A School for Fools

by Sasha Sokolov

  This is what the teacher Pavel was saying, standing on the shore of the Lethe. River water dripped from his washed ears, and the river itself flowed slowly past him and past us with all its fishes, flat-bottom boats, ancient sailboats, reflected clouds, with those who are invisible and those who will drown, with frogs’ eggs, algae, relentless water striders, torn pieces of net, grains of sand from the beloved seashore and gold bracelets lost by someone, with empty cans and heavy hats of Monomakh, with stains from axle grease, with the almost indistinguishable faces of the ferrymen, with apples of dissent and pears of sadness, and with tiny pieces of rubber tubing for valve caps without which you cannot ride a bicycle because you cannot inflate the tire if you don’t slide that kind of a cap on the valve stem; and then all is lost; after all, if it’s impossible to use the bicycle, it kind of doesn’t exist, it almost disappears, and without a bicycle there is nothing to do at the dacha: you cannot go to get kerosene, you cannot ride to the pond and back, and you cannot go to the station to meet Dr. Zauze, who arrived on the seven o’clock electric train: He is standing on the platform, keeps turning his head and looking in all directions, but you are not there, even though you promised to meet him without fail, and now he’s standing and waiting, but you’re not coming because you can’t find a good piece of tubing; even though the doctor doesn’t know that, he already makes a tentative guess: Apparently, he assumes, something is wrong with the velomachine of patient so-and-so, most likely with the valve cap; it’s typical, those caps are a constant nuisance, too bad I didn’t figure out I should have bought two or three meters of tubing for him in town; he would have had enough for the entire summer, the doctor thinks. Forgive me please, but what did Pavel Norvegov say to us when he gave us the book that our father disliked so much? Nothing, the teacher said nothing. No, I think he said: A book. Even this: Here’s a book. And even more than that: Here’s a book for you, said the teacher. And what did our father say about the book, when we told him about our conversation with Pavel? Our father didn’t believe one word we said. Why, weren’t we telling the truth? Yes, we were telling the truth, but you know our father—he doesn’t trust anyone, and when on one occasion I told him about it, he answered that the whole world consists of scoundrels and only scoundrels, and if he trusted people, he would never have become the leading prosecutor in the city, but in the best case would have worked as a building superintendent, like Sorokin, or as a dacha glass installer. And then I asked our father about the newspapers. What do you mean— newspapers?—Father responded. And I said: You read newspapers all the time. Yes, I do read them, he answered, I read newspapers, so what? Isn’t anything written there?—I asked. Why not, our father said, everything is written there, whatever’s necessary is written there. But, I asked, if something is written there, why do you read it? After all, scoundrels are writing it. And then our father said: Who’s a scoundrel? And I answered: Those who write. Our father asked: Write what? And I answered: Newspapers. Our father was silent and kept looking at me while I was looking at him, and I felt a little sorry for him because I saw how confused he became and how two large flies crawled like two black tears on his large white face and he could not even wave them off because he was very confused. After-wards he quietly said to me: Get out, I don’t wish to see you, you son of a bitch, get lost, go to hell! This happened at the dacha. I rolled the bicycle out of the shed, tied a butterfly net to the frame, and rode down the path in our garden. In the garden the first apples were ripening and it seemed to me that in each of them were worms and they were tirelessly chewing our, that is, Father’s, fruit. And I thought: Autumn will come and there will be nothing in the garden to pick, only the rotten apples will remain. I was riding and the garden wasn’t ending because it had no end, and when the end came, I saw in front of me a fence and a gate, and my mother standing at the gate. Good day, Mama, I shouted, how early you came back from work today! For God’s sake, from what work, she protested, I haven’t been working since the day you went to school; it’ll be fourteen years soon. Ach, that’s what is going on—I said—that means I simply forgot, I rode around the garden for too long—apparently all those years—and a lot has escaped from my head. You know, worms are sitting in the grackles, no, in the apples of our garden; we need to think of something, of some kind of solution, otherwise the apples will rot completely and there will be absolutely nothing to eat, we won’t even be able to make jam. Mother glanced at my net and asked: What are you doing, did you argue with your father again? I didn’t want to sadden her and answered this way: A little bit, Mama, we were talking about the foreprinter Ivan Fedorov and I expressed my conviction that he was— ah, beh, veh, geh, deh, ye, zheh, zeh, ee, and so on, but Father did not believe me and advised me to go for a ride and catch butterflies, so here I am, riding. Goodbye, Mama—I yelled—I’m riding to catch the meadow sulfurs, long live summer, spring, and flowers, wonderful thoughts, the power of passion but also of love, goodness, and beauty! Ding-dong, bim-bom, click-clack, knick-knock, squeak-squak. I listed all these sounds on purpose; they’re my favorite sounds, the sounds of a merry bicycle rushing along the dacha road, at the time when the entire settlement has already vanished into the cobwebs of tiny spiders, even though it is still quite a while until real autumn. But for the spiders it’s all the same, goodbye, Mama, don’t be upset, we’ll meet again. She shouted: Come back!