YAMAMOTO-SENSEI, the third-year teacher, pronounced English very well. His delivery, though, was alarming. His speech was interrupted by giggles, snorts, and the n-n of agreement, less extended than the n-n-n of disagreement. Jay recoiled from this gasping, spittled fellow. In Yamamoto-san’s sallowness, in the rosy wetness of his lips, in the short fatness of his nose with its exposed nostrils, in the black rims of his spectacles, he was a painful reminder of Feivel Ostroff, who had invaded Jay’s eighth-grade class more than six decades earlier. Feivel and his siblings exuded an old-world whiff that most Jewish families had vigorously sprayed away. Under ordinary circumstances the Ostroffs would not have achieved Godolphin — the father kept a little grocery in a deteriorating section of Boston, and the brood lived over the store. But the feckless father died, and the mother’s brother, made prosperous by the war, moved widow and orphans into a big apartment on Jefferson Avenue whose rent he undertook to pay. He bought them necessaries and even bikes.
If the Orloffs had been Chasidic they would have become part of a tribe wearing queer puppet costumes; they’d have attended the Chasidic day school. Or if the Orloffs had been Orthodox they’d have worn yarmulkes and attended the Orthodox school. But they were not Chasidic, not Orthodox, not even particularly observant; they were merely dark, scrawny, and embarrassing. Their lunch boxes were crammed with hard-boiled eggs and pickles. Feivel laughed at his own jokes. Some students made friends with him — he could be helpful with Latin homework, and in those days Harvard still required proficiency in an ancient tongue. Jay, all A’s anyway, ignored him.
But he couldn’t ignore Yamamoto. Jay meant to conquer the Japanese language; Yamamoto’s territory was in his battle plan. And there was a similar determination in Jay’s classmates — there were only four others now. It was as if they were attending not the decorous language center but the night school to which his grandfather had dragged himself a century earlier, even after ten hours of work, because on English his whole future depended.
Three of the others had been with Jay since the beginning — two businessmen and a programmer — and the fourth was a new pupil, a young woman who’d begun her Japanese studies in college. She was now living with a doctor from Kobe. Jay wondered what their offspring would look like — the young woman was pale and freckled, with parched hair and transparent eyelashes. Jay’s new great-grandchild, according to the pictures on the Web, was an untroubled blend of both families: he had, in charming miniature, his mother’s chin and hair and eyes, his father’s curly mouth, and Jay’s own father’s noble schnozz. In one of the pictures Mika’s grandmother held the baby on her lap. She was wearing glasses, her expression unreadable.
Yamamoto was an expert drillmaster. He made the class repeat verb conjugations and honorific forms and onomatopoeic words until Jay became mukamuka, kurakura, gennari … nauseated, dizzy, and exhausted. But Yamamoto was not entirely to blame; Jay’s disease was at last on the offensive. Well, it was his fate, wasn’t it; his unmei. Yamamoto stood during the drills, breathing noisily, waving his arms, almost shouting through his noxious giggles. He was like a soldier … like a Japanese soldier … like a Japanese soldier in the war films of Jay’s boyhood. He was dressed in salaryman’s clothing — utterly black suit, utterly white shirt, dark red tie — but he might as well have been wearing green tanker coveralls with drawstrings at waist and ankles. His mouth was always slightly open; his short white teeth grazed his plump lower lip. He liked to slice the air with his hand. Chop. Chop.
Drills were only part of the weekly class. There was also the humbling return of corrected homework, and kanji tests, and videotapes in which overwrought actors enacted workplace dramas — someone has to make an emergency presentation, someone else almost doesn’t land a contract. What a perilous life Woody must be leading. The students conducted general conversations initiated by Yamamoto.
Sheila-san, what did you do last weekend?
Cooked shabu-shabu, did tennnis, worked in the garden, did Japanese study.
Did you, now. Ralph-san?
Grilled beef, did golf, saw a movie, did Japanese study.
Sensei, what did you do? somebody usually inquired. There followed a sentence didactically employing modifiers, idioms, and contractions. Yamamoto hopefully attended a Red Sox game, but the pitiable Sox surrendered six runs. At a concert a skillful quartet performed a composition written just for them. A dog was struck on the street and ended up in trouble: dead. During these narrations the incisor-notable mouth, framed at the corners with saliva, was open in its customary smirk, a replica of Feivel Ostroff ’s anxious smile.
In high school Feivel had put on enough weight to become merely thin. He had learned to giggle less. By the time he and Jay were freshmen together across the river (Feivel’s uncle paid for room and board as well as tuition) he was calling himself Phil. He majored in classics; he wrote his senior thesis on Ovid. In Jay’s eyes, Feivel-Phil retained the feverish eagerness of a greenhorn, but now he was one man among ten thousand, less odd than many — less bizarre than a couple of Inuits, less exotic than the Ismaili prince, less greasy than the Brooklyn smart alecks shuttling between class and lab, preparing themselves for distinguished scientific careers and, it turned out, a couple of Nobels.
Phil Ostroff paid court to a dowdy Radcliffe girl named Dorothea, also a classicist, whose parents were professors in some college on the prairie. Phil and Dorothea, both summa cum laude, were married right after graduation by a justice of the peace. They went off to graduate school in Chicago, where the university paid them handsome stipends for the honor of their presence.
DURING THE SPRING semester of Japanese III, Passover began on the Saturday night before Easter. This weekend I will attend a religious banquet, Jay said. Bread may not be eaten. Using my dear wife’s recipe, my dear daughter will make soup. We will eat chicken, sweet potatoes, fruit, crackers, special fish.
Matzoh, amplified Yamamoto. As for gefilte, there is no Japanese equivalent.
Sheila would prepare the traditional Easter meaclass="underline" ham, sweet potatoes, fruit. One businessman was going to the game and the other would be visiting family in New York and the programmer planned to organize his collection of compact discs. He would arrange them by century first, he said; within century by composer; within composer by …
Yamamoto’s lower lip stretched under his awning of teeth. Next week we will enjoy hearing about your system. Tonight’s class is over.
As for this weekend, Jay insisted. Sensei wa?
The teeth flared at him. I will attend a seder.
A guest at the feast, Jay thought: the stranger in your midst … But the teacher went on. My wife will prepare the meal. I will conduct the service.
“In Hebrew?” the startled Jay inquired, in English.
Yamamoto turned his head away from this impertinence. “Hebrew is a difficult tongue,” Jay should have said — that would have been a respectful way not to ask the question. But respect be damned — the question and its companions begged for answers.