The Teacher

by Michal Ben-Naftali

  They used extreme expressions, heated, powerful words she had come to despise, words that clashed with life, with her life, which suddenly seemed so feeble and directionless in their presence. Never before had words been further removed from the phenomena they allegedly strove to reconstruct or describe or elucidate. Never before had such a distance been traveled, and with such arrogance, as if an evil eye had been spying on her wherever she turned, forcing her former life into a narrow prism. Now she no longer had a choice but to cross that abyss, to pass through those words if only to keep them at bay, to fight to keep everything she knew inside her from slipping away. But what really was it that she knew? After all, she never thought of it before, not like this. It wouldn’t be true to say she didn’t remember, but she didn’t organize it in her head, and now it was forced upon her in some violent manner that confounded her wavering memory. Had she been on the witness stand she would probably have collapsed under the weight of her own contradictions. But she knew no one lied deliberately; certain people deluded themselves into thinking they knew more than others, like Eric and his friends in the beginning, or like Müllner and the people on the rescue committee, while the others, her parents and she herself and most of the passengers on the train, ascribed to them this exclusive knowledge just because they wanted it to be true and sought to maintain the hierarchy that, in normal times, divides society into those supposedly in the loop and those who know how to take care of their own. And yet there was no way of correcting what had been said at the trial and written in the papers because, in reality, and she understood this quite early on, it wasn’t about them at all, the passengers; no one was really interested in them, not in their grief and not in their resentment; she could fight, hate, earn herself detractors, argue until she was blue in the face; but none of it would make any difference, and she chose to remain silent. She preferred not to rally or fight for Kastner’s reputation—which she never doubted—nor for her own. She was nailed to her own life, trapped in her day-to-day, and wanted it to continue exactly the same way, letter for letter.

  And it came at a price. It became a festering wound. She wanted nothing to do with them, with those institutions, she wanted never to hear from them again. Anything that had to do with the State, even years later, when they approached her to commemorate, to testify, when they called and pestered, invaded her home and took her by the throat, she wouldn’t respond; anything that smelled like institutional agency, ceremonial consciousness, national pride, Yad Vashem, she utterly distrusted. The trial and the murder were the final dissolution. For the first time, she felt truly betrayed.

  She was a victim, but not a pure victim, that’s exactly it—if she had earned her life by negotiating with the Nazis, she would be an impure victim, an impure survivor, a tainted survivor. The pure victim was the guiltless victim, who was merely led; the honor of the led sheep was preserved, because his innocence was preserved, because he never came in contact with the slaughterers, apart from when being led to slaughter. The pure victim’s fault was his sweeping passivity, his complete resignation to what was being forced upon him, his profound weakness. Blaming the tarnished victim was more complicated, since he was charged with a double passivity, both with regard to the slaughterers and to the leaders who had chosen, on his behalf, to be in contact with the slaughterers, in order to secure a deal. He facilitated that deal, which eventually saved his life. She didn’t need Kastner’s persecutors to awaken the demons’ guilt, she was there, behind the barbed wire of Bergen-Belsen, a mere step between her and the horror, she didn’t need anyone’s help to feel contempt for her own helplessness. She hadn’t wronged anyone, and yet carried the full weight of the sin. In a sense, she could only thank them, because they demonstrated the insanity embodied in the charge.

  She didn’t tell, most of them didn’t tell and didn’t testify. In the courtroom, only what could be named was relayed—wide movements across space and time, train stations, dates, people’s names. But was it important? Where was the true reality? Did they leave any room for it? Who Kastner was was a question everyone supposedly tried to answer. But who were they? Could anyone answer her that? Did she herself have an answer? Who were those people, testifying while not testifying, who were those caught in the middle, thrust into the thick of it? “Those” who shared the same universe, lived, walked and talked inside it, as divided and idiosyncratic as they were; “those” who were either directly or indirectly scarred by collective guilt; “those” who picked up their suitcases and accepted the privilege of fleeing for their lives; “those” who knew-and-didn’t-know that this privilege was a form of theft, a two-way theft in fact, depriving them too of the simplicity of being alive; “those” who eventually collapsed under the burden of an impersonal vendetta, lacking a palpable subject, which gradually also depleted them of that deep empathy that exists between people who live through a shared tragedy. Could anyone explain it, that mystery, which works precisely because it isn’t fully aware of itself, because the manipulations and negotiations merely scratch the surface of the inner workings that remain hidden from view? But they wanted to let sleeping dogs lie, to leave it behind them, to move forward, to bury their heads in what the new routine had already begun to provide, if only to a few of them. Concealment was their second nature, not because they had anything to hide, but because no one was interested, there was no one to talk to, and those who did seemingly listen judged harshly for the sake of some inflated image they held of the pure victim, or better yet, the partisan, as a potential object of identification. The pedagogical notion that when you teach students about heroes you instill values of heroism, and when you teach them about the miserable souls who didn’t know how to fight their fate you inevitably inspire feebleness, struck Weiss as entirely ridiculous. She didn’t think there was any specific weight to the way people spoke, that it truly affected the choices of others, or that there was any educational value in superhuman or inhuman feats of bravery. She also didn’t understand why only heroes counted, and she hadn’t lived long enough in Israel to witness how the exilic mentality became, at least among certain intellectuals, a new form of resistance, a type of heroism—the mother of all sins. For her, the line didn’t cross between the public and the leadership, between the knowledgeable and ignorant, the resisters and collaborators. She saw bravery and rebellion in hidden places. But of course, she didn’t involve herself. She had no trouble justifying her avoidance. It was clear to her that she wasn’t an educator, was never assigned a homeroom, as language teachers seldom were. They taught French or English and left the task of educating to the Torah, history, and literature teachers, and sometimes even to the math, physics, and chemistry teachers, God knows why. The language teachers were spared.

