The White Shadow

by Saneh Sangsuk

  Not a single person in the music room showed they heard those noises, not even him. Time went by slowly. You sat at the desk nearest to the second door of the room. You glanced at the girl. She was still in the same posture as before, sitting with her legs dangling, and sometimes she raised her head to look at the top of the pines which hardly moved for lack of wind. Thunder grumbled in the distance. The little girl sometimes remained with her head bowed, sometimes leaned her cheek against her arm and, maybe because she thought herself alone, she started to call Mum! Mum! Mum! and, by thus doing, it was as if she had broken a law she had been forbidden to transgress and, having broken it once, she went on and on, Mum! Mum! Mum! The pupils in the room exchanged furtive glances but no one dared to move. No one knew what to do to make this problem disappear. They all merely waited patiently. After a long time, he stretched up and stood still, as if he heard the litany for the first time. His hypersensitive emotive face was covered with wrinkles of bitterness and tension whose cause was hard to guess. A weird gleam of fury shot through his drunkard’s bloodshot eyes, so terrifying you hardly dared to breathe. The next moment, his body reeled as if he was going to fall dead and he had to clutch his desk, which was next to the window, with one hand; the cigarette in his other hand was consumed almost to his nicotine-yellowed fingers and he didn’t seem to be aware of it. Someone’s pencil case fell on the floor and the crash expanded in concentric waves like the slack waters of a pond run over with wavelets when someone throws a stone in them. The long curved ash in his hand fell. Before anyone had time to understand, he went to stand squarely in front of the blackboard and then, freed from all the tensions that were trying to slow him down like a spider climbing to the top corner of its web on its flimsy thread, he grabbed the eraser pad and hurled it with all his might. His target wasn’t your friend who had let her pencil case fall and who sat petrified, leaving the case wide open on the floor polished to a gleam with its dribble of rubber, ruler and pencils scattered all around, but the little girl of five or six, a child with matted frizzy hair who liked to suck her thumb and bite her nails, a child who, were she some other teacher’s daughter instead of his own, would no doubt be in nursery school where she’d wear cute clothes like a doll, play with friends her age, eat and sleep at agreed times, she’d have a teacher with a radiant and soft face who would tell her tales and legends and teach her how to sing and play various games or would be taken for a stroll in a park under tall trees and in late afternoon given a bath and powdered with talc while waiting for the school minibus to take her back home and once home she’d tell strange stories, the tales told by the teacher or her friends’ funny doings, or else would laugh before telling them as children of that age love to laugh because their world is full of marvels hard to fathom and has nothing but things that make them laugh. Missed! The eraser rebounded on the wrought iron railing of the balcony only four or five yards distant, just missing the head of the little one who sat with her back to the room and had seen nothing coming – maybe because his hand was shaking in anger. The noise startled the child, who looked at the eraser, which had fallen back on the balcony, then looked up towards him as he strode towards her, looking furious, to get closer to his target, and as the girl turned her head to look at him, dumbfounded and terrified, while trying to pull her legs out of between the railing bars and succeeding in pulling out one, the second eraser in his hand flew and hit her in the forehead full-force. Then the footsteps of the music teacher, a man with a dark past unable to control his fits of anger, resounded like the run of a cornered prey fleeing a pack of hounds, pounded on the front stairs and then on the ground-floor cement landing lined with long rows of decorative plants and progressively grew fainter. It was only then that the little girl started to bawl in pain. The pupils looked rather aghast at the violent event that had just taken place and it was some time before someone started to speak and then another and then another and before someone went to see the condition of the poor little girl and then another and then another. She had remained seated at the same place, her face looking back towards the outside again, her two feet dangling again in the air, her filthy little body shaken with sobs, her head leaning against the wrought-iron baluster, until the teacher who taught in the next classroom came to see her. The violent event, which had happened so unexpectedly, came to a close with nothing else to it. That afternoon you went back home feeling secretly unhappy. You waited for the music hour of the following week without the least desire to enter the classroom and you wished you could slip away or create some situation you could use as an excuse, even though ordinarily you were a diligent pupil who was reputed to be highly devoted to her duties. But the music hour was totally different from what you expected, as it took place in a serene atmosphere, even if at the start of the lesson the teacher looked rather embarrassed and ill at ease. At one point, as he paced up and down with his hands in his back in front of the class, he stopped and said he was sorry for what had happened the preceding week and after repeating himself with the air of someone lacking self-confidence, which made him express himself by fits and starts punctuated with ums and ahs, he said, which you felt was totally uncalled for, that he asked for forgiveness from the pupils and made the solemn promise that he’d see to it that this kind of thing didn’t happen again. The entire class remained silent, which could be taken for general assent. After a moment of silence from both sides, he started to teach with all the