Madame

by Antoni Libera

  Our Daily Bread

  My ruthless, even cruel act of severance from all that had happened brought a certain relief, but it could not bring about a complete cure. In the teenage boy that I was, something had broken and died, and the damage was irreparable. I came to doubt that anything extraordinary or wonderful, anything comparable to the kind of thing that happened in all those stories about the old days, would ever happen to me.

  With the doubts came a sort of dull lethargy and a feeling of emptiness. I didn’t sink into total apathy: I still adored the theatre, still went to concerts, still read avidly; but at school I simply lost interest. I withdrew from everything that wasn’t obligatory: no drama circles or music ensembles, no extracurricular activities, nothing that wasn’t absolutely required. Just lessons and then home, to loneliness and silence and sleep.

  Paradoxically, this state of mind allowed me to look more closely at the world around me. When I had been actively involved, whether as pianist in a jazz quartet or acting or directing in a drama group, I hadn’t noticed what went on around me, for in my thoughts I was always elsewhere – at an audition or on a stage, at a concert, in a dream. Now that I was free of all this, I began to concentrate my attention on the separate little world of school and its day-to-day life. What kind of thing absorbed the students? What mattered most intensely to them? The things that mattered usually belonged to the sphere of the forbidden: smoking, drinking, playing truant, faking signatures and the best ways of cheating in exams. Then there were more serious offences: sneaking into X-rated films, throwing parties and the clandestine exchange of information (more often than not false or wildly inaccurate) about sex or sexual organs, usually supplemented by dirty stories and unsavoury jokes.

  These were the elements that made up the fabric of school life, and from them was woven an immensely rich folklore, with a private language of its own, full of bizarre private codes, odd nicknames and colourful expressions, and a store of anecdotes about students, teachers and incidents involving them. It was like a game comprehensible only to the initiated; the stories were endlessly told and retold, with the same relish and the same gales of helpless laughter. No one ever seemed to tire of them. Among the most popular of these stories was the one about the eggnog.

  One day, Butch, the class troublemaker and tough guy, brought two whole bottles of the stuff to school, intending to drink them after class with his buddies. He smuggled them in in his satchel meaning to transfer them to the safety of his locker as soon as he got to school, but before he had time to accomplish this, he inadvertently banged the bottom of the satchel against a chair, smashing both bottles. Realising what had happened, he snatched up the satchel and at the last moment managed to flee to the cloakroom. In his wake dashed his two closest mates, loath to abandon a friend in need. When the three of them opened the satchel and surveyed its contents, an apocalyptic vision met their eyes: it was almost half full of viscous yellow liquid in which textbooks, notebooks and other paraphernalia of school life helplessly swam. A dramatic rescue operation began. One by one, carefully, with two fingers, Butch plucked the victims of the flood from the sickly ochre depths; he held them aloft and then with a nod signalled to his friends that he was ready. At this they tilted back their heads, opened their mouths and held them under the sodden pages to catch the stream of sweet eggy nectar. When everything had been fished out, including the glass from the broken bottles, the desperate feast began. The satchel with the remaining liquid, well over a pint and a half, was passed from hand to hand like a trophy cup or a cavalry boot filled with champagne; it continued its rounds until it was quite empty.

  The results were not long in coming. Given the hour (between eight and nine in the morning) and the fact that the revellers had not breakfasted, the dose they had consumed was near murderous. First to succumb to the inevitable was Cass, thin as a rail and the slightest of the three; spasms of nausea seized him in the second period. White as a corpse, a wild panic in his eyes, he suddenly ran out of the classroom with his hand over his mouth and for a long time failed to reappear. The teacher became concerned and sent someone to have a look; the messenger duly returned with the news that Cass was draped half conscious over the lavatory bowl and throwing up . . . bile, which probably meant appendicitis, or possibly twisted bowels. The school doctor was sent for, but he wasn’t yet in his office, and the unfortunate Cass was taken home.

