Eleven #2
A few more blocks up a hill and she spied the school, a hulking gray building with a name carved into the lintel in Georgian and Cyrillic.
There was nothing to suggest that children learned here, no paper flowers in the windows or children’s art, no playground outside.
Man. Even the gloomiest New York City schools had at least a few kids’ bikes in a bicycle rack up front or a jaunty sign outside.
But this place had the look of an old warehouse or a corrupt city hall.
The kids streamed in quietly. Parents watched them go.
And on the corner where she was standing, an empty dog house.
It was nothing remarkable: a wooden box with a peaked roof and a rounded opening for its resident to come and go, the size of a mailbox, painted white with red trim.
The white paint was scratched; the red paint was faded.
She knew from videos that there had once been a nice dog bed inside, but now it was empty.
She knelt down to look inside, to see if there was any evidence of Angel—although what?
Fur? A ransom note? There had supposedly been a bloodstain once but it had long since washed away.
She searched for any crumbs of food, any chewed corners, anything that would give shape to the dog that had once called this little box home.
The wooden floor of the doghouse had been sanded down by time and hundreds of nights of sleep; it was almost satiny in the middle, and Amy could imagine white, fluffy Angel curled up in a ball, her tail abutting her nose.
What was it like to sleep in this box, under the Georgian sky?
Did the traffic die down, or was she never really able to relax, one ear always cocked for a fellow traveler? A lost child?
Amy would have crawled into the doghouse had its opening been a few inches taller or she a few inches shorter, but as it was, she sat crouched on her knees, examining.
Dogs, as far as she knew, only tended to run when they were chasing something or they were afraid.
But a dog who lived on the street—even enclosed this way—was probably frightened of very little; she was accustomed to the daily clamor of urban living.
So then what was it that had sent her running?
“Amy,” said a voice behind her.
She turned, surprised, although she shouldn’t have been. “Irine! Hi! I thought I’d—” She felt oddly discovered. “I thought I’d search a bit around Angel’s former home, see what I could find.”
“Angel isn’t here, though.”
“Well, right, but maybe some clues.”
“We’ve looked all over,” Irine said. She ground out a cigarette under her heel. “I don’t think you’ll find anything. Any trace of the dog has been gone for weeks now.”
“I guess I just wanted to see for myself,” Amy said.
Irine nodded.
“And also—I mean, I’ve seen so many videos of her. I wanted to see where she, you know, worked.”
Irine blinked. “Did you walk?”
“I did.”
“You could have come with me in the car if I’d known you were coming.”
“I didn’t want to—”
“Well, as long as you’re here, come, let me show you inside the school.”
They crossed the busy street, just stepping out into it, trusting that the cars would stop the way they had for Angel and her charges; they did.
Then they whisked into the school building, past the children filing in.
Irine said hello to a few, gamarjoba, gamarjoba.
Inside, the school was slightly cheerier than its sullen exterior would suggest: posters lined the walls boasting what Amy could only assume were exhortations to study hard, keep smiling, etc.
The floor was dented linoleum, the walls painted an institutional gray-green. “This way,” Irine said.
A secretary sat in a cubicle outside Irine’s office in what looked like a distinctly 1970s setup, down to the gray filing cabinets and the heavy black phone on her desk.
And no computer—or at least Amy didn’t think it was a computer?
Instead, something like the word processor she’d had in high school to type up her half-assed book reports.
“Eva,” Irine said, “am dilit araperi sashineleba khdeba?”
The secretary had hair that was half maroon and half gray, thick glasses perched above her forehead, a Lurex sweater tight across her broad bosom.
She spit out some Georgian in a tone that Amy would have assumed was hostile, except that it was impossible to tell what a hostile tone was in Georgian.
The two went back and forth for a minute until a loud bell rang.
The bell, she was surprised to find, sounded exactly like the bell at the Columbia Street School, a sound she had forgotten until this very minute.
“Here, come into my office,” Irine said, motioning Amy past the secretary. Amy squeaked out a gamarjoba as she passed, but the secretary only gave her the side-eye.
“I apologize,” Irine said. “Eva does not like Americans.”
“How does she know I’m American?”
