The Girl from the Metropol Hotel Read online

  Right before my senior year it was decided that the two schools would merge. A group of girls, including myself, was exiled to PS 170 from their native PS 635, with its polished dark floors, shiny windows, and dear old teachers. Discipline reigned there, too, but it was the discipline of an army barracks. Generations of juvenile bandits from Pushkin and Petrovka Streets, Stoleshnikov and Degtiarny Alleys, had marked the school walls with indelible smells, like tomcats. The school stank like a menagerie, if animals could smoke. When I read the names of the girls who were being transferred there, I crawled home, shaking with tears.

  In my new co-ed class, fifty percent of the students brayed, spat at long distance, looked insolently with unfocused eyes, wore army crew cuts, chewed their nails, and had great difficulty speaking without swearing. In the evenings some of them walked to the military barracks to fight with soldiers. The other fifty percent adorned their uniforms with white lace, wore long braids, read Dreiser, Balzac, and Romain Rolland, attempted to wear bangs, and believed that not a single kiss should be given without love (not that anyone asked). Their speech consisted of phrases like “the White Army suffered a fiasco.”

  To this ridiculous hybrid Sanych was supposed to present the monumental Soviet classic Mother, by Maxim Gorky. Naturally he couldn’t have despised us more.

  The very first day he forbade the use of ballpoint pens (some rich students already owned them). In his classroom everyone was equal and had to use standard metal quills and inkwells. Soon one student, Voinov, fell victim to this policy. Sanych noticed in his hand an expensive foreign-made pen; he swiftly yanked it from Voinov’s petrified fingers, broke it in two, and tossed it out an open window. Then he returned to his notebook.

  Sanych owned a thick, well-used notebook, from which he recited monotonously everything we needed to know. We were required to write after him at maximum speed. He never improvised, never digressed, never joked. How could he joke, poor thing, with Gorky’s Mother on the table?

  Other teachers allowed themselves a little merriment. Arriving to class, the unforgettable physics instructor Nikolai Semenovich, nicknamed One-Twenty for his limp, announced in a rusty voice: “Attention! Hang your ears on a nail! Dynamo—is—a—force—that . . .” This is the only thing I still remember from the multiyear physics course.

  The math teacher Ilya Nikolaevich referred fondly to “h little and H gigantic.”

  Each teacher had his or her favorite method of handling the class. The drafting instructor Proegorkin shrieked over the buzzing noise. The chemistry teacher Colba, a heavy, clever, and sickly woman, issued vitriolic comments and lots of Fs.

  As for Sanych, he spewed his lectures like automatic gunfire, drilling our heads with his colorless, wide-open eyes. One couldn’t get distracted for a moment. He never shouted or raised his already loud voice. With the belligerent intonation normally used for sarcastic polemics, he imparted neutral facts about the author, the history of the book, its main characteristics, and so on.

  Sanych’s anger was caused by his own helplessness in the face of the boys’ insurmountable idiocy and the girls’ feminine cretinism. As if the boys weren’t bad enough, for the first time in his distinguished career he faced at the blackboard all those ribbons, curls, braids, pinafores, stockings, giggles, stupefied teary eyes, and squeaky, cowardly bleating.

  How bitterly he mocked our early-developed Lenka (D-size cups, sweaty underarms, mustache, enormous calves) when she squeezed out a garbled “Saaantimentalism.” He, the leading teacher of the men’s lyceum, had to listen to this nonsense! “‘Saaantimentalism’!”

  Later I understood that his raised intonation, monotonous and threatening, stimulated our nerves, already tense. It was an expression of his powerful will as an educator. His lectures were a baleful outburst, devoid of any playfulness. To play before this audience?

  On judgment days, at the end of each topic, Sanych took care of us efficiently. He cleared the first six desks and called the first six victims with their pens and notebooks. They were to write their answers, which he graded on the spot. Two more wrote on the board. Another pupil took the hot spot at the teacher’s table for oral questioning. If he couldn’t answer, the rest of us were called.

