School Daze

This month's installment from the village offers a bit of a nostalgic throwback to an earlier time... or does it?

Yegor Gorelov, a self-sufficient grown up at the height of his seven years, was miserable. He would be starting school in only two weeks, and time, which until then had been skipping and hopping along, had suddenly stumbled, slowed like a girl needing to fix a shoelace, and then stopped altogether. Petya, Yegor’s sworn enemy and a wussy tattletale, had been set up with everything new for school, and even Seryozha, whose widowed mother was saddled with two youngsters hardly a year apart, had been bought a brown school bag with gold fasteners, but Yegor hadn’t been bought a single thing. Nobody cared, not even a little bit. Yegor quit racing around the streets on his old bike and just hunkered down under the lean-to and whimpered to himself.

Mom didn’t make it home from work until the evening, when it was time to bring the cow in from the fields. She was in no mood for any extra annoyances.

“What’s your hurry, young ’un? Once you’re going to school, your feet’ll be sore from walking back and forth, back and forth. Get on outside while you’re still free. The lads’ll be playing on the rope swing down by the river, and you’ll have to be in school. You’ll study yourself stupid, and you’ll still end up breaking your back for the collective farm...”

Yegor gave a resentful sniffle, pulled his older brother’s hand-me-down pants up under his armpits, and said, in the most manly voice he could muster, “But what d’you think, Ma – will they call me up to the blackboard or have me write a composition straight off? Like with Dima? Like ‘How I Spent My Summer,’ eh, Ma?”

“Leave me be, Yegor you pest. Who’s going to be calling you to the blackboard? You’ll be in first grade, learning your math with colored rods and practicing your letters. Oh, stop badgering me, do. Go ask your pa.”

And Mom went off to milk the cow amid a rattle of buckets.

After doing the required number of circuits around his home, Yegor scrambled through the low fence and ran to find his dad at the farm’s management office. His father, holding the phone between chin and shoulder, was hollering at the work team leader for leaving Team Seven to its own devices somewhere or other, so now its womenfolk, who were stuck out there, would be giving him what-for when they got back. But the team leader, rolling a matchstick from side to side of his mouth, was lackadaisically giving as good as he got, to the effect that he had had nothing to do with it, and why hadn’t the diesel been delivered, and it was all the management office’s fault.

Yegor sidled up to his father along the wall, waited until he hung up the phone, and whispered in his ear, “When are we going to the district center, Pa? Pa, I’ll be needing a uniform, Pa, and you promised, remember? No way I can go without a uniform, Pa. And I need a school bag, Pa, everybody’s already got everything, except me...”

His father banged a fist on the desk and yelled at poor little Yegor, “Who let you in? Can’t you see I’m busy? Scram, or you’ll be seeing your school, all right – as good as you see your own two ears. Get a load of Mr. Fancypants here – his way or the highway! What d’you want with school anyway? I’ll be taking you out to dig potatoes in September, and that’s when you’ll see what real work is and learn something worth learning. Sitting there slobbering over books! Work’s what’s needed, not loafing about. I’m not giving that school any paint or nails or firewood, either. You’ll drive me nuts...”

After that tongue-lashing, Yegor flew like a bullet out onto the management office porch and stood there, shaking with fear. Now what would happen, all because of Yegor, was that the lovely school wouldn’t be painted a glossy green, like the year’s first grass. And because he was mad at Yegor, his pa wouldn’t give the school any nails, so there’d be nothing to hang the big map on, the map showing two hemispheres, round as apples, that glowed yellow against the blue seas and oceans... And Pa wouldn’t give the school any firewood, so the children would freeze. All of them, first grade to eighth grade. And the teacher, the beautiful Yelena Petrovna with her braid looped across her forehead like a crown, she’d freeze. And the P.E. teacher, Uncle Sasha, he’d freeze too. And Anna Sergeyevna, the principal, would be covered in a sheet of ice, and everyone would get sick, and there would be nobody to blame but him.

