What Archival Records Cannot Tell

Having finally shaken off typhus, I slowly came back to myself. I did not die.

It was already spring. The weather was fine, though in the mornings there were still sharp frosts. What people were busy with at that time, I do not know, but I remember that I was alive, that I walked, and that I must have been thinking, because my relatives sent me to school for the first time. No older person was sent with me, as there was no such custom. I went together with other children from the neighborhood.

My schoolmates—boys and girls—walked along, stamping their feet on the ground, or so it seemed to me. I, however, after my illness, felt light as a feather, like a goose quill. I hardly touched the earth at all and did not feel it under my feet. There was no wind, because if there had been, it would have carried me off to the meadow or into the mountains. Wherever it caught me, there it would have taken me.

Happy to have returned to the world, as if released from prison, I made my way to school.
I had never seen anything like the school in Truskavets. It was not so much a house as a fairy-tale palace — tall, like two barns stacked one on top of the other, and so wide that you could not see the far corner. The windows were broad, high, and bright, as if from a storybook. The roof was not visible—or perhaps there was none at all. To enter the school, one had to climb a high flight of steps, and this remained especially vivid in my memory, because only then did I truly feel that I had legs. Climbing those steps was hard.

Passing through a long corridor, I entered the classroom. There was no stove, no hearth, no oven corner, no large table, none of the icons found in every home—only tall, bright, clean windows, and benches filling the entire room. And on those benches sat children, as many as poppies on a wheat field or cornflowers in rye. One was red as a beet, another thin as a splinter; one neatly combed and smoothed, as if a cow had licked him, another shaggy, like a scarecrow left in last year’s hemp field.

The children I had come with vanished somewhere, as if swept away by snow. They scattered among the benches, and I remained standing alone in the middle of the classroom. Stunned and embarrassed, I did not know what to do.

After a moment, the teacher came over and seated me on a bench between children I did not know. The benches at home were different—simple and even—but these school benches were arranged in levels. The higher ones held your hands and book, however you wished to place them. Beneath them was something like a box, or a compartment in a chest. I saw one boy hiding a piece of barley bread spread with oil there. There was also a lower bench, almost at ground level. That was where the children sat.

That day, I did nothing at school until noon. I simply sat quietly, looking around timidly in every direction, until I fell asleep. I was not yet fully well.

What surprised me greatly was that, after seating me, the teacher did not say a single word to me. He spoke to other children, and they spoke to him, but not to me. I did not understand this at all. After lessons, I ran out into the field where potatoes were being planted and told everything I had seen and heard at school. I described the benches so vividly that anyone listening would have understood them. Pointing to the rows of planted and hilled potatoes, I said that school was arranged in exactly the same way: bench next to bench, with children sitting in between.

The next day, I felt a little more cheerful. After a week, I already had acquaintances —several “more respectable” figures — with whom I went outside, shared bread, and walked home from school. These were my neighbors, and later they became good friends.

On the wall in front of the benches hung a large wooden board. Cut into it were shapes —something like horses, something like cows, something like a shovel or a washboard. Some understood it; others only stared. One older pupil, already dressed like a gentleman and holding a rod in his hand, pointed at the board and pronounced sounds that meant nothing to me. Before long, however, my turn came as well. 

A few days after I started school, the teacher told me to come out to the middle of the room, in front of the board. The gentlemanly pupil with the rod was already standing there, waiting for me. I was not afraid of the rod, because I knew it was held by Itsyk Mayorkiv, the son of our innkeeper, who taught the alphabet to beginners like me. But standing there for the first time, in the middle of the classroom, before such a large crowd of children eager to see how I would answer, and before the teacher, who fixed his eyes on me as if I had just arrived, I felt the blood rush to my face like fire. Only then did I suddenly become afraid.

What happened to me that day, I do not remember. Nothing extraordinary must have occurred, because I would have remembered it. Bad things stay in the memory longer than good ones.

In those first days of school, I noticed that the teacher was not as frightening as the older pupils had said. But he was not particularly kind either. I saw with my own eyes how he pulled Fedya Hurbyi by the ear so hard that the boy burst into tears.

At that time the teacher in Truskavets was Teofil Lastovetskyi, a Ukrainian by nationality. He was of slender build, medium height, with quick eyes beneath a high forehead, and a thick, slightly bulbous nose that made him look somewhat Swabian. He moved briskly. He often became angry with the children, and when he did, his whole face turned red. He would curl his tongue into a tube beneath his lower teeth and press it tightly with his upper teeth, so tightly that it seemed he might bite it off. I was terribly afraid that one day his tongue would truly fall out of his mouth if he pressed it too hard in his anger. But this never happened, although there were times when all the pupils would have rejoiced if it had. (…) 

And to my late first teacher, I owe the fact that today I sit on the other side of the globe, in Carnegie, writing these memories.