The Complete Secondary School that Sasha directed, called the “Michael School” after the poet Mikhail Lermontov, formally welcomed Sasha in August 1936. Located in Tula oblast in the village of Balyk, once home to a family of famous salmon fishermen, it enrolled about ninety promising students between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, for a two-year program. Although Sasha would have to contend with the unruly hormones and genes of teenagers, he had escaped the most difficult group of all, thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds, just coming into heat. On the far side of the village, a “literacy school” bore the brunt of a thousand years of provincial ignorance. And still further along, perhaps ten minutes distance by motorcar, stood Leo Tolstoy’s estate, with its birch-lined approach.
Sasha’s position as director of the Michael School entitled him to live on the grounds, in the state-owned farmhouse, which abutted an empty barn with stables that once held fine Caucasian horses. The shingled, whitewashed farmhouse had housed an animal tender and his family when the school, in the days of the Tsar, was dedicated to equine care and breeding. A ramshackle place, the house had numerous rooms, none of them large or handsome. After the school’s conversion from animal husbandry to academic work, the farmhouse had functioned as a dormitory for indigent students. Their graffiti, since painted over, could still be seen in outline on the walls. For several years the structure stood empty because the authorities intended to raze it and plant a garden for the use of the school. But when some official objected to the destruction of a “perfectly good” building, it was left standing, abandoned, to become home to mice, birds, bugs, stray dogs, and the occasional lovers who nocturnally nested there.
Sasha promised himself and others that the first chance he had, he would marshal the students to restore the farmhouse to its original state. Many of his students came from families in which they had been taught carpentry and roofing and flooring and plastering. He would make use of those skills to improve the property. In return, he would see to it that the students received free tutoring and an extra day off for holidays, to say nothing of an occasional dinner with the director on an outside porch that provided incomparable views of grasslands and woods.
Tula oblast, in the western part of the country, was a nature lover’s delight. Through his office window, Sasha could see rolling hills of cedar, birch, and pine. Glaciers and rivers had sculpted the landscape into valleys and lakes; and buried in the mixed forest-steppe lands were wooded paths. A few farms drew Sasha to them when he yearned for a fresh tomato or cucumber or onion. In many ways Balyk and the surrounding countryside reminded him of John Constable’s paintings. The farms were not as prosperous as the ones that the English painter had depicted in England, but a haystack in one country looked the same as in another, as did a field of rapeseed or a wooden bridge spanning a creek. Willows shaded the water, and the brickwork in the milldams and the green riverbanks and the mossy posts all exuded a nineteenth-century charm. The millponds, home to ducks and surrounded by gooseberry bushes, brought to mind Chekhov’s wonderful story of that name. Cornfields ran as far as the eye could see, and cattle lowed in the meadows. Rough wooden railings fenced the fields that the government seemed to have forgotten or overlooked in this small valley.
Sasha quickly discovered the marshes, where he could hide himself in the bushes and watch the waterfowl and their young, carried along on the water, suddenly dive to capture a fish. Kissing gates could be found in a few fields, though most of the farmers had little time for romance, which seemed to take place in the village square where young people danced to accordions and old people sat sipping tea. Although the church on the square had been closed years before, some couples still found their way to the altar to have Father Zossima marry them, though if asked, not a villager would confess to such a ceremony having taken place, and certainly not in Balyk.
Two ramshackle trucks, owned by a veteran of the civil war, constituted the town’s transportation, except for one at the Michael School. When a farmer needed to transport his food or silage, the veteran, for a nominal fee, carried the produce. Most people either walked or rode bicycles, and the same man who owned and maintained the old Fords kept the bicycles in working condition.
After a week, the locals knew Sasha Parsky and treated the new director of the school with reverence. In former times, only priests would have commanded the respect shown to Sasha, but of course priests were now pariahs. Father Zossima, in fact, lived a short distance from the school, and, but for his former status, Sasha would have employed the shy and amiable man to teach Latin and Greek. After the school year had started, to assist the poor fellow, who resembled a pole streaming rags, Sasha surreptitiously paid him for tutoring students struggling with declensions and other academic demons.
The former director of the school also lived in Balyk, which was barely a village, much less a town. His name was Avram Brodsky. He had been denounced by one of his students for speaking favorably about the Left Opposition, a group formed in 1923 by Leon Trotsky in response to the rising tide of Stalinism. After the death of Vladimir Lenin, various men had vied for power, each of whom represented a trend in the Communist Party: right, left, and center. The Right (Nikolai Bukharin) argued for private ownership and capitalist policies in agriculture, retail trade, and light industry, with the state controlling heavy industry. The collectivization of farms, the Right contended, would be especially injurious to the peasants. The Center (Stalin) put their faith in the state and Party bureaucracy to forge a new country and economics. The Left (Trotsky) contended that Communism could succeed only if the Russian working class made common cause with workers and economists from across Europe. This group felt that revolution in one country was destined to fail, and thus promoted the internationalist traditions of all working classes.