—and I turned my head; my mother stood at the gate looking worried and I thought: If I return, nothing good will come of it: My mother will certainly begin to cry, make me get off the bicycle, and take my arm; then we’ll walk back across the garden to the dacha and my mother will begin to reconcile me with my father, which will require a few more years and life, commonly measured in our and in the neighboring settlements by the pieces of so-called time, the days of summer and the years of winter, my life will stop and will stand still like a broken bicycle in the shed full of old faded newspapers, where wooden blocks and rusted pliers lie around. Yes, you didn’t want to be reconciled with our father. This is why at the moment when our mother shouted after you Come back!—you didn’t do it even though you felt bad for her, for our patient mother. When you finally looked back, you saw her large eyes the color of wilted grass; tears slowly welled up in them and reflected some tall trees with astonishingly white bark, the path you rode on, and you yourself with your long thin hands and thin neck—in your unstoppable movement from. To an outside observer, tormented by the chimeras of the famous mathematician N. Fishman, the author of many textbooks and collections of problems and exercises, a man without imagination and without dreams, you would resemble in those minutes a boring bicycle rider named so-and-so, traveling from point A to point B to cover the given number of kilometers and to vanish forever afterward in a cloud of hot road dust. But, aware of your lofty ideas and desires, I know that on the day in question, marked by exceptional, sunny weather, you represented another type of bicycle rider, not vanishing in time and space. Rejection of the surrounding reality, strength in the fight against hypocrisy and servility, unwavering will, firmness in reaching the set goals, extraordinarily strong principles, and honesty in your relationship with comrades—these and many other wonderful qualities placed you beyond the ordinary kind of bicycle riders. You were not only and not as much a bicycle rider as a bicycle-riding human being, a bicycle-operating citizen. Really, I feel kind of embarrassed when you praise me so much. I’m certain I’m not at all worthy of these beautiful words. It even appears to me I acted wrongly on the day in question; perhaps I should have listened to my mother’s call, come back, and calmed her down, but I kept riding and riding with my net and it made no difference how and where I was going, it was just pleasant to ride and, as usually happens to me when nobody interrupts my thoughts, I was simply thinking about everything I saw.

  I remember I noticed someone’s dacha and thought: Here’s a dacha; it has two stories; someone, some family, lives here. Some members of the family live here the entire week, and some only on Saturdays and Sundays. Then I s
aw a little two-wheeled cart that stood on the edge of the grove, next to the haystack, and I said to myself: Now that’s a cart; one can carry various things in it, for instance: earth, gravel, luggage, pencils from the Sacco and Vanzetti factory, wild honey, the fruit of mango trees, ice picks, ivory knick-knacks, roof shingles, collected works, cages with rabbits, ballot boxes and mailboxes, feather beds and their opposites—cannon-balls, stolen sinks, tables of ranks, and objects from the period of the Paris Commune. And now someone will come and start hauling hay in the cart; the cart is very handy. I saw a little girl leading a dog on a leash—an ordinary, simple dog—going in the direction of the station. I knew the girl was going to the pond now; she’d bathe herself and her simple dog, and after that a certain number of years would pass, the girl would grow up and begin to live a grown-up’s life: She’d get married, read serious books, hurry and be late to work, buy furniture, talk on the phone for hours, wash socks, prepare food for herself and others, go visiting and get drunk on wine, be jealous of her neighbors and the birds, follow the weather forecasts, dust, count her kopecks, await a child, go to the dentist, take shoes to be fixed, appeal to men, look through the window at the cars passing by, go to concerts and museums, laugh when it wasn’t funny, turn red when ashamed, cry whenever she felt like crying, scream from pain, moan under the touch of her lover, gradually turn gray, color her eyelashes and hair, wash her hands before dinner and feet before bed, pay dues, acknowledge delivery of packages, flip through magazines, meet old acquaintances on the street, participate in meetings, bury relatives, bang pots and pans in the kitchen, try to smoke, tell the plots of films, be insubordinate in front of bosses, complain about that migraine again, go to the country and pick mushrooms, cheat on her husband, run from shop to shop, watch fireworks, love Chopin, babble, be afraid to gain weight, dream about a trip abroad, think about suicide, curse broken elevators, save for an emergency, sing romances, await a child, preserve old photographs, advance in her career, squeal from fright, shake her head disapprovingly, complain about unending rains, miss the lost things, listen to the news on the radio, catch taxis, go to the south, bring up the children, stand in lines for hours, inevitably get older, dress according to the latest fashion, curse the government, live by inertia, take drops for her heart, curse her husband, go on a diet, leave and come back, use lipstick, wish for nothing more, visit her parents, think everything was over, and also—that corduroy (cottonlinensilkvelvetwool) was very practical, stay home on sick leave, lie to her girlfriends and relatives, forget about everything in the world, borrow money, live