RACHEL HADAS
715
occasionally emerge, pick up a seashell, marvel at an egg. But boundaries,
our condition, come of clusters and cannot be magically or surgically
separated from them. It makes no sense to hope, as this school's
philosophers seem to, that denying walls will generate clusters. We
people are ineluctably enmeshed in both. The marks of reticulation are
slow to fade; why dignify the process of erasure?
I bet schools in the Stone Age, ancient cutting edges of the new,
prided themselves on the avant-garde feature of walls. Shamans, artists of
the new, slung up skins to separate the mage from the clan. A side-effect
of such moveable partitions was the fostering of divisions that sheltered
the infant notion of a separate self
Back in the Bronze Age, when I was in sixth grade, certain pages
of my history textbook featured inset boxes printed in bright red to em–
phasize each important step in human progress. What comes to mind
must have been the first example in the book. GOOD IDEA: FIRE! the
box announced. And where there is fire, one might conjecture, a roof
and walls eventually follow.
The textbook couldn't include a story told by Primo
Levi
in
The
Drowned and the Saved,
a book that had not yet been written in 1958.
But what Levi is describing took place not in some primeval period but
only a few years before I was born. He tells how his fellow prisoners in
the convoy to Auschwitz improvised a kind of screen in the corner of
the freight car. With a nail, a string, and a blanket, they contrived to
provide a modicum of privacy for each user of the infant's chamber pot
that one woman had happened to bring along for her doomed toddler.
How would my textbook have glossed this instinctive gesture of
modesty, of
amour propre?
GOOD IDEA: DECENCY - even (a footnote
might add) on the road to one's extinction.
While we make walls we are human. What is the Head saying now
that we are back in her quarters? "Teachers here are always called only
by their first names." The silence that greets this remark is hard to
interpret. First names are endemic across the country, so this policy is
hardly news. Whereupon a second thought scuttles past: many a murderer
calls his victims
tu.
Again I have that shadow sense of a sweating mimic practising in
front of a mirror. That casual gestures actually evoke the intimacy they
mimic; that only cramming minds into clusters can create a nest for an
idea - it's easier and more pleasant to believe these things than to
acknowledge the inextricable snarls that set us yearning, yes, for the
public amidst the private but also vice versa. Stifled and groping through
a grove of totems, flicking through boundaries of slung blankets for air,
as who should shove her way through steaming swamps of drying sheets
so hung as to hide the horizon, the child does finally break free of walls,
