Auto shop was our favorite subject. It gave us valuable professional skills. But we also had other shop classes. We spent each Thursday in the one-story building in the school yard. And that was a sacred day for our class 9A, with no Party congresses, great writers or intricate algebra. After two great hours spent with Georgy Georgeyevich, we crossed the corridor to the workshop where we learned to work with metal for another two hours. There was a class where our girls learned the noble art of embroidery in the same building. They were prevented from learning how to drive, which seemed quite natural to us at that time. There was also a woodworking shop in the building. We had worked in it the previous year. Passing the door from which emanated the pleasant smell of wood shavings and sawdust, we sighed sadly.
Unlike metalworking, tinkering with wood was interesting and meaningful. I, for example, took pleasure in mastering the milling machine. I can still visualize how a bar gripped on both ends rotated, and turning now one caster, then another, I cut into the wood with a chisel, first on the surface, then deeper, now increasing the speed, now reducing it… The shavings twisted like a ribbon, the bar’s outline changed, acquiring the shape I wanted to give it. Here it turned either into the knob of a walking stick or a small potbellied column for a stairway balustrade… No matter what I made, I enjoyed the creative process enormously. I was happy to realize that I was turning into a craftsman and could learn to make amazing things on that machine.
Alas, nothing like that happened when we began working with metal. To be honest, we never understood what they were teaching us or why. Our teacher Mikhail Petrovich, a thickset, taciturn man whom we called “Piece of Iron” behind his back, would give us an assignment at the beginning of a lesson. His voice was so serious, even solemn, as if we had to carry out a project on which the destiny of mankind depended.
“Saw off this corner at forty-five degrees, and this one at sixty. Then drill three holes with a diameter of one centimeter each here, here and here,” he poked with a piece of chalk at something resembling a drawing he had made on a small portable blackboard.
Either the chalk or the blackboard was bad, but the drawing was barely visible. And when our teacher turned to the blackboard, it seemed to us that he wasn’t so much pointing at it but through it.
“Do you all understand?” Piece of Iron asked. His brows came together, his face taut. We felt as if we were about to begin building an interplanetary rocket. What was there to understand?
After giving us an assignment, Piece of Iron would disappear, after which he would show up at the workshop now and then for just a few minutes. Obviously, he had no desire to observe how we carried out the project. And we were left on our own, so we started sawing, sawing, sawing and chopping off… We worked by hand on pieces of small pipe, blocks, metal plates gripped in vises. Piece of Iron never informed us why we were doing it. There were few machines in the workshop, but we were allowed to get near the drilling machine only under supervision.
Never in my life have I met a person more indifferent to children than that teacher. Once, a heavy block fell on Sergey Belunin’s foot. Mikhail Petrovich came running when he heard him yelling, and he was yelling his head off. While writhing Sergey was pulling off his shoe, Mikhail Petrovich picked up the block and examined it, as if it was the block that had suffered from its contact with Belunin’s foot.
“You haven’t sawed enough off, and the angle is wrong… Haven’t I explained that it should be forty-five degrees?”
There were two rows of long tables in the workshop, with a dividing net in the middle so that work could be done on both sides of a table. There was a vise at each workplace. On that day, rectangular plates, each three- or four-centimeters thick, were gripped in the vises. We were given the following assignment: shape something like a pyramid on the top and on the bottom, round off the right and left edges and drill two holes in the middle. I still don’t know why we needed to make that strange object, though I shall always remember how it looked. I can close my eyes and see it. Why I remember it so well is the subject of what I am about to relate.
I was working on the upper corner. I rushed with all my might to saw it off. The guys who were stronger, like Belunin, had already finished working on both corners and were about to round off the edges. At that moment, we heard the door slam, and an unexpected guest, the school principal, Boris Alexandrovich, entered the workshop.
“Well, eagles, how are your labor achievements?” He asked with his special directorial voice.
Unlike Anton Pavlovich Chekhov before him, who assumed that everything about a human being should be wonderful, our Boris Alexandrovich thought that everything about a man had to be domineering, stern and tough if he was a school principal. Before Boris Alexandrovich began working at our school, he had taught soldiers, so he was like a drill sergeant. Besides, he taught social sciences, which meant, he believed, that he was an apostle of Soviet ideology. In a word, he wanted to be a lofty authority.
Quite recently, our principal’s authority had been rudely undermined, which was attested to by a large crimson-blue bruise under his left eye. Some tenth graders and their friends had punched the principal in the eye.
Three days before, late at night, a group of motorcyclists arrived at the school building. The guys thought there was nobody at school, so they decided to ride around the spacious schoolyard. They roared around the yard, stepping on the gas, yelling and laughing. And then, the principal walked out into the yard…
There’s no need to explain how he behaved, what expressions he used to tell the guys to get out of there immediately. The tenth graders were insulted. On top of that, they had long dreamed of settling scores with the principal for all sorts of offenses. I don’t know for sure how many of them took part in the retribution, but two tenth graders were the first to punch the principal. They were expelled from school the next day.
They were expelled all right, but the whole school was delighted to discuss how great it was that the principal had been taught a lesson and to gaze ecstatically at his black eye. We noted with malicious pleasure that our high-ranking administrator had become a bit more polite, more courteous, and, speaking in contemporary language, tried to be more democratic.
So now, he entered the workshop, with a sort of amiable smile on his face, which seemed totally unnatural when combined with the black eye and the commanding voice. Piece of Iron ran hastily into the workshop right after the principal.
“Well, what are we sawing here?” Boris Alexandrovich asked. He stopped near Vova Yefimchuk and began to scrutinize a detail. “How do you like that! What star are you cutting out? Is it Israeli?” And the principal chuckled and looked over us as if inviting us to make fun of it along with him. Piece of Iron joined him, even though Boris Alexandrovich was laughing at his assignment.
When the principal entered the workshop, the screech of files became louder – we were demonstrating our industriousness to him. But, after hearing his joke, many students turned toward Yefimchuk. The latter had taken the ugly-looking plate out of the vise, and the principal was now turning it in his hands, repeating “It’s just like an Israeli star.”
Something inside me snapped.
Whenever the word “Israel” was mentioned – on television or radio, in newspapers, at meetings or rallies, it sounded either malicious or mocking, not like the names of other countries mentioned –say Hungary, Yugoslavia, Egypt… Those were countries, but Israel… Israel was the symbol of everything bad. Israel was an invader, an aggressor, an instigator, which was clear from its very name.
If something undesirable happened in some country, if that country, from the point of view of the Soviet leadership, held a wrong position or even committed criminal acts, its rulers, not the whole country, were blamed for it. The leaders acted villainously in Chile, in the USA, but the people were victims; the people were absolutely not guilty. But not in Israel! The “people” did not exist in Israel; the people were Israel. The whole country propagated extremism and violence and dreamed of conquering the whole world.