Madame

by Antoni Libera

  It was some time, however, before we experienced for ourselves the stifling atmosphere of heated passions generated by Madame la Directrice, for when she first came she did not teach our class; all this was gossip and hearsay that filtered down to us from other classes. I myself was too busy with theatre at the time to pay much attention. It wasn’t until I abandoned my extracurricular activities that I became interested.

  The main topic of discussion in school was, of course, Madame’s private life. This was a fertile and highly rewarding subject of speculation, for Madame la Directrice was unmarried. How, when and by whom this fact had been established no one knew, but it was considered incontrovertible. And indeed she wore no wedding ring, had never been seen in the company of a man who might have been her husband, and had never once, it was claimed, mentioned her family – an eloquent omission, for all the teachers spoke of their families at some point, for one reason or another. And then there was something the Tapeworm had allegedly let slip: on one occasion, carried away on a stream of effusive praise for her talents, her energy and her organisational abilities, he is supposed to have added, ‘And her lack of family ties, too, is important, for it allows her to devote herself entirely to her work here at school.’ In short, we devoted most of our time to a minute analysis of the implications of the headmistress’s single state. The permutations were endless.

  She was unmarried, yes . . . but was she single or divorced? (The possibility of widowhood was not even considered.) And if divorced, who had her husband been and why had they separated? Had she left him or had he left her? And if she had been the one to leave, why had she left? Incompatibility? Of habits, of temperament? Was he too macho or too much of a wimp? Or perhaps they had split up because of someone else. Was there someone else? Had he found someone or had she? How, where? And so on and so forth. We went over every conceivable possibility.

  But if she was single . . . ah, then the possibilities were even more exciting. Single, and thirty years old. No, over thirty! Could she still be a virgin? Hard to believe. So when was the first time? Where, and with whom? When she was at university? During the holidays? In a student dormitory? Unlikely. Well, then, perhaps in more luxurious surroundings – in some hotel, or a suite of rooms, or an elegant apartment? And what about now? How often does she do it? And what’s the arrangement? Is she living in sin with one person? Or is it a series of brief encounters, each time with someone new? In other words, does she sleep around? And isn’t she worried about getting pregnant? Does she take precautions? What are they? Dear God, what are they?

  Another urgent issue, and the subject of much lively debate, was her membership of the Party. Of this, as of her single state, we had no evidence, but it was virtually unheard of for a school head not to belong to the Party; Party membership was almost a sine qua non for such a post. And here another series of pressing questions presented itself. Had she joined the Party from true conviction or for the good of her career? If it was for her career, what did she expect to get out of it? Money? Position? Or privilege – the main privilege of Party membership being the chance to go abroad, to the West, to France perhaps, to Paris, where she could stock up on good clothes?

  These questions naturally led to others. Did she have anything on her conscience? Any past act of shabbiness, anything shameful or base? (It was the general opinion that membership of the Party inevitably entailed such things.) Had she ever denounced anyone, informed on anyone, done anyone an injury? Turned away from a ‘politically unsound’ colleague?

  Then there was, of course, the all-important question of how she behaved at Party meetings – in particular how she spoke. How did the word comrade sound on those gorgeous lips? Listen, comrades . . .; Comrade Tapeworm has the floor . . .; Comrade Eunuch, would the comrade summarise the essentials of his speech . . .? Has comrade Viper ensured the provision of coffee? No, it was unimaginable that such sentences should issue from such lips. And yet she must have pronounced them, or others like them; that was how people spoke at such meetings.

  All these speculations, fantasies and wild surmise were at first no more than games of the imagination, still in the realm of the theoretical, so to speak. Until the moment when Madame began to teach our class. Then it all changed.

  It happened quite suddenly, at the beginning of our final year. Our previous French teacher, Mrs W., an elderly and decent soul, decided unexpectedly to retire, and on the second of September, with no prior warning, Madame la Directrice strode energetically into our classroom, struck an imposing attitude at the teacher’s desk and announced that she herself would be responsible for our progress in French until our graduation at the end of the year.

