The Lesson

by Jesse Ball

  Once, she said to herself, there was that storm at the zoo. We had gone to the zoo, and torrential rains came. The zoo had just been built that year, and they hadn’t known much about zoo-building, and certainly not about flooding, for all the cages began to flood when the rain came on. Such a rain, not in all the remaining years have I seen its like. She thought about how she and her father had sheltered under a tree and had watched the animals drowning. She had cried and cried. Her father had not covered her face. Rather, he pointed out how sad it was.

  To come all this way, he had said, and then die in a cage.

  That had been the first public photograph of Loring. A photographer had taken it just as she and her father left the zoo, the rain abating. Behind them a ruined, broken landscape, with dead animals here and there. And she, dressed in a blue smock with her single braid wound tight about her neck. Of course, in the photograph, the smock was not blue.

  The Fourth Visit

  —And now we are going to try something, said Loring.

  The two were in the bedroom, where they hadn’t gone before.

  —And now we are going to try something. Please, go, stand there by the window.

  Stan went and stood by the window. A light fell now on the front of his face and shoulders.

  —Would you mind, she said, putting on this jacket?

  It was one of these very light jackets that aren’t really for wearing outdoors, and have buttons like those on a shirt. This one was grey.

  —All right, he said. Is this for me?

  He put the jacket on. It fit quite well.

  —It is, she said.

  —Thank you.

  Loring watched him there a moment.

  —Keep looking out the window, she said. Don’t turn around.

  She was wearing unusual clothing: a Chinese style shirt that buttoned on one side, in muted but iridescent green like a fish seen in muddy water; a pair of broad khaki pants; and her hair was tied up in a kerchief. The matter is confused, but becomes clear when one sees the photograph that she then took out of her pocket. In it, she, a younger woman, is wearing the same clothing, the Chinese shirt, the pants, the kerchief. She is standing by the window of a bedroom, beside a man who is wearing a light grey jacket. The light is falling on their faces, on their shoulders. It would seem the hour is before noon. She has one hand on the windowsill, the other on his shoulder. In the man’s hand is a folded wallet, of thick red paper tied with string. It hangs, held there by his fingers at the bottom right of the photograph. They are neither one young anymore.

  Loring went over to the window. The room was small, and one had to go around the bed to get to the window. The floor creaked whenever it was crossed, and she crossed it then.

  —Hold this, she said.

  She handed him a paper wallet. It was red.

  —In the other hand, she said. Now, look out the window.

  She took a deep breath, and then stood by him, looking out the window. One of her hands went to the sill, and the other to his shoulder.

  —The other hand, she said again, a bit harshly. Put it in the other hand.

  —I’m sorry.

  He took the wallet and held it in his right hand.

  On the bureau, the photograph lay flat, and by the window, her reenactment was a mirror. The light fell on their shoulders, on their faces. Whether her eyes were opened or closed in the photograph, one can’t say, but now they were closed, now they were open, and she was desperately trying to find something, struggling without moving at all.

  The boy seemed to sense this. He stood, stock-still, like a deer.

  The sound of the clock in the parlor climbed the stair and entered the room.

  —I am, she began to say, and stopped.

  Open the window, she thought. Open it.

  There was a painting on the wall by the bed of a religious procession in a Spanish mountain town. Everyone was hidden under cloth masks, and carrying torches. They were on a steep incline and the village spread out below, its own lights visible in the painted darkness.

  He opened the window and turned to look at her.

  She took her hand off his shoulder.

  —You know, he said. When I came here with my mother, I felt that I had been here before. But now I think that I was never here.

  —Never? she asked.

  —Either never, or so many times that the place disappears. Aren’t they close to being the same? I think this is an awful place. Many places are awful. I am told I should come here. My mother tells me to; she brings me here. Then I am here, and I do not have the feeling that I was brought here. I know she is my mother, but I do not see why, or why I should go with her, except when she brings me here. Then, I feel—she is serving me, because.

  He put the wallet on the windowsill.

  —Because, I want to be here, however awful it is. I am very tired. I just woke up, but I am tired. Why is that?

  Lie down on the bed, she thought.

  Through the open window came the noise from a kitchen in the house opposite. Just bustling kitchen sounds, things being placed atop one another, things being cut, water poured, cabinets open, shut.

  Lie down on the bed.

  The boy went and lay on the bed.

  —Take a nap, she said. I will be back in a little while.

  She went out and closed the door.

  Interpolation

  Then, in the room, a deep quiet as of distance. One could shout, for instance, at the edge of a vast park, and not be heard within. In this way was the tiny room sealed within itself. On the bed, the boy lay and a slight rasping sound came as his hands moved against the bedspread. Everything in the room had been there so long that the weight of each object had settled and things were as though joined. Lying there, the boy’s weight began also to settle. Although the window was open, no sound of any kind reached the bed. It was as though horse messengers were continually setting out across the steppes where in the folds of such indescribable cloth, they would lose their way and perish.