Irine smiled. “You have clear skin and beautiful teeth,” she said. “Also, I told her.”
Irine’s office was a few years more up-to-date than Eva’s—she had a computer, for instance, although it was a bulky desktop with a monitor that looked like it weighed thirty pounds.
And beside it, a black bulky phone. On the shelves behind her were framed family photos: her mother, her aunts, Zazi, and a smiling baby, a toddler, a gap-toothed little girl, a squealing ten- or eleven-year-old.
“Maia was so cute,” Amy said, trying to warm up whatever was chilly between them.
Irine smiled, then turned her chair to pick up one of the photos. “She used to let me pick out her clothes. Even when she was eleven or twelve. Now she dresses like a witch.”
“She doesn’t really,” Amy said. “Teenagers all around the world look just like that. The leather jacket, the safety pins, all of it.”
“It’s terrible,” Irine said. “I’m embarrassed to be seen with her.”
“She looks great to me,” Amy said.
“Is this how your son dresses?”
Ferry, in his vintage sweatshirts and basketball shorts. “All the time.”
Irine sighed, put Maia’s photo down next to another one, a black-and-white photo of a family: what looked to be a younger Irine, a mother and a father, and a teenage girl who looked somewhat like Irine, but broader, with curlier hair.
“Is that your family? You have a sister?”
“Mmm,” Irine said. “I did. She died a long time ago.”
“Oh no,” Amy said. “I’m so sorry. Was it—”
“It’s all right,” Irine said. “It’s been a very long time.” Then she stood, briskly, wiped her hands on her pants. Amy stood too. “All right, you’re here, let me tell you about our school.”
“Yes,” Amy said; they were changing the subject.
“Although this district is not particularly poor, it is not wealthy either, and many of our students come from families with unemployed parents. They sometimes come to school hungry, even though there are services for families to get food if they can’t afford it.
This can be a problem, because as you know hungry children have a hard time learning. ”
“The same thing happens in New York.”
“I can imagine it happens in big cities everywhere,” she said. “I will show you around.”
Passing Eva’s disapproving gaze, they left the office and turned down a long hallway. Now that the children were in class, there was silence, minus the clack of Irine’s heels.
“So what exactly is your job?”
“My job?”
“I mean what exactly do you do?”
“I manage problems,” Irine said. “Small problems, two students are beating each other up in the hallway. Big problems, students disappear from school for days or weeks and nobody can find them.”
Amy nodded; once upon a time she’d been that kind of problem herself.
“And then we have biggest problems of all. The Ministry of Science and Education wants to get involved in what we teach or what we say. And teachers don’t like this, so I have to get in the middle.”
“Is there tenure here?”
“What is this?”
“It’s a system—in the United States, well in most states, after a few years a teacher can earn tenure, which means he or she can’t be fired for what she says. Like she’s allowed to express her political beliefs without, you know, being afraid she’ll lose her job.”
“No,” Irine said. “We have nothing like this.” She laughed a little. “I have never heard of anything like this.”
The building wrapped around a large inner courtyard that was filled with playground equipment, much of it new and bright-looking, a counterpoint to everything inside the building.
“Come,” Irine said. She opened the door to the courtyard and led Amy to a large space in the corner that was roped off with sticks and twine. Inside the roped-off area, mounds of dirt were arranged in neat rows, with labels showing off different kinds of carrots and lettuces.
“Every year our students grow all sorts of things and take them home to our families. They have beans here, aubergine. I come in during the summer and harvest the tomatoes for our families. The students love it. For a while we even had chickens but it was hard to keep them alive. Turned out we had foxes.”
Amy bent down to look at the miniature garden plot.
“When I was little we had a garden like this. We grew lettuce all summer.” It was one of her fondest memories of childhood, watching the small green shoots appear from the dirt, heading outside, barefoot, to snip off some leaves for whatever her mom was making (tuna salad sandwiches, bologna and cheese), then waiting a week or two for more leaves to reemerge.
They grew other things, too, in the short Minnesota summers: cucumbers and zucchini and tiny golden cherry tomatoes.
And there was a crab apple tree in the corner of the yard whose apples her mom sometimes cooked into jelly.