The Librarian by Mikhail Elizarov Page B

parents and Vovka said unanimously: “Don’t take any risks—the important thing is to get in. You can change departments afterwards if you like.”
    Yet again I let myself be guided by cowardice. The documents were submitted for “performances and festivals”.
    But even so I was indescribably happy that summer. The girls applying for the acting faculty were so alluring, perched on long high heels and just barely covered by transparent chiffon that fluttered in draughts, baring their youthful charms to the July heat and the male glances of the entrance committee.
    When they heard that I had joined the direction department (I wisely didn’t specify which one), these beauties asked me not to forget about them. They laughed as they said: “You just whistle, young director, and we’ll come flying instantly. You’ll see how affectionately we’ll thank you for a role, dear director…” they promised, laughing and glowing tenderly.
    And then, inspired by my summer ecstasy and my eagerness to whistle to those young actresses just as soon as possible, I showed up at home and informed my odious Marina that I was divorcing her.
    My wife responded with a howl like a police siren, which, fortunately, zoomed by as quickly as a yellow car with a flashing light. Literally one week later I was once again a bachelor and full of hope. My parents grieved for a while and calmed down, and kind Vovka said that she had never liked Marina anyway.
     
    My memories of the next five years are bitter ones. “Producing folk spectacles” turned out to be much the same as metal studies, only in the field of art. The people studying there were all grownup and ugly—dumpy young women, pushy thirty-year-old guys from the depths of the provinces, directors of small-town clubs who simply needed a diploma to hang on the wall.
    Acting skills were limited to the development of diction for the first six months: “Betty bought a bit of butter, but she found the butter bitter, so Betty bought a bit of better butter to make the bitter butter better.” The teacher of stage art taught us to bow and to deliver swingeing slaps to cheeks. The acrobatic classes would have done any rest home proud—forward roll, backward roll, half split, arms out wide.
    In directing class we ran through scenes with “justified silence”. These clashes between underwater divers, spies waiting in ambush and married couples who had quarrelled—that is, characters who were logically silent—inevitably turned into series of deaf and dumb convulsions.
    For the second time I took up sociology, philosophy and the forever-foreign English language. New things that were added included the incomprehensible subject of pedagogics, cultural studies and literary studies.
    After my first session in the dean’s office I learned that I wouldn’t be able to transfer to drama except “on a paid basis”. This news hit me so hard that for the next three years I meekly allowed them to mould me into an entertainer of the masses with a tin bucket on my head and a carrot for a nose.
    I should have offered my honest, thunderous repentance to my dream and fled from that den of putrescence, but I suddenly started lying monstrously to myself and everyone else, saying that I was very happy with my studies.
    I practised self-deception. Vovka and Slavik had survived the torment of their institute and little Vanya was going to kindergarten. Soon Slavik got a good job in a company that sold office furniture and Vovka fell pregnant again and delighted us all with a second child, Ilya, so she, Slavik and my parents had even more joyful cares to occupy them…
    By the fourth year of study the veil had fallen from my eyes. A belated rescue plan was hatched—to switch from the day faculty to the extramural one and immediately get a job in the old student club. I dashed headlong to the alma mater I had derided, but I was too late. No one remembered the creator of the film
Our Beloved Polytech
any longer.