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ONE

Those were the Days!

For many years I used to think I had been born too late. Fascinating times, extraordinary events, exceptional people – all these, I felt, were things of the past, gone for good.

In my early childhood, in the 1950s, the ‘great epochs’ for me were above all the 1930s and the years of the war. I saw the latter as an age of heroic, almost titanic struggle when the fate of the world hung in the balance, the former as a golden age of carefree oblivion when the world, as if set aglow by the gentle light of a setting sun, gave itself up to pleasure and innocent folly.

Later, some time in the early 1960s, I realised I had come to see the Stalinist period, only just over, as another such ‘great era’. True, I had lived through part of it myself, but as a child too young to appreciate its malevolent power; and although I was well aware that, like the war, it was a nightmarish time, a time of degeneration and crime and collective madness, still it imposed itself on my mind – just because it was so extreme – as something unique, almost out of this world. And I felt a strange regret that I had been denied the chance to experience it in full, had scarcely brushed against it, confined as I was then to a view from the pram, the nursery and the little garden on the edge of town. The wild orgies of slaughter indulged in by the authorities of that time, the demented trances that gripped thousands of people, the tumult and delirious ravings – all this reached me only as a distant echo, faint and quite beyond my comprehension.

My sense of late arrival was not limited to the sphere of history. It had occasion to emerge in a rich variety of contexts, on a smaller, almost miniature scale.

Take, for example, my first piano lessons. My teacher was a dignified elderly lady, her family landed gentry, her own student days spent in Paris, London and Vienna in the 1920s. And here I am, on day one, already listening to reminiscences about the glorious past, the days of great talents and great masters, the speed at which pupils used to learn, the delight taken in music, how splendid it all was then and now how hopeless.

‘Bach, Beethoven, Schubert . . . and above all, above all, that wonder of nature, that example of perfection incarnate, that divinity – Mozart! The day he came into the world should be celebrated like the birth of Christ. The twenty-seventh of January, 1756: remember that date! There are no geniuses like that now. And music nowadays – oh, it’s not even worth discussing. Waste of breath. It’s finished. A barren wasteland, a desert.’

Or take chess. The game caught my interest, and after a few years of solitary practice I joined a club to develop my skills. There were just a few of us – a little group of teenage enthusiasts. Our instructor, a degenerate pre-war intellectual partial to the bottle, had us practise various openings and endgames, and showed us how such-and-such a game should be played. Sometimes, after making a move, he would suddenly interrupt his demonstration and ask, ‘Do you know who thought up this move? Who was the first to play like this?’

Naturally, no one knows. This is just what the instructor has been waiting for, and he launches into a so-called educational digression: ‘Capablanca. In 1925, at a tournament in London. I hope you all know who Capablanca was . . .’

‘Umm . . . he was a Master,’ someone mumbles.

‘A Master!’ He sneers at the hopeless inadequacy of this response. ‘I’m a Master, too. He was the Master, the absolute Master! A genius! One of the greatest chess players the world has ever known. A virtuoso of the positional game! They don’t make them like that anymore. They don’t have tournaments like that anymore. Chess has gone to the dogs.’

‘But what about Botvinnik, Petrosian, Tal?’ someone ventures; these were the stars of Soviet chess at the time.

Our instructor’s face twists into a scowl of unutterable disapproval. Then he lapses into a gloomy reverie. ‘No, no,’ he says finally, with an expression of distaste verging on disgust, ‘that’s not the same thing at all. Not compared to the way chess used to be played, to what chess players used to be. Lasker, Alekhine, Reti – now they were true giants. They had the divine spark. Capricious, spontaneous, full of wit and flair and élan: true Renaissance types. In their day chess was still the game of kings! But now . . . it’s just a waste of time. Competitions between clockwork robots.’

Or take another example: mountain climbing. I must have been about thirteen when a friend of my parents’, a seasoned mountaineer, took me up into the Tatras for what was to be my first real climb. I’d been to Zakopane before, but my experience there as a tourist had been confined to stays in comfortable pensions and lowland walks in the valleys and pastures. This time I was to stay in a real mountain shelter and climb real mountains.

And here I was at last, with my experienced guide, in the very heart of the Tatras, in a hostel of almost legendary fame. Our lodgings weren’t too bad, as we’d had the foresight to reserve a double well ahead. But the food situation was worse: queues for meals were endless. Trips to the bathroom involved similar difficulties. These obstacles and indignities overcome, we finally set off. There, ahead of us, is the trail, and there, at last, the long-awaited encounter with the majesty of silent peaks and vast empty spaces. But the longed-for peace and emptiness are disturbed at every turn by hordes of screaming schoolchildren, our contemplation of surging peaks and plunging abysses made impossible by the singing and collective clamour of tour groups going down ‘Lenin’s trail’. And my seasoned guide, in his dark-green windcheater, thick brown cords tied at the knees with special bindings, thick woollen checked socks, knee-high and tight, and well-worn, lovingly cared-for French hiking boots, perches himself gracefully on a rock and launches into this bitter lament:

‘So much for the mountains! So much for mountaineering! Even this they’ve managed to wreck. Everywhere you go, you come up against these damn pests. Mass tourism – whoever heard of such a thing? What’s the point of it? It was different before the war. You arrived, and the first thing you did after you got off the train was to stock up: buckwheat, noodles, bacon, tea, sugar, onions – not very refined, perhaps, but cheap and dependable. Then you went on to Roztoka or Morskie Oko, either on foot or in one of those small open-roofed vans that made the trip whenever enough people wanted to go – never by coach! There was a family atmosphere about that shelter at Roztoka, and the best thing was that nobody was there – fifteen people at most. That was the base camp; you’d strike off from there, sometimes for a few days, sleeping rough in shepherds’ huts and, higher up, under the rocks. That’s what it’s about, after all: silence and solitude, being alone with Nature and with your thoughts. You feel as if you were alone in the world, in a place where earth meets sky, touching the heavens, the cosmos . . . floating somewhere above the rest of civilisation. But just try and do that now, with these idiots all over the place. Tours; coach trips; “guides”, they call themselves. Lowlanders! A circus, that’s what it is – a travesty. It’s sickening.’

For years this kind of sneering at the hopelessness of the present and nostalgic sighing for a glorious past rang in my ears as an almost daily refrain. So when I took my place, at the age of fourteen, in the classroom where I was to spend my last four years of school, I was not surprised to hear variations on the same theme. Now they took the form of paeans of praise to former pupils.

During lessons the teachers would sometimes stray from the subject to reminisce about some of these old students and their doings. The personalities were invariably very colourful and their antics quite fantastic. But one would be wrong to suppose that these accounts took the form of edifying parables about exemplary pupils or cautionary tales about rogues miraculously reformed: nothing was further from the truth. The protagonists may have been exceptional, but they could hardly be called sweet or angelic; the features that made them exceptional did not rank high in any catalogue of student virtues. They were intractable, unruly and insubordinate, occasionally insulting and provocative; they had an inflated sense of their own worth; they exuded boldness and independence. They were headstrong, wilful and proud, and they went their own way. But they all dazzled with their talent – a stupendous memory or a beautiful voice, brilliance or wit or a first-class brain – they all had something extraordinary. It was hard to believe, listening to those stories, that the events described had really taken place, especially since the teachers, in recounting their charges’ outrageous antics, not only failed to allow so much as a note of condemnation to creep into their narratives but, indeed, seemed to find in the retelling, and in the whiff of scandal that often tinged it, a kind of nostalgic relish, even a certain pride, as if fortune had singled them out for a special honour in allowing them to witness something so far removed from the ordinary.

But of course there was a moral. In all these piquant, apparently iconoclastic tales of nonchalant bravado lurked a far less pleasant message. It was a warning, and it went more or less like this: ‘The fact that such things once happened does not mean they will continue to happen. In particular, it does not mean that anything of the sort can be allowed to happen in this class. Those years, those people, were exceptional, unique. Now they’re gone, and nothing about them has anything to do with you. Remember that: don’t even think of trying to emulate them. You’d come to a dismal end.’

This attitude was one with which I was all too familiar, but in this case I could not come to terms with it. Yes, the world was once a richer, more interesting, more vivid place – of that I had no doubt. I was also prepared to believe that musicians, and artists in general, were greater in the past. I could concede, although less willingly, that mountain climbing was once a nobler activity than it is now and that the royal game of chess had masters more worthy of it. But school? Was I really supposed to believe that even pupils were better in the past? No – this idea I could not accept.

It’s just not possible, I thought, that all this greyness and mediocrity around me is irrevocable; it can’t be entirely beyond redemption. After all, the way things are also depends on me: I can influence reality; I, too, can create it. In which case, it’s time to act. Time to launch myself into something. Let something happen: let something start, once again, to happen! Let the old times return, and with them the great heroes, in new incarnations!

The Modern Jazz Quartet

One legend that inspired me in those days was the legend of jazz, especially Polish jazz. Its heroes were teddy boys, daring challengers of the Stalinist morals of the day; the notorious and fascinating writer ‘Leo’ Tyrmand, ‘renegade’ and libertine, indefatigable promoter of jazz as the music of freedom and independence; and the leaders of the first Polish jazz ensembles, with their rich, colourful lives, their often brilliant careers, their trips to the West, even, sometimes, to the mecca itself – the United States of America. This was the world that made up the legend. My head teemed with images of smoke-filled student clubs and cellars, of heady all-night jam sessions, and beyond them, in a Warsaw still in ruins, still not rebuilt, of deserted streets at dawn, when the jazzmen emerged from their underground lairs as if from bomb shelters, deathly tired and strangely sad. There was a magical quality to these visions, an obscure, haunting charm that made me ache to experience something similar.

I didn’t hesitate long. I rounded up some friends who, like me, took music lessons and were competent on some instrument, and persuaded them to form a jazz band. We put together a quartet – piano, trumpet, percussion and double bass – and began to rehearse. We met after classes, in the school gym. Alas, our rehearsals had very little in common with the stuff of my dreams. Instead of intoxicating clouds of cigarette smoke, alcoholic fumes and French perfume, we were wreathed in a sickly fug of adolescent sweat, lingering from the last PE session; instead of the bohemian atmosphere of half-lit, crowded cellars, redolent of decadence, we had the ambience of a dingy gym in the harsh light of early afternoon or the cadaverous glow of the ceiling lights. Rows of ladders fixed to the wall, barred windows and a bare and endless stretch of floor, wobbling in places underfoot because some of the boards had come loose, and ornamented only by a lone leather vaulting-horse – these were our stage and backdrop. Our playing, too, fell short of the artistry of the famous ensembles: we experienced no legendary trances, no Dionysian frenzies, none of that divine fluency and blind improvisatory exhilaration. The most you could say was that we had more or less mastered a skill; we were competent at best.

I told myself not to worry: it was always like that at the beginning; our time would surely come. And to boost my morale I imagined us dazzling the audience at some future concert or school party, bringing them to their knees in admiration, my own brilliant solo greeted with storms of applause and cries of enthusiasm as I, without taking my hands from the keyboard, turned confidently to the audience to nod a nonchalant thanks and in that brief second saw all the school beauties raptly gazing at me with adoring eyes.

