Part One – There
(Eastern Hemisphere)
CHAPTER FORTY ONE – GPI. PENGUINS
In my city, pupils were called penguins. This name related not to a frenzied school gang of kids, noisy like sparrows and belligerently waving their briefcases, but a quiet chain of private students, embarrassedly clutching thick notes under their armpits and, as if by chance, slipping through the entrance to the tutor’s house.
Well, the chain existed in case if you were lucky enough to be a famous teacher…
I don’t know who and when dubbed private students “penguins,” but the term took root and became popular. I am sure that its source was the sight of a modest teenager, stooping from embarrassment or rapid growth, pressing his hands to his body (folder with notes!) and taking small steps so as not to step on his friend’s heels, but hastily (so as not to be an eyesore to prying eyes!) while entering teacher home. From the word penguins, teachers and tutors were dubbed penguinators. Particularly popular ones in the city were called distinguished penguinators. I do not rule out that it is in consonance with the machinators (schemers). There was a certain meaning to this. The entire craft, despite its antiquity and seemingly honorable nature, became semi-legal under socialism. The fact is that the tax on classes with private students was 75%. What kind of person in his right mind and of his own free will would work, giving away three-quarters of what he earned? It was as if an invisible force was trying to keep people in the darkness of illiteracy, and teachers fought against it, exposing themselves to the law. And at the same time, the same ignorant and illiterate people, brought up on the ideas of socialist expropriation, always had the opportunity to spit all over tutors as illegal schemers.
So, concealing income was making the business criminal. To a certain extent, both teachers and parents of students, and therefore children, were aware of this. This probably added to the latter’s stooped appearance and stiffness in movement. But the picture of tutoring was made up of many different levels. Since the learning conditions in most schools were poor (large classes, unqualified teachers), the children were poorly taught. On the other hand, at prestigious universities and institutes (colleges) they took bribes for admission (after all, education was free!) Therefore, an army of teachers and tutors was needed to prepare teenagers for the competition. As always, demand generated supply. And tutoring flourished. Everyone who could teach – taught. Students, school teachers, university teachers and researchers. It wasn’t always moral. For example, when a school teacher took money from students of his class, or a member of the admissions committee took money from applicants. But economics always determines morality, and the members of the selection committee did not hide, but exposed their position. It was profitable!
My first paid students appeared when I was still at school. I tutored the neighborhood kids for pennies in my senior year of high school, and in my first year at university, it was a matter of course. All my friends either taught students or looked for them.
Law enforcers were not interested in people like us. They hunted noble pengunators. The financial inspector tracked down all the students of such person, compiled lists and paid the tutor a courtesy visit. Do you think it was for the purpose of imposing a legitimate government tax on his income? Nothing like this! How should an inspector to live on his miserable salary? Therefore, the purpose of the visit was to convince the teacher that his students and income are well known to the inspector, and, in order to avoid fines and taxes, to pay the inspector an income coming from one student per year.
Judging by the fact that I was never caught by a financial inspector, I was not a distinguished penguinator. I hope that I was just a good teacher. In any case, I reached a level when I no longer had to look for students, of visiting more noble colleagues with holiday gifts… The students were already self-reproducing… In addition, it was known that I love special occasions, for example, preparing a student for Olympiads or for entering a difficult university. This required separate activities from the group. Professionals could not afford to work with one student instead of a group, even if they knew how to solve difficult problems. And I couldn’t deny myself this pleasure…
My first students, as I already mentioned, were fifth- and sixth-grade students who needed help with algebra and geometry. For me it was a no-brainer. Even when I myself was in the fifth or sixth grade. I easily managed to solve my own and other classmate’s problems on the test and write cheat sheets for everyone in need. To the credit of my classmates, many did well on the test themselves. Remembering my grandfather’s stories about tutoring the son of Governor Vorontsov, and my father’s stories about solving problems from any page of a geometry book, I understood them well. I didn’t need drafts for school assignments. After reading the statement of the problem, I could immediately dictate or write down the solution to the problem. Therefore, even in elementary school, I was interested in more difficult problems. I liked to approach a problem in such a way that the solution seemed self-evident. I even started recording my “lectures,” which later turned into my notes. The students really liked them. Everything there looked simple and clear. And it was beautifully decorated. This was affected by my never realized dream of a drawing club.
A couple of distinguished penguinators subsequently tried to buy out my full set of notes from me, but I was faithful to the copyright. In fact, one might suspect that, marveling at my stubbornness, they just bought the notes from one of my students or their parents.
But all this came later, and I started with linear equations and percent’s problems. One of my very first students was fifth-grader Vova Zhvania. This student was sent to me by my class teacher Vera Aramovna.
“A boy is from a wealthy family, you will be pleased,” she warned, omitting details that in reality did not interest me.
