XIV
Soso stood calmly in front of his
examiners. He was 15 now, and he was
down to his last exam. He couldn’t fail
his mother now. She had worked so hard
to get him here, and here was his chance to finally enter the seminary in Tbilisi. But the last subject was probably his most
hated-Russian.
It was also the subject he was most
self-conscious about. Everything else
just seemed to come naturally to him, but Russian seemed to elude his utmost
attempts to master. He spoke to the
examiners nervously. Two of them were
native Russians, and Soso just couldn’t get the idea out of his head that he was
about to be judged rather unfairly, after all, he was still just a boy.
He started speaking roughly; there was a
shakiness in his high pitched voice that he couldn’t shake. He hastily tried to clear his throat as one
of the Russian examiners asked him to tell them about his father. Soso looked apprehensively at the examiner;
surely he hadn’t expected a question like this.
He wasn’t prepared to talk about the man he hadn’t seen in three years,
the man who had deserted his mother because she tried to send Soso to
school. He figured since he was going to
an Orthodox school, however, that only allowed members of the clergy to enter, he should speak rather highly of him.
“My father? Och, he is well-liked by our entire
village. He was such a good man, and so well-liked that the priest made him a Deacon in his church. But he is a cobbler and is also very hard
working, so hard working that I see very little of him since I started
attending school.” He distractedly edged
the collar of his shirt with his index finger.
Even he could hear his thick Georgian accent when he spoke. The Russian examiner looked back down at his
examiner’s board in his hands.
“Well son, we’ll have to work on that
accent. Can’t have that in the Tsar’s
church. Russian is your language now,
but…” He looked up at Joseph and gave a
slight grin, “you’ll have a lot of time to work on that while here at the
seminary.” Soso returned his smile
heartily. The examiner waved his hand to
go. Joseph was surprised that it had
been so painless. He turned to go, and
as he did so he heard the words, “Russian is your language now,” and he
remembered the ideals of Russification, the Empire’s idea to unite Russia by
quashing nationalities like the Georgians.
He left the room thinking to himself that one day it would all be
different. One day he would be happy to
be Georgian. But try as he might, he
would keep in Georgian accent for the rest of his life.
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