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Story
by Robert Michael
STUDENTS
I stared at the artifacts I used in my history classes--the slave
bell from Pompeii, the sculpture of the shewolf suckling Romulus
and Remus that I bought near the Trevi, where tourists pulled
up in taxis, threw coins in the fountain, and then rushed away
without ever leaving the cab; my tin of Bon Bon Napoleon candies;
a facsimile of a French royalist newspaper that had called l'Empereur
"the Corsican monster" upon his leaving Elba, but ended
up a week later announcing that "His Imperial Highness"
would be arriving in Paris tomorrow. A wooden gladius, traditionally
offered to Roman gladiators who retired, that I use in class
to accentuate my points with a flourish and a slap on the podium.
My miniature guillotines--why do I have two?--which I'll give
as prizes to my students for getting top grades.
A bag of yellow felt six-pointed stars
with the word JEW printed on each in black, and white crosses,
left over from a field trip when my whole Holocaust class --
all Christians -- drove to the local mall on a Friday night.
I led 20 of us marching through the mall wearing crosses; then
an hour later we all wore Jewish stars. We were trying to discern
the differing reactions of the crowds to Christians, then to
Jews. The experiment went bust because only the most foolhardy
mall-crawler would mess with 20 people led by a gigantic, bearded
man with a most determined look on his face.
A map of Europe marking my last sabbatical
travels. 1) From Paris to the American Military Cemetery in Normandy,
where I counted the crosses and Jewish stars and wept like a
fool. 2) To the concentration camp Natzweiler, where Reichsuniversitaet
Strasbourg professors murdered 100 Jews and carefully removed
all soft tissue from their corpses so that the university's Research
Institute could display their skeletons. 3) To Dachau, where
I noted the thriving Catholic and Protestant chapels versus the
deserted, chained-up Jewish synagogue. 4) To N¸rnberg,
where I saw a swastika painted on a wall downtown and searched
in vain for paint remover. 5) To Prague, where hundreds of French
and German tourists pushed their way through the Altneushul,
Europe's oldest synagogue, while the pitifully small congregation
tried in vain to hold Sabbath services.
Some ticket stubs from a History Club trip
to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. The students suffered
and learned not only from the museum but also from the bus trip
itself, when the bus strayed into a part of the city where it
was not welcomed and was stoned.
Gifts from students after a course was
finished: An illustrated copy of Voltaire's Candide. A bull's
pizzle--Candide was whipped with one--brought from the Azores
by a Portuguese-American student. It was used there as a policeman's
billy-club. One of my colleagues in Languages has first dibs
on it.
The empty chair that many of my students
have sat in to explain why they missed their exams, to weep over
their lost relatives, to laugh at my jokes. Just last semester
a student explained that in the computer lab where she was typing
up the final draft of her paper, a friend of hers snatched the
pepper spray out of her bag and when she tried to grab it back,
it went off and the whole lab had to be evacuated. When the police
and EMTs arrived, she and her friend ran outside the building
and threw the pepper spray into the woods. After she returned
to the lab, she discovered that the file containing her paper
had been trashed. So she said.
I remember years ago requiring all students
who missed more than three classes to get permission from the
dean of students before they could return to my course. At the
time, I was leading a rich fantasy life and actually thought
this would work to improve attendance. By the end of the first
month, the dean called me, begging me to drop my requirement
because he couldn't take hearing any more sob stories.
I see in that empty chair hundreds of students
I liked, admired, and wanted to hug, and I regret I didn't tell
them so. I see favorite students who died of overdoses, who were
killed in auto accidents. I see a student who threatened me with
a knife, another who swore he'd beat me up, a young female student
who offered me more than I am willing to tell you about--yes,
right there in the office. More than a dozen times I had to to
move students out of that chair and walk them into the corridor
because I needed the safety of a public hallway.
But mostly that empty chair reminds me
of the 10,000 wonderful, beautiful human beings who were my students,
from every social class and from almost every ethnic group, who
listened wide-eyed to my stories, who kept me young, who taught
me as much about life as I learned from my own teachers and colleagues.
"I've often regarded the university professoriat as vampires,"
I told Sean Bourke over coffee at the University of Midcoast
Maine cafeteria.
"Watch it, boyo," Sean said. "You're treading
on dangerous ground there."
"Don't get me wrong, nothing about sucking blood, living
in coffins with dirt from Transylvania, avoiding mirrors and
crosses--nothing physical at all. Vampires in the best sense
of the term."
"There is no best sense of the term." Sean stirred
his coffee.
"Each year a new batch of students replaces the old. Our
students remain always eighteen-years-old to twenty-one."
"And what a group it is."
"They're built like adults but still open to change, open
to being influenced, keeping us faculty young, refreshed, vivified.
In the classroom time stands still for us."
"You're right, boyo. It's almost as if each year we climb
another bar of ecstasy, ascend another rung toward the stars."
"We plant seeds of goodness that may grow for a lifetime
in our students and their children. How startled I am when I
meet a student from years ago. Who is this person with a paunch
like mine?"
