My Several Selves, Imaginary and Real 21 страница
I returned to Fyeny a fortnight later with none of my problems solved but feeling somewhat wiser than before.
Being a Favourite
In the wake of that disturbing summer came a disturbing beginning of a new term in my third year at school.
I remember the bitter-sweet flavour of the first evening on my return to Uncle Vladímir’s and Aunt Katia’s melancholy house: sweet because of Zena’s pleasure in seeing me, bitter because of the suspicious and unfriendly look in her mother’s eye, and of the scene which followed on our absconding from the house immediately after supper.
After nearly three months of separation Zena and I felt like talking to each other without witnesses — or rather, Zena was eager to hear all about my doings during that time. We slipped out through the garden door into the gathering dusk and walked to the far corner of the grounds where there was a rickety garden seat behind some berberry bushes. Zena did not have much to tell me. She had stayed at the dacha all the summer, and bathed and swam, it seemed, for most of every day. I told her of Shoora Martynov’s and Vera’s stay at Fyeny, of our escapade in the forest and my visit to Uncle Fyodor’s. The only thing I could not bring myself to tell her was the fate of the injured horse. Zena listened avidly. When I finished, she sighed and said she wished she could have been there, too. I told her she must come next school holidays.
‘They will never let me,’ she said, meaning her parents.
‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘They’re supposed to love me so much that they can’t let me out of their sight,’ said Zena.
Startled by the bitterness of this remark, I protested, without complete conviction, that surely her parents loved her and would want her to enjoy herself.
‘Not they,’ she replied with increasing bitterness. ‘All they want is to keep me here, watching their beastliness to one another.’
I was shocked into silence, appalled not by her judgment on her parents, which I felt to be just, but by the desperate feeling behind her words, as if of a trapped animal. I could find nothing to say which would console her in this desperate situation except to fall back on our longstanding game. I reminded her of her role as Pauline Bonaparte, and of myself as her devoted cousin, Napoleon’s heir, who had come back to her after a long absence abroad. I quoted to her the French proverb about love: ‘L’absence pour l ’amour est comme le vent pour lesjlammes; il eteint le petit et allume le grand . . . ’ I took her hand and suggested she should look up at the stars — a spectacle supposed to induce a peaceful, contemplative mood. She responded, and we both leaned well back, with our faces turned up to the sky. It was almost black and so richly bespangled with patterns of light that we fell silent and remained silent for a couple of minutes. Then Zena asked, dreamily: ‘What is that large greenish star?’
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‘Probably Venus ... or maybe Hesperus, the evening star...’
I was guessing.
‘And where is the Great Bear?’
The Great Bear was the only constellation I could identify with any certainty, but I did not immediately see it. It could be just behind us . . .
Determined to locate it without moving from our seat, we leaned back farther and farther, and suddenly the seat tipped backwards and we were lying on our backs in the long, damp grass. A moment of stunned silence, then a burst of laughter. We laughed with such abandon that we could hardly get up from the ground, could hardly stand on our feet. And the more we laughed, the funnier it seemed. Our stunned moment of silence had been funny . . . the very name ‘Great Bear’ was funny.
‘Where is it. . . the Great Bear? . . . ’ Zena insisted among peals of laughter.
‘There... behind you ... a saucepan with a long handle...’
‘Why - a saucepan? . . . The Bear . . . ’
We could hardly speak for laughter during the next few minutes, and the sudden appearance of Hovra who must have crawled through the bushes, did not detract from our mirth. She told us that bárynia sent her to find us and tell us that she wanted us to come indoors.
As we came into the poorly lit dining-room with its oil-cloth covered table, Aunt Katia frowned at us across her patience cards. Zena and I glanced at one another and again began to laugh. This had nothing to do with Aunt Katia but she took it as a personal affront. She turned on me.
It was I, she said, who had taught Zena to laugh at her mother. I led her out into the garden when she should have gone to bed. I stopped her from doing her homework by inventing all kinds of games. I kept her out in the dark and the cold and would be the one responsible if she caught a bad chill.
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This torrent of accusations caught me unawares and I stood there, speechless for a few moments. Zena, on the other hand, suddenly furious, sprang to my defence.
