The Teacher Read online

  11

  Nevertheless, she qualified to teach French.

  “Do you know that in Paris they drink coffee from bowls, not mugs, and they dunk the croissant in it?” she said, accompanying her words with modest, somewhat sensual hand gestures. That was all she ever said about pre-war Paris, where she arrived by train from Budapest in order to study French. From her year-long stay at the Ladagnous boarding house on rue d’Assas, abutting Luxembourg Gardens, from everything she saw and learned there, from all the people she met, she cherished this insignificant image, a piece of the past that did not connect to a thing, and yet she felt it could be shared and experienced, this ritual dipping of bread, this freedom to taste. Paris was encapsulated in this moment that stood out in its triviality, its leisure, because it conveyed nothing but itself, because it did not betray the period in which—apart from the momentary aggravation inflicted by the mustached, surly housemother who opened the boarding house gate to her with quiet imprecations, scolded her, “You’re late,” and waved her and her heavy suitcase up the five steep flights of stairs—she was truly happy. She was twenty years old, the same age her mother had been in the photo she placed on the desk, a photo taken on a rare occasion during which her mother was not hiding behind her thick glasses, her dark eyes piercing the camera lens. Beside her she placed a photo of her father and Jan, taken a few weeks before Jan left for Palestine. She preferred to keep Eric’s photo in her purse. Since she was so efficient and calculated with her words, they sounded more like an interval that signaled an area that was off limits, a space where only in hindsight could you notice its utopian “before” quality, a moment equivalent to dipping something sweet in hot liquid, an otherworldly life, a life that told us that she, the teacher, lived a Madeleine cookie, whose virtue does not necessarily belong to early childhood but to the egress from childhood, a virtue that carries a promise, that offers an outlet of foreignness.

  12

  “Ver hot aza meydele / A malekhl a sheyns? Oygn vi tsvey shterndlekh / A neshomele a reyns.” Father hums Herman Yablokoff’s song, which he heard from a colleague at school, while shuffling the cards with dazzling speed. He fans out four jacks, a heart and a club, a diamond and a spade, and places the king on top—their father. “Once upon a time there were four princes,” he begins. “They grew up with their father the king alone in the palace. One day the king was summoned to war. He convened his sons in the parlor and announced: ‘My sons! My sons! I was called to the battlefield. I do not know when I shall return. I trust you to safeguard the wings of our palace from all harm.’” She stands on tiptoe, watching him suspiciously: “One son,” he says while waving the jack of hearts before her eyes, “will guard the wine cellar. This way,” and he flips the card and quickly inserts it into the deck slightly above the bottom. “The second son will guard the treasure chamber.” He takes the jack of clubs, flips and sticks it in a bit higher up the deck. “The third son will guard the fort.” Now the jack of diamonds disappears into the realm of the task assigned to him. “And the fourth son will guard the king’s stables.” The deck swallows the youngest son too, the jack of spades. “Many moons go by,” Father continues, “until the king returns home with a victor’s glory. Upon his return he exclaims: ‘My sons! My sons!’” Now she must follow his movements closely. “And the four princes came sliding down the chimney.” Father confidently dangles jack after jack from the top of the deck. Her eyes nearly pop out of her head. “But Father,” she says, “how do you do it?!” She picks up the deck and considers it at length. She flips through the cards with her strong fingers in an attempt to find more hidden layers. “Not with force,” he says, smiling. “Force will not help you here.” “Like this?” she asks, and gently stirs the cards. He nods. She looks at him skeptically and shrugs. The magic is over. He promises that in a year he will teach her several ancient Georgian spells he learned from Rabbi Deutsch. “Why not now?” she protests. Years later she remembered how he fulfilled his promise and taught her, that following year, how to perform the trick she liked the most, the mind reader, Nauka-Mnogo-Umeet-Gitik, which she learned by heart—Father had told her to destroy all written evidence—and how, when she tried the trick on Eric one day, he immediately sat down to work out the arithmetic behind it. But who even wants to decipher magic, she thought.