  The news came like a bolt from the blue; it was the last thing we had expected. When she was making her way down the corridor and our lookouts, stationed as usual behind the pillar to track the movements of enemy forces and warn of imminent danger, announced the joyful news that she was coming, we thought it must be just one of her brief, routine visits. The idea that she would actually teach us – that from that moment on we would experience the joys of her presence, feast our eyes on her divine form, inhale her scent, speak to her and suffer delicious torture at her hands – three times a week! – was one we had not considered even in our wildest dreams.

  That was when it began, almost from the first lesson. All the things we’d heard about suddenly became concrete and very real. Her private life, her single state, her Party membership – subjects which up to that moment had evoked no more than a vague, theoretical curiosity – suddenly became burning issues. The last of these, for example, was now seriously disturbing. How could a creature so splendid, so breathtakingly gorgeous, belong to a workers’ party? That voice, those manners, those alabaster hands, those Venus de Milo legs – in a party of miners and peasants, a party of the proletariat? Everyone knew what they looked like: you could see them in the socialist-realist sculptures around the Palace of Culture and within the arcades of that other lugubrious 1950s monolith, the Young People’s Housing District; in the gallery of portraits on the banknotes, which displayed archetypal images of prominent national representatives: the Miner, the Worker, the Fisherman, the Peasant Woman in a headscarf; in the hundreds of propaganda posters that littered the city. They were creatures of monstrous size, with hard, brutal faces and trunklike legs, their feet rammed into hideous clumpy boots, their huge, clumsy paws clutching pickaxes, hammers and sickles.

  Could one imagine her, so delicate and petite, so fragrant, in her Parisian silk blouse, in such company? We imagined the things that might happen to her there, and the thought of them was terrifying. For we knew what these marble heroes turned into once they stepped down from their plinths into the real world. We knew because we saw them in the street, in crowded trams, in canteens and on construction sites. They looked quite different then, and far more threatening: thickset and blubbery, with tiny porcine eyes, filthy and stinking of sweat, dressed in shapeless quilted jackets and caps, coarse and aggressive and always looking for a brawl.

  She must have known what kind of people her ‘comrades’ were. Didn’t they disgust her? And wasn’t she afraid of them? Didn’t it ever occur to her that they might turn on her and demand their right to . . . her body? Dreadful thoughts, all of them, and the cause of many sleepless nights.

  And then we got our first taste of that legendary pride of hers. The reality was far more painful than we had expected. It wasn’t that she was cruel or that she treated us badly; our experience confirmed none of the reports. It was something else: her air of complete, utter indifference. She seemed impregnable, impervious to everything, without human weakness of any kind. Nothing moved her, one way or the other; nothing angered or pleased her. She never shouted at anyone; indeed she never displayed any kind of emotion at all. When someone gave an unsatisfactory answer she never commented on it, far less ridiculed it; she corrected it in a businesslike way and silently entered an F in her book. Nor did we ever hear so much as a single word of praise
. You could have learnt the assignment by heart or rephrased it in your own words as fluently as if you were reading from a book; you might flawlessly conjugate, at lightning speed and without a stammer of hesitation, the most difficult irregular verbs in every possible tense – and still, for your pains, you would get only a matter-of-fact ‘bien’, accompanied by the silent entry of a good mark beside your name. Nothing more. In treating us this way she was, in a sense, the ideal of justice: the same towards everyone, industrious or lazy, gifted or not, well behaved or recalcitrant. And that’s just what was so unbearable.

  She never allowed herself to be drawn into conversation of a personal kind, despite the natural opportunities that French lessons afforded, for the first quarter of an hour was always devoted to ‘conversation’. Madame would pick a topic and begin to talk – in French, of course; then she would throw out a few simple questions. From this a so-called conversation was supposed to emerge. This was the moment for the approach. But what usually happened was that a pupil would launch into some supposedly fascinating story, get stuck in the middle for lack of vocabulary, and suddenly switch to Polish, whereupon Madame would interrupt with a sharp ‘Parle français!’

  ‘I can’t speak in French, it’s too hard, please let me finish in Polish,’ the desperate dreamer would plead.

  ‘Mais non!’ she would reply, ‘si tu veux nous raconter quelque chose d’intéressant, tu dois le faire en français.’

  And the unfortunate hopeful, so eager to ‘tell us something interesting’ but unable to do it in French, would sink back into his seat, deflated like a punctured balloon.

  But for those who could manage the French, things were no better. One of Madame’s worshippers once prepared an entire speech with the purpose of snaring her in a net of questions and extracting some personal detail. In vain. When she realised there was something a little suspect about his fluency, she interrupted him every few words to correct grammatical mistakes; then, when he had somehow surmounted these obstacles and succeeded, against all odds, in reaching his first question, namely where and how had she spent her holidays, she said she was sorry, but elle n’a pas eu de vacances cette année: she hadn’t gone anywhere.

  Thus Madame turned out to be not so much a cruel and imperious monarch, merciless in her treatment of her subjects and relishing the humiliation they suffered at her hands, as a heartless angel – a sphinx. She seemed to exist in a different dimension. Her impregnable aloofness, formality and icy calm were so unshakeable that she was impervious even to the primitive measures adopted by her worshippers in the first row, who in their desperation resorted to dropping pencils or books so that, in reaching for them, they might look up her skirt. She must have seen the point of the exercise, for it was ridiculously transparent, but she did not react. She merely made it impossible for them to succeed. Her sitting posture was impeccable: you could have spent the whole lesson lying under her desk peering up through binoculars, and still you would have seen nothing. Another time, when a dropped pencil rolled out of the perpetrator’s reach, she simply picked it up and, without pausing in what she was saying, put it away in a drawer. To the mute signallings of the victim, trying desperately to communicate that he had nothing to write with and would she please give him back his pencil, she paid not the slightest attention.

  In short, there was nothing she needed to do to make us suffer; the abyss that separated us from her was enough. Beside her, the girls in the class – plump, sallow-skinned, sweaty-palmed, their features still undefined – felt ugly and smelly and flustered; even the prettiest of them couldn’t compete. As for the boys – pimply and fuzzy-faced, uncertain of voice and clumsy of movement, their chins unattractively sprouting the first wisps of beard – her presence threw them into agonies of shame and embarrassment. She was a rose in full bloom, a butterfly, while we – we were not even buds, with their promise of opening one day to reveal the beauty of fully formed flowers; we were weeds that grew wild by the roadside, or ugly, misshapen larvae, bunched up in ungainly positions in their cocoons.

  The entire class lived only for the French lessons; between them we merely existed, in a kind of hypnotised daze. The boys wandered about gloomy and sullen, with flushed cheeks and dark circles under their eyes, leaving no doubt as to the activities to which they devoted their spare time; the girls crept around listlessly, scribbling in their diaries, where they scrupulously wrote down every detail of Madame’s appearance each day: her skirt, her dress, the colour of her scarf; her make-up, and whether it seemed heavier or lighter than on the previous day; her hair, and whether it looked as if she had recently been to the hairdresser’s. These notes were then compared, cross-referenced and compiled, so that the girls, like secret agents or archivists for the Security Services, were in possession of almost all the facts concerning Madame’s use of cosmetics and the contents of her wardrobe. They knew such arcane details as the brand of mascara she used and the number that corresponded to the exact shade of her lipstick; they had evidence that she wore tights (an almost unobtainable rarity in those days) rather than stockings, and that one of her bras was black. (Once, when she raised her arm to write something on the board, I did indeed get a fleeting glimpse of a black strap.)

