The Story of a Life

15

The First Commandment

Our divinity teacher, Archpriest Tregubov, had a different-coloured cassock for every day of the week. Grey, blue, purple, black, brown, green and, finally, off-white. You could tell what day of the week it was by the colour of his cassock, be it a Tuesday or a Saturday.

The moment he appeared in our third form, Tregubov immediately destroyed our school’s age-old traditions in the teaching of divinity. It was customary that pupils in all schools received the highest mark in this subject. This was apparently because divinity teachers were obliged to exhibit love for their fellow man and so tried not to inflict suffering on us schoolchildren. Or perhaps it was because neither the divinity teachers nor the schoolchildren took the subject seriously.

With one fell swoop Tregubov destroyed our contempt for divinity. ‘Altukhov,’ he said, ‘recite the First Commandment.’

‘I am the Lord thy God thou shalt have no other gods before Me!’ Altukhov rattled off and grinned. There was no way one could find fault with this answer.

‘Sit down!’ said Tregubov and then gave Altukhov a zero. ‘Borimovich, it’s your turn to recite the First Commandment.’

The colour draining from his face, Borimovich recited the First Commandment just as correctly as Altukhov and also got a zero.

Tregubov called on all of us in alphabetical order. All of us recited it correctly, and Tregubov, smiling with malicious delight, gave every last one of us a zero. None of us understood what was happening. It foretold great troubles.

Having completed recording our marks in his grade book – every single surname, starting with ‘A’ and ending with ‘Z’ – Tregubov stroked his beard with his perfumed hands and pronounced: ‘All of you show a complete lack of respect for punctuation. Thus, you have been fittingly penalised. Your attitude to Holy Scripture is both slipshod and thoughtless, as if you were nothing but a lot of little kittens. After the words “I am the Lord thy God”, there is a comma. And why? Because you must make a slight pause here in order to highlight the importance of the following affirmation. And yet all of you race through these holy words as if you were shelling peas. You should be ashamed of yourselves!’

He spoke softly, his narrow eyes full of disdain for us. A gold academician’s badge glistened on his silk cassock.

Before Tregubov our divinity master had been Archpriest Zlatoverkhovnikov, a feeble and deaf old man who spoke with a lisp. Things had been easier with him. You could spout any old nonsense as long as you spoke quickly and in a monotone voice. Within a minute or two Zlatoverkhovnikov’s eyelids would begin to droop and soon after he’d be fast asleep. Then we were free to do whatever we wanted, just as long as we didn’t wake the old priest. The boys at the back played chemin-de-fer and fried small fish on matchsticks. Those up front read The Adventures of the Famous American Detective Nick Carter. Zlatoverkhovnikov snored softly, and we boys had our fun until a few minutes before the bell rang and it was time for us to wake him up by dropping all our books on the floor or sneezing in unison on the count of three.

After the old priest, Tregubov appeared before us like an avenging Lord of Hosts. He even looked something like the Lord of Hosts peering down from the church dome – enormous, with a bushy beard and wrathful eyebrows. Not only were we pupils afraid of Tregubov, so, too, were the teachers. He was a monarchist, a member of the State Council, and the enemy of free thought. Equal in rank to the Metropolitan of Kiev, he induced fits of silent terror in the country priests forced to come before him for a dressing down over their various infractions. Tregubov loved to speak at the public discussions about philosophical and religious matters that were then all the rage. He spoke with smooth, sugary eloquence and gave off the smell of eau-de-Cologne.

Our hatred of him was as cold as his for us. But to this very day we still remember the holy scripture he taught us. We used any pretext to miss his lessons. A reliable refuge on such occasions could be found by attending the lessons in Roman Catholic theology. These were taught at the same time, but in a different classroom. It was only there that we felt safe. This territory belonged, in a sense, to the Roman Catholic Church and Pope Leo XIII. Tregubov’s authority went no further than the threshold of his dusty, unexceptional classroom, while in here, Father Olendsky was in charge. Tall, stout, with white hair and a black rosary on his wrist, he was never in the least surprised by the appearance at his classroom door of some embarrassed Russian Orthodox pupil.

‘Run away, have you?’ he would ask in a stern voice.

‘No, Father, it’s just that I wanted to sit in your room for a while.’

‘Sit for a while, eh? Well, you naughty little boy,’ Olendsky shook with laughter. ‘Come here.’

The boy approached Olendsky. The priest gave him a loud whack on the head with his snuffbox. This gesture signalled the absolution of all sins.

‘Sit down,’ Olendsky told the boy, ‘over there in the corner, behind Khorzhevsky,’ (Khorzhevsky was an extremely tall Pole) ‘so no one can see you from the corridor and drag you off into the fires of Gehenna. Here, sit and read this newspaper!’ Olendsky pulled from the pocket of his soutane a copy of Kievan Thought folded in four and handed it to the fugitive.

‘Thank you, Father,’ the fugitive said.

