Only once, when Kurt ceremoniously unfolded an English newspaper of gigantic dimensions on his desk, could Niesset not refrain. Eyes narrowed, he squinted at Kurt and made a throaty sound rather like a snore: “Mnnn, Gerber!” Kurt glanced up and, looking amiable but surprised, acted as if some stranger had addressed him. “Yes, that’s my name, Kurt Gerber! But how do you come to know it?”
Now it did look as if something exciting might happen. Niesset’s red face twisted into a grimace, he swallowed, now he must do something to assert his authority—but as most of the class had failed to notice what was going on, and went on talking undisturbed, he controlled himself and just managed to avoid a scene in which the ticklish subject of that warning might have come up. It came in quite convenient for him that at that moment Pollak’s full bass voice was heard singing, at considerable volume, “Figaro, Fiiigaro, Fiiiigarooo!” Niesset could probably have done without what happened next; some of the students laughed and clapped, calling, “Da capo!” Soon the whole class joined in, and it took Niesset a long time to quell the noise. When he had, Kurt rustled his newspaper loudly. Niesset jumped, and lowered his head over his textbook.
At break the students congratulated Pollak warmly on his musical performance, and Kurt himself received appreciative comments from the few who had noticed his little clash with Niesset. Something like a relaxed atmosphere had spread in the class, and even Kurt was slightly affected by it. When he came back to school after his time off sick, it had struck him that the eighth-year students were no longer concentrating so purposefully and with such unnatural stiffness. That might have been the result of the staff meeting to allot marks, or the realization that there was no need to wear themselves out so long before the end of the year—for instance, following the subject in Niesset’s lessons was impracticable, and taking down Prochaska’s remarks word for word impossible (his opening address to them at the beginning of the year was long forgotten); sooner or later there must be a setback, and if so, sooner would be better. Some even ventured to copy from each other again in a Latin test and helped one another with vocabulary in French. There was a good spirit at large among the eighth-year students. It fumbled successfully at the chilly armour with which they had surrounded themselves, cutting them off from each other. In many lessons light air seemed to waft through the classroom, fanning their faces and their hearts, and they recognized it and greeted it with melancholy joy: it was a breath of that carefree air they had breathed long ago when life was not so serious, when they were still children with short trousers and bare knees, when they looked up to the eighth year with awe, and couldn’t imagine ever being in the eighth class themselves. It seemed like the height of achievement. And now here they were, Now we’re the eighth year ourselves, they thought, but the students in the classes below us are cheeky and disrespectful, defying us behind our backs out of pure childish stupidity. We weren’t like that in the fourth year, were we?
Only in Kupfer’s lessons could no such atmosphere be felt. The students had other things to do then than wax elegiac. You had to answer him back with his own methods, and there was no liberation from the iron tension that reigned.
But finally relief did come. And from someone of whom it would never have been expected, a student who had never said a syllable too many in seven years, who was obviously bored to tears by the whole business, who never spoke up in class, and only let it be seen, in exams, that he knew much more than it was necessary to show here, indeed that he was almost amazed to find himself giving the best answers to all these questions, petty and stupid and unimportant as they were, and he couldn’t get over that amazement. He was incontestably a good student, his reports said nothing but Very Good year after year, and as he shone not only in any one subject but in all of them alike he did not seem to be brilliant, didn’t want to; he was that unique phenomenon, a good student who could not be blamed for showing off, or cramming to excess, or indeed for anything at all, who had firm opinions and yet was successful, who in all probability was a genius; and his name was Josef Benda.
This Josef Benda gets to his feet, not very enthusiastically, when Kupfer, in a bad temper, addresses him sharply.
“Benda! In the ten o’clock break yesterday, that is to say after the ten o’clock break yesterday, you were seen in the corridor when lessons had already begun again.”
Benda wrinkles his brow. He seems to consider Kupfer’s remark an unwelcome irrelevance. Or it may be that he has to stop and think what ten o’clock break and lessons are. He replies slowly, with some surprise, “Yes.”
“Don’t you know that you have to be in the classroom when the bell has gone?”
“I’d left the room.” By this Benda means something that the irritated Kupfer fails to understand.
“I know that, for God’s sake! That’s why I’m calling on you to explain yourself.”
Benda says nothing.
“What had you left the room to do?”
Benda is visibly surprised now. What are all these questions about? Then he says, with a smile intended to be bashful, but it comes over as avuncular, “Well, what one usually does when one has to leave the room.”
The two of them are talking at cross-purposes, which Kupfer takes for intentional provocation on his student’s part. He lowers his voice menacingly.
“Don’t you try playing games with me, or you’ll find it’s the worse for you! I ask you for the second and last time: where were you?”
Now Benda sees the misunderstanding. His face clears. He grins slightly. Anyone coming in by chance would take him for a total idiot (which makes the probability that Benda is a genius a near certainty). He replies, benevolently, “I was in the water closet.”
