East of Time (4 page)

During the fifth year of my studies, in the third month of the year, on the second day of the week, Berta, who never needed to raise her voice to quieten her students, made her way into the classroom with a strange, almost secretive expression on her face. I was thirteen at the time, yet I haven't forgotten — or am imagining that I remember — the green glint in her eyes, her measured walk, the blend of dignity and mystery she projected.

‘The philosopher Chuang Tzu,' Berta began, ‘dreamt that he was a butterfly. When he awoke, he didn't know whether he was a man who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly that was dreaming it was a man.'

Suddenly the door opened. Our nervous principal, accompanied by a bald inspector who kept harassing our school, looking for excuses to close it down, burst into the classroom. ‘And what are we teaching here today?' sneered the representative of the government's education board, which regarded our school as a nest of future subversives.

‘The humanity of a butterfly,' Berta replied in a whisper.

‘Hm,' said the educator. ‘Perhaps we should try something else — mathematics, for instance. Students! Pencils in hand, open your exercise books,' the intruder ordered. ‘Now, given that there are 360 degrees of longitude, and fifteen of these equal one hour, what time would it be in Moscow, if it is twelve noon in London?'

The class froze: I could taste the tension on my tongue. Then, almost in unison, a forest of twenty young hands shot up to answer the challenge. All of them had the correct answer! The inspector could scarcely conceal his astonishment.

Berta, discreetly removing a white lace handkerchief from her sleeve, managed to stop a tear of triumphant joy from falling to the floor.

 

 
Phantasm
 

A certain mystery surrounded my teacher of natural science, ‘Miss Lazar' Melman. Her olive skin, her pitch-black eyes, her Flamenco body-talk and her voice — like the rustling, silky pages of a book of psalms — betrayed, at least to me, a Marrano background, maybe even that of a royal Castilian.

One evening in March 1935, a group of five students, including me, were invited to the Melmans'. They lived a few doors from my family, in a sparsely decorated apartment, and we were meeting there to discuss our form's contribution to the forthcoming concert, ‘The Dawn of Spring', a festive affair staged annually by the children of our school.

I was elated, convinced that my inclusion by Miss Lazar was no accident. Making my way to her door, I felt everything within me rejoicing. Perhaps she would permit me to sit next to her, to touch her arm — why not? Unfortunately my joy was shortlived. As I crossed her threshold I beheld a scene with
which I simply could not come to terms. My teacher, the descendant of a possible Castilian prince, was a housewife, standing in her kitchen and cooking soup! To make matters worse, her husband, who taught Jewish Antiquity at our school and was known to his students by the uncomplimentary nickname ‘Shmelke', shamelessly addressed her in the familiar second-person.

I believe Miss Lazar read my thoughts, for on the very next morning she managed to restore, in my eyes, her aristocratic Iberian image.

‘Science,' began Donna Lazar, right at the start of her lesson, ‘can both assist and destroy nature. Permit me, dear children,' she continued, looking directly at me, ‘to illustrate this with an old Spanish folktale.

‘There was once a young flower that grew in a village. It had not been cultivated in any garden and it grew on the fringes of the season, a startling indigo blossom. A curious scientist arrived to study it; he conducted some experiments to determine its character, but the flower soon withered away. Although this happened many, many years ago, the local peasants still swear that, come night, they can hear the flowers of the village weeping...'

I must admit that at the time I could not understand the fable. Much later, I realized that my teacher's story was a Ladino song of our past and our bygone future.

 

 
My First Poem
 

Spring in the city of the waterless river, where the grey had not yet displaced the blue. Rhythmic clatter of horses, their rich golden dung on the cobblestone roads. Rumble of iron-shod wheels on wooden carts laden with an abundance of farm produce. Gardens of budding lilac.

Enveloped in such evocative tranquillity, I made my solitary way to school. I was just a boy. How was I to know that all of this was but the transient smile of a landscape which was destined to pass from the world forever?

The morning's first lesson was poetry, a compulsory subject in our school. All students had to know the classics by heart. My Spanish lady, in her ever-tight white-cage blouse, entered the classroom in the company of a tall man wearing a black cape, a white linen shirt fastened with a burgundy cravat, and a grey fedora — which, as he took it off, released a black waterfall of curly hair that cascaded down over his high pale forehead.

‘Children,' said my Castilian princess as we remained standing, ‘I want you to meet the great poet, Moyshe Broderzon, who has agreed to talk to us about the art of writing prose and poetry.'

Although Broderzon addressed us in the simplest language, I am not sure if we — or at least I — grasped everything he said. ‘Good writing,' he explained, ‘is a meeting of heart and mind, of storm and calm. Here the sun may set and rise at the same time, a rose may blossom and instantly wither away. But always remember, children: the beauty of language is priceless, but never, ever, sacrifice wisdom on the altar of beautiful words.

‘I once walked past a bronze statue,' Broderzon continued. ‘It was the statue of a nameless poet. His face was like a letter in a lost tongue, and he stood there with his mouth open, as if needing more air. And on his pedestal was engraved the following short poem:

Youth is great and daring,

A stand against the world alone;

But a twig in a storm will outshine

A plant nursed quietly at home.'

That evening, while the flame in our kerosene lamp incited the shadows to wrestle, I secretly took my fountainpen from my schoolbag, then watched as the ink began to flow. I wrote:

Three horses, three horses, white eagles,

Escaped the warmth of the king's stable

And flew into the face of the winds,

To dance in the heart of a fable.

At midnight, as the last ember died in our stove, my Spanish lady paid me a visit. With quivering hands she took my poem, and on her smile I erected a castle.

 

 
Awakening
 

Yuda Reznik, who taught me Yiddish literature, was a short man with thick curly hair and black laughing eyes. He always wore a skimpy tweed jacket which remembered his barmitzvah days, and a red tie that could have doubled as a shoelace. He was no saint, but one had to be blind not to see the halo of the song of I. L. Peretz about his head:

I'll swim around in the light

On a zephyr undisturbed;

Let no cloud obscure the sky

But the earth.

There wasn't a female student in our class who wasn't in love with him — and who could blame them, for he was a charmer. And a bridegroom of our language. There is more universality in Yiddish, he would say, than in Esperanto; more
modernity in the old traditions than in the latest innovations. His comments on writing were phenomenal. Tell only half of what you know. Remember: a story without a shadow is a sad tale. It is not the first line of a story but the last which provokes the reader...

His lectures were a feast of poetry, mirage and fable. When he spoke, reality was vanquished and succumbed to myth, while reason won a Pyrrhic victory over emotion. Above all there was Peretz, father of modern Yiddish literature, who lived in every fibre of Reznik's being.

In 1939, as Europe reached a political boiling-point, as social democracy licked its wounds after the fall of the Spanish Republic; a day or two before the first of May, when we would celebrate international brotherhood (ours being a Bundist school), Reznik fronted the class in a new navy-blue jacket with the anti-Fascist badge on his lapel. He produced a book of working-class poetry and began to read. I cannot recall the poet's name but the last four lines of the poem are still with me: