Дневник (The day-book)

A flashback brought on what I heard about in my last Russian lesson; my teacher told me that Russian pupils have a дневник (could be translated as "day-book") into which all marks are written by the teacher, and if the pupil behaves badly, that, too, is noted down. The book must be shown to one's parents regularly and is signed both by the class teacher and by them, so pupils have no possibility to hide bad marks from their parents. (Sounds quite effective to me, and there certainly are some pupils over here wh could use this!)

I suddenly realised that the paper I "saw" lying in front of Vadim in this memory was not a newspaper, as I had first thought, but Maksim's day-book. Apparently Vadim had been going through Maksim's day-book, perhaps it was him or Natasha who had to sign it since Maksim's parents were no longer alive. Vadim could see for himself how bad his young brother-in-law's marks had become, but he preferred to hear it from Maksim again, making sure the boy realised and understood that this was a serious matter. It certainly was more painful for Maksim to list all his bad marks - Vadim's method, however, worked and there never was any more trouble at school after that.