She sighed. “At least he’s no student,” she said, inaccurately.
I sighed, too. “Don’t you have some homework we could go over?”
After a long pause, she pulled out a torn sheet of newsprint—addition problems with fractions. It was homework, and she had done it. I corrected it with a pencil while she stared out the window. She got four right out of ten. I returned the sheet and explained the mistakes. She didn’t look at me or make any other sign of recognition. I wrote some new problems similar to the ones she had missed. “Want to work on those for the rest of the period?” I said.
She still didn’t look at me, but after a minute she took the paper and started to add up the fractions. Now it was my turn to stare out the window. The scratching of the terrible pencil and the snapping of her chewing gum.
5. Work a Lot, Forget Everything
When Nina left the laboratory, the snow and sky were turning dark blue. In the distance shone the lights of the “Siberian Spark.” She walked toward them, thinking about what to do. Should she go back to Moscow? But Moscow would only remind her of what she wanted to forget . . .
Nina knocked at the gate of the collective farm. She had a question for the directress. She wanted to work there for a few weeks.
The directress was very happy. “Hard workers are always welcome here,” she said.
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Nina worked a lot and barely thought—not about Ivan, not about physics. She had even lost her physics book. It didn’t matter. She cared for the gentle reindeer and the lustrous foxes. What happiness to work a lot and forget everything!
Nina became friends with Ivan Boyarsky—Ivan-2, she called him—and with his beautiful Ukrainian wife, Ksenia. Sometimes Nina asked herself: What would have happened if Ivan-2 hadn’t been married? Would she have fallen in love with him? Strange. Why were all the Ivans in the world married?
Weeks passed. It was New Year’s. Nina, Ivan-2, Ksenia, the directress, and all the workers drank Soviet champagne. “Happy New Year!” they said to one another.
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One dark winter evening, the directress said that Nina had a visitor.
“Who can it be?” thought Nina.
There at the office stood Leonid. In his hand was Nina’s physics book.
“Leonid!” said Nina. “How did you find me?”
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Svetlana had asked her psychiatrist how long until she would be cured. He said that was the wrong question. Apparently nobody was ever “cured.” Then she asked him how long until she would be able to function normally, and he said two years. At first, she said, that seemed like forever, but when she thought about it more, it wasn’t that long.
“What does ‘functioning normally’ mean?” I asked.
“Being able to face the past. Having a normal sex life. Not lying awake all night in fits of anxiety.”
“Oh. Are most people able to face the past and have normal sex lives?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I think they are,” she said. “Anyway, if anyone is, it should be me. Deep down I have a talent for well-being. I can feel it.”
I nodded. I thought she had it, too, a talent for well-being.
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We read in the student newspaper that an unclothed male freshman had jumped from a third-floor window in the psychology building. A snowbank had cushioned his fall and he was in the infirmary being treated for exposure. The paper didn’t mention his name but by lunch all the freshmen knew it was some kid Ethan who lived in Pennypacker.
In a Dickens novel, I thought, the Ethan who jumped out the window would turn out to be the same Ethan who tutored Linda. But this was real life, so it was probably a different Ethan. Certainly there was no shortage of Ethans.
Nonetheless, after lunch, I got a phone call from the program director telling me to go in to cover for Linda’s usual teacher, who was indisposed. I told him I had class. He explained that we had made a commitment to the students in this community, who were making sacrifices to change their lives. We also had to make sacrifices—we had to set an example for them, because they had been disappointed so many times in the past. Everything he was saying made sense, and yet it didn’t seem fair that he was yelling at me. I wasn’t even the one who had jumped out of the window.
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Linda asked three times what had happened to Ethan. “He jumped out a window,” I said finally. “But don’t worry, he’s fine.”
“A window?” She turned and looked at the window, like maybe she was also thinking of jumping out.
Linda was supposed to learn how to subtract fractions. Why was subtraction always harder than addition?
Misty frozen rain was whirling around as I left the building and walked back to the shuttle stop. The shuttle was somewhat less overcrowded than usual. I didn’t get a seat but I had enough room to take out my Walkman, and occasionally I could see between people’s heads out the window, and this made me cheerful. It was weird what was enough to make you feel good or bad, even though your basic life circumstances were the same.
Things changed somehow, and I was on the floor, eye-to-eye with some boots and a foil wrapper containing a mollusk of chewed-up gum. My Walkman lay nearby—the door of the cassette player had opened, and the wheels were turning. A few other passengers had also fallen, as had a paper bag of oranges.
The shuttle had rear-ended a Mercedes. The driver of the Mercedes got out of his car and came to the window to yell at the shuttle driver. The shuttle driver got out of the shuttle, to yell better. Looking out the window, I saw we were almost at Central Square. I made my way to the front of the bus, climbed out the driver’s door, and started walking back to school.
Soon the sleet turned to snow and became beautiful, and everything suddenly felt more important and meaningful. Dinner had ended an hour ago, so I stopped at a convenience store and bought a yogurt and a chocolate bar. Everything in the store seemed super-focused and clear: the soda fountain, the refrigerated shelves where the yogurts sat, the red light of the scanner.
The next day, I called the program director and said I wasn’t going to tutor math anymore. “You have to remember,” he said, “that not everyone is a Harvard student. You have to learn to see things from other people’s point of view. An upper-class privileged white kid, younger than you, comes to where you live and tells you, basically, ‘You need to know this and this and this, and then you can be part of my society.’ Are you going to immediately give this kid your trust?”
I thought it over. “I don’t know,” I said, “but I’m done with GED. If you need any ESL teachers, let me know.”
“Setting up a good rapport takes time,” he said.
“I’m going to hang up the phone now,” I said.
He sighed. “I’ll be in touch about ESL.”
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