She was in a hurry to close the door and throw the latch, but her mother had, like always, gotten stuck giving final directions over the threshold. Do laundry, iron, clean, boil, sweep. What a phenomenal number of things she thought of every time she left for work. Usually, Zinochka patiently heard her out, but she had chosen this particular day to be unforgivably slow, while Zinochka’s latest idea demanded action, being unexpected and, Zina suspected, almost criminal.

That morning, Zinochka had dreamed of being on the riverbank. That summer, she had, for the first time, gone to summer camp not as an ordinary girl but as a counselor’s assistant, overflowing with a sense of responsibility. She had spent all summer strictly raising her prickly eyebrows, to the point of leaving a small white vertical crease on the bridge of her nose, a crease Zinochka was very proud of.

But she did not see herself with the campers for whose sake she had to raise her eyebrows, but with the adults: the counselors, teachers, and other people in charge. They were tanning on the beach, and Zinochka was splashing around in the shallows. Then she got yelled at, and Zinochka headed towards the shore, because she had not yet unlearned obedience to her elders.

Coming onto the shore, she felt a look: intent, appraising, masculine. Embarrassed, Zinochka pressed her hands tightly to her wet breast, and attempted to fall onto the sand as quickly as possible. In her sweet half-doze, she imagined that there, on the beach, she had not been wearing a bathing suit. 

Her heart missed a single beat, but Zinochka did not even open her eyes, because the alarm she felt was not frightening. It was some other kind of fear, a kind that she wanted to take a look at. So she hurried her mother out the door, afraid not of the fear, but of the decision to peek into it. A decision that fought with shame within her, and Zinochka wasn’t quite sure yet which would come out on top.

Having thrown the latch on the front door, Zinochka rushed back into the room and to the window, meticulously drawing the curtains. In a feverish hurry, she ripped her clothes off, throwing them every which way: dressing gown, shirt, bra, panties… She only just took hold of them, pulled away the elastic, and immediately let go. The elastic snapped against her tan stomach, and Zinochka came to her senses. She stood there for a moment, waiting for her heart to stop pounding, and then diffidently headed for her mother’s large mirror. She approached it as she would an abyss, feeling every step and not daring to look. Only when she had reached the mirror did she look up.

Reflected in the mirrored cold was a short tanned girl, eyes round with criminal curiosity, gleaming like cherries. She was bronze all over, and only the disproportionately large breasts and the strap traces were implausibly white, as if not belonging to this body. Zinochka was, for the first time, deliberately examining herself as if from the outside, admiring and at the same time fearing that which, it seemed to her, had matured already. But the only thing to have matured was the breasts. The hips were still refusing to fill out, and Zinochka testily smacked them with her hands. The hips could be borne, though: they had widened a smidgen over the summer, and the waistline had formed. The legs, though, the legs were seriously upsetting: they formed some kind of cone-like shape, thinning excessively around the ankles. The calves, too, were still flat, and the knees had not yet become rounded and stuck out like a fifth grader’s. All of it looked simply terrible, and Zinochka anxiously suspected that nature would not help her here. And anyway, all the lucky girls had been born in the previous century when they could wear long dresses.

Zinochka carefully lifted her breasts, as if weighing them: yes, these were adult, full of future expectations. So that was what she would be like: rounded, taut, supple. It would be good, of course, to grow a little bit more, even a tiny bit; Zina went up on tiptoe, estimating what she would be like when she grew, and was generally satisfied with the result. “Just you wait, we’ll see how you’ll look at me soon!” she thought smugly and did a little dance in front of the mirror, humming the popular song “The Wearied Sun”.

And then the sound of a doorbell burst in. It burst in so unexpectedly that Zinochka dashed to the door just as she had been when she was looking in the mirror. Then she darted back, hurriedly and awkwardly pulled on her scattered clothes, and returned to the hallway, buttoning her dressing gown as she went.

“Who’s there?”

“It’s me, Zinochka.”

“Iskra?” Zina unlatched the door. “I would have opened up right away if I’d known it was you. I thought…”

“Sasha’s left school.”

“What do you mean, left?”

“Completely left. You know he only has a mom. And you have to pay for school now, so he left.”

