LARA VAPNYAR

[Russia/U.S.A.]

LARA VAPNYAR was born in Moscow, U.S.S.R., in 1971, and moved with her husband to America in 1994, when she entered the graduate program at the City University of New York, and began writing in English wry short stories as well as novels. “Love Lessons—Mondays, 9 A.M.,” about a young instructor teaching a subject she hasn’t experienced herself, first appeared in The New Yorker magazine in 2003. She lives with her children in New York City, where she teaches writing at Columbia University.

Love Lessons—Mondays, 9 A.M. (2003)

THE PRINCIPAL, MARIA Mikhailovna, was a tall, heavy woman, well over two hundred pounds, with her lower part heavier than her upper. The students nicknamed her “the Pear.” When she walked, the heels of her black pumps left deep imprints in the linoleum. Without lifting my eyes, I could see that she was walking toward me. I silently prayed that at the last moment she would change direction.

From my recent experience as a student, I knew that when a principal was approaching you, it was best to keep your eyes down. I wasn’t a student anymore, but I sat looking at my knees, which stuck out from under my gray pleated skirt. I hated my knees. They were bony, red, and often scratched or bruised. A little girl’s knees, not a teacher’s knees.

Twenty-two of us sat along the walls of the teachers’ lounge. I was the youngest. In fact, I wasn’t even a teacher; I was eighteen years old, only in my second year of college, but the school needed somebody to teach tenth-grade math so desperately that they hired me. The other teachers were all women between the ages of thirty and sixty, except for Sergey, the history teacher, who was twenty-five and male. All the female teachers wore dark skirts and nylon blouses. Most of them styled their hair in old, flattened perms. The young teachers used some mascara and lipstick, while the older ones wore no makeup at all and used the same cheap yellow soap that was supplied in the school bathrooms, making their faces and hands smell distinctly of school.

Maria Mikhailovna read to us from a thin brochure as she marched around the room. She had the deep, loud voice of a person who talked for a living. My mother had the same voice—she had hosted political-awareness sessions in schools and factories for years.

Although Maria Mikhailovna read very well, nobody seemed to listen. Some teachers chatted, others read Young Muscovite, a new daily paper that printed only shocking stories, a novelty in Russia. A few days earlier, I’d read an article about a dog that had bitten off her owner’s genitals when the owner tried to rape her. And a month earlier about a gang called the Skinners, whose members kidnapped fat people, skinned them alive, and made hamburgers out of them.

Maria Mikhailovna stopped hesitantly next to me, pausing in her reading. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, sighed, and touched the back of my chair. I stopped breathing. But then the floorboards creaked and she started walking away. I took a few quick breaths and lifted my eyes. She was definitely walking away from me, tapping the palm of her hand with her brochure.

The brochure was entitled Sex Education: The Theses. The Ministry of Education had sent it to every school that year to introduce sex education in the tenth grade. Now the faculty had to pick two sex education teachers. I had good reason to worry. Whenever there was an unpleasant errand or assignment that nobody wanted to do—supervising monthly school dances and weekly yard cleanings, taking students on trips to Lenin’s tomb, running out to a bakery to buy a cake for the teachers’ tea—Maria Mikhailovna picked me, “our young teacher.” She always referred to me as “our young teacher.” Her use of the word made “young” sound like a mark of inferiority and inevitable failure. Sometimes she peeped into my room during class, sticking her pink face inside the door and leaving her heavy body outside. She watched me teach for a few minutes, which made me sweat, sputter, confuse words, and drop my chalk on the floor. If one of my students so much as stirred or smiled, she said, “Shame on you! Don’t you respect your young teacher?” or “We know she is young and it’s very hard for her to handle you, so help her! Show some respect!” I kept my eyes down and dug my fingernails into the flesh of my palms. I wished that the most horrible things would happen to Maria Mikhailovna. I fantasized about her getting caught by the Skinners and turned into a hamburger.

Sergey wasn’t very old or experienced either, but Maria Mikhailovna never referred to him as “our young teacher.” She called him “our male teacher,” with affection and awe, as if his gender were an admirable character trait.

Sergey had naturally just been appointed to teach sex education to the boys. He didn’t mind. He seemed to know enough about sex. Every Friday, a different smug girl in nice imported clothes stood waiting for him on the school porch after classes. Every Friday, I watched from my classroom window, half-hidden behind dusty flannel curtains. At three-forty Sergey would appear on the porch, in faded jeans and a dark shirt with the top two buttons undone, carrying a wrinkled jacket and a crumpled pack of cigarettes. From my fourth-story window his back looked a little slouchy. Sergey wasn’t very handsome, but it didn’t matter to me. He walked up to the girl on the porch, smiled at her, gave her a peck on the cheek, and put his arm around her waist. He looked into the girl’s eyes with a promising expression. I let go of the curtains and sighed.

