there was, of course, the all-important question of how she behaved at Party meetings – in particular how she spoke. How did the word comrade sound on those gorgeous lips? Listen, comrades . . .; Comrade Tapeworm has the floor . . .; Comrade Eunuch, would the comrade summarise the essentials of his speech . . .? Has comrade Viper ensured the provision of coffee? No, it was unimaginable that such sentences should issue from such lips. And yet she must have pronounced them, or others like them; that was how people spoke at such meetings.
All these speculations, fantasies and wild surmise were at first no more than games of the imagination, still in the realm of the theoretical, so to speak. Until the moment when Madame began to teach our class. Then it all changed.
It happened quite suddenly, at the beginning of our final year. Our previous French teacher, Mrs W., an elderly and decent soul, decided unexpectedly to retire, and on the second of September, with no prior warning, Madame la Directrice strode energetically into our classroom, struck an imposing attitude at the teacher’s desk and announced that she herself would be responsible for our progress in French until our graduation at the end of the year.
The news came like a bolt from the blue; it was the last thing we had expected. When she was making her way down the corridor and our lookouts, stationed as usual behind the pillar to track the movements of enemy forces and warn of imminent danger, announced the joyful news that she was coming, we thought it must be just one of her brief, routine visits. The idea that she would actually teach us – that from that moment on we would experience the joys of her presence, feast our eyes on her divine form, inhale her scent, speak to her and suffer delicious torture at her hands – three times a week! – was one we had not considered even in our wildest dreams.
That was when it began, almost from the first lesson. All the things we’d heard about suddenly became concrete and very real. Her private life, her single state, her Party membership – subjects which up to that moment had evoked no more than a vague, theoretical curiosity – suddenly became burning issues. The last of these, for example, was now seriously disturbing. How could a creature so splendid, so breathtakingly gorgeous, belong to a workers’ party? That voice, those manners, those alabaster hands, those Venus de Milo legs – in a party of miners and peasants, a party of the proletariat? Everyone knew what they looked like: you could see them in the socialist-realist sculptures around the Palace of Culture and within the arcades of that other lugubrious 1950s monolith, the Young People’s Housing District; in the gallery of portraits on the banknotes, which displayed archetypal images of prominent national representatives: the Miner, the Worker, the Fisherman, the Peasant Woman in a headscarf; in the hundreds of propaganda posters that littered the city. They were creatures of monstrous size, with hard, brutal faces and trunklike legs, their feet rammed into hideous clumpy boots, their huge, clumsy paws clutching pickaxes, hammers and sickles.
Could one imagine her, so delicate and petite, so fragrant, in her Parisian silk blouse, in such company? We imagined the things that might happen to her there, and the thought of them was terrifying. For we knew what these marble heroes turned into once they stepped down from their plinths into the real world. We knew because we saw them in the street, in crowded trams, in canteens and on construction sites. They looked quite different then, and far more threatening: thickset and blubbery, with tiny porcine eyes, filthy and stinking of sweat, dressed in shapeless quilted jackets and caps, coarse and aggressive and always looking for a brawl.
She must have known what kind of people her ‘comrades’ were. Didn’t they disgust her? And wasn’t she afraid of them? Didn’t it ever occur to her that they might turn on her and demand their right to . . . her body? Dreadful thoughts, all of them, and the cause of many sleepless nights.
And then we got our first taste of that legendary pride of hers. The reality was far more painful than we had expected. It wasn’t that she was cruel or that she treated us badly; our experience confirmed none of the reports. It was something else: her air of complete, utter indifference. She seemed impregnable, impervious to everything, without human weakness of any kind. Nothing moved her, one way or the other; nothing angered or pleased her. She never shouted at anyone; indeed she never displayed any kind of emotion at all. When someone gave an unsatisfactory answer she never commented on it, far less ridiculed it; she corrected it in a businesslike way and silently entered an F in her book. Nor did we ever hear so much as a single word of praise. You could have learnt the assignment by heart or rephrased it in your own words as fluently as if you were reading from a book; you might flawlessly conjugate, at lightning speed and without a stammer of hesitation, the most difficult irregular verbs in every possible tense – and still, for your pains, you would get only a matter-of-fact ‘bien’, accompanied by the silent entry of a good mark beside your name. Nothing more. In treating us this way she was, in a sense, the ideal of justice: the same towards everyone, industrious or lazy, gifted or not, well behaved or recalcitrant. And that’s just what was so unbearable.
She never allowed herself to be drawn into conversation of a personal kind, despite the natural opportunities that French lessons afforded, for the first quarter of an hour was always devoted to ‘conversation’. Madame would pick a topic and begin to talk – in French, of course; then she would throw out a few simple questions. From this a so-called conversation was supposed to emerge. This was the moment for the approach. But what usually happened was that a pupil would launch into some supposedly fascinating story, get stuck in the middle for lack of vocabulary, and suddenly switch to Polish, whereupon Madame would interrupt with a sharp ‘Parle français!’
‘I can’t speak in French, it’s too hard, please let me finish in Polish,’ the desperate dreamer would plead.
‘Mais non!’ she would reply, ‘si tu veux nous raconter quelque chose d’intéressant, tu dois le faire en français.’
And the unfortunate hopeful, so eager to ‘tell us something interesting’ but unable to do it in French, would sink back into his seat, deflated like a punctured balloon.
But for those who could manage the French, things were no better. One of Madame’s worshippers once prepared an entire speech with the purpose of snaring her in a net of questions and extracting some personal detail. In vain. When she realised there was something a little suspect about his fluency, she interrupted him every few words to correct grammatical mistakes; then, when he had somehow surmounted these obstacles and succeeded, against all odds, in reaching his first question, namely where and how had she spent her holidays, she said she was sorry, but elle n’a pas eu de vacances cette année: she hadn’t gone anywhere.
Thus Madame turned out to be not so much a cruel and imperious monarch, merciless in her treatment of her subjects and relishing the humiliation they suffered at her hands, as a heartless angel – a sphinx. She seemed to exist in a different dimension. Her impregnable aloofness, formality and icy calm were so unshakeable that she was impervious even to the primitive measures adopted by her worshippers in the first row, who in their desperation resorted to dropping pencils or books so that, in reaching for them, they might look up her skirt. She must have seen the point of the exercise, for it was ridiculously transparent, but she did not react. She merely made it impossible for them to succeed. Her sitting posture was impeccable: you could have spent the whole lesson lying under her desk peering up through binoculars, and still you would have seen nothing. Another time, when a dropped pencil rolled out of the perpetrator’s reach, she simply picked it up and, without pausing in what she was saying, put it away in a drawer. To the mute signallings of the victim, trying desperately to communicate that he had nothing to write with and would she please give him back his pencil, she paid not the slightest attention.
In short, there was nothing she needed to do to make us suffer; the abyss that separated us from her was enough. Beside her, the girls in the class – plump, sallow-skinned, sweaty-palmed, their features still undefined – felt ugly and smelly and flustered; even the prettiest of them couldn’t compete. As for the boys – pimply and
