In fifth grade, Artyom was not at all the object of her secret love (he had been in third grade, but did not know this). At the time, Zinochka had saved him from retribution out of a passion for strong sensations: she had a pull towards the terrifying, towards, say, blurting something out and seeing what came of it. In that case, nothing good came of it, but Zina cried her heart out as much as she liked, and spent a long time in the status of a heroine. Even her braids got yanked more often and harder than those of the other girls. And this was enough, and she paid no attention to Artyom for three entire years, in the meantime replacing the braids with a short haircut. But at his birthday party, she suddenly discovered that she herself had become an object of affection, that Artyom liked her, that he looked at her in a special way and talked to her in a special way.

This was a great discovery. Zinochka was incredibly proud of herself and spent even more time preening in front of chance-met mirrors, and felt a deep need for conversation about that evening, about love, longing, and suffering. Which was when Valentina Andronovna stumbled on her and easily uncovered everything, though the everything was all so confusing that Valentina Andronovna herself got confused and abandoned this unpromising approach.

Everything was going just wonderfully, if it was not for two tenth graders who were showing an energetic interest. One was simply the handsomest guy in the school, who for his beauty the female majority regularly elected as the class president, and who, with enviable consistency, did nothing at all at this high post. The other was also all right, and Zinochka suddenly realized with terror that this was far too much luck for her. She would have to make a decision, and Zinochka did not like making decisions. Usually, she suffered and struggled and never decided anything.

Iskra was the one that always made all the decisions. Zina would report her problems, and Iskra would knit her eyebrows for a moment and deliver the program to be followed. A precise, complete program, one that was beyond doubt. And then everything was easy and clear, but going to her friend with the question of who to fall in love with seemed unthinkable. Iskra would have strongly condemned even the very question itself as obviously over-hasty, and partially petty-bourgeois (Iskra considered everything that was not aimed at serving society to be petty-bourgeois). Then there would follow a logical analysis of Zinochka’s own essential being, which would reveal such an abyss of shortcomings that Zina would need to eliminate before falling in love, that the mere possibility of love would be delayed by forty-odd years. Zinochka would then only be able to cry, because she would have no line of argument other than tears and a complete absence of logic.

Neither could she count on advice at home. Zina had come into the world when she had no longer been at all expected: eight years after the birth of Aleksandra, and the eldest, Maria, was fully adult, with two kids, and lived in the Far East with her husband. Aleksandra had a family too, she only rarely came by, and Zinochka was always somewhat uncomfortable in her presence: she was considered the eternal baby. This left her mom, always busy with her hospital, where she was a senior operating room nurse. But her mom, as it happened, was so much older that she could no longer give any advice, having forgotten the age at which you fall in love three times simultaneously. Talking about such things to her father, buried up to his neck in work, meetings, and talks, would be useless, and Zinochka was left to her own devices in a difficult and unfamiliar situation.

She was struck by inspiration during an algebra test. She wrote three letters, differing only in their address: “Yura, my friend!”, “My friend Seryozha!”, and “Dear friend and comrade Artyom!”. There followed a vague discussion of feelings, of the loneliness and suffering of a girl’s heart, of a fearful secret that stood in the way of their friendship at present, but, possibly, everything would yet turn out for the best, and she, Zina, would overcome her passions, and then she, lonely and sad, would ask again for the friendship that she now – temporarily! – was forced to reject. Having composed these missives, which skillfully combined sweeping promises with obscuring references to the fateful accidents of fortune that stood before her, Zinochka was overwhelmed with delight, and thought even that she was being awfully shrewd and foresighted. True, the question of whom to send the letters to remained unanswered, but Zinochka decided not to rush this part: it was enough that she had independently found a solution that no one else in the world, not even Iskra, would have ever thought of. So she put the letters inside her textbook and cheered up a little. She did not, obviously, have time to also do her test, but she cried up such a storm for the math teacher, Semyon Isakovich, that the old and very kind teacher gave her a “mediocre”.