  She didn’t attend the trial. It never even crossed her mind. She was there in spirit. She stood trial vicariously, and was vicariously sentenced. And when he was shot and a few days later breathed his last, on the night of March 15th, 1957, she sobbed for hours. The murder of Israel Rudolf Kastner, whom she had never met in person, stirred up the demons of her orphanhood. She had never looked up to a leader, never pinned her hopes on anyone. He wasn’t her hero. Weiss had no heroes. But she owed him her life, even if she wasn’t sure of its worth. It was within her grasp and yet it eluded her.

  Sometime back in the sixties she started teaching at our high school. Her Hebrew, which she had struggled with for the first few years, gradually improved and became refined. The number of people with whom she associated slowly diminished. She seldom received invitations, and rarely did any inviting herself. Every so often someone looked for her. Once in a while she was found. Here and there fate dealt her heart-rending encounters. Gradually, something inside of her steadied and calmed. But the nights were agonizing. She felt surrounded by suspicion and hatred, an unfamiliar hatred, harder to bear, the leadership’s hatred, hatred toward the leadership, hatred toward the poor survivors, hatred that provoked her own hatred, conquered the terrains of love and at a cer
tain point seeped into her teaching. Never directly. Weiss knew how to veil her inner turmoil.

  Thus, she didn’t start arguments, didn’t defend herself, either in the late fifties or twenty years after, when we met her. She didn’t initiate debates, not even fanciful, vulgar discussions revolving around questions such as what would have happened if; how would I have acted if; what led people to be hangmen or resisters; what would I have taken upon myself; what potential personality lurks inside me and in what way would it have manifested under circumstances I didn’t experience and probably never will. She spared us these simulation games. But how does one defend one’s character? By actions. The act she chose to perform was a complicated one. In each and every lesson, we were all collaborators. No one complained, no one protested. We allowed her to act as she deemed fit, even if she didn’t stage these scenes deliberately. We accepted her whims as divine decree even when she punished the innocent. We tried to adjust ourselves each day anew. During all those years we studied under her we experienced firsthand the enigma of collaboration. It became the greatest enigma of our lives.

  28

  One morning she woke and went swimming in the pool as usual. Upon her return she saw a fire engine at the entrance of the building. Several neighbors were crowded downstairs and when they noticed her, ran toward her panting, “Ms. Weiss, Ms. Weiss, you left the gas on.” A fire had broken out, they told her; Mr. Kahn from the second floor noticed the smoke coming from her apartment and knocked on Mrs. Lifschitz’s door, who immediately called the fire department in order to salvage whatever was left to be salvaged, but the truck came too late, they informed her solemnly with worried expressions. Mr. and Mrs. Lifschitz climbed with her to the top floor. She thanked them and asked to be left alone. The front door was torn from its hinges. Inside it was blacker than black, her every possession dessimated due to a moment of carelessness. The apartment was insured, of course, as was all the furniture, everything except what made the apartment a home, her sanctuary. When she went out that morning she had even forgotten to take along her wallet, in which she kept the two photos of her parents.

  Nothing remained. Not only the few photos that usually accompanied her, but hand-written letters from Mother and Father; the little farewell notes Mother had placed in her socks before her train journey, unbeknownst to her; letters from Jan she had kept from the time he left for Palestine and letters he sent her in Switzerland; the correspondence with Eric in Paris; birthday greetings she hurriedly retrieved from her jewelry box while packing her belongings and never even bothered to look at again, leaving them scattered in drawers, thinking one day she’d make time to read them; all the remnants of her past, all the signs that she had lived. The fire also consumed the rectangular picture she hung on the pantry wall, a gift Clara had made her when she was fourteen, which wandered with her from place to place, the cracked glass having been gently removed already back in Kolozsvár, leaving only the simple wooden frame to hold the yellowish, divided passe-partout; on the left side she had attached the figure of Chloris the nymph from Botticelli’s Primavera, her lush golden hair flowing down her neck and shoulders, her eyes wide open, her gaping mouth blowing a sprig of flowers before Zephyrus, God of Wind, a moment before her transformation into Flora; on the right side she glued the portrait of The Lady with a Fan by Velázquez, a dark and doleful, pursed-lipped figure, her gaze pensive and sphinxlike.