Not that I was in love with Sergey. What I felt for him was nothing compared to what I had felt for Prince Andrey from War and Peace, or for the math teacher from my hometown, or for the famous actor Alexey Batalov, who played a fatally ill nuclear physicist in my favorite movie, Nine Days of One Year. I wasn’t in love with Sergey, but I would have liked it if he looked at me with a promising expression.

Except for me, Sergey was the only one who paid attention to Maria Mikhailovna. He sat leaning forward, with his sharp elbows propped on his knees, light-brown eyes narrowed with attention, waiting for an opportunity to make a fool out of Maria Mikhailovna, which he did all the time. Back in school, he was probably one of those students who were always asking their teacher provoking questions. When Maria Mikhailovna said that our school was proud to have the lowest rate of unplanned pregnancies in Moscow, Sergey asked what the rate was for planned pregnancies. I wouldn’t have wanted to have somebody like him in my class. But Maria Mikhailovna didn’t mind—she responded to his quips with one of her warm, all-forgiving smiles. She smiled at him even when he didn’t say anything.

Maria Mikhailovna finished reading about the disastrous effects of the lack of sex education in Soviet schools, and moved on to a chapter praising countries where sex education was highly developed. When she read, her heavily painted eyelashes blinked, and the tip of her nose moved up and down. “In the United States, ten-year-olds know how to use a condom!” Sergey’s eyes lit up with excitement. “Ten-year-olds using condoms! I wonder what they put them on.”

I dropped my gaze and tried not to giggle, biting my lower lip and digging my nails into my knees. But a little squeal of laughter sputtered out, enough to attract Maria Mikhailovna’s attention. “It’s easy for you young people to laugh!” When I raised my head, she was looking at me with her famous knowing smile. “You think you know everything and we older people know nothing. Well, the time has come to share your knowledge.” She plopped the brochure into my lap and stopped smiling. I saw that she was serious. I also saw that the decision had been made long before this meeting and that I couldn’t have done a thing about it. They all stared at me: twenty female teachers with bad perms, one unflinching principal, and one smirking Sergey.

At home, I sat on the edge of the narrow bed where I slept and stared at the brochure. My Aunt Galya had agreed to let me live in the back room of her apartment when I came to study at Moscow University. The room was so small that my feet touched the wardrobe when I sat on the bed.

I had read the brochure twice, but it wouldn’t have helped if I’d read it ten times. The authors did a good job of stressing the importance of sex education and had included a detailed list of topics to cover, but there wasn’t anything, not a word, not a hint, of what exactly teachers were supposed to say on those topics. On Monday, I would have to walk into the classroom and announce to the tenth-grade girls that I was there to give sex education lessons. Would they laugh, or would there be a deadly silence? Would they ask probing questions? Would they laugh when I tried to answer them? Actually, they’d probably just exchange knowing looks, small smiles, sly winks. If I turned my back to them, I would hear stifled giggles and feel that tickling sensation in my spine that I always felt when I knew they were mimicking me.

I started crying, and a tear dropped onto the open brochure in my lap. I didn’t care if it got soaked. It was useless. I wanted my mother, who was in our little hometown hundreds of miles away from Moscow. But I knew better than to call her. If I did, I would start sobbing right away, and I would drown out her voice crackling through the poor connection. During my last months at home, everything about my mother irritated me: her questions, her suggestions, her endless pestering—even the sound of her voice. I couldn’t wait to hop on a Moscow train and leave for my new life. At the station, I didn’t even bother to kiss her before I climbed the steps onto the train. Then I saw her standing on the platform scanning the train’s dusty windows in search of me. I waved at her quickly and walked away from the window.

I wished I had somebody, anybody, to talk to. I’d been living in Moscow for a little over a year, and I’d lost touch with all of my high-school girlfriends and hadn’t made any new ones. Moscow girls seemed too snobbish and too well dressed to try to approach. When I spoke to them, they furrowed their brows, as if I spoke a foreign language and they were struggling to understand me. The girls who, like me, came to the university from small towns all lived on campus. They had immediately formed a close-knit circle bound by their own specific interests. They discussed how to use forbidden electric teakettles, how to dry clothes on rusty radiators and sneak boyfriends into their rooms at night. They exchanged information about dealing with hangovers, flooded toilets, and mean Muscovites. I couldn’t be a part of this set. Simply by living with my aunt, I wasn’t a part of it. What is more, they considered me a Muscovite precisely because I lived with my aunt.

I saw my distorted reflection in the glossy surface of the wardrobe. I drew my knees up to my chin and moved closer to the wall. Above my head, the photographs of Aunt Galya’s late husbands, Uncle Ivan and Uncle Boris, hung slightly off-center on the faded wallpaper. Ivan was in his twenties in the picture, and Boris in his fifties; both men had stubby noses and small, gloomy eyes. They could’ve been father and son. Every morning, Aunt Galya came into my room, climbed onto the bed, spat on the glass, and wiped the pictures with a dishrag.

