The Place Will Comfort You (7 page)

Shifra's own cheeks drained. He worried that she would not only throw out the earrings, the color of concord grape juice mixed in cream, but also lacerate her earlobes so that the piercings might scab shut. By now she had finished her fried dough. She reached for
her ears. He smiled again to nurse her fear and close the chapter. She had learned her lesson. He even let her hold his medal, his trademark in the classroom and the established reward. This she accepted and held for examination in one open palm, the earrings clenched in the other. She turned it over once.

Ordinarily the medal saw only the filtered light of the classroom. In the daylight he'd noticed tarnish which had eluded Elisheva's last polish, a fine ridge crusted around an olive leaf and a wedge between the etched legs of the Gimmel last in his surname. He had wished to scour the medal at once, with a rough twig lying near his knee in the grass. At his request, just as the bell had shrilled, Shifra had tossed the medal back, in order that their fingers might not touch.

How could she have sat in his class again today with her book open to the Mishna, wearing those earrings, and not only those earrings, but the face tinted now, too? Less so, granted, than many of the other girls, but a step in the wrong direction, her lips smeared today, more with grease than color, glossy like a drooling infant's. So he had addressed her again, but now with an audience of her peers.

“Shifra!”

Gentleness had gotten him nowhere and worse. The moist inside of her lower eyelid was somehow lined with blue; how? How? What pointed instrument did they insert so perilously close to the eyeball? To hazard blindness in the hope of capturing lust's eye.

She licked a finger, inclined her head, and flipped a page of her Mishna book. A quick sharp breath, painted eyes on the text: “‘A bull who has gored…'”

“No!”

She tried again, laboring to chisel and desiccate the sound of the letter Resh, bloated and sodden with her strange accent. She produced only a gluey, Russian-sounding trill. “Who has gorrred . . .”

“No! No and no!”

Quickly, she peered into the book of the girl beside her.

“Rest assured you know where you should read,” he said to her. “Rest assured that's not the problem. But where you yourself should be, I think in this regard you are confused. Because when you took the bus to Tel Shamai, evidently you meant to disembark a stop earlier closer to the sea where such an appearance as yours is profitable.” So, in no uncertain terms.

Never before had he invoked this plainly the prostitutes who had been roaming these dunes since long before the school's existence. Whenever he was obliged to provide his professional address to some bureaucrat or another he was certain to catch a snicker at his expense, the relish all the greater because of his reverent garb. Today with this brazen defiance the girl had pushed him beyond the subtlety of his usual allusions. An unbecoming red bloomed across Shifra's cheeks, and once he had advised her to repair to the rest room and adjust her appearance, she had arisen and left the classroom.

And never returned.

Seventeen minutes had gone by. Clearly he had managed to keep the lesson on track; the girls' eyes were all riveted on their books. He could see only the round crowns of their skulls, and eyelids veiled with fringes of hair. With a beckon of his finger, he summoned Yaffa Pirozadeh, a dark dwarfish girl attentive in class but uninspired in exams. Without disturbing the other girls, he instructed her to investigate.

Yaffa returned alone.

“I can't find her, HaMoreh.”

He could have sworn there had been no kohl on this one's eyelids when she first left the room but it would not do to make a farce of the situation by sending her out again. In his early teaching days the girls could have duped him into diluting their numbers until the population swell in the corridors would become known to the administration. No more. For years now his rule was to no longer kick anyone out, nor would he allow girls anymore private departures
from the class. He made it known on the first day of every school year: Take care of your outside business before class or after. No exceptions, until today. In the first few weeks he would find an opportunity to introduce the medal and the experience of his service, he would establish his clout and finished. After this his authority never failed long. So, never again a loitering girl outside his class door, and, behold! No more needling from the office. No:
Should the administration be concerned?
Nor:
Was is possible order was falling apart? And could the administration
(as represented always in such matters by the heavily deodorized Mrs. Adeena Plyer)
on the other hand remain confident that Mr. Durchschlag was able to suspend his standards of observance to conform to the realities of this student body? Furthermore, religious as he knew the administration was if certainly not of his camp, had it not made adequately clear to Mr. Durchschlag the institutional gratitude for his learned example? On the other hand had the administration not accurately represented his intended pupils as, in many ways, unlike his chosen society in Bnei Brak? Was there a question of compatibility?