  Another holocaust divided her life and shattered its continuity, another holocaust she had experienced clandestinely, without telling almost anyone, another rupture that rendered her incapable of feeling anything but a daunting darkness, a profound sorrow, as if she had been stripped of her humanity and from now on must be grateful for every tear shed, every moment of overwhelming emotion. In the past, whenever she tried to conjure up the small holocaust—which is how she thought of it—of her youth, the sudden cessation of her passion that had disrupted her life before the big holocaust, she couldn’t, even though she believed the small holocaust was the reason she couldn’t get back on her feet after the big one. Others succeeded where she had failed. She wasn’t moving forward, wasn’t rising, the same way her energy suddenly drained from her at a young age, when it felt as though her options had all slipped through her fingers. You still have your entire life ahead of you, Jan told her upon her arrival in Palestine, you’re young, he said as she studied him skeptically, as if he wasn’t addressing her at all, as if he was talking about someone else.

  But the fire forced upon her a more radical asceticism than she had already known. That very summer she was supposed to have visited Jan in Australia. She cancelled all her plans and took, for the first time, a week’s leave in order to prepare for her move, fleeing to the prefabricated buildings in Bat Yam, near the neighborhood of Ramat Yosef—no one knew her new address. She now resided among the Jewish immigrants from Russia, Iraq, Poland, and Turkey cloistered behind grilled railings attached to monotonous concrete slabs, some of them Holocaust survivors her age and older. They immediately identified a kinship of fate—from which she also fled—and scowled at the stranger who refused to integrate into their community and turned down their invitations. Children were always horsing around at the entrance of the building when she returned home from an exhausting day at work. The staircase was filthy, exposed sewage pipes heightened the sense of neglect, and cats often managed to weave through the window bars and leave their tracks on her sheets. She barely furnished the apartment. The walls were whitewashed poorly and cracked from the humidity. She left the tiles bare of rugs, forwent hanging curtains and let the grills on the balcony mar her view. In the evenings she tried to map out her time, jotting down the names of television programs worth watching, since she was sometimes too distracted to read. She dragged out the process of grading papers, spending much more time on it than she actually needed. For an entire year she boarded bus number 26, which went from Bat Yam to Beit Eliyahu in Tel Aviv, an hour each way. She breathed a sigh of relief when the renovations of her apartment were finished and she could finally return home.

  The more the landscapes of her memory faded, the more the longing gnawed at her heart. It was during those nights, after long days at the high school, sprawled on the agency bed she had purchased, that the girl returned to visit her—the same girl who stared with gaping and cheerful eyes at what was revealed before her for the first time, the girl who grew up in a time when there was no world, only the mighty walls of a home and a family among whom she strutted like a foot soldier, cutting paper stripes and pinning them to her sleeves, looking straight into the camera with a serious gaze that concealed a self-assured mischievousness. The girl who later appeared and came to her aid at camp, like her own loyal squire, ready to serve her the way she had once served Jan, attentive to every movement and sound. The one who slept peacefully beside the sliding door that separated her parents’ bedroom from hers, a room prepared for her in honor of entering the first grade, painted entirely in lilac with patches of white on its tiny shelves; the desk, the backpack, the spotless shirt that was ironed in the afternoon and patiently waited to be put on the next morning. Her window faced the street. A bird had built a nest there. It was their shared secret, her and the bird’s. She intuited that the nest mustn’t be removed, that if she tossed it to the ground the bird would retaliate, it would rally an army of birds to declare an all-out war against the humans, and the humans would eventually be defeated because they didn’t have beaks.

  There was also a journal in which she tried jotting down memories, a few entries she had neither the strength nor courage to process, quickly stowed away in the desk drawer. On the first page she wrote two quotes by Simone Veil. “There is a point in affliction where we are no longer able to bear either that it should go on or that we should be delivered from it.” “Every being cries out silently to be read differently.” “Living among others is no longer possible,” she wrote in one of her entries, and in another, “the greatest mystery of my life: living in the aftermath.”


  29

  The hallucinations were out of character; she was rational after all, almost too sober. She didn’t become ridiculous, had never been ridiculous, but her eyes had stopped seeing what was before them. The street filled up with old, familiar figures. They reminded her of people she had once known, but instead of greeting her with open arms, they waved their arms menacingly, they pointed at her behind her back, they plotted against her, plots that reminded her that she wasn’t alone and would never be alone, even if she were to escape to the other end of the world they would never let her withdraw into herself, it was futile to try to stave them off, futile to convince herself she had forgotten them, futile to attempt to prove they had no meaning in her life and that the life they had granted her was equally meaningless—they would come to demand the gift they had bestowed upon her against her will. Her voice became hoarse, and once she closed her eyes, traces of thoughts immediately started chipping away at her sleep. It seemed as though someone was wandering around her house and soon they were many, swooping in like bats, plunging at the walls and closets, crawling on the floor and on the counter.