The Definite Article

Our new English teacher entered the classroom with the suddenness of lightning. A young blond woman in an elegant black dress with an open neck and a pair of high heels, she plopped her purse on the instructor’s desk and announced: “My name is Alina Ivanna.”

Everyone fell silent. It was a gorgeous morning in early September, and the sunlight that streamed into our sixth-grade classroom pierced the clouds of dust suspended in the air. Through those clouds, Alina Ivanna appeared to be a goddess newly descended from the skies. Her eyes were steel blue, like the waters of the Neva. Her golden hair cascaded down her shoulders in wavy torrents. Her dress hugged her hips tightly, as if it were her skin. My buddy Sashka Rogozin and I kicked each other in the shins under the desk and lowered our eyes.

After the roll call, Alina Ivanna said she expected everyone in the class to work extra hard this school year. Ours was a new and special kind of school, Angliyskaya Shkola, with several subjects in senior classes taught in English, one of the few such schools in the city of Leningrad. Intensive English instruction at Angliyskaya Shkola normally began in the second grade; but since our school had just opened, we, sixth graders, would have to make up for our late start by having fifteen hours of English each week, twice the regular amount. “If you apply yourselves, by the end of the year you’ll be able to read Shakespeare. But for now, we’ll start with the basics.” And, turning toward the blackboard, Alina Ivanna wrote “The.”

“The definite article,” she explained. She told us that it was practically impossible to speak English correctly without mastering this most difficult sound for a Russian tongue to pronounce. “Repeat after me now, thuh.”

“Duh.” A timid chorus of pubescent voices echoed her.

Alina Ivanna puckered her eyebrows. “The tip of your tongue should rest between your teeth,” she corrected us. “Like this.” She opened her mouth wide and lifted her tongue in a way that made Rogozin and me avert our eyes again. “Thuh.”

“Duh!”

“Nyet.” She shook her head. She reached for her purse and pulled out a brass pocket mirror. Then she went around the classroom, sticking the mirror in our faces as we each attempted to pronounce the definite article.

“Daah,” I droned when Alina Ivanna leaned toward me with her mirror. “Daah.”

As a child, I had a speech impediment, which manifested itself as a burr and which my mother insisted was a “defect that made me sound kind of Jewish.” Because of the burr, the school director, Nina Gavrilovna, had initially refused to admit me. But my mother, adamant I should learn English—“so that you could become a diplomat!”—had told my father to go and see the director in person. A meat procurement manager, he promised Nina Gavrilovna two things: that she would receive plenty of fresh beef—an item in short supply at the time—and that every effort would be made to remove my speech defect promptly. She agreed to admit me provisionally, for a year, on condition that I maintained a grade of B or better in English.

“Again.” Alina Ivanna now leaned closer to me. “Say it for me again.”  I felt the tips of her hair tickle my ear, and my heart began to beat fast, so fast I thought it would jump out of my mouth, smack onto her pretty mirror.  I saw my own flustered face staring back at me. How swarthy I look, I thought, how Jewish. “Daah.”

“Nyet, nyet,” my teacher said. “Can’t you do it like this?” And she slowly ran the tip of her tongue along her upper teeth. “Thuh.”

“Dzuh.”

Alina Ivanna’s face assumed a severe expression.

“I said thuh, not dzuh. You’re not sticking your tongue against your teeth like I showed you. One more time now.”

“Baah.”

Alina Ivanna said nothing, only shrugged her shoulders. It was now Rogozin’s turn.

“Thuh.”

“Good, Sasha!” she exclaimed with a smile before moving toward the next pupil.

She didn’t address me by my first name! I poked Rogozin in the ribs with my elbow. “Hey,” I whispered, “how did you do it?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I just did.”

* * *

After school, I installed myself before my mother’s vanity mirror. I extended my mouth as wide as I could and squeezed the tip of my tongue between my teeth and pushed air through the opening hard. “Dzaah.”

I tried not to look at my nose, whose length, according to my mother, was already promising to eclipse my own father’s. But I couldn’t help it. My mother’s right, I decided. How could Alina Ivanna possibly like someone like me?

