The Big Green Tent (6 page)

“Indeed,” Victor Yulievich said, “it was this kind of behavior that led people to consider him a
bretteur
.”

No one asked what this foreign word meant, because it was obvious anyway: a troublemaker.

Then he led them up to the shabby building on the first corner of Krivokolenny Lane after its intersection with Kirov Street. With a broad gesture of his left hand, he said, “Just imagine what it was like here in Pushkin's day. Of course, there wasn't any asphalt, and the roads were paved with wooden blocks. A carriage pulls up from the direction of Myasnitskaya Street. Well, most likely not a carriage, but a small cart with a coachman. Pushkin was visiting Moscow, partly on business. He had many friends and relatives here, but he never had his own home in Moscow, or his own equipage—with the exception of the apartment he rented on the Arbat; but that was only for a little while, after his wedding. Then he moved back to St. Petersburg. He did not like Moscow. He said there were ‘too many old Aunties' there.

“Now imagine it's more than one hundred years after Pushkin's death, after the Revolution. A woman is walking down this lane, and, suddenly, from the direction of Myasnitskaya, she hears, clip-clop, clip-clop: a carriage rounds the corner and stops right at this spot. Pushkin alights from the carriage, his heels clicking on the wooden pavement, and disappears inside the house. The lady gasps, and then everything disappears—the wood pavement, the carriage, the coachman, and the horses. There were rumors that this building was haunted. We'll never know whether that's true or not. But what happened in this very building in October 1826—a poet named Venevitinov was living here then—many eyewitnesses confirm: in the main hall of this house, Pushkin read his tragedy
Boris Godunov
aloud for the first time
.
There were about forty people present, and almost half of them wrote about the reading in letters to their relatives immediately afterward, or subsequently, in their memoirs. You've all read
Boris Godunov
, haven't you? Who can summarize the plot for me?”

Mikha was always ready to be called upon, but this time he had forgotten some parts of the story and didn't want to embarrass himself.

For a while, nobody said anything. Finally, Igor Chetverikov said tentatively:

“He killed Tsarevich False Dmitry.”

“Congratulations, Igor. History is a rather muddled affair. There are in fact two versions of the story. In one, Boris Godunov killed Tsarevich Dmitry. In the other, he didn't kill him, and was really quite a decent man. Your version, charging him with the murder of another person altogether—False Dmitry—flies in the face of long-held historical beliefs. Don't worry, though, history isn't algebra. It's not an exact science. In some ways, literature is a more exact science than history. What a great writer says can become a historical truth. Military historians have found many discrepancies in Tolstoy's description of the Battle of Borodino, but the whole world imagines the event just as Tolstoy described it in
War and Peace.
Neither was Pushkin standing in the rear courtyard of the palace of Maria Nagaya, mother of the young Tsarevich, where the murder of Dmitry did—or did not—take place. The same principle applies to his story about Mozart. I suppose you've all read
The Little Tragedies
.”

“Yes, of course! Evil and true genius are incompatible,” Mikha said.

“I hold the same view. There is no definitive proof that Salieri poisoned Mozart. This is just historical speculation. Pushkin's work, however, is what one could call undiluted fact. A great fact of Russian literature. History may find proof that Salieri never poisoned Mozart, but there will still be no gainsaying
The Little Tragedies
. Pushkin expressed a great idea: a man cannot be both evil and a true genius.”

It was getting dark. Victor Yulievich said good night to the students, and they all scattered to their homes in various parts of Kitai-Gorod.

This first literary walking tour led to the foundation of a club, which by the end of the year had settled on a name for itself: LORL, the Lovers of Russian Literature.

After finding out about the first excursion, Ilya never missed a single one of these “nature walks”—what Victor Yulievich called their Wednesday afternoon literary wanderings. Ilya would compile reports on their meetings; he was the recording secretary, and a conscientious one, at that. He stored the LORL protocols, together with his photographs, in the bookcase of his sacred space, the closet darkroom.

