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The school had been built not long ago, and the newspapers had written about its opening. Its windows were wide, its desks were not yet covered with cuts and scrapes, in the hallways there were potted ficus plants, and there was a gym on the first floor, a rare thing in those days.
Iskra would long remember the chance meeting and the unexpected conversation. But then, listening to the elderly (she thought) man with young eyes, she did not agree with much of what he said, tried to challenge much of it, intended to contemplate much of it, because she was a thorough sort of person that liked to get to the roots of things. So she walked home, sorting out in her head what she had heard, with Zinochka chirping alongside.
“I told you that Vika was a wonderful girl, I told you, I told you! God, we lost eight years because of you. What dishes! No, did you see what dishes they have? Like in a museum! Potemkin probably drank out of cups like those.”
“Truth,” suddenly said Iskra slowly, as if discerning a sound from far off. “Why should you argue with it, if it is – the truth?”
“‘In the character of Pechorin, Lermontov portrayed the typical features of the superfluous man,’” Zina mimicked Valentina Andronovna very closely and laughed. “Just try to argue with that truth, Valendra will just fail you.”
“Maybe that’s not the truth?” Iskra continued to ponder. “Who declares that the truth is indeed the truth? Well, who? Who?”
“Adults,” said Zinochka. “And adults get it from their bosses… and this is my left, so let me kiss you.”
Iskra silently offered her cheek, tugged once at her friend’s dark blonde lock, and they parted. Zina ran along, purposefully clicking her heels, and Iskra walked, though quickly, decorously and quietly, and diligently continued to think.
Iskra’s mom was home, and, as usual, with a cigarette: after that terrible night when Iskra accidentally spied on her, Iskra’s mom started to smoke. To smoke a lot, scattering empty and half-full packs of “Deli”.
“Where were you?”
Iskra’s mom raised her eyebrows a bit, but said nothing. Iskra went into her corner, behind the wardrobe, where there was a small table and a case with her books. She tried to study, solving problems, rewriting things, but the conversation would not leave her head.
“Mom, what is truth?”
Iskra’s mother set aside the book she was reading carefully, bookmarking and taking notes, shoved her cigarette in the ashtray, thought a bit, took it out, and lit it again.
“I think you have phrased your question carelessly. Clarify, please.”
“Of course. If there were no such truths, man would have remained an animal. He needs to know what he lives for.”
“We do, yes. We, the Soviet people, have discovered the immutable truth taught to us by the party. So much blood has been shed, so much torment has been endured for this truth, that arguing with it, much less doubting it, is a betrayal of those who have perished and… and will yet perish. This truth is our strength and our pride, Iskra. Did I understand your question correctly?”
“Yes, yes, thank you,” Iskra said thoughtfully. “See, I think we don’t get taught to argue at school.”
“We ought to teach the truth itself, not ways to prove it. That would be sophistry. A person devoted to our truth will, if need be, defend it in arms. Our business is not chattering. We are building a new society, we have no time for chatter.” Iskra’s mother threw her cigarette butt into the ashtray and looked questioningly at Iskra. “Why do you ask about this?”
Iskra wanted to tell her mother about the conversation that had disturbed her, about the exclamation and question marks that Leonid Sergeevich used to measure art, but then looked into her mother’s stern, familiar eyes, and said, “Just because.”
“Don’t read empty books, Iskra. I want to check your library record, but I keep not getting around to it, and I have a serious speech to give tomorrow.”
Iskra’s library record was in perfect order, but Iskra read outside of her record, too. The tradition of exchanging books at schools dated back probably to the tsarist gymnasium days, and Iskra already knew Hamsun and Kellermann, whose “Victoria” and “Ingeborg” thrust her into a strange state of anticipation and dismay. The anticipation and dismay did not release her even at night, and her dreams were not at all of a nature concordant with her library record. But this she told no one, not even Zinochka, though Zinochka often told her about dreams of this kind. And then Iskra would get very mad, and Zina did not understand that she would be mad about her own dreams being guessed.
Her conversation with her mother reinforced Iskra’s belief in the existence of inarguable truths, but besides those, there also existed arguable truths, truths of a lower order, so to speak. Such a truth, for example, was the attitude towards Yesenin, whose poetry Iskra read all these days, learned by heart and copied out into a notebook, since the book would need to soon be returned. She did this copying in secret from her mother, because the ban, though not explicit, was in fact in effect, and Iskra was for the first time arguing with the official position, and therefore, with the truth.
“Oh I got it a long time ago,” Sashka said when she confided her doubts to him. “They’re just jealous of Yesenin, that’s all. And they want him to be forgotten.”