I could hear Aunt Galya moving around in the living room as I wiped away my tears. The dishes tinkled as she shuffled around, humming something out of tune, clearing her throat every now and then—all sly, subtle hints that she wanted my company. The humming and throat clearing would get louder and more persistent, and soon Aunt Galya would appear at my door and ask if I wanted a cup of tea. I would have to come out and try to look enthusiastic. Aunt Galya was a distant relative of my mother. In fact, they’d only seen each other a few times. It had been very generous of her to let me live here. My mother would have gone crazy with worry if I had had to share a dorm room with three other girls—with three “drunken sluts,” in her words. And it would have been base ingratitude for me to refuse to sip a cup of tea with Aunt Galya and listen to her stories.

The stories were either about Aunt Galya’s dead husbands or about her countless admirers. During that year, I’d learned all their names, addictions, habits, and physical peculiarities. I’d learned, for example, that Uncle Boris had a hairy back, Uncle Ivan had small balls, and Uncle Ivan’s best friend Vasiliy had even smaller ones.

Aunt Galya appeared in my doorway almost every night, holding her faded silk robe over her large breasts. Her robe used to be a kimono, but she had cut holes on one side and sewn buttons on the other. She could button it up when she wanted, but she never did. “Come, have a cup of tea with me.” But Aunt Galya never served me tea. I doubted if she had tea or a teakettle, or even a pot. Aunt Galya wasn’t big on cooking. She usually ate her meals at the factory where she worked. On weekends she had a bologna sandwich for breakfast, a bologna sandwich for lunch, and chocolate candies for dinner. Every time I came out of my room for “a cup of tea,” Aunt Galya would put a big glossy box of candies on the table and rush to the kitchen. She came back holding a glass jar filled with a turbid greenish liquid. Moonshine. She made it herself, a fresh batch every Saturday morning, and kept it in glass jars with old faded labels: strawberry jam, dill pickles, pickled mushrooms, eggplant caviar. She poured moonshine from the jar into her cut-glass tumbler, drank it slowly, ate a candy, and then poured again. She never drank more than half a liter in the course of an evening. She wasn’t as strong as she used to be. Although she was fifty-seven, she looked older, and her stomach ulcer had made her complexion sallow. She spent her evenings at home, listening to the radio or simply lying on the couch.

Aunt Galya’s steps stopped. She must have sat down. I heard the unsteady tinkling of the glass jar against the edge of the tumbler. Long, drunken yawns were beginning to replace her humming. That meant that she would be falling asleep soon and I wouldn’t have to come out and listen to her. Yet I felt somewhat disappointed, which surprised me. Even listening to her stories would have been better than sitting here alone and mourning my ruined life. I dropped onto my hard bed with a thump and resumed crying, wetting Aunt Galya’s pillow this time. I wanted my mother. If not my mother, then at least my own pillow, not this small stiff thing with its silly lace trimming.

On Monday morning, I felt better. “Maybe it won’t be a disaster,” I thought. I walked past the huge gray buildings of Moscow on my way to the school, and the crisp air stung my cheeks as if it were winter already. The trees were stripped of leaves but not yet covered with snow. It made the streets look wider. When I’d first moved to Moscow, the streets had seemed so strange and hostile. But after a few months I grew to like them. Moscow streets were like big rivers: wide, endless, and flowing. Everything—cars, people, autumn leaves—was constantly moving, and I felt swept up in it as I walked fast, my scarf flapping in the wind. I caught my reflection in a supermarket window. Even through its stained, poorly washed glass, I could see that I looked pretty.

The handles of my oversized canvas bag cut into my palms. The bag was weighted down by the book I had checked out from the library over the weekend. It was 980 pages, entitled The Nature of Sexuality. It was written by several authors, each one with a Ph.D. next to his name. The book was the only one in the library with the word “sex” in the title. I shifted the bag in my hands. Its heft was reassuring. It also contained a bright folded poster that I had copied the night before from a picture in The Nature of Sexuality.

I recalled that before my first math lesson I had been frightened too, but it had turned out all right. Nobody mimicked me or laughed in my face. The students sat quietly leaning over their notebooks, I didn’t do anything wrong, and my voice faltered only two or three times. Maybe my sex instruction would be all right too. I had my book and my poster, and it was not as if I had no experience whatsoever. I wasn’t a virgin. Or at least I hoped I wasn’t. Actually, I couldn’t be completely sure about it.

I arrived at school a few minutes earlier than usual, so I had time to secure my poster on the blackboard. I spread it on the table and picked out eight rusty tacks from the drawer. The poster, which I had created by gluing eight regular sheets of paper together, was large. In the center was a colorful drawing of the female reproductive organs with their Latin names shooting out from it like fireworks. Aunt Galya had peeked into my room and asked if I was drawing “chicken innards.” It did not look like chicken innards at all! I had gotten the colors right, and I was especially happy with the intense purple of the uterus, a color I created by applying blue paint on top of red. I wasn’t as happy with the shapes and sizes though. It proved difficult to make the poster eight times larger than the picture in the book and maintain the right proportions. I could see now that one ovary was larger than the other. But at least the poster was bright and eye-catching. Even intimidating. And that was a good thing.

