Christened With Crosses by Eduard Kochergin

Author:Eduard Kochergin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: orphans, childhood memoirs, memoirs, Soviet Union, Stalin, WWII, modern Russian literature, Russian literature in translation, orphanage, railroads, post-war Russia, autobiographical prose, autobiography, boys adventures, enemies of the people, besieged Leningrad, odyssey, journey, soviet orphans, runaway, Russian literature, in English
Publisher: Glagoslav Publications
Published: 2012-08-10T00:00:00+00:00

KNOWLEDGE IS LIGHT, IGNORANCE IS DARKNESS

The school that I first ended up in could hardly be called an institution of education. It was a long horizontal barracks divided in half. One half painted cobalt green was for civilian, city schoolchildren, and the other, unpainted, of dark brown wood, was for us, the pupils of correctional labor colonies and orphanages of the USSR NKVD. Down the center of the barracks, there was a dark corridor, and on the sides there were classroom-cells. In each classroom, there was an enormous Dutch stove, covered with metal. By the back wall of the classroom, around the stove, there was a tall pile of damp logs. On the opposite wall there was a blackboard made of a piece of plywood painted black. Above the blackboard hung an old slogan covered in flyspecks: “Knowledge is light, ignorance is darkness”. Lessons in each classroom took place in three shifts. The city was still filled with evacuees. There was more than enough populace for three shifts at the school – both upstanding pupils and enemies of the people.

In the mornings, when the Lad-driver took us to school, it was freezing in the classroom. The stove tender, Mumuka, a deaf-mute man, did not manage to heat all the classrooms with the damp logs, and we had to help him. After my training at lighting fires with the Khanty, I realized that the split logs should be placed vertically, from the butt-end to the top, like for a night fire. The dimensions of the stoves made this possible. I got it right immediately – the logs burnt much more quickly. Mumuka was very surprised and made me his assistant, and the boys gave me the title of main stove heater.

From the corridor side, on our door an announcement hung: beginner classes. Indeed, in this classroom cell, the first, second and third year pupils studied together. Apart from a few lads, all the pupils in the beginner classes were terribly overgrown. I can’t say how old they all were, but many of them had whiskers sprouting under their noses. These children of war were unmanageable. If these big louts didn’t like something, they could chuck a log at the teacher. As the stove tender, I sat on the back bench in the central row by the stove, and the split logs literally stuck into my back. My neighbor on the bench was Kunckledragger from the colony. When the teacher called him to the blackboard to answer a question, he would grab a hefty piece of wood out of the log pile and send it sliding across the floor to her, saying,

“That’s instead of me, let it answer your question.”

When the latest teacher could no longer put up with this outrage and ran into the corridor in tears, a horrible nightmare would ensue in the classroom. The overgrown brawlers jumped up from behind their desks, grabbing the smaller boys, mocking us, “crushing lice” on our heads and tossing us onto the log pile.

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