The Teacher Read online

  One day, while leaving the classroom to go down to the yard, as was her custom, she ran into him, standing in her path and blocking her way. Before she could greet him with a curt hello, he hissed at her: “You’re behaving like a Nazi.” For a moment she didn’t understand what he wanted. Then she raised her arm with a swift movement, pushed him away, and rushed off.

  Those words, Holocaust, SS, kapo, Nazis, were on everyone’s lips. They were tossed around every which way, worn out, inundated with a vapidness when used in response to any manifestation of insensitivity, indifference to suffering or senseless cruelty. They said “Nazi” not to call things as they were, but because many things simply lacked the proper names. Like always, the names were late to come, they did not fit the phenomena—neither the names for public ailments nor for private illnesses, and certainly not those that sought to give expression to the connections between them. That which had no name did not exist. A few years later—but already about a decade after Elsa Weiss passed away—a pseudo-intimate language was formed, consensual and self-assured, one that articulated the mental history of the individual with greater accuracy and dealt with pathologies openly, in a manner that allowed for intervention and the acceptance of responsibility. Depression and melancholy, anorexia and bulimia were spoken about frankly, people were sent to psychotherapy and family counseling, and were even hospitalized when necessary. But at the time the public sphere was still very much taken up with taboos. The invention of names had yet to catch up.

  In that crack between the distress and the absence of names she approached me, only once. Until then our relationship had been matter-of-fact and mutually respectful. In the course of the very first year, when she passed between the rows to hand back papers, she said to me, “You know English.” “I took private lessons,” I replied. Her gaze lingered on my eyes. It wasn’t love. It was the modest affection a teacher might feel for her students. I didn’t dream that she would gather me into her lap, I didn’t imagine the touch of her hand. She was a lapless teacher, a teacher who did not grant patronage. She treated me like a mother superior who recognized the progress of her exemplary pupil, approving her conduct with a nod and without developing a personal relationship with her, without fanning the flames of her love. I did not always want her to notice me. At times I sought her validation, and at other times I wanted to be invisible in the classroom, to get through the lesson in one piece. In that incident, she summoned me to the blackboard. During that period I had already closed myself off inside a cell that diminished my size, a cell that imprisoned my youth. I shed pounds and more pounds without realizing what was happening to me. I imagined myself without body, and waged a mighty war against my voracious appetite. Weiss stood up straight and let her hand wander slightly, her fingers brushing against the hem of my pants, which hung humiliatingly slack around my emaciated leg. “What’s going on with you?” she asked. “Are you okay?” She wasn’t making fun of me. She wasn’t putting me on display. Even though my back was to the class and my face to the blackboard, even though all eyes were on us, it was a private moment, our moment, whispered to me behind my back, to my ears only, a moment in which her heart went out to me, from behind, not head on. I was embarrassed. I did not look at her. I turned around and went back to my seat. I knew she would remember, I knew she knew and saw; I did not know what she knew and saw. It seemed the only intimacy that was possible was an intimacy from an infinite distance, an ephemeral covenant made behind my back, lacking the ability to rescue either of us from ourselves or from her loneliness.

  The “Nazi” that burst out spontaneously from the principal’s mouth could have been, simply, innocuously, a metaphorical provocation, even if it had the potential of becoming serious. But its malicious, intentional use was of course an entirely different matter. It had, this use, precedents. He knew it and she knew it, and as far as both were concerned, at least with regard to historical consciousness, which presumably linked them, it was tantamount to a court conviction. She did not think she needed to explain to him why that was. What did he really want from her? Did her arbitrariness threaten his tyranny? Or perhaps he wanted to test her weak spot, to see what his adversary was made of? In ancient or medieval history, she might have been charged with heresy or witchcraft. Even if she had thought him resentful and hardhearted, she had not thought him capable of this. This was sheer spite. The greatest insults have a way of resonating throughout a school. There is nothing like the insults hurled at us when we wish to learn or teach. They are equivalent to the insults of love, because they too pertain to self-love.

  She could not move on as if nothing had happened. She would no longer exchange a single word with him. All the reconciliatory gestures and good will the other teachers enlisted in an attempt to mediate were futile. The inability to make peace had led her into an all-out war, first and foremost with herself. Nothing was as it once had been. She saw him everywhere, hairy, thin, ugly, humped, diabolical, condemning and wreaking havoc, standing on every staircase landing, following her with his withering gaze, siccing his agents on her all around town. She heard his astringent, squeaky voice in others who wished her ill, in students who sat in class with half-buttoned shirts and considered her with impudent and brazen looks. When she entered the classroom, she suspected he had installed bugging devices in her absence, and when she was at home, hidden eyes followed her from inside the walls. Harbingers of evil surrounded her.

