Jesse Ball: The Lesson

He put the wallet on the windowsill.

— Because, I want to be here, however awful it is. I am very tired. I just woke up, but I am tired. Why is that?

Lie down on the bed, she thought.

Through the open window came the noise from a kitchen in the house opposite. Just bustling kitchen sounds, things being placed atop one another, things being cut, water poured, cabinets open, shut.

Lie down on the bed.

The boy went and lay on the bed.

— Take a nap, she said. I will be back in a little while.

She went out and closed the door.

Then, in the room, a deep quiet as of distance. One could shout, for instance, at the edge of a vast park, and not be heard within. In this way was the tiny room sealed within itself. On the bed, the boy lay and a slight rasping sound came as his hands moved against the bedspread. Everything in the room had been there so long that the weight of each object had settled and things were as though joined. Lying there, the boy’s weight began also to settle. Although the window was open, no sound of any kind reached the bed. It was as though horse messengers were continually setting out across the steppes where in the folds of such indescribable cloth, they would lose their way and perish.

Loring went down to the kitchen and put water on to boil. She got out a teapot, and a little metal basket that divided to open and close again perfectly. This apparatus was joined to a chain that ran to a little weight with an hourglass on it. The hourglass, of course, would tell one when the tea was appropriately steeped.

She filled the tiny basket with tea leaves, shut it, and set it in the teapot. Then she went to the window.

Below, in the field, the teacher’s class was again playing.

Things must be bad in the schoolhouse if they are forced out of doors on every possible occasion, thought Loring. For the children did not look like they wanted to be out of doors. They were sitting in a line in the grass, trying to read from a book. Every other child had a book. While the one was reading, the other was looking over the shoulder. Each of those other ones wrote in a notebook occasionally with pencils that were tied to the notebooks with string.

And yet, the teacher was the very picture of gaiety and joy. In a loose dress with her limbs bare, she ran back and forth in the field, calling to the children, as if to tempt them away from their work. Yet not a one went to her. There must be some secret punishment at work, and she is testing their resolve, thought Loring approvingly.

The pot shrieked from above the flames, and Loring attended to it, and to the remaining preparations of the tea. From the pantry she took some sort of cookie or cake, from a cabinet, two cups, from elsewhere, milk, sugar, spoons of overmastering delicacy, and with all such things assembled on a tray, went back upstairs, slowly negotiating the steps, and passing in the process, the eighty-three episodes of Goya’s Los Desastres de la Guerra, framed plates placed in order up and down the staircase. No. 51 caught her eye, Gracias á la almorta , the brutalized, impoverished figures huddled around a bowl of millet in a dimly unknowable place of suffering. She felt they were so cheerful, these drawings. One couldn’t help but smile. Is that how it is? Must brutality point to kindess, lack to plenty? Or does one just grin willfully at one’s tormentors, even when it seems they are not present, they have long gone away.

When she opened the door to the bedroom, Stan was asleep. She set the tray down on a high table by the bed and went to stand there over him. He had taken the jacket off and covered his face with it. He was lying there, with the jacket over his face.

Loring moved so that she stood sideways to the bed. Her eye could now regard it only in the edges. She looked again and saw a figure, lying in the bed, half covered in a grey jacket, of a sort she knew well.

She stood there quietly, the pleasure of this small but persistent, until at length the boy awoke.

— What is that? asked the boy cheerfully.

— Tea, said Loring. Tea and a bit of something to eat.

— Can I have some?

— It’s for you, of course. Come over here.

The light had changed a bit in the room. So, too, had the sound. With her entry, the noise of wind and the limbs of trees battering against one another and against the house.

— It is nice to be in a small house, observed Stan. Then you have the outside as well.

— That’s so, said Loring. The main thing is — that you can feel the weather. If you can ignore it entirely, your life is a bit sadder — which is something no one would have predicted.

The boy began to eat. Loring poured his tea and added sugar and milk for him.

— Do you like tea? she asked.

— I must, he said. Because the smell woke me up, and I was in the middle of a good dream.

His voice sounded fuller and richer. It sounded, in short, much more like her husband’s. Loring listened carefully. She shut her eyes, trying to hear every bit of it.

— What was the dream? she asked.

— I was reading a book of myths last night. I think it came from that.

Loring nodded.

— I was at a kind of doorway between one kingdom and another. There was a long wall stretching in either direction. I had a little house…

— A hut?

— Yes, a hut, on top of the wall. When people came, I was supposed to ask them questions. This was my dream.

— What kind of questions did you ask?

— Well, there was a list, but I didn’t read it. I knew the ones I liked.

— Were they difficult questions?

— I remember the ones I asked — there were four of them:

when do you believe you will return to the place you came from?

what is the heaviest thing you are carrying?

have you passed anyone dead or dying?

if you would be paid to turn back now, would you?

— Did you have money to pay them if they agreed?

— I didn’t have anything at all. Just a broom to sweep the top of the wall, and a little barrel of food. Someone would come on horseback every now and then to give me more.

— What if someone came who was to be turned back? How would you do it?

— I don’t know, he said. It doesn’t sound like a very good system, does it?

— It sounds like an excellent system, said Loring. I wouldn’t mind doing that job.

— Well, it is a good system for the one who stays there, but I just don’t know what it does for the kingdom, said Stan.

He took a bite of a black-colored cake.

— It wouldn’t be the same kingdom without the person at the end, would it? said Loring. You could almost say that you serve both kingdoms — the kingdom that employs you, and the other kingdom on the other side of the wall, because you make the difference between them clear. It is an impossible difference to know or understand, but you make it clear.

— The tea is good, said Stan. I like tea, and also black cake.

— Finish your cake, because we have three things left to do today before you leave.

listed neatly:

1. A lecture on playing chess with your eyes closed.

2. A short match.

3. A drawing exercise.

— In the dream, asked Loring, when you were at this hut atop this wall in the midst of this wasteland, waiting there with your broom and your barrel of food: did anyone actually come to the gate?

— No, said Stan. No one came.