“Dzaah.” The best I could do was this hideous, buzzing sort of sound that resembled the drone of the doodlebug, a pesky, low-flying kind of beetle that infested the wild rose bushes of the Karelian peninsula, north of the city, in late May.

The previous summer, in keeping with the school director’s orders, my mother had taken me to a speech therapist named Matilda Pavlovna. She was a frail-looking, elderly lady with silver hair gathered in a bun and the genteel manner of someone who belonged to the class of intelligentsia. Her fifth-floor apartment on the Fontanka Embankment was full of antique furniture and paintings in thick, gilded frames. “Old aristocracy,” my mother had whispered admiringly.

Matilda Pavlovna led us into the living room, where I was seated in a massive chair with two sneering lion heads carved into the armrests. Our session began with a vigorous oral test. I was told to click my tongue as if in imitation of the trot of a horse, then roll it into a tube and stick it out as far as I could. Later, Matilda Pavlovna opened her mouth and flexed her own tongue, demonstrating the mechanics of producing a crisp Slavic r. “Repeat.” 

I grabbed at the lion heads and tried to repeat, but the best I could do was a pitiful “arghh.” She nodded and told my mother she would see me weekly for two months.

I hated those sessions, with their endless oral exercise routines conducted in the oppressive semi-darkness of Matilda Pavlovna’s quarters.  It was summertime, and I would much rather have been playing outside or riding my bike along the sleepy boulevards and granite embankments. My initial progress was as poor as my attitude. But the kindly therapist never lost her noble composure. By the end of the summer, to my own surprise, Matilda Pavlovna declared my palate to be improved.

But now, I was faced with this.

I practiced before the mirror until my tongue hurt. When my father came home, I greeted him with a resounding “Dzuh.”

“What is it?” he asked worriedly.

“The definite article.”

He nodded his head as though he understood.

“And we’ll be reading Shakespeare before long,” I boasted.

“Molodets,” he said. “Thatta boy.”

The next day, during Alina Ivanna’s rounds with the mirror, I demonstrated the results of my last night’s labors. But again, she puckered her lovely forehead and said, “Nyet, Ayshenboymer, not like that.” My thuh stuck in my throat, a bone that would not be dislodged.

* * *

Two months passed. We grappled with the gerund and wrestled with past participles. I had no problems with English grammar, even when it made little sense. I understood the concept of the single negative. I had memorized the spelling of words such as laughter, thought, and might. The third form of the irregular verb I could recite on command. But I still couldn’t pronounce the definite article and the sound thuh correctly. I practiced diligently every night until a callus formed on the tip of my tongue. Yet each time Alina Ivanna came up to me with her shiny little mirror, and her hair tickled the tip of my ear, I would lose my composure and bleat out my “dzaah” like a startled sheep.

I both dreaded and looked forward to her “linguistic warm-ups,” as she called them. My whole body stiffened at her approach. Sometimes she stood so close, her thigh would push against my shoulder and I could feel the heat emanating from her body.

“Say thuh,” she’d order. My head would swim and I would blurt out my answer, then recoil at my own inanity. I wanted to please my pretty blond teacher so badly. I would have given anything to see her smile at me, to hear her address me by my first name. But instead, she only shook her head and walked away. “Nyet, not like that.”

The oral tests and grilling she administered were even worse. My name, Ayshenboymer, happened to be at the top of the register, and I was always the first one she’d call up. With a sinking feeling, I would come to the front of the class and the awful spectacle would begin. She found it necessary to correct me every time I mispronounced the impossible sound—as though I didn’t know myself I didn’t get it right. It was as if she had chosen me to demonstrate to the class how to say things incorrectly. I felt I had become my teacher’s guinea pig of sorts, or, even worse, a mouse she played with in a cruel, feline way.

* * *

I had been a good student up till then, with mostly As and Bs. But now I already had a troika, a lowly C, and in the most important of subjects, English. This near failure stung all the more badly because—a secret I wouldn’t divulge even to myself—I was madly in love with Alina Ivanna. I was in love with her ever since that full-moon night in October, when I had my first dream of her.

