The Story of a Life

26

‘Living’ Languages

The only ‘dead’ language we learned at school was Latin. This was our main subject. It was taught by our form master, Vladimir Fadeevich Suboch, who looked like a tall, thin tomcat with long, spiky whiskers. He was a kind man and we liked him, even though he would spring devastating Latin tests on us without warning. Bodyansky also paid close attention to our progress in Latin and repeatedly said: ‘Latin is the greatest phenomenon in the history of world languages!’

Greek was not obligatory. Only a few of the boys took it. It was taught by an old Czech covered in tobacco ash by the name of Pospíšil, which to us Russian speakers sounded like ‘Mr Hurry’. He shuffled slowly down the corridors on his weak puffy legs and was always late for class. And so instead of ‘Mr Hurry’, we called him ‘Opozdal’, ‘Mr Late’.

Of the ‘living’ languages, we learned French and German. These were boring lessons. The Frenchman, Serremout, who had a withered arm and a little reddish beard from the era of King Henry IV,fn1 always carried under his arm several large oleographs that he liked to hang on the wall.

The oleographs depicted the contented rural life of villagers from some unknown country during the various seasons of the year. In spring men in straw hats decorated with brightly coloured ribbons ploughed the earth, while their wives, rouged and dressed in tight laced bodices, fed yellow chickens. In summer the men mowed and danced around the haystacks, waving branches of dog-rose. In autumn they threshed grain in front of cottages that resembled children’s toys, while in winter they skated on a frozen river, apparently for lack of anything better to do. Nevertheless, these pictures of villagers were much more interesting than others that depicted boring geometrical rooms devoid of furniture but featuring a cat playing with a ball of wool.

Serremout hung up the oleographs, took a pointer with his good arm, drew our attention to the villagers dancing with their scythes or to the cat, and asked in his thunderous voice: ‘What do we see in this interesting picture?’

We answered all together in French that in this interesting picture we clearly see braves paysans or a tiny kitten playing with a nice old lady’s ball of wool. This business with the pictures dragged on for two years until one day the inspector replaced Serremout with a new teacher, Monsieur Gobas.

Monsieur Gobas had just arrived in Russia, and he didn’t know a word of the language. Ours was the first lesson he gave in this enigmatic country. Monsieur Gobas was from Brittany. He was a short, round little man, so indifferent to life that he could not even be bothered to get angry with us.

The inspector introduced us to Monsieur Gobas and left. Then Régamé, a French boy in our class, stood up and in exquisite Parisian dialect respectfully informed Monsieur Gobas that in Russia it was customary to say a prayer before every lesson. Monsieur Gobas smiled politely, apparently accepting this as one of those native eccentricities which every country possesses.

Littauer got up next. He was a Jew but knew the Russian Orthodox liturgy quite well. He went over and stood before the icon, crossed himself with a flourish, and began the ‘Prayer before Studies’: ‘O Gracious Lord, we pray to thee, send us the blessing of thy Holy Spirit, enriching and strengthening the power of our souls.’ He recited this prayer five times, then he recited the Great Litany. Following that, Littauer proceeded to the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer and the prayer of St Ephraim Sirin. Monsieur Gobas stood there politely, his head bowed and looking puzzled.

‘O Lord, Master of my life,’ intoned Littauer, ‘deliver us from sloth, despondency, ambition and idle chatter!’

We repeated his words in unison, keeping an eye on the clock. Only ten minutes of class time remained. We worried that Littauer’s knowledge of the liturgy might run out before the ten minutes were up. But Littauer didn’t let us down. He recited the Creed a second time and then ended the lesson by singing: ‘O Lord, save thy people.’

The bell rang, and Monsieur Gobas shrugged faintly and left for the teachers’ common room. A ray of sun glinted off his black frock coat as it sailed away down the hall. We broke out laughing behind the cover of the raised lids of our desks, but in no time Inspector Bodyansky stormed in, panting: ‘Tomfoolery! Blasphemy! How dare you, you bunch of louts! Who organised this little prayer service? Was it you, Littauer?’

‘What? Me?’ exclaimed Littauer, getting to his feet. ‘But I’m a Jew, Pavel Petrovich.’

‘Oi-oi-oi!’ said Bodyansky. ‘A Jew! An interesting line of reasoning. Am I to believe that if you made the sign of the cross your arm would fall off? Gather up your books and go home. Along the way you might ponder the sad fact that this is your second failing mark in conduct.’

