The Teacher Read online

  She remembered that around that time, more or less, she refrained from arguing with Mother and did almost all she could to appease her, anything to keep her from yelling. Not because Mother shouted more than other mothers—she could hear Mrs. Adler yelling at her daughters all the way from the town square—but because her shouts had a different quality, and always sounded like an echo chamber for a stifled cry that filled Elsa with dread. It was as if the shouts were a distraction to disguise something else that refused to be exposed, perhaps her frustrating idleness, maybe her mute resentment toward Grandma Rosa, who had become dependent on them day in and day out since her husband passed away, when Elsa was seven. To her question why Mother had given Grandma Rosa a free pass, Father explained that was how a daughter should treat her mother: “That is the meaning of honoring thy parents.” But it seemed to her that Mother was acting out of a sense of duty and did not truly love Grandma Rosa, because apparently love could not be commanded. This realization caused her distress, and to fear that Mother was acting out of a duty toward Father, or even to her. And even though she believed it was different in their case, she was not entirely sure. At times Mother’s rage was directed at Father or Jan or her, but maybe that was a sign of unconditional love? “There is no such thing as unconditional love,” Jan claimed. “Love is always conditional. Whoever says otherwise is indulging in puerile romantic fantasies. If you can’t explain to yourself why you love the thing you love, then ultimately you love it because you have decided to, and what you love is actually love itself.” She looked at him with gleaming eyes. She actually liked that idea, loving love itself.

  She knew that when Jan left, she would remain alone with Father and Mother and Grandma Rosa, and no one would be there to save her. Grandma had no respect for Mother, she listened to her with only half an ear, nodding skeptically, and talking to her with an affected tone as if sizing her up, perhaps even embarrassed by her. But Mother ignored it as if already accustomed to her behavior, and replied with a flat matter-of-factness that only rarely was darkened by discontent. It was unclear whether Mother actually heard what Elsa heard, whereas Grandma was blind to Elsa’s gaze, which studied her cautiously and contemplated how to come between them and prove to Grandma that Mother was more important than her. She wondered whether they had ever had a real conversation, and whether such a conversation could even take place, with Grandma always ordering Mother around as if she knew better what was proper and what was improper.

  Mother came from an Orthodox family. When they heard the rumors that the Romanian authorities were about to close down the Hebrew high school, thus ending the cooperation between the Orthodox and the Neologs, Grandma Rosa pressured Mother into sending Elsa to the religious school. Father, who also thought Mother did too much to please Grandma Rosa, adamantly objected to the idea. He feared it would “torture the girl and put her in an impossible conflict with our way of life.” After all, you yourself pulled away from them, he reminded Mother. Religious education was ill-suited to Elsa’s curious and free-spirited character and might depress her, or even radicalize her, because “that is the nature of such processes. You saw what happened when Glasner Junior inherited Glasner Senior’s place! The successful sons always pull toward the extremes, while the others are feeble and incompetent.” And his girl is far from feeble. He feared what would happen to the family once they were torn between the Orthodox, Neologs, and Zionists, each with his own Mikveh and butcher and Torah. It could not be divided in such a manner. “It will give her structure,” Mother insisted. “She must have structure. She can’t play all day.” “May she continue to play, as long as that’s what she wants. She’ll have enough time to be serious.”

