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“Excellent,” Elena Frantzevna murmured through thin white lips.”And now the poem.”

“What poem?”

“The one I gave you to learn.”

“I didn’t know you had given us a poem.”

“You’ve got the bad habit of day-dreaming during lessons.”Marvellous how quickly she got the steam up: “For a big boy like you to be so badly behaved….”

“I was absent. I was sick.”

She stared at me for a moment with her black-ringed lemurlike eyes, then referred to her roll-book. Her fingers were trembling.

“Yes, you were absent, but didn’t you have the sense to ask one of your friends for the homework assignment?”

I ought to have simply admitted I didn’t have the sense. What could she have done to me? Given me a bad mark? Hardly. But I didn’t say that. I found a way out. I said I had asked Pavlik and he had not told me about the poem. Probably forgot. I said this to Elena Frantzevna with a light touch, inviting her to treat the incident in a humorous vein.

“Stand up!” she ordered Pavlik.”Is this the truth?”

He bent his head and said nothing. Suddenly I realized it was not the truth. I had asked him about math, Russian, history, and biology, but I considered it beneath my dignity to do homework in German.

Elena Frantzevna now vented her wrath upon Pavlik. As usual, he took it in silence, without finding excuses or answering back, as if it did not concern him. Having let off her steam, she calmed down and asked me to recite any poem I liked. I spouted Schiller’s Glove, for which I was rewarded with the top mark.

That was the end of it. Ah, if only it had been the end! When I, happy and triumphant, went back to my seat I discovered that Pavlik had changed his. He was no longer sitting beside me. He and his books, his papers, his pens and his pencils had disappeared. When I looked round I found he had taken an empty seat behind me.

“What’s the idea?”

He didn’t answer. His eyes had a strange look—moist and red. I had never seen Pavlik cry, not even after fierce unequal battles ending in defeat, when the toughest boys cry more out of hurt pride than hurt bodies. Now, too, he did not allow his tears to fall, but he was certainly crying.
“Forget it,” I said.”The Rat isn’t worth it.”

He did not answer and looked past me. The Rat? He didn’t give a hang for the Rat. His friend had betrayed him. Calmly, callously, publicly, in broad daylight, for the sake of a trifling gain, he had been betrayed by one for whom he would gladly have gone through fire and water.

Nobody wishes to admit his own baseness. I tried to convince myself I had done the right thing. Say what you like, it was his fault I got caught even if he had not meant to harm me. I had to defend myself somehow, didn’t I? What if the Rat did shout at him? She shouted at everybody: it wasn’t worth noticing. And yet…. If Pavlik had been in my place, would he have named me? Never. He would sooner have bitten off his tongue. A sudden coldness creeping up my spine made me realize that these were not empty words. Recently I had read a book about Giordano Bruno. Of all the people I knew, Pavlik was the only one who could, like Bruno, for the sake of the truth as he saw it…. And indeed, that is how matters turned out:like Bruno, Pavlik was burnt to death. He could have lived, had he but held up his hands.