The Teacher

by Michal Ben-Naftali

  Who cares what he says, they tried to calm her agitated nerves after the run-in with the principal, Mr. Ben Ami, what does it matter what he said, let it go, Ms. Weiss, for your own sake, don’t waste your energy on it. But he never apologized, and in fact, what he said was beyond forgiveness or atonement. Since her own silence did nothing to ease her mind, and it never occurred to her to address him directly, her distress only grew. One day she quietly signaled to a few teachers to follow her to the end of the hallway, and handed each one a note, only after they promised complete discretion. The notes had the number of a chief inspector in the Israeli police. She asked them to call him on her behalf, he had already been updated and knew what to do. They couldn’t ask too many questions, fearing her reaction and the betrayal of her trust. She implied that she believed the law was on her side in this matter. She had been in Israel long enough to understand the power of criminal law here, and how she was being unjustly persecuted. She urged them to help find her persecutors and keep them away from her. For the first time, she spoke in terms of persecutors and persecuted. For the first time, she revealed to strangers something about the war raging inside her. For the first time, she realized how weak she was. She didn’t want to be told to leave. No one would tell her to leave, but it’s possible she envisioned banishment long before the potential banishers realized their own hidden or overt intentions, and had in effect already been banished, had already banished herself.

  She lost her skin. Her compulsive, powerful determination still managed to conceal the helplessness. But she was scared to death. She waged a war over her soul and enlisted others in the battle, but they were too foreign, too distant, and were unable to appease her and show her there was a way out. She was inconsolable; they couldn’t explain to her that what she needed, urgently, was a doctor and not a policeman. Once again they had to cooperate with her, to comply, to honor her wishes, to show her that they took her complaints seriously and were trying to pursue her persecutors. But they lost her anyway. They shrugged in the teachers’ lounge, said she was crazy, had lost her mind. Blindness had joined blindness without anyone crying out or standing up for her, and she, for her part, did not train a single soul to navigate the labyrinth of her mind.

  She went for a stroll in the yard. The abandoned bench in the rear garden was covered in beads of rain. She wiped it dry with her hand and sat down, rubbed her fingers against her warm breath, retrieved an egg sandwich from her briefcase that she had prepared that morning, removed the plastic bag and lingered for a long time. She wasn’t hungry. The rain picked up. She had forgotten her umbrella in the classroom and considered going back for it, but didn’t want to see their faces again. She hated them. She could say that openly now, at least to herself. They didn’t irritate her, that would be too lighthearted; what she felt was a dark brew of rage and resentment. She didn’t want to see any of them, didn’t want to deposit any of her assets in their little hands. No one interested her, no one touched her heart. It wasn’t entirely true, she knew that, but she wouldn’t let doubt seep into her thoughts. The rain stabbed the bench like needles, soaking her thin coat and tousling her hair, and she knew she would never step foot in that place again. That word, never, pealed like church bells with the full force of the storm roiling inside her, which had once resembled passion and now revealed itself to be the dark end of a tunnel that offered the only way out. She wanted to die. She knew it as never before. She knew that was it, she had even known it the night before, when she woke up and stole a glance at the small mirror perched on the bookshelf in the living room, next to her makeup bag, before returning to bed. Now she sat with her head between her hands, pressing them against her ears in order to silence the deafening noise blaring inside, but nothing helped. For a long while she heard nothing but screams and canons. She gradually let go and then noticed that her entire body was convulsing, her teeth chattering, she couldn’t stop the tears from rolling down her cheeks and smearing her heavy makeup, a desperate, unrelenting wail that cried out to keep away from her, to clear a path, to open the gate wide. For the first time, she noted to herself with certain satisfaction, she was escaping from school.

