The Story of a Teacher Who Proudly Carries This Title,

or How the War Entered Our Suburban School

In those days we lived by the news from the front.

We caught every word, prayed, waited…

And then the war knocked directly on our school doors...

When we were informed about the first graduate Shajid — the Hero who fell for the Motherland — such a silence fell over the school that you could hear a tear drop.

Everyone cried.

The school went numb with grief.

The primary school teacher cried — the one who had taught him to write his first letters.

"Halajan" cried (that is, “dear auntie” in our Azerbaijani way) —
that’s what everyone affectionately calls the kind-hearted cleaner, who has been washing the floors here for twenty years and never scolds the children for running through the corridors.

Even those who usually hold back their tears cried.

But the war gave us no respite.

We hadn’t yet cried out all our tears for the first hero when news came of the second…

Another mourning, again the soul-wrenching cries of mothers.

Then of the third…

By the fourth we were already standing in silence —

our tear glands had almost dried up and stopped obeying us.
The organism simply refused to cry for show.

We cried silently, staring into the emptiness of the corridors where their laughter had rung out just recently.

A heavy, mute pain settled in our chests.

We stared into this emptiness, frozen...

But the one whose heart was torn the most among us was our director.
Gray-haired and hunched over — crying in a way men of his age do not cry.

Swallowing our own silent tears, we tried to comfort him.

He looked up at us with eyes full of pain and said in a trembling voice, almost a whisper, words that still ring in my ears:

“My conscience… is simply choking me… for refusing to give him the opportunity to continue his studies after the ninth grade.

I did not allow it.

I did not honor his request, deciding it was time for him to step into adult, working life, to help his large family financially.

Now I feel an excruciating pain for that decision...

a decision that can no longer be fixed by time or tears.

He did not finish eleven grades, but he passed the most important exam of his life — externally, on the battlefields.

And he became a teacher for all of us… he has already helped Morally his Even Greater Family, his Lineage — his People, his Nation!!!

I refused a boy who later became a Shajid…”

…The school stood firm through those difficult days...

We won.

But within the walls of the school, this silence remained forever: The silence of four empty desks; Of four smiling photographs.

And an eternal lesson of courage, for which our boys paid the highest, most precious price.

…We, however, continue to teach new heroes. We teach them to hold a pen and believe in the future.

📚 Four names rose from their desks to ascend the pedestal of the eternal honor board.
🪦 And we have one conscience — sleepless: so that we remember.

Şəhidlər ölməz, Vətən bölünməz. /Heroes do not die, the Motherland is indivisible/

Alın Ak in co-creation with the KaJe MeG Quartet