the way everyone else lives, and recall the dacha, the pond, and her simple dog. I saw a pine tree, singed by lightning: it had yellow needles. I imagined a stormy night in July. At first, it was quiet and humid in the settlement and all residents slept with their windows open. Then a cloud stealthily appeared; it covered the stars and brought the wind. The wind blew and all over the settlement window shutters and doors slammed and the broken glass tinkled. Afterwards, in complete darkness, the rain began to pound: it drenched the roofs, gardens, beach chairs left in the gardens, mattresses, hammocks, sheets, children’s toys, primers, and everything else. People in the dachas woke up. They turned on but at once turned off the lights, paced about their rooms, looked through windows, and said to each other: What a storm, what a downpour. The lightning bolts kept striking; apples kept ripening and falling on the grass. One lightning bolt struck quite close; nobody knew where exactly, but they agreed that it was somewhere in the settlement, and those who did not have lightning rods on their roofs promised themselves to put them up no later than tomorrow. However, the lightning bolt hit the pine tree that stood at the edge of the forest, but it did not burn it down, just singed it, illuminating at the same time the entire forest, settlement, station, and a section of the railroad branch. The lightning bolt blinded the running trains, covered the rails with silver, and painted the ties white. And then—oh, I know—then you saw the house in which that woman lived; you left the bicycle by the fence and knocked on the gate: Knock-knock, my dear, knock-knock, I came to you, your shy one, your tender one, open and let me in, open and let me in, I don’t want anything from you, I’ll just take a look at you and leave, don’t chase me away, only don’t chase me, my dear, I’m thinking about you, I’m crying and praying for you.

  No, no, I won’t tell you anything, you don’t have the right to question me about my personal affairs, you should have nothing to do with that woman, don’t bother me, you are a fool, you are a sicko, I don’t want to deal with you, I’ll call Dr. Zauze, let him take you there again because you bore and repulse me; who are you, why are you annoying me with questions; stop, better stop or I’ll do something to you, something bad. Don’t pretend you don’t know who I am; if you’re calling me a madman, you’re exactly the same madman because I am—you, but up until now you don’t want to understand it and if you call Dr. Zauze, you’ll be sent there along with me and you won’t be able to see that woman for two or three months, and when we are released I’ll come to that woman and tell her the entire truth about you, I’ll tell her you are not as old as you say, but just so-and-so old, and you go to the school for fools not because you wanted to but because you haven’t been accepted to a normal school, you’re sick like I am, terribly sick, you’re almost an idiot, you’re unable to memorize even one poem, and I’ll ask the woman to break up with you immediately, leave you standing alone forever on the dark suburban platform, yes, on a snowy night, when all the lamps are broken and all the electric trains have left, and I’ll tell her: The man who wants you to like him isn’t worthy of you and you can’t be with him, since he’ll never be able to be intimate with you; he is lying to you, he is an insane snot-nosed brat, a bad student of a special school, and he is unable to memorize anything, and you, a thirty-year-old serious woman, you should forget about him, leave him on the snow-covered platform at night and choose me, the real man, a grown-up, honest and healthy because I would really want that and I memorize without difficulty any poem and solve any life problem. You lie, this is vile, you won’t tell her this because you differ in no way from me, you are the same as I am, as stupid and talentless, and you’re studying with me in one class; you simply decided to get rid of me; you love that woman and I’m in your way, but you’ll get nowhere, I’ll come to see her myself and I’ll tell her the entire truth—about me and about you, I’ll admit I love her and would like to be with her always, all my life, even though I never, not even once, tried to be with any woman, but, most likely, yes, of course, for her, for that woman, it doesn’t matter, since she is so beautiful, so smart—no, it doesn’t matter!— and even if I won’t be able to be intimate with her, she’ll forgive me; after all, this is not needed, not necessary, and about you I’ll say this: A man, resembling me in some way, will visit you soon; he’ll knock on the door: Knock-knock, he’ll ask you to abandon me alone on the snow-covered platform because I’m sick, but, please, please, I’ll say, don’t believe him, don’t believe anything, he’s counting on being with you, but he has no right to do this because he’s much worse than I am, you’ll understand it right away, as soon as he appears and opens his mouth, so don’t believe him, don’t believe because he’s not alive, he doesn’t exist, doesn’t occur, isn’t present, he is not, no, my dear, only I, only I have come to you, quiet and radiant, good and pure, that’s what I’ll tell her, and you, you who don’t exist, remember: You won’t succeed: You love that woman, but you don’t know her, you don’t know where she lives and you don’t know her name, so how can you come to her, you brainless fool, nobody, an unfortunate student of the special school! Yes, I love, it seems to me I love that woman, but you’re wrong in assuming I don’t know her or where she lives because I do know! Do you understand? I know everything about her, even her name. You cannot, you should not know this name, only I know her name—only I in the world. You are mistaken: Veta, her name is Veta, I love a woman named Veta Akatova.