earnestness one could expect of a real teacher. The smell of tobacco and alcohol that disgusted the pupils to the point of making them dizzy diminished. It didn’t mean he had stopped smoking as he taught; only that, when he wanted to smoke, he went to smoke outside of the room. His daughter didn’t come back to sit with an absent air at the edge of the balcony again. His wife had come back and undertaken again to take care of the child and they had made up, right? And when a man and woman make up they turn all sweet, all honey, to make up for the bitterness of past quarrels, right? Thus, just like that, his married life was set to be fine, even if it was hard to guess how long it would last, right? But no. None of the above. If he behaved like a good teacher, it was because he had been summoned by the headmaster who had given him a dressing down and had solemnly warned him that the next misdemeanour wouldn’t be forgiven, as his dissolute and irresponsible behaviour was beyond the pale. As for his daughter, he had had to hire the wife of one of the caretakers to look after her, and his wife, whom he awaited with a mixture of suppressed anger and longing, still wasn’t back, so that what you saw was but a mask hiding growing putrefaction. It was said that the day he was summoned to be given that warning, the headmaster was so incensed with him that he vociferated and told him without mincing his words that if his behaviour didn’t improve he’d have to put an end to his job as a teacher, whereas, to tell the truth, he’d have had to put an end to it a long time ago had there been an inquest and deliberation in keeping with the regulations of public service due to his dereliction of duty, his breaches of discipline and even his debts. The four or five girls who had been summoned by the bursar to be given a warning about their relations with friends of the opposite sex and the way they dressed witnessed the scene and told their classmates that, when he got told off by his immediate superior, he merely remained seated motionless with his head bowed, and when he was forced to answer questions, he stuttered incoherently and towards the end multiplied his low bows while letting out a stream of pitiful interminable supplications. He spoke of his wrangles with his wife making him drink a lot and when he drank a lot, he began to have debt problems, and this made him confused, as he didn’t know any longer if it was because of his debts or because of his wife that he drank a lot. In conclusion, he gave his word to the headmaster that he’d do his best to solve all the problems that harassed him. You learned the details of the matter with a hard to explain feeling, because you had always felt that a teacher is someone worthy of respect, but when you thought about him exhaustively you found it hard to accept that he was worthy of respect –
from his glum face, his hair too long that he never bothered to comb, his forever pursed lips whose ends drooped into a permanent display of bitterness and which he never opened but to denigrate others and show his own arrogance, revealing a smoker’s teeth in a sorry state that matched his nicotinestained fingers, all the way to his clothes always the same that were all wrinkled as they were never ironed nor practically ever washed or if they were, were washed summarily, and even though he wore shoes he wouldn’t wear socks. His gaunt body derived its strength from alcohol, his gestures were devoid of vigour, his head was permanently hung under the weight of despair, and his words came forth disjointed when he wasn’t himself. But for all that, you still feared and respected him as a teacher. His private life was his private life. Besides, his shamefaced looks in front of his pupils after the violent event of that afternoon made you and some of your friends pity him, and that was why you didn’t dare look at him with a critical eye. In the eyes of the other teachers and pupils, he was someone unusual as, no matter what, they still remembered that on the days when he was in a good mood he greeted his pupils and took them out to teach them under the rain trees around the football field. There he had played on the trumpet with odd bouts of improvisation a love song that the young favoured. Sometimes he’d stop playing briefly, beat the rhythm with his foot and resume blowing into the trumpet. Sometimes he made it speak, sometimes he made it laugh, sometimes he made it cry and groan in anger. Sometimes he blew into the harmonica he took out of his trouser pocket, holding it in the hollow of his hand, and he blew into it with the ease only great harmonica players display. Sometimes he’d even blow on a leaf and get the sounds he wished out of it. Sometimes he whistled to illustrate his explanation as to how music is something to be found everywhere and what fabulous luck it is to be able to play music through practice and if you’re able to play should it be just one instrument, you end up realising that you have a true friend for life. Sometimes he stated confusedly that music is the noblest of man’s creations and it affects not only the mood of men but also of animals and, at times, even of plants, and he added that a simple tune created by anyone was worth more than the Great Wall of China, Angkor Wat or the pyramids of Egypt – a formula that some of his pupils lost no time repeating to the history teacher, who got boiling mad and resentful. But even those teachers who showed openly in his presence or when his back was turned that they didn’t like him as an individual still acknowledged that the sound of his violin at night was utterly moving. To the numerous girls who wanted to play the guitar and who asked him to make a demonstration during the teaching hour, he answered with irony in his eyes and held out his two hands for them to compare and notice that the fingers of the left hand that hold the strings were noticeably longer than the fingers of the right hand that pluck the strings, and he explained that this was the result of intensive practice over several years before he turned