He knew where he stood. There was no kohl on Yaffa Pirozadeh's eyelids. The girl was swarthy. The color was no doubt epidermal pigmentation, which among her people was often pronounced in the area of the sockets. Not that he would dwell on female features to confirm, and he didn't need to. This fact of taxonomy he had learned as a younger man in service during the Yom Kippur War, a member of the Holy Society of Burial, the voluntary servants of last honors to God's image, washers of bodies and gatherers of parts. Any Jew's parts, regardless of their level of worship in life, would be treated in death with the most reverent care. And so it was that in divergence from most men in his community, some of the reverent, including himself, in effect enlisted with the secular ranks of the army. The first of the fallen soldiers he had prepared had been whole. The only oddity had been that the boy was very purplish-brown around the eyes. However, because of beginner's
overpreparation, Mr. Durchschlag's imagination, pressed down too tight, had sprung at a touch. He was handling a victim of the Syrian torture masters, he decided, upon which thought everything became the blackened eyes. The pummeled eyes. The agonized leave-taking in the company of hate, tears for this world receding, glazed eyes of animal suffering, organs of sight pulped blind, life in the end forgotten to pain as the poor boy would have known no prayers. What would he find under the boy's clothes? At a regrettably impressionable age Mr. Durchschlag had read in the secular paper, over a shoulder in the bus, about the Syrian methods, including the wiring and electrocution of genitals. On that occasion he had fathomed the abuser's glee, his avid matchmaking of shame with agony.

He found himself unable to remove the boy's clothes, only staring, instead, at the eyes. Finally he had broken away to seek a substance of camouflage in consideration of the relatives identifying the photo. In his panic he had asked the cook for some flour. It was then he had learned that to his squadron mates the dead man had been known as Shiners Aboudrahem. “You think the corpse wants cosmetics? Rabbi,” the cook said—to this ignoramus anyone in a beard and a black suit was ordained—“his whole family looks like that, Rabbi. Maybe in the Yeshiva you need more of a variety of Jews, a little color. Take a look at me. Look at my knuckles. Not all of us are Lithuanian stock.” Does a reverent Yeshiva boy not take the bus with every other sort of person or go to the shouk for a kilo of loquats in season? He knew of what the world was made; he had merely sunk into the depths of a detail. After the first body he came to witness actual defacements he could fathom neither as the fruit of vicious human fancy nor as the handiwork of decay. Gradually he had built up an immunity.

A roomful of girls in powder-blue uniform blouses goggled at Mr. Durchschlag over open Mishna books. One figure stood out, transfixed by the text. Sadly, only Shulee Bouzaglo, a girl born with a bullhorn for a throat, not quiet in learning but rather fueling
before the next blast. Sure enough, her arm shot up at the very same time that her mouth gaped and blared out in contention with the sages, may their memory be blessed, who had in her opinion erred in condemning to butchery the shor mu'ahd, the confirmed gorer, when the innocent bull was only doing what his nature decreed. He needed only calmer treatment from birth and a better fence. She drew back her hand to rub vigorously at one of her eyes, given to sties.

“When it's you who has been gored, Shulee,” he said, “then I recommend you bring your protest to the sages in person.” The girl's hand froze over her irritated eye. “You want your vision tested, Shulee? I don't happen to have a chart but I'll tell you an exam wouldn't hurt.” He yanked off his black suit jacket, remaining in white shirtsleeves. “For now, along with everyone in this room you will read the next two Mishnayot along with the commentary, in complete silence, and write an independent synopsis no briefer than four pages, in two drafts without consultation. I will be directly outside the classroom and I do not need to see your faces to recognize whose voice I hear. I regard this as a necessary exercise. Whenever your dedication wanes, write the following in reduced letters on the margin, with full punctuation.” He turned to the board, pinched up a stub of chalk, and struck the sections of the psalm verse into being. “Happy is the man who puts his trust in God, and does not turn to dazzlings and diversions of deceit.” He dropped the chalk in its moat. “End of verse. This must be executed in pencil. After inspection we will rub it out from the work. You and I both will find the frequency of the occurrence in the margins instructive. Half a grade increase for this term if you can ascribe the source.”