Even with Stalin’s iron grip on power, the Left and Right Opposition, though often at odds, worked for his downfall. At the mere mention of Stalin’s long-standing nemesis, Trotsky, the Vozhd would froth at the mouth. When Trotsky fled the country, Stalin swore to hunt him down. Nikolai Bukharin, like Trotsky, a Jew, earned the Boss’s contempt for his softness. Stalin was convinced that both splinter groups had to be cut down and, like chaff, thrown to the winds. But first, Sergei Kirov, Stalin’s principal competition in the Politburo, would have to be killed. On December 1, 1934, an assassin shot Kirov outside his office. The murder became the justification for subsequent purges and show trials. Stalin led the nation to believe that a conspiracy was behind Kirov’s death; but the arrests were actually designed to destroy all opposition to Stalin. Dissenters on both the left and the right were jailed in Moscow’s infamous Lubyanka Prison, tortured, and made to confess, though some refused. Trials ensued and shortly thereafter executions or exile.
Brodsky, exiled for a year to a Kolyma work camp, returned with stories of the beastly conditions. He could be found in fair weather sitting in the small square of Balyk, next to the pond, with its low circling wall. The village elders plied him with cigarettes in return for his Kolyma tales. No one doubted his stories about the skeletal prisoners wrapped in rags from head to foot, nor his recounting of the hungry driven to eat tree roots and bark, but some of his descriptions seemed too horrific to believe: the women raped in the forest, the forced abortions, the lack of food, medicine, and blankets, the plank-board beds, the daily roll calls in which unruly prisoners were made to stand naked and barefoot in the below-zero weather, the daily prostitution of men and women, the hatred of the criminal prisoners for the political ones, the suicides, the rampant tuberculosis, and in general the treachery, as well as the goodness, of prisoners.
Bogdan Dolin, a Balyk kulak, so-called because he had at one time employed laborers on his land and lent money at interest, had actually served time in Kolyma for counterfeiting rubles and forging documents that ostensibly came from the Supreme Soviet exempting his farm from appropriation. He never failed to glare when Brodsky would sit on the low wall of the pond, recounting his experiences to men and boys sitting cross-legged in the dirt. A squat, sinewy man, Dolin had a halo of wild white hair, which the locals referred to as his death cap, because it resembled the top of a poisonous mushroom. His steely torso—he had worked field and forge both—made him a formidable foe. Unlike most bronzed farmers, Dolin had an ashen face. His detractors attributed his coloring to his icy behavior, particularly toward Brodsky, whom he clearly and mysteriously disliked.
For his part, Brodsky lived alone in a small state-owned cottage, with numerous books and a lovely garden of lilacs and lindens. Boris Filatov had advised Sasha to call on the erstwhile director to learn about the area, the school, the students, and the government’s academic expectations.
Before the start of school, Sasha invited Avram to join him for a day of fishing. But Avram replied that “a proper chat required a proper setting.” Sasha had thought a lakeside would do, but found himself one afternoon in Avram’s sitting room having tea.
The man resembled a Dostoyevskian intellectual. He had a narrow face with sunken cheeks that exaggerated his orbital bones and gave his pale-blue eyes a melancholy sadness. His thick, gray hair fell across a broad forehead, deeply lined from years of squinting and skepticism. His nose, scarred from a childhood fall that resulted in a nail piercing his septum, resembled a dried fig. His thin lips, light-blue eyes, tulip-stemmed, rooster-thin neck, and peculiarly lined hands suggested he had Scandinavian roots. But his large ears, spotty beard, and wispy chin hairs argued for a mix of Nordic and Asiatic genes. He smoked constantly, and his long fingers bore the telltale nicotine stains. His painfully thin, gangly body seemed to be trying to keep a step ahead of malnutrition, which gave his skin a parchment-like quality. To assuage the discomfort of cracked lips and knuckles, he frequently applied a petroleum jelly pomade. Like many serious readers, he had pince-nez hanging from a chain around his neck. In his case, the thick lenses indicated poor eyesight. He was wearing, as he did on most days, wrinkled brown corduroy pants and a black turtle-neck shirt that exhibited a few food stains.
His sitting room, encountered immediately when one entered the front door of the cottage (there was no back door), had a low ceiling, papered to keep the cracked plaster from falling. The wallpaper, a gloomy brown-on-brown lined design, was the type sold in state stores and seen in a million flats. Avram’s heavy walnut furniture, upholstered in a dark red, rough Mohair, looked as if several generations had used it. The cottage also included three other rooms: the bathroom, with its zinc tub and taps in the shape of antlers; a kitchen, with a small coal stove, a table and four chairs, and a badly pitted soapstone sink; and a bedroom, with a single cot, an armoire, and a rickety cane chair.
