The Big Green Tent (16 page)

And follow in your footsteps, ride

The waves, or fly, to keep in stride

With Victor Yulievich, our sun,

Who'll light our way for years to come.

When the song was over, there was not a single teacher left in the auditorium. All of them had escaped to the teachers' lounge, fuming in indignation. They had been scorned! For this reason they hadn't even seen the end of the play, when the actors gathered in a circle on the stage to discuss what to give their beloved teacher as parting gift. They entertained, and dismissed, several highly comical suggestions before deciding that the gift had to be something unparalleled, something invaluable, something that “wouldn't run out” (that is, it couldn't be eaten or drunk). And it had to be useful! And bring joy! At last, they dragged onto the stage an enormous box, the size of a person. They removed the top lid and revealed a plaster statue inside: a slender young girl in a tunic. She stood there quite naturally in a Classical pose, until they commanded: “Forward!”

The statue came to life. It was Katya Zueva, covered in whitewash. It must be said that it hadn't been easy to talk her into playing the role.

Then she walked through the auditorium amid rousing applause, and kneeled down at Victor Shengeli's feet.

*   *   *

After it was all over, they removed the extra chairs from the auditorium and set up tables. The teachers were nowhere to be seen. Victor Yulievich went to the teachers' lounge to negotiate for the strikers to pick up their tools again.

They were waiting for him. Larisa Stepanovna was the first to speak.

“On behalf of the teachers' collective, Victor Yulievich, I am obliged to inform you…” the principal began with a triumphal air.

But Victor Yulievich quickly realized what she was going to say. He did the first thing that came to mind—he took a glasses case out of his jacket pocket, removed a pair of old-fashioned steel-rimmed glasses, perched them on his long, regularly formed nose. Then he went up to Larisa Stepanovna. He leaned down to peer at her infamous butterfly brooch pinned to the collar of her blouse, and said in a saccharine tone, “Oh my, how charming! What a dear little piglet it is!”

“Get out!” Larisa Stepanovna shouted.
In a voice scarlet with fury
, the literature teacher thought.

Strains of music sounded from the auditorium.

“Why are you all so on edge? Let's go drink some lemonade and dance. The kids are waiting for you!”

He smiled his disarming smile, while thinking to himself:
What a pompous son of a gun I was. I shouldn't have behaved like that. Why did I have to humiliate them? And poor Larisa Stepanovna, the corners of her mouth turned down, like a hurt little girl. She looked like she might start sobbing. What bad kids they were … But what can I do about it now? Surely not ask their forgiveness.

The notice of termination was lying on Larisa Stepanovna's desk. She had intended to hand it to him at the end of the evening, but now was the perfect time. Her hand trembling, she shoved the fateful document across the table.

“You're fired!”

There was a knock at the door. The LORLs were looking for their teacher. They had something to give him. And it wasn't bad port, but very good Georgian wine.

 

FRIENDSHIP OF THE PEOPLES

It was 1957. Moscow was aflutter with anticipation: The International Youth and Student Festival was about to open. The recent high-school graduates were preparing for entrance exams to the university. In passing from the category of ordinary young person to the category of student, they also got a dispensation from compulsory military service, along with the advantages of an education. They all sweated it out from morning till night, and Victor Yulievich coached the aspiring college students. In addition to his regular private students, he tutored several of his “own” without charge.

Conscription posed no threat to the Trianon. Ilya possessed the unique gift of having flat feet, Mikha was nearsighted, and Sanya, with his crooked fingers, was unfit for handling a weapon. In short, they all had minor defects or shortcomings that disqualified them from their military obligations. Ilya studied perfunctorily. Sanya, who had applied to the Institute of Foreign Languages on the advice of his grandmother, didn't study at all, but lolled on the divan listening to music and reading books (even foreign ones). Mikha's position was the most vexed. Jews were barred from entering the philology department, and he had decided once and for all that it was the only place he wanted to study. As if that weren't problem enough, he was also the only one of them who needed a scholarship to be able to study. His relatives had pledged to help him only until he finished high school. Of course, as a last resort he could go to night school, but he so desperately wanted to experience the authentic life of a student.

