained lost in it forever.

Victor Yulievich’s sole interlocutor on this subject was Mishka Kolesnik, his neighborhood friend from childhood. Mishka was a war invalid, a biologist and an intrepid homespun philosopher. He listened attentively, but couldn’t abide long-winded deliberation. He interrupted Victor Yulievich, grumbling, “Yes, go on, go on. I get the point.” He tried to hasten his friend’s train of thought, interjecting strange, at first incomprehensible observations and comments—which were in fact the articulation of a biological perspective.

Victor Yulievich gradually grew accustomed to his interlocutor’s unusual thought processes, and was gripped by the idea of the universalism of knowledge toward which the lame Kolesnik was pushing him. He was the one who introduced Victor, an inveterate man of letters, to the principles of evolution, the one who enlightened him on the conflict between the theories of Lamarck and Darwin, and even elaborated on such technical particulars as metamorphosis, neoteny, and chromosomal heredity.

Now, when he reflected on his growing boys, he observed how close their maturation processes were to the metamorphosis that insects undergo.

Small babies with unformed minds, human larvae, devour whatever food comes their way—they suck, munch, and swallow ideas and impressions at random, and then pupate; and within their cocoons everything falls into place in the required order—reflexes are developed and refined, skills are learned, initial impressions of the world are mastered. But how many cocoons perish without reaching the final phase of growth, never bursting the seams and releasing the butterfly within? Anima, anima, little soul … colorful and airborne, a short-lived marvel. And how many of them remain larvae until their very death, never realizing that their maturity has eluded them.

Vygotsky discussed the differences between the process of habit-formation and the unfolding of interests. But Victor Yulievich saw the picture otherwise—he observed in his pupils the unfolding of wings, and the meanings and designs imprinted on them. But why did some, like insects with a full cycle of development, undergo metamorphosis, while others did not?

Victor Yulievich sensed almost physically these moments when the horny covering of the chrysalis bursts apart. He heard the flutter and rustle of wings, and was filled with happiness, like a midwife attending a birth.

But for some reason this metamorphosis didn’t occur in all of his pupils, or even most of them, but rather in the minority. What was the essence of this process? The awakening of a moral sensibility? Yes, of course. But why did it happen in some, and not in others? Is there some kind of mysterious module of transition: a ritual, or rite? Or perhaps Homo sapiens, rational man, also undergoes a phenomenon similar to neoteny, which is observed in worms, insects, and amphibians—when the ability to reproduce appears not in mature specimens, but already in the larval stages? And then the immature organism spawns analogous larvae, which will in their turn never mature.

“Naturally, this is only a metaphor. I understand that my adolescents are, physiologically, full-grown beings. Imagos, so to speak,” he said for Kolesnik’s benefit. But Kolesnik grasped the idea at once and needed no interpretations.

Kolesnik raised his thick, arched eyebrows, and drawing out his Rs, spoke with feigned amazement.

“Well, Mr. Littérateur, you’ve certainly grown wiser during the last five-year plan. But can you provide a definition of the imago, the ‘mature’ person? What are the criteria for ‘maturity’?”

Victor Yulievich thought about it. “Not simply the ability to reproduce. Responsibility for one’s actions, perhaps? Independence? A degree of self-awareness?”

“Those are qualitative criteria, not quantitative,” Kolesnik said, jabbing him with his finger. “Look what you end up with: initiation—some indeterminate thing—and responsibility—how do you measure it? So, according to you, the human larva becomes an imago as the result of some process of initiation?”

Victor Yulievich pressed on. “You admit, Mishka, that we live in a society of larvae—immature human beings, adolescents disguised as adults?”

“There is something to that. I’ll think about it,” Kolesnik said. “The question you pose is purely anthropological, and modern anthropology is in a period of stagnation, which is a problem. But, indeed, some element of neoteny can be observed.”

* * *

Victor Yulievich combed through the pages of a stack of books. He was searching for the coming-of-age ritual he had in mind.

He found descriptions of all manner of rituals—those connected with sexual maturity, with a change in social status, with entering a select community of warriors, shamans, or wizards. He kept looking for something that touched upon the moment when the wildness and rudeness of youth underwent an instantaneous transformation into a cultured state, into mature adult existence. Of course, one could consider the graduation ceremony of European universities, when the newly educated youth are swathed in robes and silly hats, to be this kind of rite of passage. But weren’t they the very people—doctors, psychologists, and engineers—who devised that most rational system of enslavement and extermination of human beings, the Third Reich? The volume of knowledge digested did not guarantee moral maturity. No, that wasn’t the answer, either.

Although his reading failed to provide direct answers, it was fruitful nonetheless. He learned to discern the outlines of ancient rites and rituals distorted beyond recognition, watered down or taken to extremes, in the rules and customs of contemporary Soviet life. Even the induction of Pioneers into the fold, accompanied by oaths and a change of attire, was a parody of some sort of ancient initiation rite. True, these were not the new white robes of the ancient Christians, not the aprons of the Masonic order, but a simple red kerchief tied around the neck. Still, the connection was not far to seek.