“That’s awful!” Zina sighed dolefully and fell silent.

She was intimidated by Iskorka, even though she was almost a year older. She loved her dearly, obeyed her in moderation, and was intimidated by the forceful way Iskra dealt with problems; with her own, with Zina’s, with anyone’s who she believed was in need of it.

Iskra’s mother still wore a worn leather jacket, boots, and a wide belt that left burning red stripes after its blows. Iskra never told anyone about the stripes, because the shame was more painful. And, too, because she was the only one who knew: her abrasive, harsh, unyielding mother was a deeply unhappy and lonely woman. Iskra pitied her very much and loved her very much.

She had made the fearful discovery that her mom was unhappy and lonely three years ago. She made it by accident, waking up in the middle of the night and hearing dull moaning sobs. The room was dark, and only a strip of light was barely visible beyond the wardrobe that blocked off Iskra’s bed from the rest of the room. Iskra slipped out from under the covers and looked out carefully. And froze. Her mother, bent double and clutching her head in her hands, swayed before the table lit by a newspaper-covered lamp.

“Mama, what’s wrong? What’s the matter, Mama?” Iskra flew over to her mother as her mother slowly got up to meet her with dead eyes. Then she went white, started shaking, and, for the first time ever, whipped off her soldier’s belt.

“Eavesdropping? Spying?”

Iskra would never forget the way her mom had been at that moment. Her dad, on the other hand, she did not remember at all; he had given her her unusual name and disappeared when she had been a small child. And her mother had burnt all his photographs in the stove with her usual ruthlessness.

“He turned out to be a weak man, Iskra. And he had been a commissar once!”

The word “commissar” meant everything to her mom. The concept was her symbol of faith, her symbol of honor, the symbol of her youth. Weakness was the antithesis of this everlastingly youthful, furious word, and Iskra despised weakness more than betrayal.

For Iskra, her mom was not just an example and not even a model. She was the ideal that Iskra aspired to achieve. With just one exception: Iskra hoped to be happier. 

In school, the two friends were well-liked. But if Zinochka was simply liked and easily forgiven, Iskra was not only liked but obeyed. Obeyed by all, but forgiven nothing. Iskra always remembered this and was a little proud of it, even though it was not always easy to be the class conscience.

Iskorka, thought Zinochka, would never caper in front of the mirror mostly naked. The thought made her blush, making her afraid that Iskra would notice her sudden flushing, which made her blush ever more uncontrollably. This internal struggle so occupied her that she could no longer listen to her friend, she could only blush.

“What have you done?” Iskra asked suddenly, her voice stern.

“Me?” Zinochka put on an attitude of extreme surprise. “I haven’t done anything, why would you think that?”

“Don’t you dare lie. I know exactly when you turn red.”

“Well, I don’t know when I turn red. I just turn red and that’s it. I’m just sanguinous, I guess.”

“You’re ridiculous,” Iskra said irritably. “Just go ahead and admit whatever it is. You’ll feel better.”

Zinochka waved her hand hopelessly. “I’m just a tragigirl.”

“A what?”

“A tragic person of the female persuasion. Isn’t that obvious?”

“Chatterbox,” smiled Iskra. “It’s impossible to talk to you seriously.”

Zinochka knew how to divert suspicion from herself, though “to know” is a verb poorly applicable to her. “To feel” generally fit her better. Zina could feel when and how she could alleviate her friend’s stern suspicion, and acted, though according to her intuition, yet almost always unerringly.

“Can you imagine? Sasha, with his talent, will not graduate! Do you comprehend what a loss this is for all us, maybe even for the whole country! He could have become an aircraft designer. Have you seen the models he’s made?”

“Why doesn’t he want to go to a specialized aviation school?”

“Because he has ears!” Iskra snapped. “He chilled his ears when he was a kid and now the medical board won’t pass him.”

“You just know everything, don’t you,” said Zinochka, not without malice. “About the models, about his ears.”

“No, not everything.” Iskra was above such barbs. “I don’t know what we can do for Sasha. Maybe we should go to the komsomol district committee?“

“God, why the district committee?” sighed Zinochka. “Iskra, did you grow out of your bra over the summer?”