  They invited the Adlers over for afternoon tea, to celebrate her sixth birthday with the family. Clara, their young daughter, goes to school with her. Elsa is almost twice her width and height. Clara’s parents do not allow them to horse around outside because they say, so Clara has told her, that Elsa is “a menace, a troublemaker, a little hooligan.” Mrs. Adler, who heard from Mrs. Bloom, Elsa’s mother, that Elsa had been expelled from kindergarten after untying the shoelaces of all the children, said she “wasn’t the least bit surprised.” Elsa was just passing through the living room. Mrs. Adler looked at her and repeated: “I’m not the least bit surprised.” It wasn’t exactly the birthday she had been hoping for. Clara announces to her on the doorstep: “My mother told me to bring your gift to school tomorrow. She said I don’t need to bring two gifts.” Elsa doesn’t understand why, if you’re invited to two separate celebrations, you don’t need to bring two gifts, but she’ll ask Jan what he thinks later. Jan has “observations” about people, and always has smart things to say about Mr. and Mrs. Adler.

  “Ver hot aza meydele,” she sings cheerfully, dispelling the gloom that had befallen her, and pulls Clara toward the kitchen to eat candy. “You want me to make you chocolate milk?” she offers. “You know how to make chocolate milk?” Clara asks, looking at her with admiration. “Sure, of course, I made it tons of times.” It is a test, and she’s certain she remembers all the stages. She places two glasses on the counter, puts a teaspoon of cocoa powder and two teaspoons of sugar in each glass, holds them under the faucet for water and adds milk from the jug in the pantry. She stirs vigorously for a long time. The mixture refuses to dissolve and looks lumpy and strange. She hands Clara a glass. “Drink,” she says. Clara grimaces. “Yuck, you’re disgusting.” “Maybe we should try again?” she suggests, and before Clara responds, she repeats all the stages anew. Why can’t she get it right? She’s already six.

  Mr. Adler says they look bored and proposes a riddle. Elsa hates Mr. Adler’s riddles, which only his daughter can solve. Jan tells Elsa that her own solutions simply aren’t economical, and that they attest to a “deficit in mathematical thinking.” Where it is possible to encumber, she encumbers, to prolong, she prolongs, to complicate, she complicates. The whole idea, he tells her, is to find the shortcut. She knows she falls for every trap, and this time, on her birthday, she doesn’t feel like falling. Last year her parents invited Ms. Kárpáti, a witch who became renowned in the Jewish community of Kolozsvár for the tales she spun, a real Jewish Scheherazade, acclaimed also for her riddles. To the circle of girls that formed around her, Ms. Kárpáti told a riddle about an eight-year-old boy who, according to her, was a bookworm. Day and night he devoured books until he became pale and weak. His worried parents tried to limit his reading hours so that he would get enough sleep, but the child tried to trick them. Hearing his parents’ footsteps outside his room at nine-thirty, half an hour after lights-out, he hid the book underneath his pillow, turned off the lamp beside his bed and feigned sleep. Now, Ms. Kárpáti shrilled, how did the parents know, upon approaching the child’s bed, that he was not really sleeping but merely pretending? Indeed, how could they know? Elsa asked herself with wonder. “Oh. Piece of cake,” the freckled, yellow-haired Eva replied. “The lamp was hot.” “Correct,” Ms. Kárpáti confirmed and presented Eva with a prize, a homemade chocolate pomegranate she always carried with her in a basket when performing. The simpler the answer—the more it required straightforward logic and the power of deduction—the further it eluded Elsa, her mind a jumble of loose thoughts. What else could she do but memorize the words? “The lamp was hot.” The lamp was probably the main suspect and all her nightly activities
ought to be carried out in the darkness. In the dark she seats her favorite teddy bear and tells him about her day. In the dark she whispers her wishes into the pillow. In the dark she dreams dreams. Sometimes, when she’s sick, Jan hides candy for her under her mattress, in the dark. Jan also knows he must get her away from the Adlers. He promised to whistle the family whistle from the top of the street to let her know that the youth group meeting was over, and that today he was not going to allow anyone to embarrass her.

