The Place Will Comfort You

by Naama Goldstein

  How could her own division, the Graphics girls, have done this to her, one of their own? Maybe not the strongest in execution, but she had great ideas. Low on patience, high on creativity. Shulee Bouzaglo! Or, as they would hear it in roll call each morning, surname first: Bouzaglo Shulee. Their only one. Had they forgotten all their affection for her as her sick week had stretched on? Was it her fault she suffered from a chronic condition? Could she have been expected to leave the house with the eyelids still so inflamed even past the infectious phase? Several young men in her neighborhood, and many more older, considered her deeply attractive. You respected your admirers at least so much as to not willfully tarnish what it was they saw. Because of this she suffered now. Because of this, for the length of the trip, she would continue to be associated with the disgrace.

  But she was letting herself off too easily. Not just for the trip’s length would the stigma cleave but for all time, for all school time, she the friend of Yona, in a league with a weak mind, suggestible to fear. Yona had earned them both the grade. For an Annual Trip posed tests unlike those back in school. A blister on the foot translated every step into pain. The sun wouldn’t relent. A gully at the end of the long rope approached too slowly while the curious wish to spread the hands came right away. Sloshing through standing water lively with mosquito babies your imagination reduced to a transparent, writhing worm. Or a stench got to you. The torment might rise higher than the resolve, the horror stick like a nasty case of hiccups. If you stopped you would not continue. Later the failure of a girl to see herself making it through would be her lasting disgrace. The Trip would become known for this one test, and she for having flunked it. This was the big risk, and how much more so if your position among the girls wasn’t pivotal in the first place. An individualist was too easily recast a pariah. The only way to try and work around the terms was to remain on the bus, but who did this? Never anyone of stature or the hope of it.

  And who wanted to stay on the bus? The annual trip was the one school activity she looked forward to. Here, finally, your labors were rewarded richly, with novel sights and the distances crossed, and scents like strange jars being continually opened. Dropped figs fermenting in the sun, goat-crushed hyssop. So maybe also carrion, in full sight and shocking detail, but you saw purpose as clearly. Baked paths beneath a scalding sun eventually took you to shade, a loosely anchored plank spared you the fall into fast water, a hill slope lobbing rocks under the feet presently led you to the rare view. All of them saved you from hours pinned under a desk. How she despised a desk. Because she despised a desk she had drawn out her stay at home. She had brought the whole calamity on herself.

  In the powdery chamber she spotted a crumb of grit almost so large as to pass for a pebble. She kicked it, or rather tried, but her forearm was grabbed so that the endeavor had to be abandoned— forcefully grabbed by the strong fingers of the Civil Guard man. He sucked noisily on his tongue looking down at her. His neck was very short or perhaps settled deeply with the weight of his thick-skinned head. He said that she should gape a little less at him and mind the floor. She looked to where he pointed. The chamber floor was scooped out neatly, like a massive gameboard, with row beside row of craters.

  “Each one of those depressions at one time contained a jar of precious fluid,” he said. “The heart of a way of life. I ask that all of us here keep in mind that this is not a sandbox but a national treasure.”

  She hardly craved a lesson but she liked the personal touch. She checked around to see how his attention to her was being taken by the others. The girls nearby all feigned indifference and on the other hand she was indifferent to their pretense. Everyone was antsy but with his brassy voice he had singled out only one, and who? And why? Because of her looks? Her pluck? Her mystery? All three. A man, a man, the one man accompanying them, hers for the length of the trip, with all the others looking on.

  When he unhanded her she stuck beside him. The girls all looked at him. From his armed side she looked at them.

  “This way,” he said, and she did not follow but rather walked along.

  He was old but just like a young soldier smelled of cigarettes and gun oil, though also something more interior, similar to the cave. She wasn’t afraid of the cave. She was afraid of nothing. The Trip’s defeat had already taken place and it had not taken place in her, thank God. It had chosen Yona.

