naturally alighted on the cheapest solution: the Ruhla. It probably never even crossed his mind that his choice would wreak such havoc in my soul.
Whatever the truth of the matter, I still had to decide what to do with the thing. If I was to shake it off, cleanse myself of its polluting stain, as it were, something had to be done with it, and it seemed quite clear to me that a compromise would not do. Passing it on to someone else, giving it to the poor, even leaving it on the street for someone to find – none of these was a satisfactory solution. It had to be destroyed – returned to a state of nonbeing.
The place of execution was carefully chosen: it was to be Paris Commune Square (Wilson Square before the war), this being an intersection of three streets named after our three great national poets: Mickiewicz, Slowacki and Krasinski – the very same whose works, as the deputy head had pointed out, had been missing from my script. To them I now offered up the miserable Western (at least in the geographical sense) trinket bestowed on me as a result of my treacherous cosmopolitanism.
I took the watch out of its plastic bag, laid the straps flat and placed it, face up, on one of the tram tracks. It ticked loudly, showing (correctly) nine o’clock.
I took a few steps back and sat down on a bench. After a few minutes the number fifteen arrived, going in the direction of the city centre. There was a sharp crack, repeated like an echo as the wheels of each car went past. I rose and approached the gallows. On the track lay a crushed circle of metal, encrusted like a mosaic with tiny shards of glass; the cheap plastic straps, surprisingly stiffened, were still in place on each side. I picked up this dead, mummified thing and examined it curiously. The entire mechanism was one solid mass: no trace remained of the hands, the numbers on the dial, or the little screw on the side where you wound it up. One thing only survived: at the top, horribly disfigured and barely recognisable, but still discernible even in the dim light of the streetlamp, five silver letters glowed, triumphant and invincible. ‘Ruhla,’ they spelled.
I pondered them for a moment with a twinge of pity and turned my steps slowly towards the corner of Mickiewicz Street. There I wrapped the remains of the watch in the guarantee, enclosed them, thus enshrouded, in the casket of their plastic bag and deposited the whole in the gutter.
Our Daily Bread
My ruthless, even cruel act of severance from all that had happened brought a certain relief, but it could not bring about a complete cure. In the teenage boy that I was, something had broken and died, and the damage was irreparable. I came to doubt that anything extraordinary or wonderful, anything comparable to the kind of thing that happened in all those stories about the old days, would ever happen to me.
With the doubts came a sort of dull lethargy and a feeling of emptiness. I didn’t sink into total apathy: I still adored the theatre, still went to concerts, still read avidly; but at school I simply lost interest. I withdrew from everything that wasn’t obligatory: no drama circles or music ensembles, no extracurricular activities, nothing that wasn’t absolutely required. Just lessons and then home, to loneliness and silence and sleep.
Paradoxically, this state of mind allowed me to look more closely at the world around me. When I had been actively involved, whether as pianist in a jazz quartet or acting or directing in a drama group, I hadn’t noticed what went on around me, for in my thoughts I was always elsewhere – at an audition or on a stage, at a concert, in a dream. Now that I was free of all this, I began to concentrate my attention on the separate little world of school and its day-to-day life. What kind of thing absorbed the students? What mattered most intensely to them? The things that mattered usually belonged to the sphere of the forbidden: smoking, drinking, playing truant, faking signatures and the best ways of cheating in exams. Then there were more serious offences: sneaking into X-rated films, throwing parties and the clandestine exchange of information (more often than not false or wildly inaccurate) about sex or sexual organs, usually supplemented by dirty stories and unsavoury jokes.
These were the elements that made up the fabric of school life, and from them was woven an immensely rich folklore, with a private language of its own, full of bizarre private codes, odd nicknames and colourful expressions, and a store of anecdotes about students, teachers and incidents involving them. It was like a game comprehensible only to the initiated; the stories were endlessly told and retold, with the same relish and the same gales of helpless laughter. No one ever seemed to tire of them. Among the most popular of these stories was the one about the eggnog.
One day, Butch, the class troublemaker and tough guy, brought two whole bottles of the stuff to school, intending to drink them after class with his buddies. He smuggled them in in his satchel meaning to transfer them to the safety of his locker as soon as he got to school, but before he had time to accomplish this, he inadvertently banged the bottom of the satchel against a chair, smashing both bottles. Realising what had happened, he snatched up the satchel and at the last moment managed to flee to the cloakroom. In his wake dashed his two closest mates, loath to abandon a friend in need. When the three of them opened the satchel and surveyed its contents, an apocalyptic vision met their eyes: it was almost half full of viscous yellow liquid in which textbooks, notebooks and other paraphernalia of school life helplessly swam. A dramatic rescue operation began. One by one, carefully, with two fingers, Butch plucked the victims of the flood from the sickly ochre depths; he held them aloft and then with a nod signalled to his friends that he was ready. At this they tilted back their heads, opened their mouths and held them under the sodden pages to catch the stream of sweet eggy nectar. When everything had been fished out, including the glass from the broken bottles, the desperate feast began. The satchel with the remaining liquid, well over a pint and a half, was passed from hand to hand like a trophy cup or a cavalry boot filled with champagne; it continued its rounds until it was quite empty.
The results were not long in coming. Given the hour (between eight and nine in the morning) and the fact that the revellers had not breakfasted, the dose they had consumed was near murderous. First to succumb to the inevitable was Cass, thin as a rail and the slightest of the three; spasms of nausea seized him in the second period. White as a corpse, a wild panic in his eyes, he suddenly ran out of the classroom with his hand over his mouth and for a long time failed to reappear. The teacher became concerned and sent someone to have a look; the messenger duly returned with the news that Cass was draped half conscious over the lavatory bowl and throwing up . . . bile, which probably meant appendicitis, or possibly twisted bowels. The school doctor was sent for, but he wasn’t yet in his office, and the unfortunate Cass was taken home.
The next victim was Zen, a refractory and difficult boy, often insolent to the teachers. He was struck down in the fourth period. For once, however, perhaps because he was so weakened, he behaved contrary to his usual manner: he meekly put up his hand, waited patiently for permission to speak, and then said he felt sick and asked please could he be excused. The biology teacher, a strict disciplinarian with a sharp tongue, known as the Wasp or the Viper, had already heard about the Cass affair and suspected she was being made a fool of. Determined to take no nonsense from anyone, she not only refused him permission to leave the room but called him up, perhaps as an act of revenge, to the blackboard. For some moments Zen attempted heroically to battle with nature, but the outcome was inevitable. Nature won: Zen heaved suddenly and in one graceful movement expelled a prolific, multihued fountain of vomit, liberally splashing the teacher’s blue sweater. The class burst into loud guffaws. The Viper, however, retained her composure. She dabbed at her sweater with a handkerchief and then proceeded, like the good naturalist she was, to subject the handkerchief to a smell test.
‘Well, well: so this is the famous bile that Fanfara’ – for this was Cass’s surname – ‘was throwing up. Apparently this class favours alcohol as its morning drink. Well, you won’t get off lightly for this one, I promise you that. Now, go and get a cloth and clean up this mess!’
Butch alone remained victorious until the end of the day. But it was a Pyrrhic victory. He went about in a befuddled daze, visibly struggling;
