The Place Will Comfort You (17 page)

Later it would be revealed that the Dress Patterns teacher had had to coax the foremost crawlers, each by each, out to the target chamber, that when the way to Yona finally had been cleared, she could not be talked out of her surrender. The hired escort, an old but sinewy Civil Guard man, reentered and bodily dragged her out.

In reconstructing the event, some wondered how he could build up the proper leverage, confined. The elbows couldn't bend enough. Yona's pants knees were eroded, but so were everyone's. Perhaps
he'd simply been persuasive. It was proposed that he had trained his weapon at her forehead. An exchange indicating so had been picked up through the cacophony by several sources, unallied. Yona Rodelheim couldn't be made to weigh in.

Once she had been dislodged, each newly mollified girl passed the message of delivery to a recipient behind. Gradually the tunnel was unclogged.

A chalky palm beckoned to Shulee. She crawled towards it, reached, was hoisted out and to her feet, and pushed aside as a new head emerged.

She stood in a stone cell. A ventilation notch let in a dim sand-colored light. All of the faces here acquired stony tints. The girls confederated into little bands, some still crying, some passing furious opinions nose to nose, some cramming close like mute litters of cubs. Yona was sitting by a wall, not one but two teachers standing over her, demonstratively calm.

Alone, Shulee kicked out a foot, then stomped. Her breathing slowed but wouldn't ease. She scraped the other foot forward and stomped again, and the same again, shoes punishing the grit, grit punishing the shoes. Lucky her, lucky all of them, to have been delivered to the inside, with one of them a proven cork. Predisposed to becoming stuck. Little had they known, as they had filed one by one into the tunnel, a saffron-yellow efflorescence striping the velvety green meadow around, which in the heat of noon had seemed to swell and fall like the rib cage of a sleeping cat, curled around them.

Would it be the same on the other side? Of course not. Rather, even lovelier after this punishment. And more achingly tantalizing, more profoundly out of reach right now, as she stood trapped in a miserable notion of responsibility for the whole disastrous episode.

Why was she responsible? Because she had awaited her turn at
the tunnel's entrance beside Yona Rodelheim, and entered behind her. She shouldn't have chosen a place so near a girl who played on her nerves. Why had she chosen that place? It was only natural. They were meal partners for the length of the trip. They had pooled their money. They had shopped together for provisions to last the whole three days. Well,
why
had she partnered with a classmate she disliked? Because she had had no choice, that was why! If her most recent hordeolum infection hadn't kept her home from school for a week with her eyes under warm compresses and her lonely ears bathing in radio hits, she would have been present in class the day the alliances were forged.

Why hadn't anyone signed her up with their name? That was the real question. Did her own classmates really expect her to believe they had thought Yona and she were friends, so had said nothing when the teacher made the match in Shulee's absence? Shulee Bouzaglo a friend of Yona Rodelheim? The mute? Practically, tongue-tied to the point of strangulation. Oddball! An oddball! Sure, Shulee herself was regarded as a bit of an independent. A maverick! A life force. She was a godsend when the lesson dragged especially low. How they all laughed! Whereas, Yona Rodelheim? A scarecrow, if humans were crows.

How could her own division, the Graphics girls, have done this to her, one of their own? Maybe not the strongest in execution, but she had great ideas. Low on patience, high on creativity. Shulee Bouzaglo! Or, as they would hear it in roll call each morning, surname first: Bouzaglo Shulee. Their only one. Had they forgotten all their affection for her as her sick week had stretched on? Was it her fault she suffered from a chronic condition? Could she have been expected to leave the house with the eyelids still so inflamed even past the infectious phase? Several young men in her neighborhood, and many more older, considered her deeply attractive. You respected your admirers at least so much as to not willfully tarnish what it was they saw. Because of this she suffered now. Because of
this, for the length of the trip, she would continue to be associated with the disgrace.

