When the chemistry teacher appeared in the doorway with a stack of books under his arm he saw that some of the students were not in their places, they were laughing, shouting and fooling around. He told Thomas, in a loud, stern voice, that he had abused his trust. No sooner had he said that, reaching for the cane he liked to use at such moments, than an expression of the utmost misery spread over his face.
Open your books at page one hundred and three. There was total silence around him, no one whispered a word, and even after the bell went they still sat there listening, but the teacher said nothing until, at the end of break, he said the boys could pack up their things. When there was a chemistry test in class a week later, he gave Thomas seven extra questions as well as the six that the whole class had to answer. The idea was not to keep Thomas sitting twice as long as the others over the test but to show that he was able to solve more difficult problems and do twice as much as everyone else. You want to study at university, don’t you, Thomas? The teacher knew he could ensure that his best student failed the school-leaving exam. He didn’t need an extra-difficult test for that, he could interrogate him about politics, test his knowledge and his conscience there, call his attitude into question. But he was giving him a chance to show what he could do. Thomas had not managed to answer the last of the additional questions within the hour allowed. He hadn’t been quick enough. For the first time in five years he did not get a One. The teacher was wearing his miserable expression again as he gave back the tests and stopped beside Thomas’s desk. It was hard for him to see Thomas fail, it obviously troubled the teacher, he ran the knuckles of his clenched fist over the desk, there was strength in it, the will for pain as if the boy’s failure physically hurt him. Thomas lowered his eyes; it was awkward, indeed impossible, for him to meet that gaze. It would not be the only test in class this last winter before the school-leaving exam. But the teacher had made it clear that Thomas depended on his goodwill if he expected to get marks corresponding to his achievements. Then the final exams could take whatever turn they liked; nothing would come of Thomas’s plans to study at university if the teacher didn’t want him to. Nothing would presumably come of plans for university studies anyway, since they had decided at the Ministry of Education to give the children of the working classes preferential treatment, in the cause of a more just society. Disobedience was a quality that Thomas would do well to discard. The collectivisation of agriculture had been completed, there would be a pressing need for young men like Thomas to work on agricultural production, he could work with farm animals, for instance, then he and those like him would not be forming elite groups, and university studies would be left to the other sort. Thomas wondered why art didn’t count as work. Wasn’t he the son of a worker?
Oh, for God’s sake, take your hand away from your mouth! Käthe’s voice sounded brusque, she took a step towards him and grabbed his arm. Biting your nails the whole time, I’ll tear them right out one of these days if you don’t stop it.
Startled, Thomas looked at his hand; he didn’t notice when he was biting his nails. Even if he was standing in the middle of the room stark naked, as he was now, one hand behind his head, his arm crooked at the correct angle, the fingers of the other hand could land in his mouth without his thinking about it or being able to prevent it. The leg he was standing on hurt, he felt a pulling behind his knees. That was growing pains, he had often been told so over the last few years, and he must hope that his left leg, which was only minimally shorter than his right leg, could still catch up. He wasn’t fully grown yet at sixteen, all kinds of things might happen to him. Thomas was a year younger than Ella, but right at the start he had gone up a year at school, so that they were in the same class. His hair might grow, his leg, his attitude and his obedience. His feet were cold as ice just now, but he knew Käthe wouldn’t let him wear socks — even when she wasn’t working on the feet of her sculpture at all. She needed a clear view of human anatomy, she claimed.
Käthe looked at the boy critically. You must watch that arm, it keeps sinking. Hold it higher up. No, not as high as that — that’s better. The tapping of hammer and chisel went on to its regular rhythm. Amplify, hushabye, quantify, saygoodbye. Thomas tried to think of words that would sound good to it. You could avoid misunderstandings if you trusted the sound. He was sure that something like humboolabye fong fong, properly pronounced, sounded more impressive than just cold feet.
He liked sounds. Mortify, justify, purify, rectify. That last word made him think of the border official who promised the bearded German and his heavily pregnant lover, who wasn’t married to him, to get them papers, or at least to get the pregnant woman papers, because the bearded man already had them. After that the two of them spent a whole week in a cave, but they had no illusions about the unfortunate predicament they were in without papers, snow outside, a little fire burning day and night inside, because they thought the border official meant it seriously and would really help them. Thomas remembered the walk by night that he and Käthe had taken last year. She was fetching her twins from the grandparents in Pankow, it had been late in the evening, and she had let him sit behind her on the motorbike. But halfway there the motorbike had stalled at traffic lights and wouldn’t start again. So Käthe and Thomas had walked over half the Berlin borough of Pankow by night. He had asked her what his father had been like. Oh, a great guy, Käthe had replied. Then she had begun telling Thomas the story. She called his father the bearded man, because at the time he hadn’t shaved for weeks. She spoke of herself in the third person, as if it had not been her story. They waited in the cave, heavily pregnant Käthe and the bearded man. But after a week in the cave they had to accept that the kind border official was not himself a nice guy but more of a counterspy. Counterspy from Lombardy, they called him later. They could freeze just as well walking through the snow over the mountains on foot. On the watch for border patrols, they would neither of them remember their carefree life in exile in Sicily, the heat haze over the olive groves, the red soil, their happiness. On the second day they walked into a snowdrift and heard the calls of a man pulling his sledge on the other side of the valley. The man was looking for someone who had probably climbed up to go skiing a few days earlier but had not been seen since. It wasn’t easy for him to interrupt his search, but he told the two of them to get on the sledge. He had several furs on the sledge, wood, and hot embers in a cauldron; he heated three stones in it, and put them among the furs to warm the woman. Where were they going? he asked.
Käthe’s tapping died away. She stepped towards Thomas, looked at his throat, his collarbone and the hand he was holding behind his head.