Excerpts From An Education Chains rattled with Tatiana’s slightest movement, all but obscuring the sound of her heels or the backs of her hands scraping against metal at the same time each time. The only bright light in the room was focused on her face by means of a setup with a candle and a mirror, but with her hair tangled up over her eyes, she still found it virtually impossible to see anything clearly. All she really had to help her perform her part correctly was her hearing, which was fortunately aided by Katya and their cousin Anastasiya getting tangled up with each other as they shuffled around in the gloom in the least lit part of the room.
“Ow!” complained Nastya.
“Shh!” hissed someone – probably, if Tatiana’s recognition of her various female relatives’ hissed whispers was any good, Nastya’s sister Yelena.
“Katya kicked me!”
“No I didn’t!”
“Shh!”
More shuffling. Tatiana decided to assume this was her cue. She flung one hand out as dramatically as possible, wincing when the shackle fastened on it pinched her wrist. A flash let her know another spotlight had just been directed onto Katya, and so she loudly announced the name of the Grand Princess who her younger sister was currently, in Mama’s least favorite pearl rope and a paper tiara Tatiana had heavily decorated with glass stones and glitter because Mama had flatly rejected even Katerina’s pleas to borrow the real tiara that their brothers’ future wives would wear at their weddings, trying very hard to resemble.
As the second-oldest of the girls, Tatiana could have insisted on being the Grand Princess or the Reader, both much more dignified roles, but had decided to be the staritsa instead. Anastasiya, naturally, had remarked that it was fitting that Tatiana would dress up like an old woman of low birth, so Tatiana had pinched her and gotten into trouble with Mama and their tutor, but none of this had really injured her enthusiasm for the role. Yes, it involved looking horrible on purpose, but for most of the skit they were putting on, everyone in the room would be paying attention mostly to her.
Behind Katya, Nastasya and Yelena were supposed to be looking disturbed and whispering to each other while Katya acted as though she hadn’t heard anything. She could just make out her sister making a bobbing sort of curtsy.
“Zdrastvuite, Matushka,” said Katerina formally. Tatiana heard what might have been a smothered giggle in the audience. It was possible that whoever it was just found it amusing to hear one child address another as though she really were a highly respected old lady, but imagining Tatiana as a Little Mother – either like an actual staritsa or just as the wife of an important leader, Matushka to a community like Zinaida Alexeievna was to their village – could have provoked it too.
With some effort, Tatiana managed to produce a square of red fabric and a dried apple from their hiding places beneath the rags she wore. “For your husband,” she remarked in her carefully rehearsed old lady voice, rolling the apple to Katya’s feet. As her sister bent to pick it up, she held out the cloth, too. “And for the first pair of trousers for your son.”
“But I have no son,” recited Katya. Tatiana had argued with her sister a good deal about how she said this, trying to get Katya to use more animation, but finally her sister had gotten so frustrated she had started crying and Tatiana had had to pet her and had felt so awfully she’d given Katya half her share of dessert and given up all efforts to make her sister a more interesting actress.
“You will,” said Tatiana.
The lights moved away from them and, after wobbling for a moment, settled on a lectern, which Yelena managed to sneak up to while Katerina and Anastasiya helped Tatiana disentangle herself from her uncomfortable bit of the set.
“This incident,” read Yelena clearly from her script, “shows why Russia was ultimately forced to accept the recommendation of the International Confederation of Wizards and discourage the traditional practice of teaching Muggleborn children to act as councilors to important Muggles through religious institutions. After the behavior of a rogue starets led many Muggles to attack both our people and each other a few years after this incident, our motherland additionally banned Koldovstoretz School from teaching divination and all forms of mental magic to Muggleborns for over forty years.”
She curtsied and all the lights were allowed to flicker back to life as the tiny audience clapped. Tatiana, torn between bowing to her fans and sorting out her hair, tried to do both at once and nearly tipped over, winning an indulgent smile from her tutor.
“Ah, Tatiana Andreyevna,” he remarked. “It has always been a pleasure to teach you.”
