The Story of a Life

32

‘Golden Latin’

Our Latin teacher, Suboch, looked at me with wide eyes. His moustache quivered. ‘You! A boy in the eighth form! The Devil knows what you’re up to! I ought to give you a failing mark in comportment. Then you’d sing a different tune!’

Suboch was right. The trick or, as we called it, ‘psychological experiment’ that we had carried out in the Latin class could only be described by the words ‘the Devil knows what’.

At one time six pictures had hung on the classroom walls. They had been taken down long ago, but the large metal hooks had remained. The hooks gave us an idea for some fun, which we carried out with skill and panache.

Suboch was an intense man. He always exploded into our classroom like a meteor, his coat tails flying, his pince-nez flashing, his mark book whizzing through the air and landing perfectly in the centre of his desk with a thud. Little swirls of dust followed in his wake. The class jumped to its feet with a clatter of slamming desk lids and then sat down just as noisily. The glass in the door and windows rattled, startling the sparrows in the poplars outside and sending them flying off into the depths of the garden.

This was how Suboch arrived every day. He stopped, removed a tiny notebook from his pocket, brought it up close to his myopic eyes and then froze, a pencil quivering slightly in his other hand. A threatening silence replaced the storm of his entrance. Suboch scanned his notebook for his next victim.

One morning, six of the lightest and smallest of the boys, including myself, were hung by our belts from the metal hooks. The pain was excruciating: the hooks dug into our backs, taking our breath away. Suboch flew into the classroom. Just then all the other boys jumped into the rows between the desks and flipped head over heels to form several lines of handstands. Suboch was racing at full speed and couldn’t stop. He flung the mark book onto the desk and at that very moment, just as the book landed, all the boys returned to their feet with a giant bang and sat down. The six of us up on the walls undid our belts, fell to the floor, and quickly took our seats. An ominous, ringing silence filled the air. Complete order reigned in the classroom. We sat at our desks with innocent expressions as if nothing had happened.

Suboch began to rant. We denied everything. With polite insistence we maintained that nothing had happened – no one had hung from the walls, no one had executed a handstand. We even hinted that Suboch might be suffering from delusions.

He began to shake. He called the six of us who had been hanging on the wall up to his desk. He looked us over suspiciously from all sides but found no traces of plaster on our uniforms. Suboch shrugged. He inspected the hooks and the floor, but here too he found nothing suspicious. A look of alarm spread across his face: Suboch was always worrying about his health.

He ordered one of the boys to fetch Supervisor Platon Fëdorovich. The boy went out and soon returned with the supervisor.

‘Did you hear anything unusual at the beginning of the lesson?’ Suboch asked him.

‘No,’ replied Platon Fëdorovich.

‘No noise, no crashing?’

‘There’s always some noise when the boys stand up and sit down …’ Platon Fëdorovich answered cautiously. He had a puzzled look on his face.

‘Thank you,’ said Suboch. ‘I had the impression that something strange was going on in the classroom.’

‘What exactly?’ he asked in an insinuating tone.

Suboch lost his temper. ‘Nothing!’ he snapped. ‘Please excuse me for troubling you.’

Platon Fëdorovich held up his hands in a helpless gesture and then walked out.

‘Nobody move,’ Suboch told us, picking up his mark book. ‘I shall be right back.’

He left and soon returned with Inspector Varsonofy Nikolaevich, known by the nickname Varsapont. Varsapont looked at us closely and then walked over to the wall, climbed up on a desk, and went to pull on one of the hooks. It popped out of the wall before he had barely touched it. ‘Well, well!’ he said cryptically, and then stuck it back in the wall.

We were all watching him.

‘Well, well,’ Varsapont repeated. ‘What exactly is going on here? Yes, well, well,’ he repeated himself now for the third time, and then shook his head and left the classroom.

Suboch sat down and stared for a long time at his mark book without moving. Then he jumped up and tore out of the room. The door shook behind him. The sparrows scattered once again from their perches in the poplars. A draught rustled the pages of our textbooks. We sat there trying our best not to move until the end of the class hour. We were alarmed by the success of our ‘psychological experiment’ and worried we might have driven Suboch out of his mind.

