Stephen raised his hand. Everyone else pretended I hadn’t spoken. Terence continued to look at the poem, possibly waiting for his own source of inspiration. Ignoring Stephen’s hand, I addressed Paul. “Any ideas, Paul?”
Paul looked at me, startled, and then reluctantly studied his copy of the poem. “She likes it?” he said.
Stephen raised his arm farther into the air.
“A little more than that,” I said to Paul.
This time Paul looked at me coldly, as if I had just insulted him. I looked back with what I hoped was a warm smile and not a nervous grimace. What if none of them would answer my questions? I knew I would rush to fill the silence with my own words. And then what if they simply sat in their seats, inert as clay, as I talked on and on?
Then, ever so slowly, Paul cast his glance back down to the poem and reread it. “She’s anxious,” he said finally. “About the muse.”
Thank you, baby Jesus, I thought. “Where do you see that?” I asked.
Stephen could no longer constrain himself. “She says everything is hanging by a thread,” he said.
“He was asking me,” Paul muttered, looking at Stephen with heavy-lidded eyes.
I had gotten Paul Simmons to participate in class, and I wasn’t about to let him quit now, even for Stephen. “Thanks, Stephen, but I want to hear from Paul first,” I said, and then turned to Paul expectantly.
Suspicious, as if I had tricked him into learning something, Paul gathered his thoughts. “The speaker’s anxious about the muse coming because she can’t command her,” he said. “So maybe she wants to control her, but that’s not how a muse works. It just comes.”
“Good,” I said. “That’s good, Paul.”
Rusty Scarwood raised a hand. “What’s up with the flute?” he asked. “The muse has a flute. Why a flute?”
Stephen raised his hand again, and I nodded at him. “Poetry is a lot like music,” Stephen said. “They both have rhythm, repetition, lots of emphasis on sound . . . If this is Akhmatova’s muse, and Akhmatova is a poet, then it fits. The muse is going to inspire Akhmatova to make her own kind of music.”
Paul shook his head. “But the speaker says her muse stared her down. She’s pitiless, without pity. She’s not playing some pretty song in the poet’s ear.”
“Not all inspiration has to be pretty,” Stephen insisted.
Paul picked up the poem and waved it in the air. “Hello, she’s talking about Dante and the Inferno. Going to hell and seeing people burning or being eaten alive. Is that the kind of inspiration you’d want to get? I think the muse terrifies her.”
“This is great, guys,” I said, immediately regretting it—I sounded like a cheerleader urging my students to fight—go team, win!—while they huddled up to argue over their next play.
Then Terence sat forward in his chair. “Hey,” he said, and Paul stopped in midsentence to stare at Terence. Everyone else stirred in their seats, like an audience before a stage play begins. Terence rarely participated in class, and now he’d spoken twice in a space of five minutes. Slowly, unaware of the rest of the class looking at him, Terence said, “When the speaker asks the muse if she dictated the Inferno to Dante, the muse just says, ‘Yes.’ Which is weird.”
“Exactly,” Paul said. “She’s not helpful. Her muse is a nightmare.” Across from him, Stephen Watterson humphed and glared at his copy of the poem.
Terence looked at me. “Didn’t you say that . . .” He trailed off.
“Go on, Terence,” I said, encouraging him.
Terence hitched his shoulders nervously. “Well, didn’t you say that Akhmatova had to visit her son in prison? And that she was under lots of surveillance?”
Rusty nodded in recognition. “Yeah, and her ex-husband was arrested and shot, right?”
“Yes,” I said, in my best deadpan voice. It took them a second to get that I was echoing Akhmatova’s muse. Even Paul Simmons smiled, although he rolled his eyes as he did it. “Okay, Terence, so what are you thinking?” I said.
“Well,” Terence said, “maybe she wanted the same muse that helped Dante. Maybe she thought she was living in a kind of . . . hell. And she needed help describing it.” Terence picked up the poem and then laid it back down on his desk.
I nodded my head, smiling. “That’s about as good an interpretation as I’ve read, Terence. What do the rest of you think?”
Rusty Scarwood leaned over and offered a fist bump to Terence, who blushed but returned it. “That’s good,” Stephen Watterson said. The others murmured similar comments, but I saw Terence glancing at Paul sitting next to him, as though waiting for his friend’s approval. Paul remained slouched in his seat, but he saw Terence looking at him and smiled a little. “Exemplum de simia, quae, quando plus ascendit, plus apparent posteriora eius,” Paul said to Terence.
It was as if someone had struck a large bell behind my head. Paul’s Latin saying evoked a memory so strong, it seemed to physically manifest itself and threaten to overwhelm me. No one seemed to notice as they were focused on Paul, but the memory pulled at me like a powerful current, and for a brief moment, sitting in my classroom, I let it carry me back, to Fritz.
DR. JUSTINIAN BOOTH TAUGHT us European History in our fourth form year, one floor above the room where a decade later I would be teaching Anna Akhmatova. Dr. Booth was a short, dapper, dark-haired man who always wore a bow tie and a blazer, whether it was snowing or humid as a hothouse. He beat facts into our brains with the single-mindedness of a monk instructing us in catechism, and then with equal fervor he pressed us to find connections, patterns, links between historical events and figures. Aside from assigning stunning amounts of homework, Dr. Booth would deliver engaging lectures on a wide variety of topics—Martin Luther, Henry VIII’s “wife problem,” the execution of the Romanovs, the tulip mania in seventeenth-century Holland, the fall of Constantinople.
One day Dr. Booth was holding forth on the rise of the European nation-state, emphasizing its reliance upon codes of law, when a pudgy kid with curly hair held up his hand. “Excuse me, sir?” the kid said with a placid smile. “Wasn’t Justinian the Roman emperor who established an important code of law?”