to the violin, and his next utterances were praise for the traditional guitar all children know along with a virulent denunciation of the electric guitar couched in filthy language that made the girls blush. Those children asked to have private tuition to learn to play the guitar, but soon made themselves scarce one after the other until none was left, as they couldn’t stand his fits of temper. It was through those children that those who knew him became aware of yet another aspect of his lowly nature no one had noticed because he had so many others that jostled to come out, and that was his incapacity to arrive on time, his unpredictability. During the Loi Krathong festival that year, after you gave up learning music with him, there was a musical performance by various schools. On the evening your school band performed, an old man with distinguished looks whom no one knew asked him if he could play old tunes from Phrarn Boon and Nart Tharwornbut and Luan Khwantham, which left him speechless for a moment and, with a completely different attitude than was customary, he thanked the old man and said that lovers of good music are as scarce as good musicians, and he started to play ‘Tears of light’, ‘Moon o moon’, ‘The wind of the past’, ‘The ring on the finger’ and many other tunes he was asked. Most of them were opera tunes from times gone by, and instead of people leaving the front of the stage one after the other, a dense crowd massed there in thrilled silence as if under a spell. That night the full moon was more beautiful than on any other night. At the far end of the vast esplanade, the brimming river glittered. The tiny candle lights of some still shining krathong flickered in the moonlight and were reflected on the water. Far along the opposite bank, atap bushes, coconut trees and mango trees swerved under the cool breeze of the beginning of the cold season, but it seemed that he no longer paid attention to the huge crowd and focused on his violin and on the old man’s reactions only. You’d never have thought that the desperate man with the magic violin was the same man who had created a stifling atmosphere in the music room, that a man in an old-fashioned navy blue dress, a man whose violin and bow seemed to be part of his body, would have such a tremendous power over the emotions and moods of so many people. The distinguished old man rewarded him with two thousand baht, which, like all his preceding windfalls, he spent on booze that very night, without waiting for the musical performance to come to an end. He disappeared as soon as he received the money and he was apprehended by police that same night for disorderly conduct in a state of intoxication. He hadn’t harmed or insulted anyone, merely bawled out at the top of his voice and broken several plates, dishes and glasses in the restaurant where he had gone to feast. After paying a fine of a few baht he left the police station in the afternoon of the next day, walked unsteadily across town, leading his daughter by the hand or rather it was his daughter who led him by the hand, before going back home where he may have started brooding about the sour and sullen faces of his debtors big and small, or else merely told himself that his daughter could well do with new clothes or a small bike or sweets or some toy. You should have talked to your parents about him, about his behaviour, since you talked about the other teachers and your schoolmates, for at that time your whole world came down to home and school. You only started to talk about him on the evening you asked your parents whether it would be proper for him to give you private violin lessons. It must have been your being impressed repeatedly with his violin that led you, after you had received a violin as a birthday present and failed in your efforts to play it by yourself, to decide to ask him to teach you. Oh, if you had told your parents the details of his shameful behaviour or if they had paid attention to the rumours and calumnies of the local folk, they probably wouldn’t have allowed you to receive private tuition from him. You started to learn the violin with him one week after the end of the Loi Krathong festivities. You had put it into your head to learn to play the violin. Well, why not? Even if you didn’t achieve good results, you could at least expect it would help you relax after your exertions over your studies. Another reason was that you couldn’t help thinking that your violin was rather expensive and not using it would be a dead loss. It was a luxury for your family among not many other luxuries and even though they could well afford it, such a luxury should be justified. Besides, at that time you were already beginning to appreciate pure music. So that, when you made it known you wanted to study the violin, your father and your mother acquiesced and approved once they knew the cost of private tuition, for which he asked fifty baht per hour. You started at once as you had wished, at the rate of one hour per day in the music room after classes and on Saturdays and Sundays another hour per day at the teacher’s lodging house. You invited Fueang, the souvenir shop owner’s daughter, to learn the violin as well in order to keep you company, although she didn’t at all dream of becoming a talented violinist like you and appeared to be more interested in drawing. It so happened that Fueang too had a discarded violin which had been gathering dust for ages. She thus went to learn the violin with you willy-nilly. She held out until the fourth week before calling it quits as she could no longer stand the teacher’s sarcasms and bad temper. Actually you were the one who should have been