I usually started my math lessons by writing some difficult equations on the blackboard and demanding that they be solved in ten minutes. I called it “warming up,” but my real goal was to intimidate the students. I walked into the classroom, stumbling in my mother’s pumps, with parched lips and cold trickles of sweat running down my sides. And they were sitting there, all thirty-nine of them, big, smug, scary. Everything about them was scary: their pimpled foreheads and red fingers, their blue uniforms darkened under their arms, their cracking voices, the boys’ enormous feet in scuffed shoes, the girls’ awkward makeup. They could eat me alive. Math was my only weapon, because I knew it and they didn’t. I followed one assignment with another without a break. I gave them tests every couple of days and assigned excruciating homework. I was very strict about grading papers. They could be sure that not a single mistake would go unnoticed. Needless to say, I never smiled during my lessons. My students called me “the Math Hound” or simply “the Hound” behind my back. I didn’t mind that name. They feared me. I had them under control.

The last tack bent back instead of piercing the board. I straightened its tip and punched it in, then massaged my fingers and stepped aside to admire my work. Yes, it looked scary enough. I pulled down the projector’s screen to cover the poster until the appropriate time. I was ready.

The girls slowly entered the room, which looked strange with gaps where the boys usually sat. (The boys had been taken to Sergey’s classroom across the hall for their class on sexuality.) It was unusually quiet. The girls moved their chairs carefully to avoid making scraping noises, talked in whispers, and exchanged shy looks. “Good morning!” I said. My voice rang out clearly in the silent classroom. Though I always said those words at the beginning of math lessons, I wasn’t prepared for the girls’ reaction now. Instead of groaning, then sighing, then peering at their homework, they looked up at me with strange, expectant expressions. Could it be interest? I wasn’t sure, because I’d never seen my students look interested before. Then something occurred to me, something that would have made me laugh if I hadn’t been so nervous. They saw me as their teacher. They thought I possessed certain knowledge of sex the way I possessed certain knowledge of math. But unlike math, sex was something they really wanted to learn. A girl in the first row was tapping her foot on the ground. Another girl by the window rubbed the pimples on her forehead with the tip of her pen. My best math student, the pretty Sveta Zotova, twisted her ash-gray curls around her finger. Suddenly, these girls didn’t seem so big or tall or grown-up to me. They could have been girls like I’d once been, with their mothers telling them, “You’ll figure it out when the time comes.” The ground was slipping from under my feet. What if the girls were not my enemy? No, I couldn’t let them fool me! I wasn’t going to soften up. I would beguile them with my poster, then finish them off with Latin terminology. I unveiled my poster and spoke the sentence that I’d been working on for the last two days: “We’ll begin our lessons by studying the organs responsible for sexual functions in the female body.”

Aunt Galya had come home early that day and was cooking when I came in. As soon as I opened the front door, I felt waves of heat coming from the kitchen, and the sweetish smell of burnt milk crept into the hall. Apparently, something was gurgling under the lid of the big aluminum pot. I’d never seen this pot before. Aunt Galya must have borrowed it from a neighbor, along with the green apron that was tied over her “kimono.” She stood beside the stove with a dishrag in one hand and a wooden spoon in the other. Every few seconds, she raised the lid, let out clouds of white steam, and stirred what was inside. Her face was flushed. “I’m making kasha! Good for your stomach,” she announced. “I had another doctor’s appointment today, and guess what he said? That I should eat a lot of kasha and drink less!” She poured some salt into the pot from the opening in the two-pound bag, then tossed in a handful of sugar from the sugar canister. She wiped her forehead with the dishrag and turned to me. “Want some?”

Aunt Galya served us both kasha in large golden-rimmed plates with crimson roses painted on them. We ate slowly, working from the outer edges of the plates to the center. Aunt Galya was sober and quiet. I hoped that filling myself with kasha would help me get rid of the gnawing sensation in the pit of my stomach. The kasha was hot, heavy, and gluey. I wanted each next spoonful to dissolve the memory of my sex lesson.

