An Evening with Claire by Gaito Gazdanov

Author:Gaito Gazdanov
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

And then I opened my eyes again and saw smoke and red flames twilighting the cold winter streets. It was exceptionally cold at the time: at school, for instance—I was now in the sixth year—we sat there without taking off our overcoats, and our teachers went about in fur coats. They were very rarely paid their salaries, but still they always showed up on time for lessons. There were several subjects that had nobody to teach them, and so there were free periods—and we used this freedom to sing, as a whole class, the convict songs we had learnt from Perenko, a tall boy of eighteen or so who lived in the troubled outskirts of town and had grown up among the thieves and, quite possibly, the murderers of tomorrow. He carried a switchblade, always used thieves’ cant, and had a particular way of clicking his tongue and spitting though his teeth. He was a wonderful friend but a poor student—not because he lacked aptitude, but rather because his parents were simple folk and there was no one in his family to help him with his studies. In their little flat adjoining the carpenter’s workshop that his father owned, no one had heard of the Hundred Years War or the Wars of the Roses, and so all these names, and foreign words, and the thorny problems of modern history, just like the laws of thermodynamics and passages from the classics of French and German literature—all this was so foreign to Perenko that he couldn’t understand it, nor could he commit it to memory or, in the final analysis, even sense that it might one day be of any use to him whatsoever. Perenko might have been interested in these things, had his spiritual needs not found another outlet. But, as with the majority of such people, he was given to sentimentality and would sing his convict songs almost with tears in his eyes: for him, those songs replaced the spiritual thrill afforded by books, music and the theatre, the need for which was quite possibly stronger in him than it was in his more cultivated classmates. The majority of teachers failed to realize this and held Perenko simply to be a troublemaker; it was only the Russian master who took him seriously, paid any attention to him and never laughed at his ignorance, for which Perenko loved him dearly and set him apart from the others. This teacher seemed to us a strange man, because during his lessons he didn’t talk of the things we were used to, things that I had been taught over and over again in my five years of secondary education, before I moved schools—that is, to the one where Vasily Nikolaevich taught, for his name was Vasily Nikolaevich. “I’ve just given you the name Leo Tolstoy,” he would say. “The people, you know, held him in the highest regard. My mother, for instance, who was an altogether simple woman, a seamstress, took it into her

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