Dismissed

Fiction by Zaure Batayeva

When her students refuse to learn Kazakh at school, a young teacher loses her job and is thrown into financial difficulty in this short story by Zaure Batayeva.

My heart leapt to the top of my head. On the announcement board in the entrance hall, the principal of the school, Blizhneva, had hung a piece of paper. Shynar Sagyman is dismissed from her position as teacher of Kazakh and ethnic literature for violating labor regulations. In the middle of May? The eleventh-grade boys behind me were giggling. Why had she made it so public? I was still staring at the board when the secretary approached me, smiling, and said, “Hello, Shynar! The principal would like to see you.”

Blizhneva, big as ever, was sitting at her desk, stubbing her cigarette on an ashtray.

“Have you seen the order?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose I don’t need to explain to you why.”

“No.”

“Good luck, then. But remember: you will not fit in anywhere with such an attitude.”

“Thank you for the kind wishes.”

“Мaria Alekseevna will calculate the rest of your salary. Good-bye.”

further text is available on the link: https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/january-2018-kazakh-writing-dismissed-zaure-batayeva-s-fairweather-vega