The White Guard - Mikhail Bulgakov [39]
And precisely eight years ago Turbin had said goodbye to the school playground for the last time. A spasm of something like fear snatched at his heart. He had a sudden feeling that a black cloud had blotted out the sky, that a kind of hurricane had blown up and carried away all of life as he knew it, just as a monster wave will sweep away a jetty. Ah, these eight years of school! There had been much in them that as a boy he had felt to be dreary, pointless
and unpleasant - but there had also been a lot of sheer fun. One monotonous classroom day had plodded after another - ut plus the subjunctive, Caius Julius Caesar, a zero for astronomy and an undying hatred of astronomy ever since; but then spring would come, eager spring and somehow the noise in the school grew louder and more excited, the high school girls would be out in their green pinafores on the avenue, May and chestnut blossom and above all the constant beacon ahead: the university, in other words - freedom. Do you realise what the university means? Boat trips on the Dnieper, freedom, money, fame, power.
And now he had been through it all. The teachers with their permanently enigmatic expressions; those terrible swimming baths in the math problems (which he still dreamed about) always draining themselves at so many gallons per minute but which never emptied; complicated arguments about the differences in character between Lensky and Onegin, about the disgraceful behaviour of Socrates; the date of the foundation of the Jesuit order; the dates of Pompey's campaigns and every other campaign for the past two thousand years.
But that was only a beginning. After eight years in high school, after the last swimming bath had emptied itself, came the corpses in the anatomy school, white hospital wards, the glassy silence of operating theatres; then three years in the saddle, wounded soldiers, squalor and degradation - the war, yet another ever-Mowing, never-emptying pool. And now he had landed up here again, back in the same school grounds. He ran across the square feeling sick and depressed, clutching the revolver in his pocket, running God knew where or why: presumably to defend that life, that future on whose behalf he had racked his brains over emptying swimming-pools and over those damned men, one of whom was always walking from point 'A' and the other walking towards him from point 'B'.
The dark windows were grim and silent, a silence revealed at a glance as utterly lifeless. Strange, that here in the center of the City, amidst all the disintegration, uproar and bustle this great four-storey ship, which had once launched tens of thousands of
young lives on to the open sea, should now be so dead. No one seemed to be in charge of it any longer; there was not a sound, not a movement to be found any longer in its windows or behind the yellow-washed walls dating from the reign of Nicholas I. A virginal layer of snow lay on its roofs, covered the tops of the chestnut trees like white caps, lay evenly like a sheet over the playground, and only a few random tracks showed that someone had recently tramped across it.
And most depressing of all, not only did nobody know, but nobody cared what had become of the school. Who was there now to come and study aboard that great ship? And if no one came to school-why not? Where was the janitor? What were those horrible, blunt-muzzled mortars doing there, drawn up under the row of chestnut trees by the railings around the main entrance? Why had the school been turned into an armory? Whose was it now? Who had done this? Why had they done it?
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'Unlimber!' roared a voice. The mortars swung round and moved slowly forward. Two hundred men sprang into action, ran about, squatted down or heaved on the enormous cast-iron wheels. There was a confused blur of yellow sheepskin jerkins,