In the end, however, nothing so tragic had occurred. Rumours of our ‘experiment’ spread throughout the school and elicited envious admiration. The form below us decided to repeat the experiment on one of their instructors, but, as is well known, a work of true genius can never be reproduced. Their attempt ended in disastrous failure.

Suboch found out and flew into a rage. He harangued us in a manner worthy of Cicero’s famous speech: ‘When, O Cataline, do you mean to cease abusing our patience? How long is that madness of yours still to mock us?’ He used his speech for a purpose none of us foresaw. Suboch made us feel ashamed not for making fun of him, but for acting so disrespectfully during a lesson devoted to what he called ‘Golden Latin’, the most magnificent of all the world’s languages.

‘Latin!’ he thundered. ‘The language of Ovid and Horace! Of Livy and Lucretius! Of Marcus Aurelius and Julius Caesar! The language venerated by the great poets, by Pushkin and Dante, by Goethe and Shakespeare! And not only did they venerate it, they knew it, and much better than the likes of you. Golden Latin! Every word of Latin could be cast in pure gold, and you wouldn’t lose a rouble either, for there isn’t an ounce of waste in the entire language. It’s utterly pure. And you? Just look at what you’ve done! You dare to mock it. You dare to turn your Latin class into a circus. Your heads are stuffed with nothing but nonsense. With rubbish! Jokes! Football! Snooker! Smoking! Pranks! Moving pictures! Balderdash! Shame on all of you!’

Suboch roared. We were crushed by the weight of his accusations and the picture of our complete worthlessness. But we were also offended. Most of us, in fact, knew our Latin very well.

An armistice was soon concluded, and then we experienced ‘Golden Latin’s’ most glorious triumph. We did everything possible to make it up to Suboch and worked doubly hard. We got to know Suboch better and became very fond of him. Finally, the unforgettable day came when Suboch had to admit that every boy he called to the board deserved top marks.

‘I am going to put this down to pure good fortune,’ he said, grinning into his moustache.

The next day he tried to trip us up on our ‘unseens’, but again he was forced to give each one of us a perfect mark. Suboch beamed. But his joy was overshadowed by a cloud of concern, for such a thing had never happened to him before. It was some sort of miracle. And then, after the third day running when again each of us earned top marks, Suboch became distraught. Our brilliant knowledge of Latin had acquired the appearance of a scandal. The whole school was talking about it. Ugly rumours began to spread. Evil tongues were whispering that Suboch was giving us better marks than we deserved so he could unjustly claim the reputation of being the school’s best Latin teacher.

‘It appears’, Suboch said in an uncertain voice, ‘that I ought to give four or five of you boys something less than top marks today. What do you think?’

Offended, we didn’t say a word. It seemed to us as though Suboch would be happy if one of us now failed. Perhaps he even regretted making that inspired speech of his about ‘Golden Latin’. But we couldn’t unlearn what we already knew. None of us would volunteer to fail our Latin examination just to shut the mouths of gossipers. We had put our hearts and souls into our studies, and we had enjoyed it.

In the end, Suboch surrendered to the general suspicion and arranged for a public demonstration. He invited the vice-chairman of the District School Board, the school’s director, Inspector Varsapont and Father Olendsky, an expert in Latin, to come and observe one of our lessons. Suboch was merciless and cunning in his attempts to trip us up and find the holes in our knowledge. But we fought back bravely, parrying each of his blows, and passed the test in spectacular fashion. The director laughed and rubbed his hands with glee. Varsapont ruffled his hair in disbelief. The vice-chairman smiled condescendingly, and Father Olendsky shook his grey head. ‘Oh, just look at you little polyglots! Oh, you little cheats, Oh, aren’t you clever!’ he said.

After that we lost our momentum. We simply couldn’t maintain that level of intensity. The days when every last one of us received top marks were over. Nevertheless, Suboch’s renown as the school’s finest Latin instructor remained intact. Nothing could undo that.