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Authors: Shira Nayman

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BOOK: A Mind of Winter
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“She told me that the day after she got the news, she awoke with words going around in her head. Sentences I had given her, years earlier, to memorize. And then she began to recite:
The Renaissance was a period of time in history when there was a new spirit of enquiry, of interest in learning, of desire to develop new ideas and take part in new activities.
When she’d memorized those words in my classroom, she’d had only an inkling of what they meant. But when it came flashing back in her mind only a few days earlier, she said she finally understood what they meant.”

I had no idea why I was telling all this to Ma Ling. Looking at the girl, I felt muddled and sad. A glance at the watch around my neck informed me that it was almost time for the daily supply to be delivered by one of the girls to my room.

“The funny thing was,” I continued, “I never truly understood the implications of those words myself until Jennifer relayed to me that experience of hers. Knowledge is mysterious; that’s one of the things I learned as a teacher. You can think you know something and even pass it along, without really knowing it at all.”

Now, Ma Ling looked entirely baffled.

“Oh dear, I’m afraid I’m not answering your question,” I said, trying to remember what the question had been.

“Why did you stop teaching there? At the school in England?”

I tried to untangle my thoughts. “I was supposed to say certain things to my students. It became harder and harder, until finally I could no longer say them.”

A lost experience loomed up from the past: Awards Day, the last formal day of the school year. I was standing at the lectern, preparing to deliver my speech.

“About two years into the war, the headmistress asked me to address the student body. The remarks I prepared were what was expected—praising the contributions women had made to the war effort. Like everybody else, the girls had seen the newsreels: former housewives in head scarves, assembling guns and shells in munitions factories; nurses wearing the starched uniforms of the Red Cross; and everywhere—on buses, in parlors, at the movies—women and girls knitting socks. Our own girls were no exception. You could hear the
click click
of needles at assembly every morning.

“But that morning at the podium, looking at the first page of my address, I just couldn’t read what I’d written. Instead, I talked to the girls about what kind of new world they could help to make. I spoke about being independent, about developing ideas and ways of living that were new—no longer under the thumb of men: it was men, after all, who had waged this war, and every other war I knew of.”

I was no longer talking to Ma Ling, though the girl sat attentively, attempting, it seemed, to take it all in.

“After a few minutes of this, the headmistress approached the podium and whispered that she thought I should step down. I knew then that my teaching career in England was over.”

I stared hard at Ma Ling. For an instant, I felt as if she had become a creature from another world: an ancient queen, or some other reincarnated spirit. But the moment passed and there, again, was Ma Ling, restored to her earthly self. What I had just told her was a lie: the same lie I’d been telling myself for years. Yes, those events had happened, but they had not been the real reason for my departure from the school.

A fresh furrow appeared between Ma Ling’s brows. “It must be different there, now that the war is over,” she said.

I was taken aback. “You want to be a schoolteacher, Ma Ling? Is that it?”

She blushed and bent her head. “We all have plans. For when we leave Manor House,” she said quietly, into her empty tea bowl. Was there a trace of sarcasm, I wondered, in the slightly exaggerated way she’d said
Manor House
? When she looked up, her eyes had turned to flint.

I became newly aware of the healthy fullness of the girl’s arms and cheeks. I glanced down at my own arms on the table and was so startled I almost upset the bowl I held in my hands. How had my limbs become these sticks, covered in downy dry skin the color of parchment? Ma Ling’s gaze passed from my face to my torso; I followed it, noting my own sunken chest and the billowy look of my once close-fitting dress.

Ma Ling nudged her tea bowl toward the middle of the table, pushing back her chair. “We should be going.”

We walked back in silence. I knew that something had changed between us, that whatever it is that snaps sometimes between people had snapped.

The beginnings of dusk floated through the air. We wound back by way of the market, where the farmers and merchants were well advanced in the dismantling of their stalls. A man barked orders to an elderly woman; she reached above her head to unhook the glazed orange ducks, elegant as swans, strung by their necks on a wooden pole. Beside them, a boy stood by a basket of wilted radish tops, calling out the end-of-day price in a shrill child’s voice.