But she was letting herself off too easily. Not just for the trip's length would the stigma cleave but for all time, for all school time, she the friend of Yona, in a league with a weak mind, suggestible to fear. Yona had earned them both the grade. For an Annual Trip posed tests unlike those back in school. A blister on the foot translated every step into pain. The sun wouldn't relent. A gully at the end of the long rope approached too slowly while the curious wish to spread the hands came right away. Sloshing through standing water lively with mosquito babies your imagination reduced to a transparent, writhing worm. Or a stench got to you. The torment might rise higher than the resolve, the horror stick like a nasty case of hiccups. If you stopped you would not continue. Later the failure of a girl to see herself making it through would be her lasting disgrace. The Trip would become known for this one test, and she for having flunked it. This was the big risk, and how much more so if your position among the girls wasn't pivotal in the first place. An individualist was too easily recast a pariah. The only way to try and work around the terms was to remain on the bus, but who did this? Never anyone of stature or the hope of it.

And who wanted to stay on the bus? The annual trip was the one school activity she looked forward to. Here, finally, your labors were rewarded richly, with novel sights and the distances crossed, and scents like strange jars being continually opened. Dropped figs fermenting in the sun, goat-crushed hyssop. So maybe also carrion, in full sight and shocking detail, but you saw purpose as clearly. Baked paths beneath a scalding sun eventually took you to shade, a loosely anchored plank spared you the fall into fast water, a hill slope lobbing rocks under the feet presently led you to the rare view. All of them saved you from hours pinned under a desk. How she despised a desk. Because she despised a desk she had drawn out her stay at home. She had brought the whole calamity on herself.

In the powdery chamber she spotted a crumb of grit almost so large as to pass for a pebble. She kicked it, or rather tried, but her forearm was grabbed so that the endeavor had to be abandoned— forcefully grabbed by the strong fingers of the Civil Guard man. He sucked noisily on his tongue looking down at her. His neck was very short or perhaps settled deeply with the weight of his thick-skinned head. He said that she should gape a little less at him and mind the floor. She looked to where he pointed. The chamber floor was scooped out neatly, like a massive gameboard, with row beside row of craters.

“Each one of those depressions at one time contained a jar of precious fluid,” he said. “The heart of a way of life. I ask that all of us here keep in mind that this is not a sandbox but a national treasure.”

She hardly craved a lesson but she liked the personal touch. She checked around to see how his attention to her was being taken by the others. The girls nearby all feigned indifference and on the other hand she was indifferent to their pretense. Everyone was antsy but with his brassy voice he had singled out only one, and who? And why? Because of her looks? Her pluck? Her mystery? All three. A man, a man, the one man accompanying them, hers for the length of the trip, with all the others looking on.

When he unhanded her she stuck beside him. The girls all looked at him. From his armed side she looked at them.

“This way,” he said, and she did not follow but rather walked along.

He was old but just like a young soldier smelled of cigarettes and gun oil, though also something more interior, similar to the cave. She wasn't afraid of the cave. She was afraid of nothing. The Trip's defeat had already taken place and it had not taken place in her, thank God. It had chosen Yona.

He led them to an adjoining room and asked that they observe the cisterns. Shulee observed the others as they complied. He said
to notice the stone wells, notice the crushing wheels. She noticed the top cartilage of his ear, smeared with the gray secretion of the cave. She could imagine following him around in here for days, leading the others. She pictured how her face would be affected by the transformation in her state of mind: smoothed, hardened, no time for expression. He would teach her to convert her fear into intelligence. That was bravery, one acceleration of the senses made into another, the judgment rising to every split-second occasion. She would take up smoking. Smoking helped the nerves, didn't her mother always say.

“Insidious,” he said. “To put it plainly, insupportable taxation would devitalize—”

A girl from Textiles handed a classmate her canteen and watched her drink. After a spell, she reached a hand out, seized the canteen. With the other hand, gently, she pushed her friend's forehead up, separating her mouth from the mouth of the vessel. She screwed the cap back on.

“So industry goes underground,” the guard said. “Now, step this way.”

In the next chamber he tapped another chipped and pitted cistern. A girl sank to one knee, untied a shoe and retied it.

“Of course oil for the Holy Temple,” he said, “but also ointments, cosmetics and shampoo, soap.”

Shulee heard a whispered demand for spearmint gum, followed by thanks.