The boy was brought by his mother – a very young and beautiful Slavic woman, dressed as a model. She asked how often we should study and, having heard my answer, said that she would pay this much (I would have asked for half of that), and for success there would be a separate reward. Then she looked at me like a snake charmer at an interesting specimen and expressed the hope that we would have a cordial relationship. Being young, I didn’t understood the essence of the situation, except that in their family they have everything OK with money.
Vova studied unevenly, but he was a smart guy, and we became friends. One day I asked him what he would like to become. The answer came without delay,
“A Deputy Minister of Light Industry and Food Industry.”
“Why?” I was surprised at the completeness of the formulation.
“Like my dad,” he explained.
“Is the job interesting?”
“Dad says it’s very interesting, but dangerous. And Mom thinks that dad has failed with his responsibilities and was wasting away like a king Kaschey.”
I didn’t guess what he failed with, but thanks to Pushkin I caught on what he was wasting away upon.
At the end of September, Vova’s mother brought me an envelope with virgin banknotes and sighed that I was so busy at the university, but if I wanted to see her and talk about her son, she would always find time for this.
Talking to Vova’s mother seemed like a waste of time. I have always believed that such conversations do not give anything to the child. I just continued to work hard with Vova. In early November, just before the holidays (Day of Revolution is November 7), there was a knock, and a gift set sparkling with sequins and ribbons floated into the apartment along with Vova’s fragrant and stylish mother. Two bottles of cognac, two bottles of champagne and three boxes of chocolates, cookies and oriental sweets. Of course, plus an envelope with my exorbitant salary.
“We are flying to France for the holidays, so Vova will be slightly late for classes, but this will not affect your payment,” the young woman smiled at me, “My son often remembers you and praises your teaching. And I’m envious. I have never had a private teacher. I would be a very diligent student and would fulfill all the teacher’s wishes. Especially someone as young and talented as you…”
Now it seems to me that every word carried a hidden meaning of loneliness and melancholy of a young woman from the Kaschey’s kingdom, but then I did not have time to understand any of this. The Zhvania family did not return to Tbilisi. The new, as it was called – “governmental” plane, IL-62 from Paris to Moscow crashed while approaching the capital…
Fifth-grader Medea, a girl from a traditional Greek family, came to me on the recommendation of my mother’s coworker Anya. The girl’s mother was a very thin, tall woman, not devoid of prettiness, which unfortunately was spoiled by thick lenses of glasses and teeth destroyed by caries. The name Aphrodite didn’t really suit her. There was some sarcasm in this, like naming a one-legged man Hephaestus.
Once, after about a month of teaching the girl, my mother returned from work with her eyes wide open in surprise and told me Anya’s big request – to tell Medea at the next lesson that I am married, but my wife is undergoing treatment in Moscow. Now I’ve got amazed. Mom explained from the words of Anya, that is, Aphrodite, that little Medea fell in love with her young teacher and demanded that her parents send matchmakers to him. The age difference did not bother either the daughter or the parents, and Medea directly stated that she could stand without her husband for five years (until graduation) – Penelope waited longer! To distract her daughter from thoughts that were unusual for her age, Aphrodite came up with the idea that I was married. The daughter did not believe her and promised to overcome her own pride and ask the teacher herself when they met.
Hmmm… Of course, I didn’t want to lie, but the situation had to be settled. Therefore, when Medea announced that she had a question not about mathematics, but… about a personal topic, I was internally prepared.
“Are you married?” the girl asked, blushing crimson.
“Why are you so interested in this?”
Medea tensed up, and then decisively shook her head:
“If you are single, then we could get married.”
“Yes or no does not matter!”
“Why? Are you engaged or keep celibate?”
“Because I have already grown up and will change very little in a few years, while you can grow and change and become very different. How can I make a decision blindly? I propose to return to this issue in five years.”
“Is it true?” the girl beamed.
“Certainly. For now we have other tasks. I need to finish university, and you need to finish school. And both should study well.”
“I will! And you too – study well at your university!”
Everything went to everyone’s satisfaction. Medea continued to attend classes for a year or a year and a half, until their family moved to a new area.
One day I met Anya.
“How is Medea doing?” I asked, “Is Aphrodite no longer worried that her daughter is getting married early?”
“But she never worried about it. She herself have been looking for a suitable husband since the seventh grade. She was not happy by only one thing – her daughter’s national promiscuity. But time will fix everything, you’ll see for yourself.”
