The Big Green Tent (11 page)

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Freud, whose books stood gathering dust on the bookshelves of the major libraries, to Vygotsky, whose books had been withdrawn from circulation and placed in restricted-access collections.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
R
s, 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.