Stella by Siegfried Lenz Page B

visit our teacher. She had a bad accident.”
    “A car crash?”
    “No, in the harbor,” I said. “In a storm. She was thrown against the pier.”
    He thought about that, perhaps trying to work out just what had happened, and said, “Our teachers, ah, yes,” and then, “I expect you think highly of her?”
    “More than highly,” I said, whereupon he looked at me thoughtfully, but seemed satisfied with my answer.
    I guessed why he suddenly left me without a word of thanks or farewell when he stood to follow the two men in white coats who had just come through the swinging doors. They were walking toward a plain annex building, deep in conversation. He shuffled after them, plainly intending to ask for confirmation of his hopes. The doctor I was waiting for myself still didn’t appear. I’ve had practice in waiting.
    As the contents of my cigarette pack shrank I thought of Stella. It was clear to me that at school we’d have to wait some time for her to return. They had found a substitute for Stella already, for the first class, an Englishman from Lessing High School. His name in itself aroused lively interest in the class; this substitute teacher was called Harold Fitzgibbon. He was not slender, not one of those tough, wiry Englishmen you admire in TV films; Mr. Fitzgibbon was chubby, with short, sturdy legs, and his red-cheeked face invited you to trust him. We were all pleased to hear him say good morning in English, and I was silently grateful to him for mentioning Ms. Petersen’s accident—“her sad misfortune”—at the beginning of the lesson, and saying he hoped she would recover quickly. Familiar with the homework Stella had assigned in her last English class, he praised Orwell’s Animal Farm , and told us that at first no publisher had been prepared to bring it out, but then it was published by the firm of Warburg and became a huge success. Mr. Fitzgibbon said how good a choice of a book it was for us, Stella, and I couldn’t help thinking he was congratulating us on having you as a teacher.
    I was surprised when he wanted us to tell him what we knew about England. Stella had pointed out thatthe Germans were particularly anxious to find out what people thought about their country, whereas we’d wait in vain for any English person to ask, “How do you like my country?” But anyway, our substitute did ask that question—we never found out how he assessed our general knowledge of England, but what he heard must have given him plenty to think about. I still remember his surprise, his slight smile, his approval when we replied to his question: an ancient kingdom, Manchester United, Lord Nelson and the Battle of Trafalgar, the mother of democracy, a passion for betting, the Whigs and the Tories, judges wearing wigs, gardens—and Peter Paustian went on about gardens, having been to the British Isles once with his parents—and in addition a sense of fair play and colonies that had now been given up. Georg Bisanz seemed to have been listening to all this indifferently, unwilling to take part in the question-and-answer game, but then he suddenly said, in his usual firm voice, “Shakespeare.” Mr. Fitzgibbon paused in his walk up and down the room past the tables, looked at Georg, and said, “Yes, indeed, Shakespeare is the greatest writer we have, perhaps the greatest in the world.”
    During recess he was our sole subject of conversation. We talked about his looks, the way he spoke—his English accent when he spoke in German was easy to imitate, and several of us had a go. A good many people wanted to have him as their teacher for the next English class, too. I suppose no one thought then that you would never come back.
    Georg Bisanz, who had lavish supplies of pocket money—he must have got some from his grandmother—could afford more than the rest of us. That Sunday he was sitting alone at one of the wooden tables outside the kiosk. He had ordered meatballs and fruit juice, and when he saw me he