the victim of his sarcasms rather than Fueang, but for some reason or other, he seemed determined to be patient with you and was especially considerate towards you. His lodging was a small, old wooden house, its white paint all cracked and flaking. It stood at the end of the row of teachers’ dwellings built behind the school, so isolated that it seemed lost in the dense shadow of a venerable rain tree entirely covered with creepers and other parasitic plants. It stood at the foot of a hillock covered with trees of all sizes and topped with the ruins of a temple built no one knew when and since when it had been abandoned. Once in a while someone would go for a stroll on the mound to admire the panorama of town and river down below. Sometimes couples of lovers fled the outside world to find themselves alone there in a rustic and inspired background, but those who were there most often were young hoodlums who went to discreetly taste ganja or heroin and who, when the police carried out a raid, disappeared for a while. The area around the house was a tangle of wild grass tufts and weeds of all kinds. The house was so rundown that no one else would have it. At first he had dwelled in much better quarters but he had been chased out of them as his colleagues in neighbouring houses couldn’t stand the almost daily quarrels with his wife, the yelling drunkard’s racket he was given to and even his music – mostly the violin –, which got going at any odd time and which, when in a mood to listen, some found beautiful but even those that did woke up in a foul mood when, after his return thoroughly drunk he started on it late into the night and was still at it at the break of dawn. On the first Saturday you went to learn the violin at his place, your instinct as a woman told you to beware, and once in the tiny yard in front of his house, while you stood alone among creepers and flowers that grew and withered without anyone taking care of them – cockscomb, allamanda, bougainvillea and even the white flowers of the ivy gourd that grew on the slanted fence and the pale mauve flowers of morning glory sticking out of its maze of short and slender vines and fragile tips all over the ground – and among multicoloured butterflies and brightly hued dragonflies whose wings at times reflected the sun in shards of lights, you stood still, both hands on the handlebars of your bicycle, its white metallic basket at the front filled with tangerines you had bought to offer his daughter, a bunch of flowery grass you had seen along the way and had told yourself were lovely and worth being picked, two or three nice-coloured soft-cover books which were collections of love poems youngsters like to read, and the violin which rested quietly in a brown leather case, still and hesitating. You hesitated. You turned round towards the path you had come from. You could still see the houses of the other teachers, some of whom you knew as they had taught you and when you met them you bowed to them with hands joined and stopped to chat with them for a while. On a clothesline, clothes of all colours undulated under the breeze. Some boys were having fun with their bikes on a small earth mound. Some girls, relations of the schoolteachers, had gathered in a circle to play French-skipping. From one of those houses you heard the tinny sound of a radio drowned out by someone’s voice shouting to someone among laughs and that someone answering as loudly among laughs. You could also see the caretakers’ houses aligned against one side of the school wall. One of them was a small grocery shop where workers, their wives and children came regularly to stock up and some of them stood watching TV for a long time without feeling selfconscious. Just a little farther up you saw pupils busy preparing seedbeds and harrowing a plot – those were pupils learning agriculture and some of them were expressing the hope that the morning glory in their plot would be more beautiful than in the other plots so long as no one came and dug it out on the sly out of jealousy. From the gymnasium you could hear the PE teacher encourage the school team basketball players and you heard the clang of the ball hitting the back plate. Those were the classroom buildings one, two, three, four and five and, over there, the industrial arts workshop, with in front of it a straight row of Indian almond trees. All of that was familiar to you and you told yourself that your hesitation was out of place, that you had nothing to fear. And it was while attending that private tuition course that you noticed that outside of school hours he kept drinking like a fish without paying heed to the headmaster’s remonstrations, for the way he behaved when he came out to welcome you was proof enough that he was inebriated and he hadn’t showered or dressed properly. He was wearing a cheap t-shirt and cheap trousers whose synthetic fibre material was worn thin into short tears that gaped and expanded every time he gestured, which gave you an idea of the sort of man he was. His house was extremely dirty and messy in every corner and even in the very emptiness of the air, and you had no trouble imagining the confusion and mental disorder of the one who lived in it. Your heart beat wildly beneath the enormous, tangled-up cotton threads that overpowered that house. In the living room, which was used as classroom, there were old and shrivelled collections of songs and music manuals piled up one on top of the other among music magazines and magazines of another type you’d later learn were nudies. There was an old black-and-white telly he had probably bought at some auction and which was covered with dust, a very big radio cassette player with all sorts of cassettes higgledy-piggledy like the piles of books and mags and equally coated with dust. There were dishes and glasses yet to be washed, some for so long that the boiled water or soup or sauce that had rotted or evaporated had left grime rings at various levels, and some of those dishes and plates were being visited by house lizards that savoured all around in the company of masses of nonchalant cockroaches which hardly moved when they perceived human movements, and in some glasses the floating dust was like a lid. On the floor in one corner there was a sinuous line of black ants that disappeared behind a plastic garment bag whose gaping zipper revealed hangers, some naked, others loaded with shirts or trousers, and much dirty laundry piled at the bottom.