She spent three days on the question of which (two!) letters to send, and which (one!) letter not to. But then it turned out that she had misplaced two of the letters, and only one was left: “Dear friend and comrade Artyom!” And, since there was now no choice, she slipped it to Artyom when everyone was taking their seats after lunch and the long recess.

Artyom spent all class reading and rereading the letter, refused to come to the board when summoned by the teacher, got a “poor”, and sent a note asking to meet. Zinochka had not counted on a conversation, but was very happy about this nonetheless.

“I, er, don’t get it,” Artyom admitted honestly, when they had sequestered themselves in the schoolyard after school. “Are you, er, in trouble?”

“Yes,” meekly sighed Zina.

Artyom also sighed, shifted from foot to foot, and huffed. Then he asked, “Maybe you need help?”

“Help?” She smiled bitterly. “The only help for a woman is blind chance or death.”

Artyom did not know much about this kind of category, and did not particularly trust it. But she was suffering for some reason; he could not make any sense of why she was suffering, but was sincerely suffering himself.

“Maybe, er… someone’s gotta get punched in the face? You, er… you just say, don’t be shy about it. I would, for you…”

Here he fell silent, unable to bring himself to admit that for her, he would indeed do anything that she might desire. And Zinochka, out of flightiness and a lack of feminine experience, missed those four words. Four words spoken by Artyom out of the oath that he carried inside himself. Four words that for any woman mean far more than a declaration of love, for they speak of what someone wants to give, and not of what he hopes to receive. But Zinochka was only scared.

“No, no, definitely not! I don’t need anything, I will curb my vice myself.”

“What vice?”

“I am not free,” she said mysteriously, feverously trying to recall what the heroines of novels would say in cases like this. “I do not like that person, I even hate him, but I gave him my word.”

Artyom looked very suspicious, and Zinochka fell silent, realizing she was overselling it.

“Is this person Yurka from 10’A?” he asked.

“What, no, no,” Zina denied in alarm. “If it was Yurka it would be easy. No, Artyom, it’s not him.”

“Then who?”

Seeing that Artyom would not just leave her alone, Zinochka set to wriggling out of this corner.

“You won’t tell anyone? Anyone at all!”

Artyom was silent, looking at her very seriously.

“It’s such a secret that if you give me away, I will drown myself.”

“Zina, er,” he said sternly. “If you don’t trust me, then don’t say anything. I’m not a blabbermouth generally, and for you…”

Again those words came out, and again he fell silent, and again Zinochka heard nothing.

“He’s an adult,” she admitted. “He’s married and he already left his wife over me. And two children. I mean one, the second hasn’t been born yet.”

“But you’re still a kid.”

“What can I do?” Zina asked in a desperate whisper. “Well, what, what can I do? Of course I won’t marry him, I won’t marry him for anything, but for now – for now, you understand? – you and I will pretend like we’re only comrades.”

“But we are only comrades.”

“Yes, unfortunately.” She shook her head. “It took me too long to figure the situation out, if you want to know. But for now, this is how it’ll be, all right? For now, you understand?”

“Mom liked you a lot,” Artyom said after a silence.

“Really?” Zinochka grinned, forgetting all about her misfortunes with a married man. “You have an amazing mom, and I fell in love with her. I fall in love really quickly for some reason. Bye!”

And then she ran off, trying to appear tragic even from the back, even though she really wanted to sing and skip. Artyom knew that she had lied off her head to him, but he was not angry. It was not important that she had lied, it was important that she did not need him. Artyom had, for the first time in his life, discovered where the heart is located, and morosely trudged home, without any desire to skip.

This was exactly the time when Valentina Andronovna walked into the principal’s office.

“Look at this,” she said, and laid onto his desk two scribbled-on pages torn out of a lined notebook.

Her voice held a solemn and portentous note, but Nikolay Grigorievich paid no attention to this note, because he was intrigued by the address: “Yura, my friend!” and “My friend Seryozha!” What followed was not particularly intelligible, but the principal read it all, and laughed merrily.

“What a goose! No, but what an adorable silly goose wrote this!”

“I see nothing to laugh at here. Excuse me, Nikolay Grigorievich, but this is all your mirrors.”