  It was a scene of mass execution. Pauses between stammering answers were filled with timid rustling of the chalk on the board and quills on paper. Grades rained into the class ledger. In forty-five minutes he examined twenty students, half the class (he had forty-two). His white eyes frisked the rows of desks.

  He was named the best teacher in the district, and the leading theorist; college students sat in on his lectures, bringing their own chairs.

  Nothing matched the terror of our worst delinquents in his class. Those cropped heads and cigarette-sucking mugs, those paws covered with warts, more used to fistfights than to spelling, actually tried to read and write under Sanych’s ferocious onslaught. To speak without swearwords. To express their thoughts in compositions. To write after him in their scraggly hands. They sweated during his interrogations.

  “Gorky was born . . . was born . . . in, like . . .” A silent appeal to the timid masses. “He was born in, like, eighteen hundred . . .”

  “Naturally he was born after eighteen hundred. He wasn’t born in the eighteenth century, was he?”

  The class brays obediently.

  “Eighteen sixty-eight!”

  “Incredible. Now. When was the novel Mother written?”

  “In, like, nineteen hundred . . .”

  “Think. You are aiming at a firm C.”

  “. . . Oh-five!”

  “Sit down. F. Seriakov!”

  “Oh-seven!”

  “Close enough. Come to the blackboard.”

  The recipient of the F bleats mournfully: “Aleksandr Sanych, I studied . . .”

  “So you’ll study some more. Koneva, if you prompt him again, you’ll get an F, too.”

  It was like a game of fortune.

  I got hooked very quickly. His condescension was irresistible bait. Everything he assigned I had read a long time before. Gorky’s Mother annoyed me vaguely, as did all of Gorky’s big novels and plays, all those Klim Samgin, Foma Gordeev, The Zykovs. I enjoyed his Childhood, “Out and About,” his gypsy tales. The famous “The sea—was laughing” touched a nerve. On the one hand, this was against all grammar rules. On the other, it opened up new stylistic perspectives. And that strange em dash.

  Since childhood I’d been addicted to reading. At home I was always buried in a book; I ruined my eyes that way. And now I was being ignored by a literature teacher!

  I felt he ignored me on purpose. He never looked at my raised hand. Maybe he thought I was a nerd, a teacher’s pet. Glasses, braids. Fresh voice. He didn’t know that back at my old school I was the worst pupil, nothing but Ds and Fs, plus terrible discipline marks, always sitting in the front row under the teacher’s nose. But at the men’s school I didn’t have a reputation yet, so I was allowed to sit in the back. I was sixteen, a grown young person with a rich inner world and an acute sense of justice. I even managed to study better, out of pride. Even in algebra, the horror of my life.

  There we were, a proud girl in braids and lace and a white-eyed drill sergeant. I remember his first written assignment, a composition about Gorky’s Mother. I didn’t have time to reread the cursed novel. I had glanced through it ages before, at the library, or maybe Mama had bought it. Mama kept buying books maniacally—her entire family library had perished during the arrests—and I kept reading them. After school I always went to the library instead of home, where nothing good awaited me. The librarians took advantage of my addiction, and for every two books I requested, they forced me to read at least one on the school curriculum. Gorky’s Mother must have been one of the compulsory items.

  High school yearbook, 1956. Myself and Aleksandr A. Plastinin (Sanych), my favorite teacher.

  O
nly one scene stuck in my memory. It is dark, the factory whistle blows, and the villagers are getting ready to leave for work. The doors open, and the light from the huts falls on the fat mud of the road. Around this tableau I built my composition, which I made sound like the beginning of the later masterpiece One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

  But, if you think about it, what light could be falling on that road? They had only candles back then, and the front doors of Russian peasant huts led not into the house itself but into the unlit and unheated anteroom, the so-called dark room. No light could be coming from there.

  I also remember another line: “A blind, deaf, breast-sucking despair.” Like Helen Keller in infancy.

  I wrote in a tight hand, in a graphed notebook, on each line. My composition was short. A challenge to fate cannot be long-winded.

