短篇小说｜The Intermediate Class
When Kiril arrived at Room 2C for the first time that Wednesday evening, he was surprised to hear a piano ringing out from behind the classroom wall. It was early summer, and the community center was almost empty; the children’s camp had been dismissed hours earlier, and in the silence the clustered chords seemed dense and significant, like church bells. He was already late, but he paused for a moment, listening. All day he’d debated backing out at the last minute, though the course was prepaid. Even now, his hand on the doorknob, he felt a slight urge to run. But the music was too intriguing. It drew him through the door.
He was disappointed, upon entering, to find that there was no piano: just a whiteboard, a long table, and four students arrayed around it. The class turned to him, and suddenly his disappointment seemed foolish—for what business would he have in a music class?
“Is this Intermediate German?” he asked.
“That’s right,” a woman with a close-cropped Afro said. “You new?”
“Yes,” Kiril replied. “I mean, I took a class before. But not here.”
He chose a seat in the middle of the table: near enough to see the board, but far enough not to seem overeager.
A pale, thin woman sat next to the woman with the Afro, her arms covered with angular tattoos. “The teacher’s great,” she said. “We had him for Beginning.”
“Twice,” the woman with the Afro added.
On the other side of the table sat a Latino man about Kiril’s age, early thirties, with an open smile that was either optimistic or mildly deranged. Next to him, in the corner farthest from the board, sat a white man in his fifties. He was badly sunburned, and seemed to be in a foul mood about it, arms crossed tight above his potbelly.
The class was more diverse than Kiril had expected. “Why would you want to spend time with old housewives?” his mother had asked, when he’d suggested spending three hundred dollars on a German course. “Lazy American housewives” was what she’d meant: the kind with too much time and money on their hands. Kiril would enjoy telling her she’d been mistaken.
She’d never approved of his taking German in college. He was majoring in computer science, a practical course of study, and had no time to waste. Besides, he already had the gift of native English: that sprawling, absurd language she’d spent half her life trying to learn. But Kiril had always loved German, which had a name for everything. One morning, at the beginning of class, the professor had brought in an illustrated dictionary with the parts of animals, plants, and various machines written auf Deutsch. He still remembered the picture of a car, deconstructed, every piston and lever lovingly identified. English seemed fuzzy in comparison: a wide blanket, full of holes.
He heard the piano again, pealing through the adjoining wall. The sound was enormous, as though reverberating in a concert hall much larger than any community center could contain. The music stopped abruptly—a major chord, dying away—and a door opened, hidden behind the whiteboard. A man and a woman emerged, holding sheet music to their chests.
“Thank you, Claire,” the man said. “What a treat.” He wore a khaki work shirt and pants that zipped at the knee. His beard was silver, but he walked on the balls of his feet, bouncing from left to right.
The woman looked a bit older than Kiril, and was extremely short: barely five feet tall. She took the last empty seat at the table and looked down at her hands, as if wondering how these tiny fingers could produce such beautiful music.
The man took his place at the whiteboard. “I see we have a few new faces,” he said. “So let me explain the rules.” He pointed to a bell in the middle of the table. “When I ring this bell, we will no longer speak English. If anyone speaks English, I will act as if I don’t understand. This forces us to take risks with our German—to experiment together.”
The three women shared a knowing look. Clearly they had great faith in the teacher. The sunburned man, however, seemed terrified, while the man with the airy smile went on smiling, heedless of danger. Kiril decided to follow his lead, though his own smile was forced. He had never been very good at appearing relaxed.
The teacher rang the bell. Immediately the atmosphere changed. The students rose to attention, serious faces trained on the board.
“We will introduce ourselves,” the teacher said, in German. “We will talk a little about the things we do in our free time. We know this word, yes? ‘Free time’?”
He wrote the word on the board: Freizeit. He was calmer in German, less buoyant. He spoke slowly, with a certain sombre attention, like a kindergarten teacher explaining the tragic facts of life.
He pointed at Kiril. “You first, perhaps?”
Kiril cocked his head to the right and looked up at the ceiling: a nervous habit his mother referred to as calling on God. She felt he did it more often than was necessary.
“I have name of Kiril,” he said, too quickly. “Kiril is me.”