  Wherever she turned she saw the distorted face of ridicule, and inside her the face of bitterness formed, the face she had always tried to escape. It was as if she had no face, as if her face was no longer her own. For the first time in her life she felt defeated, that she had nothing more to say to them, nothing, not in Hebrew and not in English. If back then that choice, an English teacher, had made perfect sense, the logic of a neutral language, the language of no one, the unsullied language of no one beloved, if she had once fought, through the language of empiricism and hard facts, the language of skepticism and irony, to form a shared vocabulary and lucid rules of grammar that would enable a sane world of fair exchange between her and her students—now that logic was lost on her, and the battle had abandoned her. Hopeless, she saw only the holes in the web she had spun. Her old force flinched from her like a foreign body. Everything she did to alleviate the burden only weakened her further. She fumbled over her words. She knew she still sounded clear, intelligible, but she felt it was only a matter of time before she would be exposed. She had no desire to make an effort. She did not want to listen, could not listen. She no longer wanted to speak in any language.

  17

  She goes to kindergarten and learns to swear in Romanian and Hungarian. She can’t understand why the language of the hostile neighbors arouses the gravitational pull of swear words, because Jan claims there is no comparing Romanian curses to their Hungarian ones, and that if the seggfejek that run this country were also human beings, he might consider being a patriot and staying here. She is mesmerized by her spontaneous outpour and by the useful talisman deposited in her small, unpracticed hands, enabling her to hurl these precious profanities at whomever she perceives as weak or inferior to her, whomever she thinks will not be able to repay her in her own currency, because her words will render him dumbfounded, as if she has cast a spell on him. Years later, as a teenager, she herself would turn into the object of that spell’s force. Time after time, words would bring her to tears. A friend in high school would describe to her the dubious trade, as she insisted on putting it, of a wayward acquaintance of her parents. “And you know what she does with those young guys she teaches in her living room?” “What?” Elsa asks, failing to understand. “She fucks them. Why are you crying? What’s wrong with you? There’s no talking to you anymore.” But in kindergarten she juggles these dirty words as if playing with a ball, rushes home and swears at their maid, and Jan hears it from his room and becomes enraged and demands that she apologize at once. She remembers the horrible shame that gripped her, how she ignore
d the maid’s eyes welling up with tears because of what she herself had created with her words, how she slouched along with Mother and Jan to the maid’s house later that night to ask her forgiveness, in that sane world in which they at least attempted, even under less mystical notions than her own, to strive toward harmony between the words and the situations, to pacify and compensate precisely because not everything could be said or done with arbitrariness.

  18

  Ten-year-old Moshe, Sarah’s twin brother, is leaning against the side of the barrack and trying to catch his breath. He’s watching in utter terror as the children close in on him in a half-circle. It takes Elsa, who has just entered the makeshift classroom in the corner—on nicer days she teaches in the open air—only a second to realize they are playing Mr. Cohen’s scandal, which sent the camp into a frenzy last night after he was once again caught stealing bread from the women’s barracks. The entire morning she tried to fight off the suffocating heaviness in her chest since being awoken at around two in the morning by the sound of bare feet fumbling toward Mrs. Farkash’s bunk, where the latter had hidden leftovers in case one of her two children woke up hungry. She knew what would happen once Mr. Cohen got his hands on the bread. The women who were light sleepers would cry out, the children would run to summon the men in the nearby barrack and pandemonium would break loose. Mr. Cohen, who resembled a gray and pockmarked punching bag waiting to be swung at, probably knew that at no hour of the day was it truly possible to steal, even when darkness descended and people were forced to close their eyes. She caught his gaze for a split second, and it seemed to her as if this time, too, he had wished to be caught.

