A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [165]
37
WHEN I FINISHED my year in the first grade, I passed from the volcanic realm of Teacher Isabella the cat herder into the cool, calm hands of Teacher Zelda in the second grade. She had no cats, but a sort of blue-gray aura surrounded her and at once beguiled and fascinated me.
Teacher Zelda talked so softly that if we wanted to hear what she was saying, we not only had to stop talking, we had to lean forward on our desks. Consequently we spent the whole morning leaning forward, because we did not want to miss a word. Everything that Teacher Zelda said was enchanting and rather unexpected. It was as if we were learning another language from her, not very different from Hebrew and yet distinctive and touching. She would call stars the "stars of heaven," the abyss was "the mighty abyss," and she spoke of "turbid rivers" and "nocturnal deserts." If you said something in class that she liked, Teacher Zelda would point to you and say softly: "Look, all of you, there's a child who's flooded with light" If one of the girls was daydreaming, Teacher Zelda explained to us that just as nobody can be blamed for being unable to sleep, so you couldn't hold Noa responsible for being unable to stay awake at times.
Any kind of mockery Teacher Zelda called "poison." A lie she called "a Fall." Laziness was "leaden," and gossip "the eyes of the flesh." She called arrogance "wing-scorching," and giving anything up, even little things like an eraser or your turn to hand out the drawing paper, she called "making sparks." A couple of weeks before the festival of Purim, which was our favorite festival in the whole year, she suddenly announced: There may not be a Purim this year. It may be put out before it gets here.
Put out? A festival? We were all in a panic: we were not only afraid of missing Purim, but we felt a dark dread of these powerful, hidden forces, whose very existence we had not been told about before, that were capable, if they so wished, of lighting or putting out festivals as though they were so many matches.
Teacher Zelda did not bother to go into details but just hinted to us that the decision of whether to extinguish the festival depended mainly on her: she herself was somehow connected to the invisible forces that distinguished between festival and nonfestival, between sacred and profane. So if we didn't want the festival to be put out, we said to each other, it would be best for us to make a special effort to do at least the little we could to make sure Teacher Zelda was in a good mood with us. There is no such thing as a little, Teacher Zelda used to say, to someone who has nothing.
I remember her eyes: alert and brown, secretive, but not happy. Jewish eyes that had a slightly Tatar set to them.
Sometimes she would cut the lesson short and send everyone out into the yard to play, but keep back a couple of us who were found worthy to continue. The exiles in the yard were not so much pleased at the free time as jealous of the elect.
And sometimes when time was up, when Teacher Isabella's class had long been sent home, when the cats, set free, had spread all over the apartment, the staircase, and the yard, and only we seemed forgotten under the wings of Teacher Zelda's stories, leaning forward on our desks so as not to miss a word, an anxious mother, still wearing her apron, would come and stand in the doorway, hands on her hips, and wait at first impatiently, then with surprise that turned into curiosity, as though she too had become a little girl full of wonderment, reaching out, with the rest of us, to hear and not miss what would happen at the end of the story to the lost cloud,