When he had come to the bottom of his small mountain of books, he turned again to the Russian classics—the source of authority he trusted implicitly. He reread Tolstoy’s Childhood. Boyhood. Youth, Herzen’s My Life and Thoughts, and Aksakov’s The Childhood Years of Grandson Bagrov. To these he added Kropotkin’s Notes of a Revolutionary and Maxim Gorky’s trilogy, which already fell outside the bounds of Russian literature’s Golden Age, and describe the sense of injury in the childish psyche at the absolute injustice and cruelty of the world, and how this can awaken compassion and empathy.

He led his boys down the paths of little Nikolay Irteniev, Peter Kropotkin, Sasha Herzen, even Alesha Peshkov—through orphanhood, humiliation, cruelty, and loneliness, to their acceptance of things that he himself considered absolutely basic: the sense of good and evil, and the understanding that love is the supreme value.

His boys responded to his call, and learned to identify important episodes in the books on their own—Garin’s descriptions of Tema descending into the darkness of a slimy well, as though into the underworld, to rescue the dog that had fallen down it; the triumph over fear; the cat, killed by the house caretaker before the very eyes of Alesha Peshkov; and on, and on … The execution of the Decembrists, which so deeply affected Sasha Herzen. Some kind of change was under way. They were becoming more conscious and conscientious—or did it just seem so?

Victor Yulievich himself, who had to remain within the confines of the school curriculum, continually sought what he termed a “strategy of awakening.”

To this end, he gave everything he had. Those were, in essence, simple things—honor, fairness and justice, contempt for baseness and greed. He grounded them in what he considered the absolute pinnacle of classical Russian literature—he opened the door to the room, in Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter, where the fifteen-year-old adolescent, seduced by the breadth and quality of paper that had been used for a geography map, affixed a bast tail to the Cape of Good Hope while Monsieur Beaupré slept his drunken slumber, and his aristocratic father sent the worthless teacher packing, to the delight of the boy’s servant, the peasant Savelich.

And Petrusha Grinev, enduring the cruelest forms of torture, preserved his honor and dignity, which became more valuable to him than life.

Still, there was one strange feature in this whole magnificent body of literature: it was all written by men, about boys. For boys. It was all about honor, about bravery, about duty. As though Russian childhood were solely a male affair. And what about the childhood of girls? What a paltry role they played! Natasha Rostova dances and sings exquisitely, Kitty can skate, Masha Mironova fends off the unwanted advances of a scoundrel. All the young cousins and their girlfriends, with whom the boys are so smitten, are admired for their curls and frills. All the rest are hapless victims: from Anna Karenina and Katyusha Maslova to Sonya Marmeladova. Very curious. What is their story? Are they only the objects of male interest? Where is their childhood? Do they undergo the same inner transformation that boys experience? Can it be just a mere function of physiology? Of biology?

In September 1954, a monumental event took place: separate education was abolished. Girls were admitted to their school, and thereafter began to appear in Ilya’s photographic archive.

Everyone lost their senses, most notably the teachers of long standing, who were accustomed to their boys and believed that girls put them in grave moral danger.

The girls troubled everyone. And it wasn’t these girls in particular, so much as what they represented—an attractive and rather frightening elemental force. The Trianon boys didn’t deign to broach the subject, most likely because of Sanya, who couldn’t bear “impropriety.” This included a variety of things: physical uncleanliness, dirty words, lies, and disproportionate curiosity. Ilya, who allowed himself to indulge in bad language and crude jokes around others, kept himself in check in Sanya’s presence. They did not permit themselves to talk about the girls precisely because their classmates did—and their conversation was always tinged with unseemliness. But a cloud of silence hung above the heads of these three, prefiguring a still unknown rule of thumb: self-respecting men do not discuss women.

The small fry—first- and second-graders—were not fazed in the least by the girls, but the eighth-graders went nuts. The very idea of a girl was enough to unhinge them. Girls were indecent by definition. They wore stockings, held up by elastic bands; the hems of their uniforms would sometimes ride up and reveal glimpses of bare flesh, and something pinkish or blue. Even the least attractive girl had noticeable breasts hidden under her black pinafore, though it wasn’t as if the boys hadn’t known this all before. They knew, of course, but now it was all unbearably close to them. And gym class! They had a girls’ changing room where they undressed. Maybe even completely.

Excitement hung in the air like dust on a playground. All of them, boys and girls, gave off an electrical current, and all of them were love-struck.

The boys were transformed externally as well. Now they wore uniforms that resembled those of pre-Revolutionary preparatory school students: dove-gray coats and dress shirts. All wore uniforms that were too big, so they could grow into them, except Sanya Steklov, whose grandmother bought him just the right size. Although he had grown a little over the summer, he was not destined to catch up to Ilya or Mikha. Strange as it may seem, however, little Sanya enjoyed the most attention from the girls. Notes flew thick and fast through the classroom, like dangerous, honey-laden bees. The only thing missing was the buzz.