  In the meantime she finds refuge in Father’s song and the magic trick from last night. “Liber got, ikh bet bay dir,” she hums. The previous evening, when he tucked her in and wished her a happy birthday, her lips brushed against his face and inadvertently touched his lips. He is the handsomest of all fathers. She has absolute confidence in that. “You’re always bragging about your family,” Clara often teases her. “You never stop talking about them. You go on and on, my father and my brother, my father and my mother.” She wonders whether she indeed talks about them more than other children. If, heaven forbid, someone said anything bad about Jan, she could kill them. And then it happens. “What I feared has come to pass,” as Father says. “I heard Jan got kicked out of school,” Clara says. She feels as if the rug has been pulled out from under her feet. “Kicked out? Where did you hear such nonsense?” “I heard it at home,” Clara says and offers no more. Elsa takes a deep breath. “He’s a counselor for the Zionist youth group, and the school principal, Doctor Dankner, doesn’t like it. He says it’s a bad influence on the students.” “That’s exactly what I heard, a bad influence,” Clara enthuses. “Clara, do you even know what you’re talking about?” Her eyes are welling up. “He’s a straight-A student,” she immediately adds. “That has nothing to do with it,” Clara replies. The conversation is suffocating her. At home they have heated arguments about it. Father, who runs the Neolog elementary school in Kolozsvár, lost his temper when he first heard. Jan replied harshly that if he is not “backed” at home then maybe he really should rush to follow his “calling.” These words are a riddle, but she can toss them at Clara with ease: “He has backing and a calling,” she sums it up. Clara stares at her at length without saying a word. If Elsa really wants to be nasty, she has a trump card, but she’s saving it for a time of need; “only when the situation is no longer bearable,” Jan had cautioned her. She knows from Jan that Clara’s sister is a “complete idiot” and perhaps even repeated a grade. But that’s nothing—they say her father is involved in the black market. She heard her parents talking about it at home. What’s the black market? It’s serious trouble. But Father is his friend. So perhaps it is best to leave it alone. And in any case, one shouldn’t be quick to offend people. It’s a shame her mood was ruined. If Clara says one more word, she’ll fight her. Clara isn’t as strong as her, but she has long fingernails that can gouge her skin. Elsa fixes her light eyes on her. She thinks Clara is a very pretty girl. “Truce,” she suggests. Clara accepts happily. And then the sound of the whistle cuts through the air. Elsa almost bursts into laughter. She runs out of the apartment, her legs carrying her as if on their own accord, galloping toward her “cavalier,” like Grandma Rosa says.

