The Last Cold Days

To children of the past war—their hardships, and not-at-all-childish suffering. To today’s adults, who have not unlearned how to measure their lives by the truths of childhood in war. May the high rules and enduring examples always shine in us and never fade in our memory—because adults are only former children.
The Author. Remembering my first classes and our dear teacher Anna Nikolaevna, I can now say, now that so many years have passed since that happy and bitter time, with complete certainty: our mentor loved to drift off.
Sometimes, right in the middle of a lesson, she would suddenly press her fist against her sharp chin, her eyes would cloud over, her gaze would seem to drown in the sky, or it would sweep through us—as if behind our backs and even behind the school walls, something happily bright was visible to her, certainly not to us. Even when one of us stood at the board, crumbled chalk, grumbled, sniffed, looked around at the class as if searching for salvation, asking for the straw to grasp—then suddenly the teacher would fall strangely silent, her eyes would soften; she would forget the one being questioned at the board, forget us—her students—and quietly, as if to herself and to her own mind, uttered some truth that, after all, had the most direct relation to us.
“Of course,” she would say, for example—almost as if admonishing herself—“I won’t be able to teach you drawing or music. But the one who has a gift from God—here she would reassure herself and us too—this gift will be awakened and will never fall asleep again.”