The class smiled, happy to forgive his mistakes—all except the sunburned man in the corner, who had the sour expression of someone lost and unwilling to ask for directions.
“I am Kiril,” he said, more slowly this time.
Everyone said hello.
“Now, Kiril,” the teacher said. “Tell us what you like to do in your free time.”
Several images flashed in his mind’s eye: his mother, bent over a sewing machine; a scene from a film in which a monster rose from a tunnel and dangled a frightened man in his claws; Spruce Hill Park after a thunderstorm, dappled rain on light-green leaves.
“I am running,” he said. “I am running sometimes, but not far. I am running in the park.”
“What kind of park?” the teacher asked.
He thought of the muddy bowl where the dogs played, the sound of laughter, and the scent of marijuana, wafting from beneath the trees. He never smoked marijuana, but he loved the smell: herbal and rich in his overactive lungs.
“I like very much the park,” he said. “It is dark and cool, and in the park there are dogs and people and flowers and trees.”
The girl who played the piano murmured wordlessly. Perhaps she had similar feelings.
Kiril began to relax. “And . . . the park . . . is not . . .” Finally the correct word came to him. “Crowded.”
“It sounds like a beautiful park,” the teacher said. “Now we will continue.”
It was the sunburned man’s turn. “I is Arthur,” he said. The effort made his face grow even redder. He offered no further information.
The teacher pointed to the thin girl with the tattoos.
“I am Morgan,” the girl said, with only slight hesitation. “In my free time I play the guitar.”
“Very good,” the teacher said, turning to the class. “Now we will ask Morgan some questions.”
“What kind of music do you play?” the woman with the Afro asked. Her German was stiff and precise: nothing like the casual warmth of her English.
“I play the slow, sad music,” Morgan said.
“Why do you play slow and sad music?” the Latino man asked, from across the table. He had been quiet so far, the smile never leaving his face. His grammar was excellent, but his pronunciation was off, and the pale woman had trouble understanding his question. Or maybe, Kiril thought, the question was simply too complicated.
“Do you want me to seat you in the ‘Had sex this morning’ section or the ‘Had a fight this morning’ section?”
The teacher jumped into the fray. “ ‘Why’ is a difficult word,” he said. “ ‘What,’ yes. ‘Who,’ yes, and ‘Where.’ These are better, maybe, in the beginning.”
The Latino man shrugged. He seemed to disagree about the relative merits of “why.”
“We will continue with you,” the teacher said, pointing in the Latino man’s direction.
“I am called Alejandro,” he said, squaring his shoulders. “It is a pleasure to meet you.”
Kiril felt envious of Alejandro’s easy dignity, as if he had a lifetime’s experience talking to strangers.
“Yes, this is good,” the teacher said. “This is very polite. And in your free time?”
“I watch the trains,” the man said. “On a nice day, I drive to watch the big trains go to the city. Sometimes on Sundays I am the train driver for the small train. I wear the hat, I drive the people. There is nature on the left. There are trees and flowers, and once there was a fox. It is for to look at nature, the train. I drive it myself or with one person. But myself is very good. I drive the train for three hours, three hours long, and it is very good to me.”
After he’d finished, there was a long silence.
“Now we will ask Alejandro questions,” the teacher said.
“Where does the train go?” the woman with the Afro asked.
Alejandro smiled again, this time shyly, as if remembering a secret pleasure.
“It goes round and round,” he said.
The class clapped politely.
The woman with the Afro was called Wanda. The following week, at the teacher’s request, she presented an essay on the subject of “My Family.” The essay was meant to demonstrate the past tense. Wanda stood before the class with a piece of paper and read it aloud, her voice firm and slightly clinical.
“My son is a polite child,” she began. “When he was young, to the church he went. Our family goes to the church every Sunday. When my son became older, to the church he did not go. He says he is busy, but the church is not long, and the spirit is forever. In his free time my son reads books, and is not trouble. But there is trouble in his spirit, and I worry. However, this week a good thing happened. This Sunday he comes with me to the church again. Many churchmen cried. My son feels him good in the spirit, so I am happy. And I hope it will last a long time.”
The class clapped enthusiastically.
“Let us write some words,” the teacher said. “We will write ‘church,’ and ‘parishioner,’ and then—very complicated—‘spirit’ and ‘soul’ and even ‘brain’! Yes, words can be complicated.”
