'Alexander Grigoriev.'
'Would you like to study?'
I looked at him and said nothing. I must have had a pretty rough time
of it during those months of hungry street life, because all of a sudden
my face twisted and the floodgates opened everywhere— from eyes to
nose.
'He'd like to,' said commissioner Alee. 'Where shall we send him,
Ivan Andreyevich?'
'To Nikolai Antonich's, I think,' the other answered, carefully
replacing my hare on the window-sill.
'Why, of course! Nikolai Antonich has just that bent in art. Well,
Alexander Grigoriev, do you want to go to Nikolai Antonich's?'
'He doesn't know him, Alee. Better write it down. Alexander
Grigoriev... How old are you?'
'Eleven.'
I had added six months to my age.
'Eleven. Have you put that down? To Tatarinov, Commune School No.
4.'
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
NIKOLAI ANTONICH
The fat girl from the Education Department, who somehow resembled
Aunt Dasha, left me in a long dimly-lit corridor of a room, saying that
48
she would soon be back. It was in the cloakroom. Empty racks, looking
like skinny people with horns, stood in open cupboards. All along the
wall—doors and doors. One of them was of glass. I saw myself in it for
the first time since I had left home. What a sight! A pale-faced boy with
a round cropped head looked at me despondently; he was very small,
smaller than I thought. A peaked nose, down-drawn mouth.
The fat girl returned and we went to see Nikolai Antonich. He was a
stout pale man with scant hair combed back over his balding head. A
gold tooth gleamed in his mouth, and I, in my usual stupid way, stared
at that tooth and could not keep my eyes off it.
Nikolai Antonich was talking to a group of boys of about sixteen who
crowded round him arguing and interrupting each other. He heard them
out, twiddling his stubby fingers, which reminded me of hairy
caterpillars-cabbage-worms I believe they're called. He was unhurried,
condescending, dignified.
We came forward.
'A waif?'
'No.'
'From the Education Department,' the fat girl explained and placed a
paper on the desk.
'Where do you come from, Grigoriev?' Nikolai Antonich demanded
after reading the paper.
I told him.
'And what are you doing here, in Moscow?'
'Passing through,' I said.
'Oh, I see. Where were you going?'
I took a deep breath and said nothing. I had been asked all these
questions a hundred times.
'All right, we'll discuss that some other time,' Nikolai Antonich said.
He wrote something on the back of the paper. 'You won't run away, will
you?'
I was quite sure that I would, but to be on the safe side I said, 'No.'
We went out. In the doorway I looked back. Nikolai Antonich was
gazing after me with a thoughtful air. What was he thinking? One thing
he was definitely not thinking was that Fate itself had appeared to him
that day in the shape of a half-starved ragamuffin in outsize boots and
regulation jacket from which protruded a skinny neck.
________
49
PART TWO
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
CHAPTER ONE
I LISTEN TO FAIRY-TALES
'I'll stick it till the first warm day,' I had firmly decided. As soon as
the frosts let go, it was goodbye for me at the children's home. They'd
never see me again. But things worked out differently. I didn't run away
at all. What kept me there were the reading sessions.
First thing in the morning we went to the bakery for bread, then
lessons began. We were counted as Form I, though some of us were old
enough to be studying in Form 6.
Our teacher was an old lady by the name of Serafima Petrovna, who
came to school with a rucksack on her back. I really couldn't say what
she taught us exactly.
I remember the Duck lesson. It was three lessons in one—geography,
nature study and Russian. At the nature study lesson we studied the
duck as such: what sort of wings it had, what sort of feet, how it swam,
and so on. At the geography lesson the same duck was studied as a
denizen of the Earth: you had to point out on the map where it lived and
where it didn't. At the Russian lesson Serafima Petrovna taught us to
write 'd-u-c-k' and read to us something from Brehm about ducks. She
mentioned, in passing, that the German for duck was so-and-so, and the
French so-and-so. This, I believe, was called at the time the 'complex
method'. It was all sort of 'incidental'. It is quite likely that Serafima
Petrovna got this method mixed up a bit. She was an old lady and wore a
mother-of-pearl watch pinned to her breast, so that in answering her we
always looked to see what time it was.
In the evening she read to us. It was from her that I first heard the
