The Big Green Tent (5 page)

Mikha spent a lot of time at the Steklovs'. During his visits he watched Sanya fingering the keys, and saw how they responded to his touch. He imagined mysterious negotiations transpiring between the boy and the instrument, and tried to intuit their secret meaning, but was unable to get to the bottom of it.

He sat in the corner, leafing through the pages of his book, awaiting Anna Alexandrovna's return. She would place a plain cookie and a cup of milky tea in front of him, then sit down beside him—with a self-rolled cigarette that she didn't so much smoke as hold poised between her beautiful, arched fingers. Sometimes Sanya would get up from the piano and sit down with them on the edge of the chair, but his presence ruffled them. Mikha was fast outgrowing Dickens, and Anna Alexandrovna, without a second thought, urged Pushkin on him.

“But I've already read him,” Mikha said, resisting.

“This is like the Gospels—you read it your whole life.”

“Then give me the Gospels, Anna Alexandrovna, I've never read them.”

Anna Alexandrovna laughed, shaking her head. “Your relatives will kill me. But, to be honest, you can't understand European literature without them. Not to mention Russian literature. Sanya, dear, bring us the Gospels. In Russian.”

“Nuta,” he said, baiting his grandmother, “I think you're just a corrupter of youth.”

But he brought over the book in its black binding.

They decided that Mikha could read the Gospels, but he was not to remove the book from their house or breathe a word about it to anyone. Mikha had never known such abundance—he had a home with his own folding cot, Aunt Genya with her soup, the buxom, feeble-minded Minna constantly nudging him, now with her ample hips, now her ample bosom, his friends Sanya and Ilya, Anna Alexandrovna, skates, books …

In the middle of March the thaw set in. The ice in the skating rink melted, and Mikha coated his skates with machine oil to protect them, as his uncle Marlen had taught him to do. He did it too soon, though; another frost hit, and the little skating rink again froze over. Mikha could go skating again, even though winter was clearly on the wane. Now he even ventured down to the courtyard in broad daylight, after lunch. That was how everyone got a good look at his prized possession. No one else had skates like his; everyone else just strapped any old junk onto their felt boots. Only Mikha had the real kind, affixed to leather boots. His skates became the talk of the neighborhood. Two days or so later, Murygin showed up to check them out. He stood there awhile, took a good long look at them, then left. The next day, as Mikha was returning home from the rink, he found himself pressed up against the wall of his entryway by Murygin and Mutyukin.

It was no secret why they were there—the skates had taken their fancy.

“Come on, take them off!” Mutyukin said.

Murygin twisted Mikha's arms behind his back, Mutyukin kicked him behind his knees, and Mikha collapsed. In a flash they ripped the skates from his feet and sped off. Mikha, wearing only his woolen socks, dashed after them. He caught up with them at the entrance to the courtyard and grabbed Murygin, who tossed the skates to Mutyukin. Mutyukin hightailed it down Pokrovka with Mikha in hot pursuit, shouting, in the direction of the Pokrovsky Gates. They were obviously running toward Milyutin Park, where there was another skating rink.

A streetcar was just crawling out from around the corner of Chistoprudny Boulevard. Mikha had almost caught up with Mutyukin, who flung the skates back to Murygin, but Murygin failed to intercept them, and the skates landed somewhere between the streetcar tracks. All three threw themselves at the skates. The streetcar let out an unearthly shriek, followed by a long, loud screech. Then it swallowed up the sound and ground heavily to a halt. Mikha faltered and fell.

When he opened his eyes, the skates were lying right by his nose. He couldn't see Mutyukin. On the tracks in front of the streetcar lay a messy heap. Rags, blood, a twisted leg—this was all that remained of Murygin. A frantic crowd had rushed over and gathered around him. More streetcars rattled and clanged in the background. Mikha stood up, took the skates—no, just one skate. Shoulders hunched, he trudged home. He walked barefoot over the frozen ground—his socks had vanished, somehow—but he didn't feel the cold. Near the entrance to his building, teeth chattering, he chucked the remaining skate in the direction of the ice rink, then slipped into the entryway he had emerged from just five minutes before.

