Petrov Goes Back to School

The Sheshurino school was shut down on the very cusp of the New Year. The last remotely literate teacher had bolted, taking with him Lenka Pereverzeva, a secondary school graduate, and the funds collected for roof repairs, and a stack of study guides. Stunned by such unexpectedly shabby treatment, the school started declining before our eyes, growing faded and ugly like an abandoned wife.

A commission that could not have cared less drove in from the district center and had whatever was still fit for classroom use loaded into the light truck known affectionately as a polutorka, also hauling off two barns’-full of split firewood, a likeness of Alexander Pushkin painted in oils during the reign of Tsar Nicholas, and the bell that had summoned the students to class. The commissioners walked around the frog-green building that sprawled across the state farm’s land, rapped on its foundation and prodded at its planks, while the less trusting among them even tried to smash the flimsy wooden door frames.

“No, Pavel Ivanych,” said the boss-lady, head of the District Education Department. “You can strike me dead on the spot, but we won’t be able to write this piece of junk off, or sell it either. We’ll have to scrap it and split the land into lots.”

Pavel Ivanych always had a canny eye for the bottom line. “Isn’t it a pity, though?” he said. “This place is built like a fortress. Stonework all across the first floor. And where are the kids going to go?”

“Where? To Kashurino. It has an eight-grade school. There aren’t that many kids, anyway.”

Pavel Ivanych took a swig from the flask he’d been keeping warm in his boot, shrugged his shoulders, and, as part of his goodbyes to the principal, Alexandra Nikitishna, who was all bundled up in a short shawl and crying her eyes out, told her to post a guard. “Or just someone to run the furnace.” And he made himself scarce.

There was nothing to run the furnace with, though, because they’d carted the firewood away, so when Alexandra Nikitishna begged old man Petrov to keep an eye on the school at least until spring, that’s exactly what he wanted to know – what to use for fuel. He’d already done the rounds of both floors and peered into the basement.

“Is there some furniture dumped anywhere?” he asked. “They’ve swiped all the firewood.”

“Use books for fuel,” the principal said, blowing her nose into a white handkerchief. “The whole basement’s full of nothing but books.”

But old man Petrov, a conscientious and thoughtful fellow, wouldn’t hold with that kind of wanton destruction on his watch. After instructing his mother-in-law to keep the farm (which consisted entirely of a cow called Little Girl) up and running, he went to scout the felling sites and in a week had filled one of the barns to the rafters with burnable wood. Then he patted himself on the back for keeping socialist property out of capitalist hands, got the sturdy cylindrical stove good and hot, making the fresh aluminum paint bubble like a puddle in a July rainstorm, and started an asset inventory. The discarded books in the basement seemed alive to him. Installing himself on a bundle tied with twine, he pulled the top one of a pile toward him.

“This is your ninth-grade physics!” Petrov licked his finger. “Hoo boy, the know-how they’ve crammed in here! See how wisely the Lord set everything up, but this textbook here was written by Rozenberg and Pushkarev… And that’s how it is. But I’d have too hard a time with physics just now. When was I called up into the army? There you go, then! So I’ll start with getting a handle on my native language.”

Petrov liked the language book. It had pictures of fields of rye, birds flying in the sky, and a photo of Laktionov’s painting A Letter from the Front. His eyes filled with tears, and he lit a cigarette. When his ma had gotten his pa’s death notification, she’d beaten Verka, the mail lady, with her own mailbag and then they’d sat and bawled, two women with one voice. And it was cold, and the hunger was something fierce.

He turned a page. Haymaking – now that’s the ticket! Such a good time it was. Back then, Grandma Pelageya would fill an earthenware jug with milk from the daytime milking, wrap it in a cloth, and give out baked spuds and home-made bread. Petrov would whistle to the dog, and off they’d go, through the woods. The dust was warm and the puddles had started drying up, but they’d still be home to some tiny frogs. So he’d weave burdock thistle stems together, heads and all, skewer the froglets on them, and pop them into his basket. And later, out on the hayfield, he’d wait until Valka, the screechiest woman in the village, was nodding off against a haystack, and then he’d drop them down her smock. Good, so good. Pictures of an earlier life, happy as only youth can be, floated before Petrov’s eyes, combining into multicolored clouds like balloons…

It took him a week to separate the books by the effect they had on him. He ended up with six stacks. There was one that nobody should live without, that had everything – sowing turnips, assembling a rifle, splicing wires without getting killed, and astronomy. The second pile was all dictionaries, a murky business, and how to adapt it to real life, Petrov did not know. The books in the third were well-worn and tattered, with a portrait of Lomonosov or Tolstoy scrawled on in ink – they would make good cigarette papers. The fourth and fifth – Vitya Maleyev in School and at Home, Styopa the Hare, Anna Karenina – were to be read. Petrov had them all at the ready, for broadening his mind after sundown in winter. And the sixth was a goldmine of maps, and, oh, so very useful! Petrov even found Budapest, which he’d last visited in a tank. But there was no mention of Sheshurino anywhere, so small it was in the great global expanse.

And the evenings passed – long in winter, just a tad shorter in spring – as old man Petrov made his way through all the school’s learned lore by the light of a kerosene lamp and the cheery crackle of the stove crunching up the brushwood.