The Memory Police

I was a bit surprised when he appeared for the first class I took at the typing school. He did not look anything like a typing teacher. For one thing, for no good reason perhaps, I had it in my head that typing teachers were always women—women of a certain age, with an overly polite way of speaking, heavy makeup, and bony fingers.

But I found, instead, a very young man. One of average build, dressed in well-cut clothing in understated colors. He was not particularly handsome in a classical sense, but each feature—eyelids, eyebrows, lips, jaw—made a strong impression. His expression was calm and thoughtful but tinged with a distinct shadow, something you would notice if you focused solely on his eyebrows, for example.

He looked like a law professor or a preacher—perhaps rightly so, since we were in a church—or an industrial engineer. But he was, in fact, a typing teacher, one who knew just about everything there was to know about typing.

I never once saw him actually using a typewriter, though. He merely circulated among the students, commenting on the position of our fingers or the way we handled the machine and then marking the mistakes on our practice sheets with a red pen.

From time to time, we were tested on the number of words we could type in a given period of time. He would stand in front of the classroom and take a stopwatch from his jacket pocket. We would wait for his signal, fingers poised over the keys, sample text next to the typewriter. I was fairly certain that he had composed the English words on the pages we were to copy, which were usually letters or, occasionally, something that looked like a thesis of some sort.

These tests were not my greatest strength. Even for words I had been able to type quite easily during practice, when it came to the test my fingers suddenly seemed to freeze. I would reverse the letters “g” and “h” or confuse “b” and “v,” or, in the worst cases, miss the starting position for my fingers completely and end up typing nonsense.

I was particularly susceptible to that distinct variety of calm that comes before the start of a test. Those few seconds when everyone held his or her breath, when the sounds of prayers and organ music from the church had died away and our senses were concentrated in our fingers—those seconds completely unnerved me.

I was convinced that the calm in the room would assume an almost physical form, like a gas leaking from the stopwatch he held in his hand. The watch was apparently well used, and its thin silver chain was tarnished. The thumb of his right hand would be poised on the button, which he was about to push at any moment. The chain would be draped across his chest.

The gaseous calm, emanating from his hand, crept along the floor of the classroom, accumulating in the corners and eventually coming to rest on my hands. It felt chilly and oppressive. I had the feeling that the least movement of my fingers would rend the membrane of silence and everything would fall to pieces. And my heart would begin to pound.

At the instant my suffering was reaching a peak, when I was unable to stand even another second, he would give the signal to start. His timing was always impeccable—as though the stopwatch had been measuring my heartbeat.

“Begin!”

It was the loudest thing he said in the classroom. Then every typewriter would begin clicking away. Except mine, which remained frozen as though terrified.

For a long time I have wanted to watch him in the act of typing. It must be very beautiful to see. The glittering, carefully maintained machine, the snow-white paper, his perfectly straight back, his expertly placed fingers. The very thought of it makes me sigh. But I’ve never yet seen him type. Even now that we have become lovers. He never types in front of other people.

It happened about three months after I’d started attending the typing classes. A heavy snow had fallen that day—the most I’d ever seen. The buses and trains were stopped and the whole town was buried.

I left the house early, walking to the church in order to be on time for a three o’clock class. On the way, I fell several times and the cloth bag I used to carry my books had gotten wet. Even the top of the steeple was covered in snow.

In the end, I was the only one who made it to class that day.

“It’s good of you to have come in such weather,” he said. As usual, his clothes were perfectly pressed, without a stain or wet spot from the snow. “I thought no one would show up.”

“If I skip a single day, my fingers get stiff,” I told him, taking my textbook out of the damp bag.

It was particularly quiet that day, perhaps because of the snow. I sat down at the fourth typewriter from the window. We had a rule that the first to arrive could choose any machine she wanted, since each had its idiosyncrasies—sticky keys or worn-out letters. Usually he would sit at his desk near the blackboard, but that day he stood near me.

First I typed a business letter, a request for an advance copy of an instruction manual for a recently imported machine for manufacturing jam. He stared at my hands the whole time I typed. As soon as my eyes strayed the least bit from the text, some portion of him appeared in my field of vision—shoes, pants, belt, cuff links.

It’s difficult to type a letter, with all the rules concerning the line spacing and layout. I’d always had trouble, even under normal circumstances, but with the teacher observing me so closely, I grew more and more tense and made one mistake after another.

Nor did he miss a single one of them. He would bend over, bringing his face close to the typewriter, and point to each error. It wasn’t done in the spirit of reproach, but nevertheless, I felt increasingly oppressed, as though I were being backed into a corner by a powerful force.

“You need to press harder with the middle finger of your left hand. That’s why the top of the ‘e’ is always missing.” After pointing out the faulty “e,” he took hold of my finger. “None of your other fingers are bent this way at the tip.”

“No, that’s right. I jammed this one playing basketball when I was a little girl.” I could tell that my voice sounded a bit hoarse.

“It will work better if you strike the key straight down,” he said, holding my finger and tapping several times as he pulled up on the curved joint.

eeeee­eeeee­

He had taken hold of the barest tip of my finger, but I was as overwhelmed as if he had taken me in his arms. His hand was cold and hard. I don’t believe that he held me with unusual force, but I felt an inescapable sense of oppression, as though the skin of his hand had attached itself to my finger, which continued to tap at the key.

His shoulder, his elbow and hip were just there, next to me. He seemed to have no intention of releasing my finger, which continued to tap at the key.

eeeee­eeeee­…

The tapping of the key striking the paper was the only sound in the room. Snow had begun to fall again, covering the tracks I had made between the gate of the church and the clock tower. He continued to hold me tighter and tighter. The stopwatch slipped from his breast pocket, turning over once in the air as it fell to the floor. I wondered whether it had broken. It seemed strange that I would be preoccupied with the stopwatch when I should have been worrying about what he was trying to do to me.

The bell in the clock tower began to chime. Five o’clock. The vibration came from far above, rattling the window glass and passing through our bodies, before being absorbed by the snow below. The only motion was the falling of the snowflakes. I held my breath, unable to move, as though locked inside the typewriter.