‘Will you leave Leda alone?’ she shrieked. ‘Why are you always picking on her?’
Her voice must have carried across the drawing-room to my uncle’s study. We heard his door open and his heavy footsteps coming towards us. Aunt Katia pressed her pale lips together, drew herself up and pattered out of the room. My uncle appeared in the doorway.
‘What’s happening?’ he asked, glancing round the room.
‘Nothing . . , ’ Zena muttered, without looking at him.
‘How — nothing? I heard you shouting.’
‘I’m not shouting now.’
‘That’s not a proper answer to give your father. What’s got into you today? You’re not like that when you’re on your own with us. There’s a bad influence on you . . . not too far to seek.’
‘It’s you — no one but you!’ Zena’s voice broke, half-shout, half-sob.
‘What? What are you saying?’
But she ran out of the room and I followed. My heart was beating fast with the violence of this scene. It was distressing, yet gratifying as well. Zena, so much on my side that she was able to stand up to her possessive parents! Zena suddenly showing that she had enough courage and intelligence to see what was happening and to protest against it! And I knew her parents were right when they said that it was my ‘fault’, that it was I who had shown Zena the way. Whatever guilt I felt at causing this scene, it was strongly overlaid with a sense of triumph.
The beginning of the new term was disturbing because I was to lose my favourite teacher, Maria Ivanovna, who was to be replaced by a man teacher, Konstantin Danilovich Shimkóvich. It was the tradition of our school to have women teachers replaced by men as the girls passed into the middle and upper forms. Boys’ secondary and high schools had no women teachers at all. The education authorities must have had reasons for this, though I never heard them made explicit. It was probably assumed that men were better disciplinarians, which would apply more to boys than to older girls, who were on the whole very well behaved in my type of school. Be that as it may, there was unconscious wisdom in this practice — for adolescent girls, as well as boys, had to be helped to grow away from their mothers.
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I was very attached to Maria Ivanovna and grateful to her for being so appreciative of my literary efforts, and I feared the testing that was to come with a new teacher who had the reputation of an ogre. He was said to possess the sharpest, the most sarcastic of tongues, and he would taunt a girl for days with her mistakes, referring to them in and out of context. We heard that he enjoyed reducing girls to tears. If other teachers had favourites, he was given to picking out victims; once he took a dislike to a girl, he was said never to change towards her. What if he took a dislike to me? What if he decided that my compositions were no good? I was half-expecting this to happen, unconsciously assuming that Shimkóvich would set as little value on my achievements as my father had always done. And living as I was with the unsympathetic and critical Martsinovsky parents, I badly needed appreciation and praise to strengthen me against self-doubt and fear of ridicule.
I remember how quiet the class was when Shimkóvich came in to give us his first lesson. As he called our names from the register, he glanced at each girl as she half-rose from her seat to indicate that she was present. He then proceeded to explain what we had to prepare for our next lesson with him, speaking in a husky voice with a distinct ‘seminary accent’, and we could stare at him as much as we liked.
In appearance he was very unlike an ogre — slightly less than medium height, slender, with thin, almost emaciated features and a yellowish complexion. Later we came to know that he was suffering from cirrhosis of the liver —he had been a heavy drinker in his younger days —an addiction to which some of his irritability might have been due. His straight, light-brown hair was brushed back from his forehead and he had a small, well-trimmed beard. I thought he looked a little like Chehov.
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Having finished his exposition, Shimkóvich leaned back and looked us over with a benign air.
‘Who would like to repeat in her own words what I’ve just explained to you?’ he asked.
This was quite a usual procedure, and there were always a few pupils, myself included, who volunteered to summarize for the benefit of the class and perhaps for further clarification what the teacher had been telling us. But this teacher’s redoubtable reputation had inhibited us to such an extent that no one stirred. Even Lena Kazanovich, the madcap who seemed to enjoy being laughed at, remained seated.
Shimkóvich looked quizzical, raised his eyebrows at us, professed himself surprised at our lack of ability or courage. Would he have to call out names, he asked.
I was aware that Anna Avdyéevna, as well as many of my classmates, were looking at me: I had often volunteered to re-tell Maria Ivanovna’s exposition. Some of the girls began to murmur my name. The teacher’s glasses flashed in my direction; behind them I met a pair of smallish, lustreless eyes.
