The Teacher Read online

  They helped her reach the toilet in the single small cubicle at the end of the barrack, a door separating it from the rest of the large hall; ushered her into the line of women standing there impatiently day and night; saved or traded pieces of toilet paper or rags for her. “Elsa,” she said to her one evening with the twinkle of someone about to share a secret, “I always knew you were a tenderhearted child.” She said this right before they had to finish dinner and prepare for bed. “I’m not tired at all,” she would announce at this hour, like a child complaining about lights-out at summer camp. The darkness they were sentenced to every night at ten brought her back to reality. When she fell into hysterical fits, in which she mumbled meaningless sentences that grew shorter and shorter and tightened around her neck, the two stood on either side of her, hovering over her back and leaning their entire weight against it to alleviate the tension that had built up in her body, until she stopped trembling.

  23

  In my dreams, Weiss was closer to me than ever. In the first dream she taught the children of Bergen-Belsen French and English. She entered with a bright smile, closed the door behind her to keep out the belligerent wind, and greeted them. There were six of them, and she divided her attention equally, as if tearing a challah at the Shabbat table. They were utterly devoted to her, seeking her presence even after class. She let them cling to her, brushed a hand through their hair, examined their fingernails, asked if there were holes in their socks, if the soles of their shoes were still intact—they knew she was willing to trade her own bread to help them and their parents find solutions. She picked up a shoe for demonstration, lifting it high and breaking into song: “One kilometer on foot wears out the sole,” and the children joined in, forming a choir under her conductorship and gradually diverging into polyphony, “un ki ki ki un ki lo lo, un kilometre.” She seemed so resourceful, as if seeking ways to sidestep reality, to relish her teaching, to invent a “mnémotechnique,” as she stressed before them, to maintain a clear and coherent presence so they would continue to believe the world was a place worthy of living in, that one day it would be possible to return to it, that one day, they surely would.

  She harnessed all the knowledge in her possession, and most likely the knowledge she had never imagined she possessed, in order to create a world for them predicated on the words they learned to say together. “The tongue can speak words that bring life or death,” she told them. “You believe that?” one of the children asked her. “Yes, certainly. For instance, when war or peace is declared, when vows are taken, or when promises are made to bring people from one end of the world to another. In each of these examples, you can say that words sustain or destroy.” “And when you’re just chatting?” She laughed in response, started to act out metaphors, spreading her arms, and gathered them under her wings in Hungarian, English, and French. I recognized the Hungarian, even though I cannot recognize it when I’m awake. In the dream I knew that while awake I heard nothing but her silence.

  She taught language in its deepest sense, making accessible things that weren’t within reach. One of the children asked if she was referring to the story they learned in Torah class about the descendants of Shem who told each other: “Let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name,” because they merely said it and the city was built. The bespectacled girl said that because they wanted to ordain a single language in the Tower of Babel, God had been punishing us all ever since. “You think all this is God’s punishment?” “My parents say it’s punishment for a Godless world.”

  She encouraged them to memorize with her the fundamental forms of language, the rules, the genders, the verb conjugations. They were everywhere but Bergen-Belsen. Any ounce of information etched in her memory from the grand edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, whose twenty-nine volumes proudly shared space on three separate shelves in her parents’ guest room, served her to compile a glossary, which allowed the children to stroll through produce stands in markets, to plan elaborate feasts, sail and fish, go picnicking outdoors, to compose and solve crossword puzzles about sweets. On a full stomach they practiced dry swimming, standing before her in a horizontal line and mimicking the front crawl, the butterfly and breast stroke she had demonstrated. They galloped like knights, sang humorous songs around the campfire, got down on their knees and followed seven-year-old Hannah, who had been spending most of her time since arriving at the camp on all fours, glancing at them behind a stool, and replied to her angry barking with a mélange of animal languages, every animal they could think of, mammals and predators, like in Noah’s Ark, as if they were indeed the species God had chosen to protect from extinction, and would be set free once the flood receded.