While they were being initiated into the mysteries of nineteenth-century Russian literature, the LORLs also learned, piece by piece, about the war experiences of their teacher.

With his nostrils and cheeks twitching (which they now knew was the result of an injury), Victor Yulievich told them about how he and his classmates had reported to the recruitment office the day after war broke out.

They sent him to a field artillery school in Tula. The boys wanted concrete details—battle, advance, retreat, wounds. What kind of weaponry? What kind of ammunition? What about the Germans, what were they armed with?

The teacher's answers were brief and to the point. Remembering was painful for him.

Training at the Tula program was accelerated, but the German advance still outpaced it. By the end of October, the Germans forces had already pushed as far as Tula. The trainees were thrown into battle to defend the city. Each of them was given a platoon of militiamen, and the gun emplacements were manned by student commanders and rank-and-file volunteers. This would have resembled “playing war” as kids, if they had not all been cut down within twelve hours by enemy fire. Victor was saved by his politeness—the first time good manners ever saved anyone's life in any circumstance. He ordered a soldier, whose name he couldn't recall, to fetch a box of shells. The fleshy older man cursed the young commander, saying, “Who do you think you are, ordering me around? I'm fifty and you're only eighteen. You lug the boxes.”

Victor, who was in fact nineteen at the time, ran to fetch the shells without a word. He ran a hundred yards there, empty-handed, and a hundred back, carrying a hundred-pound crate. But when he returned, the panting and winded student commander couldn't find the gun crew anywhere—there was just a giant smoking crater in the spot where the gun had been set up. None of the crew survived.

There wasn't even anyone to bury. It had been a direct hit. The trainee sat down on the box, his mind empty, feeling like he was the scorched earth itself, a blast of searing metal, boiling blood, and burning rags. Then, abandoning his useless box, he left, amid the whistles and explosions that he no longer heard.

When the siege of Tula was lifted, they transferred the trainees to Tomsk—those who were left alive after the onslaught, at any rate. For a long time Victor had nightmares about the perished gunners, and the fleshy man cursed him darkly—not about the box of shells, but for something far more serious. A thousand times Victor returned to the scene in his thoughts. What should he have done? How should he have acted? If he had shouted down the fleshy older man, which was his duty as a commander, that guy was the one who would still be alive today, and not he himself.

He decided that he wasn't cut out to be a commander, only a private. He submitted a request to be assigned to active duty. It was refused—he had only six weeks until graduation. A slight transgression—that was what was called for. Not so great that he would be court-martialed or sent to a punitive battalion, but enough to get him sent to the front as a private instead of an officer.

He came up with a plan for a fitting offense. On the eve of his swearing in as an officer, he went AWOL, got drunk in the city, sneaked into the women's dormitory, and spent the night with a girl in the recreation room. Early the next morning, at his request, she turned him in to the military patrol. It worked like a charm. He was thrown into the guardhouse for ten days, and then sent into active duty as a private. There he remained until the end of the war, which for him was in 1944, after he was wounded. He never once had to give orders, only carry them out. The task was always the same: make it from point A to point B alive. And myriad petty concerns: eating, drinking, sleeping, not getting blisters on his feet. And it would have been nice to have a good wash once in a while … They gave the order—he fired. No orders—no firing. He didn't talk about that. He chose to keep silent.

“Where did you get wounded?” the boys asked.

“In Poland, during the invasion. Look, they took my hand.”

What happened after that, he wouldn't tell the kids. How he learned to write left-handed—in a rounded, slanting script, not devoid of elegance. The stump of his right arm still helped him out a little, but he never wore the pink celluloid prosthesis. He figured out an easy way of donning his rucksack—with his left hand he arranged the first strap over the stump of his right arm, and then reached around behind him with his left arm, slipping it under the other strap. After he left the hospital he went to Moscow. The institute where he had studied before the war had been reorganized, and the vestiges of it had merged with the philological department. That was the place he returned to, in his military overcoat that still reeked of war, and in officer's boots that didn't match his rank.

The university on Mokhovaya Street! What a sweet luxury it was—for three whole years he recuperated there, regaining his health through his own efforts: he washed the blood off with Pushkin, Tolstoy, Herzen …

In 1948, shortly before graduation, he was encouraged to take up graduate studies. His academic adviser would be a marvelous medievalist and renowned scholar in the field of European literature. The subject of Victor's research was intriguing—it examined Pushkin's relationship to his European counterparts in a primarily Romano-Germanic context. But Victor Yulievich wavered: he also wanted to be a schoolteacher, and he felt that he now knew what he wanted to teach them. Choices, choices …

Where was that voice that prompts you at critical moments and tells you what to do? Yet it turned out he didn't need that voice after all. The would-be academic adviser was officially reprimanded for his Western leanings and his “cosmopolitanism,” and was later sent to a prison camp.

Victor's graduate studies ended before they began. He was assigned to teach Russian language and literature in a middle school in the village of Kalinovo, in the Vologda Oblast.

They gave him room and board at the school—one room and an entrance hall, where there was a wood-burning stove. They supplied him with wood. The local store sold hard candy and crabs from the Far East, awful wine, and vodka. Bread was delivered twice a week, and lines started forming in the early hours of the morning. The store opened at nine, when the first lesson at school was just ending. The mothers, observing time-honored village custom, would bring him eggs, cottage cheese, or homemade pies that had the remarkable quality of tasting delicious when warm, but being completely inedible once they had cooled off. From time immemorial this had been the accepted form of payment for the services of doctors, priests, and teachers. He would share these offerings with the cleaning lady Marfusha, an asocial, eccentric widow, but he always drank alone. Not too much and not too little—one bottle an evening. Before going to bed he would read the only author he never got tired of.

Besides literature, he also had to teach geography and history. The school principal taught math and physics, as well as the social sciences, which were all versions of the history of the Communist Party, only with different names. The other subjects—biology and German—were taught by an exiled Petersburg Finnish woman. Besides her nationality, she had one other blemish in her biography: before the war she had worked with Academician Vavilov, an unrepentant Weismann-Morganist, who dared insist on the validity of the theory of genetics.

Everything in Kalinovo was meager. The only thing in abundance there was virginal, unsullied nature. And the people were perhaps better than city-dwellers, because they, too, were almost untouched by spiritual dissipation.

His interactions with rural children had undone all the illusions of his student years. His notions of “the good, the eternal” had not changed, of course; but the circumstances of everyday life here were so coarse, so very difficult. The young girls, wrapped in their patched and mended kerchiefs, who managed to care for the farm animals and their younger siblings before school, and the boys, who already did the work of men in the summer—what use were these cultural values to them? What was the point of studying on an empty stomach and wasting time on knowledge they would never need under any circumstances?

Their childhood was already over long ago. They were simply underdeveloped men and women. Even the ones whose mothers eagerly sent them off to school, by far the minority, seemed to feel awkward, as though they were busy with trifling pastimes rather than serious work. This caused the young teacher to feel uncertain about his role as well—and, really, wasn't he distracting them from the fundamental concerns of life by exposing them to superfluous luxuries? What did Radishchev mean to them? Or Gogol? Or even Pushkin, for that matter? Teach them to read, and send them home to work as soon as possible. That's all the students really wanted themselves.

This was when he first started thinking about the phenomenon of childhood. When it began wasn't the issue; but when did it end? Where was the boundary beyond which a human being became an adult? It was obvious that childhood ended earlier in the country than it did in the city.

The northern countryside had always lived hand to mouth, but after the war the poverty was profound. The women and children did the lion's share of the work. Of the thirty local men who had gone to the front to fight, only two had returned: one with only one leg, the other with tuberculosis. He died a year later. The children, miniature peasants, shouldered the burden of labor early, and their childhoods were stolen from them.