Chapter Five: School

The trainings in the gym continued. John watched Lara change. Now she held her spine upright, the old slouching and the lack of limb coordination disappeared. Her palms tended to be open, not clenched any longer in fists or erratically touching things around. She slept well. She stopped waking up in the middle of the night tapping around the house in search for a snack or a glass of water. She also became more lively and attentive to John’s conversations. To his quiet joy, she seemed to have begun trusting him.

This did not diminish John’s stern demands on her. Although gently, he kept on asking her to learn new exercises and to renew old ones. Lara had instructions to write down her dreams meticulously with all details she could gather from them. The girl kept a notebook on her bedside table with a pen ready on a blank page at hand to write them down as soon as she was awake. Lara had infinite questions about her dreams, but when she realised that John would not tell her what they meant, and moreover that he often joked with her seriousness about some, she settled for describing for him their picturesque variety.

John was indeed thoroughly interested in her dreams. He kept a notepad of his own, occasionally taking notes of her descriptions. “For my stories,” he said. Lara was satisfied. She was indeed helping him with his story-telling, as he asked her on the day when they met at the market. She did her part of the bargain, and he was teaching her; although Lara could not find a clear connection to stealing, it all seemed so interesting.

Lara’s dreams were changing. She remembered having had exhausting dreams in the orphanage, and later on the street, packed up with action, a lot of violence and scary things, with no real endings, where the morning would merely interrupt them without bringing repose to her mind. Now, her dreams appeased, her ability to recall dreams led her to discover that she dreamt more than one dream at night, and recalling a seemingly senseless dream could lead into a deeper dream. She managed sometimes to recall strange dreams, of ancient animals, landscapes she had never seen, of statues and castles and temples, populated by people of strange skin and hair, in clothes of unusual colours and forms. She would describe them to John in detail and sometimes even enact them. John enjoyed her natural abilities, which he always referred to as to ‘mirroring,’ the ability to become someone or something, instead of merely miming or enacting, as he explained. Sometimes she would draw for him maps and charts of her dreams, and he would ask her about details: what the weather in the dream was like, whether the streets were made of cobblestone or clay, how many entrances a house had, what the sign was above the gate of a temple, and so on. Later, he provided her with a pencil and plenty of paper to sketch the dreams.

Meanwhile, their first months together were coming to an end, and Lara was facing a less dream-like reality. School came.

“Remember, Lara, you are my daughter, and until this summer we have been living in aanother part of the town, where you had attended another school. Now you are entering a new school. What you tell them is the only thing they will know about you. Give the least possible details of your past, if any one asks you about it at all. If you are not sure what to say, change the subject or ask the person who puts the question about something different,” said John on the morning of her first day at school.

“I guess I shouldn’t talk about the street?” asked Lara fearfully.

“Not the street, not stealing and not the orphanage. You are creating a new story, a new life. Your frmer life remains your and intact, but you have to leave it quiet inside you, to leave it only to yourself, in order to turn a new page. Still, everything you’ve learnt on the previous pages will remain with you.”

They went out of the house. John was accompanying her to her new school. Just for that day, he had said, then she could do it by herself.

“How do I ‘change the subject’”? Lara nervously asked.

“It is usually better to ask then to answer. You can turn the question around and ask them the same thing. People, including children, like to talk about themselves and about things that matter to them. You can ask them everything about what they care about. If they have a puppy, for example, ask them everything about the puppy: what it looks like, what it plays with, what it eats, and so on. If someone plays an instrument, ask them everything about the instrument and the music they play, how hard it is, how they’ve learnt it, and so on. You may learn a lot by asking people, and you can become friends by not revealing too much about yourself.”

“Well, I’ll try,” answered Lara, with a great deal of uncertainty. “But why?”

“It would be easier for you not to attract too much attention. It would save you a lot of unnecessary and undeserved trouble. Just ‘mirror’ the kids around you.”

Lara deliberately overheard the strange word he was repeatedly using. “These clothes you bought me are alright. And I am clean now.”

“Yes, I chose things that everyone wears, so that you can be imperceptible.”

“What does ‘im-per-cep-ti-ble’ mean?”

“It means that you do not attract attention.”

“Is it bad to attract attention?”

