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.