“What bra?”

“Your bra. Please don’t attempt to incinerate me with your eyes. I just want to know whether all girls grow sideways or if it’s just me who’s a freak of nature.”

Iskra wanted to get angry, but it was difficult to be angry at the placid Zinochka. And the question she asked, that only she could have possibly asked, was a question for Iskra too, since, for all her air of command, she too was sixteen. But this she could not admit even to her closest friend: this was a weakness.

“That’s no way to talk, Zinaida,” Iskra said very seriously. “No way at all for a komsomolka to talk.”

“I’m only a komsomolka for now. Someday I want to be a woman.”

“How dare you!” her friend exclaimed wrathfully. “No, did you hear that, her dream is to be a woman. Not a pilot, not a parachuter, not even a Stakhanovite, but a woman. A toy in the hands of a man!”

“A beloved toy,” smiled Zinochka. “I won’t settle for being just a toy.”

“Stop talking nonsense!” Iskra shouted. “It’s disgusting to listen to, it’s repulsive. It’s all bourgeois vulgarity, if you really want to know.”

“Well, sooner or later, we’ll have to learn all about it,” Zinochka said reasonably. “But calm down. Let’s talk about Sasha instead.”

Iskra could talk about Sasha for hours, and no one, not the most egregious gossips, could imagine that “Iskra plus Sasha equals love”. Not just because Iskra rejected love itself as an untimely occurrence, but because Sasha himself was a product of Iskra’s single-minded activity, living proof of her personal strength, perseverance, and will.

Just a year ago, Sashka Stameskin’s name would come up at every teachers’ meeting, had a place in every report, and had a permanent place on the black board set up in the school vestibule. Sashka stole coal from the school boiler room, dunked girls’ braids in inkpots, and did not get better grades than ‘very poor’ out of principle. He had almost been expelled twice, but his mother would come to school, sob and make promises, and Sashka would get a reprieve “until the next complaint”. The next complaint about the incorrigible Stameskin would come right after his mother’s visit, the whole cycle would begin again, and by the November holidays, events had reached their apogee. The whole school was churning and boiling, and Sashka was counting the days until his long-awaited freedom.

Which was when Sashka’s tranquil horizon was troubled by Iskra’s appearance. She did not appear suddenly or out of thin air, but quite thoughtfully and deliberately, for thoughtfulness and deliberation were the manifestations of strength as the antithesis of human weakness. By November break, Iskra had applied to the komsomol, memorized the charter and everything else she was supposed to memorize, but this was passive, cramming anyone could do. Iskra did not want to be “anyone”. She was special, and with the help of her mother’s exhortations and her mother’s example, she took purposeful steps towards her goal. Her goal was to be an active, restless, socially-minded person - the kind of person she had from childhood thought of with the proud word “commissar”. It wasn’t an office, it was a calling, a duty, the guiding star of her fate. And, at her first komsomol meeting, taking the first step towards her star, Iskra voluntarily shouldered the most difficult and thankless burden she could think of.

“Do not expel Sasha Stameskin,” she said, as clearly and resonantly as ever, at her first komsomol meeting. “Before my comrades of the Lenin Komsomol, I solemnly promise that Stameskin will become a good student, a good citizen, and even a komsomol member.”

Iskra got an enthusiastic round of applause, was held up as an example, and she could only regret that her mother was not there. If she had been there, if she had heard the words used to speak about her daughter, then maybe - who knows! - maybe she really would stop unbuckling her wide uniform belt with that familiar convulsive movement and shouting, shortly and furiously, the words shooting out like gunfire:

“Lie down! Skirt on your head! Now!”

The last time it had happened was two years ago, at the very beginning of seventh grade. That time, Iskra had the shakes for such a painfully long time that her mother made her drink water, held the water glass for her, and even asked her forgiveness.

“You’re crazy!” Zinochka yelled after the meeting. “You’re going to reeducate him? He’ll beat you up! Or… you know what he might do? The thing that was done to that girl, in the park, that was in the newspapers.”