  The pent-up tension was relieved by chatter. Each discussion gave rise to some new idea or hypothesis. According to one of the most popular of these, Madame was . . . frigid. Of course, no one was quite sure what this term meant, but that was precisely its main attraction. Opinions on the matter differed; they could, however, be reduced to three basic lines of thought.

  According to the first – let us call it the radical line – a frigid woman was one almost entirely lacking in reproductive organs; her genito-urinary system was limited to a urethra. This view was adopted by the most primitive boys, the so-called extremists.

  Exponents of the second line of thought, more moderate but vastly richer in possibilities, claimed that a frigid woman was merely one whose sexual and emotional needs were undeveloped or repressed. Such a case, they insisted, was not incurable; indeed, according to them, it was quite simple to remedy. Perhaps the essential and certainly the most interesting aspect of this theory was an unshakeable conviction on the part of those who held it (known for this reason as the romantics) that, of all possible therapists, they were the ones most competent to treat such a complaint. If only Madame were to place herself in their hands, she would be cured in no time.

  The third view, perhaps strangest of all and held by some of the girls, could be summed up in the claim that to be frigid was simply to be in love with oneself. According to its exponents, Madame was so perfect that she had no need of men, indeed found them repulsive. She loved only herself, and in consequence was physically intimate only with her own body. This intimacy was supposed to consist mainly in the incessant cultivation of that body and to involve ministrations so intense that they bordered on the sexual: prolonged bubble baths, face masks, the anointing of her skin with creams and unguents, long, caressing massages of her stomach and breasts, and, finally, parading naked around her flat and examining herself lovingly in the mirror. In short, she was supposed to represent a rare case of female narcissism.

  And then, in addition to all this, there was that book – Zeromski’s Ashes. It was firmly established as part of the canon and a prominent item on the school syllabus. Now Andrzej Wajda’s film version had been released – with some entirely unexpected effects.

  We were already supposed to have ‘done’ this particular item on our reading list. The novel, a hefty three volumes, had aroused little interest, and hardly anyone had bothered to read it through; Roz Goltz hadn’t even glanced at it. So the film did not generate much excitement. Since we had already spent tedious days ploughing through Ashes in its written form, it was too late to exchange them for a few hours at the cinema, and in this case no one was much interested in comparisons between literature and screen. Nor did anyone pay attention to the heated press and television debates in which Wajda was, as usual, a
ccused of desecration and cheap effects. And yet people went to see it, and more than once.

  They went for three short scenes. In the first, Helena, the young and pretty heroine, is shown in her room at the manor preparing to retire for the night; as part of these preparations she apparently finds it necessary to warm her bare legs at the fire, and this she does in the most attractive way, her nightdress riding high up on her thighs as she shamelessly thrusts her body towards the flames. The second scene takes place in the Tatra mountains, against a picturesque background of splendid rugged peaks; in it the heroine, by then a few years older, is raped by a gang of highland robbers, and this provides another opportunity for a close-up of her legs, bare and flexed at the knee. Finally, in the third, some savage and degenerate Polish soldiers, fighting at Napoleon’s side in the unfortunate Spanish campaign, indulge their lust with a group of swarthy nuns against the background of the conquered city of Saragossa.

  There was nothing all that extreme about any of these scenes – they contained little nudity and not even much cruelty – but by Polish standards their audacity was breathtaking. It helped that the violated Helena was played by Pola Raksa, at that time a young star and, with her piercingly clear eyes and thrillingly, dramatically breaking voice, the object of thousands of teenagers’ lustful sighs. She was known for her appearances in a number of films aimed at young people, in which she played coltish, innocent girls who tempted men and boys with her charms but never allowed them so much as a kiss. So to see her now being savagely raped by highland robbers (perhaps in revenge for her shameless flirting) was a pleasure of a rare kind. And there was a similar, though slightly different, pleasure to be derived from identifying with Polish soldiers who fought on Spanish soil in such an ignoble cause.