Читать книгу Partner in Three Worlds - Dorothy Duncan - Страница 15

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FROM every ugly experience of my young life, Mother drew a moral deduction to train my religious character. She never called it religion and there were never any words like duty or obligation or sacrifice. But she nonetheless gave me a basis of moral law in the mode of her own faith which has lasted me to this day.

People without imagination, she said, needed pictures of God as a glorified human being in order to understand even a little about Him. But God and Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost could never be found in material beings or things. They were represented, she said, by every human being in the world to some degree, and all human beings should be approached as representatives of God.

Prayers, she felt, were senseless when they were automatic repetitions of memorized lines at certain fixed hours in certain fixed places. That sort of praying was the escape of sinners to appease their own remorse, a kind of trite bargain with their own consciences. If I felt at the end of a day that I had been good and kind to other people, had worked honestly and done even the slightest good deed, then my day had been wholly a prayer to Him.

Though she had been raised a Roman Catholic, she no longer went to church. She believed that God is everywhere, and so she felt she was still good in His sight if she worked on Sundays, for God was in our room and could be found there as easily as in a cathedral. Every stitch she put into the making of a livelihood for her child and her mother she considered a wholehearted prayer, and so she felt no need of reading prayers from books which offered them prepared.

She never sent me to church, nor did she ever forbid me to go. The time would come, she said, when I would find my way into a church because I felt the need of a place of refuge. But I must never go there to be seen or to state my presence. I could stand in the darkest corner and take into myself the atmosphere of seclusion which creates a certain relaxation of soul, but I must remember that the first pews in front were no nearer God than the ones next the door.

Confession, in Mother’s mind, was a poor escape for weaklings who, through their own admittance, tried to shift the responsibility of a judgment on their bad deeds to some other human being. Nothing had been accomplished by a confession in a church if the sinner himself had not repaired his misdeed, instead of merely confessing it and saying a few automatic prayers.

These things I learned before I was old enough to talk, for they were the basis of all the fairy stories she told. Sainte Marie, for instance, became the spirit of the mother of every child, the incarnation of mother love. And when she spoke of the way of Golgotha and the stations of the cross, I understood it to be the way of everyone’s life, in which the cross of suffering must be carried until the day when the soul becomes free.

Mother believed in an immortal soul. When the body dies, she explained, the soul remains in the universe, though often it must wait to find a new form of return to the human sphere. She wanted me to remember always that one day when she left me it would be her body only that would be gone. If my future life was good enough, she would still be with me, though she might then accompany me in a new form. I must be very careful, therefore, not to pass her by when she approached me once again. In the meantime, as always, I would be governed by this great and mysterious power which we call God, so great and so incomprehensible for the human mind to grasp that even the name of God is only a feeble expression for an idea too wide for the human thought to hold.

Not even my experiences in Berlin were able to shake this faith. It took the following years of school to test it with fire.

I went first to a public elementary school not far from where we lived in Smichov. The pupils were the boys of the neighborhood and they were all strangers to me. They were the sons of factory workers and small tradesmen and petty government clerks. The school was housed in a two-story frame building painted an ugly yellow color. It was flush with the road, a highway which led to Plzeň, and it was surrounded by railway workshops which shared the smoke and soot from their chimneys with us. There was neither a yard nor playground anywhere near.

There were approximately two hundred pupils in the school, all boys. The rooms were bare of ornament except the teacher’s desk on a raised platform, movable blackboards, and colored photographs of the head of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. We sat in rows on long wooden benches, with a wooden trestle in front of us to serve as a common desk and our backs against the trestle behind us. The subjects we studied were fundamental: reading, spelling, numbers, writing and patriotic songs which were led by the teacher as he accompanied us on his squeaky violin.

The day began when we put our two hands side by side on the front edge of the trestle desk. There we must hold them rigid and painfully motionless, touching our fingers to the wood but not our wrists. The teacher walked up and down and watched for a single flicker of nervous movement. When he found a quiver he pounced with a long ruler and rapped the back of the offending hand sharply.