Iskra smiled proudly, listening condescendingly to Zinochka’s threats. She knew perfectly well what she was doing: she was testing herself. This was the first timid trial of her personal “komsolom” qualities.

The next day, Stameskin did not show up at school, and Iskra went to his place after class. Zinochka courageously volunteered to accompany her, but Iskra nipped this attempt in the bud:

“I promised the komsomol meeting I would handle Stameskin myself. By myself, do you understand?”

She walked along the long dark corridor permeated with the sharp smell of cat, and her heart sank in fear. But never for a moment did she permit herself the thought that she could turn around and leave, could say she did not find anyone at home. She did not know how to lie, even to herself.

Stameskin was drawing airplanes. Incredible, fantastically proud airplanes, soaring straight up into the cloudless sky. The whole table was littered with drawings, with those that didn’t fit overflowing onto the narrow metal cot. When Iskra came into the tiny room with its single window, Sasha covered his drawings with a jealous hand, and, unable to cover everything, got angry.

“What do you want?”

Iskra evaluated the situation with typically female alacrity: the dirty dishes on the stool, the crumpled bedding covered with drawings, the pot on the windowsill with a spoon sticking out of it - all of it indicated that Sasha’s mom was working the second shift, and that Iskra’s first meeting with her charge would take place with no witnesses. But she did not permit herself to quail, and aimed her attack directly at Sashka’s weak spot, a weak spot no one in school had any idea about: his romantic infatuation with aviation.

“Planes like that don’t exist.”

“What do you know about it!” Sasha was yelling, but his voice clearly betrayed interest.

Iskra, imperturbated, took off her hat and coat - her coat was slightly too small, the buttons drifting all the way to the side, and this always embarrassed her - and, straightening her dress with an accustomed motion, headed straight for the table. Sasha watched her sullenly, mistrustfully, and irately. But Iskra did not wish to take note of his glances.

“An interesting construction,” she said. “But the plane won’t fly.”

“What do you mean it won’t fly? What if it flies?”

“‘What if’ is a forbidden concept in aviation,” she said sternly. “In aviation, the most important thing is calculation. You obviously don’t have enough lift.”

“What?” cautiously questioned the failing Stameskin.

“The lift generated by the wings,” Iskra repeated firmly, even though she was not at all confident in what she was saying. “Do you know what it depends on?”

Sasha said nothing, overwhelmed by her erudition. Until now, aviation had existed in his life the way birds did: planes flew because they were supposed to fly. His planes functioned according to the laws of aesthetics, not mathematics: he liked shapes that thrust themselves into the sky.

Everything started with planes that could not fly because they relied on fantasy and not on science. And Sasha wanted them to fly, wanted climbs, barrel rolls, and loops to obey his planes, the way his own body obeyed him, Sasha Stameskin, footballer and scrapper. Only the merest trifle stood in his way: calculation. It was for this trifle that Sasha reluctantly dragged himself to school, smiling crookedly.

But for Iskra, it was not enough that Sasha came to love mathematics and physics, tolerated literature, suffered through history, and drilled German words with obvious disgust. She was a sober-minded girl, and could clearly imagine the day when her charge would get sick of it all and return to the back streets, to suspect company, and his customary “v. poor” marks. Not waiting for this day to come, she headed to the district Palace of Pioneers.

“I don’t take kids who are behind,” the stern supervisor of the airplane model club told her. “Let him first…”

“It doesn’t matter that he’s behind,” Iskra interrupted, though interrupting her elders was very impolite. “Do you think only straight A students become good people? What about Tom Sawyer? See, Sasha is Tom Sawyer, he just hasn’t found his treasure yet. But he’ll find it, on my komsomol honor, he will! Just help him out a bit. Please, help him.”

“You know, my girl, I think he has already found his treasure,” smiled the club supervisor.

At first, Sasha flatly refused to go to the club. He was afraid that there, he would get proof once and for all that all his dreams were nonsense, and that he, Sasha Stameskin, the son of a dishwasher from a factory-kitchen and an unknown father, would never in his life have the chance to touch the silvery duralumin of a real plane. Simply speaking, Sasha did not believe in himself and was being desperately cowardly, forcing Iskra to stomp with her plump legs.

