Part 2: Anna's Year

Autumn turns towards winter, and Vera follows her grandmother's single year in the lake town, fifty-eight years ago, through the people who still remember it and the things she left behind.

Day 12: The Man at the Edge

Heraclitus said that you cannot step into the same river twice, because new water is always flowing past your feet.

The lake is not a river, but I thought of him tonight on the ferry house steps.

Dear Grandmother,

I took the class photograph to Emil this evening. I wrapped it in a clean tea towel and carried it under my coat, the way you would carry a warm loaf, and I arrived a few minutes before six so that I would not interrupt the bell.

He rang it first. He always does, he says, whoever is standing there. Six strokes, slow, his hands on the part of the rope that has gone smooth and grey, and then he holds the rope still until the last sound has gone across the water. Only then did he turn and ask what was in the towel.

We sat at his kitchen table under the lamp. I unwrapped the photograph and put it in front of him: you at the end of the back row in your pale dress, the children in two rows, and at the right-hand edge, half cut off, a young man leaning on the gate with his sleeves rolled up. I did not ask anything. I had decided on the walk over that I would not.

Emil looked at it for a long time. He did not pick it up. Then he put one finger beside the young man, not on him, and said, "That is me. I was twenty-four. I had carried a bench over from the hall for the little ones to stand on, and the photographer told me to get out of the picture, and I did not get out fast enough."

I asked if he remembered the day. He said he remembered the bench. He said the smallest boy in the front row cried because his shoes were new. He said you counted the children twice before the picture and once after, because one of them always ran to the water. He told me all this in a slow, even voice, like a man reading out what is in a cupboard. About you he said only, "She was a good teacher. The children would follow her anywhere." Then he looked at his hands.

I have learned something from the children these weeks, and I tried it on Emil. When you want someone to tell you about a picture, do not ask about the people in it. Ask what was just outside it. So I asked him what was behind the photographer. He smiled for the first time. The ferry, he said, tied up at the jetty, and his father on the deck with a pipe, shouting that the noon crossing would not wait for school photographs. That one question opened more than ten questions about you would have. You could try it with anyone who shows you an old photograph: ask what they could see from where they stood, and let the faces come by themselves.

On the way home I thought about the tea towel. It is linen, old and soft, and I read once why linen was always the cloth for drying cups and wrapping bread. It is made from the stalks of the flax plant, and its fibres are long and smooth, so it leaves no fluff on a glass. It drinks water quickly and dries quickly, and, unlike most cloth, it is even stronger wet than dry. Each wash makes it a little softer. A good linen towel can outlast the person who first hemmed it, which is why so many kitchens still have one with somebody else's initials in the corner.

Emil gave the photograph back before I left. I said he could keep it for a few days. He said no, it belongs to the school, and the school is mine now. He wrapped it again in the tea towel, folding the corners in neatly, like someone who has folded a great many things alone. At home I put it back in the tin, flat, under the cards.

Heraclitus was right about the water. The water that carried your ferry is long gone, and the man at the edge of your picture is eighty-two and walks with a stick. But he still rings the bell at six, and he still knows how many times you counted the children. Some things do not flow away. They sink to the bottom and wait, like stones the water keeps polishing.

Your Vera

Day 13: The Old Register

Seneca wrote that people learn while they teach.

I copied it on the board this morning in small letters in the corner, for myself, not for the children.

Dear Grandmother,

Dora found it, not me. She was looking for the big soup ladle at the bottom of the school cupboard, behind the boxes of chalk and the dented globe, and she came out holding a long grey book with cloth corners. "Your grandmother's," she said, and put it on my desk as if it were still warm.

It is the school register for your year. Every page is ruled by hand. Down the left side are the names of your pupils, across the top are the dates, September to June, and in each small box there is a stroke for present or a circle for absent, all in the same blue-black ink and the same round hand. I know that hand. It is the hand on your recipe cards. "Two eggs, well beaten." "Present." It is a strange thing to see the same small loop on the letter p in a cake and in a child's attendance.

At lunch Dora and I went through the names together, our soup bowls pushed to one side. She knows every family in the town. She would put her finger on a name and say, that is Ida's grandfather, he still mends nets. That is Pip's great-aunt, she moved away and came back. That one is Bea's grandmother on her father's side. And that one, there, is Mrs Varga, before she married. Kostya's grandmother was seven years old in your classroom, and she was absent for the whole second week of November. In the margin you wrote, in pencil, "bad cough, brother too."

Nine of my eleven pupils have a family name on your pages: a grandparent, a great-aunt, an uncle. I knew this town was small. I had not understood that I am teaching the grandchildren of your pupils.

Dora said this is how it is here. People go away to the city and some of them come back, and the same family names sit at the same desks, year after year, like plates that go back onto the same shelf after every wash. She is not on any of your pages herself, because her family came to the town later. She said she had always minded that a little, and she laughed, but she ran her thumb down the margin of the page very slowly.

In the afternoon I tried something with the class. I gave each of them a strip of good paper and asked them to write their own name in their very best handwriting, slowly, then the date, and nothing else. Ida pressed so hard that she went through to the desk. Pip wrote his name three times until he liked it. Kostya asked who it was for, and I said, for the teacher who sits at this desk in fifty-eight years. They went very quiet after that and wrote much more carefully. I put the strips in an envelope inside the back cover of your register. You could try it with any child, or with yourself: write your name as if a stranger who loves you will read it one day.

While they were writing, I looked closely at your ink. It has not faded, the way cheap ink fades. It has gone darker. Old blue-black ink often has iron in it. It goes onto the page a soft blue, and then, over days, the iron meets the air, turns the line black and binds it into the paper, a little like a tea stain that will not wash out of a good tablecloth. That is why it was the ink for registers and records. It was meant to last longer than the hand holding the pen.

On the last page of the year, under the final row of strokes, you wrote one line: "All present on the last day." Then your signature, Anna Sorel, with a full stop after it, as if you were closing a door gently.

I sat with that line for a long time after the children had gone home, and the stove ticked as it cooled.

Seneca was right. I thought I would be teaching these children letters and sums, and instead they are teaching me the shape of a town, and the register is teaching me you. When Bea asked at the end of the day why I was smiling at an old grey book, I told her that I was learning something. She said teachers are supposed to know things already. I said that is what I used to think.

Your Vera