At the time, Tatiana had thought very little of this, just grinning and bobbing a bow to him, too. On Monday, however, she remembered it suddenly when she walked into her schoolroom as usual and found a stranger standing there.
For a long moment, Tatiana and the stranger were silent, each taking the measure of the other – or at least both doing so after Tatiana recovered from her surprise. Finally, the stranger (a thin, neat-looking little man with very pale skin, very red hair which looked too thin for his fairly young face, and a matching very short beard) bowed slightly to her.
“Gudmarin,” he said.
Had Tatiana been prepared to hear English, she might have recognized the words, but as it was, she stared blankly at the stranger. “Vy Gudmarin?” she asked. You are Gudmarin? She assumed it was his name.
“Nyet. Guuud. More. Ning.”
“Ya ne znayu – ” began Tatiana, but Not-Gudmarin interrupted her before she could finish.
“Speeich English, please.”
Tatiana recognized two words, but drew a blank on the third. She had a feeling she should know it, or at least be able to guess it from context, but she was so flustered and confused by Not-Gudmarin’s appearance and strange words that she couldn’t think at all. “Speeich?” she repeated. “Chto eto?” What is that?
Not-Gudmarin made a little face. It was not quite displeased, but it was very clearly not pleased, either. “Govori po-Angliiski, pozhaluista,” he said. Speak in English, please. A wave of relief swept over Tatiana at the familiar sounds of Russian, however little sense the idea they made up made to her at the moment.
“Potomu - “ began Tatiana, but Not-Gudmarin raised an eyebrow and she rephrased. “Y?” she said. She knew that word because it was funny that the English used the same name for a letter as for their word for why.
“Yore fatha has decided you shood have lessons in English,” said the man. “I am to teach them. I am Anton Petrovich. Please sit.”
Tatiana sat. Anton Petrovich handed her a paper. “Write each of these in English letters and then translate to English, please.”
Tatiana looked at the first sentence. Дима – ето дом. Translating that was easy. Writing was much harder. Figuring out how to write Russian in English….
Her brow was still wrinkled with concentration when she handed Anton Petrovich the paper, but she was confident she had done well. This was why it was a nasty surprise when Anton Petrovich shook his head. “All wrong,” he said.
“Kt - what?”
“You have the words right - well, I can guess at them - but they are not how you say them in English. ‘Dema, thes hows’ means nothing in English.”
Tatiana frowned. “It means Dima is at the right house,” said Tatiana, reverting to Russian.
“In English, it sounds like you think Dima is stupid,” said Anton Petrovich, saying ‘stupid’ in Russian under the (correct) assumption Tatiana would not know the English word. “Maybe you mean ‘this is the right house’ - maybe you mean to tell Dima what a house is. English likes to be clear. It uses words called articles to be this way.”
And so it began. Tatiana, who had always fancied herself rather good at English, was quickly disabused of this notion by Anton Petrovich. Sometimes she raged at him and sometimes she wept, but either way got only the same response: speak English, please.
Slowly, though, she began to hear ‘very good, Tatiana Andreyevna’ – an expression she had been accustomed to hear daily – from the adult in charge of her education once again. She and Anton Petrovich continued to repeat an exchange they had begun having every day when Tatya had still despised him - “so many extra words!” “Say ‘there are so many extra words in English’, Tatiana Andreyevna” - but eventually they both did so with smiles. Spelling remained an issue - Tatiana did not see why English bothered with rules at all when every rule seemed to have forty exceptions and conditions - and her speech was clumsy, but her understanding of what Anton Petrovich said to her eventually increased to the point that he began giving her her other lessons in English as well, finding novel ways to both incorporate extra vocabulary and explain the concepts at the same time.
“Here, Tatiana Andreyevna,” said Anton Petrovich one day during mathematics, after a frustrating hour in which Tatiana had learned very little about fractions. “Take off your earrings.” Tatiana raised her hands to her ears, startled, and he clapped his hands impatiently. “I am not going to take them away from you. Just take them off and put them on the desk in front of you.”
