LITMIR.BIZ

      In the fifth grade, instead of just one Mistress, we had separate teachers for different subjects because our elementary education was over.

      The new Class Mistress' name was Makarenko Lyubov … er… Alexeevna?…Antonovna?…I don’t remember her patronymic. Between us, we called her just “Makar”, yes, checks with the handle of the most popular army pistol of 12 charges.

      “Atas! Makar is coming!” (In the school lingo "atas!" meant “beware!”)

      But all that came later, and for the first time, I met the would-be Class Mistress the day before school, when Mom brought me there to copy the curriculum and get acquainted with my new Class Mistress.

      Makarenko asked me to help her about the class wall newspaper on a big sheet of Whatman paper, which had to be adorned with a frame for which there already was the mark of a pencil line five-centimeter offset from the edges. She gave me a brush and a box of watercolors and warned to use only the blue one before going out together with my Mom to further improve on their acquaintance.

      Proud of being trusted with so important a job, I started immediately, dipped the brush in the glass of water, dampened the blue and began to paint the strip of the Whatman paper between its edge and the pencil mark, trying not to trespass it. The job turned out an up-hill one – you paint, and paint, and paint but there still remains so much to paint yet. The main problem though was that each watercolor stroke differed from others by its shade of blue, making it hard to keep the uniformly. I persevered in earnest because not every day a boy gets a chance of making frames on a sheet of Whatman. However, by the return of Mom and Mistress, I had only finished about a quarter of the frame.

      The teacher said at once that was enough, even more than that because all she had wanted of me was just passing the brush along the pencil line, but now it’s too late. Mom promised to bring a sheet of Whatman paper from her work, but the teacher said “no-no!” Then I came up with a proposal to mount strips of paper on glue over the superfluously painted areas, but the idea was also turned down, I didn’t know why.

      We left, and Mom did not rebuke me on our way home for it was not my fault if the new teacher had never in her life seen sturdy frames of plywood, but only those of thin lines as around the words of Marx and Lenin in the Regiment Club…

      When school began there was a wall newspaper hanging in our classroom. Probably, I was the only schoolboy to study so carefully the blue line borders in the paper…

      Nevertheless, our new Mistress retained some confidence in me and a month later entrusted with a verbal message for Seraphima Sergeevna in our former classroom.

      I knocked on the familiar door and recited the message to my first teacher, who was sitting at her desk facing the new growth of first-graders. She thanked me and then asked to close the upper window leaf, thru which droughts got in whenever someone opened the door.

      I readily climbed onto the windowsill and, standing on tip-toes, reached out and slammed shut the vicious leaf. The mission done and, rather than to kneel back on the sill and then lie on it with the stomach, I just jumped down on the floor. The jump turned out classy deft, and full of pride I strutted out of the silent classroom past the delight and reverence in the eyes of the small ones at their desks. How could I have thought those first-graders on a visit to my kindergarten group were so unreachably grown up? Arrogant swaggers!.