the most final
concluding work

The school principal, Pyotr Ivanovich Bykovsky, unlike his nickname, Bykovsky the Cosmonaut, had a Herculean physique. When all the classes were lined-up in the long—from the Teachers’ Room and all the way to the gym—corridor, the sizable floorboards, paint-coated in red, creaked pitifully under his measured steps alongside the ranks of students.

His mighty skull’s dome with trailing locks across the wide bold, towered half-head above the tallest, graduating, class. When the drowsy look of his big eyes sent a-coasting from under his jutting jumbo eyelids over your face, your innards involuntary contracted, even though you knew perfectly well that the mail received from the Children Room of Militia had nothing to do with you, and the principal would call another guy to get out of the ranks and face the lined-up schoolmates.

So, no surprise that when our Mistress, Albina Grigoryevna, told me to stay after classes and go to the Principal’s Office, my heart sank… In that sustained state—the heart sunk and the spleen contracted—I gave the high door of his office a meek knock, and stepped in followed by partly puzzled, yet mostly farewell, glances from Kuba and Skully… Bad luck about your karma, pal, see you in some thereafter life, maybe…

In the long and narrow office room of one window at its far end, Pyotr Ivanovich sat at his desk put in profile to the door and hardly reaching up to his waist. Slight motion of his chin sent me to get seated on one of the chairs lined-up alongside the wall opposite his desk.

Uneasily, I obeyed and he picked up a thin copybook from his desk, opened it and froze in a suspensive silence boring the pages with his fixed look. Occasionally, an irate twitch wrung his thick, clear-cut, lips.

“It is your essay on Russian literature,” announced he at last, “And you’re writing here that in summertime the sky is not as blue, as in fall.”

He consulted the copybook and read the line up, “In summer it looks as if sprinkled with dust at the edges… Hmm… Where could you have ever seen such a sky?”

I recognized the incomplete quotation from the opening sentence in my essay on free subject 'I am sitting by the window and thinking…' which was our home assignment the week before.

“In Nezhyn Street,” answered I.

He began to drive it home to me, that it absolutely didn’t matter – be it Nezhyn Street, or Professions Street, or Depot Street, but the sky always remained the same, both in the center and along its edges. And the blue was always blue, it stayed as blue in summer as it did in fall because blue was always blue.

At my timorous attempt to maintain a slightly different view on the sky blueness, he once again rolled out his weighty arguments and I surrendered.

“Yes, the same,” said I.

“That’s good. Now, we've agreed that this here sentence of yours is wrong.”

And in the same unalterable manner, we proceeded to agree about the wrongness of my views. With stolid ponderosity, he shattered each and every sentence in my essay to pieces, one by one, and, after a short, forlorn, resistance, I gave in and surrendered them, one after another.

From the left bottom corner in the window, thin iron bars fanned up diagonally, the walls squeezed the high ceiling of the corridor-like office to narrow its span, the heavy desk towered over the disciplined row of the lined-up chairs, the bulging sphere of Principal’s skull hovered over the desk with his crosswise hair wisps unable to hide the bald and only clinging to it like the cobweb over a still globe in the locked storeroom of School House Manager…

And I recanted, line by line, from the beginning to the essay’s end, each and every word that seemed so true and right to me when writing them. Yes, Pyotr Ivanovich, you’re right, I was completely wrong…

I was wrong refusing to use the template suggested by the teacher to start the essay smoothly: “Walking down the street, I heard schoolchildren arguing about Tatyana Larina from the immortal poem by Pushkin and, when already home, I got seated by the window and started to think once again about Tatyana, analyzing her social background and her love to Russian nature…”

Yes, it’s a completely wrong statement that schoolchildren would rather discuss motorcycles, karate, and fishing but not Tatyana Larina’s characteristic features. That’s absolutely thoughtless and erroneous…

When I agreed with him on all the points, he handed me the copybook and said that I could go, yet I should think it over again.

I went out to the empty school. From the entrance door came clangs of tin pails against the iron sinks and the swish of water from the taps filling the pails—the janitors had already started washing the floors. I numbly went by those 5 taps without looking at my reflection passing thru 5 mirrors above the sinks.

From the tall brick porch, I descended with a dizzy feeling that I was not myself, and not sure of now what, and how, and whereto. Probably, Galileo had the same odd feeling right after betrayal of his discovery.