In the dream, she stood in the doorway of our single room in our communal apartment, bathed in moonlight. She must have come for a linguistic warm-up, I thought, and I buried myself under the covers. Through a fold in the blanket, I watched my teacher tiptoe past the Chinese screen behind which my parents slept. She came up to my bed and sat down. The moonlight fell on her hair, rendering it platinum. Her face remained in shadow.

It was no use pretending I wasn’t there. “Alina Ivanna,” I said as I stuck my face out from under the blanket, “I’ve been working very hard on my definite article!”

“Good, Leonya,” she said softly. She called me Leonya! “But please be quiet. We mustn’t wake your parents.”

Only now did I become aware of the snoring that came from behind the Chinese screen. That my English teacher should hear my father snore! I wished my mother would poke him in the ribs as she often did when they argued in bed. But my mother, too, seemed to be sleeping soundly, perhaps even contributing to this shameful cacophony herself. “Please excuse them,” I whispered. “They wouldn’t be snoring so if they knew you were here.”

“Not at all,” she said, in English. “I assure you, this will not affect your final grade.”

Still, I was worried. I knew I should not be lying around in my teacher’s presence—I should be standing. But I couldn’t push off my covers and get up either. I was in my pajamas; and then there was something else, that terrible heaviness in my crotch, which, I knew, would be bulging now.  What if she saw the bulge? That she wouldn’t forgive me, I felt certain.

I finally decided that if I at least sat up, I might show her my respect without exposing myself. But Alina Ivanna put her hand on my shoulder and said, “Don’t bother, Leonya, I’ll get under the covers with you anyway.”  And she took out her little mirror.

“No!” I almost cried, a wave of delight, mixed with horror, rising within me. “No!”

But my tongue had turned to stone. I could say nothing, only clutch desperately at my covers, the wave now rocking my bed like a ship in a storm.

“Yes,” she tugged at the covers. “Yes!”

And now she was next to me, her dress having melted into the moonlight, her skin soft and cool. “Alina Ivanna!” I moaned, trying to cover my crotch with my hands. But it was too late. She was already putting her mirror to it. The wave rose above us like a wall, then crashed, sweeping us, together with my snoring parents, our housemates, and our whole apartment building, into a chasm that suddenly opened in the floor.

For some time, I lay with my eyes open, afraid to move. Behind the Chinese screen, my father was still snoring. I closed my eyes again, hoping the dream would come back. Then I remembered that tomorrow in class, Alina Ivanna would put that pocket mirror before me, and I would squirm and say “dzuh” like a fool and she would pucker her lovely eyebrows and walk away.

* * *

It was already November when Alina Ivanna summoned my mother to discuss my performance. I was told to wait outside the classroom while they conferred. I stood in the empty hallway staring at the clock, like some pitiful small fry.

“She told me you haven’t been trying hard enough,” my mother said as we walked back home. It was a miserably gray afternoon with bare trees and wet snow falling on our heads in lumpy blobs. “She says you don’t listen carefully and don’t do what she asks you to do.”

I said nothing.

“She said you must try extra hard on the midterm test to get a passing grade.”

“Huh.”

“I made sure your father delivers meat regularly to Nina Gavrilovna.  We’re keeping our end of the deal, so you must keep yours.”

“Huh.”

“Are you listening to me?”

* * *

For our midterm test, Alina Ivanna gave us a ditty to learn, “The Little White Duck.” “It’s about Donald Duck, a popular character,” she explained.

“It goes like this,” she began. “There’s a little white duck, sitting in the water.” She swung her hips and beat the rhythm with the tip of her shoe. “A little white duck doing what he ought to.”

A strand of hair fell across her now-flushed forehead. Rogozin and I froze at the edge of our seats, all eyes, as Alina Ivanna proceeded to impersonate the duck and the rest of the song’s animal characters. She seemed to do it with no less panache than the great Peruvian Diva, Yma Sumac, who had recently toured our country. Nothing like this had ever been seen in our school before—a teacher singing and dancing in front of the class.