  The Fourth Visit, 2

  Loring went down to the kitchen and put water on to boil. She got out a teapot, and a little metal basket that divided to open and close again perfectly. This apparatus was joined to a chain that ran to a little weight with an hourglass on it. The hourglass, of course, would tell one when the tea was appropriately steeped.

  She filled the tiny basket with tea leaves, shut it, and set it in the teapot. Then she went to the window.

  Below, in the field, the teacher’s class was again playing.

  Things must be bad in the schoolhouse if they are forced out of doors on every possible occasion, thought Loring. For the children did not look like they wanted to be out of doors. They were sitting in a line in the grass, trying to read from a book. Every other child had a book. While the one was reading, the other was looking over the shoulder. Each of those other ones wrote in a notebook occasionally with pencils that were tied to the notebooks with string.

  And yet, the teacher was the very picture of gaiety and joy. In a loose dress with her limbs bare, she ran back and forth in the field, calling to the children, as if to tempt them away from their work. Yet not a one went to her. There must be some secret punishment at work, and she is testing their resolve, thought Loring approvingly.

  The pot shrieked from above the flames, and Loring attended to it, and to the remaining preparations of the tea. From the pantry she took some sort of cookie or cake, from a cabinet, two cups, from elsewhere, milk, sugar, spoons of overmastering delicacy, and with all such things assembled on a tray, went back upstairs, slowly negotiating the steps, and passing in the process, the eighty-three episodes of Goya’s Los Desastres de la Guerra, framed plates placed in order up and down the staircase. No. 51 caught her eye, Gracias á la almorta, the brutalized, impoverished figures huddled around a bowl of millet in a dimly unknowable place of suffering. She felt they were so cheerful, these drawings. One couldn’t help but smile. Is that how it is? Must brutality point to
kindess, lack to plenty? Or does one just grin willfully at one’s tormentors, even when it seems they are not present, they have long gone away.

  When she opened the door to the bedroom, Stan was asleep. She set the tray down on a high table by the bed and went to stand there over him. He had taken the jacket off and covered his face with it. He was lying there, with the jacket over his face.

  Loring moved so that she stood sideways to the bed. Her eye could now regard it only in the edges. She looked again and saw a figure, lying in the bed, half covered in a grey jacket, of a sort she knew well.

  She stood there quietly, the pleasure of this small but persistent, until at length the boy awoke.

  The Fourth Visit, 3

  —What is that? asked the boy cheerfully.

  —Tea, said Loring. Tea and a bit of something to eat.

  —Can I have some?

  —It’s for you, of course. Come over here.

  The light had changed a bit in the room. So, too, had the sound. With her entry, the noise of wind and the limbs of trees battering against one another and against the house.

  —It is nice to be in a small house, observed Stan. Then you have the outside as well.

  —That’s so, said Loring. The main thing is—that you can feel the weather. If you can ignore it entirely, your life is a bit sadder—which is something no one would have predicted.

  The boy began to eat. Loring poured his tea and added sugar and milk for him.

  —Do you like tea? she asked.

  —I must, he said. Because the smell woke me up, and I was in the middle of a good dream.

  His voice sounded fuller and richer. It sounded, in short, much more like her husband’s. Loring listened carefully. She shut her eyes, trying to hear every bit of it.

  —What was the dream? she asked.

  —I was reading a book of myths last night. I think it came from that.

  Loring nodded.

  —I was at a kind of doorway between one kingdom and another. There was a long wall stretching in either direction. I had a little house…

  —A hut?

  —Yes, a hut, on top of the wall. When people came, I was supposed to ask them questions. This was my dream.

  —What kind of questions did you ask?

  —Well, there was a list, but I didn’t read it. I knew the ones I liked.

  —Were they difficult questions?

  —I remember the ones I asked—there were four of them:

  when do you believe you will return to the place you came from?

  what is the heaviest thing you are carrying?

  have you passed anyone dead or dying?

  if you would be paid to turn back now, would you?

  —Did you have money to pay them if they agreed?

  —I didn’t have anything at all. Just a broom to sweep the top of the wall, and a little barrel of food. Someone would come on horseback every now and then to give me more.

  —What if someone came who was to be turned back? How would you do it?

  —I don’t know, he said. It doesn’t sound like a very good system, does it?

  —It sounds like an excellent system, said Loring. I wouldn’t mind doing that job.

  —Well, it is a good system for the one who stays there, but I just don’t know what it does for the kingdom, said Stan.

  He took a bite of a black-colored cake.

  —It wouldn’t be the same kingdom without the person at the end, would it? said Loring. You could almost say that you serve both kingdoms—the kingdom that employs you, and the other kingdom on the other side of the wall, because you make the difference between them clear. It is an impossible difference to know or understand, but you make it clear.