And so it happened. Another two or three years later I met Medea. I looked at her through the eyes of a hypothetical matchmaker and noted that she did not enter medical school, married a rich Greek from Tsalka and became pregnant. None of the listed qualities aroused my enthusiasm, but the impression was most spoiled by Aphrodite’s inheritance – thick lenses of glasses and teeth destroyed by caries…
Another girl, named Dasha, was a pretty, snub-nosed sixth-grader. I think her classmates liked her and she was popular. She was from a Russian family, perhaps her dad was a military man, in any case, she did not study Georgian and knew only various words of “sexual meaning.” And wow, all these repressed words and images asked themselves to come unto the tongue.
One day Dasha noticed an enlarged photograph of an ordinary house fly on my bookshelf. On it, the fly looked gigantic like a crow, and Dasha decided that it was an African tsetse fly, the bite of which causes sleeping sickness. The girl decided to show off her knowledge and proudly declared,
“And I know what this fly is called! This fly is a dzudzu.”
The comedy of the situation was that in Georgian dzuzu is a female nipple.
I had many more child students, but most of them did not leave a mark in my memory. I sincerely taught them mathematics and physics, but, unlike school teachers, I did not live their lives. I had enough of my own. Some students tried hard, others were lazy, but the classes brought them success. I realized that there are practically no incapable or, as they were called, “dumb” students. Almost always, this nickname concealed the teacher’s inability to explain and interest, and only extremely rarely – the student’s inability to remember. To be honest, in fact, I only met one student in my life who wanted, but could not, memorize mathematics and physics. I tutored him in our adulthood, out of friendship, for free and passionately wished for his dream to come true – to enter an aviation institute. Alas, it was as unrealistic as it was for me to win a race in a swimming competition.
On the other hand, I have experience teaching vector algebra to a small child. In my first year in the university I did an experiment. I taught my little sister Maya how to work with vectors. When my group mates came to our house, they were amazed at such outstanding abilities of the child, but I already realized that children can be taught things as complex as you like, if you explain them as simply as you can.
Most students had difficulty moving from concrete arithmetic problems to formal algebra equations. They needed help with the basic principle of solving equations – transferring and collecting unknowns on one side of the equation and known ones on the other side. To do this, I told the children something like a fairy tale, how ancient magicians and wizards (read: scientists) conjured and cast a spell,
“Al Jabr!” which meant “known – in one side, unknown – in the other side.”
So that’s where the word algebra came from! Children’s little eyes lit up, a bridge between the children’s world and the incomprehensible school muck was established at that very second. Algebra was no longer an alien world for adults, but was beginning to seep into children’s minds as an interesting game. How many times has my mother or grandmother, entering a large room, found some boy or girl “casting spells” over a notebook and with pathos pronouncing such a simple spell, “Al Jabr!” And the rock of the problem opened up before them, as in the fairy tale about Ali Baba from One Thousand and One Nights.
But gradually the children were replaced by high school students. These lessons were more expensive, and applicants could be grouped together. And physics gradually replaced mathematics. After all, I studied at the physics department, but the main factor in this process was the fact that after his marriage Sasha began to need money more and take on students. It was more convenient for us to divide spheres of influence and exchange students preparing for technical universities. But I also had a contingent of applicants, independent of Sasha, who entered the country’s medical schools, where they had to take an exam in physics, but not in mathematics.
I suspect that namely these penguins brought me fame. Becoming a doctor was a cherished goal for many children and their parents. Places in medical institutes were on sale, the competition was high, and admission was difficult. Nevertheless, behind closed doors there was always a window left for the stubborn and persistent, whose parents were ready not to stand up for the cost of education, instead of spending a hundred times more on bribes.
I had a whole constellation of applicants who passed physics with excellent marks and entered the country’s medical schools. One of the first was Chichiko’s son, then… no, I won’t be able to list them, but they were all bright personalities and talented students. I hope that now they are good doctors and parents. I even want to raise a toast for that…
In twenty years of teaching, I have taught at least a couple hundred students. Of course, this does not compare with the number of students on whom the average school teacher operated. But the quality of average school teaching, as well as the salary of an average school teacher, were also incommensurable. Most of my students began to understand and love physics. Well, if not to love it, then to treat it in a friendly way. And there was no doubt about our mutual sympathies. My wife, who entered the arena during the last and most intense third of my penguinatorship, was amazed at the atmosphere that reigned in the lessons and the relationships that were unusual for teacher-students. In warm weather, I took my penguins out of town for a picnic, barbecued, played the guitar and told funny stories from student life. And they appreciated not only the quality of the explanation of physics, but also the honesty in discussing the phenomena of life and the fact that I respected their opinion…
We didn’t have any special stories. And good! My friend’s student, having had a sore throat, which was indeed infectious mononucleosis, instead of a lesson, went with her boyfriend to climb the city hills, fell and… her spleen had ruptured. Horrified that he would be accused of inattention to the fate of the student, the tutor ran to visit her in the infectious diseases department of the hospital. And there they took away his clothes and put him in quarantine!
