In school, before the ninth grade, I had a strange roommate. I was a strange girl, he was a strange boy. It would seem that such people should get along, but… We were children from completely different worlds.
I lived in my own imaginary and bookish one, he lived in another, quite real one: mom and dad are drunks, don’t breathe alcohol.
God knows why they put us next to each other: she was cool, young, long–legged, and politically literate – she taught us some (also strange) history with a party bias. However, there was no other one then. And sometimes she had a strange sense of humor–she took and put together something that didn’t fit together.
However, we lived peacefully. The guy rarely went to school and was forced to. When he was dragged by the hand by the same cool girl, he sat quietly next to me, smelled of cigarettes, and sometimes something stronger, and seemed to be asleep. I couldn’t provide him with mathematics and physics, but the subjects of the so–called humanities cycle were quite enough. She didn’t hide her notebook, and she answered questions about where the comma should be. I even wrote essays to someone in a hurry at recess on request “at least for three.”
It was a matter of survival: for this, I got to write off mathematics, and not only that.
At that time, they had never even heard of any division into humanities and smart people, but they had to graduate from high school.
My neighbor never copied anything – he just sat, slept with his eyes open, and then disappeared again. I used to waddle around smoking during recess. He was silent, and I was silent. Some of the classmates were outraged by the too pungent smells, the general neglect, and the clothes that were obviously from someone else’s shoulder, which no one washed.
I didn’t support these conversations and didn’t wrinkle my nose, probably because I myself came from an uncomfortable and dysfunctional family, the same as someone who didn’t really need it, and was moderately neglected. True, there was no alcohol addiction, but even without it, it was enough for three of them to have a not very happy childhood. There’s even more left.
He was dragged to school; I dragged myself: I didn’t like school, I had neglected mathematics and didn’t understand it.
The spark of resistance in me was probably extinguished in infancy. Sometimes it would suddenly flare up later in life, but rarely. There were no alternatives, and no one had ever heard of family education and other delights. I was reading books under my desk, and my neighbor was sleeping next to me. He didn’t hurt me.
I didn’t participate in the class life. The girls whispered, the boys kept quiet: the neighbor’s fist was developed in the struggle for survival.
He didn’t show up for the high school exams: none of the four, I think. However, the teachers were determined to be combative: to kick them out as soon as possible and forget them like a terrible dream. And they can be understood.
One of the teachers ran to his house, most likely the same homeroom teacher, and dragged him to the exam. A formal presence was still required.
I remember the geometry exam: I didn’t sleep in front of him for a couple of nights, I was cramming, and even though I looked pale, I still scratched out my four.
And so I pulled out a ticket, I’m sitting, I’m writing a theorem on a piece of paper, I’m drawing something there, I’m solving some kind of problem. Then I had to go to the blackboard, write it all down, and draw it again with chalk. In the meantime, I’m preparing for the penultimate desk. At the last one, a tired but loud elderly man – my sister’s mathematician–interrogates my former neighbor. Of course, there was no question of any ticket.:
“Do you know that?”
— no.
“Do you know that?” And this?
— no.
– Do you know what a work is?
Silence.
– What is the amount? And the difference?
— I don’t know.
The mathematician can’t stand it:
“Have you eaten today?”
I don’t hear the answer, I’m afraid to turn around: the guy is loud and short-tempered.
“I haven’t eaten, then,” sums up the maths nurse, who has already lived a long time and seen everything. “But I didn’t forget to smoke.” Okay, go ahead.
They gave him three points in his certificate, and I never saw my neighbor again.
In the meantime, we’re still sitting next to each other. Literature lesson. Pushkin, “Eugene Onegin”. Through all the inevitable husks at that time – “Onegin is an unnecessary person”, the exploitation of peasants (“So that the lordly berries are not secretly eaten / The mouth of the evil one / And they were busy singing: “The idea of rural witticism!” – poor serf girls and their evil masters) – through all this, some kind of pure joy breaks through from what I hear and read.
It even makes going to school a lot more enjoyable for me on those days when Pushkin is on schedule. The beautiful comes to life in spite of all the dead words – Pushkin will revive anyone you want.
I didn’t teach much, I remembered it by myself.
Next to him, the neighbor at the desk is sleeping again.
One day, the teacher Lyudmila Romanovna, unable to stand the empty gaze, stopped in front of him and said:
– I know that you haven’t read or taught, but you can hear something (she recited the poems very well, extremely directly; she often read whole chapters to us herself – she knew that there would be no other way to convey them to a part of the class)?! What are you thinking about? So what do you think? Say something!
The neighbor has woken up sullenly and is silent.
Romanovna stood over him for a moment and then walked away.
The lesson rolled on.
A moment later, there was a sudden rustling, rustling, and gurgling sound in my right ear, as if some ancient rusty mechanism had suddenly come to life. And suddenly, faintly, in a smoky, hoarse boyish basse:
– This is some kind of bullshit!
I turned around, and he was already sleeping with his eyes open again.
This was his review of Pushkin.
I should have finished here, but I didn’t: I suddenly remembered my roommate while walking with my sister and noticing the various wonders around me.
Warm September: girls in dresses, boys in T–shirts – some kind of miracle!
Oaks: crowns in the clouds, apples falling into the grass: boom… boom… the old garden.
The Bengal cat is walking its owner again: it steps softly on the grass, followed by a young man with a leash.
The sign shows a crossed-out dog, but no one crossed out the cat. So he feels like he’s in his own manor, surrounded by servants.
The artificial pond reflects the sky, apples from neighboring trees are getting wet – the apple year.
The old barracks from the beginning of the century before last – now, it seems, there is a military school there.
We walk past commemorative plaques, some endless checkpoints. Suddenly, music breaks into the street noise so cleanly and clearly: Prokofiev, “Romeo and Juliet.” It doesn’t fit in with the place so much that we stop in surprise. The conductor is visible through the open window: a very young one, probably also a cadet. You can’t see the orchestra, but you can hear it.
The silhouette of the conductor in the window, as in a frame, is a counterpoint. Flexible, graceful, his hands fly almost like a ballet. Prokofiev is heard.
We stand with our mouths agape. The conductor looks out the window at the uninvited listeners, but does not interrupt his lesson. The conductor’s baton is flying: “The Dance of the Knights”.
Barracks. Avenue. A handsome young man in the window conducts an invisible orchestra. “Isn’t it a miracle?!” I think.
Suddenly, a barely audible word is extracted from memory.:
– This is all some kind of bullshit!
Really, some kind of bullshit.
Just like Pushkin once did, in the eighth grade.
But we’ve been standing on this stuff and we’re still standing on it.
And yet, God willing, we’ll just have some downtime.
Invisible to the cold eye, but beautiful stuff rules the world.
Or at least she should have been, if everything had been set up properly.
And so be it!