Once, Larisa sat down on the part of the chair that I always left vacant for her. Her elbow touched mine, and her head, passing over my notebook – she was explaining something to me – moved close to my fingers. She had such soft skin. And – I don’t know how it happened – I turned my head a bit. Our faces were very close. Her eyes were so blue, so big. They looked at me without blinking.
Suddenly, Larisa said, “You have such long lashes.”
I was so embarrassed and bewildered that I blurted out, “Is that good?”
I couldn’t have come up with anything stupider. Larisa flushed and slipped off the chair.
“Oy, it’s time to go to school.”
We ran to school in silence and walked to our desks. One thought throbbed in my head, “I’m such a fool, a fool, a fool. Why did I say that?” Now and then, I forgot about it, and I saw Larisa’s eyes in front of me and heard her voice, “You have such long lashes.” And I felt so good.
I visited Larisa for two weeks, and we, two teenagers in love, failed to declare our love to each other. We were such a strange couple. I was often timid at decisive moments. Larisa was surprisingly quiet and bashful. You could hardly hear her voice during recess. Other girls chatted non-stop, giggled, shouted to each other, but Larisa was quiet. She never cried out from her seat in class. She didn’t raise her hand when a teacher asked a question. Still, she was a very good student. She was just very quiet. That was what I liked about her. She was special even in that.
It seems to me that the first time I realized I was in love was in the fourth grade. I can envision perfectly the day when Alyosha Bondarev and I walked up the steps carrying rolled-up maps from the school library. Our geography teacher had sent us to bring them over. We were panting as we carried them. And suddenly I made up my mind to ask Alyosha:
“Look… What do you think about Sarbash?”
Alyosha stopped, his eyes shone, his mug looked sly.
“She’s quite a girl. How about you?”
I was silent. Alyosha laughed.
“C’mon, don’t be scared. I don’t need your Sarbash. Larisa’s quite a girl, but I prefer Lucia.”
I was happy. Alyosha was a real friend.
Right after that geography class, we decided to play a game called “the stream” during the main recess. The stream was a game for those who were in love, and we all began to fall in love in the fourth grade.
You line up in pairs. Each pair holds hands, raises them and steps back to form a passage. The one without a partner enters the passage bending slightly, walks down it and, on the way to the end of the passage, grabs someone by the hand. Out of the passage, the new pair joins the line in the back, and the person now left without a partner goes into the passage alone, walks to its end and grabs a “victim.” That’s how the stream is played.
On the day we played the stream for the first time, many secrets were revealed. Then there were fewer of them. Almost each of the boys in class 4B had made his choice. Everybody knew perfectly well what pairs should be expected by the end of the game, to be precise, could be expected. But what if things changed?
The long recess was noisy and resounded with many voices, laughter, and the trampling of feet. And in the midst of all that chaos, eight pairs from class 4B silently played that calm game, similar to an old ballroom dance, by the wall of the corridor.
Everything just seemed calm, but if you could only hear how our hearts were pounding. There was something in those touches of hands in the passage, something about what songs were sung, poems created. Still it could never be explained and never would be.
Hearts sank in anticipation. “Who will he choose? What if it isn’t me?” “Will he go with me?” “What if she goes with someone else?”
That was how I thought too, dashing into the passage under the joined hands and making my way to Larisa. I touched her hand. Our fingers gave a start. We got out of the passage, then to the end of the line still holding hands, then we raised them. Those were blissful moments.
We didn’t play the stream in high school; we just looked at each other.
I wasn’t that timid in my dreams. It wasn’t difficult to recall what we supposedly talked about with Larisa as I remembered the previous day. It was even easier to imagine that we were traveling together because books always filled my head with dreams of travel to faraway lands, of adventures. I could spend whole evenings drawing the maps of Thanksgiving Island where Robinson Crusoe wound up. I knew every nook and cranny of that island. Only instead of Robinson, Larisa and I lived in his hut. Sometimes it was a different island where we found ourselves after the wreck of our ship. Larisa became my wife. We made love wherever we could – in the hut, on the beach to the sound of the surf, in a rocky grotto.
Of course, the best of all was to imagine it at night when I was already in bed. And everything seemed so real that I had to wash off traces of that reality in the shower in the morning. And then, when I was at school in the afternoon, I couldn’t make myself look at Larisa: what if she guessed what I had been imagining?
Maybe our daytime relations didn’t advance because of my passionate night reveries. Everything remained the same: my daytime love and passionate night dreams, “A spring named Larisa” and the wife I caressed.
I don’t know whether teenage love can be purely romantic. I think not. We were ordinary teenagers, and the feelings that gripped us during that difficult time of sexual awakening very often incited us to deeds, not only far from romantic, not only crude, but sometimes simply monstrous.
Yes, girls were often presented with candies. Some of us would carry a briefcase for a chosen one, accompanying her home from school. And some of us would toss a dead mouse into a locker room before P.E., only to carry it out heroically by the tail, to the sound of the girls' squealing, making sure to swing the dead thing right in front of their noses.
But it could also be something worse, much worse.
We were walking to biology class, first down the long corridor, then up the steps to the fourth floor. Sergey Belunin was in the middle of our group. It was he who made everyone roar with laughter. Belunin had visited a farm over the weekend, and now he was telling us in detail how they mated horses there. The whole point of his story was that a stallion had been given a stimulant in his fodder before mating.
“You should have seen it…” Sergey said accompanying his words with an expressive gesture.
The walls were about to crumble from the roaring of our laughter.
And Sergey, light-haired and tall, just smiled. It turned out that he had saved a surprise for us, and he took it out of his pocket. It was a small paper package of white pills.
“Here it is. I’ve stolen them. You can check how it works if you don’t believe me. Who wants to check? How about you, Vitya?”
Vitya Smirnov waved his hands and shook his head. The laughter became incredibly loud.
“Hey you, be quiet. Look here. What if we give it to our babes? To Umerova, for example, or Kadushkina…”
That was a great idea! It came from Dima Malatos. Everyone grew silent for a second; then an ecstatic roar broke out.
Thickset and cheerful, Dima was Greek. There were many Greeks in Chirchik. There were three boys in our class – Dima Malatos, Vasya Lumis and another Dima, Hodjidimitriadis. We also had Greek girls. They were slender and good-looking, and the boys were real athletes. I had always felt frail and feeble next to Dima. He moved like a bear. He ambled, but his gait was springy and didn’t look clumsy. He had amazingly thick black hair. His straight bangs came down to his eyebrows, which were also thick and black.
I often wondered why Greek boys were so healthy and handsome, as if chosen. That was how generously nature had endowed their nation. Could it be because of the cruel treatment of newborn babies in ancient Greece? When a feeble baby or a baby with a defect was born, that baby would be thrown over a cliff. We read about it when we studied the history of the ancient world in fifth grade. It was certainly bad and inhumane, but selection happens in nature, natural selection.