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Innocent Victims.
“One day someone broke into the Principal’s office and stole all the class records and report cards.
A general meeting was called. For six hours the principal argued, pleaded, and threatened
in the hope of discovering the name of the culprit. But no one confessed.
Finally, enraged, he pointed a plump, accusing finger at me. “It was you.”
I got up and said he was mistaken.
“You! It was you! You did it!” the principal shouted.
I realised it would be useless for me to argue.
The next day I was expelled.
Seven years later, when I was beginning to be known as a poet, I found out the truth – at a class reunion dinner I attended. It was natural to suspect me because my work was so bad that I’d got an F in German on the very day of the theft.
But at this reunion a young man came up to me, who had been one of the few all-round brilliant students at our school and had always had top grades in every subject.
With an embarrassed smile he said to me: “You know, it was I who stole the class records.” It turned out that he had been resentful at getting slightly less than a top grade that day.
It occurred to me with some bitterness that this was typical of life. How often are crimes committed by those who are models of propriety?
No one dreams of suspecting them and the blame is taken by those, usually innocent, who stay at the bottom of the class and have the reputation for being hoodlums”.
– Yevgeny Yevtushenko,
A Precocious Autobiography.
