The reflecting pool trapped, in order of distance, apple trees, a single
silvery-blue spruce, three spikes of the obelisk commemorating students and
faculty fallen in the war, and in its very depth, the tower of Lomonosov
University, with its red five-point star in a half-circle of laurel.
Students often jumped across the pool on their way to class. They lowered
bags and textbooks, stepped back and in one swift motion clipped the
corner. Some mornings I stopped and watched them.

I taught English at Gumanitarniy korpus, GUM-1, on the corner of Vernadsky
prospect, only a few blocks from the famous tower. One of the later
additions to the 400-year-old school, Hall of Humanities housed Lomonosov
University’s newer departments. GUM-1 had none of the neighboring
skyscraper’s elegance or scope. Built in the 70s, it sat square and simple,
a concrete box with a heavy bas-relief over the entrance. Inside, guards in
military uniform checked IDs. Sullen coat check women received parkas and
rain jackets and, in return, pressed numbered plastic tokens into impatient
hands.

The students laughed and kissed in the hallways during breaks. They packed
tight in the building’s few elevators, enveloped in a cloud of cigarette
smoke, sweat, and perfume. Their clothes were tailored, leather bags too
small to hold textbooks. When they skipped class, it was because their
parents took them skiing or skydiving. Other teachers, I noticed,
reconciled with that. Some, like me, were young, barely out of school. They
scanned the class for the weakest students and offered private lessons.
Others dived into work, collected teaching certificates, took out loans for
expensive Moscow apartments hours from the city center.

The English department was on the eleventh floor, one long hallway with
rooms on either side. As I walked towards my classroom a few minutes after
nine, the heavy doors swung open and shut. I lingered in the doorway,
waiting for the last of my first-year students, the smokers who went down
to their enclosed sanctuary on the ground floor and were always late. A few
girls emerged from the restroom shaking their hands, sending droplets of
water over the linoleum. Driers always ran at half power, paper towels an
unheard-of luxury. Most days the restrooms missed toilet paper and the
girls made a show of collecting sheets of Kleenex before a break. I watched
the students make their way towards classrooms, the girls lean and tall,
always in high heels, even in winter, the boys fashionably scruffy, their
fingers clutched around cans of energy drinks gulped during class. None of
them slept more than four hours a night.

“Good morning, Lida.”

“Good morning, Elena Vitalievna,” I nodded at the department chair who
walked by every morning to scold the late students.

Elena headed the small English department that serviced a new program for
economists and international commerce. She hired me on a colleague’s word,
another English teacher who knew me from high school. At the interview, she
flipped through my passport, ignoring the resume I pushed across the table.

“That,” she pointed to a registration page still listing an address in my
hometown, “should not be a problem. But just in case, carry a train ticket
with you. The police won’t give you trouble as long as it looks like you
just arrived.

“We have strong and weak groups. I’ll give you one in the middle. If a
student doesn’t show up to class, let me know. If they’re ‘budget’ and
don’t show up, let me know sooner. Lomonosov is free for veterans’
children, but just because someone’s name is on that obelisk,” she waved at
the window where, eleven floors below, the granite cast a stern geometric
shadow in the pool, “just because someone earned that, doesn’t
mean his grandchild will bother getting up at 6 for a 9 a.m. class. Some
students you won’t see for months. Give them zeros. You can’t fail too
many, but they don’t know that.”

The first weeks I followed the textbook to the letter. At a kiosk tucked
inside a subway station pavilion, I bought a pair of simple glasses without
prescription and wore them to class to look older. I piled my hair in a bun
and shaded my lips with mauve lipstick. The group was small—14 students—and
as Elena predicted, some didn’t come to class for weeks at a time. The most
fluent spoke with the British RP, residue of summer schools in London or
Malta. Even so, they knew little of conversational English. “Teacher,” they
addressed me. “Guys,” I called them, and the girls giggled, unaccustomed.
Their phrasing was stiff, cautious. In compositions, they mistrusted the
easy flow of English and weighed it down with deep Russian thoughts
expressed without articles:

parents are main teachers of our lives, they raise us and control
behavior, they are first people who helps us to divide things on white
and black.

When I asked a question, they answered in Russian, knowing it wasn’t
allowed. Gamely, I said every Russian word would cost them a chocolate and
they went down to the cafeteria and bought the entire candy row.