By the New Year, sympathies and antipathies had formed, and the first pairs of lovebirds had emerged. Those who had so far been unsuccessful at attracting someone of the opposite sex had high hopes for New Year’s Eve.

All these hopes collapsed in the middle of December, when the whole school came down with measles. It started with the youngest pupils, then broke out among the older students, until a strict quarantine was imposed at the end of the month. Students were even forbidden to move between floors and to use the cafeteria. More than a third of the eighth-grade students came down with measles. Sanya kept waiting to get sick, checking his face every morning for signs, but the reddish rash didn’t appear.

Students were allowed out of the classroom only to go to the bathroom. During the lunch break, the nurse and the lunch lady would bring pies, beet salad, and pots of sweetened tea to their rooms. At first it was exciting, but very soon it palled. The most unpleasant consequence of the whole epidemic was the cancellation of the New Year’s party. The second quarter ended on an anticlimactic note, and they all dispersed for the winter vacation. On December 31, Sanya did come down with the measles after all, which deprived his friends of yet another celebration, their favorite one—Sanya’s birthday.

Victor Yulievich brightened the dull winter break. Usually, the LORLs’ meetings were suspended during the break, but that year they met nearly every other day. In any event, Ilya had taken many photographs during this period. Many others joined them on their walks—everyone who hadn’t gotten sick. They would walk for about three hours, and then drop in at Victor Yulievich’s home to drink tea. Those were the first of the pictures in which the two friends, Katya Zueva and Anya Filimonova, appear. They were the first girls to join their previously all-male club.

Katya had still not cut off her long braids bound with black hair ribbons, which hung over the collar of her coat. Anya Filimonova, in a ski cap with the brim overhanging her face, looked like a boy, with pimples on her forehead. She was trying to conceal them with the hat, Ilya surmised. He was also the first to notice that Katya was in love with their teacher.

When she went to school, she gathered her braids into an unattractive bun; but at the LORL sessions at Victor Yulievich’s, she unbound her mane and suddenly looked very pretty. She sat at the round table, always in the same spot, resting her chin in her palm. Her hair almost completely covered her face, and Mikha had to bend lower to catch a glimpse of it. He liked her immensely, especially outside of school. He also liked little Roza Galeeva, from the seventh grade, and Zoya Krym, who was in the other eighth-grade class.

Every time Victor Yulievich addressed Katya, she blushed so violently that only the tip of her nose remained white. Katya was shy and quiet, and even with Anya, her best friend, she didn’t share her greatest secret—that she had been head-over-heels in love with the teacher at first glance, on September 1, when she saw him standing in the school yard before the opening ceremony, surrounded by his boys, animated and laughing.

She would use any opportunity to see him, and would even follow him home (keeping her distance, of course). Sometimes she would stand by the entrance to his building in the evening, but she never ran into him. She decided to join his club, but only after she had persuaded Anya, who much preferred volleyball, to attend with her.

Closer to spring, something happened that Katya would tell her husband about, not omitting any details, only two years later. Katya managed to get hold of a ticket to Prokofiev’s ballet War and Peace. The whole of Moscow wanted desperately to see the performance, and Katya’s grandmother gave her a single ticket that she had acquired through her vast circle of connections. After the first act, Katya peeked into the theater buffet, just out of curiosity. There was a terrible crush, a noisy throng, and a long line had formed to the buffet. At the table nearest the door, Victor Yulievich was sitting. He was with a beautiful woman with slightly Asian features. A bouquet of flowers was lying on the table. They talked, and then he placed his left hand on her shoulder. Katya was overcome with nausea. She went home without staying to see the rest of the performance. She told her grandmother that she had a splitting headache.

A week later, she waylaid him in the entrance hall of his building and told him she loved him. She was terrified that he would laugh at her. He didn’t. He put his hand on her shoulder, as he had done with the beautiful woman in the buffet, and said, in all seriousness, that he had already guessed her feelings, and that he hadn’t known what to do about it.

“Never mind. It’s just that I die inside whenever I think about that woman you were with in the theater. Are you going to marry her?”

“No, Katya. I’m not going to marry her. She’s already married,” he said somberly.

“Then you’re going to marry me!” And she left.

“When you finish school!” he shouted after her.

The front door slammed behind her. He smiled, shook his head, and, pulling out his metal cigarette case, extracted one from it nimbly. He could do many things with the use of just one hand—he flicked the lighter and started to smoke. He stood for a while, smoking and smiling to himself. When he had lost his hand, he immediately vowed never to marry, never to put himself in a position of humiliating dependence on a woman. For more than ten years already he had managed to evade marriage and turn his back—timidly, decisively, sometimes cruelly, sometimes kindly—as soon as the idea of a permanent family bond cropped up.

But now he smiled: the girl was enchanting, in love with him in a way at once passionate and childlike. She seemed to pose no danger to him. He could never have imagined that he would indeed marry her as soon as she finished school.

* * *

All the next year the ninth-graders were steeped in the nineteenth century. From afar, it appeared very attractive. Ordinary conversations, just as in Zinaida Volkonskaya’s salon, “revolved around literature.” And “history.” As Colonel Bibikov’s report had revealed.