“Oh, don’t,” the principal waved away her concern. “The girls are playing at love, so let them play. Everything that is natural is reasonable. With your permission.”
He crumpled up the letter and stuck his hand in his pocket.

Valentina Andronovna threw herself at his desk.

“What are you doing?”

“Returning it isn’t practical, so the only thing to do is to sweep it under the rug. Or into the fire, as the case may be.”

“I utterly object. Do you hear me, utterly! This is a document…”

She was trying to reach the paper across the desk, but the principal’s arms were longer.

“It’s no document, Valentina Andronovna.”

“I know who wrote it. I know, you understand? Kovalenko wrote it, she forgot her reader…”

“That does not interest me. Or you either. It shouldn’t interest you, I mean… Sit!”

Once, at his command a squadron would charge into an attack. Hearing the metal in his voice, Valentina Andronovna hurriedly lowered herself onto the chair.

And the principal finally took out his matches and burned both letters.

“And remember: there were no letters. The most awful thing is suspicion. It cripples people, turning them into snakes and egotists.”

“I respect your battle honors, Nikolay Grigorievich, but I consider your methods of education to not only be oversimplified but corrupt. Yes, corrupt! I tell you openly that I will complain.”

The principal sighed, sadly shook his head, and pointed at the door:

“Go and write. Quickly, while your anger is still hot.”

Valentina Andronovna savagely slammed the door. Her patience had run out, and from this day forward, she was marching into open battle for that which was the meaning of her life: for the Soviet school. Bravely, she burned all her bridges behind herself.

If it hadn’t been for the night before, Iskra would have noticed Zinochka’s increased levels of friskiness. But the night before had happened, and the usual harmony was disturbed. Iskra was busy with herself, and let her friend escape her control.

After only a little while of working at the factory, Sashka Stameskin started noticeably changing. He acquired a kind of tired confidence in his voice, his own opinions, and a special sort of attitude towards Iskra, which caused her some concern. He still, as usual, nodded in response to everything she said, and as usual obeyed, as usual whistling through his broken teeth and as usual turned gloomy when receiving yet another reprimand. And yet, at times it would become apparent that the factory, a salary, his adult life and adult circle of acquaintances were having an effect, and Iskra did not know if she should be happy or fight it with all her might.

That evening, they didn’t go to the movies, because Iskra had taken it into her head to go for a walk. Going for a walk meant talking, because Iskra did not know how to just walk or how to talk nonsense. On walks, she either educated her Stameskin, or talked about what she had read in books or what she had thought of herself. Once, Sashka had argued with her desperately on every point, then he fell silent, and lately he started to smile, and Iskra decidedly disliked this smile.

“Why are you smiling if you disagree? Argue with me, fight for your point of view.”

“Your point suits me fine.”

“Hey, Stameskin, that’s not comradely,” Iskra sighed. “You’re being cagey, Stameskin. You’ve become a very cagey person.”

“I’m not cagey.” Sashka sighed too. “I’m smiling because I feel good.”

“Why do you feel good?”

“I don’t know. I do and that’s that. Let’s sit down.”

They sat down on a bench in a withered deserted little park. The bench was tall, and Iskra swung her legs back and forth with pleasure.

“See, if you reason logically, then the life of a single person is only of interest to himself. But if you reason using instead of dead logic, the logic of society, then he, that is a person…”

“You know,” suddenly said Sashka in a strange tone, “will you get mad if I…”

“What?” Iskra asked, for some reason very quietly.

“No, you’ll definitely be mad.”

“No, Sasha, definitely not!” Iskra took his arm and shook it, as if she was shaking up the remnants of courage. “Well, and? Well?”

“Let’s kiss.”

A long pause ensued, during which Sashka felt exceedingly uncomfortable. At first he sat without moving, overpowered by his own desperate resolve, then he started fidgeting, huffed out a few breaths, and said dejectedly, “Well yeah. I just meant…”

“Let’s,” said Iskra, moving only her lips.

Sashka took in a big breath and stretched. Iskra leaned towards him, offering her tight, cool cheek. He pressed his lips there, pulled her head over to himself with one hand, and froze. For a long time, they sat motionless, and Iskra listened with surprise to the sound of an intensifying heartbeat.