Whether because of the deep voice in which he says this, or the thorough way he utters the words “water closet”, making them unintentionally funny—why doesn’t he say WC, or loo, or toilet, and why does he speak with such exaggerated care, slow, clear and correct: water closet? At any rate, suppressed laughter begins breaking out in the classroom, like water from a leaky barrel.
“Quiet!” screeches Kupfer, and the startled class falls silent. Then he cuttingly echoes Benda’s words. “Oh, so you were in the water closet. Couldn’t you have done that earlier?”
Kupfer is throwing caution to the winds, running headlong into a field where his powers are, after all, to some extent limited. But he will not admit to himself that he can hardly be in command of his students’ need to obey the call of nature. As long as they are in the school building, they ought to!
Benda himself seems to notice that this is not going too well. That he has various options. Couldn’t he have done “that” earlier? What a stupid question! Of course not, or he would have done it earlier. He says, very firmly, “No.”
“Oh yes, you could!” snaps Kupfer. “You could have done it earlier. Indeed, you ought to have done it earlier. Ought, I say. That’s what break is for.”
Now Benda is getting into his stride. Nothing in his tone of voice seems to change, but sharp ears can pick up a distinct undertone that shows he is enjoying himself.
“Professor Kupfer, sir, I can’t take a pee to order!”
The self-appointed official laughers in the class make themselves heard. Their giggles are intended to suggest that no one gets anywhere with an oddity like Benda. But the barrel is beginning to gurgle and leak in other places as well.
Kupfer misses his last chance to withdraw in good order. He snarls at the class, threatening them all with detention, and then turns back to Benda. His eyes are flashing.
“Listen to me, Benda, don’t you go too far!” Here his voice cracks. He stamps his foot. “Let me point out that you have no business in the corridor after the bell has gone, and that your actions are punishable.”
Benda stands his ground.
“But if I need to take a pee, Professor Kupfer, sir…”
The girls have had their handkerchiefs stuffed into their mouths for some time. Distorted red faces with eye
s and veins standing out are to be seen at all the desks. It can’t go on much longer.
Kupfer gasps for air, and shouts at such volume that he makes the class jump, “Then you just have to hold it in until the next break!”
The hoops round the suspiciously gurgling barrel are beginning to crack, and when Benda says, with an insistence that removes the last doubt of his purpose, “Oh, but that’s very unhealthy, sir. The astronomer Johannes Kepler is said to have died of urine retention”—when Benda says these words there is no holding them now. The barrel bursts, a great roar of laughter surges out, the class is in fits of merriment, many of the students gasping for breath and hooting out loud, the girls at the front screeching with mirth and falling into each other’s arms. Hobbelmann has put his arms over his belly, rocking up and down in his seat like a bouncing ball, Kaulich has taken off his glasses to wipe the tears from his eyes, Gerald is bent double, arms outspread, writhing with laughter; the roars swell again and again, feeding on themselves; any student who looks at another is set laughing all over again, there is no end in sight, no moderation, thirty-two eighth-year students are beside themselves with glee. No, only thirty-one. There stands Benda, calm as ever, scratching the back of his head as if wondering: good heavens, what have I started? He thus represents such a contrast to Kupfer that it sets them all off again. Kupfer was frozen rigid at first, but then life comes back into him, his mouth moves, he is probably shouting, his face is red and bloated, he shakes his fists, sends the big wooden triangle crashing down on the floor, scribbles something in the register, paces back and forth—the sight is irresistibly comic, the class laughs even more, more and more—then an idea occurs to him. He contorts himself once more, opens his mouth wide, and then he sits down at his tall desk, braces his hands on the edge of it, and calms down.
The class too becomes calm, uncannily calm. Kupfer could leave this calm to take effect, but he is still too agitated for that. All the colour has now drained out of his face, his chest is rising and falling heavily, his breath is not yet regular, and only when the small black notebook is on the desk in front of him is total silence restored.
He begins at the end of the alphabet.
“Zasche. Come out to the front of the class. What do you know about the shadow boundary of angular radiant bodies?”
“The shadow boundary—the shadow…”
“Thank you, sit down, Unsatisfactory. Walter. The curves of the trigonometric functions. Well? Thank you, sit down, Unsatisfactory.”
And so it goes on all through the alphabet. Kupfer calls names, asks questions, and marks all the students Unsatisfactory. Without any further comment at all. It is all he says when he gets to Benda too. Benda is the second in alphabetical order. Before him—or rather this time after him—there is only Altschul. What now?
Now Benda is called to the front of the class for the second time, and is marked Unsatisfactory again.
Is he going to go back all the way through the alphabet?
No. He calls Benda to the front of the class once more. And as soon as he is sitting down again—Kupfer takes meticulous care that Benda is sitting properly with his exercise book open—he is called back to the front of the class.
The fifth time, Benda stays on his feet beside his desk.
“I said sit down.”
“But as, anyway, I’m—”
“I didn’t ask you a question. Sit down.”
Benda sits down.
“Benda!”
Benda gets to his feet.
“Well?”
Benda stands there in silence.
“Come to the front of the class.”
“No.”
