The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

1988

PAUL PARTED HER bedroom curtains, then shook Tooly’s hand to bid her good morning. At 6 A.M., she moved like a confused snail, but there was no time to dawdle. The school microbus arrived soon outside Gupta Mansions, trawling the expat warrens of Sukhumvit for students lacking chauffeured cars. Even at this hour, traffic was thick: sooty vans piled with rice sacks, green-and-orange taxis, motorbikes twisting through the gridlock. She rested against the bus window, contemplating the weird city inching past.

The teachers at King Chulalongkorn International School were much like her previous ones. There were the gentle and the spiteful; those who gazed out classroom windows muttering about years till retirement; those who believed themselves capable of transforming each child — of being the one whom every pupil would remember.

Her fourth-grade homeroom teacher was Mr. Priddles, who’d given Tooly and Paul their school tour and then had snapped her up for his class — at least until a spot opened up in fifth grade. She had completed this level of coursework before, he reasoned, which promised high marks, an elevated class average, and better prospects for his second consecutive Teacher of the Year award.

Mr. Priddles — a thirtyish Englishman with trendy denim shirts and gelled ginger hair — was adored by his pupils, which made Tooly’s a lonely and secret loathing. Part of his popularity came from playing a ghetto blaster during class and having the kids transcribe pop lyrics. “It’s about engaging with the written word,” he said. “Two poems written a hundred years apart, yeah? Both are poetry. One is not better. To say that someone called W. B. Yeats is ‘better’ than someone called Sting is a construct, basically.”

Each day, Tooly arrived praying that a fifth grader had left — that someone’s dad had become president of somewhere, they’d flown home, and she could escape her horrible class. Yet inwardly she doubted her readiness even for fourth grade. Much of each class, she sat awed by the knowledge rattling around in other kids’ heads and absent in hers. To conceal her incompetence, she rarely spoke, which led the other pupils to deem her stuck-up and perhaps smelly.

“Take out a piece of paper, everybody,” Mr. Priddles said. “Time to kick butt, guys!”

The much anticipated writing test was today, producing the first marks of the term — critical to establishing Mr. Priddles’s early lead in the Teacher of the Year race. The subject was “The Old Days,” and the kids could write on any period — the objectives were legible handwriting, orthodox spelling, complete sentences. Tooly could provide none of these, for she had forgotten paper. She whispered to the boy behind her.

“You want to borrow some?” he responded. “Or you want to keep it? If you borrow it, you have to give it back. Or you want to keep it?”

“Can I have a piece?”

“Can you? Or may you?”

Tooly glanced around for someone else to ask.

Mr. Priddles intervened, asking the boy, “May she have a piece of paper, Roger?”

“She may,” the little pedant replied, handing it to the teacher.

“Now, then,” Mr. Priddles said, holding the sheet out of Tooly’s reach. “Say, ‘Pretty please.’ ”

“Please.”

“Not to me. To him. Pretty please.”

Softly, she did so.

Mr. Priddles lay down her reward, one sheet of paper. “Now what do you say?”

She hesitated, looked up. “Thank you?”

“Do you mean that?”

“Yes.”

“Very good, then.” He left her to work.

Tooly stared at the blank page. Each time she raised her pencil over it, her fingers trembled. Why was she even here? And why did everyone love Mr. Priddles when he was so obviously horrible? Was she the only one who noticed this? She looked at the others writing, then back at her sheet. Several times, she tried to imagine the old days, yet the present days kept intruding.

“Time’s nearly up!” Mr. Priddles said eventually. “Finish up, cowboys and cowgirls. One minute, then hand them in.”

She had written nothing. Everyone else was getting up. Panicking, Tooly joined the mob crushing toward the front, slipped her blank page among theirs, and escaped into the hall.

The next day, she stood before the principal, insisting that she had handed in her work. It must’ve gotten lost. They knew she was lying and told her so. Tooly reiterated her predicament: she wasn’t even supposed to be in this grade. Please.