“Let go… Come on.” She slipped out.

“Yeah so…” Sashka sighed heavily.

“It’s scary, yeah?” Iskra whispered. “Is your heart beating hard?”

“Let’s go again? One more time…”

“No,” she said decisively and moved away. “Something is happening to me and… and I need to think.”

Something really was happening to her, something new and a little frightening, and the kiss was not the reason for it, but a multiplier, a powerful push in the direction of forces that were already in motion. Iskra could guess what these forces were, but she was angry at them for awakening earlier than, in her understanding, they ought to have. Angry, and at the same time, bewildered.

The time had come for the girls to have personal lives, and they met these new lives with apprehension. They understood that this was, indeed, personal, and no one could help them here. Not the school, not the komsomol, not even their moms. They would have to face these new lives alone, eye to eye: the women that woke in them, each so similar to another and so unique, thirsted for independence, as all women have at all times.

And at this time, a time so important and so full of apprehension, Iskra was drawn not to Zinochka, whom she stubbornly considered just a girl, but to Vika Lyuberetskaya. To proud Vika, who – Iskra could tell – had already stepped across the threshold, had already felt herself to be a woman, had already adapted to this new state of being and was proud of it. Proud of it, first of all, and only then of her famous father. That was what Iskra thought, but she did not want to show up without warning, having caught the displeasure of her hostess during her first visit. So in class, she said:

“I want to return the Yesenin. Can I come by today?”

“Come, then,” answered Vika, not showing any feeling.

Iskra did not like that (she had hoped that Vika would at least be happy about it), but her determination did not waver. Finishing her homework at school – she often did that, because she had no need to study the oral subjects, and the written ones could be done along the way – she dropped by home, left a note for her mom, took the Yesenin book, and went off to the Lyuberetskys, feeling, with some annoyance, a measure of anxiety.

Vika was waiting for her and opened the door immediately. She silently hung up Iskra’s coat and, as silently, invited Iskra into her room. 

In the room was a huge armchair, which Vika gestured at, but Iskra could not dare to sit in it. She had never sat in armchairs before, and she thought she would be uncomfortable there.

“Thank you, Vika,” she said, handing over the book and sitting down on a chair.

“You’re welcome.” Vika looked at her with a smile. “I hope that now you will no longer argue that these are harmful poems?”

“These are wonderful poems,” Iskra sighed. “I think, no, I am even certain, that soon they will be recognized, and there’ll be a monument built for Sergey Yesenin.”

“What would you write on such a monument? Let’s conduct a competition: I’ll compose my own inscription and you will compose yours.”

They did so, and Vika immediately conceded that Iskra had won with her composition of “Thank you, heart, that beat for us.” They only unanimously agreed to replace the words “beat for” with “hurt for”.

“I’ve never really considered what love really is,” Iskra said with as much disinterest as possible, after they talked about school for a little while. “Probably it was the poems that made me think about it.”

“Dad says that in life, there are two sacred responsibilities that should be considered: for a woman, to learn to love, and for a man, to serve his work.”

Iskra was moving on to the topic that she had come for, and was pondering how to turn the conversation, and only for this reason did she fail to sink her teeth into this thesis like a bulldog. She let it pass by, only noting to herself that for a woman, serving her work was as important as it was for a man, as the Great October Revolution had liberated the slave of hearth and husband.

“How do you picture happiness?” Vika asked, as her guest had plunged deep into thought.

“Happiness? Happiness is being useful to one’s people.”

“No,” Vika smiled. “That is duty, and I’m asking about happiness.”

Iskra had always imagined happiness as being, so to say, astride a steed. Happiness is help for oppressed peoples, it is the destruction of capitalism in the whole world, it’s “I went off to fight with a gun and a pack, so the poor in Granada could get the land back”; her breath would catch when she read those lines. But now she suddenly thought that Vika was right, that this was not happiness, but duty. And she asked, to win some time,

“So how do you picture it?”