Pages began to riffle. Mr. Durchschlag left the classroom, closing the door behind him.

The school corridors were wide, built after an American design with the money of American benefactresses whose league, as the administration was wont to mention in faculty meetings, financed
also shelters for beaten wives and learning institutes for the congenitally impaired. He did not know how they could work this architectural style into cramped Israeli cities. In the dunes of Tel Shamai there was the space for such expansiveness. As windows were limited to the classrooms, the corridor was cool, the light gray. Sweat wormed down his ribs and chilled him. He stepped towards the end of the corridor. The sound of a recorded piano clanged through one of the doors he passed. The girls of the secretarial track accompanied the plodding music with a dogged percussion of typewriters.

The next door was the girls' toilet. In the whole building there was only one such room for his use, and why would there be more for a mere three men? Nonetheless the trek every time he required the facilities between lessons was a waste of his time and in such a spacious school accommodations could have been made. To girls who tried his rule and asked to leave class in the middle, always requesting to drink as if this were more proper, he liked to say, “Anyway the water will pass through you right away.” He might offer the blushers a conciliatory wink, but there would be no leaving. With every unclish wink of his to every blush of theirs the world revolved more steadily, the proper ratio of this to that restored. If only they would understand once and for all that the attention they could endure they already had. Women liked intimations and there the affection stopped. Didn't the blushing mark the threshold of their tolerance? He tried and tried to explain but how could he usefully do so while restraining the topic? This predatory appearance they assumed when in fact they were the quarry. Again and again he invoked the dangers before them, again and again and again, and again. But for now he should try to understand why he must check the bathroom. Unimaginable that he should set foot in such a place. And why should he? He had broken his rule and sent a girl out. After her he had sent another who had returned alleging an outside faced alone. Would Yaffa Pirozadeh lie? No. But even by
this school's standards she was no genius. She would not have taken a truly thorough look. He peered behind him, down the corridor. He looked to both his sides. He tilted his ear towards the silent toilet. A sweet smell of artificial peaches sifted through the door, such artificiality as could engulf any other odor and introduce it to a human nostril like hidden medicine.

“Shifra,” he whispered. The peach smell whispered back.

He took one step through the door. The toilet air was cold and damp, the peach scent a fine fatty mist. The men's room beside the principal's office was never perfumed, but assuredly the pains taken to mask who knew what fumes in this privy were due merely to the utter magnitude of users.

“Shifra,” he said. An old sweating pipe along the wall beside him broke into a wounded whine which at first he thought animal, grabbing a porcelain sink to steady himself. Immediately he let go and wiped his palms on his trousers. He had an educator's duty to be here but no need to touch. With the tip of his shoe he nudged open every stall door. In the last cubicle a gray puddle on the tiles in front of the commode reflected white light from a high window. Having exhausted the options here and not found the girl, he found himself for some reason relaxing. This was a toilet, a toilet like any other and he had to go. He unzipped his black trousers, planted each black shoe on a dry bank of the luminous puddle, tipped his hips forward and urinated into the toilet. The contents of the female refuse can were a passing thought, the can itself no more than a marred silver cylinder in the periphery of his vision. Who cared? The eye-ache of studying what stood outside the focal field was punishing, and anyway nothing could be truly seen like that, only blurs of ugly color and simplified shapes. When he shut his strained eyes he stumbled into the puddle, wetting a shoe and a cuff of his black trousers, with what? Girls by their positioning had control; the puddle could be nothing but relatively untainted septic tank seepage, untainted, that was, until he had been made to lose his
footing in mid-elimination. He kicked the base of the commode and left at once, without flushing or lowering the seat, only laving a hand under a dripping faucet and grabbing a coarse paper towel to wipe. Halfway down the hall he stood and recited voicelessly the proper sanctification.