  24

  At first glance, one could fail to notice the beauty of Clara’s face; the pensive blue eyes, the soft features framed by full lips painted a dark red, that along with her pinched, freckled nose, created the impression of an alluring sensuality and mischievous innocence. The lively and bold expression, punctuated with short, straight black hair that she had cut herself since high school, was now fortified by a wide body, which thickened over time and made her seemingly invulnerable. “Clara is always asking about you,” Mother would say in a tone alternating between reprimand and enticement whenever they returned from a visit to the Adlers, to see whether she could reignite her daughter’s feelings for her old friend, to whom she had stopped talking around the age of fourteen. In return, Elsa would inquire after Clara’s well-being and with that end the conversation. She no longer joined the joint family trips. She retreated into her own world and Clara into hers, graduating high school and proceeding to study painting at the arts academy, and rarely did their paths cross—barring that awkward conversation when they bumped into each other on the street upon Elsa’s return from Paris, a conversation that arose most likely because Elsa felt an instant intimacy toward her, the kind that can only be felt, rightfully or not, toward a childhood friend, and which was accompanied by the urgent need to unburden herself to someone and share the heartache she carried inside her over the American with whom she had fallen in love the very first moment she heard his voice one morning, when he was speaking to the chambermaid in the corridor of the boardinghouse, a voice sweeter than any she had ever heard before, which beckoned her to seek its owner, Christopher Roseo, a literature student who was writing a thesis on Stendhal, and with whom she spent nearly every waking hour until his return to Berlin. He sang opera arias from heart, she told Clara with twinkling eyes, and he teased her about her impending wedding, but it was over and done with months ago, she had lost contact with him, there was no point in continuing it, they would have never made it anyway, and actually, she stressed, nothing really happened between them, a platonic love she had let perish. Clara mumbled something about the everlasting flame of stolen loves and then said, “Why the hell are you doing it, Elsa?” and she replied something along the lines of, “Because Mother expects me to,” and Clara said, “Then you’re stupid.” Elsa couldn’t remember what thoughts had crossed her mind that moment, she was probably embarrassed, because she knew Clara was right, that it was a type of stupidity, and at any rate certainly not a good enough reason to do anything, but who better than Clara knew the driving influence their mothers had on their lives, she had no right to judge her, and yet still felt that Clara was truly surprised, even disappointed by her, as if she expected something else of her and didn’t think her capable of being so cowardly and characterless. “You’re stupid.” Not stupid at school or in her accomplishments, but afflicted by a different kind of stupidity, one that pertained to her ability to understand herself, to define her boundaries first and foremost to herself, and consequently to others, what was good and what was bad for her. And several weeks later Clara attended the wedding, and Elsa felt as though Clara’s expression read somewhere between an apology and regret at having been perhaps too cruel or decisive, and who was she to intervene in her affairs anyway, but they never spoke o
f it, and who knows, maybe by now Clara had forgotten all about it, whereas only Elsa remained with that tired, morose, and bitter taste of defeat she had suffered at her own hand.

  Three weeks later, Clara began to feel ill. Her bowels, which had always been weak and prone to irritability, couldn’t endure the change; her temperature spiked, accompanied by unrelenting stomach pains and headaches that exhausted her. Elsa made sure she would not have to go outside for morning roll calls and instead could be counted, like her mother, inside the barrack. Clara refused to lie in the infirmary, and waited for Elsa to be done with roll call and the lessons she taught, about two hours each day, after consenting to the request of the internal leadership to teach beginner’s English and French, so they could talk, they had to talk about the past, which elucidated at least what they had been, the lives they had lived, as well as what they had failed at, and what had not yet come to pass and existed only in the realm of expectation. Now she and Clara had become dependent on each other again, recreating against the background of wooden barracks and windowless stone buildings the ability they had shared as children to stage extreme scenes, although this time they did not have the luxury to stop playing when they became tired. They remembered how they loved to shut away in their rooms while their mothers chatted in the kitchen, how they stuck their fingers in their underwear and then licked them ecstatically. They recalled how they tried to lie on top of each other and coordinate their body movements, Elsa’s mouth clumsily fumbling toward Clara’s, but their heads bumped and their shoulders collided. “We were in complete disharmony.” “Yes, and we did our best to keep from bursting into laughter.” Little Elsa once hid her shoes in someone’s backyard so she could come home and say they had disappeared. “Did they vanish into thin air?” her mother asked her. “I lost them,” she lied through her teeth. And eventually she received new shoes. But even as a teenager, when she strayed from the magical logic of the lost and found, the lost and fabricated, and was faced with irrecoverable loss, it carried the promise of growth. The loss helped her mature, or at least that’s what she had believed. Now, as they both stood before a loss for which there was no compensation, they remembered every last detail of the games, books, people, lullabies, as if reverting back into the nothingness from which it seemed everything might begin anew.

