The Teacher

  Did teaching fan the flames of life for Weiss too? Did it validate her? Was that why she persevered in it? Did I ever detect in her gaze the simple joy over the fact that we existed, we, always we, always in plural? If we were supposed to cure her, we failed, or she failed to imagine what might have cured her. Did she not understand what was happening to her? She was endowed with such vast curiosity, but she never even tried to understand herself. She made sure only to go through the motions of speaking, quite literally.

  32

  Time healed no wounds, though one might have expected it to, as part of the natural healing process. Time did not mend the wounds; they reopened. It’s possible that was, in Jean Améry’s withering words, Weiss’s personal protest against the “natural,” “immoral” healing that time brings about. She was forced to look back, to dive into the abyss again and again, to look her sudden, violent, inevitable end in the eye, to take leave without saying goodbye as if she were a cloud of road dust, as if she was entirely meaningless. And how could she possibly live longer than her parents had, she who spent her entire life as nothing if not their daughter.

  I said at the beginning that she had died. There was no point in hiding it, in deceiving the readers. I had the starting point. Elsa Weiss was dead. I had to invent her a life. But how do you invent a life? I searched for her in vain. I didn’t find her. I looked for her out in the world, but she didn’t appear in any of the history books of the period, either by her first name or her last. Nor did she appear in any of the few memoirs and journals published about life in Bergen-Belsen, as if she had faded from memory, and been rendered invisible. I tried to locate distant traces of her young face in the few photographs that remain from the beginning of the journey, from the platform in Budapest, and upon the train’s arrival in Switzerland. There is no sign of her. She was never in front, never stuck her head out the window, as if she had already curled up inside one of the cars and asked to be left alone, as if already then she had destined herself to be present only in the classroom. As if already then she had lent herself to the blessed fading of memory. This history must be searched for elsewhere, not in books. It is only when you listen to the oral tradition, a tradition that does not impart anything directly, does not convey content or teach in the traditional sense, but rather points out a place on the world map, a place that once upon a time had left its impression in a hidden corner of her students’ consciousness; the place of the teacher. You can wander to this place. You can also never meet it again. You can spend an entire lifetime and forget you ever visited it. It is possible to take into account, in all my journeys from here on, that I had once stumbled upon that place, which suddenly demands to be put in writing.

  I felt uncomfortable suddenly being so close to her, almost breathing down her neck. She, for her part, eluded me, wouldn’t give in to me, only instructed me with her hands, with her eyes, to stay away, to make do with only what was necessary. But what is necessary in a person’s life? I don’t know. The allegedly peaceful routine, or perhaps the crises that brutally interrupt it? The liberties I took frightened me. I gave her a different name. I drew certain people close to her, and kept others away. I mostly kept them away. I thought she wouldn’t tolerate too many people around her.

  The world turned back on its axis again. I could roam freely from place to place. From an escape route, Europe had become a destination for me, a place that would perhaps offer shelter. I visited the building where she had lived in Tel Aviv. But was there anything in that building, in the apartment closed off to visitors, in the sun-scorched balcony railing, in the rickety shutters, that could shed light on the enigma that was her life? Could her house in Kolozsvár, in which she was born about a century ago, solve the riddle? Or perhaps it could be solved only by the sea and the pool, her two brave allies?

  I could only fumble around her, to become acquainted with people who had most likely lived in her vicinity, a few bunks, boxcars, or hotel rooms away. I went to talk to a few of them. Wherever I went the door opened wide, I was greeted warmly, refreshments were served; never before had I felt in this country such—what I was embarrassed to call—solidarity, simple camaraderie. They remembered more than anything how they tried with all their might to stave off the memories, how busy they were surviving, how they tried to learn the language, to acclimate, to assimilate, face forward, to the future. And no, none of them had even noticed her. Odd. But she was so beautiful in her youth, I protested. Didn’t she stand out? Was there no one who even resembled her? How did they not turn their heads when she walked by? I visited the high school. Tel Aviv is a frenetic city, always charging ahead, embracing one day and alienating the next. The security guard looked at me suspiciously. I used to be a student here, I said, I graduated shortly before the First Lebanon War. Why do you want to come in? he inquired, and asked for my ID card while informing the secretary, who, in turn, approached the principal to approve the visit. Finally I was let in. The old building remained standing, although a new one had been added in the interim. The old building is a three-story U-shaped structure; the hallways have been whitewashed several times since the early eighties, the old combination of light green and faded yellow has been replaced with a more subtle color blend of eggshell and white. In many areas the floors remain the same, Terrazzo tiles polished by the soles of thousands of shoes. In each classroom I counted twenty-two student desks, forty chairs, a modern whiteboard where the old green chalkboard used to be, and hanging right beside it, in every classroom, a reproduction of Israel’s Declaration of Independence. The windows are trapped behind the same bars, which have been repainted in pink, yellow and red. The backyard, the more intimate one, still more or less resembles itself with the olive tree, the fallen fruit of the ficus, the patches of dry grass, a few more benches scattered about. We sometimes studied Torah and Jewish history classes here, under the open sky. “In blood and fire Judea fell—in blood and fire Judea shall rise.” The front yard is a wide concrete slab. I wandered between the floors, unable to find any mention of her; in fact, there is no trace of anyone who used to teach here, no commemorative book or plaque. I stood behind the front door of a classroom for a few minutes and tried to recall her voice. I decided to climb to the roof. It often seemed to me that of all animal locomotion, flight is the only movement possible for humans. I felt like I could fly, albeit not at a great height. I could only bear the low altitudes. Skyscrapers terrified me, I wouldn’t even dare look out the window. I had to steady myself by gripping the railing, as if beyond it lurked something between a threat and a temptation.