“I can't understand your passion for the humanities. It's one thing to read books, to try to figure out what they mean, to enjoy them—but why do you want to make a profession out of it?” Ilya would say. He spurned philology, and made the independent decision to enroll in LIKI, the Leningrad Institute of Cinema Engineering.

Ilya had an uncle in Leningrad who had sought him out soon after his father's death. He invited Ilya to come to Leningrad to live with him until he started college. After Ilya received his high school diploma, he immediately took off for Leningrad. He had saved a considerable sum of money, earned through illicit means—fifteen hundred rubles. This was three times his mother's salary. He also intended to live it up before the semester began.

That year in Moscow, the dates of the entrance exams were shuffled around so the aspiring students wouldn't arrive all at the same time and thus inconvenience the guests in the city for the festival.

Ilya liked the Institute of Cinema Engineering immensely. His uncle Efim Semenovich said that Ilya's father had worked there before the war, and that some people might still remember him. He began to call around to various numbers; but, unfortunately, those who remembered Isay Semenovich weren't there anymore, and those who were there didn't remember him after all.

Ilya left Leningrad abruptly on the day he found out that the entrance exams would coincide with the first day of the festival. He wouldn't miss that great event for the world. He grabbed his camera and returned to Moscow, clutching his passport. He was required to show it five times, from the time he bought the one-way ticket at Moskovsky train station in Leningrad until the moment he made it home: to policemen, conductors, volunteer patrolmen, and to other random officials who demanded to see his documents. Only Muscovites were permitted entry into Moscow.

Ilya stopped over to see Mikha. Mikha had already been accepted as a student, it turned out. He hadn't been accepted to Moscow University, as he had hoped, but to the less prestigious Pedagogical Institute, where (as the story went) there were eight females for every two males—one of them lame, another one cross-eyed. Self-respecting young men without such shortcomings were not eager to enroll there.

Mikha had had no trouble getting in. His gender and his thorough academic training outweighed his unfortunate ethnicity. But his triumph was made bitter by loss: on the day he found his name on the list of successful candidates for admission, poor Minna died of pneumonia. He had never even visited her in the hospital. She suffered from pneumonia at least three times a year, and he couldn't have imagined that this bout of illness would be her last.

Now he was left alone with a dreadful secret and with the sinking feeling that this burden of guilt would stay with him until the end of his days. Slow-witted Minna was in love with him, and he had somehow become entangled in a strange sexual relationship with her. There was no other name for it, although sex in the absolute sense of the term was not what went on between them. Minna would lie in wait for him at the secluded end of the corridor, next to the WC, lure him into the corner, and press herself against him with all the warm and soft parts of her body, until he slipped away, flushed, shaking, and quite satisfied. He wanted to kill himself after every episode of fondling, and swore that next time he would push her away and flee; but he could never bring himself to refuse her. She was affectionate, soft, thrillingly hairy in places, and had a strong speech defect, a quality that protected their anonymity and guaranteed they wouldn't be found out. He was being slowly strangled with a sense of guilt and disgust, and the thought of suicide always hovered in the back of his mind. No one dared mention the unconscious in those days.

This was the state Ilya found him in. Ilya decided not to pry, but dragged him outside to get him to relax.

*   *   *

Moscow was uncharacteristically clean, and fairly empty. The festival was opening the next day. Through the deserted city streets, in various directions, passed motorcades of passenger automobiles, pickup trucks, some with their sides lowered, some with their sides up, old-fashioned buses—even Hungarian-made Icarus buses.

Everywhere you looked there were flags and giant paper flowers. That summer the girls were wearing full, brightly colored skirts on top of thick umbrella-like petticoats. Their waists were cinched with wide belts, and they wore their hair in “beehives.”

After they managed to get through two light cordons, the boys came out into the small park in front of the Bolshoi Theater. Quite a few people were milling around. Ilya pointed out two confused-looking and not especially pretty girls to Mikha, saying: “Come on, let's pick them up!”

