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The only things I have left of my classmates now are my memories and a single photograph. It’s a group portrait, with our homeroom teacher in the center, the girls around her, and the boys at the edges. The photograph has faded, and since the photographer carefully focused the camera on the teacher, the edges, smudged even when the picture was taken, have now completely blurred; sometimes I wonder if they have blurred because the boys of our class long ago passed into nothingness, before they had a chance to finish growing up, and their features have been dissolved by time.
(not really glowfic; see continuity description)
In the photo, we were class 7’B’. After our final exams, Iskra Polyakova dragged us all to the photographer’s on Revolution Avenue: she loved arranging all kinds of activities.
“We’ll get a picture taken after seventh grade, and then after tenth grade,” she expounded. “It will be so interesting to look at them when we become old grannies and grandpas!”
We crowded into the narrow waiting room; before us, hurrying to be immortalized, were three newlywed couples, an old lady with her grandchildren, and а squad of forelocked Cossacks. They sat in a row, all picturesquely leaning on their swords, and stared directly at our girls with their shameless Cossack eyes. Iskra didn’t like this at all; she immediately requested that we be called when the line got to us, and took the whole class to the neighboring park. And there, to prevent us from running away, picking fights, or, God forbid, trampling the grass, she declared herself the Pythia. Lena blindfolded her, and Iskra pronounced our dooms. She was a generous prophetess: each of us could expect a bunch of children and bucketfuls of happiness.
“You will give humanity a new kind of medicine.”
“Your third son will be a brilliant poet.”
“You will build the most beautiful Palace of Pioneers in the world.”
Yes, they were marvelous predictions. It’s only too bad that we never got to visit the photographer a second time, that only two of us became grandpas, and there turned out to be far fewer grannies, too, than there were girls in the photograph of 7’B’. When we came once to a school reunion, our whole class fit in one row. Of the forty-five that had been once in 7’B’, nineteen lived to see grey hairs. Having discovered this, we would no longer show up to school reunions, where the music thundered so loudly and where those younger than us met so happily. They would talk noisily, sing, laugh, and we would want to keep silent. Or, if we’d talk, then...
“The generation that did not know youth will not know old age. A curious detail?”
Joyful voices - “D’you remember? Remember?” - would carry over from the neighboring rows, while we could not reminisce out loud. We would reminisce to ourselves, and over our row there would often hang a harmonious silence.
For some reason, I still don’t want to think about running off from class, about smoking in the boiler room, or about starting horseplay in the entrance hall just to touch, for one moment, the one we loved so secretly we could not admit it to ourselves. For hours, I look at the faded photograph, at the blurred faces of those who are no longer on this earth: I want to understand. After all, none of us wanted to die, right?
We had no idea that beyond the threshold of our classroom, death kept its watch. We were young, and the ignorance of youth is compensated by its belief in its own immortality. But of all the boys that look at me from the photograph, four are still living.
How young we were.
Our clique wasn’t large then, consisting of three girls and three guys: me, Pashka Ostapchuk, and Valka Aleksandrov. We would always get together at Zinochka Kovalenko’s, because Zinochka had a separate room, her parents spent all day at work, and we could feel at ease. Zinochka adored Iskra Polyakova, was friends with Lenochka Bokova; Pashka and I were dedicated athletes and were supposedly “the hope of the school”, and Aleksandrov was an acknowledged inventor. Pashka was considered to be in love with Lenochka, I had a hopeless crush on Zina Kovalenko, and Valka only cared about his own ideas, as Iskra did about her activities. We went to the movies, read aloud those books Iskra deemed worthy, did our homework together - and talked. About books and movies, about friends and adversaries, about the drift of the Sedov, about the Interbrigades, about Finland, about the war in West Europe, and about nothing at all.
Sometimes we were joined by two others. We were friendly towards one of them, and openly hostile to the other.
Every class has its own quiet A student, someone everyone makes fun of, vaguely respects as a curiosity, and resolutely defends from outsiders. Ours was named Vovik Hramov; back in first grade, he had announced that his name was not Vladimir, or even Vova, but specifically Vovik, and so he stayed Vovik forever. He had no casual buddies, far less any true friends, and so he liked to hang out with us. He’d come, sit in a corner, and stay there all evening without opening his mouth, with just his ears sticking up above his head. He had very emphatic ears, made more so by his short haircuts. Vovik had read heaps of books and could solve even the twistiest math problems; we respected him for these qualities, and for never being in the way.
Sashka Stameskin, on the other hand, who occasionally got dragged along by Iskra, was less welcome. He was friends with an incorrigible group and he swore like a sailor. But Iskra took it into her head to reform him, and he stopped being a permanent resident of dark alleys. Pashka and I had been in too many fights with him and his buddies to forget it; my tooth, which Sashka had knocked out personally, would spontaneously start aching the moment I would spot him on the horizon. Friendly smiles were impossible under the circumstances, but Iskra said it would be so, and we obeyed.
Zinochka’s parents encouraged our gatherings. Their family had a girlish bent; Zinochka had been born last, and her sisters had gotten married by then, abandoning their father’s roof. Her mom was the head of the family: her dad had quickly surrendered once he saw the numerical superiority of the opposition. We rarely saw him, because he did not usually come home until nightfall, but if he happened to be early, he would invariably come by Zinochka’s room and would always be pleasantly surprised to see us.
“Ah, the young people? Hello, hello. So what’s new?”
Iskra was our expert on the ‘new’. She possessed a marvelous capacity for conducting intelligent conversation.
“What do you think about the signing of the Nonaggression Pact with Fascist Germany?”
Zina’s dad didn’t think anything about it. He would shrug uncertainly; I would smile apologetically. Pashka and I believed that he was permanently intimidated by the gentle sex.
Though Iskra mostly only asked those questions the answers to which she knew by heart.
“I think this is a great victory for Soviet diplomacy. We have tied the hands of the most aggressive state in the world.”