But I still remember a couple of stories. One of them concerned… how should I call it more precisely – the development of life. Not in the sense of emergence, but of social changes. One day, my group of three friends and classmates missed class. It was not customary to sneak out of private lessons; nevertheless, adult children understood that their parents paid a lot for them. If someone got sick, either their friends knew it or the parents warned me. But as a whole group!? The next lesson, a day later, all the guys were back. My question, “What do you say?” was followed by an unusual answer,
“At first it was pleasant, but then it wasn’t.”
“And what does it mean?”
They looked at each other, nodded to each other and decided,
“Nick is a good man, we can tell him true,” and they confessed,
“We went to a secret brothel, there was a police raid, and our parents had to ransom us from the police dungeons.”
To be honest, I was a little jealous of them. Not because they visited prostitutes and had been in a prison cell, but because they knew such hot spots already in their school years, and that they have parents who can ransom their children.
Another interesting story happened not to my student, but I actively participated in it. Our boss at the GPI, a distinguished penguinator, had one good student, the son of our engineer, a former graduate student and PhD doctorant of the rector.
Thanks to an excellent certificate, the boy only had to score nine out of ten points in mathematics and physics to be admitted. He was terribly afraid of the language exam and tried to avoid it by all means. But on the exam in mathematics he made a mistake and received a fair B, and in physics… he also received a B, but he insisted that it was unfair. He needed to go to appeal, but there was no one to go with him. The father was not a professional in preparing applicants to the college, and his tutor sat on the admissions committee. Anyway, the boss said,
“I know only one person who can successfully protect you.” This is Nick. Contact him.”
And the whole family unexpectedly came to see me. The boss didn’t mislead them. I was truly ready to stand for the truth. However, it was necessary to ensure that the work was in fact error-free. And I began to interrogate the applicant. I tortured him for two hours. From his the detailed description of the work it followed that there should be no errors in it.
“All right, I’m ready to go. The first thing I will ask the commission to do is to show me the exam paper. If there are still mistakes in it, I won’t be able to talk nonsense and deny them. I’ll fight in case I saw nagging in the work. And you’ll remain silent until I give you permission to speak. That’s all! Wish us luck.”
The next morning the whole company gathered at the Polytechnic Institute. The summer sky was blue and the sun was golden. The applicant’s father lit one cigarette from another, and his mother kept wiping her eyes and the tip of her nose. Finally we were called. A balding but still young employee of the physics department sat at a small table. He checked the applicant’s documents and opened the examination paper.
“Red marks are mistakes,” he said, “The commission took away half a point here and there, so four points is a fair assessment.”
I quickly glanced at the notes. These were nitpicking. In one case, the boy called Newton – Nevton, and in another, he signed the numbers crookedly when adding and subtracting, but the results were correct. We had to fight – there was no smell of physics here.
I slowly unfastened the zipper on my leather folder: on one side, on the other side and finally on the third side. I opened the folder, took out a blank sheet of paper and a fountain pen, then closed the folder, unscrewed the cap of the pen and, looking straight into the eyes of my interlocutor, said,
“Please, spell your first and last name! The first name comes first.”
A member of the selection committee turned white as if from shock and began to babble,
“Why? For what? What have I done to you?”
“Identify yourself and call the chairman of the commission,” I said in the voice of a hired killer, and the examiner reluctantly obeyed.
Five minutes later the chairman of the commission appeared and introduced himself, without being asked. Then I introduced myself as a family friend of the rector’s graduate student. I said,
“I see that there was a misunderstanding, a slight inaccuracy. There are no mistakes in the applicant’s work, there are only blots for which physics specialists do not reduce points. This is clear to you, to me, and to the applicant’s father. It seems to me that it would be completely wrong if the father of an applicant complained about the bias of the commission to his PhD scientific supervisor, the rector. Maybe you yourself can correct the inaccuracy? Take a look – there are no physical or mathematical errors.”
The chairman of the commission took a deep breath, wiped the sweat from his forehead and grumbled,
“Oh, these pseudo nerds, they found something to pick up! Of course, you have no reason to worry. After lunch, we will post the results of the appeals in the lobby, and you can see for yourself.”
I had to play by the unspoken rules. I warmly thanked the chairman of the commission for his objectivity and fatherly care for the younger generation. We left the building. Mom’s face was swollen from tears, and dad’s face was swollen from nicotine.
“Dad, mom!” the happy son yelled.
“After lunch, the results of the appeals will be posted, and the “war” will be over. But it looks like we won,” I added.
That’s exactly what happened.
In the evening, a happy family presented me with a decorative wall plate out of cobalt and gold. It still decorates our home sideboard to this day, reminding us of the hot time of entrance exams, when the morning sky looks blue and the sun – golden.
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