After a few months of rehearsing we had a big enough repertoire to play for well over two hours, and decided the time was ripe for our first performance. But here we encountered an unexpected obstacle. It turned out that the idea of a school jazz club, performing on weekends, say, was one the school authorities would not even consider: to permit such a thing would be tantamount, they were convinced, to colluding in the scandalous transformation of a respectable educational institution into a place of entertainment and from there, inevitably, into a den of iniquity. The students, for their part, refused to consider allowing the Modern Jazz Quartet, as we called ourselves, to play at the three annual school dances: at carnival, or the ball held a hundred days before graduation, or the senior prom. Rock’n’roll was by then a star in the ascendant, The Beatles and similar groups were in the early days of their triumph, and this was the only kind of music teenagers wanted to listen and dance to.

Given this state of affairs, our one chance of performing (and even this the school authorities considered a magnanimous concession) was at school ceremonies – stiff, tedious, soulless affairs full of bombast and pompous rhetoric. To agree to such conditions was to accept a compromise that bordered on a betrayal of all our hopes and ambitions – especially since it was stressed that if we chose to accept the offer, we must play in a ‘quiet and cultured manner’: ‘none of those barbaric rhythms’ and ‘none of that foul caterwauling’. Thus we were reduced to providing ‘musical interludes’ at official school functions – which rejoiced, among all of us, in the most dismal reputation.

In the end, our role in these events was more grotesque than ignominious, more farce than defeat. We played what we wanted, but the context was absurd. For instance, ‘Georgia’ came on the heels of a histrionic collective rendition of Mayakovsky’s ‘Left Forward’, and blues followed the recital, in a series of hysterical shrieks, of verses depicting the horrifying plight of workers in America, where, it was confidently stated, ‘each day some unemployed / jump headlong from the bridge / into the Hudson’. The whole thing, in short, was preposterous, and everyone, the audience as well as ourselves, felt this. How, in such conditions, could one even entertain the illusion that one was creating history or participating in momentous events?

Once a small flame of hope did briefly appear. But it flickered for only an instant, and the circumstances were exceptional.

We were indulged with various diversions in those days, and one of the most tedious was the annual festival of school choirs and vocal groups. It always took place, according to the rule, in the school whose group had won the first prize, the notorious Golden Nightingale, the preceding year. To our misfortune, it so happened that this particular year the pathetic trophy had gone to a group from our school – the ludicrous Exotic Trio, whose speciality was Cuban folklore. Their regrettable triumph meant that the task of organising the festival now fell to us. This was a monstrous headache, involving ‘community work’ after class and, most nightmarish of all, three days of auditions culminating in a concert given by the winners, at which attendance, as a sign of the hosts’ hospitality, was obligatory.

The reality surpassed our worst expectations. This was owing principally to our singing instructor, the terror of the school. Known as ‘the Eunuch’ because of his reedy voice (a ‘Heldentenor’, by his own description) and his old-bachelor ways, he was a classic neurotic, with a tendency toward excessive enthusiasm and an unswerving conviction that singing – classical singing, naturally – was the most glorious thing on earth. He was the object of endless jokes and ridicule, but he was also a figure of fear. When something had enraged him beyond the limits of his endurance he was capable, at the height of his fury, of lashing out and doing us physical harm. Worst of all, he could utter threats so macabre that, although we knew from experience they would not be carried out, the very sound of them made the world go dark before our eyes. The one he resorted to most often went like this: ‘I’ll rot in prison for the rest of my days, but in a moment, with the aid of this instrument’ – whereupon he would take a penknife out of his pocket and flick it open to reveal the blade – ‘with the aid of this blunt instrument here, I’ll hack off someone’s ears!’

And this maniac, this raving lunatic, to put it mildly, was to be in charge of the festival. What this meant in practice may easily be imagined. For the duration of the affair he became the most important figure in the school. This was his festival; these were the days of his triumph. They were also, for him, as the person responsible for the whole thing, days of great stress. He prowled the corridors in a state of feverish excitement, observing everything, poking his nose into everything, wanting to choreograph our every move; after classes he proceeded, with relish, to torment the choir with hours of practice. Everyone was thoroughly sick of him and we longed for the day when this purgatory would come to a blessed end.

By the last day of the festival most of the students were showing symptoms of profound depression and went about in an almost catatonic stupor. The permanent, oppressive presence of the demented Eunuch, the constant flow of new decisions, the endless chopping and changing, the whole accompanied, for hours on end, by the dreadful howling of choirs in full flow – all this tried our endurance to its limit. At last, however, the blessed end arrived. The last notes of some exalted song performed by the winners of this year’s Nightingale resounded and died away; the honourable members of the jury made a grand exit in stately procession; and the students, left to their own devices, with just the chairs to be put away and the stage to be swept, gave way to uncontrollable euphoria.

I had been about to close the piano lid when for some reason I began instead to sound out, rhythmically, four descending notes in a minor key, a simple arrangement that was the typical introduction to many jazz classics, among them Ray Charles’s famous ‘Hit the Road Jack’. My unthinking, barely conscious, repeated action had a spectacular and quite unexpected effect. The crowd of students milling about cleaning up the room immediately took up the rhythm; people started to clap and stamp their feet. After that, events took their unstoppable course. The three other members of the Modern Jazz Quartet, feeling the call of blood, launched themselves upon their instruments. The double bass was the first, plucking out the same four notes, eight quavers in quadruple time. Next on stage was the percussionist; with lightning speed he threw the covers off his instruments, flung himself at his drums and, after a few energetic drumrolls and strikes on his cymbals as an entrée, began, in an attitude of great concentration, his head to one side, to pound out a four-four basso continuo. Then – at first distantly, still from within the instrument cupboard – the trumpet came in, joining us in several repeats of those first four electrifying notes; and when the trumpeter at last appeared on stage, to screams of ecstasy and whoops of joy, he sounded the first bars of the theme.

Everyone went berserk. People began to sway, twitch, twist and contort themselves to the music. And then someone else, a boy who had been looking after the technical side of things, leapt up onto the stage. He pulled up a chair for me (thus far I’d been playing standing up), stuck a pair of sunglasses on my nose to suggest a resemblance to Ray Charles, pushed a microphone up to my lips and said in a passionate whisper, ‘Let’s have some vocal! Come on, don’t be shy!’

Who could resist such an enticement, a plea so eloquent with yearning, brimming with the will of an inflamed crowd? Its urgency was stronger than the choking shame in my throat. I squeezed my eyes shut, took a breath and rasped out into the microphone:

Hit the road Jack,

And don’t you come back no more . . .

And the frenzied, dancing crowd came in with perfect timing. Like a well-rehearsed ensemble they took up the words, endowing them with new meaning and determination:

No more no more no more!

English was not our school’s strong point, and hardly anyone understood what the song was about, but the force of those two words, that ‘no more’ so sweet to the Polish ear, advancing rhythmically up the rungs of a minor scale in a row of inverted triads at the fourth and the sixth, was clear to all. And the crowd took up the chant fully aware of its significance.

No more! Enough! Never, never again! No more howling; no more having to sit and listen. Down with the festival of choirs and vocal groups! To hell with them all! Damn the Golden Nightingale, damn the Exotic Trio, may they vanish from the face of the earth! Damn the Eunuch, may he rot in hell! Don’t let him come back no more . . .

No more no more no more!

And as the crowd was chanting these words for the umpteenth time, in an unrestrained, ecstatic frenzy of hope and relief, there burst into the room, like a ballistic missile, our singing instructor – puce with rage and squawking in his reedy voice, ‘What the bloody hell is going on here?!’

And then a miracle happened – one of those miracles that usually occur only in our imaginations or in a well-directed film, one of those rare things that happen perhaps once in a lifetime.

As anyone who remembers Ray Charles’s hit knows, at the last bar of the main thematic phrase (its second half, to be precise), on the three syncopated sounds, the blind black singer, in a dramatic, theatrically breaking and swooping voice, asks his vocal partner, a woman throwing him out of the house, the intriguingly ambiguous question, ‘What you say?’ This question-exclamation, most likely because it ends on the dominant, is a kind of musical punchline, one of those magic moments in music for which we unconsciously wait and which, when it comes, evokes a shiver of singular bliss.

Now it so happened that the Eunuch’s blood-curdling scream fell precisely at the end of the penultimate bar. I had less than a second to make up my mind. I hit the first two notes of the last bar (another repeat of the famous introduction) and, twisting my face into the mocking, exaggerated grimace assumed by people pretending not to have heard what was said, crowed out with that characteristic rising lilt, in the general direction of the Eunuch, standing now in the middle of a stunned and silent room, ‘What you say?!’

It was perfect. A roar of laughter and a shiver of cathartic joy went through the room. For the Eunuch it was the last straw. With one bound he was at the piano and had launched himself at me. He kicked me roughly off my chair, banged shut the piano lid and hissed out one of his horrifying threats: ‘You’ll pay dearly for this, you little snot! We’ll see who has the last laugh! You’ll be squealing like a stuck pig by the time I’m finished with you. In the meantime, I’ll tell you right now that you’ve just earned yourself an F in singing, and I really don’t see how you can change that before the end of the year.’

That was the last performance of the Modern Jazz Quartet. The following day it was officially dissolved by the school authorities, while I, as an additional reward for my brilliant solo (and it was brilliant, whatever else could be said about it), was favoured with a D in discipline.

All the World’s a Stage

The brief life of our ensemble, like the incident which brought it to a definitive close, seemed to confirm our teachers’ warnings against attempting to emulate former pupils. Here was a tale strikingly like their reminiscences of the past, full of potential colour and spice, just waiting to be brought out in the telling; but the reality was flat, and then silly, and finally, after one moment of glory, when for an instant it sparkled and shone, abrupt and ignominious in its ending.

Yet I didn’t give up. The following year I tried again to forge some magic from the drab reality around me.

It was the time of my first fascination with the theatre. For several months I’d had no interest in anything else. I knew what was playing in every theatre in town; I even went to some plays twice. Like a professional drama critic, I never missed an opening night. I also read endless numbers of plays, devoured all the theatrical magazines I could lay my hands on, and studied the biographies of famous actors and directors.

I was captivated. The tragic and comic fates of dramatic heroes, the beauty and talent of the actors, the élan with which they threw themselves into their scenes and recited their soliloquies, the mysterious half-light and the dazzling glare, the darkness, the backstage secrets, the gong that rang before the act began, and then the joyful conclusion – the audience applauding, the actors, including those whose characters had just died, taking their bows – this whole world of illusion had me under its spell. In those days I could have stayed in the theatre forever.

I decided to see what I could achieve. I wanted to know what it felt like to be up there on the stage, captivating the audience, mesmerising them with eyes and voice and force of expression: what it was like to act, to put on a show. Heedless of the still recent fate of the Modern Jazz Quartet and the troubles it had entangled me in, I set about organising a school drama circle.