“Loving and being loved,” dreamily said Vika. “No, I don’t want some extraordinary kind of love: let it be ordinary, but real. And let there be children. Three: I’m all alone, and that’s not fun. No, two boys and a girl. And I’d do everything I could for my husband, so he would be…” she wanted to say “famous”, but held it back. “So he would always be happy with me. And so we would live together joyously and die on one day, as Grin says.”

“Who?”

“You haven’t read Grin? I’ll give you the book and you absolutely must read it.”

“Thank you.” Iskra thought for a little while. “Don’t you think that’s a bourgeois mindset?”

“I knew you’d say that.” Vika laughed. “No, it’s no bourgeois mindset. It’s a normal kind of womanly happiness.”

“What about work?”

“I don’t rule it out, but work is our duty, and that is all. Dad thinks that these are separate things: duty is public, and happiness is purely personal.”

“And what does your dad say about a bourgeois mindset?”

“He says that it is a condition of a person when he becomes a slave without even noticing. A slave of things, of comfort, of money, career, ease, habit. He ceases to be free, and he develops a typically slavish worldview. He loses his self, his opinion, begins to agree, to be a yes-man for those whom he sees as his masters. That’s how dad explained the bourgeois state of mind to me. He calls people bourgeois if for them, convenience is stronger than honor.”

“Honor is an aristocratic concept,” Iskra objected. “We refuse to acknowledge it.”

Vika gave a strange smile. Then she said, with a sad tone in her voice, “I want to love you, Iskra, you’re the best girl that I know. But I can’t love you, and I’m not sure that I will ever love you the way that I want to, because you’re a maximalist.”

Iskra suddenly really wanted to cry, but she held it back.

The girls sat in silence for a long while, as if getting used to the confession being said out loud. Then Iskra asked quietly, “But is it so bad to be a maximalist?”

“No, it’s not bad at all, and I’m certain they are necessary to society. But it is very hard to be friends with them, and loving them is just impossible. Do keep this in mind, please, you are, after all, a future woman.”

“Yes, of course.” Iskra got up, suppressing a sigh. “I should go. Thank you… for Yesenin.”

“Forgive me for saying that, but I had to say it. I want to always tell the truth and only the truth, like you.”

“You want to be a maximalist with whom it is hard to be friends?” Iskra forced a smile.

“I don’t want you to leave while upset…” The front door slammed, and Vika exclaimed, “And here’s dad! And you’re not going anywhere, because we’re going to drink tea.”

Again there were sweets and cakes which were so strange to eat not for a holiday. Again Leonid Sergeevich joked and looked after Iskra, but he was pensive, pensively joked and pensively looked after Iskra. And sometimes, he fell silent for long moments, as if he was switching to some alternate inner channel.

“Iskra and I argued a little about happiness,” Vika said. “But we couldn’t figure out who’s right.”

“Happiness is having a friend who will not disavow you when the going gets hard.” Leonid Sergeevich said this almost to himself, as if he was still tuned to that inner channel. “And who is right and who is wrong…” He suddenly came alive. “What do you think, girls, what is the highest triumph of justice?"

“The full triumph of justice is our Soviet Union,” Iskra replied instantly.

She often used well-known phrases, but coming from her, they never sounded worn out. Iskra filtered them through herself, she believed in them passionately, and so even her most cliche phrasing sounded sincere. So no one sitting at the table so much as smiled.

“That is perhaps more of a triumph of a social order,” Leonid Sergeevich said. “I was speaking of the presumption of innocence. The axiom that a person does not need to give proof that he is not a criminal. That, on the contrary, the justice system is obligated to prove to society that a given person committed a crime.”

“Even if he admits to it?” asked Vika.

“Even when he swears it. A person is a very complicated kind of creature, and on occasion is prepared to take on someone else’s guilt with all sincerity. Through a weakness of character or, on the contrary, through its strength, due to a coincidence or circumstance, out of a desire to lighten the punishment by confessing, or even wanting to distract the court from a more serious crime. Although, excuse me, girls, it looks like I got carried away. I need to go.”

“You’ll be back late?” asked Vika, as usual.

