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The school had been built not long ago, and the newspapers had written about its opening. Its windows were wide, its desks were not yet covered with cuts and scrapes, in the hallways there were potted ficus plants, and there was a gym on the first floor, a rare thing in those days.
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Iskra’s mom raised her eyebrows a bit, but said nothing. Iskra went into her corner, behind the wardrobe, where there was a small table and a case with her books. She tried to study, solving problems, rewriting things, but the conversation would not leave her head.
“Mom, what is truth?”
Iskra’s mother set aside the book she was reading carefully, bookmarking and taking notes, shoved her cigarette in the ashtray, thought a bit, took it out, and lit it again.
“I think you have phrased your question carelessly. Clarify, please.”
“Then tell me whether there exist inarguable truths. Truths that do not require proof.”
“Of course. If there were no such truths, man would have remained an animal. He needs to know what he lives for.”
“We do, yes. We, the Soviet people, have discovered the immutable truth taught to us by the party. So much blood has been shed, so much torment has been endured for this truth, that arguing with it, much less doubting it, is a betrayal of those who have perished and… and will yet perish. This truth is our strength and our pride, Iskra. Did I understand your question correctly?”
“Yes, yes, thank you,” Iskra said thoughtfully. “See, I think we don’t get taught to argue at school.”
“We ought to teach the truth itself, not ways to prove it. That would be sophistry. A person devoted to our truth will, if need be, defend it in arms. Our business is not chattering. We are building a new society, we have no time for chatter.” Iskra’s mother threw her cigarette butt into the ashtray and looked questioningly at Iskra. “Why do you ask about this?”
Iskra wanted to tell her mother about the conversation that had disturbed her, about the exclamation and question marks that Leonid Sergeevich used to measure art, but then looked into her mother’s stern, familiar eyes, and said, “Just because.”
“Don’t read empty books, Iskra. I want to check your library record, but I keep not getting around to it, and I have a serious speech to give tomorrow.”
Iskra’s library record was in perfect order, but Iskra read outside of her record, too. The tradition of exchanging books at schools dated back probably to the tsarist gymnasium days, and Iskra already knew Hamsun and Kellermann, whose “Victoria” and “Ingeborg” thrust her into a strange state of anticipation and dismay. The anticipation and dismay did not release her even at night, and her dreams were not at all of a nature concordant with her library record. But this she told no one, not even Zinochka, though Zinochka often told her about dreams of this kind. And then Iskra would get very mad, and Zina did not understand that she would be mad about her own dreams being guessed.
Her conversation with her mother reinforced Iskra’s belief in the existence of inarguable truths, but besides those, there also existed arguable truths, truths of a lower order, so to speak. Such a truth, for example, was the attitude towards Yesenin, whose poetry Iskra read all these days, learned by heart and copied out into a notebook, since the book would need to soon be returned. She did this copying in secret from her mother, because the ban, though not explicit, was in fact in effect, and Iskra was for the first time arguing with the official position, and therefore, with the truth.
“Oh I got it a long time ago,” Sashka said when she confided her doubts to him. “They’re just jealous of Yesenin, that’s all. And they want him to be forgotten.”
Such an easy explanation could not satisfy Iskra. But there was no one she could consult, and she decided, after some serious thought, to ask Leonid Sergeevich when she had a chance.
At school, everything was quiet, as if the unpleasant conversation among the desks of the first graders had not happened, as if there had been no reading of forbidden poetry, and even as if the evening at Artyom’s had not happened either. Valentina Andronovna did not summon anyone else for conversations, smiled graciously when meeting, and Iskra decided that Leonid Sergeevich was right: it had happened in the heat of the moment. No one tangled the order of things, truths remained truths: as pure, inaccessible, and enticing as the eight-thousanders of the Himalayas. Iskra continued to study hard, read poetry and unrecorded novels, played basketball, went with Sasha to the movies or just for walks, and released the class newspaper regularly, since she was its editor-in-chief.
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