  The next victim was Zen, a refractory and difficult boy, often insolent to the teachers. He was struck down in the fourth period. For once, however, perhaps because he was so weakened, he behaved contrary to his usual manner: he meekly put up his hand, waited patiently for permission to speak, and then said he felt sick and asked please could he be excused. The biology teacher, a strict disciplinarian with a sharp tongue, known as the Wasp or the Viper, had already heard about the Cass affair and suspected she was being made a fool of. Determined to take no nonsense from anyone, she not only refused him permission to leave the room but called him up, perhaps as an act of revenge, to the blackboard. For some moments Zen attempted heroically to battle with nature, but the outcome was inevitable. Nature won: Zen heaved suddenly and in one graceful movement expelled a prolific, multihued fountain of vomit, liberally splashing the teacher’s blue sweater. The class burst into loud guffaws. The Viper, however, retained her composure. She dabbed at her sweater with a handkerchief and then proceeded, like the good naturalist she was, to subject the handkerchief to a smell test.

  ‘Well, well: so this is the famous bile that Fanfara’ – for this was Cass’s surname – ‘was throwing up. Apparently this class favours alcohol as its morning drink. Well, you won’t get off lightly for this one, I promise you that. Now, go and get a cloth and clean up this mess!’

  Butch alone remained victorious until the end of the day. But it was a Pyrrhic victory. He went about in a befuddled daze, visibly struggling; more important, he got an F in every subject taught that day – a grand total of five. His lack of books and his complete inability to account for their absence were sufficient for that.

  Another colourful story that made the rounds concerned Titch, a big, stocky youth who sat in the back row. He was blessed with a booming voice and was said to be prodigiously endowed, which made him the object of constant jokes and much daring speculation. This anecdote concerned the singular and inspired way in which he rescued a group of his friends from imminent discovery when they were enjoying a smoke in the lavatories – even though he himself disapproved of smoking.

  Smoking was strictly forbidden, of course, and severely punished. The life of smokers was not an easy one. Subjected to pocket searches, breath tests and humiliating examinations of clothes for the odour of tobacco and fingertips for tell-tale nicotine stains, they had to resort to various complicated manoeuvres to conceal their habit and lived in perpetual fear of discovery. They smoked at every break, but only during the long lunch break could they do so in relative safety and with some enjoyment, for the teachers were too busy then to patrol the lavatories. From time to time, however, a spot-check was made even in the lunch break, and then the smokers, their vigilance lulled, would be caught red-handed. The consequences were dire: confiscation of the cigarettes and a D in discipline, which was one step away from expulsion.

  The teachers sometimes stalked in packs and sometimes on their own. By far the more dangerous was the lone hunter: he would walk nonchalantly down the corridor, apparently minding his own business, wrapped in thought or perhaps conversing amiably with a student. Then, as he neared the cloakroom, he would suddenly bang the door open and there he would be, bursting through it and falling on his prey. There’d be no question of flight; everyone was caught.

  On the day of the famed incident, the smokers were subjected to just such a raid. But on this occasion the lone hunter who marched fearlessly into the cloakroom like the legendary Commendatore was the least expected of people: it was the art teacher, a tiny, modest, delicate wisp of a thing who blushed terribly at the slightest pro
vocation. Someone must have asked her to make the rounds; she would never have done it on her own initiative.

  The lavatories were filled with smoke, and the smokers were enjoying a lively discussion about whether it was better to inhale through the nose or through the mouth, when someone shouted, ‘Look out! It’s a raid! They’re coming!’ Everyone rushed for the stalls, hoping to drown the evidence; but it so happened that all the stalls were occupied, and they were left with the instruments of their crime dangling helplessly in their hands. Someone tried desperately to open the window, but it was too late.

  At that moment Titch, the disapproving non-smoker, rushed to their aid with an inspired counter-attack, worthy of Blücher at Waterloo; and it was this that broke the siege. Taking in the situation at a glance, he extracted his monstrous member and then, with the confident step of the experienced exhibitionist, strode straight towards the enemy, as if making for the urinal. From behind the clouds of smoke came a brief, muffled squeal of terror, and then Titch’s deep booming voice, ‘Oh, I’m terribly sorry, miss, but these are the men’s lavatories.’