The path I was taking wasn’t strewn with roses. On the contrary, it bristled with difficulties and pitfalls far more treacherous than those I’d encountered playing jazz. Playing an instrument, at any level, presupposes certain well-defined and measurable skills; the very possession of them is a guarantee of results, however basic. But the art of theatre is deceptive. While ostensibly much more accessible, it requires, if it is to bear its magic fruit, enormous amounts of work and skills of a very particular kind; otherwise it becomes, insidiously, a source of ridicule. So I had to keep a tight hold on the reins if the spirit of disenchantment was not to paralyse me, for I was involving myself in something which, while diverging considerably from my hopes and dreams, exposed my love for the divine Melpomene to the harshest trials.

Anyone who has ever been in a play knows how rehearsals, particularly walk-throughs, can sap morale: how easily every shortcoming – lack of sets and costumes, absence of lights and props, lines imperfectly learnt and woodenly rendered, clumsy movements and artificial gestures – can breed discouragement. When one considers that in the present case these elements were supplemented by two further factors, namely the amateurishness of a school production and a lack of real motivation on the part of the participants, the full extent of my torment becomes apparent. On the one hand, the cast seemed to believe I knew what I was doing: I fed them the illusions they needed, and they appeared to trust in our ultimate success. On the other hand, when they saw what I saw, they would lose faith and relapse, which meant that standards fell and the temptation returned to give up then and there.

‘We’re wasting our time,’ they would say, ‘we’ll never get anywhere. We’ll only end up looking ridiculous. And even if we do get somewhere, how many performances will we have? One, maybe two. Is all this worth it for just one performance?’

‘Of course it’s worth it,’ I would reply. ‘If it works, it would be worth it just for one moment. Trust me, I know what I’m talking about . . .’ (I was thinking, of course, of the Quartet’s swan song.)

‘Oh, that’s just talk,’ they’d say, shaking their heads and dispersing in mute resignation.

Sometime near the end of April, after months of preparation, endless reassessments, substitutions and changes of mind, countless nervous breakdowns and moments of feverish exhilaration, the play assumed its final shape. It was an hour-long collage of selected scenes and monologues from famous plays – Aeschylus to Beckett. All the World’s a Stage was characterised throughout by the darkest pessimism. It began with the monologue of Prometheus chained to his rock and went on with the dialogue between Creon and Haemon from Antigone; then came a few bitter passages from Shakespeare, among them Jaques’s soliloquy from As You Like It about the seven ages of man, beginning with the words we had adopted as our title; then the concluding soliloquy of Molière’s Misanthrope, followed by Faust’s first soliloquy and a fragment of his dialogue with Mephistopheles. Lastly, there was a fragment of Hamm’s soliloquy from Endgame.

This script, submitted to the school authorities for inspection, was rejected.

‘Why is it so gloomy?’ the deputy headmaster wanted to know, eyeing it with disfavour. Tall, thin, with a sallow complexion and a slightly tubercular look, he was generally known as the Tapeworm. ‘You feel like killing yourself after reading this. We can’t tolerate defeatism in this school.’

‘But these are classics, sir,’ I ventured, trying to defend my creation. ‘They’re almost all in the syllabus. I’m not the one who drew up the syllabus.’

‘Don’t you try to hide behind the syllabus,’ he replied, frowning as he shuffled through the pages. ‘There’s a reason you’ve selected these particular passages: it’s a deliberate attempt to question every decent value and discourage people from study and work. Here, for instance,’ he said, pointing to the page with Faust’s monologue. He read out the first few lines:

The books I’ve read! Philosophy,

And Law, and Medicine besides;

Even (alas!) Theology.

I’ve searched for knowledge far and wide.

And here I am, poor fool, no more

Enlightened than I was before.

‘Well? How else should this be read, in your opinion? It says that studying is worthless and won’t get you anywhere. Doesn’t it? And you expect us to applaud such a message?!’

‘We had it in literature class,’ I retorted impatiently. ‘Are you saying that it’s all right in class or at home, but not on stage?’

‘It’s different in class,’ the Tapeworm replied, unruffled. ‘In class there’s a teacher to tell you what the author intended.’

‘Well, then, sir, what, in your opinion, did Goethe intend here?’ I asked.

‘Isn’t it obvious?’ he snorted. ‘He was talking about pride: excessive, overweening pride. And arrogance. Just like yours, in fact. Once you start thinking you know everything, you’re bound to come to a bad end. Here you are,’ he said, pointing to a passage further down, ‘it says so here.’

To Magic therefore have I turned

To try the spirits’ power and gain

The knowledge they alone bestow;

No longer will I have to strain

To speak of things I do not know.

‘Well? There you are. Magic, evil powers, pacts with the devil – that’s what happens to the swollen-headed and the proud. But that’s something your script somehow fails to mention. And in any case,’ he said, suddenly changing the subject, ‘why is there no Polish literature represented here? This is a Polish school, after all.’

‘This is a selection from the greatest works in the history of drama –’ I began, but the Tapeworm cut me off in mid-flow and said, in tones of heavy sarcasm, ‘Ah. So you consider, I take it, that our own literature has no drama worthy of note. Mickiewicz, Slowacki, Krasinski – for you they’re small fry, third-rate, second-rate at best . . .?’

‘I didn’t say that,’ I replied. This was an easy thrust to parry. ‘Nevertheless, on the other hand, you must admit that the works of Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Molière and Goethe are performed the world over, while our own classics tend to be appreciated mainly on their home ground.’

‘That’s right – “Exalting the foreign, dismissing your own”, as the saying goes,’ he mocked.

‘Strictly speaking, it’s not a saying; it’s from a poem by Stanislaw Jachowicz, another of our great poets. You know, the one who wrote, “Poor pussy was ill and lying in bed”,’ I supplied helpfully. ‘I’m sure you know it . . .’

‘All right, that’s enough, Mr Know-it-all,’ snapped the Tapeworm, cutting off my show of erudition. ‘Do you realise your attitude is a typical example of “cosmopolitanism”? You know what that means, don’t you?’

‘It means “citizenship of the world”.’

‘No,’ said the deputy headmaster. ‘It means indifference to or even contempt for one’s own culture and traditions. You worship the West; it’s a form of idolatry.’

‘The West?’ I repeated, feigning surprise. ‘As far as I know, Greece, especially before Christ—’

But the Tapeworm didn’t let me finish. ‘It’s a curious thing,’ he said, ‘that in your script you have also omitted Chekhov, Gogol and Tolstoy. Why this strange oversight? You surely don’t intend to claim that their plays are produced only in Russia – I mean, in the Soviet Union. Or do you?’

I could see that further discussion was fruitless. ‘So, what’s the decision?’ I asked. ‘Can we do it or not?’

‘Not as it is, no. Not unless you incorporate the changes I’ve suggested.’

‘I’ll have to think about that,’ I said diplomatically; inwardly I made a gesture expressive of what he could do with his changes and snarled, Not on your life, you bastard.

Insulting the Tapeworm, especially in one’s imagination, was no great feat. Finding a solution was harder. After all the months of rehearsals, after all our hopes and dreams, I couldn’t bring myself to tell the cast about the deputy headmaster’s decision. Yet concealing it, playing for time and making promises I couldn’t keep, was also out of the question.

With nothing more to lose, I made my way, that very afternoon, to the offices of the Warsaw section of the Amateur and School Theatrical Events Board, housed in one of the city’s theatres. I went there intending to enter our play in the competition; but I did not do so lightly. The idea was tempting: to participate in the festival organised by the Board, the most prestigious event of its kind, and at the same time to defy the Tapeworm – but what if it ended in disgrace? What then? Our experience of the stage was very slight; never having faced a live audience, we did not know how we would react. Would stage-fright paralyse us? Would we forget our lines? How would we cope with the unexpected? The idea of making a hash of it was terrifying. And then the competition itself was another unknown factor: perhaps, regardless of how well we acted, our compilation would seem puerile or, worse, boring, or simply ludicrous in its tragic intensity. Failure in these circumstances meant utter humiliation. I felt I was taking an enormous risk.

A sleepy calm reigned in the festival offices. Behind the desk a young secretary sat languidly painting her nails.

‘I’d like to enter our group in this year’s competition,’ I said, a touch uncertainly.

‘On whose behalf?’ inquired the secretary, without looking up from the task on which her attention was bent.

‘What do you mean, on whose behalf?’ I asked, surprised. ‘On my behalf. I mean, on behalf of the group I represent.’

She looked me up and down. ‘You don’t look like a teacher or an instructor to me.’ She returned to her nails.

‘And indeed I’m not – neither one nor the other,’ I admitted, with a pretence of chagrin. ‘Does that mean I can’t enter our group?’

‘The deadline’s passed,’ she replied, noncommittal.

Something in my heart contracted in a spasm of dismay, yet I felt a kind of relief. I’d tried and failed, and perhaps it was for the best. My prospects of victor’s laurels had vanished, but so had the spectre of shame and defeat.

‘The deadline’s passed . . .’ I repeated dully, like an echo. ‘Do you mind telling me when?’

‘At noon today,’ she announced, exuding false regret.

I looked at my watch. It was a quarter past three.

‘I had classes until two . . .’ I said, as if debating with myself.

She spread her hands in a helpless gesture, taking the opportunity as she did so to inspect the results of her work. ‘You should have come yesterday.’

‘Oh, well,’ I muttered, and began to shuffle about resignedly, preparing to leave. But at that moment the door opened, admitting none other than S. – one of the most popular actors of the day – himself, in person. The secretary leapt up to greet him with an ingratiating smile.

S. had distinguished himself not only on stage but also as something of a character: he was known to be moody and capricious, and was generally considered a fascinating personality. Anecdotes about him abounded: how difficult he was to work with, how he would play practical jokes on his fellow actors on stage and yet take pains to make himself agreeable to the theatre staff and, particularly, to his fans. His self-absorption and delusions of grandeur were legendary; his disingenuousness, his transparent attempts to cloak these weaknesses in a veil of false modesty and to portray himself as a timid naïf, were an ever-reliable source of amusement. He craved applause and admiration, and liked to be surrounded by young people, who could be relied upon to provide both; he taught at the drama school and patronised a variety of theatrical events, the festival among them. His latest triumph had been as Prospero in The Tempest, a production for which tickets had been sold out weeks in advance. I had managed to see it several times, and knew it almost by heart.

Now, as he strode in with an arch ‘Buon giorno, cara mia’ for the secretary, I was seeing him close up for the first time. For a moment I was all but struck dumb with the thrill. But when he magnanimously offered me his hand and with his typical disingenuousness hastened to introduce himself, I recovered my wits and hazarded a gambit in which I suddenly perceived the glimmer of a chance: I addressed him in the words of Ariel:

All hail, great master! grave sir, hail! I come

To answer thy best pleasure; be’t to fly,

To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride

On the curl’d clouds, to thy strong bidding task

Ariel and all his quality.

Whereupon, sizing me up with a keen glance and finding me apparently to his approval, he assumed his Prospero’s severe and haughty look and, taking up where I’d left off, replied:

Hast thou, spirit,

Performed to point the tempest that I bade thee?

‘To every article,’ I said, and went on:

I boarded the king’s ship; now on the beak,

Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin,

I flam’d amazement . . .

He took a step toward me and threw an arm around my shoulders:

My brave spirit!

Who was so firm, so constant, that this coil

Would not infect his reason?

I galloped on:

Not a soul . . .