My neighbor on one side was the son of the Smichov postmaster. When his fingers twitched, his hands were rapped lightly, just a tap. When my fingers twitched, they bore red scars from the ruler for several days. So it was that I learned about class distinction. According to the place held by one’s father was a boy’s place in school life. Had I been the son of the meanest artisan in the railway yards, my hands would have been beaten less harshly than they were, because I had no father at all and my mother worked very hard in no social category the teacher could understand.

It was the same with the compliments we received on the work we did in spelling or writing or numbers. No matter how hard I tried, the teacher’s acceptance of my work sounded like a criticism though his words often said it was correct. Often it wasn’t noticed at all. Perhaps if I had understood then as I do now that even teachers in those days of the old empire were classified in different social grades and levels, I could have saved myself from many hurts. The Lehrer, or teachers in elementary schools such as this one in Smichov, were looked down upon by the professors in the academies, and in turn the professors in academies were frowned upon by professors of the university. Socially, the Lehrer and professors never met, for there was a world of class consciousness between them.

As is usual in such a society, my classmates took their cue from the behavior of the teacher. Because he showed that he considered me beneath them in social rank, they scorned me too. So at the age of less than seven I became a bitter little boy. Since all my classmates were potential enemies, I found it necessary to hurt someone else in turn, and I began to be cruel to Mother in small ways.

At the beginning of each term she took me to the bookshop to buy the growing number of textbooks I needed. It was impossible for her to afford new ones, so she always chose used volumes that were tumbled together in a bin in the back of the shop. Then she spent the night before each term making folded paper covers for them, but she was never able to hide the dog-eared pages inside or put back pages that had been torn out.

I hated these old books with a passion. After all, Mother herself had given me a love of the beauty of cleanliness, and now I could not throw it away so lightly. Every day I saw the greasy smears of grubby hands, the scribblings, and I had to tell the teacher again and again before the whole class that I couldn’t complete an assignment because pages in my books were missing.

Mother could hardly have liked these trips to the bookshop at the beginning of each term, but I never made them easier for her. I made no attempt to hide my dislike for the books or my resentment at having to use them. One year she turned from the bin of secondhand books and asked the clerk for new copies of every book on my list. Her face was fixed in a painful smile, but I could see nothing except the shining new covers and the crisp white pages of the volumes the clerk gave me. As a result, I was often hungry during the following months, but I refused to admit even to myself the connection between these two events.

Whenever it began to rain while I was in school, or the temperature dropped suddenly, Mother would put aside her work and walk to meet me with a shawl or a cap or an umbrella. The other boys laughed and made fun of me for days after each of these encounters. So one afternoon, when I saw Mother coming some distance away, I ran around a whole block to avoid her. I thought this would help to make me more acceptable to the dirty little stinkers who were my classmates.

Mother made no mention of having gone to school to meet me when I finally reached home. But I was thoroughly ashamed in my heart, and after that I bore the jibes of the other boys in silence, still wanting their admiration, but wanting even more not to have to avoid Mother’s eyes.

The only other events I remember clearly from my years in this elementary school were the police station and the bricklayer’s son. The police station, headquarters for the very poor borough adjoining Smichov, was directly across the street from the school. Every noon when we returned to school from lunch at home, and again when school was over at five in the afternoon, we stood about in front of the police station and watched the station wagon, which we called the Green Mary, bring in the day’s roundup of drunks, prostitutes, pickpockets and bums. I was especially impressed by the green cock feathers which the policemen wore in their helmets.

The bricklayer’s son was a stupid lout who was as unruly as he was incapable of learning. One day his mother and father appeared in the classroom at the request of the teacher, and I remember well the slavish manner in which they showed their respect for him. While we all sat and listened, the teacher told them how useless and stupid their son was, without softening his words. When the teacher was finished, the bricklayer and his wife bowed with deep respect and marched over to their son who was lolling at his place before one of the desks. The mother held him down while the father began to beat him with a great stick he had evidently brought for the purpose. The boys crowded around to watch the performance and the teacher looked on with a smirk of satisfaction on his face. When the beating was over and the parents had taken their son home, the teacher got out his violin and we all sang patriotic songs.