The History Teacher

Abstract

November–December 2013 • 17 I felt a strange and troubling attraction to her from the moment her form, her face, out of the myriad faces and forms, caught my attention. She was thirty-two, I was sixteen. And she was my teacher. In the atmosphere of spiritual poverty that characterized my school, in the absence of liberty, optimism, or anything remotely individualized, the only thing I learned was to look through the windows at the landscape that stretched back to my childhood, ignoring the screams and the voices, the scrape of chalk on the blackboard. In any part of my homeland, that depressing landscape—with its damp tree or hopeless streetcar with frosted-over windows or lonely figure carrying his burden of everyday slavery—immediately became a canvas, a painting of frozen nuances. I examined it carefully, and whenever an image would unexpectedly appear, my tongue felt the taste associations of words. Yes, words carried a taste, like food, and the most important thing was to roll them around in your mouth so as not to lose the aftertaste and to be able to continue to examine their forms. That is how the material for poetry came into being. My school could give me nothing more. But I thank that yellow, low-slung building for my meeting with her, she who for many years would be my secret, my incredible inner turmoil from which, as from a spring, I drew inspiration. My only school friend had left at the beginning of the academic year, abandoning me to loneliness , and I had to quickly turn that loneliness into something funny—only the jester is allowed to kick the king—to prevent my classmates from smelling blood. Despite what many people believe, the most flagrantofhumanvicesareconcentratedinchildren, although those vices have still not fully developed, thanks to a lack of experience. But their innate ability to persecute is perfection itself. I started to drop out of reality, in the way people go into a faint or a lethargic trance, separating myself from the The History Teacher Anzhelina Polonskaya My desire was meager, only faintly touched by Eros. What could be done with this closeness, with the possibility of such closeness? photo: Bruce Osborn Fiction 18 worldliteraturetoday.org world more and more thoroughly, not wanting to have anything to do with the space that surrounded me. And slowly, my world narrowed down to two things—contemplation and books, stolen from my father’s library when he was away from home. His library was a sacred place and therefore locked away from mere mortals, who could desecrate its holiness by, for example, leaving a book open and face down on the polished library table. But still, I am grateful to my late father for his upbringing. He was ill, and slowly and in ways dangerous for us, he was collapsing. He staked and lost his life as if on a card, or as if he had arrived late for the last train. And he remained standing forever in the emptiness of the station, empty hands hanging by his sides, in his worn-out gray suit jacket, a man with an exceptional mind, broken by fate. He was torn from the world into endless space, like a character from a Chagall painting, and he took with him a piece of our narrow world. That same winter my dog died. We’d bought her as a puppy from a drunken stranger one New Year’s. She died, having lived a long but unhappy life, on a frozen December night, quietly, while I was sleeping. We wrapped her in a plastic bag and carried her body to the garbage bins by the infectious disease hospital—the ground was too cold to dig a grave. And so my childhood came to an end, though I never really had one—I was never a child. It’s hard to recall when a flood began. Who can pinpoint what love is? All my life the only answer I have been able to give is “yearning for the impossible .” For love you can die or not die, you can sacrifice yourself or sink into your own ego, but in any case it will...