– but then I paused, as if hesitating, and, looking my extraordinary partner straight in the eye, found myself, to my astonishment, continuing in heroic iambics:

But stay, one such there was – alack, the same,

Indeed, who stands before you now, come hither

By dreams of everlasting glory driv’n,

My entry here to register. This pageant,

Liege, on which your justice will ere long pronounce

I would fain enter; but this dread Sycorax –

I gestured in the general direction of the secretary –

This monstrous hag, who here doth sit and paint

Her claws all day, informs me that the deadline

Now is past. It passed at noon, she says –

I glanced at my watch –

’Twas but three hours ago! Thus envious Fortune

Deceitfully hath pierced my hopes, and shot

Her arrows through my flesh. What now, my lord?

My hopes are spread before you, and my fate

In your good graces lies. I do beseech thee,

Give me your hand, and lend me your good favour.

For this, good sir, most humbly do I pray thee.

During this improvised tirade S. had been eyeing me with markedly increasing stupefaction. Now, as I declaimed my final line, he shook himself out of his stunned state and took up my challenge:

’Tis Sycorax, thou sayst, who bars your entry?

Nay, ’twill not do. I’ll bind her with my magic:

Thus will she break. In such a one ’tis folly

To oppose me. She’ll do my bidding.

With a mock-serious scowl he strode toward the secretary, stretched out his arms as if to draw her into the hypnotic coils of his magic, and declaimed:

Attendest thou, cruel queen? Dost thou not hear me?

This youth must be admitted. You’ll see to it.

And she, melting with adoration under his gaze and falling unwittingly into the flow of the rhythm, replied in the same metre:

Yes, sir, at once, of course, I’ll do it now!

At this S. also seemed to relax and lose some of his starchiness. He spread his arms in a rapturous gesture, a blissful smile on his face. And with grotesque sweetness he cooed his favourite phrase: ‘Ah, how lovely!’ Embracing her in a fatherly hug, he began to stroke her hair. At which she flushed and bared her teeth in a nervous smile, full of shame and sweet longing.

Going home, I walked on air. Within less than half an hour I had been subjected to a hail of experiences so remarkable that each one of them would take days to digest. I had met S., actually met him, in person! What’s more, we had clowned about together, and played our parts as equals, for all the world as if we were on stage; and I had charmed him – I had enchanted him! Most important of all, I had succeeded in getting my group entered in the festival – and with what aplomb! I was bursting with exhilaration and pride. And I felt sure, felt deep in my bones, that here at last was the hour of my triumph; my time had finally come. After such a beginning, such a radical reversal of fate, things could only get better.

I hastened to round up the cast to tell them the good news and explain what it would mean for us. I felt as if I were addressing troops on the eve of battle.

‘I know we’ll win this competition; I can feel it,’ I said as I concluded my morale-building speech. ‘Just imagine how the Tapeworm will look when he finds out! You’ll be covered in glory!’

For the first time they seemed genuinely convinced. Our performance, since it had been entered at the so-called last minute, was slotted in at the end of the festival, so we had a chance to assess the competition before our turn came. But in the end I decided that this was not an advantage. If the other performances were good, especially if they were very good, they might sow seeds of doubt and clip our wings; if, on the other hand, they were bad, and especially if they were hopeless, they would detract from the value and sweetness of a deserved triumph. I assessed my strategies like a general before a decisive confrontation with the enemy.

We arrived at the theatre where the festival was taking place a short time before we were due on stage. It was the interval, and one of the first people we bumped into was S. himself, surrounded by a garland of juvenile admirers, presumably festival participants, and basking in their reverent gaze. It was as if he had been waiting for our – or rather, my – arrival. He raised his hands in a gesture of greeting and (having manifestly prepared his lines) exclaimed:

Here’s Ariel! Spirit, farest thou well? What magic,

My quaint bird, hast thou prepared for us?

A wave of heat flooded over me and my heart began to race. It was clear that much depended on what, and how, I replied. Without much reflection, therefore, and heedless of the dreadful risk involved – that of falling flat on my face in front of an unknown audience – I blurted out, making sure only to keep the metre:

’Twill be enough, good master, if I say

That you’ll see all the world on stage anon!

Then, to avoid further complications, I gestured pointedly at my watch and turned energetically to the dressing-rooms. The remaining cast members, beaming with pride, followed joyfully on my heels. Just before the door closed I heard S. still casting his charms over his admirers. ‘That’s how we always talk,’ he was saying.

Our performance went very well, as I’d been sure that it would. There was no question of anyone’s forgetting his lines – not a single slip, not even so much as a stutter. Our acting was inspired, and we enjoyed it. One by one, the most sublime scenes from the greatest works of drama unrolled before the audience, each culminating in a monologue that fulfilled the function of a Greek chorus. But the force did not flow from our technique, our mastery of the texts or our confidence on stage. It flowed mainly from the fact that every line we uttered was imbued with truth – the truth of our own feelings and experience. In speaking the lines it was as if we were talking about ourselves. Just as the crowd of students had taken up that ‘No more’ and endowed it with a meaning of their own, so now we were singing our own song, with the words of the classics as our text.

It was a song of anger and rebellion, bitterness and resentment. Not this, it said – youth should not be like this! School should not be like this, the world should not be like this! Prometheus chained to his rock was a young teacher we had adored, fired for ‘excessive liberality’ in the classroom. The unyielding, uncompromising Creon personified the narrow-minded Tapeworm. Every silly and pathetic Shakespearean creature represented the Eunuch or his like. But the Misanthrope I reserved for myself: Alceste was me. It was with special relish that I spoke the lines of his final speech:

May you always be true to each other, and know

All the joys and contentments that love can bestow.

As for me, foully wronged, maligned and betrayed,

I’ll abandon this world where injustice holds sway

And retire to some tranquil and far-away place

Where honour’s a virtue and not a disgrace.

But I put even more intensity into Hamm’s monologue from Endgame – perhaps because these were the closing lines of our performance. I took a few steps forward, stared piercingly at the audience, in particular at the jury, seated at a long table with S., their chairman, in the middle, and began with tremendous calm:

Me to play.

You weep, and weep, for nothing, so as not to laugh,

and little by little . . . you begin to grieve.

I cast a long, lingering look around the room and went on:

All those I might have helped. Helped!

Saved. Saved!

The place was crawling with them.

Then I turned on the assembled company with a thunderous glare and launched with fury into the attack:

Use your head, can’t you, use your head, you’re on

earth, there’s no cure for that. Get out of here and

love one another! Lick your neighbour as yourself!

Out of my sight and back to your petting parties!

Having spat this out, I sank into a kind of gloomy apathy and spoke the final two sentences softly, as if more to myself than to the audience:

All that, all that!

The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.

I let my head sink slowly down, and then came the blackout, during which we all hurried offstage.

The storm of applause that broke out left no room for doubt as to the results of the competition. And, indeed, we were not left long in suspense. The good news, at that stage still unofficial, was brought to us about an hour later, in the foyer, where we ran into the members of the jury as they emerged from their deliberations. It was S., of course, who announced it – predictably, in the following form:

Most excellent, my spirit! Thou didst well

And worthily perform. The prize is yours.

‘I don’t believe it,’ I replied, finally putting an end to this Shakespearean back-and-forth. ‘It’s too beautiful to be true . . .’

‘You’ll soon see for yourself,’ he said, likewise reverting to prose. ‘Prospero never lies. At most . . . he might play tricks,’ he added with a roguish wink, and proceeded to honour us each in turn with a shake of the hand and a solemn ‘Congratulations’.

I was happy. Here it was, granted at last – the thing I’d dreamed of so often. The reality of which I was a part, which I had in a sense created, was indeed on a par with the stuff of legend. I felt like a hero whose deeds would go down in history. I was not, however, allowed to feel this way for long.

A few days later, when official news of our victory reached the school, the Tapeworm ascended the stage at morning assembly (which on Saturdays always included a summing-up of the week) and proceeded to favour us with a speech. It went more or less as follows: ‘It is my pleasure to inform you all, as well as the School Board, that our drama group has won first prize at this year’s Festival of School and Amateur Theatres. We congratulate them; we are delighted.’

‘There, you see, sir?’ shouted our Haemon, unable to contain himself. ‘And you didn’t want to approve it!’

‘You’re mistaken,’ replied the Tapeworm with a complacent smile. ‘What I didn’t want to approve was something quite different, something that certainly wouldn’t have won you any prizes. Fortunately your leader’ – his eyes sought me out and he pointed in my direction – ‘turned out to be a sensible boy. He took my advice and made the necessary changes.’

‘That’s not true!’ I couldn’t let such a brazen lie pass. ‘We played everything according to the script!’

‘The e-men-ded script,’ he enunciated, wagging a playful finger at me to defuse the tension in the air: I was, after all, publicly accusing him of lying. ‘But enough of this squabbling over trivialities,’ he concluded magnanimously.

The Tapeworm’s move was not without effect. Although in principle people believed me, not him, seeds of doubt had been sown: the deputy head had his faults, but it was hard to believe him capable of such deceit. So we were constantly baited and teased – jokingly, but in an annoying way – with questions like, ‘Well, was it censored or not?’

Listless and irritated, I waited for the prize-giving ceremony. Obviously, I thought, there’s nothing to be hoped for from the school; I should have given up on that a long time ago. That’s not where I’ll get the appreciation I deserve. It was only a few days before events confirmed how right I was.

The prize-giving was scheduled for Sunday at five. It was to include presentations of brief extracts from the selected performances, and would take place not at the theatre where the competition had been held but at the municipal community centre, which, although fine as a public amenity, was not exactly a temple to art. It housed a variety of offices and workshops, a rather grungy café and a huge conference hall, used during the week for committee meetings and on weekends either for the depressing evenings put on to entertain the old-age pensioners who lived near by or for noisy dances, attended by the older representatives of the local youth and usually ending in drunken brawls. In short, it wasn’t the most attractive locale; for me, with my aspirations, it was an affront, an outrage to my artistic soul. But perhaps it was the only possibility: at that hour theatres would be getting ready for evening performances and perhaps weren’t available. Or so, at least, I told myself. A pity, of course: it would have been nice if such a pleasant ceremony could have been held in one of the temples at which I worshipped. Oh, well, I consoled myself, it’s not all that important; no point in worrying about it.

But the sight that met our eyes when we arrived on Sunday turned my muffled resentment into serious anxiety. We seemed to have blundered into some kind of horrific nightmare.

The famous conference hall was done up as if for a carnival. On stage a bunch of teddy boys, members of a rock group idolised by the local youth and rejoicing in the name of The Firecats, were feverishly milling about. They all wore the high-heeled boots favoured by The Beatles, tight, narrow trousers and short jackets beneath which hideous folds of ruffled cloth could be seen, drooping unattractively. Thus attired, they were fussing about hooking up the cables to their electric guitars, tuning the converted radios that served as their amps and endlessly trying out the microphone with hoarse rumbles of ‘testing, one-two-three’, an activity which produced fearful whistles and caused the window panes to vibrate alarmingly.

