TE23 Double Feature

Andrea Tompa

The Hangman’s House

textbooks, inherited them from one another, and these too were not on sale—furthermore they were surprisingly similar in that in all of them the background remained impossible to obliterate, showing through even drawings done with the darkest ballpoint, in brief, it wasn’t the pictures in textbooks or classrooms that terrorized the long-haired, uniformed schoolgirl, but the morning scrutiny of the biology teacher: at seven in the morning, his mirror-smooth cheeks pomaded, his white coat starched and ironed, his gleaming shirt with downturned collar likewise, the grey, knife-creased trousers of his suit and his leather-soled pigskin shoes, Comrade teacher Antal, like one first to arrive at the place of ceremonial execution of the criminals of the day to lead the chief offender to the scaffold at eight o’clock precisely, stood stock still, hands clasped behind his back, outside the heavy wrought-iron gate of the school, signet and marriage rings on right and left hands respectively, never wearing anything 340

over his crisp, almost paper-stiff laboratory coat even in the hardest of frosts because his sun-tanned body, as he never failed to stress every week in military training, was tough and resilient, and the most that Antal put on in the biting cold of January was a grey lambskin hat on his dressed, brushed-back hair; and he bent down ten times one after another with an audible intake of breath as he cast a keen eye over the class; there he stood at the gate, his feet apart, selfconfident, checking the school identity numbers 1 on coats and uniforms, on the front for the girls, above the heart, as the saying went, on the arm for the boys, all stitched on with dark thread, not held by an elastic band so that it could be craftily pulled off after school, nor with a safety pin so that it should dangle and be easily hidden, nor yet with press studs, but well and truly stitched on, even on a sheepskin or leather coat, because they had two numbers embroidered in yellow thread on a dark cloth 1 Schoolchildren had to wear their number and the name of their school on this badge. 341