  If she thought the children would take her mind off the adults’ games, her hopes had gone up in smoke. She sits in the corner and grants them permission to continue playing with a slight nod. Eight-year-old Esther, unanimously chosen for the role of supervisor because her father is a lawyer, presides over the investigation with a sternness that does not suit her nature or her chubby, animated cheeks: “It can’t go on like this.” “But it wasn’t me. I swear. You’re making a horrible mistake. I’m being falsely accused. I’m a decent person, I have a family. You want to destroy me? That’s what you want?” Esther tilts her head skeptically. “We all know it was you, Mr. Cohen. There’s no point trying to hide it.” Moshe’s tiny, furrowed face flushes crimson, standing out against the sickly pallor of his friends; he raises a leg and kicks the air as if to keep them at bay, then retreats back into himself. “We won’t get one word of truth out of him by being nice,” Jano, standing about half a meter behind the others, blares impatiently. He is eleven, the oldest in the group. “You piece of shit,” he turns to Moshe and draws closer to him. Moshe flinches in panic. He backs into the corner and fights to keep himself from bursting into tears. Sarah looks at Elsa nervously. She has been seeking her proximity from the very first day of school, when she took the rag she had brought with her, rolled it into a long tube, pressed it against her thick glasses, and sought out her teacher’s gaze. “How do I look through your telescope? Am I photogenic through the hole, Sarah?” Elsa had asked, signaling that she remembered the girl’s name, and wresting a smile from her permanently worried face. With her pudgy body and slightly ungainly gestures, the girl rushed to greet her every morning before roll call. She ran up to her simply to feel her presence, fumbling on the ground for objects people had dropped at random in order to bring them to her, her mouth agape as if struggling to say something while at the same time making sure nothing would escape it. Moshe tattled on her mockingly a few days ago that even in her sleep she mumbles, “Miss Elsa, oh, Miss Elsa.” Sarah glared at him and denied with tears, “I do not! You’re just making it up.” “I’m not making it up at all. Mother says you have an obsheshion with Miss Elsa.” “Obsession,” Elsa corrected him and smiled. “I was also obsessed with my teachers.” Sarah looked at her despondently, as if trying to say that it wasn’t the same thing, whereas Elsa remained silent and didn’t tell her how she too as a child felt that her Torah teacher was coursing through her veins, and how she feared she was insulting her mother with the love she had for someone else, even though her mother never even noticed. That she too had imagined at the time that something infinitely important was happening in her teacher’s life, and thought that if only she had been given the opportunity she could have helped her, could have comforted her in her loneliness, so she wouldn’t have to carry her secret alone.

  Now Sarah is tilting her body forward and urging everyone to reconcile. “What are you suggesting? That we ignore it again? That we let him keep on stealing because under such conditions stealing is no longer an offence?” Jano is losing his patience. “You selfish lowlife, you piece of shit,” he raves, “scum of the earth, that’s what you are.” Elsa wonders whether she should let this scene turn into a brawl. Until now she has chosen to remain silent. “Maybe you could teach us how to swear in English and French?” Herman asks, as if reading her thoughts. “So we could curse the gendarmes and the guards.” “And the SS-ka from morning roll call,” Esther chirps, “so they won’t be able to understand what we’re saying.” They turn to her mischievously. “You must be careful with swear words. People hear them first. C’est le ton qui fait la musique. It’s the tone that makes the music.

  19

  The relative safety, perhaps the instinctive complacency, that the Weiss, Bloom, and other families around them felt during the first years of the war, collapsed all at once in March of 1944, after the German invasion of Hungary and the transformation of Kolozsvár, two months later, into a ghetto on the outskirts of town, with between ten and twenty thousand inhabitants—she read this estimation in a book years later, although the vague figure indicated nothing more than the chaos their lives had become. If once every minor change or random deviation from her routine was enough to evoke restlessness, the utter disarray now peeled off the protective layers she was accustomed to and prompted her to seek new ones. The yellow badge, which she and Mother had measured meticulously, ten centimeters in diameter, and stitched onto the left side of their jackets in the style of a uniform, caused her both distress and, paradoxically, comfort, because once the badge was removed—and she had no doubt it would be—it would signal the end of the reign of terror, and life would resume its normal course. What she had once called, not without criticism, a voluntary ghetto—those crammed, dim streets, in her child’s eyes, which snaked between the synagogue, the butcher, the baker, the fish sellers, and cheders, that reeking city-inside-a-city miles away from the theaters, the cinema, the churches, the cathedral, and the university she loved so much, a city-inside-a-city that did not lack joie de vivre but nevertheless always made her recoil in suspicion—was now her reality. As if she had been forced to return to some kind of primal nature, to the noise of the definitive identity she had always found so intolerable and refrained from displaying, even if she did not exactly wish to hide from it. Almost everyone had stumbled in this delicate dance even before the war. While the few neighbors still alive in their building were devastated by the news of their departure (old Ivagda had passed away back in ’43, and Mr. and Mrs. Kristof had aged significantly over the years and barely left their apartment; Elsa used to help them with their shopping), most Hungarians in Kolozsvár were indifferent to what was happening around them; but she did not interpret this indifference as cold-heartedness or disdain for the Jews. She thought that what was happening didn’t threaten them directly, and that they were determined to preserve their daily routines just as she and the others had clung to their habits only a few months earlier, after reading in the papers about the calamity that had befallen others both distant and near, even right by their border.