Then there was the public. It was the most bizarre and fantastic assortment of people ever gathered in one room. The first few rows were filled by pensioners from the nearby Home of Tranquil Old Age. Behind them and on benches to the side sat the competitors, surrounded by numerous relatives, and representatives of various schools, come no doubt to cheer on their friends and make as much commotion as possible. The back of the hall was reserved for the rabble: overgrown students from technical schools, soldiers on leave and gangs of excitable teenagers, alert to every opportunity for dubious pleasantries and spoiling for a fight.

It was clear what all this meant: our ceremony had been incorporated into the community centre’s normal programme, an item like any other on its list of activities. And, indeed, to the management it must have seemed providential: for the pensioners a more perfect form of entertainment could not have been devised, and for the rabble it was ideal as the medicinal dose of culture exacted by the Ministry of Education as payment for each rowdy dance.

I looked around desperately for S. and the other members of the jury, hoping that their presence, even if it didn’t raise the standard of the proceedings, might at least lend them some measure of seriousness. But in vain. Prospero, having removed his mantle, had dissolved into thin air.

I did notice another actor, however, a smooth and foppish type best known not for his achievements on stage or screen but for his appearances on television shows of the vilest sort, such as Quiz or Teatime at the Microphone. Dressed in a black suit and shiny black patent-leather shoes, a white drip-dry shirt and a pretentious bow tie, he was nervously fussing about the stage, talking to the organisers and jotting things down in his notebook. Clearly he was to be master of ceremonies.

The thing began. The brilliantined buffoon gave a prancing leap onto the stage, seized the microphone and launched into his act. He postured, strutted and smirked; he gushed; he paid effusive compliments to the audience. It was all in the worst of taste. But the public loved it, and he was applauded.

The order of the proceedings was as follows: the master of ceremonies called the winners up on stage, beginning with the lowest prizes; then, with much consulting of notes, he introduced everyone in the group; finally, modulating his voice like an American television host, he announced each prize and the performance for which it had been awarded. The Firecats’ percussionist crashed out a deafening flourish on his cymbals and drums, the master of ceremonies, having presented the certificate to a member of the group, withdrew, and the prizewinners were left alone to display their artistic skills. When this part of the ritual came to an end, there ensued a musical interlude (a notion familiar to me from another occasion), enthusiastically greeted by the back rows, in the form of some rock’n’roll number by The Firecats.

It was a ghastly spectacle. The most absurd school ceremonies, the most grotesque moments of the Festival of Choirs and Vocal Groups, were nothing compared with this travesty. To call it ludicrous, preposterous, a mockery, a farce, would not do justice to its monumental idiocy. Embarrassment and shame trickled down my back in rivulets of cold sweat.

Where am I? What am I doing here? Why did I let myself in for this? I wailed silently.

And all the while, ineluctably, our turn was drawing closer. I couldn’t decide what to do. Refuse to go on stage? Refuse the award? Refuse to perform? I didn’t dare; it would have made too much of a scene. In the end, I put my faith in the spirit of improvisation.

When the dreaded moment finally came, when the master of ceremonies, having reached the high end of his range of vocal possibilities, called us up on stage, one of my cast, to wit Prometheus, whispered into my ear: ‘You can do what you like, but count us out. We’re not coming.’

‘I’ll take care of everything,’ I said through gritted teeth, like the captain of a sinking ship. ‘You can leave the stage as soon as he’s handed over the certificate.’

We stood there, in the glare of the lights, like a group of condemned men on the way to the scaffold. The master of ceremonies droned on, consulting his notes – some nonsense about the ‘high artistic value’ of our performance. And I was looking at the back rows, where the rabble was, and thinking, They’re sitting there like good little lambs, just waiting for this farce to end so that they can finally have their dance and whoop it up. Just as we waited for the end of the Festival of Choirs. And they’re right: now I’m the thorn in their side, the pathetic creep they have to listen to. As soon as I leave the stage and the public disperses, they’ll clear away the chairs, make a dance-floor and throw themselves into the wild gyrations of some frenetic dance to The Firecats’ music. And that will be their triumph: their ‘No more’.

These lugubrious thoughts suddenly revealed a challenge. No, I decided: I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. I wouldn’t let them amuse themselves at my expense. Let them sneer, but not at me. Let them amuse themselves as they please, let them jeer – and quite rightly – at the Festival of Amateur Theatres; but they shall not mock me!

And then it occurred to me that they were the supreme judge here. To bring the thing off in front of people like myself, to win the hearts of the pensioners in the front rows, even, yes, to impress S. himself with my skills – none of that was so very hard. But to subdue the rabble, especially rabble itching for the brutish bacchanalia to come – now that would be an achievement. It was a challenge worth attempting.

‘And now, ladies and gentlemen,’ shrieked the master of ceremonies, ‘the winners of this year’s first prize, the Golden Mask! A big hand for them!’ And he hurried offstage.

‘A big hand for the end!’ someone yelled from the back.

With a discreet but authoritative nod I signalled to the cast to leave the stage. Then I took a few steps forward and, shading my eyes dramatically against the lights, commanded with an edge of impatience, ‘Lights, please.’

The old electrician in charge of the lights, whom I knew from the theatre, grasped at once what I wanted. He slowly killed every light but one, a spotlight on my face and the upper half of my body.

Then, in the most ordinary voice I could manage, as if talking to myself, I began my piece:

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players:

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages . . .

I spoke these words with a kind of cold indifference, as if from birth I had been under no illusions as to the nature of this world and life in it, as if the only emotions I knew were disgust and contempt. There was also scorn in my voice, and a certain arrogance. One might have been forgiven for thinking that, instead of reciting verse, I was openly mocking my audience. At each successive age of man I sought out the appropriate age group where it sat in the hall and spoke to them; it was to them that I directed Jaques’s wry little portraits. But behind all this there was a message, and it shone through clearly.

This, more or less, was its gist: Here you are; take a look. This is you. All of you, without exception. But not me. I may have a certain number of years, a certain age, but I fit none of these roles. I’m not a mewling and puking infant. True, no one here is. But neither am I a whining schoolboy with his satchel, creeping unwillingly to school. And the best proof is that I’m standing here now, doing what I’m doing. I’m not a lover sighing like a furnace or a soldier full of strange oaths; I’m certainly not a justice in round belly lined; still less am I slippered or in my second childhood.

Who, then, am I? And why don’t I have a place in this picture?

I have no place in the picture because I am not here. I am merely a mirror that reflects the world: its pupil, its eye. I am pure Irony and Art. And that is something that lies beyond life.

The silence as I spoke the last lines was almost absolute. Not a cough, not even a rustle. I breathed a sigh of relief. I’ve done it, I thought. Whatever they’re thinking, at least they’ve been silenced. Subdued by Shakespeare. I’ve won.

The applause may not have been thunderous (there had, after all, been something insulting in my performance), but it was sincere and respectful. I took a polite bow and was about to leave the stage when the master of ceremonies suddenly rushed in, seized me by the right wrist as if introducing a boxer before a fight, thus preventing my escape, and shouted at the already dispersing public, ‘One moment, ladies and gentlemen, one moment! We haven’t finished yet! There’s still one more surprise, one more wonderful surprise to come!’

What has the idiot come up with now, I wondered, with horrible foreboding. What else does he expect from me?

‘Our great Shakespearean scholar here,’ the master of ceremonies ploughed on, ‘had been awarded another prize – a special, individual prize – funded, ladies and gentlemen, by none other than the chairman of the jury himself, our beloved, incomparable Prospero!’

At this my heart began to beat at a brisker pace, and I even managed an inner smile. An individual prize from S.! Well, well. That was something, even in these miserable circumstances.

‘Ladies and gentlemen!’ the MC persisted, ‘This is a rare and remarkable event, sure to go down forever in theatrical history. And the prize, ladies and gentlemen . . .’ – he reached into the right-hand pocket of his jacket – ‘the prize . . .’ He paused dramatically, raising both hands, one still gripping my wrist and the other clasping the object extracted from his pocket, and screamed, ‘The prize is a RUHLA WATCH!’

‘Rukhla, Rukhla!’ came gleeful shouts from the back of the room. With the heavy guttural consonants, absent from the accepted German pronunciation, the word becomes an obscene verb (in the third person singular, present tense, to be exact); the rabble, of course, exploited this for all it was worth. I felt my knees giving way. But the MC still held my wrist aloft in a tight grip, and this kept me from collapsing in a heap to the ground.

The reasons for my collapse, the full ghastly extent of this horrific, ultimate, murderous blow, will be plain to those who know something about Ruhla watches and their peculiar significance.

The Ruhla watch was manufactured in East Germany (Geedee-arse, as it was popularly known), and was distinguished in those days for being by far the cheapest watch available in Poland. By itself, this would not, of course, have been a point in its disfavour; but its suspicious cheapness went along with unbelievably low quality. Ruhla watches generally stopped working after just a few weeks of use, and during their brief span never once gave the right time: they were always fast or slow, from the moment you bought them. Their unfortunate owners were eternally having to set them forward or back, and to perform a series of complicated calculations whenever they wanted to determine the right time. This, however, was not enough to account for the Ruhla’s reputation: there were a lot of shoddy goods on the market then, but not all of them became objects of ridicule. The Ruhla owed its unique status to the shrill advertising campaigns that insistently extolled its alleged virtues. Radio and television programmes were full of it; on game shows for the masses it was the most frequently awarded prize. A car with a loudspeaker could often be seen making the rounds of the city’s streets, haranguing people with the following jingle, blared out at full volume:

Come and play on Guess-me-Kate;

Win a Ruhla and a date!!

People reacted to this insistent hard sell with verses such as:

A Ruhla watch is rotten luck;

It wouldn’t buy a decent fuck.

To complete the picture, there was the name itself – or rather, its spelling. In Polish it could become a somewhat risqué double entendre, providing material for countless ribald jokes, to the further delight of the populace.

In short, the Ruhla watch was an inexhaustible source of hilarity, and the fact that this miracle of East German technology was now being presented to me in public (not even in a box, mind you; in a little plastic bag stapled at the top) was an unbearable humiliation. Burning with shame and embarrassment and wanting only to disappear from sight, I shoved the wretched thing into my pocket, left the stage and rushed for the exit. At the door, however, an unknown individual with a pockmarked face barred my way. Dragging me aside, he handed me a piece of paper and said, ‘You have to sign for it.’

I scrawled a hasty signature and resumed my flight. As I escaped, I heard an impatient shout, ‘Hey, you, come back here! You’ve forgotten the guarantee!’

I dragged myself home in a state of utter wretchedness, obsessively reliving those final moments. Just when I though the worst was behind me, when I was congratulating myself that by some miracle I had not come off too badly, the real blow had been delivered. It was like something out of a film: just when you think the hero is safe at last, something awful and unexpected happens and he dies after all, from a bullet shot by a bad guy lurking in a dark corner.

I also wondered about S.’s role. What had he intended? Did he consider that, having allowed me to dally with him for a moment on his Olympian heights, he was now duty bound to cast me into the abyss, so that I wouldn’t get ideas above my station? Or was it revenge for that first improvisation of mine, when I had caught him off guard and briefly held the advantage? And did that roguish wink in the theatre foyer already presage the revenge he had in store? I lurched blindly from one wild surmise to another. In the end, I decided his motives had been much simpler. I think he genuinely liked me and, searching for the right gesture, considered that a watch would be a charming allusion to and fitting memento of my late entry for the competition. Moreover, being notoriously stingy, he 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; more important, he got an F in every subject taught that day – a grand total of five. His lack of books and his complete inability to account for their absence were sufficient for that.

