I never loved school, mainly because of the teachers. Not all of them were as eloquent as Mr. Stanford. Some couldn’t even connect two words, and there were those who didn’t teach us anything, but derived pleasure from their power.
We had Mr. Ivan Isenberg, the owner of a very extensive bald head and the academic degree of the doctor of philosophy in the field of applied informatics. Now I think that if someone with a PhD is working as a schoolteacher, there’s something is wrong with him, and it seemed to us that Mr. Isenberg was a red terrorist fascist who just hadn’t been finished off by our heroic soldiers in Vietnam or in Iraq, or The Maniac and Dr. Evil in one package.
He was average height, always dressed in a faultless suit, always shaved – and always scented with sweet cologne, so sweet it seemed like a perfume for women. Like all the other teachers, he liked us all to do everything similarly – similar dress, similar studies, similar behaviour. ‘Similar’, in a word, so nobody needed to be individually catered for – so convenient!
But, unlike other teachers, Mr. Isenberg called this similarity ‘standardization’, which he thought was necessary for children. He was like some ancient paladin, a gallant knight whose sole purpose was to eradicate the sedition of originality and dissimilarity in erring, innocent youth.
He had many methods of eradication, some trickier than others. ‘Collective education’, for example, was when all the class suffered because of one pupil. If someone was five minutes late for a lesson, say, then all of us would have to stand up and stand till the bell rang. And so, during the break, the exhausted classmates would become brutes and give the late student a ‘friendly chat’ to make he was never late again. During this chat, they usually beat his legs and stomach so there was no visible bruise. And Mr. Isenberg spurred them on.
He also had a method, called ‘personal participation,’ in which the guilty pupil stayed after lessons and Mr. Isenberg read aloud to him excerpts from the Tortures and Punishments encyclopedia by Brian Lane.
From him, I learned about ducking-stools, the rack, the ‘Judas Cradle’, the ‘Spanish boot’, ‘the heretic’s fork’, ‘the qualified execution’, decimation, castration and decapitation. Some of my schoolmates felt dreadful during ‘personal participation’, but I usually stayed calm, since I am rather phlegmatic by nature and not so imaginative.
All the same, one of Mr. Isenberg’s conversations, I remember, did make a strong impression on me. It was about China, and I had always, since early childhood, been interested in China, its culture and history.
It was about Chinese women who, according to medieval standards of beauty surviving into the 20th century, had to have small arc-shaped feet reminiscent of a new moon or a lily petal. Mr. Isenberg pointed out that it was hard for a girl who didn’t possess these signs of beauty to marry.
To get that arc-shaped foot, girls from six years-old had all toes, except the big one, turned in and bandaged to the sole. Twice a day, bandage was tightened firmly. This continued until the sole took the arc-shaped form.
This procedure caused extreme pain in girls, their legs often grew numb, and there were problems with blood circulation. The toes pressed into the sole completely lost blood supply. In adult Chinese women, they looked like white rectangles inserted into the skin of the sole.
As a result, adult women had the small foot of a six-year-old child, with only the big toe developed and providing support for walking. Because of this millions of Chinese girls couldn’t move easily, fell on ladders, on slopes or in a strong wind, but were considered ‘graceful’ and ‘distinguished’. Mr. Isenberg emphasized that they were ‘standardized’ and willing to suffer great torment for it. Not without reason did the Chinese people have sayings such as: ‘Beauty demands suffering’, ‘A pair of bandaged feet costs a bathtub of tears’.
I also learned from Mr. Isenberg that the famous Chinese politician Sun Yat-Sen, as a little boy, went through anguish because of the tortures his little sister suffered as her feet were bandaged by their mother.
The poor girl couldn’t sleep at night. She groaned and cried and only at daybreak went off into a leaden sleep. But almost at once, mother came and changed the bandage on the girl’s feet and the torture continued. Shocked by all this, Sun Yat-Sen addressed his mother one day:
‘Mother, it is too painful for her. You shouldn’t bandage the legs of my little sister!’
I don’t think that the daughter’s suffering pleased the mother, but she was forced to answer:
‘How can your little sister have lily-feet without pain? If she doesn’t have little feet then, when she becomes a young lady, she won’t marry and she will condemn us for violating of customs.’
Sun Yat-Sen, the future revolutionary, continued to campaign against bandaging, but only succeeded in getting his mother to invite another woman to bandage his sister’s feet, telling him:
‘It is the custom. Everyone does it.’
Mr. Isenberg gave this example and always stressed that the destruction of traditions and ‘standardization’ was the work of mad revolutionaries who as a result destroyed the state as Sun Yat-Sen had destroyed the Great Middle Empire and led millions of Chinese to death.
Sometimes, listening to Mr. Isenberg, I thought that one of us was mad – either he was, because of what was saying or doing, or me, because I was listening to all this.
And I couldn’t really understand how and why in the best and most fair country, in the center of the world, in an era when distances between continents were reduced to a several hours flight, and electronic communications have made it possible to contact anyone and anywhere instantly – when the future which science fiction writers dreamed about had arrived – nuts such as Mr. Isenberg lived there.
Some children wanted to send a complaint about him to the State Department of Education and even began to collect signatures, but what is known to two is known to everybody – someone informed and the complainants received additional sessions of ‘personal participation’.
To be honest, my dislike of school was cultivated not only by the teachers, but also by my schoolmates. As I said I had no real friends, and plenty of enemies.
I was rather thin, but I wasn’t a puny creature at all, and in sport I did everything I should, so it was no standard healthy-fellows-against-the-puny-nerd situation.
It was rather the contrary. The guys that snubbed me weren’t on friendly terms with sport. They were big, even fat guys, fans of chips, cola, burgers and movies with Bruce Willis.
They wore rapper trousers with low crotches, black caps with long peaks, undershirts with skulls, and portraits of Jam-Master-Jay and chains as if they were black.
And of course, they listened to rap, rough rap, Onyx, D.I.T.C. and Tupac Amaru. They called themselves ‘whiggers’ – well, like ‘white niggers’ though they were typical ‘white trash’…
Yes, and they spoke among themselves in rap slang as well they understood it. You know, all those words: ‘Hey, dude, high five, brazza, everything is cool, break off to the bro a couple of dollars on heating’, and other garbage.
I wore chinos and polo necks and didn’t listen to music at all. These ‘whiggers’ latched on to me, but I usually told them where to get off or simply ignored them. Once they came up to me and began to mutter something in their slang like ‘dude, brazza, everything is great’ and so on in their ‘ebonics’. So I answered them: ‘Speak white, guys!’ There were four of them, but I could only answer two or three times before I was shoved to the ground. And then it began…