The class digested the surprise slowly. It seemed to be considering whether Karel’s outburst represented common sense or an attempt to ally himself with Sprute against them. The kid behind Sprute was caught slingshotting a rubber band and was told that as punishment after school he’d have to pick the nettles out of the small rectangular lawn around the flagpole.
Karel felt bad for him but preferred their system of punishment to the one for the lower standards, where children caught misbehaving were made to wear a sign which read I AM A BAD INFLUENCE until someone else was caught and the sign passed on to that person. Whoever wore the sign Friday afternoon at the end of school was beaten. The arrangement created from Wednesday on a sense of unbearable suspense, complete with last-minute rescues and catastrophes.
They got on with the lesson. There were snorts and sneezelike sounds and badly stifled laughter.
“I’d better not see misbehavior when I turn around,” Miss Hagen remarked.
“You won’t,” someone promised. There were more giggles.
They watched her make vigorous and glossy arches across the blackboard with a wet sponge. She outlined new subjects: The Nation as a Community of Fate and Struggle. The Soldier as a Moral Force. Heroism. Women in War. The Community and the Struggle for Unification. Hygiene.
Leda made a disparaging, hissing sound. No one reacted to it.
They would study the Great Trek, the march across the desert plateau to Karel’s home city. It had been undertaken by the leadership of the Party in its infancy to dramatize its struggle for recognition. They would study also the example of Bruno Stitt, the fourteen-year-old who had decided to die beside his father rather than abandon him to the foreign marauders overrunning the family farm. Leda sighed audibly. There was no mention of the take-home assignment, which Karel had obviously done for nothing.
He took some listless notes, wondering what the sixthstandarders were making of this. Answer not in material Egoism, but in joyous Readiness to Renounce and Sacrifice. Do not Stand Apart!
Her inconsistency with capital letters struck him as evidence of sloppy thinking, though he couldn’t say why. He wrote without comprehension, as usual, he thought grimly. He glanced over at Leda. She wasn’t writing, and she eyed the board with a critical tilt to her head. He considered her intelligence with envy and frustration. Was she going to fall in love with someone who didn’t understand what was going on half the time? Was she going to fall in love with someone who couldn’t keep up? Even if he at times made the effort he learned almost nothing, and waited for the moment when a simple question or quiz would expose his ignorance in all its vastness for everyone to look upon, stupefied, as if having opened a kitchen cabinet to reveal a limitless and trackless desert.
In literature they studied Mystical Forebears, whose chantings were transcribed from rock fragments dragged from various archaeological sites. They were so stupid that everyone changed words here and there in the workbooks to mock them: “The skin of our race is roseate-bright, our complexion like milk and blood” became, in Karel’s workbook, “The skin of our race will nauseate, right, our soup will be milk and blood.”
They were instructed to clip and remove foreign writers from their anthologies — the new anthologies had yet to arrive from the printers — with the explanation that they as a people were the only ones capable of profound and original thought. The foreign spirit, Miss Hagen explained, was like the bee, which worked efficiently and had its place, while their spirit was like the eagle, which with its strong wings pushed down the air to lift itself nearer the sun.
Karel, irritated and lost, wrote on his paper Bee — Eagle.
Miss Hagen read from the booklet Do Not Stand Apart! There were those, she read, who found it comfortable and soothing to withdraw in a sulk to their own little chamber, to nurse their holy wounded feelings and say, “You needn’t count on me anymore; I don’t give a hoot about the whole thing.” Because their tender sensitivities had been offended by one thing or another they spoiled the joy of achievement for the whole group. Who were these people who refused their obligations? Who were these people?
When she saw their faces she apologized for getting too complicated and promised to talk more about all of this later.
He received a note from Leda which read: I’m glad you like the Kestrels so much, and when he tried to catch her eye she wouldn’t look.
They watched a filmstrip involving polite members of the Civil Guard teaching methods of terrace farming to grateful and simpleminded nomads. The nomads provided comic relief by doing things like attempting to eat the fertilizers. The day ended with Miss Hagen telling the story of a young boy from a school much like theirs who’d had the courage to turn in his parents, both of whom were working for outside interests. The class reaction was muted. They went home without even the enthusiasm that came from their release at the end of the day or the new opportunity to torment Sprute.
He changed and went over Leda’s. When he peeked through her hedge she was sunning herself in a faded canvas deck chair. Her skirt was raised in a lazy S across her thighs. Her elbows were lifted to the sun. She seemed not to recognize him immediately. She did not move her skirt, and he imagined he saw underpants, of a dreamy pale blue.
On the ground nearby were discarded oil paints, tumbled across a palette like undersized and squeezed toothpaste tubes. David sat near the mess reading with his back to the sun while the breeze turned the pages of his book every so often, in anticipation of his progress.
She asked how things were at the zoo, and Karel told her. She said her skin temperature was about a thousand degrees. She asked if he wanted any mint tea with shaved ice. She said she had started a painting for him, and had given up. She held up as evidence a forearm crisscrossed with blue and yellow paint.
He was thrilled, and sat near the palette and examined the paint tubes for traces of his unrealized painting. The names on the tubes pleased him. Where some of the paint had bubbled out it was still moist, and the skins were resilient and yielding like the skin on boiled milk.
Leda said she hadn’t gotten over the bats, and wanted to know if he had. He shook his head. She hadn’t told her mother, and asked if his father had helped. Karel said he hadn’t, much. She shivered, thinking about it.
She turned the radio on. It was hidden below her in the shade of the deck chair. After some staticky popping there was a howling wind, and then the overheated music of Adventure Hour.
“This thing,” Leda said.
Karel followed along, dandling a paint tube. The story was about mountain climbers, one of whom announced hanging over a crevasse that he was doing all of this for the people. He went on to describe the mountain he was mastering, which he called the Ice Giant. An arctic blizzard whistled behind his voice. The Ice Giant was supremely beautiful and supremely dangerous, a majestic force which invited the ultimate affirmation of, and escape from, the self.
“This is a mountain climber?” Leda said. Her eyes were closed to the heat.
“I don’t understand any of these shows,” David said.
A fanfare indicated the climber’s triumph, which he confirmed by shouting, “Thus I plant our nation’s flag in this wild place.” There was a sound effect of the flag going in, sounding macabre, like something being stuck with a knife. Leda changed the station. She waved away an inquisitive fly.
Karel was moved by the notion of the almost-painting and felt a rush of feeling for her, a surge of excitement and longing that could have been audible as he watched her drowse. He shaded his eyes from the sun. She turned on the canvas chair and smiled. She had at that moment the face of a placid, intelligent child, someone younger than David. He was so filled with tenderness that it was only with difficulty that he restrained himself from announcing it whatever the consequences. She sighed and said she couldn’t have mint tea alone.