The teacher stepped back from the board and gazed for a moment, transfixed.
“Now, class,” he said, returning to himself. “Let us thank Wanda for her essay.”
The class thanked Wanda.
“Now we will talk about our work life,” the teacher said, writing the word on the board: Arbeitsleben.
They had been warned about this subject in advance, and Kiril had prepared a few vocabulary words the night before at the kitchen table, while his mother caught up on alterations: network, Netzwerk; user interface, Benutzeroberfläche.
“We will start with Alejandro,” the teacher said. “Alejandro, what is interesting about your ‘work life’?”
“Thank you for asking,” Alejandro said.
“You are welcome,” the teacher said. “Yes, this is very polite.”
“I am a driver,” Alejandro said. “I am always driving.”
“Ah, Alejandro,” the teacher said, pointing at the board. “This conversation is about our work life, not our free time.”
“It is my work life,” Alejandro insisted. “I am the driver.”
“You are always the driver?” the teacher asked. He rubbed his eyes.
“For my work life also I am driving,” Alejandro continued. “In my free time I am driving the train, but in my work life I am driving the truck.”
The teacher gave a nervous giggle. Alejandro’s smiling insistence seemed to unnerve him. “Why do you enjoy driving so much, Alejandro?”
For the first time, irritation flashed in Alejandro’s calm gaze. “You said ‘why’ is too difficult,” he said. “Is it too difficult or not?”
The teacher paused, taken aback. “Yes. Perhaps ‘where’ is better. Where do you drive the truck?”
Now Alejandro appeared sad. “I go round and round,” he said.
Kiril was impressed by the range of Alejandro’s emotions. He himself sometimes felt trapped in a single mood: a kind of pressurized worry, marbled with sadness, through which flecks of pleasure were visible during certain parts of the day—mostly in the evening, when the sun set over the gabled Victorians near the park, edging them with fire.
“Perhaps it is time for a break,” the teacher said.
He rang the bell, and he and Claire disappeared through the hidden door. Music rippled from behind the wall. Kiril was aware of the air in the room, the currents within it like water. He looked at Arthur, but Arthur pretended not to see him, glaring into space. He looked at Alejandro, and the man’s smile deepened, becoming more complex. Kiril wondered if he had seen Alejandro in the neighborhood before, while he was doing errands for his mother, or visiting one of his cousins who lived in the warren-like streets south of the park. If he saw him again, he would raise his hand in friendship.
The door behind the whiteboard opened, and Claire and the teacher emerged.
“Wonderful, just wonderful.” The teacher turned to the class. “That was Schubert’s ‘Fantasy for Four Hands.’ ”
The students nodded, but only automatically. The title of the piece meant nothing to them.
“Now we will have pair conversation.” The teacher cracked his knuckles.
Kiril was afraid he would be forced into a pair with Arthur, who continued scowling at his phone long after class had resumed. It was a great relief to be placed with Alejandro instead.
The teacher wrote the subject on the board: “My Home Life.” As the students talked, he sat by the window and looked out at the damp green night with an expression of melancholic attraction. He looked like the captain from a movie Kiril had once seen on cable: the captain of an ancient vessel, fated to sink.
“I live with my mother,” Kiril told Alejandro. “It is pleasant, but the house is small. Too small, sometimes. I have to go out.”
“To the park,” Alejandro said. “You run in the park.”
Kiril was happy he remembered; it made him more comfortable. He didn’t consider it shameful, living with his mother. Many of his cousins were in the same situation, and even those who were married or lived alone saw nothing odd about it. It was a matter of respect, of being a dutiful son. Still, it wasn’t something he would ordinarily share with a stranger.
“Yes,” he said. “I am in the park running. And it is cool and not crowded, and there are flowers and trees.”
Alejandro smiled and closed his eyes, the vision blooming in his mind. The park was only a few blocks from the community center. Perhaps they had passed each other at some point during their wanderings: under the tall sycamores, through the loose blue stones.
“Why do you run?” Alejandro asked, softly, as if aware that he was breaking the rules.
“I do not know,” Kiril said. “Let me think.”
He was not used to expressing these sorts of feelings. As a child, he might have talked to his mother about them, or even to God, but now that he was an adult, alone in bed at night, the silence lay heavy on his stomach and his lungs.
