The Lovers - страница 10

Once, Valya had asked Dina to work with her on grammar and pronunciation, flushing with embarrassment. Dina had written out a long list of Valya’s mistakes, which she had successfully fixed during the academic year. It was only the characteristic okanye^>1 that seemed incurable.

“Yes. Everything,” said Dina. “But this is his favorite this term.”

Vera rushed over to the larger pile of cheat sheets and started rustling through it, looking for the right one.

“What did you get?” she asked.

Dina replied calmly:

“That’s what I got.” She added after a pause, “But he gave me five points automatically.”

Both girls stared at Dina in amazement. “Kokon?! Automatically?!”

Dina sat down on her bed and leaned back against the pillow. “Well, not quite, not automatically… semi-automatically.”

Vera and Valya again exclaimed almost at the same time, “Semi-automatically? What does that mean?”

“I took a question sheet, prepared my answer, approached the table and sat down, and then he said to me: ‘I don’t doubt your knowledge and won’t waste time asking you.’ He didn’t even look at my draft.”

Vera tsked. “What a beast! Why couldn’t he say so straight away?”

“That’s Kokon for you!” Added Valya.

“But do you know of any other teacher who loves his subject as much as he does?” asked Dina.

“He loves the ladies, not the subject,” interrupted Vera.

“Well, he’s not such a beast after all…” Valya interjected. “I remember how in the first lecture, he made it sound like I should just pack up and leave the university immediately, and then he ended up helping me on the exam.”

“What about his humor?” Dina suddenly wanted to discuss Konstantin Konstantinovich, for some reason. “Everyone at university quotes his jokes!”

“Oh yes!” Valya agreed. “Yet he never repeats himself… not like that man… who teaches scientific communism… when he makes a joke, you don’t know which way to look…”

Vera rolled her eyes up dreamily. “Yes, Kokon is not a man you’d forget even after university. He’s a ray of light in a dark realm!” Then she remembered where she was, and picked up a book again. “All right, enough chit-chat, I’d like to pass the final exam on first try!”

Dina stretched out on the bed and put her hands behind her head.

“Go ahead, I’ll have a rest. Let me know if you’d like some tea.”

She looked at the color portrait of Muslim Magomaev, whose songs she adored, especially the recording in Italian. She had cut out his picture from a magazine, maybe the Soviet Screen, and it hung opposite Dina on the side of the cupboard, together with a few other portraits, each one with their own story.

There was Jean Marais, smiling from a glossy photographic print, which Dina had begged from her aunt, and who had received in turn from her friend. There was an autograph in the lower corner, done in blue ink. Although Aunt Ira tried to explain to Dina that the signature did not belong to Jean Marais himself, that her friend had added the autograph herself, Dina refused to believe it.

Next to it hung the terrible quality picture of Anna Magnani from a film Dina had never seen, which had been copied from a tiny photograph and enlarged to the size of a magazine page. She had once read a small article about the Italian actress with the beautiful name that was so well-suited to her unusual appearance. The article was illustrated by a few black-and-white shots from the films that she starred in. The image that was hanging on her cupboard now – the actress’ face with contrast lighting – was the one that Dina had liked the most, and she had asked the laboratory technician from the school physics laboratory to copy and enlarge this portrait.