The Story of a Life

28

The Hook-Nosed King

Whenever any important person visited Kiev, they were always brought to see our school. It was one of the oldest in Russia. The authorities were proud not only of the gymnasium’s history but its magnificent (and uncomfortable) building as well. The most remarkable feature of the building was its white marble Assembly Hall with windows at both ends. The hall was always cold, even in summer. We liked having important visitors because they always asked the director to give us a day or two off from classes to mark the occasion. The director thanked them for the honour shown the school and always agreed to the request. We hurriedly bound up our books with our belts and headed for the front door in wild packs.

But not every visit by some high dignitary went smoothly. Sometimes there was trouble. Once it involved King Peter I of Serbia. We knew he had ascended the throne following a bloody palace coup.

A week before his visit Platon Fëdorovich began teaching us the Serbian national anthem – ‘God of Justice, Thou who saved us when in deepest bondage cast’ – and instructed us to greet the king with the Serbian ‘Zhivio’ and not the Russian ‘Hurrah’. Director Tereshchenko (‘Butterhead’) was to say a few words of welcome in French to the king. Monsieur Gobas wrote the text. He was extremely proud of this. It was the first time in his life he had been asked to write a welcoming speech to a crowned head.

The director memorised the speech, just as we schoolboys would have done. But Butterhead had a bad memory. He was afraid he would forget the words when the time came to welcome King Peter. The worried director ordered the school’s new inspector, Varsonofy Nikolaevich (Bodyansky had by then been appointed to the Third Gymnasium), to provide him with the best prompter from among the boys. We didn’t like Butterhead and refused to say who was the best. Let Butterhead manage on his own. The school’s best prompter, Régamé, was in our form. We all had listened quietly to the inspector’s request, polite smiles on our faces. Eventually, we gave in. We agreed to provide the best prompter, but only if Borimovich, a quiet, harmless boy, who had been given an unjustly low mark in mathematics, received a better one. Our instructor Ivanov promised to make the change.

With an agreement reached, Régamé was given the text and then prepared a crib. It began with the usual ‘Sire, permettez-nous …’ Translated into Russian it sounded rather strange: ‘Sir, permit us to welcome you within the grey-haired walls of our illustrious school.’ We learned these words by heart, and whenever the director passed by our classroom, we repeated them in his squeaky voice. We especially loved those ‘grey-haired walls’. Butterhead pretended that he hadn’t heard us.

The school had been scrubbed and polished to a festive sheen in preparation for the king’s visit. A red runner was laid upon the main staircase. Even though it was a sunny day, the chandeliers were lit in the Assembly Hall. We arrived in our dress uniforms and were lined up in two rows in the vestibule. Suboch stood alongside us. The gold hilt of his small parade sword peeped out of the top of his pocket. He smelled of eau-de-Cologne. He had polished his pince-nez so thoroughly they glinted like diamonds. Butterhead stood by one of the marble columns. In the jargon of us schoolboys, he had ‘blown a gasket’. He was as white as a sheet and the medals on his tight coat shook from nerves.

We heard the honour guard stationed on the street shout hurrah. The cries of the soldiers kept getting louder as the king approached. A band struck up. The doors flew open. A despondent Butterhead looked over at Régamé and hurried to welcome the king.

The king, a small, hook-nosed man with a grey moustache wearing a blue uniform with silver braiding, strutted into the vestibule. Behind him was a large wave of blue uniforms and the shimmer of black top hats. The porter Vasily, a former circus wrestler, was supposed to help the king off with his coat. But he became all confused, and instead of relieving the king of his coat, tried to force him back into it, at which point the king, his face flushed, resisted and then managed to break free of Vasily’s enormous paws. An adjutant sprang forward, brushed Vasily aside with a white-gloved hand, and obligingly removed the royal coat. Vasily stood panting at attention, unable to understand what had just happened. His eyes glazed as though he were drunk.

‘Sire!’ said Butterhead, bowing before the king and waving his left hand in a frantic motion behind his back. This was the signal that he had forgotten his speech.

Régamé began to ‘serve up’ the prepared text. He did it masterfully.

The king looked with displeasure at the director’s bald red head. He was still panting after the struggle with Vasily. Then he overheard Régamé’s prompting and grinned. The director somehow managed to get through his welcoming remarks and, pointing to the narrow path between the long rows of us schoolboys in our blue uniforms, invited the king into the Assembly Hall. The king began to move, followed by the crush of his suite, the officers’ swords clattering wildly over the vestibule’s metal floor as they went. The flash of their epaulettes blinded our eyes. Walking a step behind the king was General Ivanov, the bellicose commander of the Kiev district. Next came the Serbian ministers holding their top hats and dispensing sugary smiles.

We had put our little plot together well in advance. As soon as the king began to make his way between us boys, we shouted in one friendly voice, ‘Zhulë!’ It sounded almost the same as the Serbian ‘Zhivio’, but, in Russian, meant ‘bunch of scoundrels’. We repeated our salute a few times and it reverberated down the ‘grey-haired walls’ of our school.

Not suspecting a thing, the king walked slowly on, clanking his spurs, nodding and smiling at us as he went. Suboch blanched. General Ivanov made a fist at us behind his back. The white kid glove in his hand shook with fury. A horrified Butterhead stumbled, caught himself and then minced along after the king.

After the king had passed, we heard the school choir up in the balcony greet him with the Serbian national anthem, their voices solemn and pious. Suboch stared us up and down. We stood quietly to attention, however, and our faces showed nothing but the tender emotions befitting such a solemn occasion. Suboch shrugged his shoulders and looked away.

But we were not quite done with the king. As he passed us on the way out, we shouted just as welcomingly and deafeningly as before: ‘Derzhi yevo!’ – ‘Grab him!’ Again, it sounded almost like ‘Zhivio!’ and again the king didn’t notice a thing. He just smiled graciously, and his ministers, cradling their top hats lined with white silk, filed elegantly past us towards the door. It was only when the grey-bearded and supposedly liberal Serbian prime minister, Nikola Pašić, approached that we correctly and clearly shouted: ‘Zhivio Pašić!’

We had, of course, overdone it. We had charged Matusevich, a boy with powerful bass voice (he went on to sing for the Kiev Opera), to bellow ‘Grab him!’ directly into the king’s ear. And he did. The blast almost knocked the king over, but he quickly recovered and then gave Matusevich a polite nod.

After the incident twelve of us got a dressing down from the director and were rusticated for three days. The authorities wanted to cover up the scandal in the hope it would just go away, and so our punishment was extremely light. To this day I still don’t understand why they even bothered. For me, those three days were filled with nothing but relaxation, reading, walks along the Dnieper and outings to the theatre. Not surprisingly, word of the scandal with the Serbian king leaked out. We became the envy not only of the rest of our school, but of every school in the city, none of which was ever honoured by a royal visit.