Magister Ludi (Master of Games)

She drums her pen against the kitchen table. The journal page in front of her is empty except for a few names and a five-point prompt: who, what, when, where, why. She is trying to crystallize an idea, a description. An image. Her search circles around defining a significant detail, a single characteristic. Does one characteristic reveal important information about a person? What is a characteristic? A trait? A feature? How does it translate into behavior? Are characteristic and behavior connected? She leans back and allows her neck muscles to relax until her chin touches her chest and her eyelids hide the silent march of the clock’s hand on the far wall.
He sits on top of the desk in the first row, facing the class. Smiling. It was almost fifty years ago that he had kept the minds of his students focused on the Gallic War. De Bello Gallico - it might as well have been a love story. Caesar and her Latin teacher were one and the same. Every battle opened with a warning: read the whole sentence before you try to translate. At the height of Caesar’s glory there would be a brief vision: imagine what it must have felt like to be a conqueror. When the conflict was over, a reminder: write down your homework assignment or you’ll forget what I asked you to do. His instructions carried the weight of a benign ruler’s proclamation and a hint of Tabak cologne, both trailing him like trustworthy soldiers united in their efforts to capture his students’ attention.
“Any questions?”
Her Liebler’s voice pushes into her meditation. She marks his name on the page with an asterisk. Exactly what was it that made him everybody’s favorite teacher?
“Gisela, you are frowning.”
She looks at him. His wavy black hair is cut short on the sides. The window reflects in his dark brown eyes and gold-rimmed glasses. A smile plays with his lips like the echo of a lullaby. His hands punctuate the air with excitement while he dissects a sentence. Distance in time and space now allow her to ask the questions she did not ask when she was his student. When she was young they mattered as little as the answers. Only his intonation of the hero’s journey mattered.
“Herr Liebler, did you know that we adored you? I still take sentences apart and study them to the rhythm of your pointed finger.”
“You girls seemed to be in your own dream world most of the time; I am honored it included my ancient phrases.” He walks to the blackboard and writes, “Fide et amore.”
Gisela copies the words. She circles them and draws a line with an arrow pointing to the question about his effectiveness as teacher. “By trust and love,” she translates. She notes that she admires the harmonious confluence of his features, his gestures, his words.
“I looked at old photographs this morning,” she says, “I found one of our group, tramping through the mountains during winter camp. We followed you single-file, eager to show off our new boots. Eager to be praised. After plowing through the snow in each other’s footsteps for a long mile, after bombarding you with questions and snowballs, we stood in line, impatiently waiting for you to rub our frozen hands back to life. You shook your head and smiled when we fought over your attention. It was a contest, Herr Liebler. Whoever could claim the longest touch, bragged about it all evening while we gossiped and played chess and pitched our battle hymns against the steely groans of a guitar. Most of us were madly in love with you. Did you know that we fantasized about what could happen if one of us were alone with you?”
“I think I did. Yes, I did. You girls were teenagers, overflowing with drama. You practiced ‘I am seductive’ on me. Yes – I knew. And I knew that you walked past the Helmholtz Gymnasium, on your way home, giggling, hoping to be noticed, but afraid to be addressed by one of the boys who were equally as shy and eager as you. Believe me, it wasn’t easy for a forty-year old man to teach in a school filled with playful little sirens. What you needed from me, and what you thought you wanted, were two different things. Sometimes I wanted to report your escapades to your parents, especially during camp week, when you piled up against my patience, and whispered and teased and tested until late into the night. I was angry with myself when my ego rose to your moves or worse, when it fell into the trap of short hemlines and sun-bronzed skin.
You all had such important lessons to learn. Tricky lessons – about self-esteem, about interpretations, about boundaries. I had the obligation not to respond to your budding desires while showing you that touch in itself is not wrong. Do you remember Renate? She flaunted lipstick and silvery hoop earrings and she twisted her bangs to say, ‘I’m seventeen and I know I’m very sexy.’ And then there was Reingart, the exact opposite. She probably thought she was not very attractive. I’m pretty sure she wore an older sister’s hand-me-downs. Her translations were flawless, but her voice was barely audible. Some of you had secure relationships with your parents, but some of you hated to go home after school. You had a problem with your family dynamics, didn’t you? You lived with an abusive stepfather if I remember right. You tried hard to please everybody.”
The teacher paces, the way he used to pace between rows of desks, looking over a shoulder, pointing at the gender specific ending of a noun, asking for the predicate of a sentence. “The predicate,” he stressed, “gives you the clues you need to translate a sentence. It is a signpost for tense and voice in a scramble of fact and assumption.”
Gisela remembers the heat wave spiraling through her body when he stood next to her. The red shadow crawling across her face and strangling her breath when she conjugated a verb. She remembers how her heart beat even faster when he said, “Sehr gut.” Very good. Adults claimed that learning had its own rewards, but in her Latin class the reward was Herr Liebler’s smile.
As he fades back into the past, Gisela writes quickly, summing up her investigation. Verbs cluster around his name, lyrical notes that try to capture past affection. A list of attributes sprawls across the paper and clauses line up for analysis. She looks at the clock. Before she closes her journal she draws a heart next to a group of phrases that would soon compete for the title of her memoir.