“It can be tiring for you personally to receive too much attention at first. In general, it is quite exhausting if you receive everybody’s attention all of the time. You see, attention is something like a bell-ring. Whenever someone pays attention to you, they ring your bell and you have to respond somehow. Imagine having your bell ringing all the time and having to respond to everyone’s calls all at once. It’s good when you can control whose attention you draw and when you want to have it. Most of all, it is a masterful skill to be able to draw the exact type of attention you want. This is something we shall talk about in the future. It concerns the art of stealing I promised to teach you. Your time at school is a part of that learning.”

Lara gulped. She was not sure whether she wanted attention or not. Her inside was tearing up in two: one part yearned for all the attention in the world, always and only for her, and another part shunned the thought and wanted to be… shadowy, somehow. She did not utter a word though, feeling John’s piercing gaze on her face.

“You may be asked to speak about home,” the old man continued. “However, do not mention the exercises we do there – I mean the dreaming-together exercise and the sequences. I am asking you to be silent about these exercises. You can talk about the stories and the naewas, though.”

Lara was pensive, “Is it because the exercises are strange?”

“Yes, and you may get hurt if others find out that you do strange things.”

“Why?”

“The answer is longer than the question,” John sighed, “but here is a part of it. Because people, children too, instinctively concentrate on everything strange. Strangeness disturbs people. If I am not wrong, you also concentrate on strangeness, right?”

“Yes…” Lara admitted reluctantly. “In the orphanage, we used to pick together on everyone strange. But on the street, we were all strange…”

“Right. On the other hand, иf you see an unusually beautiful face in a crowd, would you look at it as briefly as other common people?”

“No, somehow I cannot take my eyes away. From very ugly people too.”

“Exactly, there is absolutely no difference whether exceptionality is pleasant or unpleasant, good or bad. It’s simply different and therefore it draws attention. To be srange means simply not to be usual. If all people were equally beautiful or ugly, no one would draw attention. However, people are different, and some are more different than others. Difference is perceived as strangeness. The stranger the thing, the more attention it will attract. This can be pleasant attention from kind people; however, kindness often has its limits.

Many times strangeness draws unpleasant attention. If you are strange in a way that makes people feel bad about themselves, if they think you might be better than them in something, then they will try to stop you making them feel bad. They will try to make you just like them or worse than them. That would make them stop feeling bad about themselves. Somehow, being strange provokes some people – not in all - to flatten what is strange, to make it disappear and not be strange anymore. Only to make themselves feel at peace and well. If they cannot make it disappear, they mock it, make it look bad and shameful, or they beat it and beat it so long as it is there, disturbing them. That is why I would like you to learn to be imperceptible; that means to appear ordinary, not to attract attention, and you can be as strange as you like inside, but people will not try to harm you or change you.

There will be friends of yours who will like you exactly for being strange, and they may even help you become stranger, as you may help them in their own strangeness. You may also find some imperceptible people who hide their strangeness under imperceptibility. And you may like them. Very much.”

Lara thought deeply, following John’s pace. “Why people, most people,” she corrected herself, “like to beat strange things?”

“Because many people fear that it is them who are really strange, or exceptional - in a bad manner. They fear that they might discover they are weaker and more vulnerable beings than the rest of the ‘normal’ world. Many are frightened and hurt deep inside, full of guilt and anger they do not admit or express. Some fear that they might discover that they are ultimately bad inside. Not that these people are really bad - they just fear that they might be bad. People who look inside themselves, as we do when we enter our dreams, make other people look inside themselves as well – and these do not want that, they fear what they would discover inside. Just as you were afraid from the forest in your dream and did not want to look at it. Adults too have their own scary forests and scared children inside, don’t they? Look, we’re here! This is your new school, Lara.”

Interrupting their conversation abruptly, they entered the school building. John did all the talking with the adults, holding Lara’s hand. A young lady came to fetch Lara. She presented herself as her teacher, responsible for her class. John, lightly kissing Lara’s forehead, went away. The girl was left on her own now.

She looked at her teacher fearing if the woman knew that she was a thief and an orphan. The teacher looked back warmly. She took Lara’s hand and started chatting cheerfully about the day’s schedule. They went to a classroom on the second floor of the building. The corridors were freshly whitewashed and smelled of paint. Pupils were moving about, shouting and shuffling. Lara stiffened in the crowd. As she entered the classroom, she faced row of eyes incuriously staring at her. She felt sick.

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