Everything Begins In Childhood

I heard about the price from Zhenya Suchkov, who had recently taken up residence in our building. Zhenya wanted to become a physician and hoped to enter the medical school in Tashkent, in the evening department. He didn’t dream of making it into the daytime department where the competition was over twenty applicants per slot. “If only we had twenty-five thousand. That would be quite a different story. We would buy a Volga, and onward! You can only drive into the daytime department in a Volga,” Zhenya used to say with bitterness. His father was a military man, but he didn’t have twenty-five thousand, nor even ten thousand. Zhenya tried to enter the medical school without pulling strings or paying a bribe for two years in a row. He didn’t succeed. But he was a persistent young man: he went to the old Russian town of Tver and managed to make it into the evening department there. He either did it himself or with someone’s help.

Everyone knew about the bribes paid for entering college. And, of course, everybody was outraged. But it didn’t occur to anyone to protest, to fight that insolent bribery. Corruption was everywhere. It corroded the country like rust. People had grown used to it. And that was, probably, the most dreadful thing.

Yes, I overlooked one “trifle.” If you, for some reason, were not a Komsomolets (for those who don’t know: a member of the Young Communist League), you needn’t even try to enter college. They wouldn’t admit you, without even giving you a reason.

* * *

So, what could I possibly count on?

My parents began to think and worry about that issue much earlier than I, and in a different way. The question of bribes wasn’t discussed; there was no money for bribes. Something else was discussed: who could help and where did they have any acquaintances. No matter how much they discussed it, it always boiled down to one and the same person: Uncle Misha, Papa’s brother.

Uncle Misha was an “important person,” one who could have helped under the circumstances: he taught physics at the Tashkent Pedagogical Institute. Besides, he had been a member of the Institute’s selection committee more than once. What could be better and more reliable? Members of the committee had opportunities: they could ask other teachers not to give a D to their protégé, to push a protégé, even if he or she had received a C, onto the list of the admitted.

I think that my parents, without discussing it with me, counted on Misha’s help. When I entered the tenth grade, I was glad that the choice had been made without my participation. I had hesitated and suffered until it all became clear at last – there was simply no other way to do it. On top of that, I liked natural sciences, though I wasn’t an A student. After all, there was nothing wrong with becoming a physics teacher. Didn’t I want to become a history teacher?

To teach, to be a mentor – I began to think about it as something wonderful, but I did so in a childish way. I remembered, certainly with pleasure, how, after becoming a Young Pioneer in the third grade, I was a leader of the Octobrists. I taught them rules and songs, and they looked at me with respect. I began to consider our physics teacher Izolda Zakharovna a future colleague. By the way, Izolda Zakharovna quite deserved my rapt attention. She was a young, very beautiful, slender blonde with a smile that… sometimes my heart skipped a beat, and I accepted any of her reprimands with delight. And there were quite a few reprimands. Even though Izolda had a seductive smile, she was strict and demanding.

“Yuabov, you haven’t read today’s material closely.”

And that wasn’t the worst. She might say, “Your attitude toward physics isn’t serious.”

That was distressing, right? But Izolda Zakharovna was the only teacher in our school who addressed us in a formal way, “vou,” not “tou.”

In short, I easily reconciled myself to the fact that I would become a physicist. I didn’t have any difficulties on that account. Unfortunately, it turned out that Uncle Misha did have some.

In precisely that year, when I was supposed to enter college, Uncle Misha wasn’t included on the selection committee. For this reason, he found it humiliating to ask other teachers not to make it hard on his nephew, to ask that the members of the selection committee include him on the list of the admitted. So, he told my father that he wouldn’t be able to help.

You can imagine how upset my parents were and the anger of my proud, pushy father who had managed to “shove” me into school when I was still a year too young for the first grade.

But still, it was Mama who secured help, thanks to her friendship with Aunt Valya, Misha’s wife. As the girlfriends got together once again, they talked about it, and Valya said, “Ester, don’t worry. I’ll persuade him. Just think – he cannot help! He’ll do it if it’s necessary. He’ll go and ask whoever’s in charge about it.”

* * *

Everything was worked out before my graduation exams: Misha had agreed to talk to the “proper people,” and he had done so. It meant that I was about to become a college student. The expectation of changes was so strong, so new… Now, it stayed with me all the time.

I was looking over the auditorium, my classmates, the teachers. And, suddenly, perhaps just for a second, it seemed to me that it wasn’t I but some other boy with a crib sheet squeezed in his sweaty palm sitting at the long table, and I was looking at him from afar, looking at my childhood…

* * *

“That’s it, boys and girls… Hand in your compositions.” I fell back to earth. I gathered my papers and walked to the teachers’ table.

The End

* * *

Cover and illustrations are by Alexander Valdman

Literary Editor Raisa Mirer