None of my nightmares had been realized. Nobody made fun of me, nobody laughed, nobody even smiled during my lesson. Yet somehow it seemed that what happened was even worse. I kept thinking of Vera Bunina’s expression when she asked her question at the end of the hour. Vera, a quiet, overweight, somewhat slow girl, was painfully shy. For her to raise her hand and ask a question, any question, was a big deal, especially since her classmates often laughed when she spoke. She had pointed at my poster with her pale, puffy hand and asked if every woman and every girl had “that,” probably wondering whether “that” was actually as huge and ugly as I had drawn it. I expected the girls to laugh. I avoided looking at Vera’s homely face, thinking how it would redden and tremble at the burst of laughter. But nobody laughed. The girls sat silently staring at the poster. I wondered if some of them did the same thing that I had done back home. Shivering in our moldy bathroom, I used to put my mother’s hand mirror on the floor and squat down, straining my neck to have a look at it. Afterward, I lay in bed crying, feeling frightened and appalled, because it looked so ugly. I had a startling image of myself sitting at one of the desks among the girls, looking at the poster, and feeling even more frightened and appalled.

The tears were starting to cloud and burn my eyes, and a heavy lump was rising in my throat. I tried to push it back down with spoonfuls of kasha. “It is good, isn’t it?” Aunt Galya asked, blowing on hers. I nodded.

The girls had silently emptied the room as soon as the bell rang. Then, while I struggled with my rusty tacks—I wanted to take my poster off before my math lesson started—the door across the hall flung open and the boys spilled out of their classroom in groups, all blushing, excited, giggling, some even bursting out in their coarse, neighing laughs. I saw grinning Sergey in the doorway. He stood behind two of his boys, who blocked his way trying to ask him something. He scrunched his face and scratched his forehead, pretending to think hard, then he said something with a very serious expression. The boys laughed. Sergey prodded them to move them from the doorway and walked down the hall with his usual lazy gait.

I scraped kasha remains from the bottom of my plate, exposing crimson roses. I wondered what Sergey talked about in his lesson. I imagined that he shared something from his own experience. That was why the boys felt at ease with him. Then he urged them to ask questions—anything they wanted to know. I wondered if I could do the same? Just talk to the girls about my own experience, honestly, making them feel at ease with me and encouraging them to talk openly about their experiences?

No, I couldn’t do that. I took another helping of kasha and began swallowing it rapidly. When I lived at home, I’d only had one unimpressive, even embarrassing, sexual encounter with a boy from my class. I couldn’t possibly talk about that. Or about the fact that for the year that I had lived in Moscow nobody had asked me on a date. I tried to tell myself that it wasn’t my fault, that I didn’t go to parties, that I spent all my time working and studying and preparing for my lessons and my exams. But I did ride the subway and buses, and I did go to the Central Library and to art museums, and I knew that you could meet somebody at those places, but nobody had ever asked me for my phone number.

I was startled by a sudden tinkling sound. “It’s time for my medicine,” Aunt Galya said, pouring the green liquid from a jar labeled EGGPLANT CAVIAR into her cup. “The doctor said that drinking is bad for me!” Aunt Galya snorted loudly. “Can you believe that? Drinking has been keeping me alive all these years! It’s folk medicine. It goes way back.” She drained her cup and blinked several times. She did look more alive after a drink. It brought some pink to her cheeks and made her eyes greener and brighter. Glimpses of her former attractiveness came out. I wondered if there was any truth in the stories of her glorious past love life. Often after “tea,” Aunt Galya offered to share her love secrets. “Listen hard, I’m gonna teach you how to love!” she would announce while pouring out moonshine. I usually declined, making polite excuses about having to study. At other times, Aunt Galya felt like showing off her body. She would stand up, straighten her back, and say, “Just look at this! Can you see why men are so crazy about me?” I saw an aging woman in a shabby kimono, with a massive upper body, a sagging stomach, bony hips, and pale, skinny calves with twisted hairs along the bone. I saw a blotched face with small eyes the color of moonshine under heavy eyelids. Aunt Galya hardly looked like a sex goddess, especially now, when she sat staring mournfully into her empty teacup. But what if she did know something about sex? What if her love lessons were worth listening to? I had nothing to lose. I gathered up my courage and said: “Aunt Galya . . . Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?” She slowly raised her head, her expression changing from incredulous to questioning to gleeful. She moved her teacup away and ran her hand through her short, wavy hair, preparing to talk. “Aunt Galya, wait!” I rushed to my room for a notebook and pen.

In December, the schoolyard was covered with snowdrifts. The caps of soggy snow lay everywhere: on the school steps, the window ledges, the low concrete fence, and on the lilac bushes by the fence. Sharp, leafless lilac twigs broke through the snow in places, making the bushes look like gigantic porcupines. Every morning, the school janitor swept the school porch and dug a trenchlike path in the snow from the gate to the steps. There was a long patch of ice before the steps, and younger children loved to run up to the patch and glide all the way up to them, screaming with pleasure. The ice patch was also the source of another sort of students’ fun, because teachers sometimes slipped and fell there. Some tenth-graders even named the ice patch “the Teachers’ Spot.”