‘No one brave enough?’ he taunted, savouring his contempt.
I was afraid of being laughed at, but being accused of cowardice was even more intolerable. I rose to my feet. Shimkóvich pushed his spectacles up his forehead; his eyes without them looked tired and almost kindly.
‘You would?’ he asked with sudden amiability. ‘Well . . . begin.’
He had been telling us about the place of the peasant poet Koltzov in Russian literature. I did my best to give him the gist of it. Shimkóvich did not interrupt me, only nodded his head once or twice. When I had finished and was told I could sit down, he made no comment on my effort, but wrote something in the register. No teacher ever gave marks for ‘re-telling’ a new lesson, and the whole of the class was agog to see what it was.
There was a scramble to get at the register after Shimkóvich had left the class-room. Elbows dug into ribs and heads collided as the girls jumped on to the rostrum and crowded round the table. A mixture of pride and fear kept me from joining the curious crowd; I waited for them to tell me. I did not have to wait long. Ania Bielynóvich turned a smiling face and a pair of wide-open eyes towards me.
‘He gave you a twelve!’ she announced in a stage whisper. ‘Good for you!’
Other girls were staring at me too. One asked anxiously: ‘Are we to have marks for re-telling now?’ Another declared that Shimkóvich terrified her. ‘Did you notice how angry he was getting because people didn’t volunteer at once?’ ‘Obviously he’s chosen you as his favourite,’ said Mania Komarovskaya with tight lips. ‘Well done!’ commented Katia Kign. Anna Avdyéevna said nothing but I could see that she was pleased. ‘She’s afraid of him, too,’ whispered Liolia Tálina, and broke into irrepressible giggles.
I felt excited, relieved, elated by passing this test — surely it was a proof that the praise Maria Ivanovna had always given me so freely was genuine and not influenced by her personal liking for me. But the elation soon subsided and I began to wonder what would happen when Shimkóvich set us an essay to write.
As a rule we were given the choice of three subjects: a semi-abstract one, asking us to discuss some general statement; a more concrete one, such as a description of a journey or a visit to the theatre; and a third, related to what we had been reading. Themes with a philosophical bias, such as ‘What would you consider as a worth-while purpose in life?’ stimulated me most, but I was also fond of commenting on characters in fiction, especially if they were personally attractive to me.
As luck would have it, one of the subjects Shimkóvich set us for the first lot of essays we had to write, happened to be ‘The Character of Pechorin in The Hero of our Time.’
Pechorin was one of the few characters in Russian classical literature whom I admired and was eager to discuss. Because he was misunderstood and unhappy, I was ready to forgive him his persecution of the ridiculous Grushnftskiy and his cruel treatment of Princess Mary. I knew that Lermontov was supposed to have been influenced by Byron when creating this ‘Byronic’ character, and I mentioned this briefly in my essay. The rest of it, however, became an apologia for Pechorin. I explained that he behaved in the way he did because he had been cruelly treated during his most impressionable years, and I accompanied my argument with many quotations from the original.
The hour we were allowed for writing was barely enough to put down all I wanted to say, though I wrote fast and easily. Shimkóvich set us our subjects and went out, leaving us in charge of Anna Avdyéevna. But when he returned the essays had to be collected, whether finished or unfinished, and he took the pile of exercise books away, to the accompaniment of faint moans and sighs which made him smile dryly and drew a warning hiss from Anna Avdyéevna.
We had to wait over a week before he brought them back, and everyone in the class sat up, tense with anticipation, when he walked in with a stack of many-coloured exercise books under his arm. Everyone was trying to guess whose book was on the top of the pile because, as a rule, it would be the one to be discussed. With Maria Ivanovna it was usually the best essay, that is, one of mine. But Shimkóvich was unpredictable: he might even open up by castigating the writer of the worst essay.
As he picked up the book, I recognized it as mine and held my breath.
‘This is a very interesting essay,’ he began.
Was he being ironical? My tiresome body reacted by a ringing noise in my ears and a tingling sensation spreading from my head to my toes.
