Lika recognized that voice at once. Twenty years had passed, and she recognized it. Emma, the math teacher. One whom Lika could not stand. Emma called Lisa to the blackboard, some biquadratic equation problem. Lika stomped, Lika suffered, Lika understood nothing about biquadratic equations. Leekah hated math.
“My God, girl, what will come out of you? – Emma said mockingly. – Well, that’s easy. Go sit down, you poor thing…” And so all my school years.
Even then Emma seemed very old, they called her “the old hag”. How old is she now? At graduation, Lika sipped wine with the girls, and wanted to approach Emma, haughtily saying, “Well, old hag, I now have a life ahead of me, while you have only a board and boredom.”
She didn’t come up and say it. Fuck it, I thought. Though sometimes she woke up at night: she dreamed that Emma was calling her to the blackboard again. A nightmare. And now this Emma called her all of a sudden. And she had the nerve to call on a Sunday. Where did she get the phone from anyway?
“I’m sorry, for God’s sake,” Emma said. – Your friend gave it to me, we talk to each other, she calls me sometimes…”
Lika did not even immediately understand who she was talking about. But she remembered. An unassuming girl, they sat at the same desk, Lika had seen her at a reunion ten years ago. She had come to their little town for some reason, which she regretted.
Emma explained, stammering, what she wanted. Her granddaughter is in college. She rents an apartment. And there’s some problem with the landlady, a nasty story, and she really needs a good lawyer, because the granddaughter can’t do it herself…
“I don’t know who to turn to…” – Emma muttered.
Yes, Lika was a lawyer herself, a corporate lawyer, worked in a huge company. Lika in general was the epitome of success. A great career, expensive suits, sporty husband, beautiful children, a house in Corfu.
God, thought Lika, what a great moment. To get even for everything. To say into the phone: “Hello, old hag! “What, the equation doesn’t add up? Poor thing!”
Emma was explaining something else about the apartment, about her granddaughter, but Lika almost didn’t listen.
She remembered this “hag” in detail. She had, I think, only two blouses, a blue and a green one, which she had obviously knitted herself. Her shoes were awful; she had worn the same ones all the years she had been in school. She was a heavy lady, and walked with a slight limp. She walked up the stairs to her third-floor study room with difficulty, taking a long time, stopping and breathing.
Emma’s class always smelled of corvalol.
Everyone knew that she was raising her daughter alone. They lived with their daughter in a communal apartment, Lika had once been there with her friends. The room was small, two beds, a desk with stacks of notebooks, the rest were books.
Lika even remembered looking into Emma’s class one day after school, forgetting something on the desk… Emma was alone, crying. She was wrinkling a handkerchief in her hand. The old hag, the iron mathematician, was crying. Lika came out quickly. She said nothing.
And now twenty years had passed.
“Lika,” said Emma. – Forgive the old woman, I’m all talk, and you must have a lot to do. I know you have lovely children, a son and a daughter…”
“Emma,” Lika said. – Yes, I’m a lawyer, but that’s not my specialty….”
“Well, yes, well, yes, I’m sorry… I’ll look for more…”
“No, you don’t understand. I’ll find you a lawyer. A better one. And it won’t cost you anything. Everything will be fine, Emma. Believe me, okay? I will, my dear Emma.
