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When the bell rang I suppressed a desire to rush up to him, thereby confessing my guilt and my readiness to be punished.

For almost a year he shunned me. All my attempts to make it up casually, “as if nothing had happened,” were rebuffed. There were plenty of opportunities for this. We still studied in the same class, lived in the same house, and walked the same streets. The other boys in the class showed great delicacy of feeling: as formerly they had respected our friendship, now they respected our estrangement and did everything in their power to prevent embarrassing situations. Teachers and other grown-ups, on the other hand, unaware of our quarrel, kept putting their feet in it. Accepting us as the two inseparables we had been, they would invariably put us in the same group for performing chemical experiments, or experiments in the physics laboratory, being on duty in the lunch-room, or carrying out tasks assigned by the Young Pioneer organization. Our classmates would then come to our aid by volunteering to take over for one of us.

In the bottom of my heart I did not thank them for it. They kept dashing my secret hope of making things up with Pavlik “by chance.”Even so, there were many occasions when, both of us willing, we could have begun a cool relationship that would have brought us to our former friendship without the Dostoevsky-like baring of souls my friend Mitya took such pleasure in. This did not happen. Pavlik did not want it. He did not want it not only because he despised all round-about ways, all petty tricks and cunning, all the slippery, evasive ambiguous means resorted to by weaklings, but also because he had no need for a friend of the sort I had shown myself to be at the German lesson.
When, a year later, I sent him a note asking him to come and see me, he instantly climbed the stairs as in former days without making the slightest ceremony of it. I was somewhat flustered when I discovered there was no need for me to beg his pardon or in any way refer to what had happened. Pavlik did not expect me to hold myself responsible for what I had been. He was aware that a change had taken place in me and so he came.

Paul Valery has said somewhere that a writer recompenses himself as best he can for the injustices of fate. I am now recompensing myself for the injustice meted out to Pavlik. Not long ago the tenants of our old house held a reunion. I waited in vain for them to speak in kind and lofty terms of him. They recalled Ivan, they recalled Arsenov, Tolya Simakov and Boris Solomatin, but not a word did they say about Pavlik. True, they did send a letter to his parents, but that was a mere formality, however thoughtful.

They did not know him. A rare chastity of soul made him keep his inner world under lock and key. He felt he had no right to force his ideas and conceptions, his views and values, to say nothing of his doubts and hopes on others. Those who did not know him considered him listless, apathetic, prone to let life pass him by without stirring his feelings. But nobody knew better than I did how strong, impassioned, single-minded he was, and how charged with life. He was never given the opportunity to come before the judgment-seat of his fellowmen. Nothing of that which was growing, developing and coming to maturity within him had time to acquire final form.