They checked each other’s answers during tests and tucked elaborate cheat
sheets into the pages of their books. If I asked one of the weak students,
his neighbors spoke the answers in a loud whisper until he repeated. They
brought two phones to class; if I took one they continued texting on the
other. Switching to Russian, they dropped Moscow street names to gauge how
little I knew. Still, by the end of the first semester their mocking grew
soft, almost indulgent, as they sprinkled their compositions with
vocabulary from the home reading:

Even if you are as strong as an ox while you are young, only money will
provide you with good health as you age

.

Of all the teachers, they respected only Elena. Her goal for them was
easiest to convey: work hard, get some sleep when you can. She taught the
weakest groups and her students placed 2 a.m. video calls asking to go over
homework. Her power extended beyond the textbook. When the men’s restroom
door broke, the boys came to Elena asking for a new lock. Students who got
stuck in the elevator, which happened about once a week, dialed Elena’s
number before anyone else. She was their first responder. I watched her
berate flimsy girls with Burberry pendants, disheveled boys who didn’t dare
raise their eyes to this small, taut woman, and I thought Elena had
mastered that unique combination of blunt disdain and familiarity without
which nothing here was accomplished.

About once a month I walked into an empty classroom. Instead of a few
smokers running late, the entire class was gone. I cracked the windows to
the cold Moscow air that smelled of dust and benzene and sat in the last
row, studying long, two-seat desks—history dates scribbled in blue ink,
names of French presidents, the English words we’d memorized the week
before, errand, feasible, sagacious. Back in my school, they made
us come on Sundays with buckets of soapy water and dish rags. We scrubbed
and scrubbed until the tables turned pale, rough with cuts, enduring.

On such days, when my students came in, they spilled through the door
together, full of stories. They told of a terror attack on the red
Sokolniki line—two subway cars gone, darkness and panic, passengers running
over each other to get to the surface. Or the roads were blocked around the
university because Steve Jobs came for a lecture. Or the Dean pulled them
out to rehearse wartime songs for the Victory Day celebration. And in
surprising unison they would launch into Our Tenth Battalion or Across the Field Tanks Thundered. Their stories reminded me they
were 18-year-olds, living in one of the world’s largest, most famous, and
most dangerous cities.

“Lida, do you have a minute before class?” I followed Elena into the
teachers’ office and waited for her to shut the door.

“Ghamlet Mirzoyan is transferring to your group.” She waited. The name
supposedly meant something, but not to me. “He spent half of the last
academic year in Switzerland, helping his father run a family business. His
parents want him to graduate, even if it means hanging back a year. He will
be older than your other students.”

“Hamlet?” I said.

“Ghamlet. An Armenian.”

I marveled at the name, its hard sound at the back of my throat.

“Is there anything I need to know about him?”

“No,” Elena said. “Not academically at least. A few years ago, Ghamlet’s
father was shot. He lived. Made it out of the car, hid behind a building,
driver called for help…You’ve never heard of him? Arno Mirzoyan?” She
hummed a jingle that sounded vaguely familiar. A brand of yogurt? One-hour
photo?

I told her I had not heard of Arno Mirzoyan.

“Ghamlet’s father was—is—of that first wave of businessmen. Brash,
reckless, new companies spring like mushrooms. None of that was ever proven
illegal but people don’t get shot in the face for nothing. I thought I
should mention it.”

The next day the temperature dropped to record lows. As I walked, my
eyelashes turned white with frost, each breath burned my throat. Students
came in wearing heavy winter coats they refused to trade for a plastic
token at the coat check. The radiators hummed, fighting the cold. The
students unspooled their scarves, but kept gloves on, clutching their pens
awkwardly, like bear cubs taught a trick. When Ghamlet came in, followed by
Elena, they were pumping the air out of their lungs, exhaling in loud,
rapid bursts to warm the room. The group grew quiet and I knew the real
story of what Ghamlet’s father did for a living was no secret to anyone.

The boy lingered by my table, as if unsure on which side he belonged. His
eyes were such a deep shade of brown the pupil blended with the iris. He
wore a three-piece business suit, but even with the added layers of his
shirt, the vest, and the thick gabardine jacket he was thin as air. When he
shifted his weight, the deep crease at the bottom of his trousers revealed
how skinny his legs were. He placed one hand on the edge of my desk and
flexed it, the fingers bending backwards impossibly at the wrong joints.
His other hand he extended to me. “Mirzoyan, Ghamlet.” I shook his hand.
Despite the cold outside it was warm and dry.