  She crossed Ibn Gabirol Street and continued via Huberman to Gan Yaakov behind Habima Theater, stepping in the murky puddles that collected between the cracks of the worn sidewalk, passed by Tarsat and Ben Zion boulevards and turned onto her street. At home she realized she had forgotten to buy groceries. The apartment was a mess. She hadn’t changed the sheets in weeks, hadn’t washed the towels, hadn’t rolled up her sleeves, taken a rag and bucket, mopped the floor and scrubbed the tiles as she used to regularly do, especially after the rare occasions when someone had visited. She took out trash bags from the under the sink and started throwing away everything within sight, the contents of the refrigerator, the pantry, student papers, the small wardrobe she had purchased after the fire, the few books that stood on the shelves, the chinaware, glasses, bowls; she moved from cabinet to cabinet, opening drawers and slamming them shut. The bags were heavy; there was no way she could carry them down to the dumpsters. She piled them next to the front door.

  Night had fallen. She collapsed into the armchair. She heard fragments of a conversation. She told him she feared for Elsa, she was too naïve, how would she manage. She’s simply so young, she doesn’t understand the rules of the game yet. That’s her problem, always was, she puts too much trust in people. Father said everyone is naïve these days, even the most cynical and practical among us. She didn’t reply, her mother. And then she began to cry.

  What brought her joy? Music, a childhood song, the face of a loved one, a view she must revisit before she leaves no matter what. She fumbled her way to the window, returned to the kitchen table, held onto it as if possessed, as if begging it to take her captive and refuse to release her; but with just as much dread, she let go. She was ready. She looked at the clock; it was past midnight. They barged in armed, yelling at the top of their lungs, she feared they would wake the neighbors, they chased her and threatened to shave her head again, to get back at her for abandoning them. She had no one to call, no one to talk to, Jan wouldn’t understand, he never really did. She got up and walked, swaying from side to side. The walls were closing in on her; she paced the apartment from one end to the other as if balancing on scaffolds, as if having to bridge discrepancies in height, rubbing up against the walls, bouncing off them. Her legs faltered, she struggled to stretch them and slapped her thighs to cajole them into moving. She thought she heard the incessant ring of the phone. Then it stopped. An unimaginable weakness came over her. A cramp shot through her stomach all the way to her lower back. She was covered in a thin, translucent layer of sweat, felt it on her forehead, her back, her cheeks.

  She had sought death many times throughout the years. Even in her youth. And in Switzerland. She had to be kept alive. She wouldn’t let anyone tend to her, but something inside her didn’t want to die, she knew that much as well. Not because she wanted to achieve something and needed more time. Not because she thought one day she would have a family of her own. What kept her alive? It was a mystery. It wasn’t because her parents had sent her off with the command to live, that vague responsibility that tied her hands behind the curtain, it wasn’t that contract, even though that was the story she had told herself at the time. She didn’t know what protected her. But the pain was back, a violent pain devoid of all substance, unlike anything she had ever felt before toward something or someone, and she was unwilling to suffer any longer. I’m tired, Mother, she wanted to tell her, and heard her laughing at her, a chuckle tinged with disbelief. She tried closing her eyes to see her clearly, but it was futile, and then even her voice disappeared. She got to her feet, walked to the window, and opened it wide.

  She had had such dreams as a child, of bursting forth, straight ahead, with all her might, crossing the living room and hopping over the dividing rail with great momentum, into the air, to hover between heaven and earth and, if only for a moment, conq
uer the laws of gravity. Those are dreams of flight, Jan had told her. She’d spread her wings and fly several feet above ground, soar over the streets she loved, circle Dizengoff and take a right on Ibn Gabirol, cross the road at a low altitude and continue straight to Shaul HaMelech Street, hovering close to the ground, but then fall, spiral down and be done with it. Simply done with it. She wasn’t thinking of pain, wasn’t afraid she would fail; she knew she would succeed, just as she knew other things in her life once she stopped allowing herself not to know. She looked outside, mesmerized by the lightning that flashed through the window. Her eyes shone. For a moment, the lights went out. She thought about it briefly, then made her way to the fuse box outside the door, flipped the switch, and came back inside. She knew it was time to let go. The building’s windows were insulated. No one heard the great scream that sliced through the air, no one saw the black body, a bird-woman who fell like a shooting star in the middle of the night.