  In hindsight, she marked this morning as “the morning after.” It more or less resembled every morning that had preceded it. She was already in the third grade. The teachers were fond of her, even though they complained that she was impertinent and opinionated; and when she wasn’t busy expressing all manner of opinions—about grades, the Orthodox, God, and whatnot (she heard Mother parroting her to Father: “This is how your daughter speaks,” she rebuked, hurling at him sentences that Elsa had recited and putting her to shame by exposing these clumsily and prematurely-adopted adult mannerisms), she could be found doubled over with laughter, causing a chain reaction of giggling children until there was no other choice but to send her outside to calm down. Everything made her laugh, the teacher’s barrel-shaped body, her voice that sounded like a croaking toad, the laughter of others, Jan’s whistles when he paid her a surprise visit. “As far as I’m concerned, let her laugh her entire life,” Father said. Outside the house she was also prone to vexation. At times, she did not know what had come over her. Leah, her Torah teacher, wrote in her second grade yearbook: “Without anger and petulance you are as lovely as a flower.” What did she see in her, Miss Leah? What did she grant her with that mysterious sentence, etched in her heart without having to be memorized, even though she was inclined to fight its refined truth, which she only partially unraveled? But you can neither question memories nor seek apologies, not after that instance in which Sonichka, the gangly girl from her grade, wrote her a Rosh Hashanah greeting: “To Elsa, have a good year, with happiness, joy, and a little cheer,” and Elsa allowed herself to wonder out loud, “Why did you write only ‘a little cheer’?” to which Sonichka replied, “For the rhyme.”

  She didn’t know why she was so gloomy that morning. Perhaps because she had experienced for the first time something she would one day identify as the price of adjustment, a type of interim state that enabled her to function at a steady, confident pace, rattled only when encountering fervor or passion in others, and because she had long sensed in herself that greediness, she could not help but notice the gap suddenly opening up between her and them. It was also the gradual, obscure realization that the words of her bearers were creating her anew, no less than their bodies had created her.

  Since she could first remember, Mother forbade her to get dirty or lie. She claimed splitting yourself in two was a sin and that she must strive to be a good girl, an open book. “Wears her heart on her sleeve,” Mother said admiringly of one of her friends at the Ozer Dalim charity organization, who wasn’t a hypocrite like most of the women around her. Elsa had failed the “honesty test,” as Mother called the bathtub incident, with a harsh voice and a long, distinct pause between the two words, as they were walking in their Shabbat clothes down the main street with Grandma Rosa to synagogue. Elsa looked dizzily at the rounded steeples of the elegant building, which from afar resembled crystal balls; hesitant drops of urine escaped into her underwear, once she realized that what had happened between them was known to all.

  From then on, she let the mission take over her soul. Even when she tried to lie, she was no longer successful. She became transparent and her innermost thoughts could be read. During Torah study, when they studied the Book of Genesis, she thought that evil was actually created with a word, just as God had created the sun and the moon and the stars and the people. Words generated actions, which meant there would be no evil deeds were people like Mother or Leah not to call every mischief by such a cruel name. She could actually prove from Genesis that the word evil always appeared before the evil deed, as if the word spurred one into action. But she felt the adults understood nothing about words, even though their vocabulary was much larger than hers. That was why they squandered words recklessly, and stood astonished when they suddenly turned into reality, while she, for her part, could no longer endure it. “Can’t you simply forget what I said? It’s just a word.” Mother shrugged her off when she got hung up on some offending word. “Let it go, just ignore her,” Jan said when she complained to him, endorsing the advice she had received. “She’s simply stupid, and you, with your reaction to her, are just punishing yourself.” But it seemed to her that he was disrespecting Mother, and that she certainly couldn’t bear, not without immediately turning herself into the object of that ridicule. After all, she was her
daughter. How could she outsmart herself? Only years later did she realize that was precisely the reason she had conferred a special validity upon Mother’s words, thus rendering her important, or perhaps a monster. And Mother was not a monster, she was an ordinary woman, so why had Elsa given her so much power, and why had she resigned herself to relinquish it? Perhaps it was the lurking fear of her own power that led her to form an alliance with the prohibitions imposed on her. Perhaps because deep down she had already broken every possible command, had seen unholy sights, and had come into knowledge too early, she subconsciously decided not to know more.