He picked up his boots, stuck his bare feet into them, and ran straight to the Steklovs'. Anna Alexandrovna listened to the whole story without saying a word, then poured him a bowl of mushroom soup.

When Mikha had finished his soup, Anna Alexandrovna took the dirty bowl to the kitchen.

“I didn't want it to happen, I swear!” Mikha said to Sanya.

“Who would want a thing like that?” Sanya said, shaking his head.

The tram shrieked out in awful pain,

The world is not what it was before.

All that was, and is, remains,

Except Murygin, who is no more.

This was the poem Mikha wrote on the day of Murygin's funeral. The whole school had come, mourning Slava Murygin as though he were a national hero. The vice-principal and two upperclassmen laid a beribboned wreath, bought with money donated by the student body, on the grave. The ribbon bore an inscription in gold letters on a red background.

Mikha, the witness, and, as he believed, guilty party in this death, kept reliving that tragic instant: the skates flashing through the air, the metallic shriek of the streetcar, and an untidy raggedy heap under the wheels instead of the pathetic, mean boy who had been grimacing and racing through the streets a moment before. Pity of enormous proportions filled Mikha's mind, his heart, his entire body. It filled him to overflowing, it overwhelmed him, and it was a pity for all people, both bad and good, simply because they were all so defenseless and fragile, so soft, and because the mere touch of senseless steel was enough to shatter their bones, to break their heads open, to make their blood flow out, so that all that was left was an unsightly heap. Poor, poor Murygin!

No one but Ilya managed to hold on to the 1952 class picture. It was one of just two photographs in his entire archive not taken by himself; the rest were all his own. One was the photograph taken by Vasily Innokentievich on Sanya's birthday. The other one, the class picture, had been taken by a studio photographer. The picture displayed a motley group of underfed, postwar kids arranged in four neat rows. The first rows are sitting, and the upper rows stand on chairs borrowed from the assembly room. The boys are surrounded by thick sheaves of wheat, draped banners, stippled emblems, the decorative frame that formed the base, while the superstructure was the bug-eyed schoolteacher amid a mass of closely shaven heads. Murygin and Mutyukin are standing side by side in the top row on the left. Murygin is looking sideways; he's a small boy, bald shaven, paltry, and harmless. Sanya isn't in the picture. He was sick the day it was taken. Mikha is in the bottom corner. In the center stands the class adviser, their Russian teacher. Everyone forgot her name, because she went on maternity leave when they were in fifth grade and never came back. Mutyukin had to repeat fifth grade, but soon went on to other things. His career continued in a vocational school and, later, a prison camp.

Murygin, of course, was no more.

 

THE NEW TEACHER

In the sixth grade, Victor Yulievich Shengeli, a literature teacher, replaced the Russian teacher whose name no one could remember.

From the very first day he captured the attention of the entire school: he walked briskly down the hallway, with the right sleeve of his gray-striped blazer pinned shut just below the elbow, his half-arm dangling inside. In his left hand he carried an old briefcase with two copper locks—far older than the teacher himself, from the looks of it. And, by the end of that first week, he already had a nickname: the Hand.

He was fairly young, with a handsome face, almost like a film star, but excessively animated. He was in the habit of smiling for no discernible reason, then breaking into a frown, then twitching his nose or lips. He was improbably polite, addressing everyone with the formal “you”; but he could also be very caustic.

For starters, when Ilya was wending his way through the rows of desks with his unsteady gait, the teacher said: “Why are you waddling about like a duck?” Ilya took an instant dislike to him. Then the teacher picked up the attendance book to call roll. When he got to the surname Svinin (someone did have that unfortunate name, which sounded so much like “swine”), he stopped, peered closely at Svinin's small face, then said in a strange tone that could have been either respectful or mocking: “Nice name.” The class erupted in guffaws, and Senka Svinin turned red as a beet. The teacher raised his eyebrows quizzically.

“Why are you laughing? It's a very distinguished name. There was an ancient clan of boyars called the Svinins. Peter the Great himself sent a Svinin, I don't recall his first name, to Holland to study. You've never read
The Silver Knight
? The Svinins are mentioned in it. It's a fascinating book, by the way.”