Avram understandably loved the sitting room, with its small fireplace and lined bookcases that held finely tooled leather volumes in several languages. Sasha noted works by Victor Hugo, Alphonse Lamartine, Louis Musset, Alfred Vigny, and Voltaire. Brodsky also had a good collection of German writers: Engels, Fichte, Hegel, Heine, Marx. And of course there were the great Russian writers: Pushkin, Lermontov, Dostoevski, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Chekhov, as well as the modernists, Akhmatova, Blok, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, and dozens of others, all or most on the forbidden list. Filatov had said that Brodsky was a gifted linguist who could read all the foreign languages of his collected books.
“I like a strong, smoky tea,” said Brodsky, “the kind that comes from Malaysia. Did you know that Kenya has good teas? Would you like some milk in yours?”
“Please.” After Avram fetched his ewer of fresh milk, Sasha told him about the Tsar who scoffed at the very idea of tea.
“Dead leaves!” exclaimed Brodsky, lighting a cigarette. “In this country we have thousands of them, perhaps millions, and they are not tea. They are apparatchiks and oprichniki, bootlickers trained to parrot the current Soviet line, with all its jargon and ideological phrases that reduce the functionaries to unfeeling automatons.”
Sasha, aware that Filatov had wanted him to befriend Avram to gain information useful for the police, could have easily encouraged the former schoolmaster to continue, but he rather liked the man and knew that eschewing political conversations was in Avram’s best interests. So Sasha steered their talk to the school.
Brodsky told him that none of the ten teachers could be trusted, and that he needed a good administrator who would report faithfully to him. “They all wished to succeed me as director. When you received your appointment, I knew they’d be unhappy. And as we both know, an unhappy Soviet citizen is an ideal informer. So watch your step.” He had consumed the first cigarette and was now devouring another.
What was there to watch, thought Sasha? Learning was factually based. The school, Sasha explained, would not be teaching philosophy or ethics; he had already told his staff that he wanted a rigorous curriculum based on science, history, language, and literature.
Nearly choking on his tea, Brodsky sputtered, “Whose science, Mendel’s or Lysenko’s? History, from whose standpoint, the West or Stalin’s? Which literature, that of the masters or of the favored authors who kowtow to the Vozhd? One wrong step and you’ll be reported.”
At that moment Sasha decided that Galina Selivanova could not only teach Russian grammar and French literature but also serve as his chief assistant. As for her promised position as a nurse, to hell with it. An extra pair of eyes was more important.
“In your history classes,” asked Avram, “do you intend to cover the civil war and Trotsky’s prominent role in it? As you know, Stalin was absent from the fighting.”
Yes, the civil war would be a minefield, but so, too, would be the revolution. Any events contemporaneous with Stalin would have to feature him and, whether true or not, extol his heroic presence and glorious effect on socialism.
“The person who teaches Russian history at the school is a Stalinist,” said Brodsky. “I wouldn’t cross him if I were you. Let him teach whatever rubbish they poured into his head at teacher’s college.” He paused, lit another cigarette from the former, inhaled deeply, and sighed as he expelled the smoke. “Teachers’ colleges! Now there’s an oxymoron. Such places don’t teach; they engage in soul murder. What’s their subject matter? Pedagogy? Utter nonsense. The thousands of books and essays on the subject can be reduced to one good monograph, nothing more. These schools are fraudulent, wherever they occur, here or in the West. Unfortunately, a majority of your teaching staff come from them. The few who are actually knowledgeable hold degrees in science, mathematics, and linguistics. In the entire school there isn’t a single teacher of literature who knows how to read a novel or a play or a poem. All they do is summarize plots and talk foolishness about rounded characters and class struggle. And even if a book is imbued with class struggle, once you point it out, what more is there to say? Are you going to use the book as an occasion to hold forth on the divinity of Marx and Lenin, and to lecture on the defects of capitalism and the virtues of socialism? And supposing all your pronouncements are true, what have they to do with the book? A book is its own truth.”
The inadequate lighting from the two floor lamps in the sitting room was made all the dimmer by the tobacco smoke suspended in the airless room. Sasha could smell the nicotine on his skin and clothes. He wanted to run outside and feel the cleansing wind pass over him. When he heard rain spattering the small cottage windows, he relished the thought of standing in a downpour and having his clothes washed by what his mother used to call heaven’s tears. Instead, he stood and examined some of the books in the room, turning pages and noting some of Avram’s marginalia. At last, enough time had elapsed for him to make a polite exit, which he did, putting his face up to the rain and thinking of the adage: Anyone who says sunshine brings happiness has never danced in the rain.