  Many years later, when it seemed she withdrew entirely from the child she had been—when there was nothing left of her other than that furtive vestige that bemused her when she wondered where she had disappeared to—she dreamt she was living in a spacious house, its many rooms unoccupied. Her parents enter her room and tear pictures off the walls, picture after picture, as if behind each picture was another. They are looking for something. She is convinced she has murdered someone or something. Suddenly someone emerges from under the floorboards, points at her and explains that she herself has been murdered, but she insists she is to blame. She has caused someone to no longer exist and from that moment on she has been covering it up, laying fabric, and all that faded long ago and then went up in flames in the big fire. Now she does not remember a thing, not the person in question, not the circumstances of the murder, how it went unsolved, how she has not been exposed. She has forgotten it all. But suddenly she was outed by her own self and could no longer hide.

  She remembered the day she helped Jan pack his books, how she climbed on a chair to clear the top shelf and stumbled upon a book by someone named Lukács and sat down to leaf through it, a book Jan must have hidden far from their parents’ reach, a philosopher Jan’s friends often argued about while she hung out in his room, when she wasn’t sent out on urgent tasks, when the girls curled up in the boys’ laps like kittens and the voices faded into whispers and giggles, and they realized that Elsa was no longer playing but hanging her head low and staring at the floor, seeking to escape the embarrassment that had overcome her. From what she could gather from their conversation, Lukács had tried to secularize Hungary by advocating free love and protesting against the authority of the prudish Church, against parents and teachers who preached modesty, against “monogamy,” a word that appeared in the table of contents which she made a note to herself to ask Jan about, when just then Mother walked into the room and snatched the book from her hands. “You’re too young for this,” she snapped at her. “Can’t you make yourself useful instead of rifling through Jan’s books?” Elsa was staring at the page in front of her, and her mother’s sentence turned, as if by magic, into a command that precluded any reflection, casting out sex, sexuality, and “radical sexual education” with a silence not to be reckoned with.

  About four years after Jan’s departure, she met a young Gentile, three years her senior, who swam with her at the municipal pool. They saw each other often and spent many afternoons strolling through the botanical gardens. Georg was planning to study biology at Franz Joseph University upon graduating from high school, and dreamt of writing a book about “life on earth,” a book that would have no people in it, but only creatures at various stages of development, from the most primitive to the most complex creature, because the world of living creatures interested him infinitely more than people, and truth be told, he tended to place humanity at the very bottom of the evolutionary chain. His father had fallen in World War I, several months before he was born. He utterly distrusted human beings and knew all too well what they were capable of doing to each other. One evening, while her parents were out visiting friends, Elsa invited him over. They stood on the apartment balcony and gazed onto the street beyond the railing. Georg approached her from behind and gently stroked her hair. With courteous yet tenacious confidence his fingers slowly descended and playfully looped around her earlobes, then lower to massage her neck and brush against her breasts; she conceded to his silent calls, her ears filling with the sound of cymbals that crescendoed as he crowded his body against her behind. “I love it when you tremble,” he said. They didn’t hear the key turning in the front door lock.

  She was to break off the relationship at once. The girls in school knew she had been involved with a Gentile. They spoke of her behind her back. Since that night, during which she dreamt about Georg’s body with longing, she could conjure up no images. All she could remember was the immediacy with which pleasure was dangled before her and then taken away, like a now that appeared as a once-upon-a-time. Her mind was devoid of figures and fantasies; sometimes she looked inside herself and saw exposed body parts, to which nothing clung, no story, no movement, no character. She discovered she was easily aroused, that the lightest touch lit up her body. She tried not to succumb to it and mostly succeeded in her restraint; when she did give in, she redoubled her efforts to avoid it. What she felt was not worthy of the word love, it certainly did not condense into any sustainable emotion, but waned without leaving a trace, like a shooting star. She did not touch herself. Her body gradually withdrew from her. It shamed her like an animal, because she perceived her body and its needs as her real image. In order to fight this animal, she began to contradict her body, to tense a muscle instead of relaxing it, to hold in instead of letting go, to move counterintuitively, to lose touch with the primal and basic, until these unnatural gestures became second nature. She filled her days with sentences and ideas from ancient and modern literature. Her gestures also permeated into her reading, from which she took away nothing at all. The books affected the space around her, the comforting vowels and consonants that faded once she finished reading them. Her books did not inspire her with thoughts, but fortified the walls of her room and turned it into a home: the dark desk, the drawers with the brass knobs, the carpet of brown-black tones, the piano, her father’s gramophone, the solid oak shelves mounted above her bed. That was where she had grounded herself and where she had first lost herself. She acceded to the words by way of imitation. A sentence that indicated a hand or mouth or body gesture led her to imitate it instinctively. Someone extended a hand, she followed suit. And when that happened, she did not question this marvel. She wanted the anonymous, immediate pleasure to cleave her like a sharp knife.

