She gulped audibly. 'To come directly to the point. I feared you’d be bored with me after I’d shed all my . . . well, affectations. I couldn’t bear the thought of you slowly drawing away from me. And not saying anything just to spare my feelings.’
‘Silly little Brincka. I think you’re serious.’ I said this jocularly, but the lump in my throat reappered. I felt it would not be long before we did go forward at last.
‘I was silly, wasn’t I, Zhoe? I mean, it turns out that we can still be friends. People don’t have to thrill other people every minute of the day and night, as long as they’re fond of each other. We can be even firmer friends now - genuine friends.’
When we hugged each other, Oktyabrina’s handbag fell deep into the fluffy snow and we both laughed. For some reason, it struck me that this was going to be a very long winter.
A few minutes later, we came to a greenhouse and this time I excused myself to go to the toilet. When I stepped outside again, it was to a scene that somehow reminded me of high-school days: Oktyabrina was engaged in a snowball fight with a young man. Her missiles fell apart in the air, his went wide - perhaps not purposely, from the look of his throwing arm. I felt like a father watching his daughter on a date. A fragment of her snowball nicked the tail of his overcoat, and she squealed in triumph. 200
I tossed my own snowball between them. ‘Oh Zhoe darling/ called Oktyabrina. ‘I want you to meet someone. Vladimir will be getting another degree very soon, post-graduate .’
The young man smiled nervously and hurried towards me, adjusting his hat. Tm extremely pleased to make your acquaintance/ he said shyly. ‘All joking aside, I never meet girls this way - your friend fell, she needed help/
He adjusted his hat again. ‘Anyway, I was just leaving. Between you and I, I shouldn’t be here now at all/
When we had dropped Vladimir oft at a nearby school, Oktyabrina sighed deeply. ‘Do you think Gelda will be hurt?’ she ventured. ‘I’d hate to cause her anguish/
‘I’m sure Gelda will be delighted/
Tm not so sure. And you?'
‘He seems a tolerable choice - now that you’ve shed your affectations/
‘Zhoe darling, you are a sweetheart. I do so want another chance. With someone suitable at last/
Soon she began to hum: a Soviet ballad with a line about ‘finding my beloved in twilight on a background of our Motherland’s white’.
To my surprise, Gelda was upset. Vladimir’s frequent presence - with Oktyabrina - in the bookshop made her feel cramped, she said; Vladimir was always watching her. And he was a teacher, whom she scorned ‘as a class’. Besides, I think she was jealous of losing so much of Oktyabrina’s veneration, especially to ‘a classroom creep’. The very sight of him got on her nerves.
This said more about Gelda than Vladimir, since nothing in his appearance could be offensive to anyone. He was a tallish young man with large feet and heavy rubber galoshes. His face was milky and slightly slack - distinctly intellectual except for a bulbous peasant ‘potato nose’. His lapel sported a large ‘Lenin-Is-More-Alive-Than-The-Living’ badge; not necessarily a clue to personality, since many people wear
them simply for decoration in the shortage of other costume jewellery.
He also wore an imitation karakul hat with the ear flaps down and string tied beneath the chin. The hat showed great signs of wear at the crown and was apparently a permanent fixture from September to May. This was because Vladimir was five minutes short’, as the Russians say, of being completely bald, and his mother would not let him leave the house with an uncovered head. In short, he looked like a typical young member of the “"working intelligentsia’: one of the tens of thousands who study all day in overcrowded reading rooms, wearing winter pallors and shiny trousers.
Vladimir sat all day not in a library, but at the teacher’s desk of the geography room of School Number 628. On Sundays, he was a volunteer custodian in the Museum of V. I. Lenin’s Funeral Train at Paveletsky Station. In addition, he was working towards a graduate degree with a dissertation provisionally entitled, ‘The Exploration and Development of Natural Resources in Kamensk Province During the Period of the First Five-Year Plan, 1928-1933’. Kamensk Province borders the Ukraine. With funds from his mother — and, at first, her attendance — Vladimir had made several journeys there to interview local geographers. They were his life’s adventure - until he met Oktyabrina.
Otherwise, his circumstances were typical of the Soviet professional class. He shared a flat with his mother, traveled to and from work by metro, and subscribed to Soviet Geographer , Teacher of the Motherlands Schools , and Socialist Geography. For sport, he concentrated on chess, in which he’d worked his way up in the hierarchy of these things to Chess Player Second Class. He instructed Oktyabrina for hours at a time. Since she hadn’t known the game before - the name ‘pawn’ annoyed her at first, just as the knights intrigued her - it was probably their only activity in which the roles of teacher and pupil were clearly defined.
Oktyabrina and Vladimir saw each other almost every even-
ing. At first, Gelda and I were dutifully informed of their plans, which usually featured the movies. On the evenings when Vladimir worked on his dissertation, Oktyabrina occasionally joined me. She was thoughtful and composed, in keeping with her position as the ‘life companion’ of an upstanding young man.
‘He says I’m like a little fawn/ she said one evening over an ice cream. ‘Always running, running, running - a frightened fawn in the faraway forest. But he’s the gamekeeper. He’s caught me once and for all, and now he’s going to tame me.’
But if Oktyabrina’s patter about Vladimir smacked of the old hyperbole, other elements in her attitude towards him were new. For one thing, rather than resenting his research - lacking a pass, she could not join him in the library - she encouraged him wholeheartedly. She recognized the dissertation’s importance not only as such, but for its enhancement of Vladimir’s self-esteem.
‘Every young man must prove himself in some desperate duel with his own will’, she confided. ‘It’s rather like St George slaying his dragon - only harder in a way because modem challenges are in offices and less dramatic. . . . When Vladimir conquers the dissertation, he’ll be a mans man. The least I can do is help.’
There was much to help with. Vladimir suffered the self-doubts of any shy, conscientious young man, plus several added burdens incurred by his position and his means of obtaining it. The headmistress of his school was an old chum of his mother from their days of volunteer social work in the 1930s. In fact, it was she who’d found Vladimir his job after graduation, as a favor to Mama: in her school, Vladimir would find support as a novice teacher. And indeed, the headmistress spent a few minutes in Vladimir’s classroom most mornings, before the opening bell. She helped him wipe the woodwork with a wet rag. . . .
Oktyabrina recounted this with surprising candor. ‘You’re aghast at the lack of heroics, aren’t you, Zhoe?
Because I m needed by Vladimir the man, not the symbol. His tiniest problems are mankind’s greatest for me: thats the joy of being a mature woman .’
As a dedicated Young Communist, Vladimir took the organization’s precepts seriously, especially those establishing the duty of teachers in instilling Communist moral principles. He sometimes wished he could ignore the responsibility, but everything in his background made him fight for right.
Thus, even if some teachers snickered at meetings of the Pedagogical Council and Young Communist Committee, he knew his duty was to expose boys who smoked in the lavatory and sneaked wine into political instruction sessions. Punishing the boys wasn’t the answer, but the problems had to be discussed. The headmistress deserved support. Vladimir s friends sometimes tried to catch his eye to suggest he sit down and relax. They knew that his vulnerability in class was as much the fault of his own zeal as the teenagers cynicism. To some extent Vladimir himself recognized this, and promised himself before each meeting to be realistic. But rebellion in the classroom - spitballs and wisecracks - corrupted the children themselves, and the social fabric