“Are you aware that this is disobedience?”
“Yes.”
“Will you kindly come to the front of the class?”
Unexpectedly, Benda does go to the front of the class without a word, and stands there without a word, not even making any attempt to answer, as he had before. Kupfer’s hopes are dashed. He stops the questioning and begins to teach in a low voice. And any remnants of triumph that he might still be feeling come to nothing. Towards the end of the lesson Benda speaks up.
“Benda?”
“May I say something?”
On the lookout, for the last time, for a clear offence, Kupfer says yes.
“It’s not part of the lesson,” Benda assures him.
“Go on!” snaps Kupfer impatiently.
And Benda says, slowly and seriously, “I made a mistake just now, Professor Kupfer, sir. It wasn’t Johannes Kepler who died of urine retention, it was Tycho Brahe.”
No one laughed this time. But they all felt that, on the devastated face of Kupfer as he turned away, inextinguishable grief over something that had never been known before was imprinted…
The general opinion was that nothing could happen to Benda, it was, all of it, too unimportant. Only the five Unsatisfactory marks gave some cause for concern.
But not to Benda, who thought that Kupfer would let the whole thing rest at that. He probably also said so to make the Unsatisfactory marks of the others, which after all they owed to him, seem harmless.
It didn’t work with one of them: Egon Schönthal.
Schönthal—known to those who walked reasonably upright as “the toad”, and who was always annoyed by being asked if he’d crawled out of his mother’s body just like that—was the perfect example of a lad who would crawl to anyone without thought. The question of to be or not to be never bothered him, only the question of to be good or even better; he would go to any brutal or humiliating lengths when they were to his own advantage. If Kupfer’s unapproachable attitude after today’s pitched battle had not been so alarmingly icy, Schönthal would undoubtedly have been ready to kiss the dust of Kupfer’s shoes and swear by all the saints that he, out of all of them, had never once laughed. Schönthal could do more than that, he had more than once wormed his way out of a noose prepared to hang him. He did not shrink from being the only one to make true solidarity impossible, the only one to plead pathetically to be let off a detention imposed on the whole class; he denounced others both openly and in secret, lied with incredible subtlety to get himself out of a tight place—damp and toadlike, he crawled over all obstacles until he reached the peak he meant to climb. And indeed, he was the only one apart from Benda who never got a worse mark than Very Good. But what seemed an inevitable necessity in Benda, one that he simply accepted as just about permissible, was in Schönthal the exhausting pinnacle of achievement, a blessed certainty that no one could do better.
So the toad went about looking sullen, making pained faces and showing the gums of his prominent teeth, thinking of the shame represented by a mere Good in the column of Very Goods. He was furious, but did not quite like to adopt an anti-Benda stance. His only consolation was that the splendour of Benda’s own series of Very Goods had also suffered. At last he said venomously, “Yes, very amusing, all well and good, but who’s going to get me my Very Good back?”
The students looked at him in amazement.
“Very well, don’t gawp in that silly way—what I mean is, how did I come to lose my Very Good?”
Some shook their heads, embarrassed by his attitude, never as inappropriate as now. Finally Lengsfeld, who had twice been obliged to stay down a year, broke the silence in his high voice.
“Listen, will you? If everyone, and I mean everyone, were to worry over whether this incident could harm them, then you’re the last to have any reason for it.”
Schönthal ducked his head. “No one asked your opinion, but I’ll tell you something all the same: if it’s all the same to everyone, and I mean everyone, how they’re marked, then it isn’t all the same to me.”
Lengsfeld, not a very pugnacious character, withdraws. As Benda also leaves the group, Schönthal looks challengingly from one to another. He thinks he has won.
And indeed, his last argument does have some effect. Scholz, Pollak and Brodetzky nod thoughtfully. Hmm, he has a point. How
do we deal with this? You toil away for eight years, and then maybe you whistle your advantage down the wind for some childish nonsense like this. It’s not such an open and shut case as it seemed.
“It’s not all the same to any of us how we’re marked!” Kurt’s voice is sharp and menacing, there’s a lot he wants to get off his chest. This scene has been the nastiest for quite some time. But Schönthal doesn’t let him go on. He casts Kurt a poisonous glance and says, venomously:
“Thanks. I’m grateful to you for that information. But you just listen to me. For you—” (his forefinger stabs the air from below) “for you in particular, of course, it makes no difference, because you’re going to fail anyway.”
For a moment Kurt does not take in the real meaning of Schönthal’s words; he only senses their vicious hostility, and he says nothing, repelled.
Then something shoots past Kurt. A body. It is Weinberg, who has got up on the bench behind him and now jumps down. He makes straight for Schönthal and punches him hard in the face. Schönthal staggers slightly, his glasses fall off, he stares wide-eyed, with a stupid expression, and covers his face with his hands. A drop of blood seeps through his fingers, and then another. He takes out a handkerchief and runs out of the classroom. Without a word, the others watch him go. Weinberg brushes something that isn’t there off his hands, turns abruptly and goes back to his place.
Young Gerber Page 11