“I am running because there is a pain in my head,” he said. “My eyes hurt with work and there is a head pain. Then I am running and there is no head pain. Especially in fall, the best season, the season that is the best. The cool season, with many birds.”
“I see,” Alejandro said. “It is clear. I like fall also.”
Here they had exhausted the appropriate words.
“Where do you live?” Kiril asked. He had to force himself to use the casual du. Sometimes, when he searched for German, Russian came to him instead, and he reverted to the patterns of childhood. “Always be respectful to strangers,” his mother told him. “You’re not the sort of person who can afford to be impolite.”
Alejandro sighed. “I am living with men who are not so good,” he said. “Fight-men.”
“That is a little bad,” Kiril said, though he didn’t fully understand.
“Let us come back to the table,” the teacher said. “We will read a poem about a miller, a brook, and a waterwheel. It is an old poem, but it has words that will be helpful for you to know.”
The class read the poem out loud, one student at a time. Kiril remembered it from somewhere: some distant fluorescent classroom, shaded with humiliation. When it was Alejandro’s turn, he read carefully and fluently, as if he understood the poem’s meaning, though it was from the eighteenth century: a time of simple emotions, travelling handymen, and light flickering on water. Perhaps in another time Alejandro would have been this miller, Kiril thought. He would have wandered the woods, ever hopeful, eyes dazzled by sudden flashes of sunlight.
The following week, they discussed where they liked to go on vacation: the shore, the mountains, abroad. When the discussion was over, it was Claire’s turn to read an essay in front of the class.
“My essay is titled ‘An Interesting Week,’ ” she said, and began to read.
Kiril had come to enjoy the calm commitment of her voice, the way the others leaned in to hear it. She wore large glasses—perhaps, Kiril thought, to magnify her tiny eyes.
“I wanted to have an exciting week,” she said, “in order to write an essay the class would find interesting. But on Friday my boyfriend was sick, and I was only able to do such interesting things as travelling to the pharmacy and taking his temperature. Then on Saturday I became sick, and did such interesting things as coughing, shaking, and dreaming in a fever. On Sunday we both felt better, and so we did such interesting things as reading, drinking tea, and sweeping the dusty house. I was worried. I asked my boyfriend if my life was a little boring. My boyfriend is a serious person. He thought for a long time. He told me that everybody’s life is a little boring, if you write it down.”
The essay seemed to confuse the students. They searched the teacher’s eyes for an explanation. Kiril, however, found it clear and precise. It seemed to express fundamental truths about existence.
The teacher clapped. “It is a complicated essay!” he said. “It is a little komisch. Let us write some of the words. We say ‘cough,’ ‘coughed,’ ‘has coughed.’ We say ‘dream,’ ‘dreamt,’ ‘has dreamt.’ We say ‘shake,’ ‘shook,’ ‘has shaken.’ ”
He wrote on the board in wide, looping arcs, then stopped to examine his handiwork. He frowned, as if troubled by the images such words implied.
“Did you not play piano this week, Claire?” he asked. “That would be interesting.”
“No,” Claire said, with a resigned expression.
“No?” the teacher asked. “You did not play? Or playing the piano is not interesting?”
“I do not have piano.”
The teacher seemed lost. “You do not have a piano?”
“A piano is very expensive, and my house is small.”
“Ah, but you should have a piano,” the teacher said. “You play so well. Your boyfriend can buy you a piano.”
“My boyfriend?” Claire stifled a laugh.
The teacher seemed momentarily shaken, though Kiril couldn’t understand why. Perhaps he was afraid of losing control of the conversation.
“Yes, as a gift,” he insisted. “Because you play so well.”
Perhaps the teacher meant it as a joke, but something about the intensity of his voice suggested otherwise. The discussion was becoming too personal; the students shifted in their seats.
Claire did not laugh. “My boyfriend will not buy me a piano,” she said, evenly, refusing to echo the teacher’s emotions.
The teacher nodded sadly, as if this news confirmed sad truths about life that he generally chose to forget. Kiril wondered if the teacher’s duets with Claire were the sweetest part of his week: something to look forward to, on otherwise unremarkable evenings. Maybe in solitary moments he imagined her small hands dancing across the keys.