“Maybe that is the problem,” Principal Cutter acknowledged. “Maybe you have been in the wrong grade.”

Tooly’s despondency switched to excitement. Someone was listening! He placed a few calls and, minutes later, she had a new homeroom teacher, the affable Miss Fowler. In third grade.

Tooly pinched her stomach, saying nothing as she left the office. She had to do two years of her life over now.

After a week in third grade, Tooly was offered the chance to repeat her writing test under the supervision of a parent. If she performed at a superior level, the principal would consider — just consider — fifth grade, where a space had opened up.

Paul set the allotted twenty minutes on his digital watch, found her a pencil and paper, and started the countdown. Although she had an uncanny ability to know the length of one minute, Tooly suffered an equal inability to estimate longer periods: they stretched infinitely, then ended all of a sudden. Paul called time and lifted away her sheet, though her work was unchecked, uncorrected, incomplete. She hadn’t written one-third of what she’d planned to say about the old days.

“I didn’t get to the end.”

“We can’t cheat.”

“Just to put some small things in? Please?”

“They said only twenty minutes.”

Tooly lay on her bed, listening to the computer in Paul’s bedroom whirring and blipping as he began work for the evening. She crept back into the living room, drew her assignment from his briefcase, and resumed writing, continuing for nearly forty minutes, terrorized by the possibility of his return. One last time, she read over her essay. It was perfect:

Intrduction

People led a very different life from us in the Old Days. They did not travel alot because of the bad conditions. They had no radios telephones or any other means of communication. They had no television so they saw plays or listened to music instead. The punishments were very hard and cruel. Their clothing was very different from ours. The rich ladies wore beatiful colorful dresses and lovely hats. The poor had less clothes.

People were tougher and noisier than we are now they were quick to lagh and sing but also quick to quarrel and fight.

They were fearful of wichcraft, but respectful of others of higher rank.

They were usually married at 14 yrs, or there about, middle aged at 30 yrs, and not many lived to an old age.

They made cheese. Alot of fruit was grown was grown especially apples and cherries. The rich and powerful land owners siezed the common land and fenced it in as their own.

People liked to have their houses decrated beautifuly with carvings. They also liked attrative chimneys. Not all houses were made of wood. Infact many of them were made of brick.

The sailors who manned ships in the Old Days lived a hard and often dangerous life. Their ships were small and cramped. The men lived in front of the ship which was damp and like the rest of the ship infested with rats.

A woman who nagged her husband was tied to a ducking-stool and ducked in a pond or river. She could also have a scold’s bridle put on her head. In the bridle was a piece of iron which was fastened across her tounge and kept it still.

THE END.

She counted the paragraphs — eight, the most she’d done in one go. She slipped the test back into Paul’s briefcase. The following morning, he stuffed it into an envelope and signed his name over the sealed flap, sending it with her to school. Tooly handed it in, jittery with excitement.

That evening, Principal Cutter telephoned her home to give the result. She handed the receiver to Paul and ran into her room. After he’d hung up, Tooly rushed back, heart pounding, to learn the grown-ups’ verdict on her life. “Did he say I can go in fifth?”

Paul collected his binoculars. As a special occasion, he said, they were going to look for birdlife at Lumpini Park.

In the early-evening heat, he gazed up at the trees, as she gazed up at him in agony. “Keep your eyes out for bulbuls and bee-eaters,” he said. “You hear that? That was a coppersmith barbet.” He directed Tooly to a leaking hose, at which a blue-winged pitta drank.

Paul pressed the binoculars to her eyes, his unsteady grip making for a dizzying view. “Your principal,” he informed her, “says it’s not believable that you wrote so much in twenty minutes.”

“But you timed me! Did you tell them?”

“I can’t cause a commotion. Can’t draw attention over this. Do you like that bird?” he asked, by way of apology.

“I don’t know.”

“You can stay in third grade.”