‘Don’t thank me, thank God,’ replied Olendsky. ‘I am nothing more than a pitiful tool in His hands. He has delivered you from the House of Bondage like the Jews from the land of Egypt.’

Of course, Tregubov knew that Olendsky was hiding us in his classroom. But even Tregubov was defenceless before Olendsky. Whenever they met, the good-natured priest became exquisitely polite and venomous. The dignity attached to the position of archpriest of the Orthodox Church prevented Tregubov from arguing with Olendsky. We made as much use of this fact as possible. In the end, we knew the Catholic liturgy better than many of the Poles.

‘Staniszewski, Tadeusz,’ said the priest, ‘recite the Magnificat.’

Tadeusz Staniszewski stood up, straightened his belt, coughed, swallowed hard, looked out of the window, then at the ceiling, and, finally, confessed: ‘I’ve forgotten it, Father.’

‘Forgotten? But you never forget to come to church when Panna Gzhibovskaya is there, do you? Sit down! Who knows the Magnificat? Well? Anyone? Oh, Blessed Virgin of the Virgins, Queen of the Apostles! How is this possible? You’re all silent! Everyone who knows the Magnificat raise your hand.’

The Poles never raised their hands. But once in a while one of the Orthodox boys did, one of those miserable fugitives from Tregubov.

‘All right, then,’ said an exasperated Olendsky, ‘you recite the Magnificat! And should God not punish all of you,’ and here Olendsky pointed at the Poles, ‘then it will be due only to His great mercy.’

Then the fugitive stood up and recited the Magnificat without a single mistake.

‘Come here!’ said Olendsky.

The fugitive approached. Olendsky removed from the pocket of his soutane a large handful of sweets that looked like coffee beans and gave them to the boy. Next, Olendsky snorted a pinch of snuff, quickly recovered himself, and began to tell us his favourite story about how he had held a requiem Mass for Chopin’s heart after it had been returned to Warsaw soldered in a silver urn. After school, Olendsky walked back to his rectory. Along the way he always stopped children on the street and ruffled their hair as they passed by. Everyone in Kiev knew him – the tall priest with the smiling eyes.

For us children, divinity lessons and church matters in general were a constant source of torment. The only thing we enjoyed was Lent. We had a whole week off to fast and attend services before confessing our sins and receiving the Eucharist. We always chose one of the suburban churches. The priests there didn’t pay close attention to whether the schoolboys bothered to attend all the necessary Lenten services.

Lent almost always included the grey and misty month of March. The snow had already begun to turn dark and dirty. And with each passing day, more and more patches of blue sky signalling the arrival of spring could be seen in the gaps between the clouds. Jackdaws cawed in the naked poplars. Greyish pools of cold water formed on the melting ice of the Dnieper, and in the markets they were already selling pussy willows covered with furry little catkins.

We dreamed of finding some way of getting under Tregubov’s skin, but he was invulnerable. Only once were we able to avenge ourselves for all the torments and fears he had inflicted on us. And our revenge was merciless.

When we were in the fourth form, we heard from some of the older boys that Tregubov was afraid of rats. We smuggled in a small grey rat and released it beneath our desks while Tregubov was telling us some story from the New Testament. Zhdanovich squealed and jumped up onto his desk.

‘What’s going on?’ Tregubov asked in a threatening voice.

‘A rat, Father!’ said Zhdanovich, trembling.

We all jumped up. The terrified rat was running around Tregubov’s feet. With remarkable grace, Tregubov hopped onto his chair and lifted his cassock up to his knees. We saw that he was wearing striped trousers and slippers with delicate trim on them. We started throwing our textbooks at the rat. It squeaked and darted off in the direction of the blackboard. Father Tregubov quickly moved from his chair to his desk.

‘Open the doors!’ he roared in his canonical bass voice. ‘The doors! Let it out into the corridor!’

We pretended that we were too frightened to go and open the doors. Then Father Tregubov screamed so loud that the glass shook in its frame: ‘Platon Fëdorovich! Over here!’ And then he flung his mark book at the rat.

The door flew open and there stood the alarmed Supervisor Platon Fëdorovich. Proctor Kazimir was there as well, looking over Platon’s shoulder. Finally, Inspector Bodyansky showed up. Frowning so as not to laugh, he took command and began organising the expulsion of the rat. Tregubov refused to climb down from his desk. He merely lowered his cassock, standing there before us like a monument to himself, twice life-size. Once the rat had been expelled, Tregubov, aided by Bodyansky, climbed down from the desk. One of the boys obligingly handed him his mark book, and Father Tregubov, having by now regained his usual sublime appearance, removed himself from the classroom. Only some time later did Tregubov realise that the rat could not have ended up in the classroom by pure chance. He demanded an investigation into the matter, but it led nowhere. The entire school rejoiced, but Inspector Bodyansky said: ‘Don’t gloat over human weakness! Better you take a close look at yourselves, for I have recently begun to notice once again that some of you, gentlemen, have been going about with broken insignia in your caps. And for this I’m prepared to deprive any boy of his dinner.’