Zampano Hill

Zampano Hill, the slope behind my house, has been slashed, whacked, chopped and chain-sawed. Where ivy circled the birdbath and feral cats hid from raccoons in the thick tangle of pampas grass, a new order will have to be established. The squirrels will have to take detours. Next time the skunk leaves a message for me, he’ll probably have to run away along the ditch, no more fruitless mulberry to hide behind. And the Blue Jay, that shrieking puffball of indignation, when he comes back later in the spring, he’ll have to complain from somewhere else because his swaying oleander lookout has been deconstructed. Only the mocking bird will be happy; he can still practice at four every morning since the pine tree has been labeled as “growing to the ground, not falling to the ground.” The tree specialist said I could sleep in the back bedroom again, even during a storm. And you, dear musical mocker, will see to it from your seat at the top of the pinecone factory, that I will be awakened early.
At the end of last year I surrendered my rights to the hill. I had tripped and rolled several feet down into the junipers during an intense weeding project. While I had been trapped in this prickly nest I assessed the impact, and I admitted to myself that I was getting too old to control the landscape. Let the community administrator take care of it.
Yesterday trucks lined up in the street and men came to clear Zampano Hill. Oh yes, they did clear the hill.
“Please, mind the water pipe that runs up the side.”
“Yes.”
“And the bench. Don’t take away the bench. That’s where I meditate.”
“Yes.”
“I used to grow tulips up there. And daffodils”
“Yes.”
I sounded pathetic. What do men with chain saws care about the stories that hide in the pyracanthas, stories that bend under sagging redwood boards, stories that glow purplish when the sun wakes the morning glories?
“Yes.” The young man nodded and cut into the ivy- covered branches of my chestnut tree.
That’s when I realized that he didn’t understand me. The man in poison green safety vest and orange pant protectors who stabbed his shears into my paradise didn’t speak my language at all. And suddenly I was embarrassed by my passionate plea.
Later, when he piled pampas grass stalks into a heap, when his saw stuttered through brittle rosemary bushes and juicy yucca stems, when he reduced a canopy of oleander into short naked stubs, I watched. I followed his moves like a stalker, from the back porch, then from the bathroom, then from behind the blinds in the kitchen .A mad woman who had lost control over her past and her common sense.
The spiraling, bursting, crazy components of my thoughts spun themselves into a bullet and propelled me toward a bookcase of journals and photo albums. For the rest of the day I ripped pictures from yellowing pages and copied fragments of events into a computer list. I tried to collect twenty years of memories while the man on the hill slashed their concrete expressions.
When I moved into Timber Cove in November of 1987 I had envisioned ribbons of red geraniums trailing down from the hillside, but soon learned that the area had once been a dumpsite and leftover toxic waste made for a difficult environment. The previous owners must have gathered enough information to plant accordingly – mainly evergreens and ivy.
They had attached a rope to the fence at the very top. The only way to climb the steep terrain was to hold on to the rope. I cut steps and walkways into the rocky ground. The next year I cleared a small platform at the top for a table and chairs. A couple of seasons later, by the time my grandchildren were able to walk, we had picnics on the hill and Easter egg hunts, and chats with blue jays, squirrels, and the hissing mothers of wild kittens. I bought a rainbow colored umbrella.
By trial and error I learned what the ground rejected and what it would support. The few geraniums I planted didn’t last because it was too hard and too dry. I hauled soil and fertilizer up the hill for a bed of red poppies. They only bloomed one season. A grouping of gladiolas looked pretty for a while, until they tilted and leaned into each other. But one day I bought a bag of bearded iris rhizomes from a catalog. Must have been fifteen years ago and still, every April, some of them sprout their lavender and white flower heads on sturdy upright stems. And the naked ladies – I don’t know where they came from – they shoot into the air, three of them, or five, or sometimes seven, every August.
Joe used to carry a blanket up the hill to keep me warm when we watched the stars together. He sprinkled the walkway with rose petals when I was in a bad mood. We chalked messages for each other on a big sandstone rock or scribbled them on the backside of seedling envelopes and stuck them in a toy mailbox. We built a tiny deck by the pine tree and watched the mother cat drag her kittens into the dugout below.
After Joe’s death I found five empty vodka bottles in a shallow grave. No matter what I planted in his memory – it died. First the weeping cherry. Then the crabapple tree. Fifty red tulips only bloomed once. Even the daffodils succumbed to an overdose of oxidized metals or maybe they were killed by his ashes.
The only thing that is left of him on the hill is the sundial. It remembers that he died at 1:30 in the afternoon. I can still see him the way he looked the last time he climbed all the way up – haggard – half his weight lost to cancer. He carried a piece of hot dog wrapped in a napkin for the cats. After he sat down he pulled a flask from his coat pocket and loaded the syringe with vodka. Then he opened a can of Ensure and dumped its content into the bushes. I spied on him the way I spied on the landscaper yesterday, hiding my sadness behind the blinds.
Even before Joe’s restless spirit haunted the hill, my mother had taken her place among the Zampano ghosts. After she died in 1991 I imagined her gliding down from the clouds and landing in the corner where sunflowers tilted their heads with the time of the day. My mother loved sunflowers. And she loved the color purple. I can see her purple gauzy gown flutter in the wind. She shakes her finger at me, the way she used to do when I was a child.
“Vorwärts gehn,” she says. Go forward.
She always warns me when I climb too deeply into retrospect. Though I have only just begun my list of hillside memories I stop writing and walk outside. The men have hauled away a truckload of trees and bushes, have reduced the landscape to evergreens again. I climb to the top, clean a plastic chair with my bare hand, and sit until it begins to rain.