  —The tea is good, said Stan. I like tea, and also black cake.

  —Finish your cake, because we have three things left to do today before you leave.

  Three Things Left to Do

  listed neatly:

  1. A lecture on playing chess with your eyes closed.

  2. A short match.

  3. A drawing exercise.

  The Fourth Visit, 4

  —In the dream, asked Loring, when you were at this hut atop this wall in the midst of this wasteland, waiting there with your broom and your barrel of food: did anyone actually come to the gate?

  —No, said Stan. No one came.

  Blindfold Chess, as Told to Stan

  —Chess is many things, but one thing it IS not is a game that is played on a board. Make no mistake, good chess is played entirely in the head. And that is why it is no difficulty at all for masters to have a game wherein they simply announce the moves to another and never look at a board at all.

  —But doesn’t that become confusing very quickly?

  Stan was sitting on the floor underneath the table. He had discovered a hole of some kind, possibly a mousehole, in the wall by the near table leg. He was trying to peer into this hole, and at the same time was listening very carefully, one supposes.

  —Yes and no, said Loring. In fact, people have been known to play not only blindfold, but also simultaneously. That is to say—if I showed up in a town and had no money to pay for my dinner, I might be convinced to give a simultaneous exhibition wherein I would play ten or fifteen people at the same time, going from board to board and making my moves. Now, a blindfold simultaneous exhibition, as you may imagine, is a little more difficult. There, one goes from board to board and is simply told the last move that happened. You are at board three. Your opponent played pawn to c3. What is your move? This may seem entirely impossible, but players do it, and have done it, playing blindfold simultaneously against more than thirty master-strength players. Of course, it takes its toll on the mind. In fact, that’s why it has been outlawed in certain countries. The sense is, it shortens the careers of the best masters. It ages you, mentally, which is an awful idea.

  —Can you do it? asked Stan.

  —I have only done it with three or four games going on at once. Ezra gave an exhibition once where he did twenty boards.

  —Did he win?

  —He won fifteen, drew four, and lost one.

  —To whom did he lose?

  —To me. It was a trick. The organizers switched me in for the amateur that was supposed to be playing. He, of course, recognized it at once, but it didn’t help. Here, let me show you the moves.

  Stan climbed up into his chair, leaving his perhaps-mouse-hole behind somewhat regretfully.

  She showed him the moves of the game on the chessboard.

  —And here he is forced to resign. He’ll lose his knight no matter where it moves. Any of these pawn moves lose immediately also. That’s called zugzwang.

  —Shall we play a game without a board, asked Stan.

  They tried, but it soon proved impossible. Stan could not remember which piece was where and kept trying to move knights that were hiding elsewhere or rooks that had already been taken off the board.

  —Don’t worry, said Loring encouragingly. It comes in time. Let’s play our weekly match.

  While they played, many things happened all around them. Loring thought about the open window upstairs and that it should be shut. She thought about the photograph that was lying on the bureau in that same room. She thought of the teacher that she had seen instructing the class, and of the dog that had been barking early that same morning. Mostly, though, she thought of standing in the bedroom and looking at her husband out of the corner of her eye.

  —What have you been thinking about, Stan? she asked after he lost all four games in a row, quite badly.

  —I was thinking about what you told me.

  —What is that?

  —About imagining things that might happen or might have happened. About trying to pretend that those things are real, in order to see what might be true about them. You said I should, if I felt the edge of something, I should follow it and see where it leads.

  —And what were you imagining?

  She sat up.

 
—Well, there came a knock at the door, and when you went to check, it was my father, only he looked different than the way that he usually looks.

  The boy told Loring a story then, in which she was included as a character. They were sitting there, at lessons, as always, and a knock came at the door. Loring went to answer it, but there was no one there.

  And then Stan had lost the fourth game and they were speaking about his daydreams.

  —A hermit always longs for visitors, said Loring, until they come, and then he wishes them gone.

  —Are you talking about my dream?

  —No, no, just speaking to myself. It is what old people do. You remembered those dreams very clearly, didn’t you?

  —I have been trying to. I remember them partly, and make it up partly—make up what happened.

  —I see, she said.

  She looked at the boy in front of her. He was looking at her very closely; she felt herself being looked at. Who is it, she wondered, who is looking at me? If it is you, please put your hand out and touch my arm.

  The boy sat and did nothing.

  A moment passed.

  Put your hand out and touch my arm.

  But nothing happened. Loring was suddenly seized with a grave fear. Was it all a cruel trick? She stood up and rushed out of the room. The boy jumped up and followed after her. She stopped in the pantry, leaning against the shelves. Was she crying?

  —Are you all right? asked Stan.

  She knelt down next to him.

  —I’m all right, she said.

  —Will you tell me a story?

  —I will.