“The piano is a very expensive instrument,” the teacher said, finally. On the board he wrote, Ein Klavier ist ein sehr teures Instrument.
The class wrote the sentence down dutifully, with the exception of Claire, who already knew all about it.
“And where is Alejandro?” the teacher asked. “The man who is always driving.”
“Alejandro is not here,” Kiril said.
“I’m going to ask you a series of scary questions. When I’m done, let’s see if you can guess why I’m asking them.”
He had noticed Alejandro’s absence as soon as class began, and as the minutes ticked by his disappointment had grown ever larger, until he had a hard time focussing on the discussion. Wanda and Morgan were already paired, Claire and the teacher were always disappearing behind the wall, and Arthur repelled all human contact. Kiril had hoped that, of all of them, Alejandro might become his friend.
“Alejandro is a good student,” Wanda said, clearly and with perfect pronunciation. “His German is very good, despite his accent.”
Kiril wondered if she had practiced lines like these at home, about each of them: Arthur learns very slowly. Kiril speaks too quickly, he is nervous. It seemed unfair to talk like this, behind someone’s back.
“But having an accent all of us!” he said, his voice a shade too loud. “It is natural, and he speaks well and he asks good questions. He is a very good student, the best!”
Now the students looked afraid, as if he had threatened them. Kiril was filled with remorse.
“I am sorry,” he said. “I am making many mistakes.”
“It is my fault,” the teacher said. “Let us not speak of Alejandro. Probably he is sick. He is taking a sick day. There is a word for this.”
He wrote it on the board: Krankentag.
“Yes, that is good,” he said, stepping back. “If you use this word, you will sound like a native speaker.”
The class wrote the word down.
After that day, Claire and the teacher no longer played the piano together. During the next class, while Morgan read a halting essay about her political activism—“I am walking against the government; I am walking with many others to the large building of the government, holding hands”—Kiril watched Claire out of the corner of his eye. Whenever Morgan spoke an unfamiliar word, Claire wrote it down in her notebook. Later, during the break, newly bereft of music, she checked these words against an online dictionary, clarifying their gender and their endings and making small corrections. The teacher played in the other room, alone, the pieces softer, more restrained.
Alejandro did not come to the next class, or the one after that. Kiril waited for him to appear, the way in high school he had waited for far-fetched things to break up the tedium: sudden snowstorms, a citywide blackout, subtle variations on the end of the world. In the meantime, he paired up with other students: with Wanda for “My Childhood,” with Morgan for “My Student Life.”
He was glad that he was not paired with Claire. He found her quiet precision intimidating, and preferred to watch her from the other side of the room.
It was the middle of July now: their second-to-last class. Kiril was disappointed that the course would soon be over. Not because it had been particularly helpful—his German was improving only slowly—but because he felt as if an opportunity had been lost. Sometimes, as they stumbled through conversations about their parents and their pets, he felt like a person in a dream who hears a party happening in a nearby house. His legs are frozen; if only he could float through the window, like a piece of colored paper, and slip at last into the living world.
“Now we will do a short exercise,” the teacher said. “We will say a few sentences about what led us to learn German.”
Wanda consulted her notes. “There is a man at my church who studies the piano,” she said. “He plays and sings a different kind of music. I didn’t know the words. It was in a different language. It was German, he said. It was so, so beautiful music.”
“Very good, Wanda,” the teacher said.
“They said it was too expensive,” Wanda went on, disregarding her notes. “But the money is mine, and I will spend it. Some people do not understand. Because of small minds.”
Suddenly, Claire began to speak: haltingly, at first, as if Wanda’s story had woken her from a nap. It seemed to Kiril that she had become more tentative as the class went on—not because her German was deteriorating but because the emotions she wanted to describe were becoming more complex.
“I am like Wanda,” she said. “But I was the one who played the piano. I knew the words, but I wanted to know them better. I thought . . . that if I knew them better . . . I would feel differently. And then . . . I did. And it was different . . . than I thought it would be. And then time went by, a long time, and then I didn’t play the piano.”
While Claire talked, the teacher stared at the ceiling. When she was finished, he rubbed his eyes.
“We will turn to the essay,” he said. “Arthur is worried about his grammar, so we will help him. He will read a sentence, and we will correct him. Then I will write the sentence on the board.”