She wrote the lyrics on the blackboard for us to copy down in our notebooks. We were to translate them and recite the song before the class the next day.

I worked feverishly on “The Little White Duck” well into the evening.  Later that night, I declaimed the song to my father.

“This must be Shakespeare,” he said, pleased.

“No, Papa, this is Donald Duck.”

“Never heard of him.”

In the morning, before leaving for school, I smoothed my hair and slicked it back, like a duck. Later, when Alina Ivanna called my name, I stood up and walked past my intently staring comrades to the podium.

“Little White Duck,” I announced, looking straight ahead at the back wall, where a reproduction of Repin’s Ivan the Terrible Killing His Son hung. The crazed czar was holding the bleeding prince’s head, a look of abysmal despair on his face.

“Dere’s a little white duck,” I began.

“There is a little white duck,” Alina Ivanna corrected me.

“Sitting in dah water.”

“The water.”

“Dah little white duck.”

“The duck.”

She wouldn't even let me finish!

“Dah little white duck.” Now I couldn’t remember the next line.

“Doing what he ought to,” she cued.

“Doing what he ought to,” I repeated dumbly.

“Well, continue.”

“A little white duck,” I quacked.

“We’ve heard that already.”

“Sitting in dah water.” By then my head was empty.

“You’re making us wait, Ayshenboymer.”

“A little white duck!” I clucked in desperation.

A stony silence descended upon the class. I couldn’t stand it, and I kept repeating, like a parrot, “A little white duck, a little white duck,” even as my classmates chuckled.

Alina Ivanna raised her pen over the class register like a sword.  “Only a couple of weeks ago, I had a nice conversation with your mother, Ayshenboymer.” Why, why did she have to say that in front of the whole class! “And today, all you can say is ‘a little white duck.’” The pen went down, scratching. “I’m giving you dvoika, a D.”

* * *

A dvoika in English was an extraordinary event in our school. The director, Nina Gavrilovna, summoned my father for a consultation. He returned from it looking grim and wouldn’t say anything to me at supper. But later that night I heard him say to my mother behind the Chinese screen: “Nina Gavrilovna told me he’s not doing well in English after all.”

“What did she suggest?”

“That we transfer him to a regular school, where they teach German, that he might do better in that language.”

“Only over my dead body.”

“Agreed. I heard enough German in the trenches, God knows.  Anyway, we ended up making another arrangement.”

I bit into my pillow. I knew what that word “arrangement” meant.  Nina Gavrilovna would receive more prime beef from my father. I wanted to run to my parents’ bed and beg them to let Nina Gavrilovna transfer me to a regular school. I wanted to tell them that I’d rather study German, even Greek or Chinese, if necessary, than continue with my English class. But I knew my parents would be angry with me if they knew I’d been eavesdropping on them. And my mother, she’d never relent, so dead set on making a diplomat out of me was she.

* * *

During the winter semester, Alina Ivanna no longer corrected my mistakes.  When I stood before the class reciting an assignment, she would look out the window at the bare frozen poplars that waited forlornly for spring. She acted like I was no longer there. Naturally, this only made me feel worse. I knew I was only tolerated because my father had given a bribe to the director, and I hated myself deeply.

I even began to hate the English language itself. Why, I thought, did it insist on using that silly unpronounceable sound, when Russian and other languages did perfectly well without it? Why did the English people create such a monster in the first place? Not that I would dare pose such impertinent questions to Alina Ivanna. She might think even less of me. So, I continued to mispronounce my thuh, and the English teacher looked more and more remote.

