Grown-up people do not know that a child can give exceedingly good advice even in the most difficult case. A fool with a heart and no sense is just as unhappy as a fool with sense and no heart—from The Idiot, a novel by the 19th-century Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky.
The phone rang, and my stomach clenched when I heard her voice.
“Didi? I want to go home,” said my 6-year-old daughter, Bella.
Two hours earlier, I dropped her off at new school in a squat building in a forest of Soviet-era apartment blocks on Krasnoarmeyskaya (Red Army) Street in Moscow.
She hugged me goodbye, a little longer than usual, and as I rode the metro to the Goldman Sachs office, I whispered a silent prayer that she’d make it through the day.
But Bella had just spent the minutes between class periods hiding in the bathroom so no one would see her crying.
Finally, she composed herself, found her teacher and pantomimed that she needed to talk to me.
“I don’t understand… anything,” she said, her voice cracking.
I tried to respond with soothing words, but I had no idea what to do.
If this was just a transfer between schools in our hometown, I might have told her to tough it out.
But this was different.
This was Moscow, and Bella was one of the first foreign students at Novaya Gumanitarnaya Shkola, where everything—every subject, every instruction—was in Russian.
No translators, no hand-holding.
I told her I’d call her back and immediately dialed my wife, Jillian.
“What do we do?” I asked, already feeling torn.
We went back and forth.
I thought maybe I should head to the school, convince Bella to stay a little longer, maybe let her sit in a quiet room and read an English book.
Jillian, on the other hand, thought it’d be better to pick her up and start fresh tomorrow.
I didn’t want to argue.
So, I headed back to the school.
When Bella saw me, her face brightened up considerably as if she was being rescued from a sinking ship.
We walked hand-in-hand to the metro, and I gently told her that I understood this was hard, but that it would be good if she could try to stick it out next time.
I had a feeling this wouldn’t be the last time we’d have this conversation.
At Novaya Gumanitarnaya Shkola, the kids were reciting Pushkin’s “Yevgeny Onegin” (“My uncle was a man of virtue. . . .”) by heart and tackling algebra as early as six years old.
Bella, though, spent those early weeks feeling completely lost.
She couldn’t sleep at night, and in class, she dreaded being asked about homework she wasn’t even sure had been assigned.
Russian grammar looked like hieroglyphics on the blackboard.
Her mantra became, “It’s okay to feel like an idiot. This will take time.”
But she felt betrayed.
Before sleep, Bella told me she knew why she wasn’t being called on in class.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because my father works for an American bank,” she said, deadpan.
The next morning, we met a man with a shock of steel-wool hair and teeth whose color and arrangement suggested decades of Soviet dentistry and heavy smoking.
His name was Vasiliy Georgievich Bogin, the school’s founder and mathematics maestro.
He spent 45 minutes with Bella, speaking to her in English, throwing algebra problems her way that were clearly beyond her.
Bogin would have been nearly six feet tall if he had better posture, but he always seemed to lean forward, as if drawn to something else while prowling the school.
His eyes had the impish gleam of a man cooking up a brainteaser for the next person he encountered.
“Anyone who thinks that 2 + 2 = 4 is an idiot,” he liked to say.
More on that later.
Afterward, Bogin told us he rarely admitted non-Russian speakers, let alone ‘Americans’, and he couldn’t make any special accommodations for Bella.
It sounded like a soft rejection, but then he surprised us.
“But I will take her,” he said.
Bella struggled in those first weeks, and we promised her she could switch to an international school at any time.
But she started finding ways to cope.
In math, where language wasn’t as much of a barrier, she worked hard to prove she wasn’t clueless.
And when she didn’t understand something, she perfected the smile-and-nod tactic, memorising words to look up later.
Slowly, the language began to seep into her consciousness.
“It’s like solving a code,” Bella, now 12, recalled the details over Zoom while I was on a flight to Kazan, Russia for the BRICS Summit last Tuesday.
“Every day, I just have to figure out something new to say.”
Even Russian literature became less daunting.
One day, her teacher Galina Lebedeva was talking about fairy tales and realised Bella didn’t know the classic Russian ending.
It was akin to “. . . and they lived happily ever after.”
So, she made her repeat it, word by word.
Bella hesitated at first, but then she did it.
Her classmates applauded, and she beamed.
Late that spring, Bella came home with a startling announcement—Bogin had picked her for the school’s Olympiad team, largely because of her math prowess.
We couldn’t believe it.
How would she even understand the questions?
But Bella assured us she was getting it.
Our inclination as parents had been to step in and protect her.
Or maybe it was better she fought these battles herself.
As Bogin often said, “Life is the best teacher.”
Bogin taught a class called myshleniye—critical thinking.
It was based in part on the work of a dissident Soviet educational philosopher named Georgy Shchedrovitsky, who argued that there were three ways of thinking: abstract, verbal and representational.
To comprehend the meaning of something, you had to use all three.
When I asked Bogin to explain Shchedrovitsky, he smirked and responded with a question.
“Does 2 + 2 equal 4? No. Two cats plus two sausages is still two cats. Two drops of water plus two drops of water? One drop of water.”
Bella started bringing riddles like that home.
“Ten crows are sitting on a fence,” she said during family dinner on Sunday.
“A cat pounces and eats one. How many are left?”
“Umm, nine,” I said, fearing a trap.
“Nope, none!” she gleefully responded.
“Do you really think that after one crow is eaten, the others are going to stick around?”
After eleven months in Moskva, it was time to move on to the Beijing office.
On her last day, Bogin held an assembly to say goodbye.
“What would we not have had if she had not been here?” he asked.
“How did she enrich our school?”
“Bi-da-yuh!” someone shouted back.
“The school newspaper!”
“Great friendships!”
A chant began. “Spa-si-bo! Spa-si-bo!” (“Thank you!”)
Some teachers and children had tears in their eyes.
I went onstage to express my deep appreciation but was too choked up to speak.
Suddenly, Bella strode forward and took the microphone.
In confident and flawless Russian mixed with Bidayuh, she thanked the school for all of us.
The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune.