The Decembrists—the beating heart of Russian history, its finest legend—appealed strongly to everyone. Ilya even collected his own portrait gallery of the Decembrists (yet another collection he began, then abandoned to the whims of fate), and rephotographed their portraits from books, thus becoming very handy in the art of reproduction. Once Sanya, while he was examining Ilya’s amateur reproductions, pointed at a certain mustached and rather shaggy-haired fellow, and, as if it were the most ordinary piece of information in the world, said, “This Lunin was a brother of one of my great-great-grandmothers. Grandmother says he was without fear and reproach. We’re related to two Decembrists, in fact. The other one was my grandfather Steklov’s great-great-something. You should ask Nuta about it. She’ll tell you. She even has some of his letters.”

Mikha and Ilya were astounded: Could this be true? And they rushed off to ask Anna Alexandrovna.

Anna Alexandrovna gestured vaguely with her hand, a cigarette between her fingers, and frowned. “Yes, we’re related to them.”

Like all people of that generation, she avoided talking about the past, even a past as distant as this one. Nevertheless, the boys peppered her with questions. She answered tersely. Yes, Mikhail Sergeevich Lunin was her great-grandmother’s brother. And Sanya’s late father, Stepan Yurievich Steklov, was a descendant of Sergei Petrovich Trubetskoy. Sergei Petrovich’s son lived on Bolshaya Nikitinskaya Street. There had been many Trubetskoys; it was a real clan. This very house belonged to one of them about a hundred years ago. The first owner was Dmitry Yurievich, but that was a different line—not the line related to the Decembrist. She herself was not directly related to Trubetskoy, but Sanya was a descendant through the matrilineal line.

Here Mikha grew indignant. “And you never told us, Sanya?”

“Why should I go spreading it around?” Sanya said uncomfortably.

“Oh, come on! Most people would be proud.” Mikha seemed to see Sanya in a different light now. “That poem, you know the one—‘In the depths of the Siberian mines…’ and all that. That’s about them!”

Such rapturous admiration was written all over Mikha’s reddish face that Sanya had to pull the rug out from under him. He bent down close to his ear, and, quietly, so that Anna Alexandrovna couldn’t hear, said, “Yep! In the depths of the Siberian mines, two men sit to take a shit. Their sad labors won’t be lost—their shit makes the best compost!”

Anna Alexandrovna had raised him on these stories of his ancestry, but he was indifferent to the birthright of his ancestral roots.

Ilya either overheard or guessed what Sanya had said, and he let out a long peal of laughter. Mikha’s expression of shocked dismay thoroughly amused him. Batting his long, childish eyelashes, Mikha said, his voice trembling, “How dare you? How do you dare? I should challenge you to a duel for such words.”

Anna Alexandrovna savored this little scene. Her red-haired favorite, whose ancestors would never have been allowed to set foot in an aristocrat’s home, was prepared to challenge her grandson to a duel.

“You’re still just silly boys, your sprouting mustaches notwithstanding. Go put the kettle on for tea, Sanya.”

Sanya went out to the kitchen obediently. Anna Alexandrovna rummaged around in the sideboard. There was nothing special for tea today—just rusks and dried bread rings. But the scent of vanilla, and something else, something pre-Revolutionary, always wafted out when the upper door of the cabinet was opened. Mikha loved it.

They drank their tea in silence. Mikha and Ilya were mulling over what they had learned, amazed that people they had known so well, and for such a long time, were so highborn. They even sensed their proximity to the grand sweep of history in the present moment.

I’ve got to take pictures of them all, Ilya thought. Anna Alexandrovna, and Nadezhda Borisovna, and Sanya. So that the collection will be complete. Anna Alexandrovna, especially, since she’ll probably die soon.

And he already started to envision how he would make a real portrait, so that the nose with the little hump, and the bun fastened with a large brown hairpin, and the short wisps of gray curls falling behind her long ears onto her wrinkled neck would all be visible. And he imagined taking it at such an angle that her sunken cheek, and her long ear with the diamond in the lobe, would all be in the picture.

Mikha munched on rusks and wondered whether it would be proper to ask Anna Alexandrovna why Colonel Trubetskoy had not gone out onto Senate Square, and why he betrayed his comrades. But he was too shy.

Anna Alexandrovna, meanwhile, had gotten up and disappeared behind the room divider. The wardrobe door creaked, and she reemerged with a sizable box, covered with golden tapestry fabric. It contained a valuable book, published in London at Herzen’s Free Russian Press in 1862: The Notes of the Decembrists.

“Here. Wash your hands, wipe your noses, and be careful when you turn the pages. And don’t believe everything you hear or read about the Decembrists.” She seemed to have intuited Mikha’s silent question. “No matter how you look at it, the history of Russia has been rotten, but those times were not the worst imaginable. There was a place for nobility, and dignity, and a sense of honor. Now let me see your hands.”

