"They were very glad to see me at school," said Zoya thoughtfully. "Very glad ... and very considerate. Just as if…as ill were made of glass and might break at any moment. And yet it was very nice to feel that they cared."
Once Zoya came back from school accompanied by a round-faced, rosy-cheeked girl, the very picture of health. It was Katya Andreyeva, one of my children's classmates.
"Hello, how are you!" she said smiling and shaking my hand.
"Katya volunteered to coach me in Maths," said Zoya.
"Can't Shura do that? Why bother Katya?"
"You see, Lyubov Timofeyevna," said Katya seriously, "Shura has no teaching ability. We've gone through a lot without Zoya, and it must all be explained to her very gradually and systematically. But Shura. …I've heard him explaining things: one, two, three and that's that. And that won't do."
"Well, seeing he has no teaching ability…:
"Don't laugh, Mummy," Zoya put in. "Shura really can't explain things properly. But Katya here…"
Katya, I soon found, was indeed good at it. She did not hurry, she did not go on to the next step until she made sure that Zoya had taken in everything. I heard Zoya say to her once, "You are wasting so much time on me."
And Katya replied hotly:
"What are you saying! While I'm explaining it to you I learn it all so well myself that I don't have to go over it again at home. It comes to the same thing either way."
Zoya used to tire quickly. This did not escape Katya. She would push the book aside and say, "I feel rather played out. Let's talk about something else for a bit."
Sometimes they would go outside, take a walk, then come back and sit down again to their work.
"Are you planning to become a teacher?" said Shura jokingly one day.
"Yes, I am," answered Katya seriously.
Katya was not the only one who visited my children. Ira would drop in, some boys came: modest, shy Vanya Nosenkov, Petya Simonov, who loved nothing like a football game and an argument, gay energetic Oleg Balashov, a very handsome boy with a clear noble forehead. Occasionally Yura Braudo would look in, a tall lanky youth with a slightly ironical expression on his face, a pupil in the parallel class. And then our room would echo with noise and laughter. The girls would cast aside their textbooks, and the conversation would be about everything at once.
"D'you know, folks, Tarasova is not the only one who plays Anna Karenina, there's Elanskaya too," Ira would say. And at once a hot argument would start over which actress had a deeper, truer understanding of Tolstoy.
Once Oleg, who dreamed of becoming a flyer, came to us straight from the cinema, where he had just seen a film about Chkalov. He was full of it.
"There was a man!" he kept repeating. "Not only an extraordinary flyer, but a wonderful man. And with such a fine sense of humour. You know, when he flew across the North Pole to America in 1937, the reporters there asked him, 'Are you rich, Mr. Chkalov?' 'Yes,' he answers, 'very. I've got a hundred and seventy million.' The Americans just gasped. 'A hundred and seventy million! In rubles? Dollars?' And Chkalov comes back calm as you like, 'A hundred and seventy million people working for me, just as I work for them'."
The children laughed.
Another time Vanya read a poem called The General, dedicated to the memory of Maté Zalka, who was killed in Spain. I remember that evening very well: Vanya, his face thoughtful, sat at the table, and the rest were grouped about, some on the bed, some on the window sill.
It's cold tonight in the mountains.
Worn out by scouting for days,
He warms his cold and tired hands
Over the campfire's yellow blaze.
The coffeepot quietly simmers.
The tired soldiers sleep.
The Aragon laurel glimmers
And rustles its lazy leaf.
And suddenly it seems to the General
That the laurel's branches outspread
Are his native Hungarian time trees,
Whispering over his head.
Vanya's reading was simple, seemingly without pathos, but we could all hear a great heart beating passionately in the short restrained lines. And Vanya's gaze became unusually tense and firm, as if the boy himself were looking proudly and sorrowfully into the gloom of the faraway Aragon night.
His native land is far away,
But wherever he goes he feels
The Hungarian sky above him,
Hungarian earth 'neath his heels.
The Hungarian crimson banner
Is flaming in his hand,
And wherever he fights he's fighting
For his own Hungarian land.