✷
That evening, he requested the train master send a cable to Galina: “Come at once. The school needs you.” Although he had initially offered her a job for the spring, the fall term would shortly begin, and he knew he could use her immediately. If the other teachers wondered about this hasty appointment, he could win them over with the promise of lightened clerical work. In the fall, Galina could manage the front office and, in the spring, move into a classroom. He would arrange a school for Alya and lodging for Galina. In fact, she could, if she wished, share his farmhouse. He would gladly partition it, giving her an equal amount of space. The important thing was that she function as his eyes and ears, write the numerous reports required by the local Soviet, and relieve the current secretary, a sickly woman, ambient with anxiety over her many tasks. He asked Galina to respond at once. Fearing she would say no to his importunate request, perhaps because of her having to estrange herself from Viktor, he was delighted to receive a response the next day that said: “Will arrive Saturday next. Bring a wagon to the station. We have baggage. Appreciatively, Galina.”
She had neglected to say whether she would be arriving on the morning or afternoon train. So Sasha paced the platform from 9:30 a.m. to 4:22 p.m. It was a velvet day, with the leaves already starting to paint the forest in fiery yellows, oranges, and golds, the fall colors that brought travelers from afar to see the trees ablaze in chlorophyll wonder. Galina exited with bags and her daughter in a shower of sunshine, as if descending from heaven in a halo of light. Sasha hoped it was a good augury.
Hugging them both, he helped carry their bags past the small station house to the clearing behind, where he had parked the school’s old Model T truck that was mostly garaged because it suffered from age and a shortage of parts. Sasha crossed his fingers that the vehicle would make it back to the school without incident. The three of them strapped the luggage on the flatbed and climbed into the open cab. An accommodating farmer cranked the motor, knowing to cup the crank in his palm so that if the engine kicked back, the violent twisting would not break his wrist or his thumb. Sasha handed the farmer a few coins, honked the horn, winked at Alya, and took off in a cloud of blue exhaust. Drat! He had neglected to bring goggles for his guests to protect them from the dust of the roads. He wore a pair that made him look like a deep-sea diver. The dusty roads were also deeply rutted, and tested the springs of any vehicle. Sasha made it a point to ease around the furrows and drive with one side of the car on the smooth sides of the embankments.
They passed a lake that assured good fishing, but that would come later, Sasha promised. Avoiding any blowouts—the tires were bare!—Sasha made it back to the school in record time. He explained the housing situation, dire as it was throughout the Soviet Union, and offered to give Galina and Alya the farmhouse while he slept in a classroom that had, for some inexplicable reason, been home to an adipose couch. Galina seemed conflicted, but Alya begged that he join them in the farmhouse so that he could teach her how to play chess and could flip her in the air.
“We’ll see,” he said, “but first we have to carry the luggage inside, and you have to unpack.”
He had told Galina about his willingness to divide the house, especially in light of her smoking. She said she was quitting. He frowned skeptically. Once the family had unpacked, Galina offered to make everyone dinner. Sasha readily accepted, given his execrable cooking. He showed her the larder, which was more plentifully stocked than her own flat in Ryazan, and opened a bottle of wine, of a local manufacture. They clicked glasses, toasted her new life, and watched Alya run off to the barn and the hayloft.
Grudgingly, Galina remarked, “She’ll love it here.”
“And you?”
“We’ll just have to see.”
She donned an apron he kept in the kitchen, sliced cucumbers and tomatoes, and prepared the trout that he had bought for the occasion. He watched as she deftly salted, peppered, and dipped the fishes in a mixture of eggs and milk, and rolled them gently in bread crumbs. Then she made black tea. For dessert they had blackberries and yogurt.
“I must admit,” he said aimlessly stirring his tea, “I didn’t think you’d come . . . not now . . . not until spring.” Pause. “Why did you?” Pause. “My saying I needed you wasn’t the reason, was it?”
Through the kitchen window they could see Alya agilely climbing down a rope from the hayloft. Galina pointed and replied, “That’s the reason. I grew up in the country . . . among horses. . . . I wanted the same for Alya.” She looked imploringly at Sasha. “You won’t mind if we have a horse?”
In Ryazan, he had talked about the school and its former mission . . . and of course about the horses. Now she wanted one for her daughter. “Would a pony do?” Sasha asked. It would require less work and feed. But Galina knew equines. She would use her free time to look over the pasturage in the countryside, where she could both acquaint herself with the environs and evaluate the horseflesh. Then she’d decide. Her independence both frightened and excited Sasha, but where would it all lead?
When he introduced Galina to the teaching staff—five men, five women—they were seated in the smoking lounge, arrayed in a semicircle, with Sasha and his “woman,” as she soon came to be called, at the front. Sergei Putin, the groundskeeper and handyman, was also present. A factotum, he immediately smiled ingratiatingly at Galina. The instructors, all but one graduates of teaching colleges, were filled with theories about “active” learning, class indoctrination, love of the motherland, alternation of subjects to keep boredom to a minimum, weekly testing, circular seating, and the use of printed questions (which never changed from one semester to the next) to ready students for each class. Writing assignments were usually descriptive—“How I spent May Day”—rather than analytical or argumentative. His staff would have to be schooled in writing arguments, not plot summaries.