That night, lying awake in my cot, naked against the thick wet heat, Ma Ling’s flinty eyes came back to me: nubs of condemnation punched from the darkness. Where had I seen that expression before? I remembered another time, sitting beside Ma Ling as she brushed her hair before the cracked glass; seeing the calm of her features reflected in the mirror as she struggled to say—or not say—what she meant, I had felt my own happiness peel away.
My patron
, Ma Ling had said. To hear her refer to him that way, to see the coyness in her face—and pride! It was then that it came to me, watching the steady brushstrokes that turned Ma Ling’s hair to burnished metal: that innocence is not something you’re born to, it’s something you must construct with the scraps life throws you. A painstaking labor, grain by grain, brick by tiny brick.

How much of sin could be effaced in this way? What of me? And what of Robert?

Here I was, witness to Ma Ling’s own fastidious labor—Ma Ling, sitting at her makeshift dressing table, brushing her hair in careful, relentless rhythm.

Another rhythm. Of course! Ma Ling’s patron was the man of the three-part rhythm on the stairs. I imagined her sitting on the four-poster bed beneath maroon drapings, propped against a mountain of silk pillows and struggling to read aloud from Wordsworth, Jane Austen, George Elliot. Lying beside her, I pictured a man just the other side of youth, handsome and trim, wearing a fine linen shirt and smoking a cigarette. The man’s cane leaned against the bed and, although the injury I fancied he had sustained in the war was not immediately apparent, the aura of the hero hung about him. An incongruous image—not a hundred feet from my own meager room: the two of them luxuriating among pillows reciting the words of the English poets.

From that time on, when I descended at night to the passageway joining the front of the house to the back, I waited in the airless oblong space with a sense of dread until I heard the sound of croup on the stairs. When it finally came (and some nights this was not until dawn), I slowly made my way back upstairs to my room, which had also changed—no longer a place of respite but a chamber of tense confinement.

Just as initially the house had welcomed me, its spare tidy rooms offering a new chance of order and peace, now it seemed to be shutting me out. Wherever I went in its rickety confines, I began to feel as if I were intruding, as if my presence were an affront. Even the schoolroom began to feel like a no-man’s-land, cordoned off, a site of potential danger. I kept my duties to a minimum: preparing and conducting my lessons, avoiding going anywhere I was not absolutely required to be. Dining I kept to the barest necessity, on some days appearing only for breakfast, when I would pocket one or two of the white buns that would serve later for my supper.

And then my late-night wanderings ceased. During those interminable black hours, I now committed myself to the immobile punishment of my room. It bit into me, this loneliness. How distant this room was from my cozy, neat suite at the country school I’d taught in—a hemisphere, a lifetime away: the study, with its chintz-covered couch and antique writing table, and beyond double doors, the sleeping quarters, a pleasing room with gauzy white curtains that fluttered by day, and at night were still before a heavy tar cloth that blocked the light of my reading lamp from the whirring steel enemy prowling the skies.

There my life had buzzed with purpose, even more so when the girls had begun arriving from war-ravaged London to stay in those relatively safe parts.

Penelope arrived with the first trainload. I noticed immediately the fraught, dreamy look in her face that signaled a girl with a passion for books. In the classroom, Penelope attended to my words with a mixture of distraction and fervor. One evening in the common room, two weeks after her arrival, she asked nervously if she might show me some verses she’d written. I suggested she visit my rooms during the evening study period.

In my sitting room, Penelope seemed different: older, more confident. When she finished reading aloud the verses she’d brought—which held the promise of a true poet—the girl seemed curiously indifferent to my response. Why the anxious request in the common room, I wondered, if she had no interest in her teacher’s thoughts? The cool, almost arrogant look on her face as she left came back to me, as if Penelope had set me some kind of challenge that I’d failed. And yet, behind those cool eyes, there had been the shadow of coy pleasure.

Penelope showed up at my rooms the following Thursday evening and again, the week after that. Without either of us discussing it, this meeting became a routine.