“No, please,” she said, looking at him.

“Or you can go up a grade.”

“To fifth?”

“Back to fourth, with your teacher from before, the one everyone says is so good.”

“Mr. Priddles?”

The Thai national anthem burst from the loudspeakers, as it did each evening at 6 P.M. Everyone fell silent and stood at attention, even the joggers, chests heaving, sweat rolling down their faces. In hired boats on the lake, people stilled the wobbling vessels.

“But I—”

“Shush,” Paul said.

“I wasn’t supposed to be in that grade,” she whispered. “It’s—”

“Shh!”

The school gave her a failing mark for the writing test, which drove down Mr. Priddles’s class average; he might not win Teacher of the Year now. Even more vexing, this girl — whom he’d generously taken into his class — turned out to be a defiant little thing. She never laughed at his witticisms, though others were in hysterics. She was a dud, and he was saddled with her.

Thereafter, whenever she asked a question Mr. Priddles pretended not to hear. When she handed in work, he rejected it on any pretext: “Wrong color pen!” He ridiculed her before the others and — to their delight — once tied Tooly to her desk with a scarf after she stood up without permission to look out the window. If she approached him after class, he spoke sweetly, while looking as if he might spit on her. “Mustn’t moan all the time,” he said. “It’s all subjective anyway.”

“What does ‘subjective’ mean?”

“It’s when the person in charge decides.”

His contempt transmitted to the kids, who treated her as if she were diseased. One day, a boy sneaked up behind her in the hall and choked her for no reason. She stopped trying after that, read novels under her desk, and did her best to lower the class average. Whenever Mr. Priddles played pop songs, she exerted herself not to hear or to absorb the idiotic words. At lunch, she stole away to read her book, erasing an hour. Had it been possible to cut longer stretches from her life, she would have.

Later that week, during Mr. Priddles’s class about poor people, he played “We Are the World,” the lyrics printed on the blackboard:

It’s true we’ll make a better day

Just you and me.

The question was whether the final line, grammatically speaking, should read “Just you and I.” As Mr. Priddles rewound the cassette, Tooly mumbled a mysterious word—“brimstone”—from the book secretly open under her desk, realizing too late that she’d said it rather loudly.

“Pardon us?” he said.

Everyone looked at her.

She chewed a strand of her hair. “Nothing.”

“Share with the class.”

“Uhm,” Tooly began, “there’s just a thing, ‘brimstone,’ that I don’t know what it is.”

“You mean ‘grindstone,’ ” he corrected her. “It’s what you put your nose to.”

A boy asked, “Why do you put your nose to it, Mr. P?”

“It’s a totally cool saying, isn’t it?” he replied. “Basically, it means working hard.”

Tooly consulted the page on her lap — the word was indeed “brimstone,” with neither grind nor nose in sight. “Brimstone,” she repeated.

“I. Don’t. Think. So,” Mr. Priddles said in a rising scale. “And what led you to this particular off-topic interruption?”

She didn’t hear his query until the paragraph she was reading came to an end, at which point Mr. Priddles stood, arms folded, before her, saying, “The whole class will wait…. Earth to Matilda?… Paging Miss Zylberberg?”

When she looked up, a boy yawned at her, his mouth wide like a lion’s. “Brimstone,” she repeated.

Mr. Priddles snatched the book from under her desk. She watched it being led off by its front cover, which almost ripped under the weight of the hanging pages. He dumped the volume, Dombey and Son, in the trash can and — to his pupils’ uproarious joy — spent the rest of class pouring drips of his Pepsi over it.

She boarded the microbus home, realizing only in traffic that she’d forgotten her book bag in the classroom, which meant that she’d fall even further behind, and — worse — that Mr. Priddles had her private things, including her sketchbook of noses. She’d have to beg for it. Tomorrow fused in her mind with its successors, a chain as infinite as a mirror reflecting a mirror. She dreaded days and wanted no more of them.

