clothes, as if she was in a factory. And as far as she was concerned, she was: School 81 was a factory for education. There were two ways with Comrade Gesheva: public praise or public humiliation.
She couldn’t stand ‘hooligans’ and ‘retards’, which meant anyone who was late for class or slightly dim. Her favourite method of discipline was to attack the top of your head with the blunt end of a key that she always carried in her mantle pocket, or to pinch your ear lobe with her sharply manicured nails. If you weren’t on the receiving end of her corporal punishment, she tried to make you complicit in inflicting them on others.
By Gesheva’s decree, one of my tasks as the Unit Leader, and the tallest girl in the class, was to intercede in hooligan fights, a manicured index finger helpfully directing me towards the fray. I was also expected to report on my comrades, to her and to their parents. Who was exhibiting signs of being a hooligan or a retard, who had said what about whom, who had behaved badly? It was a daunting task, made more complicated by the fact that one of the two chief hooligans was my friend Toni. Toni, the son of our balcony neighbours with the Lada, had been my best friend since we were seven. He ran a bit wild at school as a result of having a father with great ambitions for his kids, and even greater anger management problems, which resulted in beatings for Toni. My first task as a Unit Leader was to go to Toni’s parents and report his bad behaviour. After several days of anxious procrastination, I finally confessed to my mother, who promptly gave me my first lesson in ethics. It’s not your job to report to anybody, she said. You are his friend.
Comrade Gesheva’s response to my failure revealed that she followed a different ethical code. It came in the form of a brief butdevastating speech in front of the class: ‘The fish starts rotting from the head’ (me), and ‘The class must know that its Unit Leader is a zero. Kapka, you are a complete zero. You must reflect on this very carefully.’
Meanwhile, other girls were throwing Gesheva morsels of information about well-known hooligans like Nikifor. Nikifor had no full-time father, and his mother was an alcoholic. In other words, they were official degenerates, which in a strange way proved useful for Nikifor: he had nothing to lose. He was beyond Gesheva’s terror tactics. He sneered at her and her key, driving her into a frothing rage.
But after a traumatic accident in which the son of a teacher was pushed out of the top-floor window and shattered on the pavement below in a mess of glass, Nikifor disappeared. An awed whisper went around: he had been sent to a Corrective Labour School. It would be years before any of us saw Nikifor again and I imagined his life there, guarded by growling, whip-wielding Cerberuses exactly like Gesheva.
My own fear of Gesheva manifested itself in two ways: in increasingly regular attacks of gastritis and in increasingly escapist books. I was joined in my psychological truancy by Esther, who was congenitally incapable of toeing the official line. We tried to write science-fiction stories which closely resembled the translated books we devoured –
2001: A Space Odyssey
, Isaac Asimov’s
I, Robot
, and Ray Bradbury’s
I Sing the Body Electric!
and
Dandelion Wine
. Our characters had suitably foreign names like Peter and Jack. Esther was a better sci-fi writer than me, which I put down to her otherworldly physicist parents.
We followed fanatically the TV series
Blake’s Seven
, and we played teleporting games where you left behind the mud of the Youths and suddenly found yourself in an invented world, whose small but selectpopulations spoke like characters from
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
and said things like ‘Don’t let me depress you’ or ‘You’re turning into a penguin, stop it immediately!’ Around the same time, we were gripped with
Star Wars
mania. Life was only worth living
She couldn’t stand ‘hooligans’ and ‘retards’, which meant anyone who was late for class or slightly dim. Her favourite method of discipline was to attack the top of your head with the blunt end of a key that she always carried in her mantle pocket, or to pinch your ear lobe with her sharply manicured nails. If you weren’t on the receiving end of her corporal punishment, she tried to make you complicit in inflicting them on others.
By Gesheva’s decree, one of my tasks as the Unit Leader, and the tallest girl in the class, was to intercede in hooligan fights, a manicured index finger helpfully directing me towards the fray. I was also expected to report on my comrades, to her and to their parents. Who was exhibiting signs of being a hooligan or a retard, who had said what about whom, who had behaved badly? It was a daunting task, made more complicated by the fact that one of the two chief hooligans was my friend Toni. Toni, the son of our balcony neighbours with the Lada, had been my best friend since we were seven. He ran a bit wild at school as a result of having a father with great ambitions for his kids, and even greater anger management problems, which resulted in beatings for Toni. My first task as a Unit Leader was to go to Toni’s parents and report his bad behaviour. After several days of anxious procrastination, I finally confessed to my mother, who promptly gave me my first lesson in ethics. It’s not your job to report to anybody, she said. You are his friend.
Comrade Gesheva’s response to my failure revealed that she followed a different ethical code. It came in the form of a brief butdevastating speech in front of the class: ‘The fish starts rotting from the head’ (me), and ‘The class must know that its Unit Leader is a zero. Kapka, you are a complete zero. You must reflect on this very carefully.’
Meanwhile, other girls were throwing Gesheva morsels of information about well-known hooligans like Nikifor. Nikifor had no full-time father, and his mother was an alcoholic. In other words, they were official degenerates, which in a strange way proved useful for Nikifor: he had nothing to lose. He was beyond Gesheva’s terror tactics. He sneered at her and her key, driving her into a frothing rage.
But after a traumatic accident in which the son of a teacher was pushed out of the top-floor window and shattered on the pavement below in a mess of glass, Nikifor disappeared. An awed whisper went around: he had been sent to a Corrective Labour School. It would be years before any of us saw Nikifor again and I imagined his life there, guarded by growling, whip-wielding Cerberuses exactly like Gesheva.
My own fear of Gesheva manifested itself in two ways: in increasingly regular attacks of gastritis and in increasingly escapist books. I was joined in my psychological truancy by Esther, who was congenitally incapable of toeing the official line. We tried to write science-fiction stories which closely resembled the translated books we devoured –
2001: A Space Odyssey
, Isaac Asimov’s
I, Robot
, and Ray Bradbury’s
I Sing the Body Electric!
and
Dandelion Wine
. Our characters had suitably foreign names like Peter and Jack. Esther was a better sci-fi writer than me, which I put down to her otherworldly physicist parents.
We followed fanatically the TV series
Blake’s Seven
, and we played teleporting games where you left behind the mud of the Youths and suddenly found yourself in an invented world, whose small but selectpopulations spoke like characters from
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
and said things like ‘Don’t let me depress you’ or ‘You’re turning into a penguin, stop it immediately!’ Around the same time, we were gripped with
Star Wars
mania. Life was only worth living
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