Tatiana removed the back from one earring, removed the earring, and carefully put the back of the earring back on the post before putting it down and moving on to the other one. Once she was done, Anton Petrovich pointed to the pair of them. “Tell me about these earrings,” said Anton Petrovich.
This was maybe the easiest question Tatiana had been asked in lessons for a long time. “They’re quarter-carat diamond studs,” said Tatiana, speaking in Russian because she did not know the English words to answer the question.
“Is each diamond a quarter of a carat?” asked Anton Petrovich, not ordering her to speak English or stopping the lesson to teach her the new words. He must have guessed, correctly, that Tatiana was interested enough in these words to guess them from context and the placements of the hated articles she now sometimes had strange dreams about.
Right now, though, her teacher was stranger than her dreams, or so it seemed to her. A quarter of a carat each? Had Anton Petrovich gone mad? “Of course not,” said Tatiana, still speaking in Russian. “Those would be as big as Mama’s everyday earrings. They are a quarter of a carat together.”
Anton Petrovich nodded. “Good.” He waved his wand and to Tatiana’s surprise, her left earring stood up on its own, balancing on her paper on its stone. To her even greater surprise, not to mention dismay, her pencil started tracing the square outline of said stone. Next, the other did the same, and then they both hopped down to form two more tiny squares right below the first two. “Look at this,” said Anton Petrovich as Tatiana’s earrings finally fell back over and she snatched them up, examining them to make sure the pencil hadn’t dirtied them. “What do these four make up?”
His pencil traced a square around the four little squares. “Four quarter-carats?” asked Tatiana, looking sideways at her teacher as she slipped her right earring back in and bent her head to put the back of it back on.
“One half-carat,” corrected Anton Petrovich, now speaking Russian again, too - he always did when explaining something Tatiana was having trouble understanding in lessons that weren't her English lessons. “Two earrings together make up a quarter-carat, remember?”
Tatiana traced the squares with one fingernail. “Two together are a quarter carat, and four are a half-carat,” repeated Tatiana.
“Very good.” Her pencil rose again and began drawing more little squares. “So what would two half-carats be?”
“One carat,” said Tatiana. Halves were easy.
“How many earrings?”
Tatiana looked at her fingers, counting on them without moving them. She had mastered that trick two months ago when Anton Petrovich had begun scolding her for using her fingers all the time. “Eight,” she said.
“Very good,” said Anton Petrovich. “So one of your earrings is…?”
“An eighth of a carat.”
“Very good!” said Anton Petrovich. The pencil rose again and drew a line up each row of squares, dividing each little earring-sized internal square into two pieces. “Now what do you have?” he asked.
“Accent diamonds,” said Tatiana. “Not good.”
Anton Petrovich smiled thinly. “You are amusing, Tatiana Andreyevna. Now tell me: how many pieces are there now?”
Tatiana thought furiously. There had been eight, now each eight was two, eight times two was…”Sixteen?”
“So each of these accent diamonds is…?”
“One-sixteenth of a carat!” said Tatiana.
“Very good, Tatiana Andreyevna.”
That evening, Tatiana informed Nadezhda, “I learned new words today.”
Her nanny looked amused. “What words did you learn?” asked Nadezhda, speaking slowly and clearly in English. Papa had told her she must speak to Tatiana and Katerina both as much in English as she could, and Tatiana had quickly realized how this order could be used to make sessions with Anton Petrovich make sense faster.
“Die-ya-mond, car-at.”
“Carrot? An orange vegetable?”
“No. Care-at.” Tatiana tapped her ear to hopefully clarify further. “What is carrot?” she asked, then cursed herself for a fool when Nadezhda raised an eyebrow. “What is a carrot?” she corrected herself.
“Much better,” said Nadezhda, and helped Tatiana with the definitions of these new words and the assignment Anton Petrovich had set her for the night. She was tired and a bit out of temper when she finished it and finally got to go to bed and drink a cup of chocolate there before sleeping, but also felt very, very clever and proud of herself for, Nadezhda had said, successfully written a whole paragraph in understandable English.