Calligraphy Lesson (2 page)

If you can measure your life by anything at all, it's probably by the number of such encounters allotted to you.

I remember very well how I experienced that for the first time. My twelfth year. The smell of peat bogs burning around Moscow. The hazy country mornings of seventy-two. A charred aftertaste to everything, even the hot strawberries from the garden-bed. Mum went on holiday to a rest home on the upper Volga, and took me with her. One of my first trips away.

It rained incessantly, we lived in a damp, mosquito-infested little house, and at first I was bored, nightly film screenings notwithstanding, but after a while the weather improved, we got a new canteen neighbour, Uncle Vitya, and our life took a turn for the better. We swam with him, took motorboat rides on the Volga, went on forest rambles. Sinewy and gold-toothed, Uncle Vitya made Mum laugh no end with his stories. I didn't get half of his jokes, but the way he told them made it impossible not to laugh. I took a great liking to Mum's new acquaintance. What's more, I was bowled over by the fact that he worked in a recording van—a “Tonwagen.” No doubt I was already spellbound by words.

There I go, presumptuously calling that teenager myself, though I'm
not at all sure whether he'd agree to acknowledge himself in me as I am now: grey-haired, advanced in life, a sickly bore with a brazenly protruding belly. He'd be very surprised: can that really be me? I don't know that I could find anything to answer. Not likely. We may be namesakes—but so what?

Among Uncle Vitya's stories I somehow remember one about how, skating on the river as a child, he and other boys would sometimes happen upon frogs frozen into the ice. If you peed on them they'd come to life and start moving. And another one about the war. He told us about the penals
¹
whose only hope was to get wounded. Redeem your guilt with blood and you'd have your decorations and rank restored. And so they'd resort to self-infliction, shooting themselves in the arm or foot through a loaf of bread so there'd be no gunpowder traces in the wound.

It had never occurred to me that Mum liked to dance, but now she'd be out dancing with Uncle Vitya every evening.

One day Mum started speaking to me in a strange voice. If Uncle Vitya ever asked me about Dad, she implored, I should tell him that he was dead.

“But he's not dead,” I said, surprised. “He just moved away.”

She pressed my head to her breast:

“But you're my clever boy and you understand everything.”

I understood nothing, but nodded all the same.

And I began waiting for Uncle Vitya to ask me about Dad.

It was strange to see Mum rouging and powdering herself, making up her eyes, painting her lips, spraying perfume on her neck, and doing her nails—I'd be hit by the sharp smell of nail varnish. I had never known her like this before.

Mum was a teacher, she taught Russian language and literature, and by that time she'd already become head of School No. 59 on the Arbat. Ever since year one I'd commuted with her across the whole city—initially from Presnia, where we lived in a communal apartment, and later from Matveyevskaya, where we were given a two-room flat in a new housing development.

Naturally, she wanted to keep her child close by, at her school, but this made life much more complicated for me. Her role model was some retired maths teacher. His son had been in his class, and he knew the subject better than anyone else, but when his father called him up to the blackboard all he'd ever say was “Sit down, C”—even if his son had got the problem correct. I had to go through something similar when our class was being divided into English and German sets. I wanted to go in the English set—and with good reason, because German was a kind of punishment for those who weren't doing well: do badly, went the threat, and it'll be the German set for you. I was doing well, but Mum put me exactly where I didn't want to be. So none of the other parents could reproach her for anything. School came first for her, things personal and domestic second.

Her generation had grown up under the slogan “The Motherland is Calling!”

Perhaps, if I hadn't got into a university with a military chair after finishing school,
²
she would equally have sent me off to Afghanistan not only with sorrow but also with a sense of having fulfilled her mother's duty to the nation. I don't know. Incidentally, it would seem that I am to this day a reserve officer of the nonexistent army of that nonexistent nation. I did, after all, once swear an oath in a military camp near Kovrov
to defend the soon-to-disintegrate motherland till the last drop of my blood. We had to kiss the red standard, I remember, so I brought it to my lips—and got a great whiff of smoked fish. No doubt our commanders had been tucking into some beer and fish and wiping their hands on the velvet cloth.

While still at school I didn't realize, of course, how hard it must have been for Mum and all our teachers: they were faced with the insoluble problem of teaching children to tell the truth whilst initiating them into a world of lies. The written law requires that truth be told, but the unwritten dictates that if you do, you'll be facing the music later.

They taught us lies they themselves didn't believe because they loved and wanted to save us. Of course, they were afraid of wrongly spoken words, but they were afraid for us even more than they were for themselves. The country, after all, was in the grip of a deadly word game. You needed to say the right words and not say the wrong ones. The line had never been drawn, but inside everyone sensed where it lay. Our teachers were trying to save truth-loving youths from folly, to inject them with a life-giving dose of fear. You might feel a little momentary sting, but then you'd have immunity for life.

We may have been badly taught in chemistry or English, but at least we got illustrative lessons in the difficult art of survival—how to say one thing, and think and do another.

The gods of the grownups were long dead, but we had to venerate them during idolatrous rituals. School taught us children of slaves the meaning of submission. If you want to achieve anything, you have to learn how to pronounce the dead words of a dead language, in which that dead life stagnated and rotted away.

Generally, what does it mean to be a good teacher?

Clearly, a good teacher under any regime must cultivate in his pupils
those qualities which will help them later in life, and will not teach them to go against the current, because they're going to need a completely different type of knowledge: the knowledge of the traffic laws in this particular life. Veer into the oncoming lane and you're heading for a crash. You need to reverse and merge into the mainstream flow. If you want to get somewhere in this life, earn a decent wage, provide for your family and children, you have to blend into the mainstream: you're the boss—I'm the fool, I'm the boss, you're the fool, honour and profit lie not in one sack, who keeps company with wolves will learn to howl.