Mikha gently removed the cat that had settled on his lap and placed it on a pillow. Then he rushed to the bathroom to wash his hands, to show the proper respect for the rare edition he was so eager to touch. When he came back, he opened the book to a random page and started reading:

“‘It was difficult to owe a debt of gratitude to a person whom one held in such low esteem.’”

“Wait a moment, give it here,” Anna Alexandrovna said. She threw a cursory glance at the open page and smiled triumphantly. “You see, this is just what I was talking about. Sergei Trubetskoy wrote this after his interrogation. On the night of the fourteenth of December, he was arrested, and His Imperial Majesty Nikolay Pavlovich himself interrogated him. The Tsar was horrified that a prince descended from the Gediminids, a more aristocratic family than the Romanovs, could have ‘gotten mixed up with this filth.’ At the end of the conversation, the Tsar said, ‘Write to your wife to tell her that your life is not in danger.’ In other words, the Tsar made the decision even before the investigation. But Trubetskoy knew he was guilty of wrongdoing, and accepted all the charges, even that of plotting to kill the Tsar, though in reality he had been vigorously opposed to it.”

“Victor Yulievich said that all the Decembrists gave testimony, admitted everything honestly, because they thought the Tsar would understand them and change his policies,” Mikha said. He was eager to be seen in a positive light in this aristocratic company.

“Yes, they told the truth. Trubetskoy repented his actions bitterly during the interrogations, but never betrayed others. They never stooped to lying. As for Sergei Petrovich, many memoirs testify to the fact that he was loved and respected in exile. As far as I know, there was only one traitor among the Decembrists: Captain Maiboroda. He informed the authorities about the planned uprising three weeks in advance. I don’t know for certain—there may have been one or two others. But there were more than three hundred involved in the plot! Read about it, the interrogation protocols have been published. Informing on others was not in fashion back then, that’s the point I want to make,” Anna Alexandrovna said with peculiar emphasis, which only Ilya picked up on.

“Truth be told, it’s a story that recalls the Gospels. Maiboroda hanged himself—albeit many years later.”

“Like Judas!” Mikha said, revealing his knowledge of biblical history.

Anna Alexandrovna laughed. “Good going, Mikha! You’re a man of culture.”

Mikha grew bolder with the encouragement.

“Anna Alexandrovna, which Decembrist was the…” he began, then faltered. He wanted to say “best,” but decided it would sound too childish. So he said, “Your favorite?”

Anna Alexandrovna leafed through the book. It contained several reproductions. She removed a portrait on yellowing paper that had been cut out from somewhere.

“This one. Mikhail Sergeevich Lunin.”

The boys leaned in over the picture. They had already seen the face, it was part of Ilya’s collection. But in that picture he was young, full-lipped, and mustached, and in this one he was twenty years older.

“Look, he was decorated. See? There’s the cross, and there’s something else I can’t make out,” Ilya said.

“He took part in the 1812 campaign. The only thing I know about his decorations is that they were publicly cast into a fire when he was sentenced,” Anna Alexandrovna said, smiling. “But it didn’t prevent him from remaining a hero.”

“The bastards!” Mikha exclaimed. “War decorations—throwing them into the fire!”

“Indeed. He wasn’t even in St. Petersburg during the uprising. They caught up with him in Warsaw and shipped him back home. He was one of the organizers of the Northern Society, but by that time he had already ceased to play an active role in the conspiracy. He believed that they were not acting decisively enough. Lunin was among those who believed they should kill the Tsar, but others didn’t support him in this. And Trubetskoy, chosen subsequently as their ‘dictator,’ was opposed to the murder.”

“But if Lunin had been able to win them over to his idea the October Revolution would have happened a century earlier!” Mikha said, his eyes wide with excitement. Everyone laughed.

“It wouldn’t have been called ‘October’ then, Mikha,” Anna Alexandrovna said, curbing Mikha’s enthusiasm.

“Oh, that’s true. I didn’t think about that. And what happened to Lunin afterward?”

“Mikhail Sergeevich was arrested again, after serving his sentence to hard labor, this time for his letters. He had also analyzed the reports presented to the Tsar by the Secret Commission. These were published. That was why they arrested him a second time, and why he was sent to prison again. And there he died. Rumor has it that he didn’t die of natural causes, that he was killed on orders from the Tsar.”

“How despicable!” Mikha said. It took him several days to get over Lunin’s death. He wrote a poem called “On the Death of a Hero.”

* * *

This was the most beautiful, the most heroic page of Russian history. Under the guidance of Victor Yulievich, it became the cornerstone of what inspired them, the event that honed their young minds and hearts.

Mikha Melamid wrote an essay, quoting lines from Herzen:

I was present at the mass, and there, before the altar defiled by a murderous prayer, I swore to avenge the executed, and vowed to struggle against the throne, against this altar, against these guns. I did not avenge them; the guardsmen and the throne, the altar and the guns—all remain; but now, thirty years later, I am still standing under the same banner, which I have never once forsaken.

Later in the essay, the boy wrote, now in his own words: “And they remain unavenged till this very day.”

The teacher was moved by Mikha’s essay. Here was one of his boys grasping that moment of transition, the moral crisis of another adolescent, who had lived one hundred years before.