  He led them to an adjoining room and asked that they observe the cisterns. Shulee observed the others as they complied. He said to notice the stone wells, notice the crushing wheels. She noticed the top cartilage of his ear, smeared with the gray secretion of the cave. She could imagine following him around in here for days, leading the others. She pictured how her face would be affected by the transformation in her state of mind: smoothed, hardened, no time for expression. He would teach her to convert her fear into intelligence. That was bravery, one acceleration of the senses made into another, the judgment rising to every split-second occasion. She would take up smoking. Smoking helped the nerves, didn’t her mother always say.

  “Insidious,” he said. “To put it plainly, insupportable taxation would devitalize—”

  A girl from Textiles handed a classmate her canteen and watched her drink. After a spell, she reached a hand out, seized the canteen. With the other hand, gently, she pushed her friend’s forehead up, separating her mouth from the mouth of the vessel. She screwed the cap back on.

  “So industry goes underground,” the guard said. “Now, step this way.”

  In the next chamber he tapped another chipped and pitted cistern. A girl sank to one knee, untied a shoe and retied it.

  “Of course oil for the Holy Temple,” he said, “but also ointments, cosmetics and shampoo, soap.”

  Shulee heard a whispered demand for spearmint gum, followed by thanks.

  “Flax seed,” the guard said. “But without question, and having everything to do with the most popular fodder recipe of the time—”

  Someone was snuffling drily, in an increasingly obsessive way, the nose more and more self-interested. A girl from Textiles was scratching a friend’s back. She stopped and picked a chip of stone off the grayed shirt, then went back to scratching, up and down, gradually moving sideways. The man had lost the crowd. He should be relying more on his personality and less on the knowledge. The lecture was too long. He took a breath and moved on. He paused beside a dark, lopsided cleft in the chalky wall.

  “All because of an obscure feud of the Second Temple era,” he said. The shoelace-tier bent to deal with the other shoe.

  “Doesn’t that hole in the wall look a lot like an ear?” Shulee said.

  The guide swung his heavy head as if annoyed by a gnat. The girls murmured. The scratcher had stopped scratching. The snuffling had ceased. The shoelacer’s fingers were frozen mid-task.

  “At the heart of which,” the guide went on, raising his voice. “Stood one stray ram of a prized lineage. Now naturally our interest turns to lanolin.”

  “For the history of hand cream we had to crawl through the sewer?” Shulee said.

  He took a slowly swiveling step to face her. Those from Shulee’s division looked at each other. Perhaps now they would remember her as they should. This was her excellence. Once in a while she rose up like no one else.

  She slurped her upper lip into the lower, then released it. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It came out.”

  “Came out,” he said. “Maybe you still need diapers.”

  “You should watch out what makes you curious,” she said. “I’m a minor,” whereupon a woman’s voice cried out from an adjoining chamber, reedy, echoing, sepulchral:

  “That is really quite enough!”

  Even the armed guard’s cheeks seemed to blanch, before he recognized the whine of the Dress Patterns teacher.

  “Join her,” he said.

  Shulee opened her mouth to continue the conversation, but thought better of it. She swung a hip around and skipped over the nearest threshold.


  The space in which she found herself was exactly like the one she had just left: gray concavities in the floor, black holes in the walls, a few incomplete cisterns. Beside one of them sat Yona Rodelheim, her legs crossed oriental-style, the toes of her Pumas orange as dusty persimmons, her eyes closed. The Dress Patterns teacher sat a little higher, on a stone shelf that protruded from the wall. She glanced at Shulee and pointed at the floor next to Yona. Shulee found a place across the room.

  In the next chamber, a shuffle and mutter reorganized into the continued lecture. A dark face poked through the portal, regarding her briefly in the punishment room, then retreating.

  Several times Shulee thought to advance a point of view or hum a song, but in every such instance she recalled the teacher in the room and refrained.