  The art teacher beat a flustered retreat and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Titch was the hero of the hour and the recipient of many appreciative pats on the back. ‘He chased her off with his sprinkler,’ was how the affair was popularly summarised.

  Another story worth repeating concerned Roz Goltz and the unforgettable beginning of his essay about the lot of an oppressed serf, as described in Boleslaw Prus’s novella Antek. Roz (his real name was Roger) was an unusual boy. Secretive and unapproachable, he moved in his own mysterious ways, made no close friends, and had an odd way of speaking. His habit of asking strange – but by no means stupid – questions in class, confounding the teachers and backing them into corners, had earned him the nickname ‘the Philosopher’. He was an extreme rationalist: everything had to be explained from first causes and followed to ultimate conclusions, which often led to a reductio ad absurdum. His smart-aleck ways, sometimes verging uncomfortably on mockery, would doubtless long since have earned him a good talking-to were it not for his scientific gifts. He was very strong in physics and chemistry, and his maths was of university standard. He also knew a lot of things that weren’t on the school syllabus. He had read dozens of popular books on natural science, history and medicine.

  Despite his agile and receptive brain, Roz had an Achilles’ heel: he was hopeless in literature. He couldn’t fathom the set books and had no idea how to discuss them; writing essays was torture for him. He would usually copy them from friends during break, and repaid the favour in kind by letting them copy from his maths notebook; but when he tried to write anything himself it ended up full of linguistic and stylistic oddities, and, more important, strayed ridiculously far from the assigned subject.

  The literature teacher, knowing he would have to pass him whatever happened, because of his brains, would sigh and shake his head. ‘Well, there it is, your native language just isn’t your strong point.’ Usually he gave him a D minus.

  On the day when the essays about the plight of serfs were due, Roz volunteered, for the first time in his life, to read his out.

  The teacher couldn’t believe his ears. ‘What’s this? Roz is volunteering to read? But certainly, by all means! How could one not applaud such a momentous event?’

  So Roz got up and began to read. And his first sentence was as follows: ‘After a hard day’s work, Antek looked like male genitalia after intercourse.’

  The boys whinnied loudly, the girls giggled, and then a deep hush fell on the room as the class held its breath, waiting for the teacher’s reaction. The teacher, however, continued to sit there quite calmly, smoothing his goatee, as if nothing special had happened. ‘Well, go on,’ he said matter-of-factly.

  But the rest of Roz’s essay was not distinguished by anything of note. Perhaps the style was slightly more strained than usual in the effort at originality.

  ‘Why did you volunteer to read?’ the teacher asked when Roz reached the end.

  ‘Because I wanted to get more than a D minus,’ Roz unhesitatingly replied.

  ‘And what made you think you would?’

  ‘The liveliness of the style, which you’re always telling me I lack, but mainly the fact that I took to heart what you’re always saying about how words should be surprised at themselves if the style is to be original.’

  The teacher’s face reflected with painful eloquence his inner battle. He was clearly tempted to let it go and dismiss Roz as a hopeless case, but he knew he couldn’t let that first sentence pass without comment.

  ‘All right,’ he said finally, ‘I’ll give you higher than a D, but only if you explain exactly what Antek looked like after a hard day’s work.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ asked Roz, surprised. ‘He looked the way I said he did.’

  ‘Describe it, then. What did Antek look like, exactly?’

  ‘He looked,’ Roz stammered, ‘like male . . . genitalia.’

  ‘Ah! But surely that’s not all?’ insisted the teacher.

  ‘Like male genitalia . . . after intercourse,’ Roz mumbled feebly.

  ‘Precisely!’ The teacher mercilessly pinned Roz to the wall. ‘And that means – what, exactly? Do tell us.’