* * *

But life, of course, is more than just heady knowledge about the Decembrists. For instance, the New Year was coming up. It was the most important holiday, the only one that wasn’t for the greater glory of the state, the only one without red flags. It was the only completely human holiday, with the rehabilitated Christmas tree, sanctioned drinking (for adults), presents, and surprises.

This year there were no epidemics, and everyone was eagerly anticipating the New Year’s Eve party. For two weeks before the school celebration, planned for December 30, everyone was mad with excitement: all their dreams of love were about to come true.

This was the first party with girls. They weren’t wearing their uniforms. Instead, they came all dressed up, as colorful as butterflies, and some of them even wore their hair loose. The teachers were also dressed up. Victor Yulievich found it touching that the holiday excitement had affected everyone without exception. Even the principal, Larisa Stepanovna, was wearing high heels and had pinned a brooch to her collar. It was a butterfly with outspread wings—a creature she in no way resembled.

The older students had begun to make preparations for the party so long before, and so carefully, determined as they were not to overlook a single detail in their arsenal of sanctioned pleasures, that plans kept changing throughout December. At first they considered a costume ball. Then they changed their minds—instead of spending time on elaborate costumes, they would have a talent show. They even thought of inviting a real band, but their money didn’t stretch that far. Maybe skits would be a good idea—or a cultural program with poetry, and Natasha Mirzoyan performing Schubert? Or even a real play?

As often happens when there is an overabundance of ideas, it ended up being an incoherent jumble of everything, with no particular rhyme or reason. Those who were in favor of a costume ball or carnival threw on something funny or ridiculous. Katya Zueva, bringing to fruition a long-held plan, appeared in the guise of a postal worker, with a ticket-taker’s bag instead of a mailbag. On her chest she wore a piece of cardboard painted with the number 5, supposed to resemble a badge; instead of the official blue cap of the uniform, she wore a tricorne hat made of folded newspaper. On her back, for those who were completely slow-witted, she had stuck a piece of blue cardboard with a white inscription reading POST. Her friend Anya Filimonova dressed up like a gypsy in a colorful skirt, with hoop earrings, a necklace she had made herself, and a large shawl that her mother had dragged out of a trunk and warned her to treat with the utmost care, since it was very old. In her hand she held a deck of cards for fortune-telling—but she was too shy to use them. She hadn’t even wanted to dress up at first, but Katya had persuaded her to—she needed the moral support.

The evening also featured a poetry montage and a human pyramid, which the whole gymnastics team had practiced to perfection. Twelve people, balancing one on top of the others, representing a Christmas tree hung with ornaments.

* * *

The shop teacher, crippled Itkin, was wearing his war decorations, and the gym teacher, Andrei Ivanovich, for once appeared not in his everyday blue zippered working vest, but in a white sweater. Both of them smelled strongly of eau de cologne—Itkin of Troynoy, and Andrei Ivanovich of Chypre. They played records with old songs that only a trained circus bear could have danced to. When “Rio Rita” came on, the girls started to shuffle their feet, but no one dared to venture out into the middle of the room until the gym teacher invited the senior Pioneer instructor to dance. They danced “Rio Rita” together, the only couple, under the stern gaze of their older colleagues. Tasya Smolkina, an enthusiastic tenth-grader who was a member of the Komsomol committee, saved the day by initiating several games: Freeze Dance and Duck Duck Goose for the younger ones, and Love Mail for those who had romantic hopes for the evening.

Katya Zueva, the mail girl, passed out numbers, and everyone began writing love letters. Katya darted around the room delivering them. Victor Yulievich stood over by the window, waiting for the moment when he could slip away to the teachers’ lounge for a smoke. Just as he got to the door, the mail girl intercepted him and thrust two letters into his hand at the same time. He tucked them away in his pocket. “I love you” was scrawled on one of them; it had no return address. The other one read: “Do you like Pasternak’s prose?” That one was from number 56.

Victor Yulievich went downstairs to the teachers’ room, where two young elementary-school teachers—one pretty, the other rather plain—were whispering and giggling together like eighth-graders. They were also obviously hoping to get some romantic pleasure, their small share of happiness, from the evening.

Victor Yulievich tore up the love note and threw the pieces in the ashtray. The older girls at school fell into two groups: those who adored Victor Yulievich, and, a smaller group, those who preferred the gym teacher. The literature teacher opened the other letter—it had been written with a hard pencil in a round, girlish script, very faint. Rising to the challenge, he wrote his answer: “Except for The Childhood of Zhenya Lyuvers.” He folded it up and wrote “56” on the back, and then began to muse. He had been thinking that nothing had ever been written about the childhood of girls in Russian literature. How could he have forgotten Pasternak’s early novella? He had read it before the war, when he was just a boy, and its intricacy, its contrived unevenness, its elusive structure, and its superfluity of words had not appealed to him. But this was, it seemed, the only work about a girl’s childhood in all of Russian literature. How could he have overlooked it? It contained everything that preoccupied him now: the awakening of consciousness, a psychological catastrophe that prefigured the enormous physiological changes the girl would soon, without warning, undergo. Even her first experience of death! He wanted to reread it immediately, without delay. But his home library contained no Pasternak. He’d have to look for it at the Lenin Library.

