The Place Will Comfort You (10 page)

Why this fate? Why had he ended up surrounded with the female progeny of compromised Jews? Not by choice. New to
teaching, he had tried to secure a position at a Yeshiva, then at some of the devout boys' schools, then reverent girls' schools in Bnei Brak, with no success until Tel Shamai. Perhaps his scholarly record at the Yeshiva hadn't been stellar, perhaps he did not come close to the levels of absorption which might approach the rapture of those hallowed days when God spoke directly to His sons. Perhaps even in those days he wouldn't have been favored. But to the task that finally was revealed as his lot he applied himself with good intent. He arrived furnished with the strategy of scented erasers in a bag as incentives to participation. And participate they did, but wrongly. Every day Mrs. Adeena Plyer complained about the noise. The girls would clamor for the scented nubs and he would submit in return for brief quiet. When he implored them to attend and forge their link in the Jewish chain the girls rolled their eyes at him, chewing gum.

On the second day of the annual school trip, after spending the night in a hostel room, alone in the company of the cold gun to which he had allotted the top bunk, as howls of jackals drilled through the night, Mr. Durchschlag had fallen asleep on the bus and dreamed he was a girl.

His last wakeful sensation had been the window rattling against his cheek. Later he understood that the smells, to which he had grown inured, had crept up on him again in his slumber. In his dream the cloud of female odor in the bus emanated from his own body. His flesh was swelling in new places. He felt brassiere cups pressing. Young breasts they must have been, intent on every subtlety of pressure, knowledge hungry. He had become breathless. A soft wind slipped under his elbows as if he wore short sleeves, a cool current lapping at his shoulders, slipping under them to breathe a thrilling chill onto damp hairs, then swirling between his thighs as if he were entubed in a skirt, out of which the breeze curled back and emerged ripened, reinvented as a sour animal spoor that set in motion a response in him to open wide, somehow, the whole of him
widen like a yawn, expanding, ravenous, gulping. When the bus had lurched up an incline he awakened to his jaw hanging slack. He snapped it shut.

In a front passenger seat Mrs. Adeena Plyer and the girls' homeroom teacher had been asleep, the two girls seated across smiling at the bus driver who had smiled back through the rearview mirror. One of the girls offered the driver a sucking candy and he took it.

An orphan child, Mr. Durchschlag had felt himself then, stranded, without recourse. His ribs bore down upon his heart, outside the window nothing but desert sands. What to do except reach out and hold the girl across the aisle from him? If only he could, the two of them would have pressed together like twin sisters in a world of sisters, the closest of the close, yet of pure intent. Instead he had taken out his wallet.

Unzipping the scarred change compartment, he had pulled out his medal. The brass plating caught the light as he twisted it beside the window.

“Mr. Durchschlag,” the girl, now he couldn't remember who, had yelled over the noise of the engine, “do you have more chocolate coins maybe?”

He corrected her.

“A medal?” she said. Other heads turned his way. “For what a medal, Mr. Durchschlag?”

He held the medal closer to her and let her read the inscription:
To Shahya Durchschlag, our esteem. Company Seven.

The girl flattened her hand to receive the medal, which he let drop to be scrutinized, first by her, then all around. He watched it travel from the fingers of one girl to the next, the etched olive leaves and the letters of his name catching the dazzle of the day.

“I'll tell you, girls,” he said, “about my time in the military.”

“But men like you, they don't go to the army,” the girl, or else another girl, said. “Don't you get exemptions and stay in Yeshiva instead?”

“To study the laws and protect us all in the eye of God. Who then is exempting whom? And why is such scant notice paid to men like myself, who serve on both fronts?”

“You served in the army?” She squinted at the medal, the olive branch curved in a familiar way, but the Israeli Defense Force symbol absent its sword.

“I served the army,” Mr. Durchschlag said. “As a member of the Holy Society, I was stationed with this particular border patrol troop and in their station I received the fallen. The boys all chipped in for a medal, custom-made. A private gesture, hence not the full emblem. They recognized the voluntary risk. And you? Before every Independence Day you thank the armed forces for your lives. The Holy Society you don't thank. We're equally exposed, dangling over death itself to secure your position in the lap of safety.”

The switch in their perspective had been visible, as tangible as the luster of imminent tears. Only a teacher was privileged to witness these rare moments of concentrated growth. For the first time, he warmly treasured his job.

“You buried the dead?” the girl asked.

“I prepared them for burial. I also took the pictures.”

“The pictures?”

“The pictures,” Mr. Durchschlag said. “For the family to identify.”

By then half the bus had become his audience, a warm desert wind nuzzling his nape.

“Mr. Durchschlag,” a girl whispered. “They show the family a picture of a dead face?”

Mr. Durchschlag smiled at her. “The family think the face is of a living man because we open the eyes and because, here.” He leaned forward, further than allowed by law just this one time because of the tricky balance on the jostled bus, and spread his thumb and pointer finger as far as he could. With his fingers he framed the girl's jaws as if to caress her, but stopped short of touching. “This is a professional secret.” Eyes all around him widened.
“We pinch the jaw at a very particular point, and the corpse grins.” Withdrawing his hand, he demonstrated on himself, baring his teeth. “His own mother is convinced he is alive.”

The girls stared at him. Two or three tried the maneuver on themselves without success. He showed them again, afterwards turning his palm this way and that, twisting it like a key while they gazed upon it. The medal kept passing around, the bus groaning.