Arthur got slowly to his feet. “The title of my essay is ‘My Wife,’ ” he said.
Arthur hardly ever spoke, and yet his German had improved the most, Kiril thought. Not that he realized it—he was fixated on his mistakes.
“My wife is German,” Arthur began. “My wife in the Army is meeting.”
“I met my wife in the Army,” Wanda said. “It is correct.”
“I was in Germany,” Arthur continued. “She is the East.”
“She lives in the East,” Kiril corrected.
“She is from the East,” Morgan said. “She is from East Germany.”
The teacher wrote the corrections on the board, bouncing from foot to foot. Only when his hands were moving did he seem truly happy.
“In the East they speak German,” Arthur said. “In the East they do not speak English. But we have this language.”
Here Arthur mumbled, as if refining the words like rough rocks in his mouth.
“Secret,” he managed, after a while. “Secret.”
“Is it a secret language?” Claire asked.
Kiril found himself staring at Claire. He tried to turn away, for the sake of politeness and to follow the exercise, but his eyes were drawn back each time she spoke, to her odd, self-satisfied smile. She seemed to be aware of some joke the rest of them couldn’t grasp.
“Yes, thank you,” Arthur said. “We have a secret language. In the old.”
“A long time ago,” Claire said. The phrase stirred her. She smiled thinly.
Arthur sighed. “We have a secret a long time ago.”
“And now?” Wanda asked.
“And now?” Arthur echoed. The essay slipped from his hands and fell to the floor, and he cursed.
“Perhaps it would be better to move on,” the teacher suggested.
Arthur did not pick up the paper. “I want to speak to my wife, but not in German,” he said, voice trembling.
“I want to speak to my wife in German,” Wanda corrected.
“No!” Arthur’s voice was suddenly gruff, almost barking. “I want to speak to my wife not in German.”
Claire murmured, “You want the secret language.”
“Yes,” Arthur said. “This is better. But it is so, so speaking difficult.”
Claire nodded. “It is perhaps impossible.”
“Yes,” Arthur replied. “It is far away and difficult.”
“It is not so difficult,” Wanda said, strictly, as if chastising a lazy child.
“It is not so difficult,” Kiril agreed—though of course it was the most difficult thing in the world.
“No,” the teacher cried, in sudden anguish. “It is not impossible! Two people who speak a language well will come one day to the ‘secret language.’ It is not so different from what we do. It is there every day, all the time, when you speak! I promise, it is not so far away!”
He stopped and leaned against the desk. Kiril wished the teacher could be calmer, less concerned with the emotions of others. But he supposed that was the way teachers always were. Their satisfaction hinged on the lives of strangers.
“Are you healthy?” Arthur asked the teacher.
The teacher stared at him blankly.
“Are you all right?” Claire asked.
“Yes,” the teacher said. Blinking, he stood up straight again, and forced a laugh. “I am only a little tired.”
He wrote it on the board—Ich bin nur ein bisschen müde—but the class was too shocked to copy it down.
“Next week is our last class,” the teacher informed them. “We will all bring something to eat. Please write a food you will bring on the list. It is nice if it is homemade, but it is not necessary. People are busy.”
He passed the list. “Please write down one dish you think everyone will like,” it read, in English. Kiril wrote down “pierogies,” as he always did when someone asked him to represent his culture. The women at his mother’s church sold them, in order to save the Orthodox orphans in distant countries.
When the class left the community center, the air was wet and heavy. It had rained, or else it was going to rain—Kiril wasn’t sure which. With little ringing sounds of friendship, the students scattered like drops of water. Wanda and Morgan walked west, while Arthur fell into a car with a rusted roof and roared away. That left Claire and Kiril alone at the trolley stop, which was confusing. Claire had never waited at the trolley stop before.
“Change of plans?” he asked.
“I’ve moved,” Claire replied.
This brought up a host of questions. Had she and her boyfriend moved together, or had she left him, striking out on her own? Why had she decided to move at the height of summer, when the air could be so hot and heavy you hardly knew how to breathe? Was she happy in her new place? Would she become happy there, given time?
Kiril didn’t feel that he had the right to ask any of these questions, now that class was over. Instead, they talked about the teacher’s sudden outburst.
“He tries so hard,” Claire said. “But he’s a bit ridiculous, isn’t he? I can’t imagine the pay is good.”
