I cannot even explain to myself where today’s memory came from, of my acquaintance with the school librarian Maria Grigoryevna, whom some children called Marya Grygorovna. I think today’s suddenly-in-the-morning-arisen thought is connected with my attitude to reading then, in second grade, and now, when I have to restructure myself completely to reading on a computer. But it pulls me now into my distant childhood, and as if under hypnosis all the sensations of that time…
I did not like Marya Grigoryevna…. oh how I did not like her… Once a week she would come into our class with her tattered and not always reglued books, interrupting the idyll of a wonderful drawing lesson, and in Ukrainian this word sounds even more wonderful — Malyuvannya. And so I sit, relaxing, thinking from which corner of the album sheet to begin to “malyuvat’” (Ukr.). and suddenly… there you are! Marya Grygorovna in the middle of the lesson, in a constant burgundy knitted jacket, in house slippers with rubber soles, of course in glasses with a black frame (frames of another colour were not for sale then), comes into our class, we all have to stand and greet her, and our teacher Elena Ivanovna had to urgently free her desk for Marya Grygorovna’s further library actions.
She would call us to the desk one by one, show a book and ask, rather strictly: “Have you read it?” I would shake my head one way or another (yes-no). Marya Grigoryevna would record the book in the form, and in a week you had to bring it back, Read and Reglued!
Of course in the class there were “our own sly ones and cheeky ones” — the boys, who could shout out without raising a hand! (as the school rules of behaviour in a lesson required): “MaryaGrygorovna! I forgot the book at home!” To which Marya Grygorovna would answer calmly and demandingly: “In a week you’ll bring it, reglued and read, and you’ll tell the whole class what you read about.”
In that period of my childhood life I took this phrase “what you read about” as a terrible punishment. To go out to the desk like that and tell the whole class what you had been reading, and if the book turned out uninteresting, then what to tell? I remember I was so conscientious that I tried with all my strength to avoid such a situation, a retelling to the whole class, that is I lived by the rules: “read — I read, glue — I glue, hand in the book on time — I hand it in! (oh! just so they’d leave me alone and ask less).” To be continued…