With Monsieur Gobas we plunged into the jungle of irregular verbs and conjugations. The noble French language became a tangled labyrinth of rules. We lost our way in the thickets of all those mysterious accents – l’accent aigu, l’accent grave, l’accent circonflexe. Gradually we began to think of the living language of Flaubert and Hugo as something distinct and separate from what Monsieur Gobas was teaching us.

With each passing year we loved French literature that much more and worked ever harder to read it in the original. We began to study the language on our own or hired private tutors, having lost all hope in this phlegmatic Breton. Yet he kept on conjugating and declining mindlessly as he stared out of the window at the falling Russian snow. His eyes gave away nothing except a longing to be alone by a warm fireplace. We asked him about Balzac and Dumas, about Hugo and Daudet, but he pretended not to hear or told us that these were writers for adults and not Russian schoolboys who still didn’t know the difference between le futur and le conditionnel.

In time we learned that Monsieur Gobas had a small stone house in a Breton village where his old mother bred rabbits and he had come to Russia solely to earn a bit of money in a few years’ time and then retire and return home to his mother and grow mushrooms that he would be able to sell for a considerable profit in Paris. This explained why he had no interest in Russia or French literature.

Only once did Monsieur Gobas have a talk with us from the heart. It was a spring day. He was preparing to leave, to spend the summer holidays in Brittany. This explained his relaxed mood. He joked in a morose way how man had been created for a quiet life. For this reason, one must always follow the rules and be content with little. He then told us how as a boy he had caught lobsters with his grandfather. He sighed and fell silent as if lost in thought. Through the window we could see the chestnut trees in full bloom. The soft, fresh air of spring filled the corridors and caressed our faces. A sad Monsieur Gobas looked out of the window and shook his head – life had cast him out into an alien world like a ladybird blown by a strong wind from a green leaf. And all because he was poor, and this dreary labour was the only way he could scrape together enough to guarantee a peaceful old age.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s life! We mustn’t curse and moan. Patience is its own reward. Isn’t that so?’

No one said anything because at that time we were convinced that patience was the same thing as stupidity.

Many years later I told my friend the writer Arkady Gaidarfn2 how Serremout had taught us French with his oleographs. Gaidar was delighted because that was how he had learned French. Memories came back to him, and for several days in a row he talked to me of nothing but Serremout’s teaching method. We were living at the time near Ryazan and enjoyed going for long walks and fishing in the nearby lakes.

‘What do we see in this picture?’ he would ask in French and then, before I could say a word, answer himself: ‘We see an unwelcoming village and two poor travellers shaking its dust from their boots. We see the villagers who refuse to exchange with the travellers three eggs for a handful of tobacco.’

On the train back to Moscow somewhere along the little-travelled line between Tuma and Vladimir, Gaidar woke me in the middle of the night and asked: ‘What do we see in this interesting picture?’

I couldn’t see a thing because the flickering candle in the lamp was sending long shadows up and down the carriage.

‘We see,’ Gaidar explained, ‘a railway thief pinching a pair of warm felt boots known in Russia as “valenki” from the basket of a nice old lady.’

With these words, Gaidar – a good-natured giant of a man – jumped down from the upper berth, grabbed a nimble fellow in a checked cap by the collar, took the valenki from him, and said: ‘Get lost! And you’d better hope I never lay eyes on you again!’

The frightened thief ran to the door and jumped from the moving train. This was, I’m certain, the only practical application ever of Monsieur Serremout’s method.

Our German lessons were more interesting, and not because Oskar Fëdorovich Johanson was a model teacher, but because sometimes we got to occupy ourselves with matters far removed from the German language. Most of all this involved Oskar Fëdorovich asking us to make copies of his operatic score ‘The Spirit of Tokay Wine’.

Johanson was a nervous old Viennese. He came to class with a sawn-off leg from a wooden chair. When the noise in the class became unbearable, Johanson grabbed the chair leg and banged it on his desk with all his might. Order was restored immediately. Johanson was a knowledgeable music lover. He had planned to become a composer, but some obscure chapter in his life had destroyed his dream and so, with disgust, he turned to teaching. His demands of us were minimal. If one of us failed an exam, Johanson would stare at the boy for a long time over his pince-nez, sigh, and then slowly write down the lowest possible passing mark in his book.