That evening, Paul brought out another wrestling video. She asked permission to watch a bit of the Seoul Olympics, which kids had been talking about at school. But he was boycotting the Games because of the opening ceremony, during which the South Korean organizers had released doves that settled on the Olympic cauldron. Instead of chasing away the birds, the organizers just lit the flames, roasting the doves on live TV. This, he believed, said all that needed saying about the Olympic spirit. Consequently, as the world witnessed Ben Johnson beating Carl Lewis in the hundred-meter dash, Paul and Tooly watched a videotape of the Iron Sheik throttling “Rowdy” Roddy Piper.

“How was school?” he asked.

School was a country and home was a country, and the two sent each other letters but never met, Tooly the emissary shuttling between.

“In art,” she said, “we did paintings of a volcano. Everyone had to draw themselves on the side of it, having a picnic, and then we all died. But everyone had to die of something else, not from the volcano.”

“Hard to believe: during a volcanic eruption, dying of something else. Incredible bad luck, at a minimum.”

“It was just pretend.”

“I realize. But still. Or-or-or, what’s the point, really?”

“I got killed by a slingshot.”

“That’s not going to happen. If there’s magma and toxic gases, no one would have the presence of mind to fire a slingshot.” He cleared his throat. “It’s a reminder of how dangerous they are.”

“Volcanoes?”

“Slingshots. But, yes, volcanoes, too.” He returned his attention to the muted wrestling on TV.

As the roast chickens in tights bounced each other off the ropes, Tooly wandered into her bedroom. When the door closed, she flopped forward onto the mattress, remaining facedown for a minute. She sat on the floor before the air-conditioning unit, chilled teardrops blown across her cheeks. In the bathroom mirror, she studied herself, curious to see her face, the crumpled expression, dull bright eyes, these features so arbitrarily affixed to her nature.

She heard the television click off; a hiss sounded from Paul’s inhaler; he flipped noisily through a book on birds. “You coming to read with me?” He had so little to communicate, yet always wanted her beside him. She sat on her bed, resisting the force of his will. Air conditioners thrummed. Shelly’s mop slopped. Paul blew his nose.

“You’re really settling in at this school,” he said when she returned. “Better than the last one.”

On her way home the next day, the microbus idled under the sun, heating the metal chassis and broiling the children inside. They were two blocks from Gupta Mansions and, with this gridlock, it would have been quicker to walk. But they weren’t allowed out before their home addresses. She reached her arm through the open window, hand swiping torpid air as the bus shuddered in place, exhaust coughing from its tailpipe.

On the sidewalk was a tall Western woman who took a small hop with each step of her leather sandals, straps wound around her ankles. She wore genie pants and a shirt with a mandarin collar, her slender arms clinking with bangles. She drew both hands behind her head, twisting and winding her chestnut hair into a chignon, stabbing the pile with a pencil plucked from her lips, then approached Tooly’s window. “Hello, you.”

Tooly stared, unsure whether to reply.

The woman added, “You’re just the person I’ve been looking for.” She placed her hand on Tooly’s tanned forearm, ran her fingers down its length to the little hand, which she held.

Tooly knew she should pull back but did not, instead looking directly at the stranger, whose head was cocked with such fondness that Tooly could not look away. Neither could she hold the gaze, so glanced shyly down, then back up.

The microbus lurched forward, tires turning less than a rotation, leaving the woman a step behind in the road. A couple of other kids looked at Tooly for an explanation. She turned from them, searching for the woman, who approached again, her face softening in a smile. “So hot today,” she said. “But I love it like this. It’s our sort of weather.” She winked. “Want to come out and walk for a bit?”

“We’re not allowed.”

“No? Ah, well.” The bus pulled ahead again. “Goodbye,” the woman called out, and walked away.

“Okay,” Tooly replied softly. So empty that word sounded to her. A motorbike buzzed past. Pedestrians in flip-flops hurried through gaps in the traffic.

But the woman — her mother — was gone.