I happened to witness our elderly chemistry teacher go sprawling on the spot. She spun on the ice in her bulky fur coat, struggling to get to her feet, until one of the ninth-graders came to help her. I saw how other kids stared at her from the porch and through the school windows and laughed. Even the nice ninth-grader who reached out to save her couldn’t help but chuckle. In December, eight weeks into my sex education class, the Teachers’ Spot had become my main concern as I walked to school. I didn’t feel anxious about my lessons anymore. I thought of them as of some dull but not too unpleasant chore as I made small, cautious steps toward the school porch.

My sex instruction wasn’t a success, but at least I managed to fill eight forty-five-minute lessons with information. I’d learned how to make a digestible mix from my three contradictory sources: Sex Education: The Theses, The Nature of Sexuality, and Aunt Galya’s life stories. I usually used The Theses as a frame, Aunt Galya’s tales for details and examples, and the mammoth Nature of Sexuality for emergencies. Whenever I ran out of things to say, I threw in a Latin word or two.

It was hard to steer Aunt Galya in the needed direction. When she didn’t feel well, she would only talk about the deficiencies and repulsive habits of her lovers and of men in general. She slumped down on the couch with a bowl of kasha and talked about smelly breath, nasty sounds, and shriveled body parts. She could go on and on, stopping only occasionally to eat a spoonful. Finally, she would usually get up moaning, dump kasha into the garbage, and pour herself some moonshine, looking defeated and guilty. When she felt better, she would sit at the table with a box of candies and talk about her heroic qualities as a lover, laughing heartily and devouring one candy after another. “He was lying there out of breath, all drenched with sweat, and I wasn’t even slightly tired! You should’ve seen the look on his face when I said, ‘How about another go?’ I thought he’d die right there.” Oddly enough, those “better” sessions ended in the same way as the “worse” ones, with a portion of moonshine.

I knew that my students wouldn’t be interested in any of that. Techniques and precautions were the information that they needed. And so did I, but it was awfully hard to guide Aunt Galya toward the things I wanted to know. When she yielded, I grabbed my notebook and scribbled down the precious facts to retell them to the girls later.

Yet I was afraid of students’ questions. I lay in bed at night imagining what would happen if the girls asked me something. I tossed and turned, sometimes trying to figure out a way to dodge questions, sometimes simply praying that the girls would be too shy to ask me anything.

And they were shy, at first. They sat tense and silent, afraid to show any reaction to what I said. But as the lessons progressed, they relaxed more. They smiled or gasped or exchanged looks, sometimes whispering to each other. And then one day, I saw a terrifying sight—Sveta Zotova raising her hand. I had a feeling she wasn’t just going to ask for permission to go to the bathroom. Her beautiful narrow hand with long fingers and manicured fingernails looked like a deadly snake. “Sometimes we want to know something in particular. Can we ask questions?” My stomach dropped. I fingered a piece of gum stuck to my desk and thought, “No! No! You can’t!” But Sveta was still talking: “We could ask anonymous questions. Can we write them on pieces of paper and leave them here?” I almost let out a sigh of relief. It was the perfect solution. It would leave me enough time to consult a book or Aunt Galya.

The girls put a brown shoebox under my desk and started leaving their questions in there after Friday math lessons. There were only one or two questions each week, most of them from Sveta Zotova. I recognized her neat, firm handwriting and perfect logic: “I read that oral contraception is 97 percent safe. Does that take into account the times when a person forgets to take the pill? If not, what would be the correct percentage?” Other girls’ notes weren’t as good, and some were barely legible, with spelling mistakes, omitted words, and words crossed out or written over others. The questions covered everything from contraception to breast enlargement to behavior on a date. One girl (poor Vera Bunina, probably) asked, “What should I do if I am on a date and I really have to pee and I don’t want the boy to know that I’m going to the bathroom?” Aunt Galya was annoyed by questions like that. “Let her pee in her pants if she is such an idiot!” I, on the contrary, loved these silly questions more than Sveta’s serious ones. I could imagine my girls going out on dates and experiencing these difficulties. I liked to act out these situations in my head, with me as the main character, and think about what I would do. At times, I actually enjoyed my lessons.

About four weeks into my sex lessons, the other teachers had started treating me differently. They never asked me about my lessons, or made any remarks about them, but they actually became aware of my existence. It felt so strange, as if I’d suddenly lost a magic hat that had made me invisible all the time. They still didn’t consider me a colleague—I hadn’t been admitted to their gossip circle—but they nodded to me when we met in the hall and talked to me about minor events at the school: “Did you hear that a cafeteria window was broken?” They even asked me about my private life: “When are your exams?” (Younger teachers.) Or “Do you miss your mother?” (Older teachers.) I didn’t feel that I was in a vacuum anymore.

Sergey started noticing me too. I caught him looking in my direction with a questioning expression, as if he didn’t know what to make of me. At times, he’d stop by my room and peek in, but then leave without saying anything. Or he would stare at me and squint his eyes as he did when he wanted to make fun of somebody, but then turn away again without saying anything. I was a perfect target for him. An incompetent sex education teacher! It made me nervous but, at the same time, oddly pleased.