At the gate, I stopped and opened my copybook. Underneath the essay there was put a fractional mark, the denominator (content evaluation) was blank, and the divisor (grammar evaluation) – 4. Below the incomplete mark, in the same red ink, Zoya Ilyinichna turned out, in that diligently pretty handwriting of hers, four pages of her own essay that I was wrong and belied the Soviet youth. I should have recollected the winged words from the novel How the Steel was Tempered, as well as the heroes of Krasnodon underground resistance, and the heroes of the Red Army…

~ ~ ~

Not every Konotop school could boast of a room so properly equipped for the classes in Physics as that at School 13. The blue blinds hung from the iron rings running along the string-cables fixed over the windows. They were pulled together before demonstrating educational films on this or that subject in the curriculum. But there was no screen – the films were projected onto the large square of frosted glass frame in the wall above the blackboard, like, a 2 m x 2 m TV for you.

The film projector itself was located in the back room behind the wall with that frame. Besides the aforesaid projector and round tin cans with the films, the room was furnished with lots of shelves to keep all kinds of lenses, tripods, rheostats, weighs and other untold treasures in boxes, caskets, cases to be used for staging various experiments from the textbooks on Physics and Chemistry. And on a separate stool, there also stood the gray trunk-like tape recorder “Saturn” loaded with the tape on two white reels.

The film projectionist and keeper of all the hoard was Teacher of Physics, Emil Grigoryevich Binkin, a calm handsome man of about thirty, with his eyebrows slightly twitched up his straight forehead to meet the curly short wisps of black hair, well matching the swarthy skin in his face. During the breaks, he stacked and reshuffled the things amassed in the treasury, while softly whistling all kinds of melodies, so clearly and subtly, without the slightest clam.

I had a wary attitude towards him. First, for terminating my unauthorized reading at his Physics lessons…

Normally, each day I smuggled to school a book from the Club library and at the lessons the hinged part in the desktop was flipped over to open the book placed upon the inner shelf-receptacle for a schoolbag and – full ahead, Captain Blood! Let’s board the bastards!

Teachers were also happy to have so quiet a boy in the class, no trouble at all. Still, some of them made occasional attempts at breaking the equilibrium of the serene co-existence because I obviously was busy with anything but their lesson.

“Ogoltsoff! What have I just said?”

But even when engulfed by adventures in a different, Antarctic-Tropical-Martian, world, I did not cut the ties with the surrounding school nuts and bolts completely. Some tiny buoy at the edge of my consciousness kept still receiving, in a form of muffled background, the concurrent sounds in the classroom.

“Ogoltsoff!”

Aha, it’s time to come up to the surface… The memory rewinds the recording of background for some half-minute back.

“You, Alla Iosifovna, have just said that ‘read’ is an irregular verb.”

“Get seated!!”

And then at the Class Parents Meeting, she would complain to Mother, “I do see that he’s busy with something miles away from the lesson it’s only that I can’t run him down.”

Binkin had no problems with running me down. He did not demand to repeat anything, he asked questions instead, “So, what conclusion do we come here to? Ogoltsoff?”

And that’s where no mechanical rewind of the previously registered background could come to the rescue. How to present conclusions from you didn’t know what, especially when in sight of the dark ironic eyes above the thin rim of his glasses? He was killing with his rock-solid calmness and seemed to know exactly what page the book for bootleg reading was open at. So I had to sometimes skim the Physics textbook at home and stray-reading at school was rescheduled to fill Chemistry and Algebra classes. No, I couldn’t brush Binkin off.

Only once I did come to grapples with him on a thermodynamics issue when he asked whether the temperature of the boiled potato and the soup around it was the same. I stated that, no, it’s different.

“Alas, but the laws of Physics confirm it’s the same in both.”

“Well, yesterday, I ate soup for the midday meal and it was fine, but then I bit thru a potato in the soup and burned my tongue. As a scorched victim, I plea the Physics to revise their law-enforcement policy among unruly potatoes.”

The supportive solidarity giggles from the classmates mingled with bell in its deafening uproar of a ring for the break…

That is why I was so astounded when our Class Mistress, Albina Grigoryevna, announced that on Sunday, at 11 o’clock, I should be at School 11 for the City Physics Olympiad…