EUGENE DUBNOV
85
He also laughed because he was glad for him. Yura was probably the
only one in the class who had not gloated yesterday when their teacher
had said that the higher a man soars the harder he falls-and asked
Orlik to explain. Orlik went terribly red and started to mumble some–
thing, and after the bell almost all the class, having guessed what had
happened, began to rag him. They drove him into such a state that he
ran home before classes were over. Immediately after school, he had
rung Yura up and suggested that they meet, as usual, by Peter the Great's
oak in Petrovsky Park.
It
turned out that Orlik's father had been removed from his post–
that same mysteriously exalted post which he had occupied for so many
years-and transferred to a much, much lower one. On account of this
the grand celebrations planned for Orlik's fifteenth birthday had been
cancelled. When Orlik informed the teacher, who had already been
invited, he had been imprudent enough to confide in her and to explain
that his birthday party had been cancelled because his father had been
sacked. Yura was nettled by the fact that he himself had not been invited
to
the party, but he immediately forgot his annoyance when he heard
how unjustly the powers that be had treated Orlik's father.
"You see, the Latvians disliked him right from the start, because he
is a Russian, and began to undermine his position," Orlik complained.
"They simply hate Russians. And so they slandered Dad for supposedly
feathering his own nest-which I bet they'd been doing themselves. So
they pulled the wool over the ever-vigilant eyes of the Party, and it has
victimized an innocent man. Well, just you wait-our time will come,
and we'll show them! Dad will go to Moscow soon, and then the truth
will out!"
But now when the two of them met at the No.
T T
tram stop
to
go to
the lido on Kish Lake in Mezhapark (for it was closer and cheaper to
get
to
than the beach), Orlik seemed to have completely forgotten his
father's misfortunes and his own thirst for revenge. Yura was at first
happy to see Orlik in his usual exuberant mood, and did not immedi–
ately understand why his friend had forgotten his family tragedy. But the
reason became clear soon enough: in the tram Orlik never stopped talk–
ing about an embarrassing incident which had taken place that morning
in school. Standing by the window in the corridor, he had been for the
umpteenth time enacting, for the benefit of the boys from his own class
and the adjoining A-section, some small scenes from that same film they
all liked so much. And everybody was so excited that no one noticed
Pickled Newts, their biology teacher, on her way to their classroom to
begin a new lesson. By the time somebody spotted her and whispered