  30

  Near the end of the 1981 school year, we gave her a gift, David Attenborough’s book Life on Earth. She didn’t expect our gratitude. She didn’t expect that something of her hidden desires would be revealed to us. And suddenly it seemed to us that she was happy, happy to be acknowledged, like a distant relative attending a family ceremony of unwrapping presents and discovering she had not been forgotten, and the present was even to her liking. The gift we dared to give her baffles me even today. Did she understand at that moment that we loved her? And why would we give her a gift if not out of love? What was it if not a gift of love? She understood something, probably didn’t hold onto it for long, but for a brief moment it was possible she let herself be loved. At the end of our last class, moments before everything was said and done, we wanted to stay with her in a place where it was possible to talk about love. This is for you, we brought you something. And she smiled.

  She took the book, handling it as gently as a precious etrog before Sukkot, and unwrapped it bashfully and with wonder, visibly emotional. It was a tremendous vote of confidence, to accept a gift from us, to acknowledge the spontaneous gesture of our young hearts that held her in high regard, and not view it as a crude invasion of her privacy, an intolerable violation of the type of interaction she had toiled to uphold during the three years she taught us. She understood our need to give of ourselves to her, even though she had probably never expected us to cherish her hard work. We bought her something we were almost certain she would like. Obviously, we didn’t know her home had emptied of books. We had no idea what kind of storm had been raging during those months and years in the teachers’ lounge and in her life. We didn’t know that she had been teaching us while the ground was shaking beneath her. She kept up appearances, as a teacher is expected to do. Summer rolled in. We enlisted in the army. On a weekend leave, about ten months into our service, a friend called me. “Did you hear what happened? Weiss killed herself.”

  Weiss took her own life. No one had anticipated the calamity, but once it transpired, it was perceived as the end of a chronicle foretold, or a divine decree, outside our scope of responsibility. The shock was reserved, dry, void of sentiment. Feelings of guilt or anger, which the defeated often store with those left behind, were suppressed and faded away. There were those who said, as if embracing her point of view, that a new generation of students had emerged—over the period of a single year—a strange and rude generation that didn’t listen and didn’t obey. “After us,” they said, it was no longer the same, as if her life and death had truly been up to us. For some reason this explanation made sense to some of us, even though it didn’t lead us to the obvious conclusion that in our absence, once we went our own way, we became her murderers. We hadn’t mattered that much. The flip side of that same explanation was that it was an act of insanity, an act that the school promptly washed its hands of, and was the fate of a woman who had always made an exception of herself. The heavy silence that shrouded her life grew thicker surrounding her death. Life at school had resumed its course. A new teacher was found to replace her. It was the end of an era, an era she had presided over without ever assuming her position, without forging a vision, without setting the tone. She was the school.

  31

  During my years in Paris I taught Hebrew lessons each and every week at the Orthodox synagogue in the 19th arrondissement. I wore a long cotton dress, put on a wool sweater vest and arrived thirty minutes before class. By this time, the last of the employees and worshipers had already scattered. I received a key to the front gate and set up the classroom. The “Jewish Radio” would blare through the room day and night, even when the synagogue was closed. The desks were soiled with leftover scraps of food. I would wipe up the rivulets of drool that dribbled from the meaty lips of the synagogue beadle, who was prone to rest his head on the table for an afternoon nap without bothering to clean up after himself. In the corner of the room stood a cramped cubicle with hundreds of candies, canned foods, Kiddush wines, and a small fridge for the staff. Just before seven o’clock in the evening, around eight adult students would gather, most of them laborers and housewives, who lived in a type of voluntary ghetto in the arrondissement, some full of disgust and contempt toward Paris, others merely indifferent. Very few crossed the Seine to the Latin Quarter, visited the Louvre or d’Orsay or the Opéra Bastille. Only Jerusalem inspired in them a passion for unequivocal justice and ignited a hatred toward its enemies, both real and imagined.

