EVENING STAR, MORNING STAR

She hides her broomstick in the lumber room full of rags and cleansing preparations. Amongst all the wipers, wet clouts and mops with plastic shanks there is just one broom – fragrant and neat with seed grains. That is her broom. Onto the polished stick she leaves a curly hair with a lucent point. When she gets out of the room and walks along the corridor limpid and bracing droplets of sweat flicker on her underwaist. But I am the one to get the lesson up – I officiate. I ritually wipe the green blackboard with fizzing fluid scenting of chocolate and mint.

Behind the cupboard’s window a soldered glass cylinder stands up; there is an asphalt plate soaked in formalin inside. Under the armpits and the tummy of a white tanned sexless embryo of a nephtalim run cords of catgut fastening the body to the plate. I whiff upon its huge head and shine the glass against the eyes, tightly shut, with a velvet rag. Sometimes she opens the cupboard window and knocks her pink nail onto this very spot, just like teasing a goldfish in an aquarium. The fluid sways and the eyes give a momentary glimpse.

I know it all because I sit on the front desk and am able to see everything. I see everything even while checking the elegant ellipses of the piece of chalk which unite into a gentle and definite gothic spire. The weight of the piece is twenty grams exactly altogether with the bluish diaper-patterned paper wrap. I measure it before every lesson by a chemist’s balance whose measuring weights are several flat and marked wafers. Its name is engraved into the material – cade, heth, aleph, lamed, kaf – CHALK. I don’t have to do quite so many things – the necessity of acts is accomplished. Light comes from the north, no phantom sun spots appear on any surface and the air is crystal.

When she comes in it is only me to see that her illusive blush is in fact due to the wind beaten cheekbones, the pale freckled circles around her eyes are the proof of the aviator’s glasses she wears to keep out from the extreme speed up there. At the time the lesson begins I slip off my trainers and put my bare feet into my special bleached felt slippers. Then I tuck the points of my fingers into the ears and freeze, eyes shut. The lesson ends with the words, “Did you understand, students? This is our Solar system!”

I gaze around bewildered. They did understand it – they understand it all. There are eleven circles drawn on the board and all of them are aware that this is the sun to give them heat and the moon to shine with its reflected light, and all those conglobular wound in rock rings and variegated gases planets which nobody has ever seen – they are already material to the class. Within forty minutes the class apprehended that basic unyielding knowledge to determine their place in the universe. It is the life-long mainstay, the touchstone for any postward information.
I do not understand. I only ascertain. I measure the piece of chalk again, it weighs seven and a half grams. Our solar system therefore has the weight of twelve and a half grams and consists exclusively of milky white chalk and two letters – C&H.
Wait, though!
You don’t know what she scribes in that heavy magic book in The Teachers’ Room. In the ruled boxes she enters – Sun, Moon, Earth, Mercury, Milky Way, Galaxy, and Supernova.
This book is called The Material Book. And if you wish to understand a little bit more just stay with me after classes.
She leaves with the rest of the teachers, they all head along to the buss stop; she laughs, arranges her hair, after that she stops and bends down to fix nothingness on her shoes and lets everybody pass by.

Then she enters the lumber room.