“All right,” he sighed wretchedly. “But you come too. Or I’ll run off.”

So they went together, though Iskra was far more interested in the sonorous poetry of Eduard Bagritsky than in model airplanes. Indeed, she was not simply interested, she had recently begun to write her own epic poem, “Song of the Commissar”:

Above the ranks, the crimson banner blazes true
Commissars, commissars, our country follows you

And so on for two pages, the hope being to end up with twenty pages or so. But just now, the important things were aircraft models, ailerons, fuselages, and the somewhat bewildering concept of lift. So she did not lament her postponed poem; she was proud of silencing her own song.

This, the necessity of subordinating one’s petty personal weaknesses to the main goal, the joy of overcoming oneself, was what Iskra spoke of as they walked to the Palace of Pioneers. And Sashka did not speak, torn by doubt, hope, and more doubt.

“We cannot come into this world just for the sake of pleasure,” Iskra explained, meaning the future, not the past, when she said “pleasure”. “Otherwise we will have to admit that nature is just a heap of coincidence that cannot be scientifically analyzed. And admitting this means meekly obeying nature’s whims, becoming its humble servant. Can we, as members of the Soviet youth, admit this? I’m asking you, Sasha.”

“We can’t,” said Stameskin gloomily.

“Correct. And this means that every person - every single one! - is born for some particular goal. And you need to seek your goal, your calling. You need to learn to discard all that is random or minor, to define your life’s great task…”

“Hey, Stameska!”

Three boys peeled themselves out of an alley; though one of them should rather be called a young man than a boy. They moved lazily, with a swaggering, lopsided walk.

“Where’re you off to, Stameska?”

“Got stuff to do.” Sashka shrunk in on himself, and Iskra immediately caught this.

“Maybe think about it first?” The eldest spoke almost reluctantly, as if he was having trouble finding the right words. “Get rid of the girl, we need to talk.”

“Back!” Iskra’s cry was clear and bright. “Go back to your dark alleys yourselves!”

“What’s this?” the young man drawled mockingly.

“Out of my way!” Iskra pushed his chest with both hands.

The push only made him wobble a little, but he immediately stepped aside. Iskra grabbed Stameskin’s hand and pulled him away.

“Watch out, butterball. You’ll regret it if we get hold of you!”

“Don’t turn around!” Iskra shouted, dragging Stameskin away. “They’re all miserable cowards.”

“If only you knew,” Sashka sighed.

“I do know!” she cut him off. “Only those with truth on their side are brave. Those without truth on their side are just insolent, that’s all.”

Despite the victory, Iskra was sincerely upset. She exercised daily and systematically, played basketball with great passion, loved running, but the buttons on her shirts needed adjusting more and more often, her dresses were bursting at the seams, and her skirts filled out so much from year to year that Iskra was filled with despair. And the stupid word “butterball" - said in front of Sashka, no less! - was far more offensive to her than any curse.

Sashka fell in love at once, with the strict club supervisor, with light-winged gliders, with the very name “airplane model club”. Iskra’s calculations had been correct: Sashka had something to lose now, and he clung to school with the stubbornness of a drowning man.

Moving on to stage two, Iskra came over to Stameskin’s place every day not just to help with homework, but to catch Sashka up on that which had been lost in the halcyon days of his freedom. This was, so to speak, extracurricular, more than she had promised: Iskra was steadily molding Sashka Stameskin into her hypothetically constructed ideal.

Half a month after meeting Sashka’s former friends, Iskra met them again - this time without Sasha, without help or support, and not even in the street, where if worst came to worst, she could at least scream, though Iskra would have rather died than called for help. She had run into the dark and echoingly empty entryway, when she was suddenly seized, squeezed, dragged under the staircase and thrown onto the dirty cement floor. It was so unexpected, swift, and silent that Iskra only had time to curl up, bending in an arc, her knees pressed against her chest. Her heart froze, and her back tensed in expectation of blows. But for some reason, she was not getting hit. She was getting grabbed, groped, shoved, with wheezing and getting in each other’s way. Someone’s hands pulled off her hat, yanked at her braids trying to pull her face away from her knees, someone roughly pushed up her skirt, pinching her hips, someone was squeezing in down her shirt. And all of this was spinning, colliding, breathing loudly, puffing, hurrying...