Maria Mikhailovna, on the other hand, began paying less attention to me. After asking me to show her my list of topics and collating it carefully with the one suggested by Sex Education: The Theses, she was content to let me teach. She never peeked in during my sex lessons, either because she didn’t care what I was saying, or because she didn’t want to be responsible if I taught the girls something wrong. I was happy that she also peeked in less frequently during my math lessons, perhaps afraid that I’d start talking about sex.

My only problem was that after a while I started doubting Aunt Galya’s expertise. At bedtime, I tossed under my thin woolen blanket and wondered: “What if Aunt Galya was wrong? What if lemon juice wasn’t good enough as a contraceptive? What if eating a lot of cabbage didn’t make your breasts bigger? What if hair on your legs wasn’t a sign of infertility? What if Aunt Galya’s whole attitude toward men was wrong?” The last question bothered me the most. Aunt Galya seemed to see men as soldiers in an enemy army. Even more than that, as soldiers defeated and captured. “Don’t let them sneak away!” “Make them work very hard!” “Don’t let them get lazy!” “Don’t reward them until they deserve it.” Cold sweat broke out on my forehead when I remembered repeating Aunt Galya’s words in my lessons. I looked at the portraits of Aunt Galya’s late husbands, glistening softly in the moonlight above my head. They didn’t look very happy. And they were both dead.

Sometimes during my math lessons I would look at the boys and wonder how much they knew about the girls’ sex instruction. I wondered if Sveta shared some of Aunt Galya’s wisdom with her boyfriend Sasha Smirnov? A few other girls had boyfriends from the same class too. I was sure the boys knew something now. They avoided looking at me. They sat at their desks trying to be as quiet as possible, trying not to do anything that would attract my attention. They acted as if I knew something bad about them, something that they didn’t want me to know. A few times, I had the urge to go back on my words, to say that it wasn’t me talking, it was Aunt Galya! And then I would think about Sergey. What if the boys talked to Sergey about my lessons? I imagined Sasha Smirnov raising his hand, lifting his big body out of the desk with a crash—he couldn’t move quietly—fingering a jacket button and saying in his deep-voiced monotone, “The girls’ teacher said that men . . .” I wondered what Sergey’s reaction would be. Every time he looked at me with his new, questioning look, I wondered if he was thinking it was I who hated men.

Sergey finally talked to me during the lunch hour in our school cafeteria. The cafeteria served only preprepared lunches, one or two combinations each day of the week. On Fridays we could choose sardelki with beet salad or herring with mashed potatoes. I would have preferred sardelki with mashed potato, but you couldn’t change a combination. The sardelki, my favorite food, had hard skins and tasted better than the usual franks. I loved how the juice burst into my mouth when I sank my teeth into them. I hated beet salad. Few things could be more appalling than chunks of overcooked beets with potatoes and carrots swimming in a pool of smelly sunflower oil, but I decided to put up with it for the sake of the sardelki.

I sat down at the teachers’ table and began piercing my sardelki with a fork when Sergey tapped me on the shoulder. He stood grinning by my chair with a plate of herring and mashed potatoes. “Don’t let them sneak away; make them work very hard!” He winked at me and walked to his usual place at the end of the table. My heart jumped up and down inside my chest. I spent the rest of the lunch break waiting for Sergey to continue. I chewed hard on the sardelki and shook the excess oil off the cubes of potato and beet. I was sure that Sergey had already thought of what to say; he was only waiting for the opportunity to speak. I had the terrifying thought that he somehow, through some unimaginable source, had become aware of Aunt Galya’s existence and he would ask about her. I grew tired of waiting—I almost wished that Sergey would strike sooner. I stole a quick glance in his direction. He wasn’t looking at me. He was working on his lunch, pulling bones out of the herring and laying them on the edge of his plate. It was a perfect chance to escape. I left my plate and hurried out of the cafeteria. I almost made it to the exit when I heard Sergey’s voice again, rustling somewhere above my ears, the words barely audible amid the cafeteria’s steady rumble. I had to lift up my face to make out what he was saying. He was asking me on a date.

The following Monday, I woke up early. I had set the alarm for 8 A.M., but when I opened my eyes, the room was still dark and my fluorescent clock read only 6:30. I had come home from my date with Sergey at about 10 P.M. and had taken off my only skirt and my pantyhose before I collapsed onto my bed and fell asleep.

I stuck the tips of my toes out from under my blanket and immediately pulled them back. The room was frigid. Normally, I would have stayed in bed until the alarm clock rang, all bundled up like a cocoon, but that day I simply couldn’t keep still. My limbs felt like they were filled with tight little springs, longing to be released, pushing me to move, stir, do something. I sprang off the bed and attempted to do some aerobics on the little rug by the wardrobe, but my feet kept bumping against the bed. My reflection in the mirrored wardrobe surface—barefoot, wrinkled blouse, tousled hair—seemed awfully funny for some reason. I plopped down on my bed and started laughing, pressing my hands to my mouth so that I wouldn’t wake Aunt Galya. I thought of phoning home—my mother usually woke up early. I even took the receiver off the cradle, but then I put it down. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to stop laughing, and my mother would think that I was crying, and it would be impossible to prove that I really wasn’t. That too seemed awfully funny, and I sat and laughed until I became aware that I was famished.

