Probably, I caught cold by the vacations end and started school later than my classmates because I could not get it what was happening the morning when I finally came to our classroom.
The lessons had not begun yet and the newcomer Malvina-like girl appeared in the doorway right after me. Like all the schoolgirls at any grade in those times, she wore the compulsory uniform in Queen-Victorian style—a dark brown dress with a white lace collar and a black apron on copious straps covering all of her shoulders.
She stepped into the room and stopped expectantly. The next moment a godawful hue and cry burst out, “The Cow of the Courtyard!”
She dropped her school bag on the floor and, wrapping her arms around her head, ran along the aisle between the desks, while everyone else—both the boys and the girls—blocked her way, hooting and yelling something in her ears, and Yura Nikolayenko ran behind her and rubbed himself at her back, like dogs do, until she sat down at her desk and dropped her face into her hands.
The mayhem ceased only when the classroom was entered by a teacher asking, “What’s going on here?”, she was perplexed no less than me.
The girl got on her feet and ran out of the classroom without even picking her schoolbag up from the floor.
The next day she never showed up and we had a class meeting attended, instead of her, by her father who was red in the face and shouting that we were a bunch of scoundrels and pinched his daughter by the chest. He demonstrated with his hands where exactly were applied the pinches.
Then our Mistress told the meeting that pioneers shouldn’t disgrace themselves by nagging their classmates so disgustingly as we did because the Malvina-like girl was also a pioneer like all of us.
And I felt ashamed even though I had not been pinching or nagging anyone. The beautiful girl never more appeared in our class, probably, she was transferred to the parallel one.
(…” the crowd is a merciless beast…”
runs a line from Avetic Isahakian’s poem about Abu-Lala, which I learned very well even before reading it…)
Individual cruelty is no less ugly as collective one. In spring I got another deep scratch when witnessing an example of maternal pedagogy.
The empty afternoon Courtyard was entered, between our house and the corner building, by a woman heading to the buildings on the opposite side. Behind her, a six-year-old girl ran and sobbed holding her arm outstretched to the women and kept repeating the same words with the voice hoarse from non-stop wailing, “Mom, gimme your hand! Mom, gimme your hand!”