He went back to the auditorium, and passed the note back to the mail girl, Katya. He had missed the human pyramid and Schubert. The music had died down altogether now—a waltz had just ended. People shuffled back to their places by the wall. Suddenly, a ringing slap, uncannily loud, resounded through the dusty stillness. Everyone turned to look. In the middle of the room stood a lanky couple—Anya Filimonova in her absurd gypsy attire and Yura Burkin. Anya was clutching her shawl, which she had removed, to her chest. Yura was pressing his hand to his cheek, where the trace of the sturdy volleyball-playing hand was blooming, compliments of his resolute partner.

It was a scene worthy of Gogol. But the curtain did not fall. Everyone continued to stand rooted to the spot, expecting the plot to unfold. And unfold it did: Yura removed his hand from his cheek, raised it slightly, and brushed it across his partner’s face. It made the sound of a smacking kiss.

The crowd let out a quiet gasp—Oooooooh! Katya threw herself at her friend, everything came to life, everyone was overwrought. Anya, who had turned scarlet, wept on Katya’s shoulder. Through sobs, one could make out:

“He … He … blew his nose on my shawl!”

Yura rushed out of the auditorium. Katya looked around. “Is there no one here willing to stand up for her honor?”

She was pale, trembling, filled with fury, and it was clear that she would lose no time in trying to destroy the offender herself. All year she had talked about nothing but noble men and beautiful ladies!

Mikha flew out the door, as though he had wings on his feet. He caught up to Yura in the boys’ bathroom. His hands shaking, Yura was smoking one of his father’s cigarettes, which he had pinched the night before. He didn’t even smoke, it made him queasy. He had been trying to get used to it since sixth grade, but couldn’t. But he liked the act of smoking, just to hold the cigarette in his hand, and this time, he suspected that it wasn’t even going to make him feel queasy.

Mikha grabbed the cigarette out of his hand, broke it in two, tossed it aside, and then said in a slow, calm, contemptuous voice, “A duel! I challenge you to a duel!”

“Mikha, are you nuts? A duel? What duel? She just can’t take a joke, the idiot.”

“We won’t shoot, we have no pistols. We have no weapons whatsoever. Hand-to-hand combat will have to do, but we’ll stick to all the rules.”

“Are you out of your mind?”

“So you’re a coward. On top of being an insolent boor,” Mikha said.

“Okay, okay, if that’s what you want,” Yura said, reluctant but also conciliatory. “When?”

“Today.”

“But it’s already nine thirty!”

* * *

Mikha summoned up all his organizational skills and the duel took place an hour later at Milyutin Park.

The tenth-graders tried to talk Yura out of it, and the ninth-graders worked on Mikha. The rules of the duel were invented on the fly.

Yura whined the whole way, “Mikha, why are you itching to have your face punched in? I need to get home. My father is going to yell at me, my mother has probably gone to school to find out what happened to me.”

But Mikha was adamant.

“A duel! Till the first drop of blood.”

Ilya and Sanya exchanged glances, winked at each other, and even snickered a bit between themselves. Sanya said, “Our little bleeding Jesus!”

Mikha’s second was Ilya, and Yura’s was Vasya Egorochkin. The snow in the park had settled in big drifts, and the seconds had to stamp out a small area for the fight. Sanya suggested that they use leather gloves for the fight, but none of them owned such a luxury. For some reason, Sanya felt sure that fighting with bare fists was against the rules.

“The ancient Greeks wrapped leather belts around their fists.”

Where had he picked that up? But he spoke with confidence. He just knew, that’s all. And they had belts galore. The seconds took off their own belts, hooked them together to make one long one, and laid it in the snow between the duelers, as a barrier. The duelers were supposed to approach it and start to fight on the count of three.

The duelers wrapped their school-uniform belts around their fists, but with the clasps inside their palms. It was very uncomfortable.

“Maybe we can manage without the belts?” Yura suggested. Mikha didn’t even deign to answer him. Ilya suggested that Burkin convey his formal apologies. Mikha rejected this on reasonable grounds.

“The apologies are due to the lady herself.”

Yura’s spirits lifted. “By all means! I’ll apologize right away!”

In view of the absence of the lady in question, the truce was declined. Mikha took off his glasses and handed them to Sanya. They threw off their coats.

“Maybe that’s enough already?” Sanya whispered.

“Just hold it!” Mikha burst out, infuriated. Ilya started counting. On the count of three, they went at each other.

They stood face-to-face: heavyset Yura, Mikha, thinner, but also madder. Mikha jumped up and down in place, and with both fists at once, somehow, popped Yura in the face, awkwardly and painlessly.

Yura’s anger finally kicked in. He launched a single punch at Mikha’s nose. Blood gushed out instantly. Sanya groaned, as though he had taken the blow himself, and pulled out a clean hanky. The punch wasn’t exceedingly strong, but it was perfectly on the mark. From that moment on, Mikha’s nose would be a little crooked. It was sore for a long time. Most likely it had been broken.