The teachers lodged in Balyk, some with other families, some in their own modest homes. Filatov had mentioned the advantages of housing the faculty in a single building, but given the shortage of funds, that project would have to wait. All but one of the male teachers were married, and their spouses self-employed: in stitchery, baking, wine making, and the like. Semen Sestrov’s wife was a painter specializing in miniature watercolors. None of the women teachers had married. Sasha’s roster read as follows.
|
Men |
Women |
|
Astafurov, Leonid (Greek and Latin) Budian, Mikhail (Marxism) Glinski, Pavel (World History) Kotko, Benedik (Russian Literature) Sestrov, Semen (Russian History) |
Chernikova, Vera (Chemistry) Levanda, Elena (Fine Arts) Oborskaia, Olga (Physics/Math) Petrowa, Irina (Biology) Rusakova, Anna (French/German) |
Sasha pictured his faculty as animals and plants. Leonid was anything but leonine. He was a hunched prairie dog with two large front teeth. Mikhail taught and looked like a wolf. Pavel’s fat cheeks reminded him of an inflated frog, and Benedik, with his unruly beard and nose sprouting black hairs, brought to mind a porcupine. Semen, who fastidiously attended to his dress and appearance, was called “the rose.” The women, too, resembled fauna and flora. Vera, tall and thin, recalled a giraffe; Elena, she of the delicate hands, an orchid; Olga, he swore, could have passed for a wild boar, including the protruding tusks; Irina Petrowa, the dissecting artist, had the instincts of a hyena, always scavenging; and sweet Anna, the lilac, always arrived at school pickled in perfume.
Reading the expressions and posture of his staff, Sasha saw a range of emotions regarding Galina, from “She’s here to spy on us” to “I’ll just wait and watch”; from “She’s quite a pretty woman” to “Clearly, she’s a harlot.” To relieve the tension, Sasha explained that the current secretary, Mrs. Berberova, had long needed help in the office. Galina would oversee enrollment applications, student transcripts, state financial aid, housing arrangements (most of the students boarded with local families or commuted), and counseling. In the spring, she would assume additional responsibilities, academic ones, as she was qualified to teach Russian grammar, which staff members found onerous, and French language and literature.
Anna, currently teaching French, asked, with downcast eyes, “In the spring, am I to give up my spot for her?”
“No, Galina will teach beginning French, and you the advanced courses. I am sure Galina can learn a great deal from you.”
A satisfied Anna relaxed her shoulders and settled back into her chair. She even swept her wispy hair from her face.
Vera sat stiffly and pouted. Never one to speak directly, she struck poses. Sasha asked her to state her concern.
“Will the teaching staff still have the final say about admissions or will she?”
“The staff.”
Vera conspicuously sighed in relief.
Sergei, he of the oily smile and bad breath, wanted to know whether Devora Berberova would still be in charge of the financial transfers that came from the state to the school. He seemed to be in her thrall. Sasha suspected that she occasionally dipped into money that belonged to the school. How else to explain the costly gifts that the gossipers said she showered on Sergei?
“I am introducing a new accounting system,” replied Sasha, “one that Galina is familiar with.”
She glanced at him skeptically but did not question his statement, though she did remark that she regarded the school as exceptional owing to the outstanding qualifications and dedication of the teaching staff. Sasha suppressed an ironic cough, since he had already told Galina that both the staff and curriculum needed overhauling.
“Where will you be living?” asked Semen, who always had an eye for a pretty woman.
When Galina glanced at him, Sasha feared that he’d have to answer the question mincingly, but a second later she bravely spoke up:
“At the moment, as you know, I am staying in the farmhouse, which is not a satisfactory arrangement. But the director intends to have a wall built and make two living quarters out of one, for privacy and decency. Have you a better suggestion?”
A flustered Semen, not expecting a question in return, acknowledged the shortage of housing and said that the director’s plan sounded reasonable to him.
“Any further questions?” asked Sasha.
“Just one,” replied Elena. “Will my counseling duties be curtailed? I am, after all, the only one on staff, who holds three degrees, in psychology, art history, and education.”
Whatever the occasion, Elena never failed to tout her three degrees, even though her sclerotic personality made her an ineffective counselor. The students much preferred talking to Devora Berberova, who had about her a genuine warmth. Teachers and students alike often lodged complaints; thus the eventual announcement that Galina would be sharing the counseling was greeted enthusiastically.
The group then recessed for tea and biscuits, after which Galina absented herself, and Sasha took the occasion to revisit his ideas about academic standards.
“When classes begin, I trust that we can overcome our old habits. Instead of asking the question ‘how,’ we should be asking the question ‘why.’ Why, for example, does Macbeth fall prey to the inducements of his wife? The how question can lead only to summary, not analysis. In science, for example, instead of asking for the names of phyla and taxonomies, give the students that information, and then make them apply it. Take vertebrates, five classes of them, right, Irina?”
“Right!”