I sensed the anxiety of the other students. I looked at the girls, the
pretty young girls who spent entire breaks in the restroom fixing their
makeup. They flipped through their notes for the first time in weeks,
hushed, serious.

Elena placed her hands around Ghamlet’s shoulders. “Mirzoyan, you don’t
have the whole day.” She guided him to the first open seat. The girl at the
other end of the desk began pulling her notes, pencils, textbook scattered
around to free space for him. “This is group four,” Elena said. “This is
your teacher, Lidia Pavlovna.” She hovered over him until it was clear
Ghamlet brought nothing to class. “Where is your book?” she asked. He shook
his head. The girl pushed her textbook across, carefully, until it rested
halfway between them. Elena sighed and left the room.

We began each lesson with vocabulary practice. “Turn to your neighbor,” I
said. There was a shuffle of winter coats. “Ghamlet, face Vika, please.”

“You remind me of someone,” Ghamlet said. He drummed his palms against the
table. “That’s it! A concierge in my building. Do you moonlight, teacher?”

“Those on the right begin,” I instructed. “Pick a new word from your
reading and your neighbor must provide a sentence with that word. Switch
after five examples.” As the students spoke I moved up and down the rows,
listening, correcting. Ghamlet whispered something I hoped was relevant
English to his neighbor. He stretched his arm along the desk and rested his
head on it, like a pillow. I tapped his shoulder as I passed.

“Sit up,” I said.

He straightened, brushing an invisible speck off his shoulder—dandruff or
the trace of my touch.

From that day, whenever Ghamlet entered the room, my body temperature
dropped. He turned in only two written assignments. His compositions veered
wildly off subject, speckled with misspellings ( I didn’t knottiest that before), printed on thick paper
watermarked with his last name and bearing a Swiss street address.
Eventually, he befriended some boys and even brought a single long-stemmed
rose to each girl and to me on Women’s Day in March. Still, most were
afraid, as if they tried and failed to separate his charm, his open and
relaxed smile, from the image of his father, bloodied, leaning against the
chromed car and looking for shelter before the next bullet came.

I altered readings to remove anything about families or fathers. Instead,
we talked about commerce, business plans—barely-guided classroom
discussions. It was the only thing that interested Ghamlet. I handed out
cards with the latest vocabulary, embarrassed for my handwriting. “Use
those words,” I told him. “You’re wasting our time,” Ghamlet complained. “I
could be working right now.”

He took phone calls in class and stepped out to finish them in the hall.
One day I followed him. He was giving someone elaborate instructions for
shipping crates of frozen chicken through customs.

“Turn that off.”

He hung up immediately but made no motion to return to class.

“Don’t you have any respect for your teacher, your classmates?” The words
came out wrong, I knew it. Like whining. “For this university?” He must
know, I thought. Everyone knew. This recognition, centuries of history, the
fame of the “Russian Harvard” all came from a poor peasant boy, Mikhail
Lomonosov, who once ran away from home. He tagged along with a group of
fishermen and walked all the way to Moscow. It took him three weeks. All he
wanted was to study at a real school.

“This university?” Ghamlet smirked. “Look, look here.” He knocked
on the wall. The sound was hollow. “Cheap. Nothing but sheetrock. You think
you’re doing good. You think you’re getting somewhere, going to Lomonosov,
studying international relations, no less, but it’s the same old story.
Cheap walls, restrooms without toilet paper. Next time you’re washing your
hands, look under the sink. It’s rusted through. Everything here is
corrupt.” He took my vocabulary card out of his pocket. “Do you think when
my father is talking to his business partners he needs this? Rolling in money! Pay through the nose! You think a rival comes
into his office and my father says, ‘Yeah, I bought that bankrupt watch
factory from under you, but let’s look on the bright side of things?’”

“You need to trust me.” I said. “It’s a process.”

“Oh, please.” He crumpled the card, looking to toss it, but the hallway had
never seen a trash can. “You’re about as old as my new stepmother.”