“You will already be dreaming.” Leonid Sergeevich got up, neatly pushed his chair in, bowed to Iskra, winked mischievously at his daughter, and left.

On her way home, Iskra thought carefully about both the conversation about bourgeois mentalities and, especially, the one about the presumption of innocence. She really liked the name “presumption of innocence” itself, and she agreed with Leonid Sergeevich that this was the foundation of justly dealing with a person. And she was sorry, too, that she had not reminded Vika of this mysterious writer with the foreign surname Grin.

The heart-to-heart conversation she had expected and so needed had not happened: Vika’s confession that she did not love her not only upset Iskorka, but also galled her. And this was not simply a matter of pride (though it was that too), it was also because Iskra herself was drawn to Vika, sensing in her an intelligent, discerning young woman. She was drawn to the coziness of the large apartment, to the comfortable way their daily life was arranged, though if she was told this, she would furiously deny this weakness to the point of angry tears. But most of all, she was drawn to VIka’s father, to Leonid Sergeevich Lyuberetskiy, because Iskra herself had no father, and in her eyes, Lyuberetskiy was the most perfect of all possible fathers, albeit one that needed to be taught better a little. And Iskra would absolutely have taught him better, if only… But there could be no “if only” in reality, and Iskra did not engage in empty dreaming. So she was a little sad.

At home, Iskra was greeted by a cup of milk, a piece of bread, and a note. Her mom wrote that she would be conducting an important meeting, would be home late, and that her daughter should go to bed on time and not read novels in bed; the word “novels” was underlined. Iskra shared her dinner with the neighbor’s cat, checked that all her homework was done, and suddenly decided to write an article for the next issue of the school newspaper.

She wrote about trust for a person, even for a very small one, even for a first grader. About faith in this person, about the way that this faith grants wings, what miracles can be accomplished by a person who has faith that he is trusted. She remembered – very opportunely, she thought – Makarenko entrusting money to Karabanov, and what a wonderful guy Karabanov became after that. She explained the “presumption of innocence” and what it means. After reading it over and making some corrections, she made a clean draft and put it on her mom’s desk: she always ran her articles past her mom. Then she made her bed, turned off the lights – for some reason, she had recently become shy of changing with the lights on – put her nightgown on, turned the light back on and slipped under the covers. She took out a Dos Passos book she had hidden away, and began to read, listening alertly for the clatter of the front door.

Maybe because she had to listen for the door, maybe because the thoughts of guilt and innocence, of trust and distrust would not leave her head, maybe because her body, freed of her belt and bra, lived its own loose and relaxed life, maybe because of all those things at once, she did not manage to read for long. Carefully re-hiding the book, she lay down on her side, tucking her hand under her cheek, and immediately fell asleep.

It seemed to her that she was awoken instantly the moment she had begun to sleep. She opened her eyes: her mom was standing over her.

“Put on your housedress and come out to me.”

Iskra came out, yawning, warm and pink from sleep.

“What is this?”

“This? It’s an article for the newspaper.”

“Who told you to write it?”

“No one.”

“Iskra, do not lie, I am tired,” quietly said her mother, though she knew perfectly well that Iskra never lied, even to save herself from the soldier’s belt.

“I’m not lying, I wrote it myself. I didn’t even know I would write it. I just sat down and wrote it. I think I did a good job, didn’t I?”

Her mother did not opine on the quality of the work. She threw a piercing glance and began to smoke, breaking matches energetically.

“Who told you about this?”

“Leonid Sergeevich Lyuberetskiy.”

“A self-reflecting intellectual!” Her mother laughed shortly. “What other prattle did he pour into your ears?”

“Nothing. I mean, he said things, of course. About justice, about…”

“So.” Her mother turned sharply, her eyes flashed with a familiar cold fire. “You did not write this article and will not write it in the future. Ever.”

“But that’s unjust…”

“What is just is only what is useful to society. Only this is just, remember that!”

“What about human beings? A person in general?”

“There is no person in general. No! There’s a citizen who is obligated to believe. To believe!”

She turned away, and scratched nervously at the matchbox with a match, not noticing that the cigarette clutched in her teeth was already smoking away.