Yegor snuffled, wiped his nose on the sleeve of his checkered shirt, sighed, glanced up at the blue August sky, and had just about decided to put off his preparations for school to another daywhen he saw his grandma shuffling out of the store.

“Granny!” Yegor grabbed her around the waist. “Come on, Granny, let me help carry your bag. What have you been buying, Granny? Granny, guess what, nobody wants to help me get ready for school. Not Ma, not Pa! And then they’re going to keep me back a year” – he was repeating something he’d often heard at home – “like Dima, and then what? What good’ll I be to anyone? When I can’t read or write?”

But Grandma guessed from the get-go what Yegor was up to.

“What do you want from me? Is it my job to get you ready for school? Haven’t I bought you enough? Me and your grandpa set you up with a bike, and you went and broke it. Racing here and racing there, and you broke it. And when I ask you to bring grass for the rabbits, where d’you get to? And to do some weeding? And to haul water? When there’s work to be done – poof, you’re gone. But then, for the littlest thing, ‘Oh Granny, oh Grandad, work miracles, spoil me rotten’...”

“But Granny,” Yegor whined, knowing that he almost had it in the bag. “I’ll do better, honest. A Pioneer – and I’ll be one soon – would never lie to you. I haven’t been... thinking right, that’s it... Gran. But as soon as I go to school, I’ll have discipline, just like that. It’s what Ma says all the time – look at Dima, she says, he was a goof-off, good for nothing, and now it’s just like he’s someone else, right, Gran? But what can I do without a uniform? They’ll laugh at me! They won’t let me into the classroom. Then how’m I going to learn to write? I’ll be a big, stupid know-nothing, that’s what...”

Yegor rode the bus to the district center with his grandma and grandpa. Grandma, wearing a light dress on account of the heat, was dozing but kept a tight grip on the purse she held on her knees that hid a wallet with her pension and a notebook where her daughter had written everything Yegor would need for school. Grandpa was looking out the window, surveying the collective farm fields, cursing the workers for not doing a proper job, and saying that if he were the farm chairman, he’d make it hot for Team Seven and wouldn’t even register their workday units so they wouldn’t get their pay.

But Yegor was gazing out the window, his eyes squinched up with happiness, He was dreaming of lining up in his new uniform for the special ceremony on that first day, of Sergei Sergeyevich, the deputy principal, coming out carrying a big bell decorated with a scarlet ribbon, of everything around being dappled in the sultry shades of fall, and of the girls being all dressed up, their white hair ribbons quivering like cabbage white butterflies. And of himself giving Petya, his sworn enemy, a good thump in the back with his school bag and pulling the neighbor girl Lyuda’s braid for being a show-off and always getting good grades.

At the district center, Grandma took Yegor off to a big store where they stood in a huge long line with a bunch of other first-graders. A chunky saleswoman who really could not have cared less picked out a dark blue suit and a white shirt. They didn’t have dress shoes in the right size, which upset Yegor so much, he almost started bawling. Grandma bought him sneakers instead, telling him that the autumn was short anyway and the snow would be flying soon and boots would do just fine then. The stationery department sold them notebooks complete with blotting paper, a set of those colored rods in a little box, pens in all sorts of colors, and even a pencil case. Yegor was most ecstatic over his new pencil sharpener and promptly used it to sharpen a ballpoint pen. The wooden ruler, the eraser, the colored pencils, the neatly bound student logbook whose pages some caring person had laid out all nice for him, and the box of modeling clay were stashed in a blue school bag that gave off a positively befuddling odor of knowledge. Yegor clasped his treasure tight and grasped at last that school was just the best.

While Grandpa was having a beer, or two, at the bus terminal, Grandma, groaning and lamenting that school cost an arm and a leg, was buying her grandson, socks, t-shirts, and new sweatpants.

Back at home, Mom took Yegor’s riches and locked them away in a closet.

“I know you,” she groused at him. “You’ll drag it all out to show your pals, and lose things or break things, and exactly who can afford to go and buy it again?”

But Yegor, knowing that he now had everything he would need, was a happy ticketholder on the train of his dreams. And off he went to while away the last few joyful days, in freedom.