“No way,” Mikha said, offended by the suggestion, and turned to go.

“Aw, I'm sorry, Mikha. I'm a boor! Shall we go and get drunk somewhere? Come on, let's go to the National.”

Somehow they were able to get into the National. Possibly, the doorman had gone to relieve himself and had forgotten to close the latch; or maybe he was relying on the effectiveness of his sign, which read “Closed for a Special Event.”

“We're drinking cognac,” Ilya said confidently, and ordered doubles from the discombobulated waiter.

They drank their double cognacs with two pastries, then repeated their order. Between the first and second rounds, Mikha's spirits visibly lifted. Just then, a young man with a Hasselblad camera on a strap came up to them. He looked Russian. He asked them whether he could join them.

“Sure, go ahead,” Mikha said, offering him a chair.

They immediately hit it off. He said his name was Petya. It turned out, though, that he wasn't just an ordinary Russian “Petya,” but a Belgian whose real name was Pierre Zand. He was of Russian descent, a student at the University of Brussels. They split the second round three ways, then went to wander through town. On Ilya's advice, Pierre left the camera behind in the hotel room.

They strolled through the center of Moscow, and it would have been hard to imagine a better tourist than Pierre was. He recognized all the places where he had never once set foot—the reminiscences of his mother and grandmother, and a deep familiarity with Russian literature, were coming to life for him.

And the veteran LORLs were the best possible guides for Petya, with his nostalgia for a place he had never seen before.

At Trekhprudny Lane, by a small wooden house, Ilya stopped and said:

“Marina Tsvetaeva lived somewhere around here.”

Pierre seemed to melt and go soft, and all but wept, saying:

“My mother knew Marina Tsvetaeva well, in Paris. They won't publish her here…”

“Tsvetaeva may not be published here, but we all know her,” Mikha said:

“Some are of stone, some are of clay,

But I am silver and sparkle!

My crime is betrayal, my name is Marina.

I am the ephemeral foam of the sea.”

“Actually, I like Akhmatova more. As for Ilya, he's obsessed with the Futurists.”

*   *   *

But never mind their preferences. What was astounding was the fact that they were standing there with a real person, their own age, whose mother had known Marina Tsvetaeva in real life. For them, Pierre himself represented a vast, already nonexistent country that had gone into exile. While they were walking, he told them about his family, about that former Russia, which to his interlocutors seemed as insubstantial and distant as Brussels or Paris. And how bitterly Pierre hated the Bolsheviks!

*   *   *

Mikha and Ilya, who had often discussed the shortcomings of socialism, had for the first time met a person who didn't talk about the shortcomings of the Communist regime—rather, he raked it over the coals, condemning it as satanic, dark, and bloody. He saw no fundamental difference between communism and fascism. In some unaccountable way, Pierre was able to unite a love for Russia with a hatred of its system.

For the next two weeks, they were almost inseparable. Thanks to Pierre, they all managed to cram themselves into a Belgian bus and get into the opening of the festival at Luzhniki Stadium. More than three thousand of the finest athletes bloomed in formation as a single flower, or spread themselves out in geometric patterns, hands, feet, and heads rising up or descending in perfect unison. It was a thrilling spectacle.

“They did this sort of thing at Hitler's rallies, too,” whispered Pierre. “Leni Riefenstahl's films were shown all over the world. The great power of mass hypnosis. But it really is powerful to witness it! And amazing!” Pierre sighed and pressed the button on his camera. Ilya did the same.

Then there was a jazz concert, a mass relay race with torches, some water ballet, along with countless song-and-dance ensembles of the Soviet Army and Navy, industry and trade groups, and cooks' and hairdressers' labor unions.

Pierre had absolutely no interest in the Egyptians chanting “Nasser! Nasser!,” the black citizens of newly independent Ghana, or the Israelis, who were also very popular among Soviet citizens branded with the same ethnicity in the “fifth line” of their passports.