  They knew nothing about me. My teaching was void of me; my experience and wisdom went completely unnoticed. Language transformed me into a conduit through which not a thing was shared with them, no thoughts, no passions, nothing of me. I welcomed them warmly, even though we shared nothing but the limited vocabulary and grammar that were completely tailored to their needs. They sought to learn everyday Hebrew so they would be able to get by in Israel, those who wished to immigrate, to understand the news on the radio, to shop and chat. I gave them basic exercises that demanded of me limited creativity, we learned songs and read articles out of Sha’ar LaMatchil, we walked along paved paths, the narrow margin of error easily lending itself to a slight correction or a lighthearted scolding.

  We lived in an absolute present, with neither a past nor a future, speaking in a common language that didn’t require us to bridge distances or take risks. We spent long hours together this way, without struggling, hours in which I knew contentment, though perhaps contentment isn’t exactly the right word. Language made me happy, the verb conjugations, the pronouns, the practice, the innovation, the immediacy. I extended my arms enthusiastically whenever pointing to a particular verb, and asked them to conjugate it. Only when I left in the late evening did I contemplate how much effort I had exerted. Only then did a kind of heaviness color the pleasure. I felt I was going backward, as if I were becoming a child again and returning to a very early exchange of basic questions and answers in a native tongue, settling for useful signifiers and emptying my own language of meaning and ideas. Here and there I betrayed the traces of more ancient studies, when I raised my hand in an overdramatic gesture that didn’t suit the dimensions of the words uttered, but rather the dimensions of a different saying, one that was no longer in my lexicon.

  In those years, I didn’t think of Weiss, or of the fact that I was treading the same paths she had once tread. It seemed she had disappeared from my consciousness and cleared the way for other teachers. I never asked myself questions about her, a fact that undoubtedly had to do with the way she appeared, with her uncompromising demand on the living present, with the warning she sent our way, both directly and indirectly, to refrain from knowing her. The teacher would find a way to tell us everything we needed to know about her. To try and sidestep her, to expose her secrets, would have meant betraying her. And anyway, if she did have mood swings, they went unnoticed. It is possible that we didn’t attribute to her an inner life. She protected us from her by making sure to teach us “only” the required material and not create any situation that might lead her to say thin
gs she would later regret. It was impossible to identify with her or wish to resemble her. She didn’t serve as a role model, and I believe I wouldn’t be mistaken if I said that none of her students followed in her footsteps. She was someone you didn’t want to resemble, a manifestation of pure element, almost inhuman, in a certain sense asexual, preceding any sexual distinction, to which our reaction was primeval and subject to volatile shifts between attraction and repulsion. She dictated a different principle, which I tried to trace back decades later, a different lesson I tried to understand, had to understand, wanted to learn, but with a different kind of knowledge, one that was neither historical nor objective. I allowed for the possibility that at the end of that process I might come to know more about myself than about her. I wondered whether I too would desperately want to throw myself off the roof.

  We met her when we were young enough to still be able to dismiss her as part of the intrigue called high school. We told ourselves that life, our lives, would start after, even though we kept postponing that starting point. When did we in fact begin to live? When we began studying with her she already had thirty years of teaching English under her belt, five or six days a week, and yet nothing about her showed any wear. She was fresh, sharp as a tack, and fulfilled her duties as faithfully as ever. The connection with the students was important to her, the one thing she didn’t renounce. Did she derive pleasure from the generations of students, from the rows of ever new faces? Don’t give up on it, I was also told more than once, leave yourself at least one class for the sake of Eros. Draw strength from them, for they give strength. And it was true. With time I could appreciate this power, the force that remains stored inside you even after you step out of the classroom, and that slowly dissipates the further you withdraw, submitting to other forces.