Yet, I had never felt more drawn to her. In my dreams, I was suddenly twenty-three, which, I imagined, was my teacher’s age. I would follow her back home from school. She lived in a new housing development at the other end of town. (The gathering dusk and the crowds returning from work allowed me to remain unnoticed.) Quiet as a ghost, I would ascend the dimly lit stairs and slip into her communal quarters, a small room with a pine wardrobe, a chrome bed with snow-white pillows piled up high, and a black cat on the windowsill. While she changed into her housedress behind the wardrobe’s door, I sat in taut anticipation at the table, reading the lyrics of “The Little White Duck.” Later, we would sing the song together, my beautiful teacher swiveling lightly on her hips, eyes half-closed, hair swinging as she carried me to the celestial realms.

* * *

By the middle of the next semester I couldn’t stand the shame that Alina Ivanna might give me a passing grade simply because her bribed boss had told her to. I told my parents that I was resolved to pass the year-end exam on my own merits—but that in order to do so, I needed to see the old speech therapist, Matilda Pavlovna again, and as soon as possible.

“Whatever for?” my mother asked, surprised.

I told her about my struggles with the sound thuh and how it made everything impossible.

“Well, I wish you had told us sooner. All this time your father and I thought you weren’t doing well because you didn’t pay enough attention in class.”

“That’s what she says!” I cried. “But it’s a lie!”

“Don’t talk like that about Alina Ivanna. Why is it that you hate her so?”

“I don’t hate her, I—”

I lowered my head, holding back my tears.

“All right, then. I only hope Matilda Pavlovna is still around, and well enough . . .”

Fortunately, the old speech therapist was still intact, and she agreed to receive me that very Saturday.

This time, I went to the house on the Fontanka Embankment un-chaperoned. I ran up the five flights of stairs, skipping steps, and leaned on the bell. Matilda Pavlovna smiled and showed me in. The living room curtains were drawn against the gray March afternoon, and antique sconces gave off soft, soothing light. Matilda Pavlovna offered me the old lion chair and settled in another chair facing me. “Your mother tells me you’ve been having a problem in your English class, dear,” she said.

Her grandmotherly tone relaxed me. I told her about the definite article, the linguistic warm-ups, and “The Little White Duck.” “I just can’t seem to get my tongue to rest between my teeth,” I concluded bitterly.

“I could help you with that,” said Matilda Pavlovna.

“But that’s not all,” I said.

 “What else, dear?”

I described Alina Ivanna’s dismissive expression each time I tried to pronounce the unwieldy sound; her habit of calling me by my last name even though she always addressed my buddy Rogozin as Sasha; and how she never bothered to look at me anymore. By the time I finished my story, I was in tears.

“Poor child,” said Matilda Pavlovna and handed me a handkerchief.  It was scented with lavender and embossed with her initials, MP. “Tell me, dear, why do you think your teacher treats you like this?”

“Because she doesn’t like me!”

I needed to blow my nose badly, but not wishing to spoil Matilda Pavlovna’s beautiful handkerchief, I kneaded it nervously with my hands and sniffled.

“Why would she not like you, dear?”

I wanted to say, “Probably because I’m a Jew,” but instead I said, “Because she doesn’t like my face.”

Matilda Pavlovna smiled wistfully. “But you’re a handsome boy. If you were my grandson, I’d be proud of you.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

Still, I wasn’t convinced. Matilda Pavlovna is a kind old lady, I reflected, like my own grandmother, Lyolya, but unlike them, I suspected that to Alina Ivanna I would remain the same ugly Jewish duckling no matter what. There was also the sticky subject of my father’s past bribes. But I couldn’t tell Matilda Pavlovna about that, for I knew my mother would kill me if she ever found out.

“Why don’t you go ahead and blow your nose, dear,” Matilda Pavlovna suggested.

I did as she said. I now felt better.

We got down to work. Matilda Pavlovna pulled from a book cabinet an old, leather-bound edition of Treasure Island and had me read the first paragraph of the first chapter, “The Old Sea Dog.” When I had finished, she nodded her head approvingly. “There’s nothing wrong with your tongue either,” she said. “All you need is a little practice.”

Matilda Pavlovna produced her own little mirror, in a bronze, round frame with a handle, which she gave me so I could monitor my tongue movements. “Let’s start with some tongue twisters,” she said. “Repeat after me: theater, think, breathe, this.” I repeated the best I could. And then: “Father, mother, sister, brother, hand in hand with one another.” To my own surprise, I was able to pronounce the pesky sound without much strain. Was it because of her handkerchief’s lavender scent?

