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Translated by Margaret Wettlin

“It is easy to love for no reason. Friendship is not so irresponsible. ”

We lived in the same house, on the same stairway, but we did not know each other. Not all of the kids in our house were members of our gang by far. Some parents, protecting their offspring from the influence of the street, sent them with nurse-maids to walk in the park of the Lazarev Institute, or in the church yard where spreading maples threw their shadow upon the sepulcher of the Matveyev boyars.

There bored to death under the surveillance of god-fearing and decrepit old women, these children in hidden ways discovered secrets the kids of the street shouted forth at the top of their lungs. Timidly if greedy they deciphered the “rock legends” inscribed on the boyars’ sepulchre and on the pedestal of the monument raised to State Councillor Lazarev, Knight of several orders. Through no fault of his own, my future friend shared the fate of this pitiful hot-house breed.

All the children living in Armyansky Lane and the adjacent street went to either one or the other of the two schools on the other side of Pokrovka. One was in Starosadsky, the other in SpasoglinishchevskyLane. I had no luck. In the year of my entering school there were so many applicants that those two schools could not accept them all andI became one of a group sent to a school quite a distance from home, School No. 40 in Lobkovsky Lane on the other side of the Chistye Ponds.

We immediately realized that we were in for it. The kids from the Chistye Ponds were at home here, whereas we were looked upon asintuders, uninvited guests. In time the school would boil us all together in its pot and we would be on an equal footing. But at first the healthy instinct of self-preservation made the boys from our district hang together. We sought one another during the intervals and we came to school and went home in a solid body. The most dangerous moment was that of crossing the boulevard. We executed it in military formation. On reaching Telegraph Lane the tension was somewhat relaxed and by the time we got to Potapovsky we felt that we were completely out of danger and began capering, bawling songs, wrestling and, when winter came, throwing snowballs.

It was in Telegraph Lane that I first noticed a tall, thin, pale and freckle-faced boy with blue-grey eyes that seemed to take up half his face. He was standing off to one side with his head inclined, watching our pranks with a quiet, unenvious admiration. He would give a little start whenever a snowball sent by a friendly but unrelenting hand caught somebody in the eye or on the mouth, and if one of us made a particularly daring sally, he would give a restrained smile and a flush of suppressed excitement would color his cheeks. Once I discovered I was shouting too loud, gesticulating with too much vigor and putting on a show of fearlessness not required by the game we were playing. The realization that I was showing off in front of this new boy made me hate him. Why should he be hanging about all the time?What was he after?Could he have been sicked on us by our enemies?When I voiced my suspicions, the other boys laughed at me.
“Dope! He’s from our house.”
It turned out he was not only from our house, he lived in the flat just below me and went to our school, though he was in a parallel class. How could we have failed to meet before?My attitude to the grey-eyed boy changed immediately. What I had taken for intrusiveness had been reticence that kept him from thrusting himself forward; he had a right to join our gang but he was waiting to be invited. So I took the initiative in my hands.
During our next snowball fight I sent a ball in his direction. It hit him on the shoulder and he looked surprised and seemed to mind it. The next one brought an uncertain smile to his lips, and only with the third did he believe in the miracle of his acceptance as one of us and, picking up a handful of snow, he addressed an answering missile to me.