Once, when I was in the sixth form, Johanson left his opera score on the tram. It was his only copy. He put an advertisement in the local newspaper, but no one returned the score. Johanson stayed away from school for a whole week and when he returned, we hardly recognised him – he was grey in the face and had a torn scarf wrapped around his yellow neck. The silence in the classroom that day was deathly.

‘Well, young men,’ he began, ‘it’s all over! That opera was my whole life’s work. Writing it kept me young. With every page I could feel the clock move back in time. Yes, it’s true! It was the music of happiness. That’s what I was writing about. And where is it, this happiness, you ask? It’s all around us! It’s in the wind in the trees. In the oak leaves, in the smell of wine barrels. In the songs of the birds, in women’s voices. It’s here, there and everywhere. I dreamed of becoming a wandering musician, not a man forced to wear this teacher’s uniform. I envied the Gypsies. I wished to perform at village weddings and in a woodsman’s cottage. For lovers and the lonely, for heroes and poets, for those who have been lied to but still not lost their faith in human goodness. All this was in my opera. Everything! I thought I could die a contented man having seen it performed on the stage of the Vienna Opera. Perhaps, I thought, my friend, the old poet Altenberg, would come, take his seat in one of the velvet chairs, looking like a big teddy bear, and tears would pour from his eyes.fn3 For me this would have been the greatest reward. And perhaps my music would even be heard by her, she who had never believed in my talents …’

Johanson beheld his thin fingers as he spoke. He seemed intoxicated with grief. He always spoke in a flowery, theatrical sort of way, but now we didn’t notice. We just sat there, our eyes staring at the floor.

During the break Suboch came to speak to us. ‘I wanted to warn you’, he said as we gathered around him, ‘to be particularly considerate towards Oskar Fëdorovich. Although I expect you already knew this yourselves.’

That same day the call went out to every form in our gymnasium: ‘Find the opera! Find it no matter what!’ I don’t know who issued the call. It reached everyone by word of mouth. We broke into groups to discuss our search plans like a bunch of conspirators. We seethed with impatience to get started.

The hunt began. We questioned all the tram conductors, we visited the markets. We searched the shopkeepers’ stacks of wrapping paper. Finally, the score was found at the Lukyanovsky Market. A boy from the eighth form had discovered it. A market woman had tried to use the sheets to wrap lard, but her customers complained that the ink smeared all over the lard and so she had to find some other paper. Thanks to this, only three pages were missing. The boys in the eighth form returned the manuscript to Johanson, and so we did not get to witness it. We only saw how he walked down the corridor after class surrounded by the older boys. He was not wearing his pince-nez. He was stumbling and swaying from side to side. The boys were supporting him. Inspector Bodyansky was standing in the doorway to the teachers’ common room, smiling and nodding. He folded Johanson into his arms and they kissed.

Several days of music madness followed in our school. Johanson brought in his opera score and fresh music paper. He handed the paper out to us, and we sat down and made several copies of the opera for him.

This was in late winter, and in the spring I received in the mail a formal invitation stating that Oskar Fëdorovich Johanson requested ‘the honour of my presence’ at the performance of selections from his opera, which was to take place at the home of one of my classmates. I arrived on the appointed evening at my friend’s house on Bibikovsky Boulevard. The formal staircase was brightly lit, and the two large drawing rooms were crowded with guests. Most of them were boys from our school, but there were girls from the Mariinskaya Gymnasium as well, along with some grey-haired musicians and actors. Johanson had yet to arrive. I stood by the entrance to the main room and looked down the staircase. Suddenly, Oskar Fëdorovich appeared. He bolted up the stairs looking slim and youthful in his elegant black frock coat. He strode into the drawing room. Everyone applauded.

The music, performed by a string quartet and piano, began all at once. It truly was music of happiness or rather of the joys and sorrows of lovers, worthy of Tristan and Isolde. I am incapable of conveying the beauty and melodic power of his music. After the concert most of the guests congratulated Johanson and left, while those of us who remained were invited to dinner. Late that night we accompanied Johanson home. He stopped along the way at the telegraph office to send a cable to Vienna. He came out looking a bit sad and said that he had waited too long for this happy day to come. And when you wait too long for happiness, it somehow turns into a kind of sorrow.