we could lay hands on. In the evenings we lit fires in the garden and
roasted what we had bagged.
Here is a description of one such evening—they were all much alike.
We are sitting around our fire, tired out, hungry and ill-tempered.
Everything is black with smoke-the mess-tin, the sticks from which it
hangs, our faces and hands. Like cannibals getting ready to devour
Captain Cook, we sit in silence, staring into the fire. The smouldering
brands suddenly blaze up and fall apart, and a cap of curling, dark-red
smoke, hangs over the fire.
We are a 'commune'. The whole children's home is divided into
communes. Foraging on one's own is a hard job. Each commune has its
chairman, its own fire and its own reserve supply—whatever has not
been eaten that day and is left over for the next.
Our chairman is Stepka Ivanov, a fifteen-year-old boy with a smooth
mug. He is a greedy-guts and bully whom everyone fears.
'What about a game o' knuckles?' Stepka says lazily.
56
All are silent. No one cares to play knuckles. Stepka is sated, that's
why he wants to play.
'All right, Stepka. Only it's dark, you know,' says Romashka.
'Know where it's dark? Get up!'
There was nothing our chairman liked more in the world than to play
knucklebones. But he cheated and everyone knew it. All except Valya
and I sucked up to him, especially Romashka. Romashka even lost to
him on purpose so's to keep in with him.
If you think we were roasting some dainty gamebird over our fire you
are mistaken. In our mess-tin, seized in battle from the kitchen, we were
cooking soup. It is real 'soup made from sausage stick', as in the fairy-
tale which Serafima Petrovna had read to us during the winter. The
difference, if any, is that while that soup had been made from a mouse's
tail, ours had any odd thing put into that came to hand, sometimes even
frogs' legs.
And yet it wasn't a bad summer. It had stuck in my memory not
because we were poorly fed. I was used to that. I don't remember ever
having had a decent meal those days. The reason I remember this
summer was quite a different one. It was then for the first time that I
gained a sense of self-respect.
It happened at the end of August, shortly before we went back to
town, and around one of those fires on which we were cooking our
supper. Stepka all of a sudden announced a new procedure for eating.
Up to now we had eaten from the one pot in turn, spoon by spoon.
Stepka started, as chairman, then Romashka, and so on. But now we
were to tuck in all together while the soup was still hot, the quickest
getting the most.
Nobody liked the new arrangement. No wonder! With a chairman like
ours no one stood a chance. He could wolf down the whole pot in no
time.
'Nothing doing,' Valya said with decision.
This was greeted with a hubbub of approval. Stepka slowly got up,
dusted his knees and hit Valya in the face. It was a smashing blow that
sent the blood gushing over his face. It must have got into his eyes too,
because he started to wave his arms about like a blind man. 'Well,'
Stepka drawled, 'anyone else asking for it?'
I was the smallest boy in the commune, and he could have mopped up
the floor with me, of course. Nevertheless I hit out at Stepka. All at once
he staggered and slumped down. I don't know where I had struck him,
but he sat on the ground blinking, wearing a sort of thoughtful
expression. The next minute he was up and made a rush at me, but now
the other boys took my part. Stepka was thrashed like the cur he was.
While he lay by the fire, howling, we hastily elected another chairman—
me. Stepka, of course, did not vote. In any case he would have been in a
minority of one, because I was elected unanimously.
Oddly enough, this scrap was my first act of social service. I heard the
boys say of me: 'He's got plenty of guts.' I had guts! Now, what sort of
person was I? Here was food for thought indeed.
CHAPTER FIVE
IS THERE SALT IN SNOW?
57
Nothing changed in our school life that year except that I had now
become a pupil of Form 3. As usual, Korablev turned up at school at 10
a.m. He would arrive in a long autumn overcoat and a wide-brimmed
hat, leisurely comb his moustache in front of the looking-glass and go in
to his classroom.
He asked no questions and set no homework. He simply related
something or read to us. It turned out that he had been a traveller and
had been all over the world. In India he had seen yogi conjurors who
had been buried in the ground for a year and then got up as alive and
well as anything. In China he had eaten the tastiest of Chinese dishes-
rotten eggs. In Persia he had witnessed the sacrificial feats of the
Mohammedans.
It was not until several years later that I learned he had never been
outside Russia. He had made it all up, but how interestingly! Although,
for some reason many had said that he was a fool, none could maintain
that he knew nothing.
As before, the chief figure at our school was the Head, Nikolai
Antonich. He made all decisions, went into everything, attended all
meetings. The senior boys visited him at home to 'thrash things out'.
One day I was lounging about the assembly hall, trying to make up my
mind whether to go down to the Moskva River or to Sparrow Hills,
when the doors of the teachers' room opened and Nikolai Antonich
beckoned to me.
'Grigoriev,' he said (he had a reputation for knowing everyone in the
school by name). 'You know where I live, don't you?'
I said that I did.