And not long ago, in Moscow,
I heard from many who cried
That hit by a German grenade he was
In the battle of Weska, and died.
I refuse to believe that rumour,
And know: he is fighting in Spain,
And before he dies he'll be welcomed
In his own Budapest again.
While in the distant sky of Spain
The German vultures fly,
Do not believe the rumours
Of the General's death, for they lie.
He's alive. He's somewhere near Weska,
Where the tired soldiers sleep;
Above him the laurel glimmers
And rustles its lazy leaf.
And suddenly it seems to the General
That the laurel's branches outspread
Are his native Hungarian lime trees
Whispering over his head.
Vanya stopped. No one moved or said a word. We were all swept, as if by a hot wind, by the emotion o[ those days when every heart was swayed by the events in Spain, when the words "Madrid," "Guadalajara," "Weska," were near and familiar, and our hearts beat faster at every piece of news from those distant fronts.
"Ah, that was good!" Shura broke the silence.
And immediately questions poured in from all sides, Who wrote it? where's it from?"
"It was written back in '37. I found it not long ago in magazine. Good, isn't it?"
"Let us copy it out!" begged the children in chorus.
"Spain…There's only been one blow as bad as that since then—the fall of Paris," Vanya remarked.
"Yes," went on Zoya, "I remember that summer day very well. The newspaper came, and there it was—Paris taken! And it was so terrible, so shameful!"
"I remember that day, too," said Vanya slowly. "You just couldn't believe that the fascists were walking about Paris. Paris under the Nazi jackboot! The Paris of the Communards!"
"I wish I had been there! I would have fought for Paris like our men did in Spain—to the last drop of blood!" said Petya Simonov quietly, and no one was surprised at his words.
"I dreamed of doing that too: first about Spain, then of fighting against the White Finns, and I missed everything…" said Shura, heaving a great sigh.
I listened to them and thought: what fine people are growing up…!
That winter I got to know Zoya and Shura's classmates well, and would often recognize in them the traits I knew so well in my own children. And I thought: that is how it should be. A family is not a closed box. Nor is school. Family, school and children live by what moves, worries and gladdens our Country; and everything going on around them educates our children.
Look, for example, how many creators of wonderful inventions in the past remained unknown! But now everyone who works hard and well and with talent becomes famous. And everyone who creates is surrounded with the respect and love of the people. Take this girl textile worker who has invented a new method of producing many times more beautiful strong cloth than before. Her example has inspired the textile workers all over the Soviet Union. Or this girt tractor driver—she works so cleverly and well that her name, unknown yesterday, is now loved and respected by all. Here is a new book for children, Timur and His Squad, a story about honour, about the noble feeling of friendship, about respect for human dignity. Here is a new film called The Dawn of Paris. It is about the French people, about the Polish patriot Dombrowski who fought for the freedom and happiness of his native land on the barricades of Paris. And the children drink in greedily everything good, honest, brave and kind, of which these books and films are full, of which every day of our life is full.
And I see that although there is nothing dearer to my children and their friends than their Motherland, the whole wide world is also dear to them. For them France is not the country of Pétain and Laval, but the land of Stendhal and Balzac, the land of the Communards. The English are in their eyes the descendants of Shakespeare. The Americans are the fellow countrymen of Lincoln and Washington, Mark Twain and Jack London. And although they know that the Germans have brought ghastly, devastating war on the world, have seized France, crushed Czechoslovakia and Norway—the real Germany is for them not that which produced Hitler and Goebbels, but the land of Beethoven, Goethe and Heine, the land where the great Marx was born. There has been fostered in them a deep and burning love for their own Country and respect for other peoples, for everything beautiful which has been created by all the nations of the world.
All that the children have seen around them, all that they have been taught in school has fostered in them genuine humanism and a passionate desire to build and not to destroy.
And I believed deeply in their future, that they would all be happy and that their life would be good and lull of light.
Next: Green is the Colour of Youth