In the kitchen, I sprinkled a piece of rye bread with salt and ate it standing in the doorway. Aunt Galya was stretched out on her bed in striped men’s pajamas, her blanket on the floor. She slept on her back, pressing a small pillow to her chest as if it were a teddy bear. I walked over to her, covered her with the blanket, and tiptoed out of the room.

When I arrived at the school, the streetlamps were still lit, shining yellow rings of light onto the snow, making the snow seem soft and warm. The path to the porch had been freshly swept and the Teachers’ Spot glistened. Aside from the school janitor with his fuzzy broom, there wasn’t anybody in the schoolyard. If I slipped and fell, nobody would see me. I ran up to the Teachers’ Spot, pushed with one foot, and glided to the porch without falling.

In my classroom, I opened a window, letting in an icy, swishing gust of wind. I sat down at my desk, then immediately stood up and walked to Tanya Myshkina’s desk in the first row. I couldn’t sit there either. I walked to the back of the room and sat in Vera Bunina’s chair for a minute, then on the edge of her desk. The thought occurred to me that I was behaving just like Goldilocks, trying out my students’ chairs and desks. What if I told the girls about my date with Sergey? What if I told them what a promising expression he had in his eyes? What if I told them how his hand got stuck in the knot of my scarf when he tried to unbutton my coat in a crowded movie theater? And how later he kissed me through the entire Godfather: Part III, pausing only when he perceived, with his peripheral vision, that one or another of the characters was about to be killed. He let me go then and watched him die, while I wished that the death would be quick. What if I told them that the best part of the date wasn’t even being on a date, but walking to our meeting place at the Pushkin subway stop, because men turned to look at me when I walked. I wondered if the girls would be able to understand any of it. I imagined how I would talk to them, sitting on the edge of Vera’s desk like this, swaying my legs and laughing.

Then I saw something that made the laughing springs go quiet somewhere in the pit of my stomach, replaced by the familiar sensation of panic. The brown shoebox lay under my teacher’s desk, looking small and deceptively harmless. I had forgotten to pick up the questions on Friday. I slowly slid off Vera’s desk and walked to the box. Inside was a notebook page folded in four. My first thought was to throw it away, to get rid of it, and pretend that there wasn’t anything in the box. But what if by some miracle I knew the answer? I unfolded the note. About half of the page was covered with firm, rounded letters. It looked like Sveta Zotova’s handwriting, but it wasn’t as neat as her usual notes—she must have been nervous when she wrote it. I smoothed the paper in my hands and read the question quickly.

I read it a second time, this time aloud, right after the bell had rung and the girls had taken their places at their desks. “I’ve been dating Boy X for some months now, I like him very much, we have a steady relationship. When he touches me in certain places, it feels very good. But lately I’ve gone out with Boy Y a few times. He doesn’t read books, he has a dumb laugh and pimples.”

I paused and looked out at the class. Some of the girls took quick looks around, trying to guess the author. Others seemed genuinely interested in the problem itself. With their mouths open and their brows pulled together, they strained to digest the question and possibly apply it to themselves. In the first row, Tanya Myshkina was chewing the tip of her pen so hard it seemed she might bite off a piece and swallow it. I tried not to embarrass Sveta by looking at her, but with my peripheral vision I saw that she was gazing out the window at the concrete schoolyard, twisting and twisting her curls on her finger. I cleared my throat and read the note to the end. “I don’t like Boy Y at all. Why then, when he touches me in certain places, do I feel exactly the same as with Boy X?” Now they were all looking at me. They seriously thought that I could answer the question.

The ticklish springs of laughter were coming back, building up somewhere in my chest and struggling to get higher and higher. And then I said something that I’d been wanting to say for a very long time.

“I don’t know!”

I enjoyed saying these words so much that it made me lightheaded. I felt like hopping on one foot around the classroom singing, “I don’t know! I don’t know! I don’t know!” The springs of laughter were growing bigger and bigger, breaking through my skin, leaving my body, filling the room. Then I heard the first sounds of giggling. I wasn’t sure if it was me or one of the girls. Soon everybody was laughing, even Sveta Zotova. Soon the separate sounds became simply one loud, steady rumble in the room. I didn’t hear Maria Mikhailovna open the classroom door. I couldn’t hear what she was saying. I only saw the tips of her black shoes, and her pink face squeezed between the door and the door-frame, her eyelashes blinking and her lips moving. If she was saying anything about inappropriate behavior and disrespect to the young teacher, none of us could hear it.