No, they were not at all intending to beat her up, they simply meant to feel her up, squeeze her, grope her, “get handsy”, as boys would call it. And when Iskra realized this, her fear immediately evaporated, and her fury was so fierce that she choked on it. Digging her hands into someone’s arm, kicking away the one crawling under her skirt, she managed to leap up and fly up the staircase, three steps at a time, into Sashka’s long corridor.

She burst into the room without knocking: red-faced, disheveled, with buttons torn off her coat, still clutching her schoolbag with her textbooks to her chest with both hands. She burst in, closed the door, and sagged against it, feeling sure that in just a little bit, in just a moment, the persistent trembling in her knees would drop her to the floor.

Sashka’s mother, glum and skinny, was frying potatoes on the kerosene stove, while Sashka himself was genuinely trying to solve a word problem at the table. They stared silently at Iskra, and Iskra clarified, smiling assiduously: 

“I got held up. Downstairs. Excuse me, please.” Pushing away from the door with her whole body, she took two steps and collapsed onto a stool, in desperate tears from fear, hurt, and humiliation.

“Oh no, Miss Iskra, what is it?” Sashka’s mom generally addressed her as an adult, out of respect. “Good god, what did they do to you?”

“Pulled my hat off,” Iskra muttered, dazed and pathetic, stubbornly smiling and smearing tears across her round cheeks. “Mom will be upset, she’ll scold me for the hat.”

“Good god, how can this be?” cried out the woman. “Drink some water, Miss Iskra, drink some water.”

Sashka got up from the table, silently moved his fussing mother aside, and went out.

He came back half an hour later. Put Iskra’s blue knit hat in front of her, spit out blood and two front teeth into a basin, spent a long time washing his beat up face. Iskra was not crying any longer and was watching him fearfully instead; he met her glance and smiled with difficulty:

“Let’s study, or what?”

From that day on, they went everywhere together. To school and to the ice rink, to the movies and to concerts, to the reading room and just walking around for no reason. Through the streets. Always together. But it did not so much as occur to anyone to poke fun at this. Everyone at school knew how good a friend Iskra could be, but no one, not one person, not even Sashka, knew how she could love. Iskra did not even know herself. It was all called friendship, for now, and that which was contained in the word was quite sufficient for her.

And now, Sashka Stameskin, after so much effort and perseverance put into believing the reality of his own dream, having caught up, and in some areas having overtaken many of his classmates, was leaving school. And this was not just an injustice - this was the collapse of all Iskra’s hopes. The conscious and the not yet conscious ones.

“Maybe we can get that money together for him?”

“You’re so smart sometimes, and such an idiot other times!” Zina threw up her hands. “Sure, we can try to get that money, you thought of that. And will he take it?”

“He will,” Iskra said without a moment’s thought.

“Yes, because you’ll make him. You can even make me eat milk skin, even though I know for sure that I will die if I do.” Zinochka twitched her shoulders in revulsion. “That’s just charity, is what it is, and that’s why you’re an idiot. An idiot, and that’s it. As in, an unintelligent woman.”

Iskra did not like the word “woman”, and Zinochka was teasing her a little. The circumstances were unusual: Iskra did not have a solution. And Zina had found a solution and was therefore quietly rejoicing in her triumph. But she could not rejoice for long: she was impetuous and generous and always blurted out exactly what she thought.

“He needs to go work at the aircraft factory!”

“He needs to get an education,” Iskra said uncertainly. But her resistance was just inertia, born of the usual feeling that until now, she had always been right about everything. Her bright-eyed friend’s solution turned out to be so simple that she could not even argue. Getting an education? He could get an education in evening school. The club? Silly to think about; at the factory they weren’t playing with models, they were building real airplanes, gorgeous ones, the best in the world, ones that had set unbelievable records of length, height, and speed. But Iskra could not give up so easily, because this solution, a solution that would make Sashka’s eyes light up again, was not hers this time.

“You think it’s that easy? It’s a completely secret factory, they only take people who have been thoroughly checked out.”