I am forced to jump ahead in my story in order to describe how we got rid of Tregubov. It was in the eighth form and I was then living alone, without any family, in a room on Diky Lane that I rented from an infantry lieutenant by the name of Romuald Kozlovsky. He lived with his mother, Pani Kozlovskaya, a quiet and kind old woman. It was the autumn of 1910 – dank and dreary, pewter skies, and tree branches sheathed in ice. Long-dead leaves that refused to fall rattled in the cold wind. On days like this I often had headaches. I didn’t go to school but stayed in my little room on Diky Lane, lying in bed with my head wrapped, and trying not to groan for fear of disturbing Pani Kozlovskaya.

Gradually I warmed up, and the pain subsided. Remaining in bed, I would read one of the yellow paperbacks from the Universal Library. The fire crackled in the stove. All was quiet in the small flat. Now and then a bit of snow blew past the window. The pain now gone, my head felt especially clear and I was surrounded by beauty – the colour of the blue-grey sky, the faint smell of burning wood, and the snow on the windowpane. It was on such a day that Pani Kozlovskaya opened the door to the ring of the postman, took the newspaper, gasped and hurried into my room.

‘Kostik,’ she said, ‘something terrible’s happened to Count Tolstoy!’

I jumped out of bed, grabbed the newspaper, which smelled of paraffin, and began to read the first telegrams about Tolstoy’s flight. A terrified Pani Kozlovskaya stared at me and kept repeating: ‘Dear Lord, save him! Save him, dear Lord!’

I got dressed in a hurry, pulled on my coat and went out. I thought that everything in the city must have changed in an instant with the arrival of this staggering news, but everything appeared to be normal. Trucks carried firewood through the streets, an old Kiev tram clattered by, children were out walking with their governesses. Unable to stay away, I headed off to school.

Newspapers littered the desks. Our form master – the Latin teacher Suboch – was late to class. He was never late to class. He came in, collapsed in his chair, removed his pince-nez, and sat hunched for a long time staring out of the window with his bulging, short-sighted eyes. It was as if he was waiting for something. Finally, he said to me: ‘Dear boy, go to the offices of Kievan Thought. They’re posting the latest telegrams there. Find out what’s happening. We’ll wait for you.’

Nothing of the sort had ever happened in our class before, but now everyone looked upon it as something quite normal. I got up and left. Platon Fëdorovich intercepted me in the corridor. ‘Where are you going?’ he threatened and blocked my path.

I told him. Platon Fëdorovich bowed his head and promptly stepped aside to allow me to pass. Upon returning I paused to look into the classroom through the door’s upper pane before going in. Suboch was reading aloud. No one was moving, as if they were frozen in place. I quietly opened the door and heard a familiar passage from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.

Somehow, we managed to muddle through our lessons for the next two or three days. Then, on another dank morning, I left my room to find special editions of the newspapers with black borders on the front page, bewildered people on the streets, and crowds of students near the university. They were just standing there, not saying a word. Everyone had a black crêpe armband on their coat sleeve. Some student I didn’t know came up to me and fixed an armband to my coat.

I made my way to school. Mounted Cossack patrols rode up and down the streets. Large groups of policemen had gathered in the courtyards. Along the way I met up with some of my classmates – all of them were wearing black armbands like mine. We took them off in the cloakroom and put them on our jackets. The school was unusually quiet. Even the first-year boys kept the noise down. That day our first lesson was divinity. Tregubov entered quickly, much quicker than normal, crossed himself before the icon, and sat down at his desk. Matusevich, the pupil on duty for the day, got up and went over to him. Tregubov gave him a weary look but said nothing.

‘Yesterday, at six o’clock in the morning, at Astapovo railway station,’ said Matusevich, trying to remain calm and speak loudly, ‘the greatest writer of our country, and perhaps of the entire world, Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy, died.’

The desk lids slammed. The whole class stood up. In the profound silence could be heard the clatter of horses’ hooves as a patrol rode past. Tregubov leaned forward over his desk, squeezed its edges tightly with his fat fingers, and sat motionless.

‘Stand up, Father!’ Matusevich said in a soft voice.

Tregubov slowly and heavily rose to his feet. His neck was crimson. He stood there with his eyes lowered. A few minutes passed. To us it seemed like hours. Then we all slowly and quietly took our seats. Tregubov picked up his mark book and walked out of the classroom. He stopped at the doors, turned, and said: ‘You have forced me to honour the memory of an apostate who was excommunicated by the church. We won’t discuss whether or not he was a great writer. I have committed a crime against my office and will have to answer for it before God and my superiors. Nevertheless, from this day forward I am no longer your teacher. Farewell. And may God grant you wisdom.’

We were silent. Tregubov walked out. The next day a new divinity teacher arrived. Tregubov’s replacement was a young priest, a lover of philosophy and literature with a face like the poet Nadson. We fell in love with him immediately for his discretion, charm and youth, and our warm feelings for him remained until it was time for us to leave school.