  13

  Odd how it all suddenly came flooding back, on her way home to Tel Aviv from Bat Yam. More than fifty years had gone by, and she never remembered exactly what had happened. She recalled a certain exertion in her hands, her arms, recalled that she was doing something strange. No, it only turned out to be strange later, at the time it had simply happened. The ill-at-ease feeling awakened in her only decades later, after denying the entire story, after believing that she had forgotten and that she had nothing left, that everything had been destroyed in the great fire that consumed the apartment in Tel Aviv, that the fire had swallowed the books, the photographs, the letters, that she had no image left to hold onto, after she tried to extract images from within and—nothing, ashes upon ashes, only then had she invoked that image from the abyss. It was night time and her parents were out, probably visiting the Adlers. Perhaps they had taken Grandma Rosa with them. Jan was away at summer camp for a few days and let her sleep in his bed. She was frightened, something had woken her from her sleep, maybe she had heard noises outside and had gotten up, drowsy, to see what was going on, if the door was indeed locked, and on her way back to bed mistook the bathtub for the toilet. She sat down on the slippery rim, gripping it, but sensing the absence of the backrest and that she might easily slide and collapse into the concave bathtub, she pressed her hands against the opposite wall with all her might, pushed her body up, rushed back to bed, and sank into a deep sleep. She remembered that in those days the boys had let her into their secret club, after she had successfully passed several clandestine tasks she had not told a soul about, not even Jan, who was her confidant, and even got to participate in a meeting on the roof of Janusz’s house by the school, in which they embarked on a pursuit of MWTBC, the encrypted name of the man-with-the-black-cape who chased them around town. Short Albert said in his determined baritone that the man was plotting to kill them, and they had to outrun him. The gravity of the mission had scared her, and she leaned back on a pile of bricks that was placed in front of their headquarters to settle her racing heart. “Are you crazy?” Albert roared. “You’re leaving fingerprints. We’ll all be found out because of you.” She quickly shoved her hands deep into her pockets. Albert’s instincts and swift reaction troubled her. While she contemplated what to do, Jóska, Albert’s right hand man, brought down his fist on her. She swore to the boys she would not rat on them, that they could trust her completely, and when she returned home with her left eye ringed in crimson, she adamantly refused to tell the truth, and said she was playing with a ball and stumbled into the goalpost. Was she afraid she would talk about it and betray them in her sleep? Was it that fear that woke her up? Or perhaps it was the tension that prevailed in the house over Jan’s imminent departure and the realization that they would not see each other for a long time, even though they had stopped talking about it, maybe because they understood there was no way to talk about it, because it was impossible to grasp or plan, it deviated from the time units familiar to her, and so it seemed to her parents as well; but the impending trip already cleaved the air, and Father and Jan, like old warhorses, had put down their weapons. Father tried to listen attentively to the plans of the young pioneers, as he called them, regarding Palestine, and outside the house he even spoke with pride about his son’s independence and determination, “a stand-up boy,” he said about him behind his back. For some reason it was not enough to alleviate her concerns, because the mere conflict was more than she could bear; it was a fact, Jan was leaving, which meant that someone couldn’t live with someone, someone had to give up and go away, there were things, she understood, that could not coexist and there could be no compromise between them. Jan explained to her that Mother and Father could not live with his truth, and he, for his part, could not live with theirs. “Parents always identify with authority, because it upholds their authority and because they mistakenly believe that we, the children, need authority, that without it we cannot grow.” “You’re an authority to me,” she said to him. “You’re right,” he replied with a smile, “but one day, I hope, you will rebel against me.” Was she really capable of rebelling? She wondered. She often heard Father tell Mother that he was skeptical about the whole Zionist thing. He would not get up and leave everything they had here for any “spiritual” fortune—not to mention “material” fortune. “What do you have here?” Jan asked derisively. He did not believe that the atmosphere of anti-Semitism and terror that prevailed around them was worthy of the name “home.” Elsa had no doubt that for her and her parents it was home. It was difficult to understand how you could leave it, and for such a faraway place. “What if you regret it?” she asked him. “When you grow up, you’ll join me,” he promised her. “You certainly can’t stay here for long.”

  The following morning she discovered she had relieved herself i
n the bathtub. Father was hunched over the cramped bathroom sink, letting it fill with water while Mother stood behind him and relayed the awful, terrible story. “The smell when we came back from the Adlers,” she said. “And what was it? You can’t imagine, like a horse’s.” And she waved her hand in a snake-like motion as if painting how it looked, a gesture that conveyed both wonderment and disgust. “I swear it wasn’t me,” Elsa said, defeated, but there was no sign that someone had broken into their apartment. “Admit it, at least admit it was you.” “Why? It wasn’t me!” Mother sighed heavily and started scrubbing the bathtub again, having already cleaned it the night before, and then proceeded to dust and sweep every room. Father let the “Minister of Interior,” as he called her, supervise all household matters. Apart from birthdays, those rare occasions during which she was allowed to invite a group of children, she was permitted to host only one friend at a time, and invite her to stay for dinner, provided they reported to the sink immediately upon finishing their meal, their hands raised in a gesture of salutation or submission, so as not to smear oil on the chairs or soil the walls and thus sabotage the immaculate cleanliness which Mother had accomplished through constant housework that calmed her. She remembered her tantrums over Jan’s “vulgar” posters, which he had the nerve to hang in “her house.” Jan fought back. He said that his room was his castle and that she had no right to meddle in whatever happened inside it. “You can never achieve perfection,” he teased her. “To stop making a mess is to stop living.” He groused to Elsa that sometimes it seemed to him that Mother’s obsessive cleaning was her statement against life, that she was picking a fight with it to loosen its grip on her. But what kind of battle is that? Elsa asked. Jan said he believed Mother was battling life because she felt she had no foothold on it.