“Asking students to repeat fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals accomplishes little. Better to give them the list and ask why reptiles are included. We would, then, be testing not whether they had memorized the list, but whether they could apply to snakes the characteristics of vertebrates: spinal cord, central nervous system, internal skeleton, muscular system, and brain case.” Sasha paused and looked around, noting his colleagues’ discomfort. “I realize it’s a seismic shift to move from how to why, but unless you have a better suggestion, I can see no other way to teach our students to extrapolate and think critically. Can you?”
Mikhail reminded the assembly that Soviet education had always proceeded on the principle of rote learning. “In fact, I can repeat Eugene Onegin word for word because of the training I had. Memory is more important than . . .”
Before he could finish, Sasha interrupted him. “No one is disparaging memory. I am merely adding another level: analysis. Surely, you don’t object to that?”
But the teachers knew that once the camel gets his nose in the tent, the body will soon follow. Give an inch, and then it’s a mile. Students trained in critical thinking would soon be asking questions that could endanger everyone. Instead of the usual Soviet catechism, students would ask why this form of government and not another; why this leader and not someone else; why this approach to learning and not the old way or the Talmudic way or the Socratic way? As John Donne had said, “A new philosophy calls all in doubt.”
Sasha encouraged his colleagues to talk openly about the history of the school and the staff. He wished to avoid the pitfalls of the past, and feared falling into a trap similar to the one that had ensnared Avram Brodsky. But his colleagues spoke only grudgingly. The best he could elicit from them was the observation that he should let common sense be his guide. But common sense without historical memory is virtually useless. From whence comes the sense? If it’s common, then it must have a track record. What Sasha wanted to know did not issue from common wisdom. For example: Why had some teachers and students failed in the past while others succeeded? Could one discern trends or patterns?
Reminded that the school office had several filing cabinets of old records, Sasha replied that he had diligently read them and not a one bore on the history of the school, staff, and students. They had been purged. By whom? His colleagues merely shrugged, although Elena had a vague memory of two men using a dolly to wheel boxed files out of the office. Their destination? She had no idea. Looking around for help, Elena met only cold stares.
“If not for my counseling duties,” she said, delicately stroking the air, “I would never have seen the files being removed.”
To reinvent the wheel simply wasted everyone’s time, Sasha observed. All of the current staff had served under Avram Brodsky. Surely, they could tell the new director “something” about the former one. “He lives within walking distance of the school,” said Sasha. “It’s not as if he disappeared.”
“Oh,” remarked Benedik Kotko, “he disappeared all right. For over a year. And no one in this room wants to touch the subject. It’s poison.”
Sasha let the subject drop.
When the staff left the meeting, they were not inflamed with the spirit of discovery but rather with the desirability of denunciation. This new director was challenging old truths and settled habits. To no one’s surprise, Comrade Boris Filatov soon arrived. Wearing a neatly pressed military tunic, he wanted to discuss the direction of instruction at the school. But first he would meet with the staff, including Galina, and then Sasha. If forewarned is forearmed, Galina would tell Sasha about the encounter with Filatov, who would undoubtedly employ his usual candid style.
“Citizen Parsky!” said Filatov, spreading a newspaper before he sat on the stained and ragged couch in Sasha’s office. “I received your report about meeting with Galina Selivanova and Viktor Harkov. In light of your initial reticence to visit these people, or should I say reluctance, I would never have guessed that you would offer Galina Selivanova a position. Viktor Harkov, too?”
“No, Comrade Filatov, just Galina.”
“So, you’re already on a first-name basis, but why wouldn’t you be, since she is living with you.” Pause. “Pretty woman.”
“Looks can be deceiving.”
“Are you punning? Do you mean the living arrangements or the woman’s appearance?” Filatov removed his silver cigarette case, and then remembered that Sasha abstained from nicotine. He decided as a courtesy to deny himself the pleasure.
Sasha smiled in appreciation. “You raise several issues, Comrade Filatov: Galina’s hiring, our living arrangements, and her attractiveness. As a matter of fact, the three are related. When I met the mother and daughter, I was much taken with the little girl and depressed by their living conditions. I knew that if I offered Galina Selivanova a job at the school, she could improve her standard of living—and the child’s. Her good looks are an added bonus. By the way, did you know that she has a superb singing voice? She has started a choir. The students adore her.” Sasha, who had been sitting behind his modest desk, with three wall portraits looking down on him—Marx, Lenin, and Stalin—went to his bookcase and removed a volume. He rustled through several pages and then quoted:
“‘Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast.’ Do you know the author of those words, Comrade Filatov?”
Although a cultured man, Filatov was not often asked questions of this kind. “Shakespeare.”
“William Congreve, Act 1, Scene 1, from The Mourning Bride.”
A bit annoyed, Filatov asked, “And the point of this exercise?”
“I knew you’d say Shakespeare. Everyone does. But it only goes to prove that majority thinking is not always right.”
Filatov removed a cigarette and lit up. Would he now excoriate Sasha for his forwardness? Through a mouthful of smoke, he said, “Point well taken.” Yet again Filatov had proved he was a different kind of OGPU officer, a more sophisticated and cunning one.