  Had the woman recognized her voice as the one uttering the foul language in the tunnel? If so, she didn’t let on. Perhaps there was no recognition. Shulee was not a Textiles teacher’s charge. Would the teacher remember a voice without the context of a student? Maybe not, hence the hopelessness in her own voice at the time, knowing she would never confront whomever she had put on notice.

  But everything about this woman came across hopeless, a wan member of the Reverent sector. You wanted to tuck this kind of person back into one of their crowded neighborhoods. The mere sight of them, so much more fabric than skin, made you drip sweat. Knowing the crippling frequency of the Holy Law’s interference in their day made you recoil in fear. It was better to know less. The less you knew, the less bound you. For the Trip the woman had put together a particularly cumbersome outfit. The Trip was the only occasion on which the school relaxed the traditional ban on trousers worn by their female students and staff, in school or out, and indeed today, in concession to the inevitable thistles and biting things, the teacher was wearing unfashionable track pants. Over these she wore a long denim skirt to keep secret the fact that her legs split at a higher point than the ankles. To this woman every girl in the school would look like a whore even in a skirt, whereas to Shulee the thought of a body so thoroughly concealed all its life nearly brought tears. She herself braved expulsion from the school on a daily basis, squirming on the hindmost seat of her bus every afternoon, as she pulled tight jeans on under the skirt, then peeled off the skirt and unbuttoned the uniform blouse to reveal a tank top, a halter top, a bustier, to feel the sun, feel the breeze, to signal to the modern nation that she was a part and feel the eyes of her men pleased.

  She drew a heart in the grit of the floor. She sifted out the larger particles and formed a small mound. She looked over the shapes cut in the walls. She observed the dust-dulled strands of her meal partner’s hair. The hair was dull to begin with, an ugly blond, like terrier fur.

  If only the lecture were audible here, no matter how stultifying. When she applied herself to listening, she found she could, with some effort, discern the words through the wall.

  “The perdurability of human hair!” he said, as if he had been following her eye around the punishment room. “Provisionally, of course. Conditions allowing, climate permitting, stability, exceptional dryness. Naturally our thoughts turn to Masada.”

  Masada? They were nowhere near Masada. Masada was last year. She put her finger to the floor again, then raised it to her mouth, discreetly, tasted not much of anything, or rather much of nothing, coatingly, chalk. At Masada the lecture had been as needlessly abstruse, as unending, but at least it had contained the grain of a better story. The men killed the women and the young, the men killed themselves. The Roman slavers found dead bodies. For the generations after there remained a girl’s braid, in a glass display case, caked with a gray paste of desert dust. She saw it herself. Very dry hair. Time tore the braid from the head and time conserved it. That most definitely had been a better Trip. On Masada there had been other groups. She remembered seeking shelter with a Japanese tour. Their guide she hadn’t understood at all, but the propulsive intonation tilted her, and tilted her, till she was angled in among them, equally, and they had made room, respectful. Of her kinship to the braid. They had seen it: where her curls ended, hair unlike theirs. They could imagine her two thousand years needing shampoo.

  She knew of their regard for suicide. She had followed every episode of Shogun on TV. In class of course they’d all been mad for Richard Chamberlain but Shulee liked the samurai. Squat though he was, but what ferocity compressed! And how she had triumphed in bending the eye to see the facial strangenesses as ornament. No one in class had believed that she could. On a woman, all right, they’d said, on the women it was like makeup, like adornment, for example take Chamberlain’s love interest, a doll, a stunner, but the men? The men were not like men, too strange, fierce as beasts and fussy as girls with their silks and hairdos. Impossible that her feelings for the samurai were real. They said she was just trying to stand out. Untrue. His single-minded hatred for the leading man had won her heart. Then the hara-kiri episode had come and after that nobody scoffed, she was given space. The act had shaken foe and friend alike. What would the show be without the samurai? At break she had chalked an elegy to him upon the blackboard, just his name, over and over, Omi Omi Omi, with the proper honor suffixes: san and of blessed memory.

