The Video

The nursery where I’ll be working for the next two months is attached to a senior school. The headmaster of the joint schools was quite keen for me to help them with a project of theirs. They were taking part in a competition for best teacher, which they’d entered one of their language teachers for. They opted for a video entry, which they were going to shoot in the nursery (while it still had the decorations from the Christmas party up). The headmaster had spared no expense, hiring a professional cameraman, having a script written, and training the youngest children in the nursery to pretend to be cute little mice and carry a cardboard model of a toy from one side of the set to the other (a surprisingly difficult feat). Even as I screeched to a halt by the gates of the nursery in the car of Slava (a guy who works for the school in some mysterious capacity which I still haven’t worked out), I wasn’t exactly sure where I came into all this. All I knew was that I’d been asked to help the school with their teacher of the year entry by one of my colleagues at Interra.

I was greeted by the headmaster, who was wearing a starchy blue suit and looked like he was about to explode with excitement. It has since become clear that this is his permanent look. He bounded over to me and shook my hand firmly, then began speaking at a million miles an hour. His words merged into one unintelligible string of consonants and vowels in the unlikeliest combinations. I wondered at what point I should stop him and say that I had no idea what he was talking about, but he didn’t even take time to breath, just drained his lungs to the very bottom and then spoke in a pained choke on an in-breath. After what must have been five minutes or so, he nodded curtly and somebody thrust a script into my hands. Then he whirled around, leapt over to the set where the film was to be recorded, and threw himself into a big throne. The throne was used by Ded Moroz at the Christmas party, but the headmaster looked very at home in it. I wondered if perhaps he had a throne in his office too.

Looking down at my script, I saw that my role in this video was double: I was acting a student who was acting the Nutcracker. The clincher was, they wanted me to speak in English. Suddenly everything fell into place. I was needed to showcase the extraordinary capabilities of this language teacher. Firstly the headmaster would say a short introduction in the role of narrator, ensconced in his throne, then the language teacher would speak a short excerpt of the Nutcracker in German, and finally, I would appear and sweep everyone off their feet with my impeccable English. I scanned my script and did my best to learn it by heart. It wasn’t easy, but after about half an hour (in which the headmaster had delivered the introduction a couple of hundred times to the weary cameraman), I was ready for my scene. As I walked onto the set, the headmaster stopped me with a look of alarm.

‘Woah woah woah, hold on there! You don’t look anything like a prince!’

I looked down. I was wearing a black hoodie, Puma sweats, and black trainers.

‘Uh, I guess I don’t. Am I meant to?’

‘Of course! You’re playing the prince! This won’t do. We’ll have to film it another time. How does Sunday morning work for everyone? Say, 7am? I protested in the strongest way I knew how: by making a pained expression and saying ‘I guess I can make it’. The headmaster read my expression and said ‘oh all right then, 8. And Slava will pick you up.’ Then he asked ‘and how about tomorrow? Are you free before work tomorrow morning? Let’s go and buy you a costume fit for a prince!’ Again, I was free, and was too English to object.

Slava called me early on Saturday morning. He was already waiting outside my house. He drove me across the Yenisei and back to the school at a speed that I didn’t think possible for a bashed-up car which was twice my age. When the traffic got thick, he drove between the outside lane and the oncoming cars, swerving past the odd bus with a maniacal chuckle. We got to the school in no time at all, and I followed Slava through the narrow (empty) corridors and into the part of the school where all the offices are. The building gradually got warmer as we approached this end of the school, until eventually we saw a flight of stairs down to a basement, which steam was billowing out of inexplicably. Well, not entirely inexplicably. The headmaster, who was dressed in a vest with a heavy silver chain around his neck, like a cross between a mayor and a gangster, tried to explain why there was steam pouring out of his school’s basement, but all I heard was ‘nuuuuupochemu-toyestparkotoriypodniymaetsyaizpodvala LOL!’ Then he cheerily added ‘it’s not too bad, kind of like our own personal sauna’.

So the headmaster, Slava, a woman who appeared to be Slava’s girlfriend, and I all piled into Slava’s little car and shot towards a big clothes shop. A very big clothes shop. A huge hangar full of racks and racks of clothes. We scoured the hall and picked out three suits which looked vaguely royal. Then I tried them all on. The trouser waists were twice as big as my waist. I looked scarily like a clown. So we tried a size down. Still too big by far. This was the smallest size they had in the vast hall. So Slava drove us to another shop. This one wasn’t open that early in the morning, so we all had milkshakes and coffees in the cafe, and then went back. Still, none of the clothes were small enough for my supermodel waist. So we went to a third shop. Slava said that, if this didn’t have anything which fitted me, we were going to Kids’ World and that was that. So I was grateful that we did at last find a shop which had things in roughly the right sizes. The head picked out a shiny bright red shirt with a collar for me, followed by some heavy grey trousers which looked positively middle-aged. Then he and Slava argued over which grey jacket was better. Neither of their choices matched the trousers, but that seemed to be a secondary concern. Finally, after I’d been made to try on about ten different combinations of clothes, we headed to the till. Then the headmaster decided that I needed smart black shoes and tinsel around my neck in order to really look like a prince. He took me to the shoe shop next door and grabbed a few pairs of shoes in roughly my size. Then we all bundled back into the car and sped off again.

The next morning started even earlier, and the river Yenisei was steaming with all its might in the morning light as Slava rocketed across the bridge. Luckily I remembered all the words from my script, The final nasty surprise was when the head urged me and the teacher to do a waltz together onstage at the end of the film. I know roughly how to waltz. She decidedly doesn’t. We tripped each other up a few times, but the cameraman was so exhausted by this point that he didn’t even care, and we stumbled around like idiots while music from The Nutcracker played elegantly in the background. After a firm handshake from the headmaster, everyone dissipated, and I was left alone in a big dark school hall. If they win the competition off the back of that I’ll be amazed. I was so tired I could hardly keep my eyes open.

On the drive back to work in the centre, Slava took me across the Island of Rest. We got out the car by the bank of the river and walked until there was so much freezing condensed river water in the air that you can't see your hand in front of your face, and even though you’re surrounded on all sides by towering Soviet-era houses, you could be in the middle of nowhere for all you know.