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domestic tasks, fetching water from the river and collecting wood, and generally helping their mothers about the house. There had never been a school in his remote village, but one had been built in Novosibirsk for the children of the local railway administrators and supervisors.
    One winter morning Grigori walked the twenty kilometers into the ramshackle town and presented himself at the door of the little wooden schoolhouse. The
klassnaya dama
stared at him in astonishment. He was small for his age with a peasant’s stocky body and strong legs, and he was bundled up in layers of rough homespun garments, the traditional high-necked shirt and baggy pants topped with a makeshift cloak. He wore rough
velenki
, felt winter boots bound to his legs with birch bark, and his bushy black eyebrows sparkled with a coating of early-morning frost. But there was no mistaking the intensity of his purpose as he stared at her with deep dark eyes and told her he wanted “to learn.”
    “But what do you want to learn, little son?” she had asked, smiling as the warmth of the old tiled stove defrosted his eyebrows, sending a shower of droplets down his face.
    Grigori didn’t even notice. “Everything,” he had answered simply.
    The teacher had sighed with satisfaction. A year of tutoring a reluctant brood of young students who would far rather be out sledging and throwing snowballs at each other in winter, or dipping themselves in the river in the softer days of summer, had left her frustrated in her chosencareer. At last she had someone who wanted only “to learn.”
    Arrangements were made for Grigori to lodge in the teacher’s tiny house, where he slept on a narrow wooden shelf over the tiled stove that warmed the house in winter and on the tiny porch in summer. The
klassnaya dama
taught him to read and write, and when he had mastered that, she opened up the entire world to him through geography and history, sharpening his mind even further on mathematics and scientific matters. In return he brought her water and wood, ignoring the scorn of the other children because he was doing “girls’ work.” And every now and then his father left precious little parcels of fresh eggs and butter on her doorstep.
    When Grigori was almost thirteen she knew she had taught him all she could, but he was ready for more. A scholarship was applied for and won to a school in Moscow, and the
klassnaya dama
herself accompanied her prize pupil to the city. But first she took him to the local tailor, an enterprising Jewish man who, with Novosibirsk’s tenuous new prosperity, had set himself up in business there. The man made Grigori his first proper pair of trousers and a coat, for which the teacher paid. Blushing with pride, Grigori vowed that somehow, some day he would repay her.
    Feeling strange in his new city clothes, Grigori had finally ridden the train that had bypassed his life for so many years. The teacher deposited him at the school, and under the curious gaze of its middle-class pupils, she kissed him good-bye affectionately before leaving to visit her family in St. Petersburg. Grigori was alone and terrified of his new environment.
    His new clothes were exchanged for a blue-gray military-style uniform and his terror was hidden under a mask of aggressiveness. But it still didn’t stop him from blushing angrily when he heard the girls, demure inbrown dresses and black aprons, giggling behind their hands about the new “wild boy from the sticks.”
    A month later his beloved
klassnaya dama
was killed in a train accident near Moscow, on her way back to Siberia, and for a while Grigori wanted to die too. She was his only link between his past and his new life, and alone, he didn’t know how to cope with either. It was his steely core of ambition that came to his rescue. That and the magic of his classes.
    He survived the school by keeping to himself, ignoring the baiting of the smart city children until eventually they left him alone. At the