“With the deplorable state of housing in Balyk, I decided that since the farmhouse needed renovation and was large enough for two families, I would move in mother and child. Our living arrangement is perfectly innocent, irrespective of the whispers you hear.”
Filatov looked around for a place to tip his ashes and decided on the palm of his hand. “I have heard nothing.”
“That’s good, if true.”
“True that I’ve heard nothing or good that I’ve heard nothing?”
“I hope both.”
Filatov appropriated the metal trash bin next to Sasha’s desk, tipped in the ashes, and snuffed out his cigarette, leaving behind the stub, which now exuded a foul smell. “You are a clever lad, Citizen Parsky, perhaps too clever for your own good. I think we need to talk about education, Soviet education, and how you are expected to disseminate Party truths.”
What followed was a stock speech that Filatov had given to a hundred schoolmasters in his lifetime. He, in fact, liked this part of his police work, “instructing instructors about proper Party instruction,” as he liked to phrase it, convinced that the repetitions were not only witty but also pedagogically useful. He droned on about why the world functions as it does, and how it ought to function. He explained how ideologies became dominant and grew into systems based on religious, legal, and political beliefs.
“But where does the class struggle and the working man fit in? They don’t, because the needs of the laborer are always ignored. Soviet education has to fill that omission in every discipline, from economics to literature to science. Social class is the crucible in which all else is forged. Since every class has its values, we should not be surprised to find that self-interest and selfishness are paramount. Take the example of commodities. The ruling classes have convinced us that value inheres in the product itself, when actually the value is external, added to it through labor. But does the worker receive his fair share of the profits? No. The ruling classes argue that if not for their investments, the product would never have come to market. So money trumps labor. This truism can be found in every aspect of society, and every student must be taught to see it.”
In response to Sasha’s question, Filatov said that Avram Brodsky had been allowed to return to Balyk after his year in Kolyma but could not leave the area. “Internal exile,” said Filatov. “You would be doing us all a great favor if you could draw the man out. I fear he may still be secretly active in the Left Opposition. Learn what you can. The three R’s: What is he reading, ruminating about, and ’riting?”
Sasha explained that he had no taste for politics, and that he and Brodsky talked mostly about literature. If he now introduced politics, surely Brodsky would be suspicious.
“Work into it slowly. You can use literature. Ask about a Marxist approach to your friend Congreve, for example. See where the discussion leads, and report back to me. In fact, I intend to call on him myself. Perhaps I can induce him to tell me about the people and ideas he admires. Some friends! They cost him his directorship.”
All of Balyk had an opinion about Filatov frequently passing through Brodsky’s gate and entering his cottage. Some hazarded that Filatov’s visits were a warning to Brodsky to stay clear of trouble; others said he came to elicit information, which, if not forthcoming, could cost Avram his life. The teachers at the Michael School were particularly energetic in their suppositions and fantasies, each one advancing a different theory about the former director: that Brodsky worked for the secret police because his elderly parents had been threatened with exile; that he was secretly married to a Soviet agent or to a Trotskyist to whom he reported; that he and Sasha had made common cause to spy on the faculty; that he was an anarchist; that he was a Zionist urging Jews to leave the country for Palestine; that he had a shortwave radio that he used to stay in communication with the émigré communities in Paris and Berlin; that he could conjure spirits that conveyed his message to the netherworld; that he poisoned farmers’ cattle and wells; that he preferred men to women; that he was a distant relative of Filatov; that he had escaped a longer prison term in Kolyma because the authorities regarded him as privy to traitorous plots, all of which he shared with the secret police. And so on. The one thing about which everyone could agree was the man was an enigma. Even though the teachers at the Michael School had served under him for many years, those same people now claimed that Brodsky had been a demon with supernatural powers, leading them to behave in ways they would normally have avoided. In a word, like all Jews, he communed with the devil. Had it not been for his occult powers and his chthonic connections, they would have denounced him when he was first appointed to direct the school.
✷
“A word, Comrade Director.” Sasha invited Vera Chernikova into his office. She sat across from him, with her skirt just above the knee, exhibiting handsome legs. Her perfume rose like incense, hovering in the room and clinging to his clothes. The scent followed her like a contrail. “I am not alone in my concerns.” But before Sasha could ask their source, she continued. “Others, like Olga Oborskaia, share them. Nepotism has become a problem in our schools. This new woman, Galina . . . are you grooming her to succeed you? She will undoubtedly feel entitled if you make her your second in command.”
“She is more an aide-de-camp than a school official or officer.”
“When Director Brodsky left, we were led to believe that his successor would come from the ranks, a teacher who worked and achieved more than required, a sort of Stakhanovite teacher. But that never happened. Major Filatov felt new blood was needed, an attitude that I quite understand. But a new person has no knowledge of the school’s history and traditions, as you are undoubtedly discovering. I would hope that one of your first official acts will be to designate the next in line.”