Another colourful story that made the rounds concerned Titch, a big, stocky youth who sat in the back row. He was blessed with a booming voice and was said to be prodigiously endowed, which made him the object of constant jokes and much daring speculation. This anecdote concerned the singular and inspired way in which he rescued a group of his friends from imminent discovery when they were enjoying a smoke in the lavatories – even though he himself disapproved of smoking.

Smoking was strictly forbidden, of course, and severely punished. The life of smokers was not an easy one. Subjected to pocket searches, breath tests and humiliating examinations of clothes for the odour of tobacco and fingertips for tell-tale nicotine stains, they had to resort to various complicated manoeuvres to conceal their habit and lived in perpetual fear of discovery. They smoked at every break, but only during the long lunch break could they do so in relative safety and with some enjoyment, for the teachers were too busy then to patrol the lavatories. From time to time, however, a spot-check was made even in the lunch break, and then the smokers, their vigilance lulled, would be caught red-handed. The consequences were dire: confiscation of the cigarettes and a D in discipline, which was one step away from expulsion.

The teachers sometimes stalked in packs and sometimes on their own. By far the more dangerous was the lone hunter: he would walk nonchalantly down the corridor, apparently minding his own business, wrapped in thought or perhaps conversing amiably with a student. Then, as he neared the cloakroom, he would suddenly bang the door open and there he would be, bursting through it and falling on his prey. There’d be no question of flight; everyone was caught.

On the day of the famed incident, the smokers were subjected to just such a raid. But on this occasion the lone hunter who marched fearlessly into the cloakroom like the legendary Commendatore was the least expected of people: it was the art teacher, a tiny, modest, delicate wisp of a thing who blushed terribly at the slightest provocation. Someone must have asked her to make the rounds; she would never have done it on her own initiative.

The lavatories were filled with smoke, and the smokers were enjoying a lively discussion about whether it was better to inhale through the nose or through the mouth, when someone shouted, ‘Look out! It’s a raid! They’re coming!’ Everyone rushed for the stalls, hoping to drown the evidence; but it so happened that all the stalls were occupied, and they were left with the instruments of their crime dangling helplessly in their hands. Someone tried desperately to open the window, but it was too late.

At that moment Titch, the disapproving non-smoker, rushed to their aid with an inspired counter-attack, worthy of Blücher at Waterloo; and it was this that broke the siege. Taking in the situation at a glance, he extracted his monstrous member and then, with the confident step of the experienced exhibitionist, strode straight towards the enemy, as if making for the urinal. From behind the clouds of smoke came a brief, muffled squeal of terror, and then Titch’s deep booming voice, ‘Oh, I’m terribly sorry, miss, but these are the men’s lavatories.’

The art teacher beat a flustered retreat and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Titch was the hero of the hour and the recipient of many appreciative pats on the back. ‘He chased her off with his sprinkler,’ was how the affair was popularly summarised.

Another story worth repeating concerned Roz Goltz and the unforgettable beginning of his essay about the lot of an oppressed serf, as described in Boleslaw Prus’s novella Antek. Roz (his real name was Roger) was an unusual boy. Secretive and unapproachable, he moved in his own mysterious ways, made no close friends, and had an odd way of speaking. His habit of asking strange – but by no means stupid – questions in class, confounding the teachers and backing them into corners, had earned him the nickname ‘the Philosopher’. He was an extreme rationalist: everything had to be explained from first causes and followed to ultimate conclusions, which often led to a reductio ad absurdum. His smart-aleck ways, sometimes verging uncomfortably on mockery, would doubtless long since have earned him a good talking-to were it not for his scientific gifts. He was very strong in physics and chemistry, and his maths was of university standard. He also knew a lot of things that weren’t on the school syllabus. He had read dozens of popular books on natural science, history and medicine.

Despite his agile and receptive brain, Roz had an Achilles’ heel: he was hopeless in literature. He couldn’t fathom the set books and had no idea how to discuss them; writing essays was torture for him. He would usually copy them from friends during break, and repaid the favour in kind by letting them copy from his maths notebook; but when he tried to write anything himself it ended up full of linguistic and stylistic oddities, and, more important, strayed ridiculously far from the assigned subject.

The literature teacher, knowing he would have to pass him whatever happened, because of his brains, would sigh and shake his head. ‘Well, there it is, your native language just isn’t your strong point.’ Usually he gave him a D minus.

On the day when the essays about the plight of serfs were due, Roz volunteered, for the first time in his life, to read his out.

The teacher couldn’t believe his ears. ‘What’s this? Roz is volunteering to read? But certainly, by all means! How could one not applaud such a momentous event?’

So Roz got up and began to read. And his first sentence was as follows: ‘After a hard day’s work, Antek looked like male genitalia after intercourse.’

The boys whinnied loudly, the girls giggled, and then a deep hush fell on the room as the class held its breath, waiting for the teacher’s reaction. The teacher, however, continued to sit there quite calmly, smoothing his goatee, as if nothing special had happened. ‘Well, go on,’ he said matter-of-factly.

But the rest of Roz’s essay was not distinguished by anything of note. Perhaps the style was slightly more strained than usual in the effort at originality.

‘Why did you volunteer to read?’ the teacher asked when Roz reached the end.

‘Because I wanted to get more than a D minus,’ Roz unhesitatingly replied.

‘And what made you think you would?’

‘The liveliness of the style, which you’re always telling me I lack, but mainly the fact that I took to heart what you’re always saying about how words should be surprised at themselves if the style is to be original.’

The teacher’s face reflected with painful eloquence his inner battle. He was clearly tempted to let it go and dismiss Roz as a hopeless case, but he knew he couldn’t let that first sentence pass without comment.

‘All right,’ he said finally, ‘I’ll give you higher than a D, but only if you explain exactly what Antek looked like after a hard day’s work.’

‘How do you mean?’ asked Roz, surprised. ‘He looked the way I said he did.’

‘Describe it, then. What did Antek look like, exactly?’

‘He looked,’ Roz stammered, ‘like male . . . genitalia.’

‘Ah! But surely that’s not all?’ insisted the teacher.

‘Like male genitalia . . . after intercourse,’ Roz mumbled feebly.

‘Precisely!’ The teacher mercilessly pinned Roz to the wall. ‘And that means – what, exactly? Do tell us.’

A long silence fell, and the suspense in the room reached new heights. Would Roz dare to press on over such slippery ground? And if he did, wouldn’t he sooner or later come out, willy-nilly, with some filthy monstrosity? And – perhaps even more urgently – would the teacher, with all his attention concentrated on tying the unfortunate Roz in knots, involuntarily reveal some of his own knowledge about the object of Roz’s bold comparison?

‘I don’t know,’ he muttered finally.

‘Ah!’ The teacher was triumphant. ‘You don’t know. Well, then, if you don’t know, don’t write about it. And the only reason you’re not getting an F is that you volunteered to read.’

There were sighs of relief, but also disappointment. Not, of course, because Roz hadn’t got an F, but because that rare thing, a discussion in class on such a fascinating topic, had come to an end.

Such, then, was the daily bread of our school.

Madame la Directrice

On this somewhat Lenten menu the figure of the headmistress occupied a prominent position. Or, rather, not so much the headmistress herself as the elaborate tangle of surmise and speculation that grew up around her person.

The headmistress appeared rather late on the scene – just as we were entering the sixth form – and taught French. She was a very good-looking woman of thirty-odd, and the contrast between her and the other teachers – a grey, boring and embittered lot, of whom the best that could be said was that they were nondescript – was a striking one. She was always well dressed, in clothes whose quality and cut made it immediately apparent that they were of Western manufacture; on her well-cared-for hands she wore a discreet number of elegant rings. Her face was carefully made-up, and her chestnut hair, cut short and styled by a skilful hand to display her long, graceful neck, was smooth and glossy. Her deportment and manners were impeccable; and there wafted about her, in delicious waves, the intoxicating aura of good French perfume. At the same time she gave off an icy kind of chill.

Beautiful and cold, splendid and unapproachable, proud and merciless – this was our headmistress. The Ice Queen.

Her arrival threw the school into a turmoil, and for a number of reasons. Her appearance and behaviour alone would have been enough; the senior teachers eyed her with suspicion and were a little afraid of her, while the younger lot either were jealous – of her looks, her clothes and her position – or tried to insinuate themselves into her good graces. But there was also a rumour, spread soon after she came, that she was planning a radical reform of the school, and planning it for the very near future. The alleged aim was to make the school into an early outpost of a new educational experiment: to use a foreign language – in this case, of course, French – as the language of instruction. Her efforts in this direction were said to be well advanced; some thought the change might even take place with the beginning of the next school year.

This prospect, on the face of it so beneficial, sowed terror throughout the school. For most of the teachers, some of whom had been there for years, it augured inevitable departure: in an experimental outpost of this kind, all subjects except history and literature had to be taught in both Polish and the other language simultaneously, and so they would have to be not merely fluent in the latter but capable of teaching in it as well. And for the pupils the thought of having to learn everything in two languages conjured up nightmares.

Another element in the consternation caused by the coming of Madame la Directrice was the disquieting tangle of emotions she stirred in the hearts of the students. At first – almost at first sight – she inspired an instinctive affection, bordering on worship; she was like something not quite of this world, a goddess who by some miracle had stepped down to earth from Olympus. Then her coldness, her superciliousness and her peremptory ways began to make themselves felt, sometimes painfully, and the enthusiasm waned somewhat. The ensuing disappointment, however, transformed itself not into hostility or a thirst for revenge, but into something quite different: a classic case of sadomasochistic love, fuelled by humiliation and pain on the one hand and images of filth and violence on the other.

In other words, worship of the headmistress continued, but in a very particular form. In secret she was the object of fervent prayers, in which all past cruelties and humiliations were forgiven; in public – in the lavatories, in corners of the schoolyard – of coarse ale-house gossip and obscene and brutal fantasies. These acts of sacrilege, in which the object of worship was verbally humiliated and abused beyond all bounds of shame, helped to deaden the stings of unrequited love, but they were also degrading to the desecrators themselves, so that, when they returned to their inner sanctuary to prostrate themselves before their idol, they paid for their profanities with further pain and self-inflicted torment.

It was some time, however, before we experienced for ourselves the stifling atmosphere of heated passions generated by Madame la Directrice, for when she first came she did not teach our class; all this was gossip and hearsay that filtered down to us from other classes. I myself was too busy with theatre at the time to pay much attention. It wasn’t until I abandoned my extracurricular activities that I became interested.

The main topic of discussion in school was, of course, Madame’s private life. This was a fertile and highly rewarding subject of speculation, for Madame la Directrice was unmarried. How, when and by whom this fact had been established no one knew, but it was considered incontrovertible. And indeed she wore no wedding ring, had never been seen in the company of a man who might have been her husband, and had never once, it was claimed, mentioned her family – an eloquent omission, for all the teachers spoke of their families at some point, for one reason or another. And then there was something the Tapeworm had allegedly let slip: on one occasion, carried away on a stream of effusive praise for her talents, her energy and her organisational abilities, he is supposed to have added, ‘And her lack of family ties, too, is important, for it allows her to devote herself entirely to her work here at school.’ In short, we devoted most of our time to a minute analysis of the implications of the headmistress’s single state. The permutations were endless.