“Is Sashka a spy?”

“You have to fill out forms, stupid. What will he write under “father”? What? Even his own mom doesn’t know who his father is.”

“Oh, really?” Criminal curiosity flared up in Zinochka’s eyes.

“No, she knows, of course, but she doesn’t say. And Sasha will write “unknown” in the form, and who knows what they might think, can you imagine?”

“What? What might they think?”

“That this father is an enemy of the people, that’s what they might think.”

“Stameskin, an enemy of the people?” Zina burst out laughing merrily. “Where have you seen enemies of the people named Stameskin?”

Here Iskra was forced to fall silent. But even having conceded this point, she still insisted that getting a job at the aircraft factory would be very hard. She was exaggerating on purpose, because she had a solution in mind: the komsomol district committee. The almighty komsomol district committee. And this solution was meant to compensate for the hit to her pride that Zina had inflicted with her suggestion.

But Zinochka thought concretely and spontaneously, relying only on her intuition. And this innate intuition immediately indicated a solution:

“What about Vika Lyuberetskaya?”

Vika Lyuberetskaya’s dad was the chief engineer at the aircraft factory, and Vika herself had been deskmates with Zinochka for eight years. Iskra, though, generally steered clear of Vika. Because Vika was also a straight-A student, and because Iskra was a bit jealous of her friendliness towards Zinochka, and, most importantly, because Vika was always a little condescending with all the girls and haughty with all the boys, in the manner of a queen dowager. Only Vika got rides in a company car; she always got out a block away from school, but everyone knew anyway. Only Vika was the proud owner of silk underclothes from Paris, the object of Zinochka’s excruciating envy and of Iskra’s contemptuous disdain. Only Vika had a coat of real Siberian squirrel fur, a Swiss watch with a luminous dial, and a fountain pen with a golden nib. And all this put together defined Vika as a creature from another world, a world Iskra had felt irony-tinged pity for since childhood. 

They were rivals even in how they did their hair. While Iskra stubbornly wore two pigtails behind her ears, and Zina cut her hair short like most of the girls in their class did, Vika had a real hairstyle done at a salon.

And also Vika was beautiful. Not adorably plump like Iskorka, not a pretty imp like Zinochka, but a mature, serene, self-confident young lady with large gray eyes. And the gaze of these eyes was unusual: it seemed to pass right through one and into a distance only Vika could see; a wonderful distance, because Vika always smiled at it.

Iskra and Zina had different opinions about beauty. Iskra acknowledged beauty that had been captured once and for all on canvas, in books, in music or in sculpture, and in life demanded only the beauty of the soul, implying that any other beauty was suspicious in and of itself. Zinochka, on the other hand, worshipped beauty, was envious to tears of it, and served it as something sacred. Beauty was for her a deity, living and almighty. For Iskra, beauty was only an outcome, the triumph of mind and talent, yet another demonstration of the victory of will and reason over the inconstancy and weakness of human nature. Which was why asking Vika for something was impossible.

“I’ll ask her myself!” Zina protested warmly. “Vika’s a marvelous girl, on my komsomol honor!”

“Everyone’s marvelous according to you.”

“Trust me just once, just the one time. Just one single time, Iskorka!”

“Fine,” Iskra agreed graciously after some hesitation. “But don’t put it off. September first is the day after tomorrow.”

“Thank you!” Zina laughed. “You’ll see how wonderfully it will all work out. Let me kiss you for it.”

“You always need your nonsense,” Iskra said with a sigh, though she did present her tight cheek to her friend. “I’ll go to Sasha’s, make sure he doesn’t do anything out of confusion.”

On the first of September, the black “emka” stopped a block away from the school. Vika hopped out of it, walked to the school gates, and, as usual noticing no one around her, headed straight for Iskra.

“Hello. I believe you wanted Stameskin to work for dad at the aircraft factory? You can tell him to come to the personnel department tomorrow.”

“Thank you, Vika,” said Iskra, doing her very best not to pay attention to her triumphant arrogance.

But her mood had been ruined, and she was far less radiant when she entered the classroom than when she had run into the schoolyard half an hour previously.