A bad teacher, meanwhile, will instruct his charges to live by a different law, the law of the conservation of human dignity. By and large this is a road to marginalisation at best, and to jail or suicide at worst. Unless they just shoot you.

Does this mean that bad teachers were good, and good ones bad? Then again, it's always been like that in Russia: the right on the left, the left on the right. It's an age-old question, and one that still hasn't been answered: if you love your Motherland, should you wish her victory or defeat? It's still not completely clear where the Motherland ends and the regime begins, so entangled have they become.

Take hockey, for instance. On both sides of the barbed wire, USSR–Canada matches were regarded as the symbolic clash of two systems. By the end of Soviet power we were supporting the Canadians against the Soviets. But in seventy-two, the year of the epoch-making Summit Series, the teenager I obstinately refer to as myself still inhabited an unshadowed, prelapsarian world—and supported “our lads.”

It really was a strange old nation. Hockey victories prolonged the regime's life, while defeats shortened it. You couldn't tell from close up that
that
Paul Henderson goal, scored from the goalmouth 34 seconds before the end of the final game, not only changed the outcome of the
series, but became the point of no return for the entire world empire created by the moustachio'd despot. From that moment on, its disintegration became only a matter of time.

It's curious that a man who struck at the very heart of my country should accept his fate in an eminently Russian manner: first he turned to drink, having ditched hockey, and then became a proselytiser.

Hockey has found its way into these pages because our school happened to stand just opposite the Canadian embassy. In front of it would park incredible foreign limousines that had turned into our Starokonnyushenny Lane straight from American movies. You could press up against the window and take a good look at the dashboard—the number 220 on the speedometer was especially impressive—and we boys in our mousy-grey uniforms would heatedly debate the merits of Mustangs over Cadillacs or those of Chevrolets over Fords till a policeman leapt out of the booth outside the embassy gates and sent us packing.

A reception for the Canadian hockey players was held in the embassy. Word of the Canadians' arrival spread instantly, and we crowded on the opposite pavement, trying to get a look at our idols. These were our gods, come down from television's ice rink, and it was strange to see them in suits and ties. In the first-floor windows of the Arbat townhouse, flung open on that warm September day in seventy-two, we caught glimpses of Phil Esposito, “Bullyboy” Cashman and brothers Frank and Pete Mahovlich. In response to our adoring screams they peered out of the windows, smiled, waved, gave us thumbs up—all as if to say, Well, fellas, ain't life just dandy!

So many years have passed, yet still I can see, vividly as ever, the toothless grin of Bobby Clarke, who'd leaned out of the window and thrown us a badge. Other players, too, began throwing badges and sticks of chewing gum. Even some biscuits. It all really kicked off then!
Try as I might to catch something, anything, I was shouldered aside by those with more luck on their side. I would have ended up empty-handed. But then the miraculous happened. Bobby Clarke, who was almost lying on the windowsill, began jabbing his finger in my direction. I couldn't believe my eyes. He was looking at
me
, and threw
me
some gum. I caught it! He laughed and gave me another thumbs up—you did good, son! It was then that we were driven off by the police. I shared the gum with my friends, but the wrapper I held on to for ages. Need I mention that it was the best-tasting gum I've ever had in my life?

The next day Mum came into our class. She had her strict face on. Mum knew how to be strict, and when she was the whole school was afraid of her.

She began saying that our behaviour had brought shame and dishonour upon the school and the whole country as well. We'd been photographed by foreign correspondents, and now the whole world would see how we'd debased ourselves by fighting over their chewing gum.

Everyone was silent. I felt injustice in these accusations. And suddenly, to my own surprise, I spoke out.

“Why does our country have no chewing gum?”

“Our country doesn't have a lot of things,” Mum replied. “But that doesn't mean you have to lose human dignity.”

I didn't forget that.

As headmistress, Mum was the school's representative of that prison system, and she had it hard. I know she shielded and saved the skins of many. Trying to do whatever possible, she rendered unto Caesar the things which were Caesar's, and Pushkin unto the children. For several generations Pushkin was a secret code, the key to the preservation of the human in this bedevilled country. By then many already believed that the worse things were, the better, the sooner everything would go to
pieces, but those like her strived to endow an inhuman existence with humanity. There was no saving her own skin, though—she got what was coming to her, and then some.

By the time I was seventeen our relationship had deteriorated to the extent that I'd stopped talking to her. Completely. We lived in the same flat but I wouldn't even say hello to her. I couldn't forgive her being a Party member, nor our having to write essays on
Virgin Lands
and
Malaya Zemlya
³
at school. I thought that the struggle against the odious system must be waged without compromise—starting with yourself, your family, those closest to you. I wanted to live not by lies,
⁴
but I didn't understand then that I wasn't a hero, I was just a little brat. My silence, too, I think, shortened her life.

Now, no sooner have I written that I'd stopped talking to Mum than I sense that I've not written the whole truth, and have ended up lying as a result.

Yes, I never even said hello to her, but not only because I'd read
The Kolyma Tales
and
The Gulag Archipelago
,
⁵
which had inexplicably ended up in my possession around that time and changed much in my youthful conception of the world. Of course not. The conflict arose because of my first love. Mum didn't like that girl. She didn't like her at all.

At school she was the all-powerful headmistress, she could quell an inexperienced teacher's unruly class with a single glance, but at home, in her relationship with her own son, she turned out to be completely helpless. Of course the mother wished her son well. But she didn't know
how to do him good. And of course Mum was totally right about that girl. But I realised that only later.