  He accepted my challenge. He gave me a B+ and commented in red pencil. At the next class he smiled, very faintly, or so I thought. And he looked just a little bit pleased.

  I didn’t need much. My sails filled with wind. I raced ahead, newly in love with myself.

  A tiny phrase of his, and I’m repeating it all day. Interpreting it this way and that. “Original but arguable.”

  On the next judgment day he summons me to the front desk and I quickly write an answer. Briefly and unconventionally, the way he prefers. He reads it on the spot, quietly asks me an additional question. I object to his objection. He nods, surprised, then smiles. We have a conspiracy.

  I’m dizzy. It’s like first love. Youngsters fall in love with anyone who pays them the slightest attention.

  My self-esteem shoots through the roof. I want to improve myself. I receive another B+. Good enough, for now.

  I’ve become his best student. Later I learn that in every class he has a best student. In the ninth grade it’s Sulimova, a proud-looking girl in pretty yellow shoes. I look at her in disbelief: It cannot be. There cannot be two of us. (There are many of us, it turns out.)

  It’s spring, the final exam—composition. I’m nervous and can’t finish proofreading; the bell has already rung. Everyone is leaving. Sanych is at his table and suddenly he says, “Don’t rush. Take as long as you need.”

  We remain in the empty classroom for a long time, me and my love. As I’m leaving he says, “I’ll proofread it, too.”

  For the final composition I receive an A. My last A from Sanych. From then on I would always write compactly, in graphed notebooks, on every line. The way he taught me.

  I saw him once more. A year later we had a reunion. The former pupils were partying, laughing, singing, joking, celebrating our friendship, our common past. It was February 1957. Suddenly I discovered many intelligent, enlightened faces among the boys from the previous years.

  A small vortex in the foyer, and in its center a gray head, a ruddy face, and very light eyes. Sanych. He is laughing shyly. I hear shouts: “Sanych, Sanych.” The boys must have shared a drink with him. They address him tenderly, but without familiarity. It is now clear who was everyone’s favorite teacher. They won’t let him go. A whole crowd follows him out.

  Later I learned that one sees colorless eyes like his in people suffering from heart disease.

  Many years later I was being feted at the German embassy in Moscow: I had been awarded the Pushkin Prize. There were several of us chatting in a circle: the writer Anatoly Makarov, the painter Boris Messerer, the economist and author Nikolai Shmelev. Suddenly we discovered that we all had graduated from the same high school, PS 170, and that we all shared a teacher, Aleksandr Sanych Plastinin.

  “Sanych died young,” I told them. “He wasn’t forty-eight. According to legend, he fathered eight children. Then he married a former pupil. She had graduated from our school and stayed there as a lab assistant. She had been in love with him since childhood. She loved him very deeply. She was a cousin of my classmate Mila. She gave him more children. They lived in great poverty. End of legend.” My male companions paused respectfully and then began to talk about Sanych, about the role he had played in their lives. We decided to establish an association of Sanych’s former students. Then we all went home.

  Sanych is in his grave. He has been dead for many years.

  “The doors open, and the light from the huts falls on the fat mud of the road.”

  Foundling

  I was discovered among the virgin lands of Kazakhstan. The people who found me were Konstantin Ardi and Vasily Ananchenko, Moscow correspondents of The Late Night News, a daily radio program. Later, when I began working there, this became my nickname: Foundling.

  To be precise, they found me at the radio station in Petropavlovsk, the capital of northern Kazakhstan. Ardi and Ananchenko came to Petropavlovsk to work on a story, and I arrived there from the provincial town of Bulaevo to retrieve the typesetting for my newsletter—I was responsible for producing a newsletter about the work of Moscow State University’s student brigade.

  It was September. All students had returned to Moscow, tanned and emaciated, equipped with songs, wages, and biscuits, dressed in striped sailor sweatshirts and duck trousers, a donation from the navy. They were leaving behind giant silos, built with native stone, adobe houses, and sheds for sheep. Those buildings were supposed to be finished by seasonal workers from Armenia, but I don’t know if anyone ever finished them or if they were buried under the snow after the campaign to familiarize college students with the simple life of prison laborers was over.