The duel was, for all intents and purposes, over.

* * *

Meanwhile, when the students had already left for home, the two young elementary-school teachers were sitting with Andrei Ivanovich and drinking a modest nightcap. Only the cloakroom attendant and the cleaning lady, who sometimes stayed overnight in the utility room when her husband drank too much, were left behind. Katya Zueva, now without her tricorne newspaper hat, wearing her brown coat, its cuffs and hem lengthened with black wool, sat on a chair in the cloakroom waiting for Victor Yulievich.

When he came downstairs, she handed him a note.

“A letter for you.”

He looked puzzled—he had already forgotten about the game. “Oh? Thank you,” he said, stuffing it absentmindedly into his coat pocket.

He found the scrap of paper in his pocket the next morning. It said:

I can lend you his new novel. Do you want it?

—Katya

He didn’t immediately understand what she was talking about.

On January 3, Katya called for him, and, still in postal-worker mode, delivered him a typewritten manuscript.

* * *

Pasternak’s new novel was called Doctor Zhivago. The first pages—even those before the death of Maria Nikolaevna Zhivago—affected Victor Yulievich deeply. This was the continuation of that legacy of Russian literature he had thought was over and done with, lost forever. It seemed that this tradition had sprouted anew, in the present. Every line of the new novel echoed that tradition and spoke of the same thing—of the ordeals of the human heart in this world, of the growth of the human being, of physical death and moral triumph; in short, of the “creation and wonder” of life.

For the entire school break, Victor Yulievich was completely absorbed in Pasternak’s novel. He was enchanted by the poems, though they seemed to be tacked on at the end in a clumsy and gratuitous way—they were recognizably Pasternak, but with a newly minted directness and simplicity. This was, evidently, the “unprecedented simplicity” the poet had long dreamed of.

As soon as he had finished the book, he began reading it again from the beginning. He discovered in it more and more gems of thought, feeling, and word. At the same time, he discerned its weaknesses, and the weaknesses appealed to him as well. They forced one to think, to ponder. Victor Yulievich felt no fondness for Lara, a rather thinly drawn character who kept doing things that attested to her foolishness and narcissism. But boy, how the author loved her!

Victor Yulievich was dismayed by the insistent coincidences, chance meetings, and convergences, until he realized that they were all connected, the loose ends all tied up, during the scene describing Yury Andreevich’s death, the parallel movement of a streetcar carrying the dying Zhivago, and Mademoiselle Fleury, proceeding on foot, without haste, in the same direction, to freedom—one departing from the land of the living, the other leaving the land of her captivity.

A magnificent postscript to the classical tradition of Russian literature, Victor Yulievich thought, pronouncing his verdict.

On January 10, the last day of school break, Victor Yulievich phoned Katya. They met in front of the fabric store on Solyanka Street. He thanked her for the enormous happiness she had afforded him.

“As soon as I read the book, I realized there was someone I had to give it to,” she said.

Then she revealed something to him that he would on no account have asked her: how she had acquired the book. “My grandmother has known Boris Pasternak nearly her whole life. She typed out the novel for him. This is Grandmother’s copy.”

Victor Yulievich placed a warm hand over the babbling mouth. “Never tell that to anyone. And you didn’t tell me, either.”

He kept his hand over her lips, and they moved ever so slightly, as though she were whispering to him silently.

She had just turned seventeen. She was barely out of childhood, and she still displayed some of the ways and manners of a child. Her long, bare neck stuck out of her coat. She had no scarf. Her hat was a child’s bonnet that tied under her chin. Her light brown eyes showed hurt, and a film of tears.

“No, no one—just you. I knew you would like it. I was right, wasn’t I? You did like it?”

“More than you can know, Katya. More than you can ever know. A book like that changes one’s life. I will be grateful to you until the day I die.”

“Really?” Her eyelashes opened wide, and her eyes lit up.

My God, it’s Natasha Rostova! Natasha Rostova in the flesh!

It took his breath away.

* * *

After Katya finished school, they got married. The first to know about it were, of course, the LORLs. They were thrilled. By September, Katya’s belly was noticeable to anyone who was paying attention, and the LORLs were doubly happy.

These circumstances drew them still closer to their teacher. Now, after their sessions, they would occasionally share a good bottle of Georgian wine, which flowed freely at Victor Yulievich’s home. They even started calling him Vika—to his face. And he didn’t object, though he preserved the custom of using the old-fashioned and respectful form of “you” when addressing them.

The sessions of the Lovers of Russian Literature continued to be held in Ksenia Nikolayevna’s room, but Victor Yulievich and Katya now lived in an apartment that belonged to one of Katya’s relatives. He had moved to the Russian north, having gotten a better job, and offered them the use of the apartment, in a residence for railroad workers, with windows facing onto the rail yards. They began their new life together against the background of an unceasing twenty-four-hour refrain: train departing, train arriving …