Alexander Hertzen once said, "Nothing ennobles youth so much as a strongly awakened interest in humanity." When I recall how my children and their school comrades were brought up, I think: Yes, it was just that which made their youth inspired and beautiful. Everything which took place in our country and beyond its frontiers concerned them directly and was their personal affair.
Zoya and Shura grew with their country—not as spectators but as active participators in everything that went on around them. A newly built factory, the daring idea of a Soviet scientist, the success of Soviet musicians at an international competition—it was all a part of their life, inseparable from their personal destiny. They would think about these things, so near and dear to them, and discuss them endlessly at school and at home. And this was their education.
Zoya's talk with the Secretary of the District Committee did not just stay in her mind. It lodged itself in her memory, and every word he had spoken that day, the day of her second birth, became a law for her.
Zoya had always been surprisingly exact and conscientious about carrying out her duties. But now she put every ounce of her strength, all her heart and soul into every task she was entrusted with. For now she knew for a certainty that her work was a part of the great common task outlined by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
Very soon after entering the Komsomol Zoya was elected organizer of a Komsomol group. She at once made out a list of Komsomol assignments. "Everyone who calls himself a Komsomol member must have a Komsomol job," was her motto. She asked everybody what they were interested in and what work they wished to do. "Then the work will go better," she remarked when talking to me. She knew most of the answers beforehand for she had taken good notice of her classmates. The list of duties was long and detailed: one was responsible for schoolwork, another for physical culture, a third—for the wall newspaper…There was a job for everyone. Zoya and a few other Komsomol members were to teach some illiterate women in one of the houses in Staropetrovsky Street.
"That's a difficult job," I told Zoya. "And it's a long way off, and you won't very well be able to drop it. Have you thought of that?"
"What are you talking about, Mummy!" Zoya flared up. "Drop it? Once we start a job…"
On her first free evening Zoya set off for Staropetrovsky Street. When she came back she told us that her pupil was an elderly woman who could neither read nor write but was willing to learn.
"Just think, she can't even write her name properly!" said Zoya. "She's up to her neck in work—housework and children. But she will study, I'm sure. She was pleased to see me and called me 'my pet'…
Zoya borrowed a book from me on the method of teaching people to read and write, and sat up till late at night over it. She began visiting her pupil twice a week, and nothing—neither rain, nor snow, nor tiredness—could stop her.
"If there's an earthquake she'll go just the same. If there's a fire she'll still say she cannot let her Lydia Ivanovna down," Shura would say.
And although sometimes there were irritation and mockery in his voice, he often went out to meet Zoya after her lessons, because the autumn was wet and gloomy, and we were worried about Zoya coming home in the darkness and the mud. Shura rather liked going to meet his sister and accompanying her home. Let Zoya feel what it meant to have a brother—a protector, a supporter, a man in the family!
Shura, broad-shouldered and strong, was taller now than Zoya.
"Look what muscles!" he loved to say.
And Zoya would answer in happy pride and wonder, "Yes, Mama, feel what muscles he's got—they're like iron!"
One day I brought home three tickets for a concert in the Great Hall of the Conservatory. They were playing Chaikovsky's Fifth Symphony. Zoya was very fond of it, and assured us that every time she heard it the music brought her some new delight.
"The more familiar the music is, the more it affects you. I've had proof of that so many times," she told me once.
Zoya looked very glad when I brought the tickets, but suddenly she seemed to groan inwardly. She put her forefinger to her lips and bit it slightly, as she always did when she suddenly remembered something that had escaped her memory.
"But, Mama, it's on Thursday!" she cried. "I can't go. I go to Lydia Ivanovna on Thursdays."
"What nonsense!" Shura burst out indignantly. "How tragic if you don't go for once!"
"It's no use. I can't bear to think of her waiting for me for nothing."
"I'll go and warn her that you won't be coming."
"Once you start a job you ought to finish it. She waiting for me to come for the lesson and I go to a concert? No, I can't do that."
And Zoya did not attend that Chaikovsky concert.
"There's character for you!" Shura kept saying with a mixture of indignation and involuntary respect for his sister in his voice.
Next: New Year's Eve