  14

  Elsa Weiss did not choose what to teach. She talked about everything apart from what truly concerned her. She was not dramatic; she neither breathed life into the subjects, nor went out of her way to interest or intrigue. It was the tyranny, which relieved the lessons of the dreary routine of grammar and syntax, of conversational English, that aroused interest. Only a single lesson resonated with a vibration that tyrannized us in a different manner. “Eveline.” She pronounced the name of Joyce’s story with something of a sigh or longing, protracting the transition between vowels. “She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue. Her head was leaned against the window curtains and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne. She was tired. […] But in her new home, in a distant unknown country, it would not be like that. Then she would be married—she, Eveline. People would treat her with respect then. […] Her time was running out but she continued to sit by the window, leaning her head against the window curtain, inhaling the odour of dusty cretonne. Down far in the avenue she could hear a street organ playing. She knew the air. Strange that it should come that very night to remind her of the promise to her mother, her promise to keep the home together as long as she could. […] —‘Eveline! Evvy!’ He rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to follow. He was shouted at to go on but he still called to her. She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.” Elsa Weiss’s harsh gaze softened with embarrassment, directed at no one in particular.

  15

  For several years after she graduated from high school, she continued to carry the girl she had been like so
meone who would never grow up, a stillborn. It was difficult to determine whether she was fully aware of the magnitude of her actions or their implications. While she did believe her conduct was sound and sober, she could not help but notice the thin layer of indifference that sheeted her conflicted decisions, for which frankly, in hindsight, she could never fully account, just as she could not understand how, later in life, she had come into full being precisely when it seemed that the world around her and everyone else was gradually shrinking. To travel to Paris, to get married: here too she tensed and relaxed alternatingly, at her full discretion. She was the one who had urged Eric to marry her, only a few weeks after they met for the first time through a high-school friend the summer of graduation, already knowing she was leaving for a year. She remembered how she had studied his handsome profile and told herself she was going to marry him, all the while aware of both the arbitrariness and inevitability of her decision, which made him squirm in his seat before he came to his senses and realized that she was serious. Laura Christmastree, who lived in the adjacent room of the boarding house during her first few weeks in Paris, did not conceal her misgivings. “I don’t understand. You’re not describing who he is, what you talk about, what he means to you.” They fell into the habit of crossing the garden and sitting at Au Petit Suisse on the corner of de Vaugirard and rue Corneille. “I’m not asking to push your buttons. I’m simply trying to understand why.” “It has to do with home, my parents, my family.” “That’s not enough. You have to know more. It’s your life. What about you?” “I have to get married.” “Why?” “He loves me.” “I’m sure he’s in love with you.” “Either I do it now, or I never will.” This conversation saddened her, why was she making light of it? Was it because she had all the time in the world, or because of her impatience, directed inward with either humility or indifference? Why did she think this question didn’t even need to be asked? Where did she muster this resignation from, when no one had made any demands or entrusted her with their expectations? It was of her own making. She had the faint sense that this was the only time when she could still afford to act without thinking, to be the less important beneficiary of her actions. Of course, she knew she could marry at a later time. She was also confident of her passion for men, a passion ignited and extinguished in the blink of an eye, and summoned another feeling to furnish her with pleasant intimacy, rational and long-lasting, an intimacy that wouldn’t exasperate. The question of what she really needed or wanted had never even crossed her mind. The future was clear, almost too clear, and as to married life—dimly devoid of dreams.