I brought only a pair of shoes one centimeter too short for my feet. I hadn’t ever heard or read anywhere that it’s possible to grow your feet one centimeter in just one night…
On the first of September, Mother gave me one ruble to repay the debt. However, at the ceremonial line-up in the schoolyard, Lyoudmilla Konstantinovna was nowhere to be seen, and in the Teachers’ Room they told me she was ill and explained how to find her apartment in the two-story block by Bazaar, so I went there.
In the apartment, she kept repeating there's no need for such haste, it even somehow seemed to me she was not very happy that I returned that debt at all. And then her father entered the room and I was surprised to see it was Konstantin Borisovich, the projectionist at Club. The world was really a small place.
(…and were I asked now of the vividest impression from the visit to the Cultural Capital of Russia, my immediate response delayed by no hesitation would be—it is the luminous twilight in the sidewalk bounded by the stone parapet that opens to a few granite steps down to the immensely wide flow of the Neva River by the Palace Bridge when a random wave splash against the lower step sends up high spatter and the shrill screech of the girls from our excursion group standing on the first step from the stream…)
~ ~ ~
Still and all, Lenin was quite right marking the force of habit as a tremendously mighty force. Take, for example, the albums of young ladies from beau monde, where Eugene Onegin, with a reckless stroke of the quill, sketched out his author’s whiskered profile on the page following the autograph by a certain Lieutenant Rzhevsky. Such an album was the must for any young lady of quality to outpour her personal feelings and amass creative scribblings of her guests and visitors.
Of course, no album of that kind had ever come near my hands, yet after a whole lot of wars, three revolutions, and radical changes in the way of life, the albums for the sentimental exercises of sensitive girlish souls were still there because those albums had too much of a hard-die habit to simply disappear.
The struggle for life taught them to cunningly disguise—no silk bow-ties on the cover, neither creamy pages anymore—a general-purpose ruled-paper notebook in brown leatherette covers for thirty-eight kopecks, such was the common aspect of a girl’s album in our class. In place of long-nosed self-portraits of aristocratic rascallions there came cutouts from the color illustrations in Ogonyok magazine, securely mounted on glue… However, poems managed to survive:
Why? O, I don’t know whyA streetcar needs rails to go far or nighWhy? O, I don’t know whyWhy do parrots scream and cry?I do not know why…
A-and fancifully adorned inscriptions to relate profound maxims and winged expressions of all sorts also proved immortal:
The one who loves will forgive anything”Cheating kills love”
When such an album, accidentally forgotten on a desk, fell in a guy’s hands, he, having turned a couple of pages, would slap it back on the desk—some “girlish nonsense”.
Yet to me, for some odd reason, those albums were interesting and I dutifully scrutinized them. As a result, I got an offensive handle of “lady-bug” among the schoolmates. Nobody ever called me that to my face, even though when our class lined-up at a PE lesson I was only the fourth in the line, and the shortest guy, Vitya Malenko, could beat me up in a wrestling match under the scornful giggling of the girls. No, I have never heard that handle, but if your sister and brother attend the same school, there is no secret for you about you that you don’t know…
The school principal, Pyotr Ivanovich Bykovsky, unlike his nickname, Bykovsky the Cosmonaut, had a Herculean physique. When all the classes were lined-up in the long—from the Teachers’ Room and all the way to the gym—corridor, the sizable floorboards, paint-coated in red, creaked pitifully under his measured steps alongside the ranks of students.
His mighty skull’s dome with trailing locks across the wide bold, towered half-head above the tallest, graduating, class. When the drowsy look of his big eyes sent a-coasting from under his jutting jumbo eyelids over your face, your innards involuntary contracted, even though you knew perfectly well that the mail received from the Children Room of Militia had nothing to do with you, and the principal would call another guy to get out of the ranks and face the lined-up schoolmates.
So, no surprise that when our Mistress, Albina Grigoryevna, told me to stay after classes and go to the Principal’s Office, my heart sank… In that sustained state—the heart sunk and the spleen contracted—I gave the high door of his office a meek knock, and stepped in followed by partly puzzled, yet mostly farewell, glances from Kuba and Skully… Bad luck about your karma, pal, see you in some thereafter life, maybe…
In the long and narrow office room of one window at its far end, Pyotr Ivanovich sat at his desk put in profile to the door and hardly reaching up to his waist. Slight motion of his chin sent me to get seated on one of the chairs lined-up alongside the wall opposite his desk.
Uneasily, I obeyed and he picked up a thin copybook from his desk, opened it and froze in a suspensive silence boring the pages with his fixed look. Occasionally, an irate twitch wrung his thick, clear-cut, lips.
“It is your essay on Russian literature,” announced he at last, “And you’re writing here that in summertime the sky is not as blue, as in fall.”
He consulted the copybook and read the line up, “In summer it looks as if sprinkled with dust at the edges… Hmm… Where could you have ever seen such a sky?”
I recognized the incomplete quotation from the opening sentence in my essay on free subject 'I am sitting by the window and thinking…' which was our home assignment