Scenes From Village Life - Amos Oz [46]
The iron gates of the school were locked for the weekend. The school building and the playground were surrounded by iron railings topped with coils of barbed wire. Benny Avni circled the site twice before he found a place where it was possible to climb into the playground. He waved to the dog, which was watching him from the other side of the road, took hold of the iron railing and hoisted his body up, pushed the barbed wire to one side, scratching himself in the process, and half jumped, half rolled into the playground, twisting his ankle as he landed. He limped across the playground, dripping blood from his lacerated left hand.
Entering the school building through a side door, he found himself in a long corridor. Several classrooms opened off it on either side. There was a smell of sweat, food and chalk dust. The floor was littered with scraps of paper and orange peels. He went into a classroom whose door was ajar, and on the teacher's desk he found a dusty cloth and a piece of paper torn from an exercise book, on which a few lines were scribbled. He inspected the handwriting: it was indeed a woman's writing, but it was not Nava's. Benny Avni replaced the paper, now stained with his blood, on the desk and turned to look at the blackboard, on which was written in the same womanly hand: "The calm of village life compared with the bustle of the town. Please finish by Wednesday at the latest." Underneath appeared the words: "Read the next three chapters carefully at home and prepare to answer the questions." On the wall hung pictures of Theodor Herzl, of the President and the Prime Minister, as well as some posters illustrating slogans such as "Nature lovers respect wild flowers."
The benches were all higgledy-piggledy, as if the pupils had been in so great a hurry to leave when the bell rang that they had simply pushed them aside. The geraniums in the window boxes looked sad and neglected. On the wall opposite the teacher's desk hung a large map of Israel with the village of Tel Ilan in the Manasseh Hills circled in green. A solitary pullover hung on the coat hooks. Benny Avni left the classroom and limped around the deserted corridors. Drops of blood from his scratched hand marked his passage. When he reached the toilets at the end of the first corridor, something drew him to the girls' toilets. He found the smell slightly different from that of boys' toilets. There were five cubicles, and Benny Avni checked to see what was behind each door. He even looked into the cleaning cupboard. Then he retraced his steps and took another corridor, and another, until he finally found the door to the teachers' common room. Here he paused for a moment, feeling the metal plate with the words Teachers' Common Room. No entry for pupils without special permission. For a moment he had a feeling that some sort of meeting was going on behind the closed door, and he was afraid of disturbing it, yet also eager to interrupt. But the common room was empty, and dark, too, its curtains drawn over the closed windows.
Bookcases lined two walls of the room, and in the middle was a large table with a couple of dozen chairs. Empty and half-empty tea and coffee cups littered the table, together with books, timetables, printed circulars and notebooks. Next to the far window was a large cabinet with a drawer for each teacher. He found Nava Avni's drawer, pulled it out and laid it on the table. It contained a pile of exercise books, a box of chalk, a packet of throat pastilles and an old sunglasses case with nothing in it. After a moment's thought he put the drawer back in its place.