She was unmarried, yes . . . but was she single or divorced? (The possibility of widowhood was not even considered.) And if divorced, who had her husband been and why had they separated? Had she left him or had he left her? And if she had been the one to leave, why had she left? Incompatibility? Of habits, of temperament? Was he too macho or too much of a wimp? Or perhaps they had split up because of someone else. Was there someone else? Had he found someone or had she? How, where? And so on and so forth. We went over every conceivable possibility.

But if she was single . . . ah, then the possibilities were even more exciting. Single, and thirty years old. No, over thirty! Could she still be a virgin? Hard to believe. So when was the first time? Where, and with whom? When she was at university? During the holidays? In a student dormitory? Unlikely. Well, then, perhaps in more luxurious surroundings – in some hotel, or a suite of rooms, or an elegant apartment? And what about now? How often does she do it? And what’s the arrangement? Is she living in sin with one person? Or is it a series of brief encounters, each time with someone new? In other words, does she sleep around? And isn’t she worried about getting pregnant? Does she take precautions? What are they? Dear God, what are they?

Another urgent issue, and the subject of much lively debate, was her membership of the Party. Of this, as of her single state, we had no evidence, but it was virtually unheard of for a school head not to belong to the Party; Party membership was almost a sine qua non for such a post. And here another series of pressing questions presented itself. Had she joined the Party from true conviction or for the good of her career? If it was for her career, what did she expect to get out of it? Money? Position? Or privilege – the main privilege of Party membership being the chance to go abroad, to the West, to France perhaps, to Paris, where she could stock up on good clothes?

These questions naturally led to others. Did she have anything on her conscience? Any past act of shabbiness, anything shameful or base? (It was the general opinion that membership of the Party inevitably entailed such things.) Had she ever denounced anyone, informed on anyone, done anyone an injury? Turned away from a ‘politically unsound’ colleague?

Then 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 fuzzy-faced, uncertain of voice and clumsy of movement, their chins unattractively sprouting the first wisps of beard – her presence threw them into agonies of shame and embarrassment. She was a rose in full bloom, a butterfly, while we – we were not even buds, with their promise of opening one day to reveal the beauty of fully formed flowers; we were weeds that grew wild by the roadside, or ugly, misshapen larvae, bunched up in ungainly positions in their cocoons.

The entire class lived only for the French lessons; between them we merely existed, in a kind of hypnotised daze. The boys wandered about gloomy and sullen, with flushed cheeks and dark circles under their eyes, leaving no doubt as to the activities to which they devoted their spare time; the girls crept around listlessly, scribbling in their diaries, where they scrupulously wrote down every detail of Madame’s appearance each day: her skirt, her dress, the colour of her scarf; her make-up, and whether it seemed heavier or lighter than on the previous day; her hair, and whether it looked as if she had recently been to the hairdresser’s. These notes were then compared, cross-referenced and compiled, so that the girls, like secret agents or archivists for the Security Services, were in possession of almost all the facts concerning Madame’s use of cosmetics and the contents of her wardrobe. They knew such arcane details as the brand of mascara she used and the number that corresponded to the exact shade of her lipstick; they had evidence that she wore tights (an almost unobtainable rarity in those days) rather than stockings, and that one of her bras was black. (Once, when she raised her arm to write something on the board, I did indeed get a fleeting glimpse of a black strap.)

The pent-up tension was relieved by chatter. Each discussion gave rise to some new idea or hypothesis. According to one of the most popular of these, Madame was . . . frigid. Of course, no one was quite sure what this term meant, but that was precisely its main attraction. Opinions on the matter differed; they could, however, be reduced to three basic lines of thought.

According to the first – let us call it the radical line – a frigid woman was one almost entirely lacking in reproductive organs; her genito-urinary system was limited to a urethra. This view was adopted by the most primitive boys, the so-called extremists.

Exponents of the second line of thought, more moderate but vastly richer in possibilities, claimed that a frigid woman was merely one whose sexual and emotional needs were undeveloped or repressed. Such a case, they insisted, was not incurable; indeed, according to them, it was quite simple to remedy. Perhaps the essential and certainly the most interesting aspect of this theory was an unshakeable conviction on the part of those who held it (known for this reason as the romantics) that, of all possible therapists, they were the ones most competent to treat such a complaint. If only Madame were to place herself in their hands, she would be cured in no time.

The third view, perhaps strangest of all and held by some of the girls, could be summed up in the claim that to be frigid was simply to be in love with oneself. According to its exponents, Madame was so perfect that she had no need of men, indeed found them repulsive. She loved only herself, and in consequence was physically intimate only with her own body. This intimacy was supposed to consist mainly in the incessant cultivation of that body and to involve ministrations so intense that they bordered on the sexual: prolonged bubble baths, face masks, the anointing of her skin with creams and unguents, long, caressing massages of her stomach and breasts, and, finally, parading naked around her flat and examining herself lovingly in the mirror. In short, she was supposed to represent a rare case of female narcissism.

And then, in addition to all this, there was that book – Zeromski’s Ashes. It was firmly established as part of the canon and a prominent item on the school syllabus. Now Andrzej Wajda’s film version had been released – with some entirely unexpected effects.

We were already supposed to have ‘done’ this particular item on our reading list. The novel, a hefty three volumes, had aroused little interest, and hardly anyone had bothered to read it through; Roz Goltz hadn’t even glanced at it. So the film did not generate much excitement. Since we had already spent tedious days ploughing through Ashes in its written form, it was too late to exchange them for a few hours at the cinema, and in this case no one was much interested in comparisons between literature and screen. Nor did anyone pay attention to the heated press and television debates in which Wajda was, as usual, accused of desecration and cheap effects. And yet people went to see it, and more than once.

They went for three short scenes. In the first, Helena, the young and pretty heroine, is shown in her room at the manor preparing to retire for the night; as part of these preparations she apparently finds it necessary to warm her bare legs at the fire, and this she does in the most attractive way, her nightdress riding high up on her thighs as she shamelessly thrusts her body towards the flames. The second scene takes place in the Tatra mountains, against a picturesque background of splendid rugged peaks; in it the heroine, by then a few years older, is raped by a gang of highland robbers, and this provides another opportunity for a close-up of her legs, bare and flexed at the knee. Finally, in the third, some savage and degenerate Polish soldiers, fighting at Napoleon’s side in the unfortunate Spanish campaign, indulge their lust with a group of swarthy nuns against the background of the conquered city of Saragossa.

There was nothing all that extreme about any of these scenes – they contained little nudity and not even much cruelty – but by Polish standards their audacity was breathtaking. It helped that the violated Helena was played by Pola Raksa, at that time a young star and, with her piercingly clear eyes and thrillingly, dramatically breaking voice, the object of thousands of teenagers’ lustful sighs. She was known for her appearances in a number of films aimed at young people, in which she played coltish, innocent girls who tempted men and boys with her charms but never allowed them so much as a kiss. So to see her now being savagely raped by highland robbers (perhaps in revenge for her shameless flirting) was a pleasure of a rare kind. And there was a similar, though slightly different, pleasure to be derived from identifying with Polish soldiers who fought on Spanish soil in such an ignoble cause.

Butch claimed that in one cinema the projectionist would, for a small fee, put on a special treat for aficionados after the last showing and screen just the three all-important scenes, over and over again, freezing the film on the right frames – for example, just at the moment where Pola Raksa stands by the fireplace with one lifted leg exposed almost to the hip. (This, incidentally, gave rise to a long and completely pointless discussion about whether it was possible to freeze-frame with a film projector; Roz Goltz, who knew all about everything, insisted it wasn’t, because it would burn the frame, and a fight nearly broke out.)

In any case, it seemed that the rather singular interest generated by the film had one beneficial result: a national classic once dismissed with a shrug and a yawn now had young people reaching for it unprompted. What they did with it, however, could not exactly be called rereading, nor could the longing it satisfied be described as a thirst for literature. It was dipped into mainly for the mountain rape scene, in the hope that the written description might supply more detail than the brief shot in the film. And this, for the reader, was the beginning of the most remarkable experience of all, for it turned out that in the book, the scene to which the film devoted less than a minute was preceded by an introduction of epic proportions – three whole chapters – and could be read as an independent whole: the story of the brief passion that flamed between the two protagonists and of its tragic end.

It begins with the ‘lovers’, sick of the world, escaping into the mountains (the chapter entitled ‘There . . .’). Here they proceed to spend a sort of honeymoon, living in a hut on the edge of the woods in a state of almost permanent ecstasy (a chapter eloquently entitled ‘Hills and Valleys’). Finally, as a result of their reckless decision to spend the night in a cave high up the mountain (‘Window in the Rocks’), they are set upon by highland robbers. It is at this point that the rape scene occurs, followed by the despairing heroine’s suicidal leap from a precipice.

Among the pupils this episode became immensely popular. It was obsessively read and reread, whole chunks of it were quoted by heart and every detail was minutely discussed. No other text on the syllabus had ever kindled so much passionate debate or inspired such in-depth analysis. Special attention was, of course, devoted to anything that could conceivably have a connection with sex; but since the language was so flowery, so full of metaphor and so richly studded with bizarre turns of phrase, it was not always evident what did and what didn’t.

Take, for example, the following sentence: ‘Exhaustion tore the passion from their bodies.’ The intended significance of this became the subject of endless speculation and analysis: did it mean that the protagonists’ exhausting climb had weakened their sexual desire or, on the contrary, strengthened it? Some believed, with Roz Goltz, that the enigmatic verb could be interpreted only in its negative sense, implying a drop of sexual vigour, and that anything else was absurd. Others, mainly the romantics, insisted that the controversial verb ‘tore’ was to be taken in the sense of ‘intensified’ or, better still, ‘wrung’ or ‘squeezed’, as one squeezes the last of the toothpaste from a tube. In this case, it was the protagonists’ capacity for sexual arousal that was being wrung or squeezed out of them – a capacity they had exploited to excess, one might even say plundered. In support of this theory they adduced – from memory – the following two sentences:

Erupting onto these summits, they not only thrust away water and thirst, and shook the dust of the earth off their feet, but also separated in spirit from their flesh, their veins, their blood, their bodies. Then they acceded to the highest bliss, and it seemed the beginning of eternal happiness, the limit of that other world, a heavenly passion.

‘There you are,’ the romantics insisted, ‘it says that they separated in spirit from their bodies. That means they became pure body: pure, naked animal instinct, shameless and uncontrolled. Isn’t it obvious?’