  Also, they left me—I had to finish the newsletter, which I wrote myself under different names.

  But then a radio editor in Petropavlovsk belatedly decided to put out a story about our brigade. He called the Bulaevo Party Committee office, where I was staying alone with my guitar. Oh, the nights in the deep Kazakh province! An empty office with a cot; a phone in the hallway; dogs barking in every yard; not a single light anywhere. Then the phone rings. Who can be calling so late?

  “Miss, is anyone from the student brigade still around?”

  “Everyone’s gone.”

  “But what about you?”

  “I’m working on the brigade’s newsletter. It’s almost done.”

  “You are exactly who I need! Can you come to Petropavlovsk to talk on our radio program? I was away and missed them. I wanted to record them at work, singing at the bonfire . . .”

  “Actually I was going to Petropavlovsk tomorrow, to collect the typeset for the newsletter. And I happen to own a guitar.”

  Pause. The editor is digesting this amazing coincidence.

  “Well. You are welcome to stay at my house. My wife will cook a meal.”

  Fat snowflakes twirled over the one-story town of Bulaevo; vast puddles rippled like oceans in a storm. A strong, early winter wind was blowing from the steppes. I was winding my way to the station, dragging my guitar. By way of clothes I had a red raincoat, made in China, and an orange kerchief that resembled a waffled towel. Underneath I wore a sailor sweatshirt, bell-bottomed duck trousers, and green army boots. Everything, except for the navy surplus garments, was purchased by my poor mother. I shed tears over those purchases but wore them anyway. That was my wardrobe when I headed for the virgin lands in the early summer, toward my fate.

  • • •

  This is how I ended up there.

  That spring, at the end of my senior year in the department of journalism, I made an attempt to find a job. I tried the weekly publication The Week, where my contact, a former classmate, sent me hints by opening a desk drawer with an empty cognac bottle—but I don’t give bribes, on principle; I tried the satirical publication The Crocodile, where another of my classmates had been hired. I tried the radio, the satire and humor department, where the correspondents laughed politely when I stumbled in from the street, announcing that I wanted to work there. The reason I looked for work in humor-related offices was my freshly minted diploma. My specialty was humor pieces and short sati
rical sketches. But I couldn’t get a position.

  At this difficult point in my career I heard that the university was sending a student brigade somewhere to Kazakhstan, to conquer the virgin lands. So I devised a plan: I would travel across the country with that brigade. When else would I get a chance to see Kazakhstan? That was the spirit of the time. Difficulties at home? Pack up and go across the Urals, to the end of the world.

  • • •

  To be honest, the crucial stage of my education, the final oral exam, I approached with zero enthusiasm or effort. It happens to students at the end of senior year. I stopped studying. My senior thesis, “On the Nature of Humor,” I cobbled together at the last moment, the night before the deadline. It consisted of twelve pages of theory and a dozen freelance pieces I had written as an intern for The Crocodile. At the defense, the committee members were trying to decide whether my jokes were funny. Eventually they reconciled, and I got a B+ and departed quite pleased with myself.

  Summer of 1958. During my internship with Sovetskaia molodezh in Jurmala, Latvia. I even applied some lipstick, which always bounced around in my purse but was never used.

  During my five years of studies I not only learned nothing new but actually forgot what I used to know in high school. In the journalism department they were turning out future ideologues, first and foremost. We had to read endless tomes on the Communist press, primarily by Lenin. Then there were courses in dialectic materialism, historical materialism, the foundations of Marxist philosophy, some ridiculous empirical criticism, also by Lenin, interspersed with sporadic attempts to instill in us correct spelling and basic editing principles. Our class included stars of local journalism from the Soviet Union’s many republics, whose knowledge of the imperial language was more than shaky. In the one-page dictations, some students made thirty or more mistakes—the record was thirty-eight, by a student from Baku. They went on to become editors in chief of their local papers. In addition, we had among us two unhurried Mongolian students who in five years failed to take notes on a single lecture.