  I knew that the Kastner affair lay at the heart of the matter, but also that it was on the margins, like a distraction, that Weiss had happened to have found herself on that train just as she had happened to go along with everything else that came her way, and could just as easily not have boarded it. I learned of the story of the train by chance, one Holocaust Memorial Day, when I found myself at a memorial service for the survivors of the Kastner train, on Emanuel Haromi Boulevard, not far from my house, where Kastner had lived with his wife and daughter, and where he was murdered. When I got home, I knew. I knew with a complete confidence that I cannot explain. I went onto the Kastner website, searched for the passenger list, which numbered one thousand eight hundred and sixty-four. And there she was, among them, the teacher. I had to probe further. I drove to Jerusalem, to the Israeli television archives in Romema, and asked for a documentary about Kastner, which had been aired about two months after Weiss’s death. With a pair of headphones I sat in front of a tiny screen and turned up the volume. One of the speakers was a young woman, the daughter of this murdered man, and suddenly I felt as though I was hearing my own voice, a voice determined to speak uninterrupted, while trying to suppress a slight, almost inaudible tremor. I heard a voice asking to survive in a world not trying to silence it, but actually instructing it to speak out loud. I heard a voice fighting to preserve its whispers, its hesitations, as though I had tricked myself and came from beh
ind, from the past, from the mouth of another woman. It was my own voice coming through the headphones, even though I couldn’t remember what I said, or who said what while she spoke in my voice. Only that it was my father whose reputation I was fighting for, and suddenly I was the daughter of the murdered man. I was dumbfounded. I didn’t rewind the film to see to it again. But even my own words I can’t always recall.

  And the teacher’s words, too, were as if they had never been.

  33

  In the second dream she stood at the blackboard jotting down things that pertained to texts Freud had written in the twenties. The blackboard was soft, malleable, as if made of Playdough, a receptacle-blackboard, a womb-blackboard, which she did not only write on, but became one with as it set no boundaries. She could sculpt it, pour into it, even bake in it. She stuck her head in and out of it as if playing, and the blackboard swallowed her whole; she merged with the words and the material, a single mass, a body from which she emerged and into which she faded, a magic notebook that cast her words in her image and absorbed the residues with a unique work of conceptualization that allowed her to witness how her own concepts were created, singular, hers and hers alone. She burst into wild, unexpected laughter, clearly elated and relishing the quiet harmony she created with her tool. And yet, the words were contorted and creased, ingested and spit out, losing their shape to render her text illegible. I was supposed to copy them down and asked myself what I would do if she quizzed me; maybe I’d borrow someone’s notes before.

  The class took place in my father’s old study, in an apartment on the ground floor of a residential building on Bloch Street that had been converted into an office. To the right of the entrance was a spacious room with bookshelves mounted on a blue wall. Weiss presided over the lesson against volumes of verdicts and law and administrative ordinances, which served as the blackboard. We sat or stood opposite her, next to the desk, leather chair, and wide window, in an area opening into a yard leading to the dumpsters—I don’t know who we were, or how many of us there were. Outside the office, along the corridor leading to the waiting room, were a cramped, unrenovated bathroom and kitchenette. It was the back room, the area outside the law, narrow and dark, damp and moldy in the summer, cold and oppressive in the winter, smelling as if it had absorbed decades’ worth of urine, mildew, and bleach. A grilled window faced the backyard and the heart-wrenching scuffles between the courtyard cats. Weiss furiously erased the blackboard. She left us in the room and went to the bathroom, from which sounds of intestinal distress emerged. We remained frozen in place. She returned seething, “What filth.”

  She seemed so real. I saw her up close. She returned just as she had left, standing an arm’s length from me, as if in resignation, as if giving in, turning herself in, giving into me, revealing herself without inhibitions so I would finally understand something I refused to understand, or was incapable of understanding. And then a discouraging sorrow spread over me at the thought that I was stalking her, pursuing her, chasing the one who wouldn’t be caught, who evades any representation. I knew she wanted to tell me something, that I had to understand something beyond her. How far can I go, how far do I have the courage to go, where do I stop, whether knowingly or unknowingly? Weiss taunted me, and perhaps sought to dissuade me, to stop the search. Enough, let go. From this point on you must not know. And also: from this point on, don’t even try to invent.