Another scene that was interminably discussed was the one where the pair, intoxicated with happiness, decide to kill themselves by jumping off the precipice. The fascinating attraction of this passage lay not in the dramatic or lofty subject matter but in two or three sentences (underlined in almost everyone’s copy) of a universal and quite independent significance. The first of these is uttered when the hero, urging his beloved to make the desperate leap that will take them to the ‘land of happiness’, suddenly utters, in tones that brook no denial, the following surprising command: ‘Well, take off your clothes!’ It soon transpires that his intention is simply to suggest that they should use her dress to tie themselves together before the leap, so as not to be separated during their fall; but the first impression these words made on the reader was so strong that it ‘tore’ them irretrievably from the context in which they were embedded.

The next sentence was descriptive: ‘Slowly, as if in her sleep, she rose and with a calm smile began to tear at her bodice.’ Here, again, the final words were underlined, usually twice, and further stressed by an exclamation mark in the margin.

The dramatic suspense was happily broken in the third sentence: ‘But when, from within the folds of black silk, there flashed an arm that was whiter than a pure cloud, he pressed his lips against it.’ Here the crucial phrases were ‘from within the folds of black silk’ and ‘he pressed his lips against it’.

And then there was the final, tragic sequence: the attack, the rape and the leap from the precipice. This, too, was endlessly pored over. Oddly enough, here the attraction lay not in reading about the base pleasures of the robbers, clad in ‘red trousers and black shirts smeared with grease’, but in the passage which precedes this most dreadful event and describes the circumstances of the attack.

The text makes it quite clear that the attack comes at dawn, when the lovers are still lying asleep, ‘covered by a coat’. The hero, however, awakens only when he is already fettered and bound in four places – at the elbows, wrists, knees and ankles – and tied to the trunk of a spruce tree; in the cave a huge fire, lit by the robbers, is burning brightly. The question naturally arises why he did not discover this sooner: how could he possibly have slept through all that tying and binding and fire-lighting, not to mention the noise, to be woken at last only by what, in the text, was described as a ‘terrible feeling’?

Roz Goltz poked merciless fun at this passage. ‘What a load of rubbish!’ he would exclaim. ‘You’ve got to be out of your mind to write something like that. I’m woken by the slightest creak of a door, the buzzing of a fly, the tiniest ray of light – but he, oh, no, he manages to sleep through seven bandits running around, tying him up, undressing him, tying him to the trunk of a tree and leaping over the fire. It’s ridiculous! It just defies plain ordinary common sense!’

‘You may be good at physics,’ one of the romantics would counter, ‘but you don’t know anything about what it’s like to live with someone in a physical relationship. It was because all that sex had exhausted him. There he was, banging away at her day and night without a break – it’s no wonder he was like a corpse afterwards. Just like your Antek after a hard day’s work. It’s perfectly natural. Anyway, Zeromski was a sex maniac, so he knew what he was talking about.’

This lively interest in the mountain scene in Ashes was not kindled by a thirst for knowledge about the still mythical sphere of sex, still less by any appreciation of the qualities of the prose. It sprang, quite simply, from hopeless love for Madame la Directrice. All that debate and literary analysis was mere camouflage, an attempt to pretend to oneself that the issues discussed, while interesting and amusing, had absolutely nothing to do with oneself personally. But the truth was that the story embodied all the secret dreams and longings connected with the person of Madame. In the imagination of the readers, she was the beautiful Helena, and the reader himself the cause of her ecstasies. No one ever admitted this out loud, of course, but it was perfectly plain.

For my part, I’d finished with Ashes a long time before. The book had bored me to death as it had everyone else, and the mountain episode, with its insufferable pathos and purple prose, was more than I could stomach: after a few pages I simply skipped it and went on to where the main story line resumed. Now I was torn: seeing what was going on around me and feeling the tension building up around Madame, I was tempted to take a look and find out for myself what all the fuss was about, what exactly was supposed to be the connection between the book and our own lives. But pride prevented me. I didn’t want to be one of the sheep, didn’t want to stoop, even in my own eyes, to the level of my friends, panting with a mixture of sentimentality and lust. And, of course, there was the fear that it would come out – for it was generally acknowledged that whoever was reading Ashes must secretly be harbouring a burning passion for the icy Madame.

So I thrust away the temptation and refused even to look at the book. Except once, and that was largely by accident. But I paid for it dearly.

It was during a biology lesson. I was sitting on my own at a double desk in the back row, terribly bored. At some point I noticed that on the unoccupied half of the desk someone had left a book, wrapped carefully in brown paper. To while away the time I picked it up and looked inside. The title page was missing and most of the pages were uncut. I took a look at the text. Yes, this was it: Ashes, volume two – the one with the mountain episode. It didn’t take long to find it: it was the only part where the pages had been cut, and their bottom corners were sticky from much thumbing. I placed it on my lap, assumed an attitude of deep concentration, right hand on forehead (the left was needed for turning the pages), and began to read.

What I saw surpassed my wildest imaginings. I knew it was kitsch, full of rapturous moans and heaving sighs, but I hadn’t expected anything like this. It was mind-boggling. How could Zeromski have written this stuff? And, having written it, consented to its publication? Why had no one prevented him? It was also hard to believe that this was part of a book on the school syllabus – and that people actually liked it. Loved it! And then there was their reason for liking it: this – this! – is what they wanted to take as their model for their imaginary love affair with the headmistress!

On the other hand, perhaps it wasn’t so odd after all. For this prose, with its ridiculous style, its lofty idealism, its thick tangle of euphemism, symbolism and innuendo, and its improbable plot, contained something that the overly sensitive, excitable adolescent, struggling with hormones run amok, immediately picked up on. That something was perversion, and a fascination with perversion. It was clear that in these passages Zeromski was giving vent to some private obsession, some secret, deeply buried longing; the most exalted prose could not conceal this. It was a classic ‘sign of exhibitionist excess’, to use a phrase once coined by a certain philosopher.

Mostly, though, the thing was screamingly funny. Reading all those descriptions of ‘virginal fields like lovers, flowing with milk and honey’, all those stiff, artificial dialogues full of exclamations like, ‘How manly you are, how strong and how terrible!’ and poetic invocations of an ‘eternity long past’, it was a struggle not to laugh out loud.

Then I had an idea. Wouldn’t it be fun to take some of the most ridiculous phrases and put them together in a sort of romantic prose poem, which I would then present in literature class, poker-faced, as the work of some newly discovered poet, unanimously hailed by literary scholars as an unknown genius on a par with our greatest classics? The idea was immensely appealing, and exerted such a pull on my imagination that from then on I read with only this in view, concentrating on the expressions, metaphors and sentences I would use, how I would put them together, which of them would come first and which I would keep for last.

I was so absorbed in my fury of creativity that I didn’t even notice the Viper’s approach. She had crept up from behind and was now standing over me, looking over my shoulder. Like the hero of the novel waking up to find himself fettered and bound, I was unaware of the threat until her bony hand came down, like the claw of some huge crustacean, and whisked the book from my lap.

‘So, what’s this we’re reading in the biology lesson?’ she began, launching into one of her typical disciplinarian acts. ‘I’m sure it’s fascinating, but is it relevant?’ She glanced at the beginning of the book. ‘Title page missing . . . pages uncut . . . just this bit in the middle here . . . look at these pages, they’re filthy from use. Well, let’s take a look – maybe we’ll find it interesting, too?’ And she read out:

Here, on your breast, was a wolf – here, next to your beating heart! But you killed it. Oh, my lord and master! That terrible snout, those white fangs, they were here, next to your throat. Its curved claws slashed at your ribs, its eyes looked into yours. How manly you are, how strong and how terrible! How invincible! You are stronger than winter, stronger than the ice and the wind! Nothing can frighten you, nothing on earth, neither man nor animal. How terrible you are! How beautiful! I tremble at the thought . . . I am your slave . . . Oh, my love . . . There . . .

The class settled down to enjoy itself. It was clear that a lengthy break could be expected, further enlivened by the entertaining spectacle of a student being held up to mockery and ridicule. This kind of thing could always be counted on for amusement.

‘Well, no, I see that it isn’t quite relevant,’ pursued the Viper, ‘the wolf isn’t our subject today.’

Out of the corner of my eye I caught a few people in the act of discreetly slipping their copies of Ashes, volume two, into their satchels. The Viper, in the meantime, effecting a slight change of tone, launched into the main part of her pedagogical act.

‘So this is what our proud Shakespearean, the pride of our school, the winner of last year’s Golden Mask, is reading! Sentimental tripe for schoolgirls, bilge for the masses! Romantic rubbish!’

She was right, of course. But I had to defend myself. ‘This is Zeromski’s Ashes,’ I muttered in an undertone, as if wanting to save her further embarrassment. ‘It’s on the syllabus.’

The Viper was not in the least put off. ‘Zeromski’s Ashes,’ she pointed out, ‘is required reading for pupils in the year below you. I may teach biology, but for your information I am not entirely unacquainted with the literature syllabus. So you’re a little late with your reading. That’s point number one. And two, since you’re so industrious and conscientious that you’re catching up on your reading in the time reserved for biology, perhaps you’d be kind enough to tell us why the only cut pages are here in the middle and the rest hasn’t been touched. Here you are,’ she said, displaying the book, ‘just here, on these moans and sighs . . .’

The class burst out laughing. I was furious. ‘It’s not my copy,’ I blurted out, searching for a means of escape, but this only made things worse.

‘Not your copy?’ asked the Viper, surprised. ‘Whose is it, then?’

‘I don’t know,’ I snarled, ‘it was just there.’

‘I see. It was just there . . . so I suppose you just picked it up and began reading from the middle?’

‘That’s where it fell open.’

‘Indeed! It fell open.’ She wouldn’t give an inch. ‘Not only do you have the tastes of a besotted schoolgirl, you’re a hypocrite as well – trying to disown them. And I suppose next you’ll be telling me you just wanted to see what it is the others like so much about it?’

But it’s true, I wanted to say, that’s exactly right! But I couldn’t prove it, and no one would believe me. I had to find another line of defence. As if I had reached the end of my tether, I snapped, ‘What would you have preferred? Would you rather I’d cut the pages here in class? Why all these insinuations?’

This was a good move. Naturally, it infuriated the Viper even more. ‘Very well,’ she said drily. ‘Let’s leave it at that. But tell us, in that case, what we’ve covered in today’s lesson.’

‘The rabbit . . . the anatomy of the rabbit,’ I stammered out, noticing on the blackboard a huge poster with a picture of this mammal, its stomach open to reveal a colourful tangle of entrails.

‘Excellent! Very good,’ said the Viper. ‘But what about it? Which organs, which functions, which internal system?’

‘Reproductive,’ someone prompted in a whisper, but I took this to be a joke at my expense, intended for the amusement of the class.

‘I don’t know,’ I admitted, defeated. ‘I wasn’t paying attention.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ acknowledged the Viper in tones of false regret. ‘So you won’t hold it against me if I give you an F.’ She entered it in the book with a flourish. ‘And now, it’s my pleasure to inform you that today we’ve been learning about the sex life of the rabbit. A subject right up your street – odd you didn’t notice. In any event, you will please learn it thoroughly and present it to us in the next lesson, so that no one can doubt your competence in the matter.’

This stung, and the prospect of the rabbit was a dark one. But the worst thing, of which the Viper was quite unaware when ridiculing me in class, was the implication that I was secretly reading the notorious episode, just like everyone else. And there could only be one reason for that: Madame had broken my heart, too.