The scientific work Evgen sent to academician Alexandrov in Moscow as Evgeniy Yakovich advised. Anyway, in order to be published in an academic publication academician review is need.
Soon the answer came. Academician Alexandrov wrote that the industry in which Viktorovskyy works is perspective and important, theorem proving he approves and he also will be happy to recommend for printing more than one of his paper.
Meanwhile, Evgen started to write new theorems. They are directly related to the integral curves for discontinuous field of directions. He worked despite pain that abandoned him during all day and all night. His mother caught him unconscious several times have entering into the room. Recovering after consciousness he asked her not to call a doctor.
- There is no need to call a doctor. It's because of weariness. A little more and I'll finish ... then I’ll have a rest.
- But when it will happen? - his mother denied. - I do not believe ... You finished the school externally, then the university you went ahead of schedule. And now this science ... Have you ever think about your health?
- Do not you pleased that your son wrote for «Mathematical Collection» Academy of Sciences.
- It's really pleasant for me. I as happy as a clam your success. Only my gladness quickly becomes blind when I see your torture.
Time of work and distribution came. Theretofore Evgen didn’t think about his workplace. He has his own theorems and he never leaves them. Evgeniy Yakovich asked Evgen where he wants to work.
- I’m ready to work anywhere.
-Anywhere… But teaching will be time-consuming. You’ll have no time for science. What about graduate school? Did you talk with dean?
- No.
- You should talk with him.
- I don’t want.
- Why?
- When I was the first-year student he wrote reports on me.
- It’s ancient history.
- Maybe. But I have had the opportunity to feel his bad blood.
When dividing Evgen has signed an appointment in Cherkassy small town.
Later Remez and Szymanski tried to talk with the dean but he refused to listen to them. He even resented that such respectable people took up the cudgels for Viktorovskiy. «There are enough scientists in Kyiv, - he claimed – but we have not enough teachers." And it’s already too late to do anything because documents went to the ministry.
Evgen was met in Cherkasy full well. The school director and parents were glad of his arrival. But the most happy were students. They liked young teacher since he had practice-teach at their school. He knows math like no other in Kiev.
Now pupils mention his entering the class at first time, his taking attendance without class register, his playing chess, despite the board. They liked his mathematical circle for young pupils when the whole class stay after classes to solve Evgen’s non-standard tasks.
Evgen could not complain that he doesn’t like teaching. Each lesson became a kind of revelation for him. He always didn’t leave the class without seeing a gloss in student's eyes and desire to know more.
It made him strong also for his science. Being in Cherkasy he proved the fourth theorem of discontinuous fields and sent it to academician Alexandrov. Three months later he found his papers on «Reports of the USSR Academy of Sciences».
It was a great victory! Evgen didn’t expect that his scientific papers can be printed on such short notice. Someone is on waiting for several years but without results and he waited only three months!
He decided to prove a few theorems and generalize the notion of integral curves for discontinuous field of directions but he had not enough time and required books.
Engen get a touching letter from Evgeniy Yakovich in which he congratulate Evgen with his publication, wrote about news in scientific world and strongly urged to enter to graduate school. Evgen Yakovich explained that in graduate school is closer to natural sciences and engineering and engineers will be interested in his theorems sooner or later. Even professors Smohorzhevskyy and Zmorovych do not deny seeing Evgen’s articles in academic journals and invite him to work with them.
"Maybe it will be better for me – thought Evgen. – I’ll have much more time, the library is at hand and the mother will be happy. But don’t they say that he must work for a fixed time?"
But Evgen’s request was ignored as he supposed. Regional authorities consulted with regional for a long time. As a result, they refused him in a period of his exams.
It was summer vacation. Evgen had a lot to do in Kiev. He returned to the previous theorems again after arriving in Cherkassy with new thoughts. They took almost an entire school year. The new work was made but it too large and it needed to be cut.
By hard adventure Evgen was ill with pneumonia. Floodwaters swept away part of a road. He thought just a minute and walked on water because he hurried to school. Later he thought that Vasil Myronovych did so. He stopped deck that could cripple people on the construction of the school. At school nobody noticed that Evgen’s shoes were full of water. When he came home it throws him into a fever.
Khrystyna Ivanivna, his landlady, made him drink all kinds of things, but the fever heat did not cease. He only felt better in about a week. He could get up and even worked a little.
Khrystyna Ivanivna also cheered up.
“Told you so, don’t think I’m old and illiterate,” she was saying when making fire in the stove. “My medicines always help. Here, drink another herb brew, and it’ll all vanish as if by magic. Just stop that writing. Get stronger and then write as much as you will. You look so exhausted. And you are not even married yet. Or aren’t you going to?
“Was it ever too late for that?
“It’s not too late even at thirty. Only you are twenty eight already.”
“I still have time.”
“Sure you have. If you have not met your destiny, there is no need to hurry…”
Another week passed, and Yevgen completely recovered. It only hurt inside as before. However, he has already got used to those pains: it would hurt a while and then cease. It must cease sometime. He made a fair copy of his new work - it took several copybooks – and sent to Moscow.
“Thank heaven” Khrystyna Ivanivna crossed herself. “Now he will have some rest.”
“But Yevgen got to work again each time after coming from school. There was no free space in the room. On the bed, on the bench, even on the floor – everywhere there were sheets full of notes. Only the table remained free, without a single piece of paper.
“And I thought you had already got free…” Khrystyna Ivanivna peeped into the room one day. “And here, good gracious, there is no place to make a step.”
