Calligraphy Lesson Read Free Page A

closest to you. I wanted to live not by lies, 4 but I didn’t understand then that I wasn’t a hero, I was just a little brat. My silence, too, I think, shortened her life.
    Now, no sooner have I written that I’d stopped talking to Mum than I sense that I’ve not written the whole truth, and have ended up lying as a result.
    Yes, I never even said hello to her, but not only because I’d read The Kolyma Tales and The Gulag Archipelago , 5 which had inexplicably ended up in my possession around that time and changed much in my youthful conception of the world. Of course not. The conflict arose because of my first love. Mum didn’t like that girl. She didn’t like her at all.
    At school she was the all-powerful headmistress, she could quell an inexperienced teacher’s unruly class with a single glance, but at home, in her relationship with her own son, she turned out to be completely helpless. Of course the mother wished her son well. But she didn’t knowhow to do him good. And of course Mum was totally right about that girl. But I realised that only later.
    Disaster struck at Mum’s school when Andropov came to power. No one knew he was already mortally ill. Once again everyone got frightened of their own fear.
    The seniors wanted to organise an evening dedicated to the memory of Vysotsky. Mum’s colleagues tried to dissuade her, but she authorized it. The evening went ahead. The kids sang his songs, recited his poems, listened to his recordings. Someone informed on the headmistress.
    The school got an exemplary slap on the wrist to teach others a lesson.
    I’d already moved out by then. I remember how I came home and Mum told me how she’d been summoned, boorishly spoken to, yelled at. She tried to defend herself, to explain. No one was going to listen to her.
    She wanted to live out her life without losing human dignity. For that she got absolutely trampled.
    For the first time, I think, Mum burst into tears in front of me. I didn’t know what to say, I just sat beside her and stroked her on the shoulder.
    Suddenly I wanted to ask her forgiveness for not having spoken to her for almost a whole year, but I never did.
    Mum got kicked out of work, a blow from which she would never recover. School was her whole life.
    She fell seriously ill. First her heart. Then cancer. So began the hospitals, the operations.
    By then I was working at a school myself, at the no. 444 on Pervomaiskaya Street, and after lessons I’d go and see her. I spent hours in the hospital ward, doing my marking, fetching Mum something to drink, giving her the bedpan, reading her the paper, cutting her nails, just being close by. It we spoke at all, it was of trivialities. Or rather, of what seemed important then, but now, so many years on, seems unimportant.I kept meaning to ask her forgiveness, but somehow I never managed to.
    Later I described it all in The Taking of Izmail : her neighbour in the hospital who, bald from chemotherapy, never took off her beret, which made her look like a caricature of an artist; how bits of her nails, grown long on her gnarled toes, would fly all over the ward when I clumsily attempted to cut them; how I brought in some boards for her bed, because Mum couldn’t get to sleep on its caved-in wire frame.
    The novel, written a few years after Mum’s death, took its rise from Russian literature, containing as it does many quotations, associations and interweaving plot threads, but by the end I was simply describing what was going on in my own life. From the complex to the simple. From the literary and the learned to Mum’s foam-filled bra, which she wore after they cut off her breasts. From Old-Slavonic centos to her quiet death, which she so longed for to release her from the pain.
    There were a great many people at her funeral: teachers with whom she’d worked, former pupils. She’d accumulated a lot of pupils over the years. Only through your own