Across from our house there is a school, and today, on this clear and warm first day of autumn, sounds were drifting over from it. We know this technique from films, and I used it a great deal in my former life: reverberation makes the words impossible to make out.
Not a single intelligible word reached us from the school. But the sounds did: a short speech by the headmistress, followed by a long stretch of enthusiastic emceeing. At one point they started singing the national anthem; the host joined in through his microphone. He would have done better not to, because hitting the notes was plainly not among his talents...
Then I got busy with something of my own, stopped paying attention to the school, and remembered it only when silence fell. And the silence was absolute, like in the countryside, as though nothing had happened at all. The caretaker went on doing whatever he had been doing in our courtyard, and the tall poplars stood there, slowly turning yellow.
People in the know, returning from the school, told me that the host was “a former physics teacher.” I’m almost afraid to ask what he teaches now. They also said that “everyone was dying laughing at his singing.”
I worked in a school myself for several years, long ago now, and I remember that the feelings on this day were always mixed. We, the teachers, as it were, used to congratulate one another on “the New Year.” Those were the years when school uniforms were no longer worn, and quite a few other things had not yet appeared either.
Then I started remembering our own first-day assemblies, back when I was a pupil at that same school. In fact, there was a proper assembly only when I entered first grade. After that, we were usually taken to the Museum of Lenin, which stood not far away. We would sit in the soft chairs of the conference hall and listen, presumably, to speeches. I remember none of them. Nor do I remember us singing anything. Though perhaps I have simply forgotten.
I dedicate this post to the heroes who work in Russian schools today, and to the folks who, just as we once did, are learning their own important lessons, whatever the school may think it is teaching them.
The day before, on the last day of summer, I spent a couple of hours in the village where I grew up. For the first time in many years, at least twenty, I drove out to look at the old road, long since abandoned.
Once, we travelled that road endlessly, on foot and by vehicle, in winter and in summer, in the sidecar of a motorcycle, or sitting on sacks of potatoes behind a tractor...
The field where they used to sow fodder crops is now overgrown with weeds, and for some reason several cubic metres of rotten slabwood have been dumped there. The road itself looks exactly as an abandoned road ought to look. I have no complaints about the road.
For some reason I took not a single beautiful photograph, although there was a lake with scraps of mist hanging between two wooded islands, and a little wood running down to the water, and our village street, not abandoned at all but still wonderfully lived-in, homely and warm.
Now, as I sit down to write this, when night has already fallen and those poplars can no longer be seen, I suddenly remembered verse by Russian poet Rubtsov, who died long ago, and Dulov’s setting of these lines, which I want to share.
The poem is about departure:
"A blurred road, crooked poplars, yellow fields, the distant sound of a whistle as if from another land.
At first there is no regret. Then comes the harbour, darkness, sailors hurrying people aboard, and finally that sudden pain rising from the fields: the ache of love, of the dates long gone, and of leaving behind.
I sailed on, farther and farther, never looking back, towards the misty shore of my foolish youth."