Kiril couldn’t disagree, and yet he felt the urge to defend the teacher. The world they had built together seemed a fragile, tenuous thing; one stray word and it might collapse entirely—and in a week it would be over, no matter how well they behaved.
The trolley was coming down the hill. Kiril wanted to tell Claire something before it arrived. He wanted to explain that he was nothing like the teacher, that he was not a ridiculous person, though he might seem so, in that awkward little room. He had a mother he loved, even if she was old-fashioned and stiff; he had cousins whom he saw every weekend; friends from school with whom he went to movies and bars; women he dated from time to time, without forming long-term attachments; a job that paid well, where he was respected, even essential. He had a full life, a full world.
But why would she care? To her, he didn’t exist beyond the boundaries of the classroom; and the same was true of her, for him, for everyone. Still, he wanted to tell her: not about loneliness, exactly, but about a strange feeling that sometimes came over him, now that he was taking the German class. He would be riding the subway, or walking in the park, and the faces that appeared before him seemed less like strangers locked in silence than like people who might offer him their secrets, if given a small room, a whiteboard, a friendly teacher. On the trolley ride home, the windows were full of other people’s lives.
The trolley stopped, folding its accordion doors. They climbed on board.
“You must be tired,” Kiril told her. “I’ll leave you to your book.”
He could feel the formality of his English. He wished he had the courage to speak to her only in German, here in public, no matter who might overhear.
She smiled. Perhaps she knew what he was thinking, for she replied in German. “Yes,” she said. “My voice is tired.”
“Ja, natürlich.” He smiled at the words, flowing so easily from his mouth. “Tschüss.”
“Tschüss,” she replied, and took her seat.
He sat a few rows behind her and looked out the window, toward the Victorian homes that faced the park and, above them, the purple crown of the sky. He knew that she was looking, too, lines of German echoing in her head, until the last echoes faded, replaced by the music of daily life: overheard complaints; lyrics from the summer’s hip-hop hits; the sound of the conductor, naming the streets he travelled every day, round and round.
It was easy to drift back into it, like a dream that lasted for years. When Kiril looked up again, Claire was gone.
On their last night together, twenty minutes after the class had started—after they had drunk a little of the dark beer the teacher had brought, after they had agreed to talk one last time in German only—Alejandro appeared in the doorway. His shirt was torn, and Kiril thought he could see the yellow outline of a bruise at the edge of his right eye socket.
The teacher tried to mask his surprise. “Alejandro, hello,” he said. “It is good to see you.”
“It is very nice to see you as well,” Alejandro said. “I would like to apologize for my long absence.”
“It is no problem,” the teacher replied. “We are glad you are back. This is our final class party. We are talking about our language goals and practicing our future tense. We are appreciating how much we learned together.”
“Yes, we learned a lot,” Alejandro said.
“Happy we are to have Alejandro back,” Kiril said, though what he really felt was a sense of foreboding. It was as if they were moving backward in time, becoming more innocent and less skilled.
“We are all very happy,” Wanda said.
“That can’t be good.”
The teacher got up and poured Alejandro a glass of beer.
“Thank you very much,” Alejandro said, taking a sip. “The beer is pleasing to me.”
“Now, Alejandro,” the teacher said. “We will talk about our language goals. For example: Claire, what is your goal?”
“I will read poetry,” Claire said, “and write my komischen stories.”
They gave their goals to Alejandro, one by one. Kiril would listen to German songs as he ran in the park. Arthur would ask his wife about her day. Wanda would learn the lyrics to the old songs the man in her church had played for her.
“You see how it is done, Alejandro,” the teacher said.
“It is complicated,” Alejandro said.
“This is the last class,” the teacher said. “Try, please.”
“I am having a hard time with friends,” Alejandro began. He spoke more slowly than Kiril remembered, more stiffly. Perhaps his jaw was injured. “I am trying to talk to people in many languages. But people do not talk. I am thinking they are strict; they are too strict, and then they become angry. I am thinking I will take a class and we will talk to each other in the class and it will be easier. I am thinking we will say what we must say, and we will be friends. But we do not make friends, because language is strict and we do not understand difficult things. When you do not understand, you get angry. It is natural. How can you understand when things are strict? You cannot understand!”