“Have you any suggestions?”
“It would be forward of me to advance my own name. I leave that to others. But I would mention Olga Oborskaia and Semen Sestrov.”
Sasha asked ironically, “Are directors so short-lived that before they even settle in, the staff prepare for their departure?”
“We in the Soviet Union are changing the world every day. One must be prepared for the coming Utopia. I am merely acting in the spirit of revolution and change. I’m sure you understand.”
“Absolutely, and I thank you for your concern.”
He saw her to the door and gave her a firm handshake.
Given Sasha’s own specialty in Soviet history, he told Semen Sestrov, who taught a course in the Russian Civil War, he would like to observe his class. Semen was flattered to be the first teacher Sasha visited. The ten o’clock class had a full enrollment, and the students were exceptionally earnest and well behaved. One brave student asked about the role of various leaders in the conflict. When Stalin’s name surfaced, as Sasha had hoped, he waited to hear Semen explain Koba’s minimal contributions to the Russian Revolution.
“The Vozhd,” said Sestrov, “was raising money from the Baku oil barons, and was fomenting rebellion in Georgia through his underground activities.”
“Why,” asked the same student, “does the traitor Trotsky and his ilk say that the Vozhd played no role, and that he may, at one time, have been in the employ of the Cheka?”
“As a double agent,” replied Sestrov, skillfully evading the fact that Stalin played little or no role in the civil war.
Education was always a dicey affair. The Tsarist rulers, in need of bureaucrats to staff the many government agencies, had found it necessary to expose their servitors to modern Western ideas, and therein was the problem. A few of them, influenced by nonauthoritarian ideas, grew into disaffected radicals who challenged Tsarist rule. Sasha wondered how many among the current students at his school would become free thinkers, and what kind of changes would they clamor for? Despite his bitter disapproval, Sasha knew the Soviet reasoning for the vast surveillance system found in every school and university. In the Michael School, which classrooms were or were not bugged provided a wealth of humor, though it was no joke that some of the teachers were probably on the Cheka payroll.
One morning Sasha arrived in his office to find Goran Youzhny, his staged cell mate. He handed Sasha a letter with orders from Filatov to find lodging and a lab for “Comrade Youzhny, a friend of the OGPU,” who was now honing his skills as a police photographer. The storyteller Bella Zeffina’s house would fit the bill, but Sasha explained that the school had no room for a lab. Goran thanked him and replied that all he needed was a small space. And in the near future, would Sasha mind if he came to the farmhouse with his camera for a story he’d like to write about the school and the new director? Sasha agreed, and Goran left. But the idea of a falsely confessed killer, an OGPU friend, showing up with a letter from Filatov and the need for a lab troubled Sasha.
A few days later, on a chill autumn afternoon, with the daylight threatening to prematurely quit the sky, Goran drove up on a motorcycle with a sidecar holding a handsome box camera and tripod. He formally introduced himself to Galina and Alya, and immediately set up his camera on the grass, snapping a number of pictures of the farmhouse and barn, some just of the structures and some with Sasha and the mother and daughter. Inside the house, he arranged lamps and lights to allow him to photograph various rooms, again with and without the principals.
When Sasha asked wasn’t the film prohibitively expensive, Goran conspiratorially replied, “We have a friend, don’t we?”
“In a celluloid factory?” Sasha joked.
Moving into the barn for more shots, Goran observed that it wouldn’t take a great deal of carpentry to turn one of the stables into a photo-processing lab. If Sasha agreed, and if money could be found for the remodeling, Goran volunteered to assume responsibility for maintaining the chemicals and equipment. He would even be glad to show Sasha and the Selivanovs how to develop film.
“I’ll make inquiries,” said Sasha, not at all happy at the prospect of being watched.
They were standing in the barn and Alya, as usual, was in the hayloft swinging on a rope that Sasha had doubled and fashioned into a swing. To exit the barn quickly, Alya frequently uncoiled the rope and dropped it from the hayloft door and repelled to the ground. Goran focused his camera on Alya swinging, but Sasha knew the light was insufficient for a good picture and the camera not good enough to capture an object in motion. Goran snapped it anyway, and then began to fold up his camera and tripod.
“The money?” asked Sasha.
“What?”
“It will take a large sum.”
With a dismissive wave of the hand, he replied, “Our mutual friend will help.”
Galina had silently watched the scene develop and asked enigmatically, “Tell me, Goran, will the pictures tell a story, one hidden in the film?”
Her question, which sounded innocent enough, discomfited Goran. He stuttered, fumbled with the camera, and tripped over the tripod, as he edged to his motorcycle and sidecar. Sasha stood amazed, but Galina, her arms folded across her chest, impassively watched the young man depart.
“A picture,” she said, “is like a book. It lends itself to many interpretations. Now we’ll just have to wait.”
“For what?” asked a confused Sasha.
“The official reading.”