“Flax seed,” the guard said. “But without question, and having everything to do with the most popular fodder recipe of the time—”

Someone was snuffling drily, in an increasingly obsessive way, the nose more and more self-interested. A girl from Textiles was scratching a friend's back. She stopped and picked a chip of stone off the grayed shirt, then went back to scratching, up and down, gradually moving sideways. The man had lost the crowd. He should be relying more on his personality and less on the knowledge. The
lecture was too long. He took a breath and moved on. He paused beside a dark, lopsided cleft in the chalky wall.

“All because of an obscure feud of the Second Temple era,” he said. The shoelace-tier bent to deal with the other shoe.

“Doesn't that hole in the wall look a lot like an ear?” Shulee said.

The guide swung his heavy head as if annoyed by a gnat. The girls murmured. The scratcher had stopped scratching. The snuffling had ceased. The shoelacer's fingers were frozen mid-task.

“At the heart of which,” the guide went on, raising his voice. “Stood one stray ram of a prized lineage. Now naturally our interest turns to lanolin.”

“For the history of hand cream we had to crawl through the sewer?” Shulee said.

He took a slowly swiveling step to face her. Those from Shulee's division looked at each other. Perhaps now they would remember her as they should. This was her excellence. Once in a while she rose up like no one else.

She slurped her upper lip into the lower, then released it. “I'm sorry,” she said. “It came out.”

“Came out,” he said. “Maybe you still need diapers.”

“You should watch out what makes you curious,” she said. “I'm a minor,” whereupon a woman's voice cried out from an adjoining chamber, reedy, echoing, sepulchral:

“That is really quite enough!”

Even the armed guard's cheeks seemed to blanch, before he recognized the whine of the Dress Patterns teacher.

“Join her,” he said.

Shulee opened her mouth to continue the conversation, but thought better of it. She swung a hip around and skipped over the nearest threshold.

The space in which she found herself was exactly like the one she had just left: gray concavities in the floor, black holes in the
walls, a few incomplete cisterns. Beside one of them sat Yona Rodelheim, her legs crossed oriental-style, the toes of her Pumas orange as dusty persimmons, her eyes closed. The Dress Patterns teacher sat a little higher, on a stone shelf that protruded from the wall. She glanced at Shulee and pointed at the floor next to Yona. Shulee found a place across the room.

In the next chamber, a shuffle and mutter reorganized into the continued lecture. A dark face poked through the portal, regarding her briefly in the punishment room, then retreating.

Several times Shulee thought to advance a point of view or hum a song, but in every such instance she recalled the teacher in the room and refrained.

Had the woman recognized her voice as the one uttering the foul language in the tunnel? If so, she didn't let on. Perhaps there was no recognition. Shulee was not a Textiles teacher's charge. Would the teacher remember a voice without the context of a student? Maybe not, hence the hopelessness in her own voice at the time, knowing she would never confront whomever she had put on notice.

But everything about this woman came across hopeless, a wan member of the Reverent sector. You wanted to tuck this kind of person back into one of their crowded neighborhoods. The mere sight of them, so much more fabric than skin, made you drip sweat. Knowing the crippling frequency of the Holy Law's interference in their day made you recoil in fear. It was better to know less. The less you knew, the less bound you. For the Trip the woman had put together a particularly cumbersome outfit. The Trip was the only occasion on which the school relaxed the traditional ban on trousers worn by their female students and staff, in school or out, and indeed today, in concession to the inevitable thistles and biting things, the teacher was wearing unfashionable track pants. Over these she wore a long denim skirt to keep secret the fact that her legs split at a higher point than the ankles. To this woman every girl in the school
would look like a whore even in a skirt, whereas to Shulee the thought of a body so thoroughly concealed all its life nearly brought tears. She herself braved expulsion from the school on a daily basis, squirming on the hindmost seat of her bus every afternoon, as she pulled tight jeans on under the skirt, then peeled off the skirt and unbuttoned the uniform blouse to reveal a tank top, a halter top, a bustier, to feel the sun, feel the breeze, to signal to the modern nation that she was a part and feel the eyes of her men pleased.