“You can understand,” Wanda said. “Although it is strict, you a little understand.”
“You understand only small things!” Alejandro said. His hands were balled into fists, and the fists were trembling. “There is no point, the weather, there is no point, the weekend! My goal is real talking! My goal is friends! But it is so hard to talk in the work life, the home life. And where are the friends?”
“There are friends,” Kiril insisted. Something had gone wrong, though he didn’t know where, exactly. They were all so willing; you’d think they would have learned something.
Claire laughed quietly. “This is a little komisch.”
“Please, stop,” the teacher said, raising his hands. “Please, let us have a little pause.”
He rang the bell.
“I’m sorry,” he said to them, in English. “But there are limitations. We don’t have much time, and then there are the varying language levels. Oh, you’re right, Alejandro, it’s too stiff, it’s too strict, too expensive—and it’s not enough. But we have to do something, don’t we? Isn’t something better than nothing?”
“Jesus Christ,” Arthur said. “This class is three hundred dollars.”
“Yes, the money,” the teacher said. “And I only get half. But no—let’s not. That’s the shallow way.”
“Easy for you to say,” Arthur said.
“I am sorry,” Alejandro said. “I was inappropriate before. I spoke too quickly. I understand you better now.”
“Do you?” the teacher asked. “I don’t even understand me.”
The class stared blankly. Kiril would have liked to speak up, to let the teacher know he agreed with him, and that he forgave him everything—and yet it wasn’t the sort of thing he would say, in any language.
“Please,” the teacher said. “Please come with me. I wanted to give you all a treat, on the last day. I wanted to do something special.”
He led them behind the whiteboard and through the hidden door. On the other side of the wall was a small auditorium, with a grand piano set up on a stage. There were no seats, only a host of unused air-conditioners lying in rows, covered with plastic cases. Kiril realized, suddenly, what a cool, lush summer it had been so far. One never noticed the soothing parts of life. They passed like afternoon hours, like breath.
The teacher went to the piano and lifted the keyboard cover. “You need something underneath the language,” he said. “Something to hold on to.” Now he switched to German. “I am playing the piano,” he said, pressing the keys. “I am playing some Schubert: ‘Der Erlkönig.’ You can hear it? Here is the horse, in the left hand. You can hear it, yes? You understand?”
Claire closed her eyes. “I can hear it.”
“What is this horseshit?” Arthur asked.
“This is his music,” Alejandro replied.
The teacher played faster. “And now the wind is rising. And now we are hearing the boy, who is frightened. You know he is frightened because he sounds frightened. And here is the father. You can hear he is strong, in his voice. You would know it, even if you did not understand.”
“I understand,” Claire said. “It is clear.”
Kiril doubted that anyone could hear her, other than him. She was very close, on his right, though she barely came to his shoulder. She seemed to belong in this other room, with the piano. He could hardly believe they had once talked on the trolley, shuttling down the tracks like a clumsy, mechanical beetle. He was ashamed of how proud he had been, to speak to her.
“And now the demon arrives, the Demon King,” the teacher said, switching to English. “And he wants to take the little boy to the land of the dead. You can hear it: his voice is seductive.”
“I’m leaving,” Arthur yelled. “I wasted my damn money.”
“Go ahead and leave, then,” Wanda hissed.
Arthur crossed his arms tighter, helpless in his anger.
The teacher played faster now, switching back to German. “The boy is afraid, but the father cannot hear what the Demon King is saying. And now the melody is too bright, like when someone talks without listening. That is how the man talks. And then the boy says that the Demon King is hurting him, causing him pain. Listen: here is how it sounds.”
He played for a minute without speaking: high, bitter chords, like someone breaking ice with a hammer.
“That is the wind again,” Claire said. “I can hear it.”
Kiril felt a pleasurable pain move up his spine. He thought of cool wind in the branches in Herbst: the season with the correct name, but only in English.
Now the song was over, the ice-chords fading to silence.
“I do not need to tell you what happens,” the teacher said. “You know.”
“The boy dies,” Wanda said.
“Natürlich,” Claire said, the last, clustered consonant a whisper.
“But it is so, so beautiful,” Kiril said.
The teacher nodded. He closed the cover. From outside came the sound of sudden rain.
来源：纽约客（2018.04.02）
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