A Greater Music by Deborah; Suah; Smith Bae Page A

eventually gave up all hope that I ever would. Before long, I was finding school almostimpossible to bear. What had started out as a simple inability to concentrate during lessons gradually became more serious, and I was even making excuses to get out of physical education or art class, claiming that I wasn’t feeling well or had forgotten to bring my materials. I opened my mouth as wide as everyone else during choir practice, but I was only miming. I never made a single friend, either, which could have injected at least a small amount of enjoyment into my experience of school. One day during class, the teacher came over and gave me two sharp raps on the shoulder with her pointer (my head was practically buried in my book), then pulled out the book I’d been concealing inside my textbook. She then announced my latest test scores in front of all the other students—the greatest punishment anyone could think of. She demanded to know why a student who had the temerity to do so poorly in a test, a test which, moreover, her own diligent teaching should have amply prepared that student for, had been reading a book instead of listening to the lesson. I don’t remember the title now, but the book in question was some run-of-the-mill detective story. When I made no attempt at an answer, the teacher opened the book at random and started to read it out loud to the rest of the class; in the passage she read, the female proprietor of a dive bar was talking to the detective, in a suggestive, bantering way. If I remember correctly, their exchange had been fairly critical to the plot, containing a clue about how the investigation would turn out. It was the kind of thing that would satisfy an adolescent schoolgirl’s keen sense of shame and morality. The other students all burst into laughter at the superficiality of the dialogue. Of course, the teacher laughed too. So this is the kind of thing you read! She curled her lip in contempt. And with your test scores never more than 70 at the very highest. Reading this nonsense, well, it’s not appropriate, I’ll have to confiscate it. You’d better watch yourself, now. Watchyour attitude in my lessons. I’ll make sure the other teachers know, too. That you were reading some trashy book during class, that is. We’ll all have to make sure we keep a good eye on you. I’m no pushover! (This was one of her favorite threats, which she always delivered with a particular relish.) At the time, no one thought to ask me whether I wanted to keep on attending school—well, of course they didn’t. The book was confiscated and I was made an example of, but I still carried on hiding my own books inside the textbooks, and I never did learn to listen in class, not even when I went to university. I couldn’t listen, and so I couldn’t understand. After graduation I never saw any of them again, my classmates. And there are things I can’t grasp even now. Why do we have to go to school in order to learn things that we could learn just as well from reading books? The only thing school teaches us is how to submit to the will of the group, nothing more. Of course, unlike me, the majority of children don’t yet know how to read when they start school. I’ve no idea how they manage to make it through school, keeping up the proper student lifestyle for all that time. In any case, there was no way I could learn German in anything resembling a school environment. Self-study would have been ideal, but given how very different German was from Korean I thought it might be a good idea to have a teacher, at least for the meantime. If school hadn’t been such a nightmare for me I would have gone to a private academy, which felt less restrictive as it was up to you if and when you felt like dropping out.
    Erich was a frequent player in my nightmare. He wears a long brown coat that comes all the way down to his ankles, reminding me of a kaftan, and a large hat