  But that was last year, a somewhat childish episode—sincere, but after all a character on television. This year she was committed to Marcus Bentov, the drummer from the rock group Neft, the bald one, a real personality. Everyone went for the pretty singer boy, but there was always so much more life behind the frontman.

  When at last the time had come to leave the manufactory, Yona Rodelheim was roused and made to crawl out first, practically, the Dress Patterns teacher before her, the armed escort behind. All the way out, a murmured comforting, or goading, could be heard ahead.

  • • •

  A grate was slammed, the emptied crawlway swallowing the echo. From her seat Shulee could hear the Dress Patterns teacher urging a more efficient drift towards the vehicles. Through the broad windshield just ahead she saw green all around, swept by silvered ripples in the breeze. The driver peered at her through the rearview mirror, spitting a lump of gum into a coffee can electric-taped onto his dashboard. She saw the guide adjusting the strap of his gun and climbing onto the Clerical bus.

  Finally every girl had boarded the two buses. The drivers started the engines, but did not yet pull out. Two teachers stood facing Shulee, who was sitting on their assigned front seat.

  “Bouzaglo, Shulee.” This was the Art History teacher, her head turned so her left eye honed more sharply on her student.

  “Present!”

  The teacher closed her eyes, then opened them. The Dress Patterns teacher stood beside her, gazing off along the center aisle.

  “What is wrong with your assigned place?” the Art History teacher said. “I see your partner is doing a fine job of saving it.”

  “I want to sit with you,” Shulee said.

  The teacher anchored her fists at her waist. Under the caked dirt, her jeans, a good fit and in vogue, confirmed the rumor sparked in school by something in this woman’s bearing, in the composition of her clothes, in her unsaddened spinsterhood at very possibly already twenty-five, that outside teaching hours she wasn’t observant. These jeans were well worn and an investment. They had a life outside of school, as did this woman, admirably lean, with flat, wide hip bones propped on widely spaced thighs. To school she always wore silver filaments in her earlobes and sleeveless dresses of Indian cotton with sleeved shirts underneath to comply with the code. Now her mouth was curving in a sealed, downturned smile, succumbing.

  Shulee smiled back. Normally their relationship was troubled, the teacher too often distracted from the substance of Shulee’s in-class observations, too hung up on their loudness and sweep. But on the Trip there was a hope. Here academics were irrelevant except for having forged a preexisting, intradepartmental fealty, familial warmth. Shulee knew this woman and the woman knew her. This teacher would have heard her swearing in the tun
nel, would have recognized the voice, and didn’t care.

  “The jeans on you are something, Teacher,” she said. “Where did you get them? You’re a bomb. You look good normally but these show off your figure like we can’t see as a matter of routine. That I should look so good when I’m your age, Amen.”

  The Dress Patterns teacher took a deep breath, and blew it slowly out, mastering her envy. She would have to. Her colleague was everything she was not, lovely and dark, with black hair cropped close to a delicate skull, a Yemeni with deep brown skin, today splotched with gray. Clean her up, and she belonged on the chair of a sidewalk cafe in an artist’s neighborhood in Tel Aviv, where she would sit engrossed in conversation, uninterested in people-watching, since she was the people to watch.

  “All of our clothes on all of us right now are something,” she said. “We’re all coated with deposits.”

  Shulee enjoyed the sound of this. The teacher’s throaty accent beautified a burnished university Hebrew. “Are they from Dizengoff Center?” Shulee said. “Billy Jean Modelle, right?”

  “We’re all tired,” the teacher said. “Not one of us had an easy time in there. I’m sure we’d all appreciate a measure of release right now but, Shulee, you must try to find yours via channels more constructive than this incessant unruliness.”

  “Authentic,” Shulee said. “Not the knockoff. I can tell the knockoffs.”

  She locked her eyes on those of her teacher’s. Now the teacher knew. Shulee, also, was a contemporary woman in her private life, regularly shopping for pants, knowing the popular labels.