Matilda Pavlovna gave me some more tongue twisters to do at home and told me to come back in a week. I did my homework on Sunday instead of playing outside, and with a diligence that surprised my mother. I overheard her say to my father, “I’m beginning to think he’d actually like to become a diplomat after all.”

* * *

For our year-end test, we were to learn Hamlet’s soliloquy by heart. We had already slogged through The Jungle Book and tackled The Old Man and the Sea. Still, none of us was quite ready for the depths of Shakespeare. But the education department decreed that all sixth graders in special schools like ours should be familiar with the great English bard.

Rogozin and I studied for the test together. We read the soliloquy several times, looking up a lot of words in the dictionary. Still, we could understand little beyond the first line: “To be or not to be, that is the question.” Good thing we weren’t expected to translate the soliloquy into Russian! For the words that stumped us, we found mnemonics. For the word bodkin, the mnemonic was Botkinsky, the name of the quarantine facility for infectious diseases in Leningrad; for the word contumely, it was kontuziya, contusion. We memorized the whole thing like one memorized an arcane prayer, by rote.

We agreed that if one of us forgot a line while reciting the soliloquy in front of the class, the other would prompt him. With that in mind, we practiced lipreading. In the end, I could practically read Hamlet’s soliloquy from Rogozin’s lips. This was to be my insurance against the repetition of the duck fiasco.

The morning before the test, I rehearsed the soliloquy with my father, delighting in my newly gained mastery of the sound thuh. As I spoke, he pursed his lips and nodded his head approvingly. “This is Donald Duck,” he said when I finished. “Correct?”

“No, Papa, it’s Shakespeare!”

“Oh, well, then. Molodets!” And he wished me luck.

* * *

It was a sunny day in late May.  In spite of the warm weather, Alina Ivanna had her black dress on. Her hair was gathered in a ponytail. With her strong, Slavic cheekbones, she looked like Nazarova, the movie star of the day and renowned tamer of lions.

“Ayshenboymer,” she said. Her voice snapped like a whip.

I stepped in front of the class, my heart beating perilously close to my ears. In the sea of faces, I found Rogozin’s. He nodded to me, ready. I let my gaze rest on Ivan the Terrible.

“To be or not to be,” I began confidently, “that is the question.

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And, by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep—”

Everything was going well, my thuhs ringing clean and crisp. I was already halfway through the soliloquy, and past treacherous bodkin. There was only the very tough contumely ahead, but I had my mnemonic ready.

“Th’oppressor’s wrong,” I rapped out, “the proud man’s contumely, the pangs of despised love . . .”

It was then I caught Alina Ivanna’s steely gaze. She was standing by the window, arms crossed, and she looked dismayed—as if I had just uttered a profanity.

“The pangs of despised love,” I repeated, wondering if I had muddled the definite article or what.

Suddenly I understood. No matter how hard I tried, Alina Ivanna would never call me by my first name. She would never say, “Good, Leonya,” not even now that I had gotten the definite article. We’d never be the same age, she and I—but even if we were, she’d never sing with me, only look at me with disdain and disapprobation. Nothing I could do would change her opinion of me—it was cast in stone.

My mind went blank. I couldn’t say another word.

Thirty pairs of eyes stared at me with consternation. In this blur of faces, I found Rogozin’s. He was moving his lips vigorously. What was he saying? On the wall behind him, Ivan the Terrible was still killing his son.

Alina Ivanna unfolded her arms and took up her pen. To be or not to be was no longer the question.

LEONID NEWHOUSE

Leonid Newhouse wrote about his experience growing up in the Soviet Union in Leningrad Stories, a (yet unpublished) collection of stories, of which “The Definite Article” is one.  Another story from the collection, “The House of Cards,” was recently published on JewishFiction.net, and a third one, “The Overcoat,” in The Tint Journal.