Within three months, all of them, including Ilya, Senka Svinin, and, in particular, Mikha, thought the teacher could do no wrong. They clung to his every word, twitching their lips and furrowing their brows in perfect imitation of him.

The Hand also read poetry to them. At the beginning of every class, while they were settling into their seats and getting their notebooks out, he recited a poem from memory, never telling them who the author was. His choices seemed very idiosyncratic. One day it would be the familiar “A lonely sail is flashing white”; and the next, the enigmatic but memorable “the air is blue, like the bundle of linen of a patient just discharged from hospital.” Then, out of nowhere, he'd toss out some inspired gobbledegook, like:

Outside it was cold,
Tristan
was on the stage
.

A wounded sea sang in the orchestra pit,

Green realm behind the bluish steam.

A heart that ceased to beat.

No one saw her enter the theater,

But there she was, seated in her box,

Like a Briullov painting.

Women so lovely live only in novels,

Or come to life on-screen …

Men steal for them, or worse.

They ambush their carriages and

Poison themselves in garrets …

Mikha's heart leapt to his throat when he heard poems like this, though the other students were unmoved. But Mikha was the one the teacher looked at—he was almost the only one who lapped up the verses. Sanya would smile condescendingly at the teacher's weakness: some of the poems were ones that his grandmother had read to him. The other kids forgave their teacher his curious predilection. They considered poetry an effeminate affectation for a man who had fought on the front lines during the war.

Occasionally, however, he recited something very apropos. When they began reading
Taras Bulba
, he came to class with something that was clearly about Gogol:

Our own wayward riddle,

You alighted on the earth,

Our own thoughtful mockingbird

With sorrow on your brow.

Our Hamlet! Laughter mixed

With tears, inner woe,

Outer cheer, burdened by

Success, as others by ill luck.

Darling and martyr of

Fame, always gentle to you,

Drone of life, wanderer,

Struggling with an inner storm.

A ruined ascetic in spirit,

An Aristophanes on the page,

Physician and scourge of all

Our ills and wounds!

It seemed there wasn't a single occasion in life for which he didn't have a poem at the ready.

“We are studying literature,” he would constantly remind them, as though it were breaking news. “Literature is the finest thing humankind has created. Poetry is the beating heart of literature, the highest concentration of all that is best in the world and in people. It is the only true food for the soul. It is your own choice whether you grow up to become human beings, or remain on the intellectual level of beasts.”

Later, when he had learned all the students' names and assigned them seats after his own idiosyncratic fashion (not in the same order as their class picture, and not alphabetically, either), after everyone had formed a bond through discussions about cunning Odysseus; the mysterious chronicler Pimen; the unfortunate son of Taras Bulba; Pushkin's honest but slow-witted Alexei Berestov; and swarthy, clever Akulina—all part of the school curriculum, by the way—the boys started asking questions about the war: What was it like? And it immediately became clear that Victor Yulievich loved literature, and hated war. A strange bird! In those days, the entire population of young men who hadn't had the opportunity to shoot Fascists was enamored of war.

“War is the greatest abomination ever invented by man,” the teacher told them, curbing their tongues before they could even ask: Where did you fight? How did you get wounded? How many Nazis did you kill?

One day he told them.

“I had just finished my second year of college when the war broke out. All my classmates immediately reported to the recruitment office, and all of them were sent to the front. I am the only one from my group who stayed alive. Everyone else perished, including two girls. That is why I am against war with all my heart and with both my hands.”

With that, he lifted up his left hand. He tried to raise his right half-arm in tandem, but was unable.

On Wednesdays, literature was the last class of the day. When it was over, Victor Yulievich would say, “So, shall we go for a walk?”

The first of these walks took place in October. About six of them went. Ilya had rushed home, as usual, and Sanya had skipped school that day, which he often did, with his grandmother's permission. The Trianon was represented solely by Mikha, who later recounted word for word the stories he had heard from the teacher on the way from school to Krivokolenny Lane. Victor Yulievich had told them about Pushkin, but the way he talked about him made them wonder whether he and Pushkin hadn't been actual classmates. It turned out that Pushkin was a card shark! And a skirt-chaser! He was a real womanizer! On top of that, he was a brawler, held grudges, was always ready to make a scene or kick up a row, to fight in duels.