"Or with gray hair? or with three kids hanging on?--and
they're the grandchildren." Sean raised his eyebrows and
his cup.
"I see teaching as an implied contract. I introduce my students
to the amaranthine world of ideas, and they gather in my classes
to stir and stimulate me, to keep me forever young."
"Sounds like the Dylan song, with its dozen and a half blessings."
"He's very much in the Jewish tradition with that song,
When I persuade even one student to self-control, courage, wisdom,
justice, or goodness, I'm in ecstasy."
"So there's the Greek tradition, too."
"Once, after a particularly brilliant lecture on classical
Athens and Sparta, oh, brilliant's too strong a term."
"A rare exposition, you mean, boyo."
"Where everything came together just right. Insightful analogies
left the students gasping for air like fishes cast upon a beach
after a subsurface explosion. Metaphors so light and meaningful
they took wing. Trenchant jokes, telling questions, riotously
funny personal stories making crucial historical points."
"Nothing irrelevant or self-indulgent? Ah, lad, I had the
experience once or twice myself."
"After class, a co-ed didn't walk, she ran to the podium.
I asked myself, could I have touched this person, was she reborn
in my class?"
"Aha, the God complex. So, what was her question?"
"Professor Kohan, she said, our midterm's coming up soon,
you know. Like would you mind, would it trouble you, how can
I say this, could I please copy your notes?"
"Oh, they ask me this all the bloody time."
"I handed her the single three-by-five card I clutched throughout
my fifty-minute talk."
"And? Let the cat out of the bag, boyo. What did it say?"
"It read, Don't forget to pick up the mail on the way home."
Sean laughed so hard his coffee streamed from his nostrils. "You'll
be the death of me, boyo. What a bleedin great story."
"I've got another one for you. One Fall semester, the Registrar
assigned me to a lecture hall I'd never taught in before. At
the window behind the students, I faced a family of pigeons."
"Not my favorite bird."
"Nor mine. No one else could see them having sex on the
windowsill. Look at what they're doing, I told the students.
When they turned, the feathered little devils were already disengaged
and dancing along the sill like, well, pigeons."
"One guy shouted BULLSHIT at me in the middle of my disquisition
on Freud," Sean said with an arched eyebrow. "Another
forgot to take his Thorazine and screamed hysterically at every
tragedy in Irish history, and there are plenty of those."
"Lecture more on Stalin, a young neo-Nazi ordered me. Forget
saying those bad things about Hitler. When I saw something glinting
in the student's hand, I checked the thickness of the glad that
stood between me and certain death, but it was only his ballpoint
pen."
"I think you were projecting your desire to kill the git,"
Sean said laughing. "A student threatened me with a knife
because I refused to act as his faculty advisor. Another promised
to sue when he fell out of his classroom chair and knocked out
a tooth."
"My worst experience was with a twenty something guy, Vietnam
vet. He'd trained for the priesthood. He was PTSD'd out by the
Nam. He asked me for help and I turned him away."
"Dannyboy, I can't believe you. You'd never turn someone
who needed help away."
"Of course, you're right. It's my guilt talking. I mean
I couldn't save him. I suggested he go to our Guidance Department.
Talk to someone there."
"Sounds reasonable."
"It wasn't. I missed the signs. He told me about how he
couldn't get out of bed in the morning, his having no reason
for living."
"Anyone can feel this way."
"Aha, yes. But he also began wearing his old uniform, telling
me how he stood guard with his handgun outside his house. And
when he said goodbye, he didn't make eye contact and spoke as
if he meant adieu, not aurevoir. He blew his brains out on Lincolnville
Beach."
"Where do we go from here, Danny? I say we raise a glass
to them all. God bless every mother's son and daughter of them."
"As my yiddishe mama used to say, ayn brocha oyf deineh
keppeleh. A blessing on their sweet little heads."
Robert Michael © 2009
Robert Michael was educated
in survival: in a tenement childhood with absentee parents; in
U.S. Army, serving with the Army Chief of Staff in the Pentagon
and in a combat outfit (in Bitburg, Germany, C Battery, 4th Missile
Battalion, 6th Artillery Regiment, 7th Army); as an editor in
New York City publishing. He trained in chi gung under Master
Wu, in tai chi under Dr. Lam, and in ju jitsu and Kempo karate
under Sifu Bill Aguiar of the Black Dragon Fighting Society;
in fiction under Michael Cunningham, Amy Bloom, Margot Livesey,
Maria Flook, Michael Klein at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown;
in poetry under Robert Pinsky and Billy Collins. His creative
non-fiction saw print in Black Belt Magazine, the Chronicle of
Higher Education, the Jewish Magazine and his 2006 book HOLY
HATRED was nominated for a National Jewish Book Award. His short
story MR. CHRISTIAN will be published in POETICA. His poetry
has seen print as "God Wrestling" in Exploding Ink
(2005); "Moshiach," "All My Directions,"
"My Soul," in Whispers of Inspiration (2005); "Easter,
1903" and "I don't want to die before I die" in
Menorah Review; and "Apostasy" in Journal of Ecumenical
Studies.
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