After the annual school trip, Mr. Durchschlag discovered that Mrs. Adeena Plyer the vice principal had lied. The trip could not have proceeded legally without an armed escort. Had he chosen to remain behind, the girls would not have been in danger because they could never have left the school. But disciplinary difficulties did end after the trip, with his switching from erasers to the medal. Classes passed through and changed over. The new girls learned the meaning of the medal from the girls before them, and its potency prevailed.

In the dunes of Tel Shamai Mr. Durchschlag rose and turned his back to the sea. His time slot in the class had closed. By now the teacher to follow the Mishnaic studies would have discovered the girls abandoned, or else Meshulam Banai would have made a stink. The students would be queried, an administrative interest in pedagogical idiosyncrasies newly whetted.
She wore what? And he said what? No doubt the first time he said such a thing. Not the first time?
If the story of the medal were to come out, Mr. Durchschlag would deny it. What medal, what ill-selected reminiscence, and according to who? Girls gab and gossip. He turned out the undirtied linings of his pockets in a motion to convince the hand once and for all, no wallet, none, gone, and neither would he find his girl.

P
ickled Sprouts
 

I
N FIFTH GRADE comes the call to duty, and a new layer in the uniform. A white apron will protect the pink school blouse and the gray skirt, a tiara of white cotton will secure the head. You've never eaten in the cafeteria, but just like everyone you will prepare the food when your turn arrives.

It's part of the curriculum. But of the coarsening in your hair you have not been forewarned. The auburn baby-silk predominates still, yes, but tougher, darker stuff is threading through. There is talk of blood, the knowledge always secondhand, not from the source. Her?

Her. All down her legs.

In two years you will see firsthand what makes pants-wetters of grown girls. For the meantime, there are myths, the slide show in the darkened classroom tells you.

“‘There are myths,'” the nurse reads what is beamed onto the back side of a map. She says, “Don't you believe them. For example, when you're in your Period, you can absolutely feel free to cook and bake as usual. There is absolutely no need for concern that everything you touch will botch the recipe. Girls, here we see just one example of a bubbeh myseh. Of a granny tale. A granny tale.” She employs repetition for a placating effect; the second time you're less
afraid although her voice does not grow softer. She's a healer with occasional bad news. On the first Thursday of each month glass dowels frisk your scalp for lice. They leave cool trails; cool oozes lovely towards the ears but sometimes at the end there is a note. “You haven't heard it yet, better that it should come from me instead of someone it so happens you believe.”

She welcomes questions. Few are forthcoming. Someone says she heard that if you take a steaming bath, that stops the, stops it.

False, the nurse says, and to always check bathwater temperature before immersion, baths being our nation's fourth most common cause of moderate-to-serious burns. “All yours,” she finally says.

The Homeland teacher shuts the class door. White-shod footsteps clop away. The map is flipped: a ram's horn curves along the blue Mediterranean. Back in fourth grade the wide trumpeting end was carved away and reaffixed on its wrong side, to Egypt. That was the year in which the schoolyard filled with prophets in pink shirts and pleated midiskirts. That was the year, they said, marking the start of the disastrous shrinking which would push us to the sea. The principal is doing what she can to stave it off: New-issue maps show the green scar, but the school map has not been changed. At home the downstairs neighbors' girl still plays that band of Swedes singing their bounteous intentions for the world in awkward English.

“But the second round of founders soon failed, too,” the Homeland teacher says, “because of basing their economy on bergamot.”

You think of the truncated horn on the new maps, without the Sinai just a mouthpiece kissing Lebanon, a gaunt neck craning against Syria and Jordan. Warm wind would stammer through, unamplified.

Shouts spatter the schoolyard with a spectrum of accents. Faces and limbs paint blurs of brown and tan and pink against the background
of concrete. You're pale and you have a pale sound. Your parents came here from elsewhere and say they brought you with them, a history you don't broadcast in your public life.

Your mother likes to send you to the grocery with lists; she says you need occasions to speak up and, to this end, the lists are always subtly revised. From all your whining, all the begging off before each shopping trip, she says, no one would ever guess that you are practically a native. Where's the bluntness? Where's the extroversion?
What
is the big deal?

When your father and I brought you here, she says, oh boy. We didn't even speak the language. Transitioning on that scope, she says, it takes conviction and persistence. You will call things the wrong name, you won't know how to argue like the locals, you'll be found amusing, so? You can't afford to dwell. You forge ahead. You give yourself a push. So, go! And if he gives the wrong percentage fat this time, say something, say it twice. Out. Now!

She won't acknowledge this is all her fault. Because of coffee. It's your job to buy it, to influence, with varying success, the proper quantity, the right amount of change. But you are not allowed to drink it. Your mother says it stunts the growth. In your mind there is no question that it does the opposite. To wit, the children here all drink it, and they are sharp and harried as grownups, no one in sight as permanently stunned as you. It is as if you were raised somewhere very different, then put down here. You drink milk. You speak soft and slow. You sneaked a taste of coffee just last week, and it's too late. The harshness! You've been raised on mac and cheese.

An eastern current lowers a fine mesh of desert particles over the schoolyard. You trip up on an early stage of Chinese jump rope, once again assume the static role, supporting the elastic with your ankles. The other end is looped around a chair because you like to keep the players down to two.

Shlomtzee hops through three stages without snagging. “You up
for cafeteria duty soon?” she says, and graduates to the next level. You slither the elastic to your waist.

“Do I know? What letter are we up to in the roster? Tet, right?”

“Yud.”

“Already? Like I care.” Of greater pertinence to you is whether one must eat the fare once one has done the work. “They give you eggs a lot?” you ask her. Shlomtzee owns a meal-plan card. “Hard-boiled? Soft-boiled?”