Chapter 3 Lust

11:28 PM

That day Lena really dreamed about owning a gun and pulling the trigger, sending the bullet to her head. She was even tired of screaming and disciplining the class of pupils. Eight-year-old Marianne was lying on the floor, her friend Maya was jumping over her to shift Lena’s attention to herself, Maya’s sister, Monika, was pretending to be mentally challenged, stuck out her tongue and exhaled indistinguishable sounds. Lena tried to juggle writing notes for the parents of these girls about their behavior and checking tasks which she set for other students, at least those willing to learn. Lena wondered how so many teachers survived teaching other people’s kids. She thought about those rich businessmen working for corporations, enjoying civil business meetings with cups of tea and coffee, she daydreamed about politicians who could literally sleep during their voting sessions, while she was paid so little to manage the crowd of undisciplined future businessmen and politicians. It required either a great life naivety to choose such a job or a handful of drugs. It was a vocation to have enough patience to deal with children, parents, other teachers and red tape. A vocation she didn’t entirely have. She looked at her workmates, who not only survived hours of classes, preparations, and test-checking but also managed to juggle family at home. From child environment, they entered another child environment, and Lena wondered how come their heads didn’t explode at some point. Maybe Lena didn’t like children so much or slowly lost the youthful idealism of her teen years when she had to spend time with her siblings, as she had no other choice. She often wondered why her mother devoted her life entirely to the family. But her husband (Lena’s stepfather) owned quite a successful tiles and facilities shop and they could afford to pay for a stay-at-home mum and her children. The husband was an entirely different case, but Lena didn’t want to think about that. She also didn’t want to think about children.

At the end of the lesson with the DEVIL’s class (Marianne was the incarnation of the devil, her parents should be already aware of the fact), Lena was asked to the new director’s office for a consultation. She had a feeling that there was going to be a problem since the lack of discipline in the DEVIL’s class was quite known and Lena wasn’t the only teacher who couldn’t control the charismatic eight-year-olds in their acts of naughtiness and mischief.

She knocked at the door and entered the office. To her surprise, the director, who Lena was used to for the past two years, disappeared and his place took a different man. His hair was dark, he had light blue eyes and he was muscular, as Lena could see shapes of his biceps coming out of his shirt. He was about Robert’s height, so he was heading over Lena, he wore an elegant suit and smiled friendly at her sight. Lena combed her messy hair with her hand, wiped the sweat from her forehead and awkwardly smiled back. The metal label on the man’s desk showed an engraving Karol Markowski, director, which Lena was quick to pay attention to.

Lena felt weaker in her knees and politely sat at the chair she was shown to.

‘Is it about class 2D?’ she asked after a short introduction.

‘Oh, no. I’ve heard that these little devils get on everybody’s nerves. I don’t believe that children are all sweetness. They can put people in a psychiatric ward...’

Lena already liked this man, she smiled in understanding, looked at his hands and skin, and felt strangely vulnerable.

‘I should know. I have a wife and a son.’

Something dropped in Lena’s stomach.

‘Oh,’, she mumbled in disappointment.

Karol Markowski took his phone and showed Lena the picture of his smiling child. The boy was five, maybe six years old. Lena glimpsed at the hand of her director’s wife, who was apparently real, although the only body part that she saw was a hand. It wasn’t a bad-looking hand and that made matters worse.

She smiled at the picture and said some half-compliment about the son, hiding the fact that after what Marianne had done in her class five minutes before, she really hated children.

‘I invited you here because I wanted to get to know my employees. I value cooperation between coworkers. School is like an organism, it has to run well. And this process should be based on mutual understanding. But let’s quit this official tone. Tell me something about yourself.’

Lena couldn’t help but like this man. She said that she had been working as a teacher for a couple of years, that she lived in Warsaw and enjoyed films and music. Of course, she didn’t mention that she was desperately thinking about quitting her job and she shared the flat with a gay policeman and a virgin sex doll. She also didn’t mention that she was an undercover, amateur detective.

‘I heard that you are a good teacher. You have a passion for the language. And this is not a single opinion.’

Lena smiled. At this point, she liked this man even more. After ten minutes of a reasonable conversation, a soft and intelligent voice drilling sensible content into her ears, and staring into a dark handsome face, she left the office in an entirely different mood. All of a sudden, she forgot about this little bitch Marianne, who was systematically destroying her classes, who had a very successful mother, who earned twenty times as much as Lena, and whose family laughed at Lena’s parents’ notes and treated her pain as entertainment. Suddenly, she even appreciated the fact that she was a teacher.

‘Has anything happened?’ Robert was looking at Lena over the kitchen table while both of them were consuming a simple breakfast consisting of egg sandwiches with ham and drinking black coffee.

‘Why?’

‘You look different.’

‘I finally got these clothes that I ordered online. The package came yesterday.’

‘I’m not talking about clothes. I didn’t say that you look better. I said that you looked different. Are you worrying about anything? Is it about work?’

Lena was deep in her thoughts. This time it wasn’t about the frustration of having a difficult day at school. Something happened overnight. Something which was already deeply rooted in her stomach, spreading through the veins all over her body, making it difficult to sleep, to wake up and to consume these egg sandwiches without an extra effort. She had already forgotten that feeling. It perished somewhere in between her weekends in Cracov, her classes at the University, her adventures with her policeman friend, who was now in front of her but somehow invisible. Now it hit her with twice the force she was prepared to handle.

‘It must be the clothes. And make-up. I invested in myself.’

Robert shrugged, still looking at her suspiciously, but opting out of asking any more questions.

Lena lied. She knew exactly what had happened. She fell in love.