  A long silence fell, and the suspense in the room reached new heights. Would Roz dare to press on over such slippery ground? And if he did, wouldn’t he sooner or later come out, willy-nilly, with some filthy monstrosity? And – perhaps even more urgently – would the teacher, with all his attention concentrated on tying the unfortunate Roz in knots, involuntarily reveal some of his own knowledge about the object of Roz’s bold comparison?

  ‘I don’t know,’ he muttered finally.

  ‘Ah!’ The teacher was triumphant. ‘You don’t know. Well, then, if you don’t know, don’t write about it. And the only reason you’re not getting an F is that you volunteered to read.’

  There were sighs of relief, but also disappointment. Not, of course, because Roz hadn’t got an F, but because that rare thing, a discussion in class on such a fascinating topic, had come to an end.

  Such, then, was the daily bread of our school.

  Madame la Directrice

  On this somewhat Lenten menu the figure of the headmistress occupied a prominent position. Or, rather, not so much the headmistress herself as the elaborate tangle of surmise and speculation that grew up around her person.

  The headmistress appeared rather late on the scene – just as we were entering the sixth form – and taught French. She was a very good-looking woman of thirty-odd, and the contrast between her and the other teachers – a grey, boring and embittered lot, of whom the best that could be said was that they were nondescript – was a striking one. She was always well dressed, in clothes whose quality and cut made it immediately apparent that they were of Western manufacture; on her well-cared-for hands she wore a discreet number of elegant rings. Her face was carefully made-up, and her chestnut hair, cut short and styled by a skilful hand to display her long, graceful neck, was smooth and glossy. Her deportment and manners were impeccable; and there wafted about her, in delicious waves, the intoxicating aura of good French perfume. At the same time she gave off an icy kind of chill.

  Beautiful and cold, splendid and unapproachable, proud and merciless – this was our headmistress. The Ice Queen.

  Her arrival threw the school into a turmoil, and for a number of reasons. Her appearance and behaviour alone would have been enough; the senior teachers eyed her with suspicion and were a little afraid of her, while the younger lot either were jealous – of her looks, her clothes and her position – or tried to insinuate themselves into her good graces. But there was also a rumour, spread soon after she came, that she was planning a radical reform of the school, and planning it for the very near future. The alleged aim was to make the school into an early outpost of a new educational experiment: to use a foreign language – in this case, of course, French – as the language of instruction. Her ef
forts in this direction were said to be well advanced; some thought the change might even take place with the beginning of the next school year.

  This prospect, on the face of it so beneficial, sowed terror throughout the school. For most of the teachers, some of whom had been there for years, it augured inevitable departure: in an experimental outpost of this kind, all subjects except history and literature had to be taught in both Polish and the other language simultaneously, and so they would have to be not merely fluent in the latter but capable of teaching in it as well. And for the pupils the thought of having to learn everything in two languages conjured up nightmares.

  Another element in the consternation caused by the coming of Madame la Directrice was the disquieting tangle of emotions she stirred in the hearts of the students. At first – almost at first sight – she inspired an instinctive affection, bordering on worship; she was like something not quite of this world, a goddess who by some miracle had stepped down to earth from Olympus. Then her coldness, her superciliousness and her peremptory ways began to make themselves felt, sometimes painfully, and the enthusiasm waned somewhat. The ensuing disappointment, however, transformed itself not into hostility or a thirst for revenge, but into something quite different: a classic case of sadomasochistic love, fuelled by humiliation and pain on the one hand and images of filth and violence on the other.

  In other words, worship of the headmistress continued, but in a very particular form. In secret she was the object of fervent prayers, in which all past cruelties and humiliations were forgiven; in public – in the lavatories, in corners of the schoolyard – of coarse ale-house gossip and obscene and brutal fantasies. These acts of sacrilege, in which the object of worship was verbally humiliated and abused beyond all bounds of shame, helped to deaden the stings of unrequited love, but they were also degrading to the desecrators themselves, so that, when they returned to their inner sanctuary to prostrate themselves before their idol, they paid for their profanities with further pain and self-inflicted torment.