FullReads

Our priceless friendship was almost wrecked on the first day of school. We went to the same school and our mothers arranged to have us seated next to each other. When class functionaries were to be elected, Mitya nominated me for sanitary inspector. I did not nominate him for any of the other posts—why, I do not know; perhaps because I didn’t think of it, perhaps because I was shy of nominating him after he had done the same for me. Mitya made no mention of his disappointment, but the moment when I was elected sanitary inspector marked the moment when I was dismissed from his good grac
es. My duties consisted of wearing an arm-band with a red cross on it and of examining the hands and necks of my fellows before lessons began and putting a cross in my notebook opposite the names of the unwashed. Three crosses in succession meant either the crime had to be rectified by a scrubbing, or one of the parents had to appear in school. On the face of it, there seemed to be no dazzling splendor in my position, but Mitya was green with envy. Night after night after elections he would telephone our number and in a tone of withering sarcasm ask for “Comrade Sanitary Inspector.” I would go to the phone.”Comrade Sanitary Inspector?” “Yes.” “You barnacled bladder troll!”—and down would go the receiver. It must have taken a great deal of resentment to think up a cuss-word like that. I accepted the title as the name of some slimy and obscene species of the devil.
I came to look upon Mitya’s outbursts, changes of mood, sentimental tirades and zest for quarrelling (if only for the sake of the treacly reconciliations), as an indispensable aspect of friendship. When I came to know Pavlik I did not realize for some time that I had found a different and more genuine kind of friendship. I believed I was merely patronizing a queer egg who was exceedingly shy. To a certain extent this was true of our early relationship. Pavlik had not lived in our house very long and had no friends. Furthermore he was, as I have already said, one of those unfortunate kids taken for outings in the church yard or the park of the Lazarev Institute.

The regimen of supervised outings exhausted his parents’ solicitude for his well-being. In later years I knew of no way in which they curbed his activities or intruded upon his life. He enjoyed complete independence, resigning all rights to parental care in favor of his younger brother, he himself seeing to his own upbringing. I am not exaggerating; that is exactly how it was. Pavlik loved his family and was loved by them, but he refused his parents the right to govern his likes and dislikes, the order of his day and his movements. He was much freer than I was, with all the domestic taboos I was subjected to. Even so I played the first fiddle in our friendship. This was not only because I was an old resident of the neighborhood; my advantage lay mainly in my being unaware of our friendship. I still looked upon Mitya Grebennikov as my best friend. It is amazing how adroitly he forced me to play the game of “Sacred Friendship” with him. He liked to walk down school corridors with his arm on my shoulder and to have our pictures taken together with the waters of Chistye Ponds as background. Vaguely I felt that his motives were not wholly disinterested; say what you like, there was something flattering about being the friend of Comrade Sanitary Inspector; and, posed against the camera of one of the Ponds’ “shooters” his delicate effeminate beauty gained by contrast with my broad-faced, flat-nosed plainness. While the photographer was busy with his machinations underneath the black rag, nurse-maids vied with one another in admiring Mitya’s sloe eyes, his haircut disgustingly styled a Bubikopfand the entrancing black bow that blossomed out from under his collar.”Why, he’s as pretty as a girl!” they gushed, and that moron took it as a compliment.