  34

  I was uncertain. It could still be a mistake, I told myself, until I reached her grave in the cemetery in Holon. The timeworn headstone had turned gray, coarse, and filthy. The black letters, etched in Hebrew and English, had gradually eroded as if adhering to a gnawing mechanism of self-erasure, destined to one day fade into the stone entirely, like a memorial for an anonymous soldier whose place of burial remains unknown, a monument that is a straight vertical, a right angle, pure shape. I had to move closer to read the names of her parents, Shmuel and Leah Bloom. Their daughter, Weiss by marriage, appearing by her full name, just so, on the list of train passengers, literally took her leave from the balcony into the air and downward, to the earth, thirty-eight years after the night they parted from each other in Kolozsvár, on Sunday, March 28th, 1982, a few hundred meters from Rabin Square, still Malchei Yisrael Square at the time. By then she was only Weiss, a lonely woman without a first name.

  There are no possessive determiners on the headstone inscription: not our mother, not my sister; neither our teacher nor my teacher. Students are not in the habit of purchasing burial plots for their teachers. The material aspects of burials are the family’s intimate affair. Whereas it is incumbent on the students, qua students, to appoint themselves a teacher and put in a plea for their salvation in her absence, to talk to the dead teacher. As Paul too ordered his Christian students in his Epistle to the Philippians: “Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling.” Thus, he had captured both wings of the disciples: with one wing they attempt to glide by appointing them a teacher in their image and in their likeness. They once again reflect upon the teacher’s soul, which enfolds all of his teachings—how little they remember of the materials taught—in order to grow, to become different from who they are. With the other wing they break their flight, trembling and pleading before him.

  Weiss didn’t open any doors in her lifetime. Even the door to her grave she locked. Don’t call on me, the worn inscription warns, fending off her visitors. Farewell, don’t come searching for me, her last testament and nonexistent will says, demanding the impossible: to be anonymous within her name, to be a no-woman inside the name that precedes her. What do they command us, those who leave without a will, those who interrupt their lives and disappear from ours in a single night? What ultimate lesson would they have wanted to impart?

  The grave told me, Leave. The grave drove me away. Without uttering a word, it told me about a woman who does not wish to be remembered, a woman who wishes not to be, and never to have been. The grave said, Find a different way. There ought to be a different way. I stood for a long while. I leaned in to listen. “Every being cries out silently to be read differently.” That’s what I think I heard.

  Notes

  Page 34: Who’s got such a little girl, / such a little angel? / Eyes like two stars, / A pure little soul. (Yiddish lyrics by Janet Fleishman, music by Herman Yablokoff)

  Page 38: “Dear God, I beg of you.”

  Page 39: Neolog Judaism was the name attributed to the non-Orthodox branch of Hungarian Jewry.

  Page 54: James Joyce, “Eveline,” featured in Dubliners, published 1914 by Grant Richards Ltd., London.

  Page 67: Love of country is our law.

  Page 69: To work is to pray.

  Page 74: Assholes.

  Page 79: A nickname given by the women and children to the female S.S. officers, from “Bergen-Belsen Diary” by Szondi.

  Page 159: Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, Translated by Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr, first published in Routledge Classics 2002.

  Acknowledgements

  To my teachers and friends: Yosef Brucker, Tzipora Rimon, Nahum Sagi, Arieh Barnea, Daisy Hefner, David Frenkel, Ofra and Yitzhak Katzir, Gilly Sinita.

  To Sari Kivistö and the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.

  To my friends Naama Tzal, Dana Olmert and Shira Hadad, for their lucid and enlightening readings of my manuscript and all their help.

  To Oded Wolkstein, my editor, a master magician and kind soul.

  To my Dana.

  MICHAL BEN-NAFTALI was born in Tel Aviv in 1963. A writer, translator, and editor, she has published collections of essays, a novella, a memoir, and a novel, as well as many articles on literature, philosophy, and art, in Israel and abroad. Her translations from French to Hebrew include works by Jacques Derrida, André Breton, Marina Tsvetaeva, Maurice Blanchot, Julia Kristeva, Esther Orner, and Annie Ernaux. She has received the 2007 Pr
ime Minister’s Prize, the 2008 Haaretz prize for Best Literary Essay of the Year, and the 2016 Sapir Prize for The Teacher. Her latest book, A Dress of Fire, was published in 2019.

  DANIELLA ZAMIR lives in Tel-Aviv, where she works as a literary translator. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in literature from Tel Aviv University, and her master’s degree in creative writing from City University in London.

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