It was New Year's eve 1939.
Zoya came home from school and told me that the girls in her class had been writing each other New Year's wishes. You have to burn the paper with the wish written on it and then swallow the ashes just as the Kremlin clock strikes midnight.
"Those girls!" scoffed Shura.
"Perhaps I won't swallow mine," laughed Zoya, "I don't suppose it tastes very nice, but I don't mind reading it."
She took out of her pocket a small note, carefully folded and sealed, and read it out loud:
"Zoya, do not judge people so strictly. Don't take everything so much to heart. Know that nearly all people are egotists, flatterers and insincere, and that you cannot rely on them. Take no heed of their words. Such are my wishes to you for the New Year."
Zoya's frown deepened with every word, and when she had finished it she threw the note violently aside.
"If you think that about people, why live?" she said.
Zoya was soon carried away by the preparations for the New Year's Eve fancy-dress ball. The girls had decided to dress up in the national costumes of the Soviet Union. We thought for a long time what we should dress Zoya in.
"As a Ukrainian," Shura suggested. "She's got good eyes and her eyebrows are all right. Why shouldn't she be a black-brewed Ukrainian lass? She has an embroidered blouse and a skirt. All she needs are beads and ribbons."
Later that evening, when we were alone together, Shura said to me, "Listen here, Mum, we ought to buy Zoya some new shoes. All the girls in the class have got shoes with some special kind of heels—not very high but still..
"Medium heels," I prompted him.
"That's it. And Zoya's wearing the same as boys do."
"We shan't manage it this month, Shura."
"But I don't need a new shirt. And I don't really need a cap."
"Your hat is not fit to be seen."
"But, Mama, I'm a boy and Zoya's a girl. Grown-up, too. It means more to her."
And indeed, it did mean a lot to her.
I remember coming home once and finding Zoya in front of the mirror, trying on a dress of mine. On hearing my footsteps she turned round quickly.
"How do I look?" she asked with a shy smile.
She liked trying on my dresses, and took great joy in every new purchase. She never asked me to buy her new things, and was always content with what I made for her myself. Nevertheless Shura was right: she could not help caring about it.
We scraped together the necessary sum, and after a hot argument with us, Zoya went and bought herself a pair of black shoes with medium heels.
We also got up a New Year costume with beads and ribbons. We washed and ironed Shura's shirt and arrayed him in a new tie. And off my children went to school, smart and excited. I stood for a long time at the window, watching them go.
It was a surprisingly light calm evening. Outside, the fluffy snowflakes kept falling slowly. Zoya and Shura will pass through this snowy stillness and plunge right into the colourful and noisy throng, so merry and young; and from the bottom of my heart I wished that the whole of the New Year would for them be just as bright, gay and happy.
They did not come back till early morning; it had been quite a ball at school, with music and "dancing till you dropped," as Shura put it.
"We played at Post, and some nut kept on writing to Zoya that she's got beautiful eyes. Really he did! And in the end he even burst into poetry! Here, listen to this!"
Shura stood up, struck a pose, and hardly able to restrain his laughter read the lines:
Such a clear-eyed lass you are—
My heart is fit to die!
And all your soul, so great and deep,
Is shining in your eye.
And all three of us laughed away.
Towards the end of the winter it happened that the very girl who had written Zoya the New Year wish about human egotism and of how one can never rely on people, stopped teaching her housewife-pupil.
"It's a very long journey," she explained to Zoya, her group organizer. "And they give us so much homework to do! I simply haven't the time for the job. Take it off my hands."
Zoya's eyes were black with anger when she told me about it. "That's something I cannot understand. She undertook the job and then dropped it! And she did not even think that by doing so she was letting everybody else down, not only herself. Does she call herself a Komsomol girl? And suppose she happens to meet this woman in the street—how can she look her in the face? And everyone in the class?"
Zoya herself did not miss giving her lessons once. One Thursday she had a splitting headache, but she overcame it and went just the same.
Shura and I would always be informed quickly and in detail of every 'success on the part of Zoya's pupil.
"Lydia Ivanovna remembers all the letters already…
"Lydia Ivanovna can already read in syllables.
"Lydia Ivanovna can read fluently now!" Zoya at last informed us triumphantly. "Remember how she couldn't even sign her name? And now her handwriting is getting good."
That evening when she went to bed Zoya said, "You know, Mama, I have been going about all the week thinking what good thing has happened to me. And then it came to me in a flash: Lydia Ivanovna can read! Now I understand why you became a teacher!"
Next: Sad Days