must be said that in such beautiful, complete families, like Fanyasha’s, in which all members of the family give the child a lot of love, there is a high probability that the favorite child will grow up spoiled, petulant, selfish and stubborn. Therefore, it really was difficult for Fanyasha to accept and understand what humility was.
The first day at school got her acquainted with this quality. Surprisingly, just one day of humility gave her a new, previously unknown sensation of softness and femininity. This filled Fanyasha with pride. She knew that she had touched something secret and important. Not that she suddenly decided to become a prudent and silent type – no way! Fanyasha just felt that now there were new tools for communication in her arsenal.
Chapter 7:
Maximum Readiness for Action while Keeping Inner Calm
“Bosya, hey Bosya, tell me, what did you boys learn in school on the second day of class?” asked Fanyasha with a cunning smile, jumping into the cloud bus.
“Oh come on, Fanya, what do you care? No matter what, you girls will have something different!” muttered Bosya.
“But Bosechka, please, please just tell me. I’m interested! I really want to know,” said Fanyasha, still dying to hear her brother’s explanation.
“Well, as far as I remember, we were given all kinds of different tasks all day long the second day, and we were supposed to make a decision really fast and act on it. That’s really important for men! So it was really cool, although at that moment I still couldn’t understand when we would finally start our studies. That’s it.”
Fanyasha didn’t hear her brother’s last words, as the cloud bus had already taken off high into the sky and was racing to the school.
Fanyasha was thinking and imaging the whole way to school about what other skills could be important to girls, and about what she could expect to learn in school today.
At first, she was imagining how they would all be forced to wash and clean up, since girls should look after cleanliness and order. Then she guessed that everybody would be given the opportunity to demonstrate their talent at dancing or singing. That’s when she would surprise everybody! Her grandmother Nakomis had been working with her all throughout Fanyasha’s young life, teaching her to sing beautifully and to dance, so Fanyasha was absolutely sure that no one was better than her at singing and dancing.
She got so engrossed in her thoughts about her talents that she didn’t notice that she had wound up next to her school, and a strong gust of air once again threw all of the students into the right classrooms.
“This is amazing! It’s so beautiful! It’s just incredible beauty!” said a girl with a long red braid, and clapped her hands.
Fanyasha took a look at the girl, and together with the other students she started looking around their classroom with delight. The whole room was shining and transfused with light. There was not a bit of yesterday’s greyness and dampness left! In place of yesterday’s hard chairs, all of the schoolgirls got to sit on soft red armchairs. In front of them on the little cream-colored tables were white notebooks and colored pencils. It was hard to hold back one’s emotions, but Fanyasha had figured out yesterday that silence was like gold for a girl in school.
A raspberry-colored cloud appeared unexpectedly in the middle of the classroom, and in a flash turned into Horda Etyudizovna. However, today her dress had a deep raspberry hue, and her dark hair was wrapped into a tight bun, with a pearl hairpin shining in it. A playful twinkle was flashing in her large black eyes.
Despite that, her voice and facial expression were still serious and cold.
“Good morning, students. I want to start by recognizing one of you, and by giving away our first pink cloud. Krygoliya Zorge, I’m talking about you! You demonstrated your knowledge of rule number seventy-six with dignity! Congratulations!
With these words, the teacher pointed with her long index finger on her right hand at the girl with the red-haired braid, and in her other hand their immediately appeared a large scroll with the names of all the schoolgirls.
Horda Etyudizovna touched the scroll with her finger across from Krygoliya Zorge’s name, and a small pink cloud immediately appeared on the paper.
“Who can tell me why Krygoliya got a pink cloud?” the teacher slowly turned round and round, and looked fixedly into the girls’ faces.
“Efaniya Aros,” she suddenly snapped, “tell me, what is rule number seventy-six about?!”
Here Fanyasha shook out of fear, and she was extremely hurt that her brother’s advice didn’t work. After all, she had honestly read all four hundred rules for girls’ behavior in elementary school, and she honestly put her notebook under her pillow, but now she couldn’t remember a thing that she had read.
“Murisa Laucar, maybe you can answer me?”
The teacher shifted her glance to Fanyasha’s neighbor with the white bangs, and Murisa answered her quickly and precisely, “Rule number seventy-six says a girl should always speak out loud about her positive emotions!”
Within an instant, there were two new symbols on the scroll: a pink cloud next to Murisa’s name, and a black mark next to Efaniya’s name.
“I can’t believe it,” thought Fanyasha, offended. “This repugnant, uneducated neighbor even managed to learn the rules. I was wrong to listen to my over-confident brother! I got into this stupid situation because of him! I’ll give him what for tonight! He’ll get a beating from me!”
“I’m warning all of you,” sounded Horda Etyudizovna’s metallic voice, “the rules of behavior are the basis of the elementary school program. They have to be not only known, but also clearly executed. I’m going to mark every one of your achievements or successes in my gradebook with a pink cloud, and I’ll give a black mark for every failure.
“Fifty pink clouds will give you the chance to visit the school library and park. Fifty black marks will be a straight path to getting expelled from our school, and going right to a remedial school. And keep in mind, I’ll never let any angel graduate from elementary school if she doesn’t know the rules or hasn’t completely learned any one of the subjects we teach here! Believe me, it’s better to delay the birth of your person than to make this person suffer all throughout life with an angel who doesn’t understand the rules.
“That’s why I encourage all of you to know and execute the rules, and try your best in your studies!”
Fanyasha was interested by her teacher’s words.
“What could that mean,” she thought, “to delay a person’s birth. Hmm, if that’s possible, then, maybe, it’s possible to stop the child from being born altogether. In that case, I won’t even have to go to school! It would be good to know what goes with what. Ahh, I know! I’ve got it! I’ll make Bosya tell me everything he knows about that, since he let me down with learning the rules.”
Meanwhile, Horda Etyudizovna continued.
“Yesterday’s class, as you could probably guess, was dedicated to humility, one of a woman’s most important qualities. Thanks to the special conditions we created, you all learned the skill of humility one way or another. And we’ll see as time goes