  They also spoke about her and Eric. She knew they were going to get divorced. He was in a good mood. He slept in the youth movement barrack and could have snuck into her bunk at night as the other couples did, but they had stopped sleeping together long ago, and there was no point in pretending.

  The days preceding Clara’s death were almost completely erased from Elsa’s memory. Clara’s condition had deteriorated and she could no longer stay in the barrack. She was admitted to the infirmary and placed on a middle bunk, below a young girl ill with dysentery and above a young man who lay unconscious with typhus. The doctor’s mother, Mrs. Shtark, who tended to the patients, concocted a sauerkraut brine to ease her pain. Elsa tried spoon-feeding her. “It reminds me of the chocolate milk you once made me,” Clara said, and with tears added that she knew she wasn’t going to make it. On the morning of August 8th, Elsa warmed her hands against her cup of coffee, murky and grainy as always, and hummed to herself a tune she liked, until the melodic line was abruptly interrupted by Mrs. Adler’s scream.

  Elsa stayed in the camp for ten more days. On August18th, five weeks after they first arrived at the camp, she learned she was being released. She was finishing up a class and one of the leaders, she couldn’t remember who, came and told her she was on the short list of those being released now; the others would be released later on, they didn’t know yet when, and she must get ready at once and gather her belongings because they had to reach the train by foot. Others provided more details: she was among the three hundred eighteen people being transferred to a refugee camp in Switzerland, at Caux, Zionists and religious Jews and seculars like her, who had no distinct affiliation. Most of the group was comprised of children and the elderly. There was no time for explanations—how the list was compiled or if there was any logic to it. One way or another, she was unworthy in every respect, and although she knew something about the surprisingly powerful forces that erupted from within her at that time, just like the anxiety she had developed in the seemingly steady and affluent world she came from, she didn’t think this prize was awarded to her for exemplary behavior. She felt as though an anonymous force, something as arbitrary as the toss of a coin, a creature that probably wasn’t even human, was sparing her. She ran to the youth movement barracks to talk to Eric, cried and told him she wanted to stay. “Are you mad? Don’t you dare even consider it. The rest of us will follow later, it’s a matter of a few weeks.” “How can you say that with such confidence? Up until now everything has gone wrong.” “You can’t say no. It would be insanity.” She knew he was right. “But it’ll be winter soon,” she said worriedly. “I expect we’ll come much sooner. Take what you’re offered, think of yourself, think of the advice you’d give someone else, the only advice worth giving, never turn down what you’re given.” She soberly knew that her good fortune was her bad fortune, a miracle that tightened around her neck like a noose. She should have been stronger, not let him persuade her. Some weakness had come over her, a weakness she never compensated for. Someone wanted her to be saved, or perhaps to suffer even more; she knew with complete clarity that the survivor is doomed to suffer. She returned to her barrack. Mrs. Adler was sprawled across her bunk. Elsa rushed to her and sobbed bitterly, refusing to calm down. They sat in a long embrace. “Get up and go, my child,” Mrs. Adler told her softly. “We’ll meet again.” Elsa collected her few belongings and joined the convoy awaiting her outside. No one said a word to her. She considered whether to say goodbye to her pupils, but her nerves failed her, and she left without looking back. Some stood and watched her walk away until she became a tiny dot and disappeared.

  Their convoy marched for hours until they reached the civilized passenger train that awaited them. They were on their way to The World of Yesterday. Those left behind at the camp ended up forced to wait many more months, until December 2nd, before they joined the others in Switzerland. By then their living conditions had worsened. Three more people died. From August 18th to December 2nd, six babies were born. Seventeen prisoners were transferred to other blocks in the camp and were never released.

  Now Elsa Weiss was the privileged among the privileged.