It was some weeks before I realized just how much I looked forward to those visits, odd as they were. Penelope would arrive, wary and reserved. The moment she began reading, the haughtiness would settle over her. And yet, as the weeks passed, she also seemed more open to my comments, scribbling in the margins of her notebook as I gave my response.

“I’ve heard you’ll be staying over the summer,” I said at the end of the spring term. Most of the girls were to be billeted to families in the surrounding villages; only a few were to remain at the school, along with a skeleton staff.

Penelope’s face flashed with irritation; she reached for her notebook and began to read. Everything fell away: the school, my work, the other mistresses and girls. The poem at an end, Penelope looked at me with deep eyes—and there, a smile on her lips, happy and shy. The smile seemed an omen; I felt released from a stricture I’d not until that moment known I was constrained by, and reached for her hand. The girl remained motionless, then turned her head slowly toward me as a startled animal might, an opaque muffled look in her eyes.

“Penelope,” I said softly. I found myself drawing toward that beautiful, clouded, enigmatic face. But the girl’s lips suddenly twisted; she snatched her hand away. A rustle of papers, a flurry of movement, the click of schoolgirl heels: a blurred expression of disgust. Then the sound of a door opening and closing. Bewildered, I looked around the room. All was as it had been: I was alone.

A few short weeks and the summer was upon us. All but the five girls boarding for the summer were dispatched to their billets, and the school seemed suddenly large and gracious, alive with the promise of some delightful invitation.

It was one of those rare days that in any given year the English can count on one hand, when the sun is strong and hot. At breakfast, the girls were in high spirits; I suggested an outing to the lake. The cook packed us a picnic of potted meat, carrots, chalky ration-flour buns, and for dessert, squares of hard dark chocolate. The walk in the heat was marvelous, and I found myself feeling content, humming a melody under my breath as I watched the girls chatting happily up ahead. Even the icy remove Penelope had adopted since our last private meeting failed to unsettle me.

At the lake, I spread a faded checked tablecloth on the grass and readied lunch while the girls splashed in the water. The heat showed no sign of letting up. How lovely it would be, I thought, gazing out at the shiny white limbs of the girls, to be in a climate where one was always surrounded by syrupy heat, where bright rays layered the world into dappled textures of glow and shade. The girls emerged from the water, shaking droplets from their hair and skin as they ran up the bank. Penelope wrapped herself in her towel, the others preferring to dry themselves in the sun.

After lunch, the girls slipped on their tunics, put on socks and shoes, gathered up their belongings. On the long walk back, they sang rounds. Once we reached the school grounds, they dropped their satchels and raced to the bathhouse to rinse off. I climbed the driveway at my own slower pace, deposited the picnic basket at the kitchen door, and then doubled back to the bathhouse. By the time I got there, the girls were stripped down, standing above the long metal trough, their backs to the door where I stood, lathering themselves with bars of rough yellow soap. It was cool within the barnlike structure, and I imagined their shoulders and arms to be covered with goose bumps. One girl reached down to the faucet, cupped a handful of water, and, giggling, splashed the face of the girl beside her. Soon all five were spraying each other, gasping with fun. I stood silently behind them, watching the fluid and unself-conscious grace of their movements.

When one girl twisted around in her play, she caught sight of me at the half-open door and turned fully to face me. Immediately, the others turned too. I found myself confronted by five naked, shivering, suddenly quiet girls, their hair dripping onto their shoulders. Unthinkingly, I sought out Penelope and again, unthinkingly, lowered my eyes and found my gaze fixed on the girl’s well-developed bosom. The girls seemed to be waiting for me to say something, to explain my presence.

I cleared my throat and began, awkwardly, “When you’re ready, girls …” There was a pause, an endless ringing, and then I retrieved my will, forced my gaze back up to the level of the girls’ faces in time to see a look of dark despisement in Penelope’s eyes.

“When you’re ready, cook has tea for you in the common room.” I turned and walked from the outhouse, aware of the stony silence that continued to fill the vast draughty room behind me.

BOOK: A Mind of Winter
10.66Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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