“Please, come in. Come in just like that. I’m going to rewrite that stuff one more time.”
Khrystyna Ivanivna bent down, picked up several sheets, and stepped across the threshold.
“I came to you on business. But you are, probably, busy.”
“Never mind, tell me.”
“Here it is. I thought you would finally get free from that science and help some good people. I have a granddaughter. Perhaps, you remember my Sasha, you used to teach her in the tenth form. She is such a good girl, such a good girl. But she graduated from school and never went to study anywhere. She says ‘I’m afraid to apply because I’ll never pass the math.’ And I’m telling her ‘Why wouldn’t you ask Yevgen Yevgenovych, he will help.’ And she’s telling me, ‘Ah grandma, teachers like Yevgen Yevgenovych don’t waist their time on losers.’ And she’s got so shy, blushed so much, as much as a poppy.”
Yevgen felt his temples buzzing. He felt his heart beating faster and faster. He would not have known what to do if it had not been for the wind blowing into his window and lifting a sheet from his table. He noticed Olexandra, Sasha form the tenth form in the very first lesson. She was slender, had long braids freckled cheeks and such playful blue eyes, which he for some reason compared to splashes of water in the sun. Those splashes would sparkle and the freckles would brighten up with laughter. Afterwards, Yevgen noticed, times and times again, that before beginning his lesson he would need to see those splashes. Nevertheless, he was far from even thinking of anything more than that. He was a teacher and she was a pupil. However, until the Farewell Bell, he gave every lesson for her.
Having mastered himself, Yevgen inquired,
“Where is she going to apply?”
“I guess, to become a teacher. Her parents told so. Though, I haven’t asked this time.”
“Tell her she may come. I’ll feel happier too.”
.
Sasha would not come.
“So, where’s your granddaughter?” Yevgen asked Khrystyna Ivanivna in several days. “Why isn’t she coming?”
“She’s quite stupid yet, Yevgen Yevgenovych. She says, ‘What will the people say…’ What about those people? Some people pay the money to get their children prepared for universities…”
And then Sasha came. Timidly, she knocked on the door, and even more timidly said hello. Yevgen shovelled his papers at once, asked her to sit down.
“Why are you so shy?” he asked. “You used to be different at school.”
“That was at school.”
“You’ll have school here too. A short lesson and problems. You will solve the problems and I will do my stuff. Ok?”
“No, I’ll better go.”
Yevgen noticed that her hands were shaking, that she all was like a stretched string.
“You won’t go anywhere.” He could barely say the words now. “Here’s some paper, here’s a pen, and sit down at the table.”
Sasha obeyed. He wrote two problems for her and tried to go on with his proofs. But it was of no use. He heard her breathing, the pen scratching in her hand, and he could not concentrate. She also saw Yevgen crossing out most of his writing and said,
“I disturb you.”
“Not a bit.”
“Then why are you crossing out everything?”
“Not all the things come out as you’d want.”
“Are you having trouble doing that?”
“I have… Why?”
She put her pen aside, patted her hair and almost whispered,
“Is it true that you have been to Germany, to Nazi camps?”
“It’s true.”
“Were you scared?”
“A lot of things happened.”
“Tell me.”
“A lot of stuff was written about it.”
“No, tell about yourself.”
“Maybe, I’ll tell you sometime.”
“How about today?”
Yevgen spent the whole evening telling his story. How he left Kyiv with his mother and sister before the Nazi came. How, after that, they brought them from Myronivka to Germany in barred waggons. How he worked in a quarry. Most of all things, he spoke about Vasyl Myronovych. Tears came into Sasha’s eyes as Yevgen said he never found his friend. When she was already going to go home, Sasha asked what he was writing and calculating all the time. She has never seen such formulas, not only formulas, even such letters. Yevgen was moved. He felt light, so light at heart. Only his mother asked him what he was doing. With her four classes, she could barely understand the things that bothered her son’s head; still, she asked. And Sasha is interested in it too. “Thank you, my dearest,” he would like to say to her. “I’m so happy it makes a difference to you.” But he never said it. He took a thick book of Academy of Science reports, opened the page where his paper began and, as if ashamed of something, said,
“I’m calculating things like that.”
Sasha turned a page, another page, looked at them for a long time, eventually asked,
“So you are a scientist; why are you in the countryside? Why not in Kyiv?”
“They say, there is a whole lot of scientists in Kyiv all the same, and there is not enough of teachers.” He answered and laughed.
At the end, Sasha did not understand if Yevgen Yevgenovych was joking or telling the truth.
From that day on, she came almost every evening. Khrystyna Ivanivna baked tasty cookies, made tea of dry cherry twigs, treated them and then went to her room across the inner porch. When washing the dishes there, she started singing a song:
Black Sea sailor, mother dear, Black Sea sailor
Walked me out barefooted in the frost,
Walked me out barefooted and kept asking
“Is it frosty here, girl, or not.”*
Her thin and painfully strained voice brought some sadness. But, as soon as the song died away, Sasha started doing her problems and Yevgen – the theorems.
Nearly before the very date of school graduation, Yevgen got a letter from professor Remez. And in another two days there came a letter from Smogorzhevskiy. Both professors insisted on his postgraduate studies. They wrote that that time nobody would hinder him for there would be a permission from the Ministry.
Yevgen let Sasha read the letter. She asked him even more often about himself, about things he was working at, and seemed to live his every move.
* a folk song