  25

  She found herself in a sanatorium of the kind Grandma Rosa used to patronize after becoming a widow, the kind of place that depressed her mother because of the Jewish women who went to such health resorts to take in the air after the death of their husbands, spending days on end playing card games, choosing routes for short walks in order to feel they were in motion, and eating pastries—her mother’s greatest fear was “becoming like them,” or “ending up like them.” The spacious hotel rooms had been converted into a displaced-persons camp, but since the passengers weren’t many, she received a room of her own in which she could finally be alone. Few people strolled outside, many chose to hole up in their rooms like her. There was little traffic on the roads during the day, mostly private cars that cleared the way for trucks loaded with more refugees. For the first few days she preferred bolting the window of her room and withdrawing into her silence, even though the silence weighed heavily on her and she feared she would lose track of time completely. The bell of the white Lutheran church, commanding the distant mountainside with noble, reserved elegance, gave the signal for daybreak. She opened her eyes to the rivers of light that penetrated the dark green curtain, but remained in bed for a long period without being able to coax her body up, her eyes wandering across the white ceiling to come to rest on a tiny speck on the wall lamp. The pristine sheets pulled tight across the bed, the soft, fluffy blanket that lay on her body like a healing poultice, the water that poured from the taps in abundance, the clean towels that hung across the bath railing in i
mpeccable symmetry, all invited her to relax her muscles. The clear mountain air that refreshed the bed sheets gradually expelled that smell from her nose. It was all real, she told herself. They were straight facts, she knew those facts, she did not even have to commit them to memory, and that somehow reassured her, to know exactly what happened, what they call historical truth, plain and simple, a truth you could either surrender to or rise up against, but not alter. How long had it been since she was home, she had no home, would she ever have a home? She had an existence; of that she was certain. She had a body that enabled her to move. She was subjected to conflicting powers, but never really bothered to examine what she was feeling. She didn’t need to touch herself to discover that it was her, that she, Elsa Weiss, the daughter of Shmuel and Leah Bloom, was alive. But who was that person who was still alive? What was still alive inside her?

  At night she moaned and groaned, now that she could let go, without a single soul around; she woke with a start, her throat full of phlegm, aching from shouting, and sank back into a troubled sleep from which she woke late, heavy and ragged from dreams. She stepped outside briefly, and overcome with exhaustion rushed back to her room to sleep. Twice a week a chambermaid appeared with a mop and rags, swiftly dusting the table and cabinets, wiping the window, vacuuming the carpet, scrubbing the bathroom, and changing her sheets in utter silence, with a solicitous look tinged with both terror and compassion. The impersonal service, its tenacious and neat rhythm, prompted her to recover, as someone subjected to a hidden struggle between destruction and rehabilitation; but rather than having a moderating effect, this struggle widened the gap between her and the world. There was something both difficult and insipid in the splendor around her. The harmonious straight lines, the water gurgling in every direction, the jingle of bells on the sturdy cows, were all procured effortlessly, as if apathetic. She didn’t need them. She refused to admire her surroundings with the ungratefulness of a refugee rebuffing the abundance that exists for its own sake, an untimely abundance whose sheer fullness defied her. She refused to take in the normal landscape, to rush at the spread on the dining room table—eggs, turnips, margarine, rye bread, and end-of-summer fruits, riches she had long ago put behind her. She felt neither hunger nor thirst, and drank and ate as if forced. Waiters fussed over her, offering coffee and tea as if she was a regular guest, as if she was a returning guest to the sanatorium, and now she was required to truly recover from something, but she knew she would never be able to recover from this. She would not let herself readjust to things of beauty, to the luxurious town wrapped like a box of chocolates, a clouded paradise lying wide open, neither trampled on nor disfigured by their presence. At times it seemed this prim and processed nature was overpowering and defeating them. They were the survivors of a collapsed civilization and it hosted them, not with a warm welcome, but cautiously, suspiciously, as still as a postcard. Stiff representatives of welfare and relief agencies—who projected discontent over the fact that their guests were not the usual bourgeois but rather the desolate Europeans, terrifying figures they had to serve for nothing in return—waited to reequip them for life, to allow them to put on new strength as if changing costumes in a backstage dressing room, before returning to the front stage of history. She saw the recoiling and frightened faces of the locals who were robbed of their blessed equanimity, and the awestruck faces of the refugees as they witnessed the dogged persistence of world order, even if now it seemed more absurd than ever, as they reflected on what had once upon a time been a comforting respite among the mountains and limpid, undisturbed lakes, and was now a life in limbo, suspended and facing the unknown.