One morning, waiting for the elevator on the ground floor, I looked into
the smoking room and saw Ghamlet remove a cigarette from another boy’s
mouth. The gesture was slow, almost paternal. I smiled, cocked my head a
little as Ghamlet dropped the cigarette to the ground and put the fine tip
of his shoe to it. Then, without breaking stride, he locked his arms around
the boy’s waist and threw him against the wall.

The boy scraped the floor, looking for support, trying to get up, but
Ghamlet was on him, pushing all his weight on the boy’s shoulders as if
willing him to stay underwater. He punched aimlessly, without
method—stomach, cheeks, nose. He hit and drew his skinny arm back, hit
again. Finally, he lost balance and fell backward, but continued to kick,
the tip of his shoe now digging into the boy’s thighs and shins.

The walls in the smoking room were glass. Paralyzed, I watched the other
student slide to the floor, cradling his head, deep gashes on his arms.

“That is enough.” Elena walked by without acknowledging me. She was white,
her hands shaking. At her feet, the boy breathed heavily, trying to
suppress a cough. “Lidia Pavlovna, please see your student to the teacher’s
office. I will be in as soon as I can.”

Ghamlet broke through the small crowd that had gathered outside the smoking
room and headed for the elevator. For the first time I saw other students
look directly at him, drinking in the black of his eyes, the intensity that
already began to subside. Then the elevator doors slid open and I followed.

I didn’t go to class. I did not even know when one period ended and another
began. It took hours for Elena to see that the boy was safe, call for an
ambulance, and make the sorts of decisions that followed when one student
attacked another. In the teacher’s office on the eleventh floor I was
exempt from it all. The news about Ghamlet’s father didn’t reach me until
later, after I escorted my student to the restroom where he rinsed his
hands and spent long minutes rubbing his knuckles, after I made us tea in
paper cups. Later that night national channels ran a short feature from
Montreux. This time, there had been no car and no corner to hide. Arno
Mirzoyan was shopping with his second wife and youngest son when a
motorcyclist drove down the ancient pavement and shot him three times in
the chest. The news, that spread over the internet in minutes, missed
Ghamlet that morning as he headed to class and caught up with him in the
smoking room, brought by the hapless, unlucky boy who would wear a neck
brace the rest of the school year.

As Ghamlet’s adrenalin wore out, his hands began to shake. I rummaged in
the cupboards for the last of the holiday candy.

“Eat something.” I placed a box in front of him, a Women’s Day special,
chocolate wafers and praline. His phone had been restless ever since we
left the smoking room but for once he ignored it. When it wouldn’t stop, he
walked over to the window and threw the phone in a wide arch. Eleven floors
below, we heard it hit the water.

“How old are you?” Ghamlet said.

“24.”

He picked a chocolate from the box.

“My father closed his first big deal when he was 24. Took his partners
skiing to celebrate, not to Switzerland yet, not that kind of money, just
outside of Moscow in Sorochany. He was coming down a mogul run when he
heard a gunshot.” He picked another candy and let it rest in his palm, the
chocolate melting. “All of his partners already gathered at the foot of the
slope, he was slow. He didn’t grow up skiing and couldn’t do bumps. Then
came another gunshot, and another. He told me later, that was the worst—not
knowing where they came from, if he’d been hit. He felt no pain, but it was
cold and he thought the body betrayed him. Finally he looked up and there
it was. Fireworks. It was December and the country had just voted a
constitution in. Sorochany was blowing a year’s budget on fireworks.”

I studied his face where new lines formed and old ones evaporated. As if
someone pulled a plug and Ghamlet’s watermarked paper, gabardine suits,
personal drivers, years of vacations under a more exotic sun, all of it
went like water down the drain. The young man who sat in front of me was
quiet, confused, absentmindedly rubbing chocolate spots from his fingers
with a monogrammed handkerchief. I taught at Lomonosov for a few years
after Ghamlet graduated, the incident in the smoking room never mentioned
again. In time, elevators began to run like clockwork, no longer trapping
students between floors, a loud janitor made rounds of the classrooms
replacing the locks, and even restrooms received a modest daily allowance
of toilet paper. Once every fall, a man in rubber overalls waded in the
reflecting pool with a net that came up full of leaves and small coins.
Still, sometimes on my way to class I stopped and rapped my knuckles on the
wall. I put my ear to the cold surface and listened for the hollow sound
within.