‘The writer has obviously fallen under the spell of the character she discusses,’ he continued. ‘There’s nothing funny in this,’ he remarked sharply, glancing over his spectacles in the direction from which a faint titter was heard. ‘She has treated the subject seriously and was able to express her views with a commendable clarity and even eloquence. My point is that she has taken the character’s opinion of himself at its face value, and I do not happen to agree with her. Our disagreement merits discussion . . . ’
He went on for the next quarter of an hour, reading extracts from my essay and adding his comments to each quotation. In his opinion Pechorin was merely a poseur and a trouble-maker, an egoist who cared for no one but himself, an unscrupulous Don Juan who gave himself Byronic airs. Wealthy upper classes, he continued, produced such types by the dozen in Lermontov’s day, and the poet meant to satirize them, but perhaps he was not quite single-minded about this. Such types should be shown for what they are — mere drones, of no use whatever to the community. They ‘go mad from too much fat’ — z zhiroo biesiatza — Shimkóvich savoured this crude popular saying as he quoted it, and for a moment I felt an intense dislike for him. By the time he had finished talking, my apologia for Pechorin was torn to shreds, and I was shaken and burning with confusion, yet obstinately unconvinced.
Shimkóvich laid my essay aside and started on another. I was now sure that I would not get more than ten marks for it — something that had never happened before. I also knew that I should never be Shimkóvich’s favourite and that I was not going to like him. For however much I admired revolutionaries, it was not on account of their ‘usefulness to the community’ but because of their courage in defiance, their rebellion against ‘the oppressors’ and the terror and pity which their destiny aroused in me. My view of life was deeply and passionately romantic: the French revolution was right in deposing the king, but I admired also the aristocrats who went to the guillotine with flowers in their buttonholes and a smile on their lips. Shimkóvich’s scornful reference to the ‘upper classes’ struck me as spiteful and in bad taste. I recollected what my sister had told me: he was the son of a village priest and the grandson of a peasant; he had received his education at a village school and a seminary, and he was proud of it. My sister got on very well with him, but then, she worshipped Tolstoy who believed in simple life and dressed as a peasant.
These thoughts and many others whirled through my head while the teacher’s voice droned on, commenting on more essays, causing blushes and shamefaced grins to appear on many faces. He stopped a few minutes before the break to set us our task for the next lesson. As soon as he had left the room, the monitors pounced upon the pile of essays and began distributing them. Some of the girls pretended to be so frightened of seeing their marks that they peeped inside their books and hurriedly closed them again. Others boasted of unexpected successes. ‘I’ve got a ten, I’ve got a ten!’ Liolia Talma sang and giggled excitedly.
Alma Fibikh stuck a sharp chin into my shoulder trying to look into my book as I braced myself to open it.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘A twelve minus! And what a lot of writing underneath ! ’
It looked incredible but it was true: Shimkóvich had given me full marks with only a minus for what he pleased to call my ‘mistaken conclusions’. Half a page below was covered with small spidery writing in red ink, more or less repeating what he had said earlier in the lesson. To me, however, it was the last sentence that mattered — ‘Although in my opinion the writer has failed to prove her thesis, she has considerable literary resources at her disposal.’
I thought the two Komarovskayas looked disappointed and wondered why they seemed to be so eager to see me fall from grace. They always vied with one another to do things for Anna Avdyéevna, and it must have hurt them to find me regarded by everyone as her ‘favourite’, without apparently doing anything special to merit this. And now the most exacting of our teachers was on the way to singling me out as his best pupil! They clearly felt this to be terribly unfair. Yet I did not see how I could be blamed for what was happening. In fact, I could have told them that being Anna Avdyéevna’s favourite was far from an unmixed blessing, and I was soon to discover how awkward could become the role of Shimkóvich’s best pupil.
Of course, it was flattering to have my essays read aloud to the class as examples of good writing; gratifying to be complimented on the quickness and appositeness of my replies to questions on literary subjects, even when these compliments were so wrapt up in circumlocution as to be almost incomprehensible. Shimkóvich often used clerical turns of speech and mannerisms of pronunciation peculiar to the seminary, but as he was clearly doing this deliberately, no one found it ridiculous. In any case his pupils feared and respected him too much to giggle during his lessons, unless he himself gave us a sign that his remarks were intended to make us laugh.
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