A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [226]
When they whispered breathlessly in recess about some "halfwitted Tali who lives down the alley," who hangs around in the Tel Arza woods and gives it to anyone who hands her half a pound, or the fat widow from the kitchen goods shop who takes a few boys from class 8 to the storeroom behind her shop and shows what she's got in exchange for watching them jerk off, I felt a pang of sorrow nibbling at my heart, as though some great horror was lying in wait for everybody, men and women alike, a cruel, patient horror, a creeping horror that was slowly spinning a slimy invisible web, and maybe I was already infected without knowing it.
When we got to class 6 or 7, the school nurse, a gruff, military woman, suddenly came into our classroom, and stood there for a whole double lesson, alone in front of thirty-eight dazed boys, revealing to us all the facts of life. Fearlessly she described organs and functions, drew diagrams of the plumbing in colored chalks on the blackboard, she spared us nothing: seeds and eggs, glands, sheaths and tubes. Then she moved on to the horror show and treated us to terrifying descriptions of the two monsters lurking at the gateway, the Frankenstein's monster and the werewolf of the world of sex: the twin calamities of pregnancy and infection.
Dazed and shamefaced, we left the lecture and went out into the world, which now appeared to me as a gigantic minefield or a plague-ridden planet. The child I was then grasped, more or less, what was supposed to be pushed into what, what was supposed to receive what, but for the life of me I could not understand why a sane man or woman would want to get caught in those labyrinthine dragon's lairs. The bold nurse who had not hesitated to lay everything bare for us, from hormones to rules of hygiene, had forgotten to mention, even obliquely, that there might be some pleasure involved in all those complicated, dangerous procedures, either because she wanted to protect our innocence or because she simply did not know.
Our teachers at Tachkemoni mostly wore threadbare dark-gray or brown suits or ancient jackets and constantly demanded our respect and fear: Mr. Monzon, Mr. Avisar, Mr. Neimann Senior and Mr. Neimann Junior, Mr. Alkalai, Mr. Duvshani, Mr. Ophir, Mr. Michaeli, the imperious Mr. Ilan the headmaster, who always appeared in a three-piece suit, and his brother, also Mr. Ilan but only in a two-piece suit.
We had to get to our feet when each of these men entered the classroom, and we could not sit down until he had graciously indicated that we were worthy to do so. We addressed the teachers as "my teacher," and always in the third person. "My teacher asked me to bring a note from my parents, but my parents have gone to Haifa. Would he please let me bring the note on Sunday instead?" Or: "Please, my teacher, doesn't he think he's laying it on a bit thick here?" (The second "he" in this sentence does not, of course, refer to the teacher—whom none of us would ever have dared accuse of laying it on a bit thick—but merely the prophet Jeremiah, or the poet Bialik, whose blazing anger we were studying at the time.)
As for us, the pupils, we lost our first names completely from the moment we crossed the threshold of the school. Our teachers called us only Bozo, Saragosti, Valero, Ribatski, Alfasi, Klausner, Hajaj, Schleifer, De La Mar, Danon, Ben-Naim, Cordovero, and Axelrod.
They had a plethora of punishments, those teachers at Tachkemoni School. A slap